Friendship

“Always, in one way or another, life puts in our path those who for some reason are near to us. Each individual creates his own environment according to what he is himself.
         And, if such is our dominant preoccupation, all those whom we thus meet on our way are the very ones to whom we can be most useful.
         For one who lives constantly in the spiritual consciousness, everything that happens to him takes on a special value and all is conducive to his progressive evolution. It will always be beneficial for him to observe his encounters, to investigate both the apparent and the deeper reasons for them, and, in accordance with his altruistic aspirations, he will ask himself what good he can do in each different case. And according to his own degree of spirituality, his action will always have a greater or lesser spiritualising effect.
         If we observe at all attentively the causes which bring us closer to our kind, we see that these contacts occur at various levels of depth in our being, depending on our own special mode of conscious activity.
         We can classify these relationships into four main categories corresponding to our four principal modes of activity: physical, vital, psychic and mental. They may have their play in one or several of these categories, simultaneously or successively, according to the quality and type of the manifestation of our activity.
         Physical contact is compulsory, so to say, since it depends on the fact that we have a physical body. It inevitably occurs with those who have provided us with this body and with all those who are materially dependent on them. These are the relations of kinship. There are also relationships of proximity: neighbourhood in houses, in the various means of transport, in the street. (I may remark here — and this remark also applies to the other three categories — that this relationship is not necessarily exclusive: this is in fact rare, since we are seldom active on only one plane of our being; what I mean is that the physical relationship is dominant over the other three.)
         Vital contact occurs between impulses and desires which are identical or liable to combine in order to complement and heighten one another.
         Psychic contact occurs between converging spiritual aspirations.
         Mental contact comes from similar or complementary mental capacities and affinities.
         ...
         To direct our action in the right way and reduce as far as possible the causes of our wrong attitudes towards our fellowmen, we should always investigate with the greatest care the numerous reasons for our contacts and find the category of affinities which binds us to them.
         A few rare beings are close to us in all four modes of existence at the same time. These are friends in the deepest sense of the word. It is on them that our actions can have their most integral, their most perfectly helpful and beneficial effect.
         We should never forget that the duration of a contact between two human lives depends on the number and depth of the states of being in which the affinities that bind them have their play.
         Only those who commune with the eternal essence within themselves and in all things can be eternally united.
         Only those are friends forever who have been close or distant friends from all time in this or other worlds.
         And whether or not we meet these friends depends on the encounter we must first experience within ourselves, in the unknown depths of our being.
         Moreover, when this meeting occurs, our whole attitude is transformed.”

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