Thoughts on the Degree of Friendship -by Michael Douglas PG/PCP WA

Thoughts on the Degree of Friendship
by Michael Douglas PG/PCP WA

The lesson of the 1st Degree is friendship. But what is friendship, and what are we expected to understand about it?

Some traditions claim that friendship is the summit of human relationship. This is because it is intentionally chosen. It’s a relationship that we enter of our own free will. It’s not something that can be forced; it’s not something we’re born into. It’s something we have to choose freely within our hearts, which makes it different from most any other relationship in our lives. Our relatives are bound to us by blood or social contract. The people we work with or build things in the world with are chosen for their capabilities or their resources. Romantic relationships usually have an almost chemical foundation. They tend to whack us upside the head. But we choose our friends of our own free will.

There’s a sort of contract or covenant that goes along with this. It may sound odd to speak of friendship as a contract, because it seems to reference an unfeeling or legalistic business model, but in the ancient world, in the pre-lawyer culture of the patriarchs, there wasn’t much of a difference. A contract was a promise; it was a vow; it was giving your word of honor; and people would swear themselves to friendship in a way that is no longer common in our culture. Establishing a relationship of voluntary commitment in this way is the purest exercise of our freedom.

In the Hindu Vedas and the Zoroastrian Avesta we read of a god named Mitra, who later becomes Mithra in the Mediterranean world and also Matreiya, the prophesied future buddha. Mitra in Sanskrit means ‘friend’, but the original meaning is ‘contract, covenant, vow, or promise.’ It later took on the meaning of ‘friend’ because friendship was recognized as a covenant relationship. We often call our acquaintances and folks we know to talk to ‘friends’ , but this is something very different. The covenant between David and Jonathan is our primary example, a vow undertaken in the face of familial and social opposition. This is why it was so powerful in the Hebrew tradition that there was a covenant between God and the people. the model for which was the covenant between God and Abraham. God and Abraham had a legal contract. There were obligations on both sides which were very explicit, and they sealed it the way contracts were traditionally sealed at that time. They split a sacrificial animal down the middle and walked through the two halves. Actually, in the case of Abraham, they split several animals in half: a cow, a goat, a sheep, and two doves (this is detailed in Genesis 15 and associated rabbinic commentaries). They laid out a course of bisected animals and walked through them to seal the deal. Symbolically, this suggests being parts of the same body, explicitly recognizing and initiating the depth of the relationship.

This sense of making a vow to enter into a relationship is something we still commonly do with marriage, perhaps the only serious vow many people make in their lives. There are vows that link us to institutions: for instance, politicians sometimes take oaths of office. All federal employees take an oath to defend the constitution. I took one years ago when I worked for the Census Bureau. These formalize the relationship between an individual and a corporate institution. But there aren’t so many places in the private realm where we make these kinds of binding vows to each other. Fraternal vows, essentially swearing friendship with a bunch of individuals we haven’t even met yet, are particularly anomalous in the modern world.

So what are we doing when we make a vow? We’re engaging the will in a particular way, and we’re creating an explicit energetic connection. We’re opening a channel for something to happen. We’re forming a vessel for something to be poured into, and we’re engaging the will to make that happen. The yogic teacher Yogananda said, “Will is how we turn energy into reality.” When we make a vow, we are lining up all the levels of our being, and we’re speaking an intention. It’s like banging a gong. We’re hitting this note, and it echoes out and creates the world; it changes the future. This is our power as human beings. The more all the different pieces of ourselves come together, the more all our levels are integrated, the more what we do and say creates the world.

It’s worth spending time to contemplate this: that it’s part of our function as human beings to create the world in this way, through making promises. The Buddha said that developing friendships in accordance with our highest ideals is the whole of the spiritual path. Because if we can do this with each other, then we can do this with God. And if we can’t do this with each other, we can’t do it with God.
There’s a Sufi saying that you need to keep the secrets of your friends; because if you don’t, why would God tell you His secrets?

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