Regular contributor John Ryan borrows from Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) to talk about 'friendliness'

So far on this Blog site we’ve talked about being authentic, discovering your core values, sharing important and meaningful issues with other Men, and accepting heartfelt challenge.

One question that keep arising in all this is about the nature of friendships and more importantly:

What is real, authentic friendliness?

According to regular Becoming Better Men contributor John Ryan, this is a somewhat complex and difficult question to answer. From John’s perspective, we need understand a few other things first before we can understand what real authentic friendliness is.

The first is friendship – or more precisely, the distinction between friendship and friendliness.

According to John, friendship is love without any physiological/sexual underpinning to it. But de draws a distinction even here – asserting that it is not the friendship that you understand ordinarily — the boyfriend, the girlfriend type friendship. For as John argues; to use the word friend in any way associated with physiology/sexuality is sheer stupidity. This is more about impulse and infatuation than it is about friendship.

John points out that if you act in friendship from this physiological/sexual space and reach the conclusion that you are in love - you are wrong. All you are experiencing is little more than a hormonal attraction. And the important factor here is that your chemistry can be changed and when this happens, this superficial hormonal experience that you have chosen to identify as love will also disappear.

So to reiterate, John says that friendship is love without any physiological/sexual underpinning to it – and this has become a rare phenomenon.

Too often in today’s world friendship is understood either in physiological/sexual terms, economic terms, or in sociological terms — or in terms of acquaintance, a kind of acquaintance. But John asserts that friendship in a true sense means that if the need arises you will be ready even to sacrifice yourself in the name of friendship. Friendship means that you are willing to make somebody else more important than yourself. In this sense, friendship is not a transaction, an exchange of bodily fluids or a communal relationship - it is love in its purity.

And achieving true friendship is possible even the way you are now. Even unconscious people can have such a friendship. And as you become more conscious of your being, true friendship starts turning into friendliness.

Friendliness has a wider connotation than friendship by itself. Friendship can be broken, the friend can turn into an enemy. That possibility remains intrinsic in the very fact of friendship.

For example, John reminds us of the Machiavellian idea: “Never tell anything to your friend which you would not be able to say to your enemy, because the person who is a friend today may turn into an enemy tomorrow”. He also reverses this to suggest that we should never say anything against our enemy, because our enemy can equally turn into a friend tomorrow.

From John’s perspective, Machiavelli is giving us a very clear insight: that our ordinary love can change into hate, our friendship can become enmity any moment. This is the unconscious state of man — where love is hiding hate just behind it, where you can hate the same person you love but not be aware of it.

Friendliness becomes possible only when you are real, you are authentic, and you are absolutely aware of your being. When you are in this space and love arises, it will be friendliness.

So back to the original question: “What is real authentic friendliness?”

It will need a great transformation in you to receive a taste of authentic friendliness. As you are, friendliness is a faraway star. You can have a look at the faraway star, you can have a certain intellectual understanding of its extistence; but it will remain only an intellectual understanding, not an existential taste.

And according to John, unless you have an existential taste of friendliness it will be very difficult, almost impossible, to make a distinction between friendship and friendliness. Friendliness is the purest thing you can conceive about love. It is so pure that you cannot even call it a flower, you can only call it a fragrance which you can feel, sense and experience - but you cannot catch hold of. It is there, your nostrils are full of it, your being is surrounded by it. You feel the vibe, but there is no way to catch hold of it; the experience is so big and so vast and your hands are too small.

As John stated at the outset: the question is very complex. But this not because of the question itself, but because of you. You are not yet at the point from where friendliness can become an experience. Be real, be authentic and you will know the purest quality of love — just a fragrance of love surrounding you always. And that quality of the purest love is friendliness.

Once Gautam Buddha was asked, “Does the enlightened man have friends?” and he said, “No.” The questioner was shocked because he was thinking the man who is enlightened must have the whole world as his friend. But Gautam Buddha is right, because the enlightened man cannot have friends because he cannot have enemies. They both come together.

Friendliness is unfocused, unaddressed love. It is not any contract, spoken or unspoken. It is not from one individual to another individual; it is from one individual to the whole of existence, of which man is only a small part, because trees are included, animals are included, rivers are included, mountains are included, stars are included. Everything is included in friendliness.