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Mercenaries or Besties
What Are Friends For?
OBEY fezzik.
When Andre the Giant’s stenciled face began appearing everywhere in American cities in the 1990s, immortalized against brick and concrete in the artist Shepard Fairey’s series of “OBEY” stickers, posters, and graffiti, his image suddenly became Americana. Before his death in 1993, and before the generational rise of this movie, Andre the Giant was best known as an angry, hulking, powerful professional wrestler. But I was way more interested in his character from The Princess Bride, Fezzik. I used to imagine that the face depicted on Fairey’s authoritarian stencils was not the 7-foot, 4-inch, 520-pound World Wrestling Federation icon. Instead, these drawings were asking me to “OBEY” Fezzik.
If you visualized Fezzik, then Fairey’s work was no longer a clever send-up of an Orwellian theme. “OBEY” was, instead, a gentle reminder, a soft demand from Fezzik for loyalty and friendship, a command I was happy to follow. The WWF persona was a man to fear, the kind of giant who might throw you off a cliff if you triggered his wrath. Not Fezzik. Fezzik was on my side, your side, our side. Not just some colossus, Fezzik was a tenderhearted poet (“Anybody want a peanut?”), the kind of comrade who would carry you and several friends up the sheerest of cliffs, even the Cliffs of Insanity; or who would nurse you back to health from your brandy-amplified PTSD; or who would bring you four perfect horses exactly when you needed them to make sure you got away safely, reaching a place where no bad guys could ever find you. Fezzik was the friend of all friends.
The Princess Bride is, first and foremost, a story of friendship. More specifically, it is a story of loners who finally find their real pals. It tells of an unforeseen “bromance,” one of the greatest bromances ever to inhabit the silver screen. Their friendship begins with a post-traumatic, mercenaries-turned-besties alliance between the Turkish giant Fezzik and the Spaniard Inigo Montoya. This partnership later includes Westley, the Farmboy turned Dread Pirate Roberts turned back into Westley again. These three unlikely friends overcome their personal demons to support each other’s journeys in grief, revenge, and, of course, storming the castle to liberate the Princess. Like most friendships, theirs is a beautiful accident of circumstance, a harmonizing of shared suffering, a camaraderie that is only just beginning when the story ends.
Friendship is never a guarantee. In this story, each hero begins as a loner. In the book version, the karmic origins of their solitude are further examined. Fezzik and Inigo have come together as mercenaries, and are already close friends when the movie begins, but their origin stories mark them both as social outcasts who each lost their parents too soon. Inigo’s mother died in childbirth, and his father was brutally murdered by the Six-Fingered Man, leaving Inigo alone at the tender age of eleven. In the book, Fezzik loses his parents inexplicably during a young wrestling career in Mongolia. Westley’s origin is never clearly established, only that he works in squalor as some kind of serf for the family of his beloved Buttercup. And as the Man in Black, it’s obvious Westley prefers to roll solo. So why do these heroes come together? What’s in it for them?
What’s in it for anyone? Why do we ever befriend each other? Is there a biological or spiritual imperative to friendship? Do comrades aid our spiritual journey, or are we better off, as many spiritual voices have modeled and taught over the ages, figuring life out in solitude? Perhaps our desire for friendship is a remnant of our tribal days, when we had to team up to defend ourselves against neighboring clans. Thus our ancestors passed along the habit of identifying with a tight band of comrades, of defining a “we,” of forming a posse, a squad to help us survive a dangerous world.
The haphazard origin of the friendships among the characters in The Princess Bride brings to mind the accidental origin of most friendships. Few friendships are ever planned. Your friends start as the kid your mother made you play with when you were little (exactly how my father became best friends with the Six-Fingered Man), the girl who sat down next to you in the university cafeteria as you faced doubts about your self-worth in an unfamiliar social setting, the guy you found yourself in a heated political conversation with at a cousin’s wedding reception, the woman with whom you commiserated on the torment of having the same horrible boss, the one you kept bumping into in creative circles and with whom you eventually exchanged contact information. Friendship has something to do with coincidence, but also with mutual benefit. Friends find each other through attraction, but the chemistry involved is much harder to name than sexual or romantic longing. We can’t be sure why Fezzik and Inigo, for example, love each other so dearly, but their Odd Couple charm reminds me of the pull of so many friendships over the course of my own life.
Inigo and Fezzik meet as mercenaries working under a man who is the definition of a bad boss, the Sicilian “genius” Vizzini. Perhaps the two create bad karma when they help Vizzini with his plot to kidnap and kill Buttercup. However, as the story makes clear, the two are good guys who’ve lost their parents and might just exhibit poor judgment when it comes to obeying their abusive employer.
Lose your parents, find an abusive new father figure. It’s a classic story. When we meet them, Inigo and Fezzik have built an amazing connection, a friendship that will eventually include a third, heartbroken warrior, the formerly innocent Farmboy Westley, now the deft Man in Black, aka the current holder of the title “Dread Pirate Roberts.” Personally, I always longed to be part of such a wacky brotherhood, or brother-and-sisterhood, and turned to this movie whenever my life felt as if it were missing the presence of that genuine quirky and supportive friend. Whenever I couldn’t find my Fezzik in real life, I found Fezzik here.
Meditation: First, Make Friends with Yourself
PARTICIPATING IN A GREAT FRIENDSHIP is one of the wonders of life. How do you find one? Are there clear Buddhist rules for when a friendship is at its best, when it aids one’s practice of mindfulness and compassion? From a Buddhist perspective, a good friendship is one that helps you recall your awakened qualities, qualities that, like muscles, need to be developed through training. These qualities include patience, generosity, and insight.
There are certainly some classic Buddhist guidelines for building healthy friendships. But to understand the Buddhist approach to friendship, you have to start at the beginning. The key to friendship, to finding your Fezzik, is first to make friends with yourself. There is a simple word for this process of accepting your own friend request: that word is meditation.1 In the Shambhala tradition, meditation has nothing to do with leaving the world behind or transcending anything. It has to do with getting to know yourself so that you will be poised to befriend others more fully.
Those who meditate will tell you that meditation brings you more in touch with your aloneness. Mindfulness delivers an experience of the mind that cannot be directly shared by anyone else. Meditation can provoke a lot of restlessness and, on a deeper level, unveil anxiety and fear because the practice points out the raw truth, stripped bare of distractions, that you are, in fact, always alone with your own mind.
The mind that is discovered in meditation is a personal and private space, a movie theater with a seating capacity of one. I often joke that we should serve ourselves popcorn during meditation sessions, because the mind is history’s greatest cinema. Sit up, relax, and enjoy the show. Sometimes my personal movie is boring, like watching twenty minutes of C-SPAN. At other times, my mind is more rambunctious, like an episode of Game of Thrones. In the theater of self-awareness, you are cowriter, codirector, and audience for your own perceptions, beliefs, and opinions. If you don’t believe me, put down this book, sit tall, and for a few minutes just watch your thoughts dance. Don’t worry about finding the breath (or any other meditation technique you may have encountered). Just let your awareness go wherever your thoughts lead you. Even if you’re bored, there’s actually quite a compelling movie being shown in there—or in “here,” or wherever the mental theater actually “is.”
Something seminal happened to me during that same difficult era when I discovered The Princess Bride. I took my first formal class in meditation, a class just for children. I was nine or ten, and found the practice incredibly boring—I didn’t start meditating semi-regularly until high school—but it was a productive boredom, a nonevent that carried tremendous value. Being silent with the tools of mindfulness introduced me to a feeling of vivid ordinariness. In that space, the seeds were planted for a delayed-release curiosity about the mind. Most of the ordinary magic of meditation was lost on me at the time—I fell in love with the practice only later on—but I remember the value of realizing that I had an entire internal world to explore, my own VHS collection of thoughts and stories, perceptions and projections.
The mind was an inner space that was related to, and yet totally distinct from, the world out there. In fact, my mind was my true home, a home into which others could never be fully invited. Because of this privacy, the mind is a realm equal parts scary and fascinating: one part castle, one part haunted house. I have spent many years since then trying to get to know my mind a bit better, in order to become more genuinely available for the people I know and love.
As I’ve said, if you’re going to learn how to befriend other humans, you have to match that effort by befriending yourself. In the course of my life, if I really wanted to “find my people,” I also had to learn how to find myself, if not as my best friend then at least as my first friend. Later on, the existential confusions of puberty and high school made me commit to regular meditation. And the first time I got dumped in college, that’s when I knew I was a Buddhist. During those years, the practice and teachings became indispensable to who I was.
When you meditate, you don’t find instantaneous peace, although practice can definitely guide you into a less tumultuous inner setting, a relative calm within body and mind, at least temporarily. The positive effects of mindfulness techniques on the parasympathetic nervous system have been well documented, both anecdotally and empirically. I trust the accumulated accounts of millions of practitioners more than I trust the objective evidence of scientific studies, but both are quite helpful.
There is, however, one big fairy tale currently being offered up about meditation: the fantasy of transcendence, the possibility of entering a permanent bliss state, an inner paradise devoid of thoughts and feelings. Some systems of meditation promise a sudden bypassing of all the discomfort of thoughts and emotions, the ability to settle into the same induced ease every single time you sit. While these approaches may have some positive effects on stress levels, I believe they are not as reliable as promised. And even if these versions of meditation are helpful, they miss the real treasure chest of the practice. The deepest benefit of meditation, for me, is the possibility of befriending the inherent creativity of the mind itself. When you feel at home in your awareness as it is, you have access to the power of your mind as a creative tool. The mind no longer needs to be wrestled or suppressed into peace. When your awareness is like a movie screen, and your thoughts are seen as worthy characters, the mind becomes like a theater. When you watch a movie, would you rather get to know the characters or pretend they don’t exist?
Genuine meditation includes a certain amount of discomfort. Chief among the uncomfortable experiences of meditation, you will eventually discover, are your own Rodents of Unusual Size. In this case, they are Rodents of Unusually Small Size, so small they aren’t even physical entities. These Rodents of Unusually Small Size are negative thoughts, the aggressive commentaries with endless self-critiques that gnaw at you. They’re the thoughts that tell you you aren’t good enough, not properly equipped to be human. These pests try to convince you that you’re probably going to die forgotten and unloved. As I began to practice more throughout my teenage years, I saw that I had a seemingly endless supply of these mental rodents scurrying around. No one knows yet where negative thoughts reside physically in brain or body, or where they come from—they aren’t single origin. Maybe it’s our advertising culture that forces these Rodents of Unusually Small Size upon us; maybe it’s institutional racism and sexism; maybe it’s inherited trauma from our parental and genetic lineages regarding self-worth; maybe it’s an inheritance from a previous lifetime of confused circumstances. I think it might just be all of the above. Who knows?
Long before anyone knew what the brain looked like or how a nervous system functioned, the Buddha realized an important point. Moment by moment, we don’t need to know exactly where our thoughts live in the brain; we just need to know how to work with them. The set of tools for doing so could collectively be called “mindfulness.” Over time, mindfulness can help you cohabitate your nervous system safely with the Rodents of an Unusually Small Size. With greater familiarity, some of your negative thoughts might become harmless. Some rodents might dissolve into space. Some might even morph into little Mice of Compassion.
Embracing Aloneness
THE PURPOSE OF MEDITATION IS to learn to be truly yourself. But if you want to be yourself, you have to invest considerable training in being with yourself. As I have discovered through my own struggles, if you don’t set aside time for getting to know your mind directly, then in the presence of others your sense of self will get increasingly confused. Without mindfulness, you will always be constructing your sense of self based on others’ perceptions. Why is this externalized experience of self a problem? Because you can’t ever really know for sure what others think of you. You receive only occasional feedback: gestures, glances, comments about who people think you are. These external messages are always subjective, momentary, and indirect, received in pieces, brief exchanges, fragments of interaction.
So without being able to know what others think of you, you are left to define your sense of self in terms of what you believe others might think about you, which is two degrees of separation from a verified connection with your own mind. Meanwhile, while you worry what others think, they are caught up in the same game themselves, worrying what you think of them. A friendship between two people without self-awareness is like trying to talk to somebody standing right next to you by calling them on a cell phone with only one bar of reception. You try to say hello, sending a signal to a satellite many miles above, and you wait for the weak signal to ricochet back. The other person, standing next to you, speaks into their own phone, and the message goes to space and back before reappearing in your ear, garbled, indecipherable. You think to yourself, “Did they just say something mean about me? I bet they did.” Without mindfulness practice, this is what our sense of self often feels like: indirect, chaotic, and full of gnawing assumptions about the unclear messages we receive from others.
On top of this indirect experience of self, we often operate from the premise that the messages we receive confirm an underlying suspicion: that there is something fundamentally wrong with us. In a society where the residual belief in original sin is deeply embedded in our secular identity, suspicion of human nature is the cultural air we all inhale. If you assume that your humanity is somehow flawed, unwholesome, or broken, then you might fear that time spent with others will expose this underlying brokenness. If you engage in friendships from this angle, you will always be relating to friends while hoping to fix the things about yourself that you’re afraid the other person sees. Now you’re several degrees and one big Pit of Despair away from experiencing yourself directly. The solution to this mess is not to abandon other people; it’s to give befriending yourself the same urgency that you give to befriending others.
The Shambhala teachings are based on a radical view about the nature of all human beings, and all sentient beings. Nothing at all is broken; wisdom is the deepest stitching in the very fabric of consciousness. This optimistic view of the nature of all sentient beings is often referred to as basic goodness.
The word goodness often confuses people. It is not meant to place a value judgment on either people or experiences, as if some were good and some bad. Yes, some people, more than others, might be ruled by destructive views and harmful habits. But in the context of mindfulness, the word good lacks any sense of evaluation or comparison to some other object that is deemed better or worse. Instead, it refers to appreciation without comparison. Good here simply means worthy of existing, worthy of being experienced.
In the Shambhala teachings, enlightenment refers to a person who remains fully connected to their basic goodness at all times, completely relaxing into the confidence that such a spacious sense of self-worth carries with it. An awake person can handle anything life throws at them: pain and pleasure, successes and letdowns, confusion and wisdom, depression and elation, even birth and death.
The reason meditation has meant so much to me is that I have come to see it entirely as my daily preparation for relationships. Every good relationship is based on the willingness of each participant first to be alone. When it comes to experiencing your own mind, you are always alone, and you could find natural strength in this aloneness, rather than viewing it as some state of desperation needing to be fixed or healed by another person. Buddhist teacher Ajahn Sumedho says it like this: “When it comes to the actual experience of life, we are very much alone; and to expect anyone else to take away our loneliness is asking too much.” Sitting in the movie theater of your mind, you are alone. Others have cocreated the spectacle, but you are the only one who bought a ticket for this private screening.
That being said, we still need a means of sharing our lives, even if the act of sharing aloneness can only ever be an approximation. This is where the human need for art and culture originates, why the relationship between mindfulness and culture is so important. Culture is the collective language of personal experiences. Throughout the ages, humans have invented all forms of it: music, visual arts, architecture, storytelling, poetry, and fairy tales, all to share what it is like to be a unique perceiving, feeling, thinking person. Culture is our best method for being alone together.
Introverts Unite!
A FAVORITE T-SHIRT OF MINE boasts the rallying cry “Introverts Unite! We’re Here! We’re Uncomfortable! And We Want to Go Home!” I love this T-shirt because it points to the boundaries of our solitude and the parameters of our interconnection.
Those who have studied the nature of human consciousness deeply—whether approaching it from the standpoint of psychology, spirituality, sociology, or biology—have had to deal with a riddle, a seemingly irresolvable tension. This question is at the core of any contemporary interpretation of Buddhist teachings. It involves how personal experience interacts with social experience. On the one hand, we each rely on other people constantly. None of us is self-sufficient, at least not in the external world. Our physical realities occur in a fluid state of molecular and causal interdependence.
Interdependence is not only about the physics of the outer world. Your inner world, your very personal and private state of mind, is also entirely shaped by the influence of others. There are more than seven billion humans on this planet now, creating a precarious network of interdependent cultures and views. From the start of life in the womb, your sense of self is affected and molded by attachment and by relationships to those who are not you, especially those who nurture you, or fail to nurture you; to those who instill feelings of safety and belonging. As the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh points out, whatever is Me is always molded by that which is Not Me. A flower, he famously contends, is made up of nonflower elements: the sun, the soil, the water, and especially the human minds that decided on the strange label daffodil. Without all these nonflower influences, a flower couldn’t be a flower. Even our bodies are not all “us.” Nine-tenths are composed of foreign microbes. Quite literally, 90 percent of you is not you. Even those of us who claim to be independent have learned how to be independent by following the lead of people we admire. In terms of cause and effect, declaring our “independence” is literally a joke.
Modern neuroscience tells us that our brains operate in a social manner, as our nervous systems are primed to take cues from the nervous systems of those around us. As the neuroscientist David Eagleman says, “Brains have traditionally been studied in isolation, but that approach overlooks the fact that an enormous amount of brain circuitry has to do with other brains. We are deeply social creatures. All this social glue is generated by specific circuitry in the brain: sprawling networks that monitor other people, communicate with them, feel their pain, judge their intentions, and read their emotions. Our social skills are deeply rooted in our neural circuitry—and understanding this circuitry is the basis of a young field of study called social neuroscience.”2
This “young” field of study called social neuroscience can join together with an ancient field of study called Mahayana Buddhism, a group of contemplative traditions that could be translated as the practice of “relational awakening.” Honoring this social, interconnected nature of life is every bit as important to our awakening as self-inquiry and personal accountability might be. Scientists also believe that the longing to connect deeply with others is what distinguishes the most advanced part of our brains from the brains of earlier mammals and reptiles. What makes us different from salamanders, squirrels, and early primates is our deep, unstoppable longing to link up with each other, our karmic wiring for connectivity.3 Even in our most analytical moments of abstract philosophy, we are still seeking contact with other humans. If Buddhism is about living an awakened life, then we must be aware of our need for genuine connection as the basis for that human awakening.
Even classical Buddhist teachings are completely based on reliance on others, a fact that sometimes gets missed in the more individualistic interpretations of the Buddhist paradigm. We are each asked to contemplate the meaning of sangha, the community of friends or peers who share our journey through life, those who give us the power to become more mindful and compassionate.
Whether we believe we are supposed to rely on others or to go it alone comes from the stories we inherit from our culture. The Princess Bride starts out as a classic American loner tale, but soon morphs into a story of total reliance on friends. At first glance, the Man in Black (Westley in disguise) might seem the perfect libertarian hero, more so than even a solitary yogi like the Buddha. When we first meet him, he seems to have gotten used to working alone, via his pirate training. Working alone has gotten him pretty far in the story, and it has made him look exceptionally cool. Within the American canon of powerful superhero loners, the Man in Black is akin to Batman’s younger, wittier (and much poorer) brother. But even this superhero needs the help of friends, and Westley can’t get his true love back, or even survive his own plot, without their help.
When you sit alone in meditation, you start to realize that, amazingly, you were never alone, because you see clearly that you didn’t write your own script. We have to balance the experience of our aloneness with the truth of just how interdependently constructed we are.4 Here is the tension we each must inhabit, a tension that perhaps describes all Buddhist teachings: Your sense of self can only be experienced personally, but it is constructed socially. If we understand this tension, we will understand reality. With this insight, what once was a friction between the twin truths of aloneness and interdependence melts into harmony. The parallel practices of making friends with yourself and making friends with others begin to complement each other. Time spent in solitude and time spent with others can each help you awaken. At last, an introvert has no choice but to accept their interdependence with others, at least if they want to understand reality fully. And it is exactly at this point that good friendships become crucial for any spiritual path, that moment when introverts realize we must unite.
What Is a “Good” Friend?
SOMETIMES IT’S ABUNDANTLY CLEAR HOW the right friends bring out the best spiritual qualities in us—if we’d only pay attention. Once upon a time, I was living with a close friend in Brooklyn. This friend was exceptionally thoughtful and compassionate. At the time, he was my Westley in body, my Fezzik in spirit, and my passionate Inigo if I ever needed a verbal swordsman to defend me against attacks from others. One day we discovered that our apartment had a mouse problem (Rodents of the Usual Size). My friend said he would buy traps, and I automatically assumed he would get those nondeadly traps. I didn’t know much about mouse traps; I remembered only an incident years earlier, when my mother and I caught a mouse in a humane trap and walked pleasantly to a nearby park to set it free. This rosy memory might’ve engrained in me the assumption that anybody I considered a compassionate person would always use nondeadly traps. A few days after my friend set the traps out, I came home before him to find that we’d indeed caught a mouse. I examined the helpless creature, recently caught, stuck on a tray of glue that it had mistaken for an oasis of cheese and honey. I could see its tiny lungs heaving anxiously for breath. For a moment, I mirrored the mouse’s pain, that pain we all know: the trauma of blindly mistaking entrapment for safety—confusing “ouch” for “wow”—the suffering born of not knowing how to navigate this cosmos without getting yourself caught up in a horrific situation. I scratched my head, trying to figure out how to liberate the mouse from this have-a-heart trap that my have-a-heart friend had laid for it, in his indisputably have-a-heart manner.
I brought the tray out onto the fire escape and started trying to work the mouse free from the glue. Its legs were stuck, and the glue seemed extra sticky. The mouse kept trying to bite my hands, but I kept working, eventually getting one leg out of the glue, then another. Honestly, I was close to giving up, assuming the trap had simply malfunctioned. I considered secretly hurling the mouse off the fire escape so that it would die as quickly as possible, but I couldn’t let my best friend down. How could I look him in the eye if I gave up and killed the mouse? Would I have to lie to him? I couldn’t abide these thoughts. After about twenty minutes of careful work, I finally freed the little torso, and the mouse limped away and disappeared. When my friend came home a little later, I told him that we had caught a mouse. “Did you … um … kill it?” he asked, cautiously. “Of course not!” I said, still clueless. “It took me like twenty minutes to free the little dude.”
My friend suddenly hugged me deeply, like Amma might. “Oh, man, you are so sweet. The hardware store was out of humane traps, and those don’t really work anyway. I mean, I wish they worked, but … oh, man. You’re just supposed to crush it with something heavy and put it out of its misery as fast as you can.”
I tried to tell my friend that I had kept going with my rodent liberation project to look good in his eyes. One classic Buddhist teaching on compassion states it very simply: “With some [friends], your shortcomings fade away and your positive abilities grow like the waxing moon. Hold such [friends] dear to you, dearer than your own body.”5
It was only because I’d assumed my friend was compassionate that I chose the hard work of doing the right thing for that creature. At other times, I have done the wrong thing simply because no one was around to help me raise the bar for my conduct, or because I was unable to follow the guidance of those who had tried. The world is composed of both stories. One the one hand, we all have those fourth-grade stories, the “no-clue” narratives enacted out of confusion, when no one is around to inspire you to do that which is skillful, that which is kind. On the other hand, you can celebrate the stories of a friend going above and beyond the call of duty and inspiring you to be more awake than you would otherwise have been. That kind of friend makes all the difference.
My teacher Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche has repeatedly made the same case: it matters whom you invite into your personal sphere. He calls it “hanging out with the right crowd.” He’s not talking about the cool kids. He’s talking about associating with those people who help you wake up. In my R.O.U.S. story, I was grateful to have a well-chosen friend, because our friendship made me raise my compassion game, so to speak. In fact, a Buddhist definition for best friend could simply be the person who helps you bring out your “best” qualities: mindfulness, generosity, patience, confidence, and creativity. The best friends are the ones who support your awakening, and whose awakening you in turn support.
Discernment vs. Judgment: Letting Go of the Wrong Friendships
GIVEN THAT MOST FRIENDSHIPS BEGIN by coincidence, how do you choose your friends? In that same classic Buddhist text on compassion, the one that tells you to spend as much time as possible with those who bring out your highest qualities, well, just a few verses later, it says the opposite. It says you should work with difficult people with an open heart, treating even your toughest relationships as sacred teachers, because difficult people can reveal opportunities for you to develop patience and generosity. How do we reconcile these two statements, the need to be careful about whom you create a close friendship with, and the need to welcome difficult people as potential teachers? For anyone trying to be both mindful and compassionate, this dilemma may lead to a codependent relationship or feeling like a doormat.
The Buddhist ideal of a bodhisattva complicates the practice of friendship. A bodhisattva is a being who dedicates their existence to the benefit of many others. Students of Buddhism are eventually invited to take on such an aspiration themselves. Just how many “others” are we talking about? The classic teachings on becoming a bodhisattva say the student should dedicate their life to all beings. This number is so vast, and such an abstraction, that it’s hard to pinpoint its meaning. Yet the teachings are unanimous in declaring that happiness comes from working to benefit as many others as one possibly can. Personally, I can’t even begin to conceptualize the simultaneously microscopic and intergalactic nature of this request. Our inability to conceptualize the bodhisattva’s aspiration is part of its power. But this ideal also brings up an important question about accountability to other beings. Am I supposed to perform the same duties for all beings that I would for a close friend? Am I supposed to help all sentient beings move a heavy couch up two flights of stairs?
The answer lies in the definition of friend. Friendship is a special relationship; your close friends represent something very different from someone you simply care about. You can care about many beings, including tremendously difficult or disturbed people, but you can exist in an active relationship with only a limited number of friends. Each time we choose to cultivate a friendship with someone, we are making an important choice.
A crucial concept in Tibetan Buddhism is the idea that each of us lives within the intimacy of something called a mandala, a Sanskrit word meaning “sacred circle.” In the Shambhala teachings, we use the mandala as an artistic mapping of the close relationships that comprise our life, family, colleagues, close friends, and life partners. A friend once referred to the mandala as a depiction of a personal ecosystem. Visually, a mandala is a depiction of all the supportive relationships that help you fulfill your intention to wake up.
Social media greatly complicates the definition of personal relationships, because it stretches the boundaries of your personal ecosystem far beyond anything humans (and human nervous systems) have been able to keep track of before. In some ways, the technology of our era is wonderful for compassion, because we can bear witness to the lives of more people than ever before. Isn’t it amazing that everybody you knew in the fourth grade, everyone you were mean to, and vice versa, can now find you again?
By training the mind, you can develop compassion for all beings, but you can’t carry everyone up the Cliffs of Insanity. Even Facebook, perhaps in the interest of avoiding virtual “compassion fatigue,” limits the number of friends we can each accept. If you can choose a few good friends to inhabit your life, that might just be enough. The only way to avoid feeling like a total failure as a friend is to choose carefully whom you want to associate with, and practice those relationships with a clarified intention. This requires understanding that there’s no such thing as bad people, but there is such a thing as bad friendship.
Perhaps the term bad friendship sounds judgmental. In Buddhism, judgment and nonjudgment are very often misunderstood. (It often seems that Buddhists aren’t supposed to have an opinion, or even make choices, but you can’t avoid making choices in life—about where to shop, whom to vote for, how to decorate your bedroom, and especially whom to associate with.) Nonjudgmental means allowing experiences, especially potentially painful ones, to enter your heart and mind. A judgmental attitude is neither scientific nor kind. With judgment, you neglect to let the moment even touch you. Before you’re aware of what’s happening you’ve already passed a verdict, so you can’t see clearly. Friendship requires the ability to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy, quinoa and cocaine (or worse, iocane). You can remain completely nonjudgmental toward drug addiction, but that doesn’t mean that you want to get addicted yourself. Some friendships simply aren’t healthy.
To take an example from The Princess Bride, Wallace Shawn gives us the gift of Vizzini, one of the best bad friends in cinematic history. He is a particularly poor choice to befriend when you are suffering the way Inigo and Fezzik are both suffering—from the trauma of losing their parents at an early age. Vizzini is that bad friend who promises shelter and sustenance but instead delivers abuse and misdirection. I’m sure we’ve all been in an unfortunate friendship like that or had a boss like him (and I’m sure the boss wasn’t nearly as funny as Vizzini). Maybe you’ve even followed a spiritual teacher like Vizzini, an emotional puppeteer who berated and gaslighted you constantly, making you live in a constant state of fear that if you didn’t give him what he wanted, you’d end up unemployed in Greenland, or otherwise discarded, drowning in dangerous waters.
Bad friendships don’t support the development of mindfulness, and they incubate our worst qualities: insecurity, escapism, and jealousy. Unhealthy friendships are founded on the belief that we are okay only if someone else tells us we are okay, which is quite a tenuous definition of safety. At their worst, bad friendships are paralyzing rituals of codependence that enable our worst qualities to stay frozen over a long period of time.
A relationship that undercuts confidence in your basic goodness can make it harder for you ever to want to develop mindfulness. Mindfulness can only grow in an environment where there is a yearning to be present. But if you are surrounded only by people who make you feel basically bad about yourself, why wouldn’t you want to escape the present moment, and even escape your own body, every chance you got? It might be wise to exercise caution when you let someone into your mandala, your personal ecosystem. If you are going to expand your capacity to help others, those close to you need to participate in a structure that’s supportive for your awakening, and you need to return the favor to them.
Ironically, the more nonjudgmental you become, the more discerning you get about whether to cultivate a closer friendship with a given person. “Nonjudgment” is the clarity you need to see that some relationships just don’t work. The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy friendship is not whether you love each other; it’s whether you help each other wake up. And if two people want to help each other awaken, they need to do something that the greatest action movies of our time understand. To help each other wake up, you have to help each other beat the bad guys.
Copyright © 2017 by Ethan Nichtern
