Watch a group of young children who are holding hands and skipping around in a circle. They’ll smile and yell and laugh, as well as complain and desire to change places. Watch as they rearrange themselves to be next to the ones with whom they feel most compatible, and then you’ll see the circle pick up and go around again.
Friendship, in its most elemental experience, is at its purest at this young age before social structure and custom have been shaped into an unconscious habit. Young children still have a very awakened subconscious, good instincts, and working intuition. Like animals, they have the ability to sense other’s intentions toward them. Like animals, so much of their sensing world is still on an energetic/vibrational level of natural compatibility, and incompatibility. Children know right away if they like or don’t like someone.
You can see it on a playground where many children come who don’t all know each other. They’ll scan all of the children present and within seconds gravitate toward selected individuals, pick up play and begin forming friendships. There is much to learn from watching young children, and remembering how you were as a child. There’s not as much concern over social custom. There’s not such deeply ingrained social politeness. There’s the truth of the vibrational rate: I’m drawn to this one and not drawn to that one. Nothing personal, it’s just a vibrational frequency.
Left to their own devices, children have the ability to seek out their own vibrational frequency. But because parents wish for their children to get along, to like everyone, to not hurt anyone’s feelings, to not appear rude or too truthful, they encourage their children to deny their connection to their feelings: “Now don’t say that to Bobby,” or “You don’t really feel that way.” Early on, parents begin teaching children to deny their natural instincts in favor of becoming socially acceptable. On the surface, teaching children to fit in seems a worthy service parents try to provide. In reality, this is the earliest beginning of disconnecting children from what they know, and instilling confusion and distrust for their instincts. This teaches children that instincts and self-awareness are something to be overridden in favor of social acceptance.
Many parents look at this as an either/or proposition. But it is possible to show your children how to fit into, and understand the social structure and culture in which they’re born, while retaining their spiritual and intuitive connection by teaching your children how to express their feelings with clarity and compassion through example and instruction.
The point is that within 30 seconds of meeting someone, all humans know whether their energy fields and vibrational frequencies are compatible or not. But value judgments are layered on top of this, such as “I like you”, “I don’t like you.” When the value judgment is removed, it’s much easier to recognize and delineate a harmonious vibration, an irritating vibration, a loving vibration, an over-stimulating vibration, and so on. Each person we meet falls within a spectrum. The awareness of the compatibility and potential for friendship is nearly instant—and usually, even with clouded subconscious connections, amazingly accurate and consistent over time.
When you meet someone you “like,” there is an immediate expansion of the energy field around both individuals, a kind of spiritual embracing and commingling. When you meet someone you don’t “like,” there is a spontaneous contraction of the energy fields and a resistance to opening oneself up or connecting. The instinctual self knows what’s healthy and not healthy for it. Another way of explaining this would be to look at the analogy of chemical composition. Some chemicals, when added together, blend well. Some become volatile and explosive. There is nothing wrong with either one of the chemicals; neither of the chemicals is bad. Simply, each has its purpose and some are just not meant to be combined. Again, it is not personal.
This is also true of people. If we were to accept that not only do you like and not like someone else nearly instantaneously no matter what they do, but as well, others like or don’t like you on the spot, no matter what you do, this would free a tremendous amount of emotional and spiritual energy to accept who we are, to be who we are, and to accept who we like and wish to have as friends. This isn’t to say it’s not possible to get along with a great myriad of people with different vibrational rates—especially as one becomes more spiritually clear— but natural friendship is something that happens naturally. It cannot be forced or willed.
Over time, you can learn to adapt to and may come to favorably tolerate someone with whom you share an incompatible vibration, but you will always be aware that you are making this compensation. And, yes, you may be able to find something to “like” about everyone, but this does not negate or override the essential, immediate bond that takes place in a natural friendship.
There are many values placed on friendships that also cause unnecessary complications in relating. These stem primarily from social custom and conditioning. Many people define friendship as, “We see things the same way. We agree,” when agreement or disagreement has nothing to do with anything. Many people think their friends should back them up no matter what they do or say. So we begin developing friendships where there is no genuine exchange of honest information.
Healthy friendship reinforces our ability to feel connected. It’s one of the earlier reminders that there’s something greater beyond oneself to point to the larger spiritual connectedness to All-That-Is. So, yes, there is an element of acceptance of the other in friendship, but social custom takes that a step further and requires the white lie which protects the friend from truth that would be helpful to them to grow and evolve into clear and spiritual beings. We don’t tell our friend when we experience them in a negative way. We don’t volunteer that the person with whom they’re involved is engaged in deceitful behavior. And when we do finally feel like we must tell them something we believe is important for them to know, we agonize over how we’re going to muster the courage to do it. We don’t want to rock the boat. We’ve been trained to support our friends by telling them what we think they want to hear.
Spiritual friendship is nearly the opposite. It involves truly being a reflection back to that individual, including how we experience them, as well as how they are impacting their environment and other people around them. Very few people have friends who share in this way. Therefore very few people are ever privileged to get accurate and useful feedback.
Humans have been trained to believe that all other humans are so delicate that they could not handle this information. The only thing that’s delicate is social custom. What people respond to when they hear the truth about themselves is not so much an inner reaction, as an outwardly trained reaction of embarrassment (“What will people think?”) to protect the ego. The inner self knows when it hears the truth. And if social convention were not in the way, the inner self would feel relieved that someone has shared the truth with them because this allows them to begin rebuilding trust in their own instincts, and regain a more accurate perception of themselves and reality.
Q: If we were clear about our feelings and were in touch with our natural vibration, would we have many friends or a few?
Many, but not the kind of friends that most people think of as friends. If we were clear and were allowed to naturally gravitate to those whose vibration rates we matched, we’d have this friend who we like to do this with, that friend who we do that with. We would not be possessive, or try to own or consume our friends. We would not try to turn our friends into our Siamese twin. We would not try to fit every need into one friendship. We would see, like the circle of young children, that we can all be connected as friends while getting something different from each friend.
It’s extraordinarily rare to come upon one friend who is truly a match on many levels. If you are lucky and you find that friend, you’ve found your soul partner, and possibly marriage partner—the one with whom you’ll be able to go through life, supporting each other in ways where you are only capable of helping each other grow. You would only be capable of sharing your heart and soul, and not social custom or Madison Avenue versions of dysfunctional romantic/sexual love, but genuine soul love.
Q: As adults, what is the best way for us now to find good friends?
To reveal yourself as deeply as you are able with everyone you meet. Unfortunately for adults, many have been so far removed from their own natural ability to identify positive friendship originating from a spiritual nature, that they don’t easily recognize friends on that level. This is because as adults we’ve been trained to look for what’s in it for us. In business, friendships are made to further business, economics, or ego purposes. They are rarely made because of a recognition of a spiritual vibrational connection.
Revealing oneself blows the cobwebs out of the other and shocks them into a more pure emotional/spiritual state. From within that state, they’ll be more able to recognize if you match their vibrational rate, and if they feel comfortable or able to move forward on the level of friendship you’re capable of providing.
Q: How can we reveal our true self to people?
There’s a difference between talking about emotions in general, and revealing yourself. When you talk in general, you’re playing the role of conversational facilitator/mediator. When you talk specifically, you are revealing yourself.
Nearly everyone in your culture falls prey to, “If I say what I really think, I’ll hurt their feelings, or they’ll take it the wrong way. I’ll be perceived as self-centered, insensitive, or aggressive,” and so on. When what’s called for is simply just expressing how you’re experiencing the moment. So until you find a way to grow past the social politeness, you won’t truly experience what it’s like to reveal yourself.
Most people assume that when you talk about removing social politeness, this automatically means that you will hurt other people. In actuality, you hurt them more by not expressing your experience, because then your body goes to defend you from that person whom you feel unable to tell the truth. In self-defense, you’ll pull your energy away from that person and create a wall. In doing that, they then lose a greater connection to the All-That-Is. So much of this takes place on an energy level, where this energy moves and connects and merges and disconnects. If people were able to see what I’m saying, it would instantly become obvious. But people interpret all of this on an intellectual level, on a social custom level, and not on a spiritual, energetic, emotional level. They’re so entrenched in custom and habit that they’re unlikely to break out of it on their own. The only hope is for those who’ve grown enough spiritually to realize the truth of this to begin practicing it. Then possibly through your example someone else will begin to learn and change.
One of the major reasons why people don’t want to begin expressing their experience of another is because so much of our conversation is geared towards competition—I’m right and you’re wrong. It’s about one-upmanship; I’m smarter than you are. If we were to begin sharing this experience, the other person would be so quickly triggered into ego response that they wouldn’t really hear what you’re saying.
There’s also a common belief that these conversations take place in a short amount of time within one meeting. You go away from that conversation with many unresolved emotions. But social custom will most likely prevent you from going back to that person and saying, “I would like to clear up our previous conversation. I didn’t understand what you meant when you said this.” Or “This is what I felt when you said that.”
The reason why we don’t is because we’re taught not to hold too much emotional content in the conversation to begin with; to have it be primarily intellectually based, win/lose on the spot. We’ve also internalized that the mature thing to do is to just let it go and get over it. But all that does is cause this person to harbor these unresolved feeling, and causes a mental loop of repetitious thinking—”I should have said this or that.” You’ll find yourself replaying the conversation many times in your head, refining what you could have said that would have been more clever, more cutting, or more ably defending your position.
If people believed that they could go back and have as many conversations as were needed to get at the truth of each other’s experience, and knew that each person would be willing to do this, it would allow them to survive as friends during all of that. This would be the beginning of genuine communication and healthy friendship. Anything less is the façade of friendship, which is what nearly all friendships are.
When you find a true friend, you will find that initially there is a great desire to share all of yourself, all of your thoughts. You will find the other person very stimulating on many levels. But eventually, as your energies remain expanded and connected with each other, you’ll find there is less and less of a need to talk, and more and more of just enjoying each other’s presence. So much of what people talk about has no content of any meaning. It is really the being together where the greatest exchange takes place. It would be like going out and sitting at a beautiful place of nature, and instead of sitting quietly and enjoying it, feeling the need to talk to it.
Humans still have much to learn about connection, friendship, and love. No real steps will be taken towards any of these until the first step of truly accepting your instincts, knowing when you feel a vibrational compatibility and when you don’t. And perhaps even more important is acquiring the skill and the willingness to reveal your experience of yourself and how you experience the other. Until this happens, you will remain in very limited and often convoluted friendships.
Perhaps, if we emphasize once again that people like you or don’t like you immediately, and nearly permanently, no matter what you do or don’t do, this will begin to give you the freedom to just be who you are. You will not scare off those who are your true friends.