Friendship & Colleagues

    The title of my blog is "Musings of German Dave" and this is a musing of mine. The last 2 posts were interviews and all said they were fantastic interviews but I didn't have a chance to put my thoughts in perspective in a more up front manner. So to start off with I wanted to talk about friendship and what it means.

Friendship has various connotations throughout history and wherever region you go to. What friendship means to one group of people will not mean the same thing to another group, so forth. I feel though that friendship should be based on the idea of sacrifice! I like this quote from Lord Krishna as he is speaking to Arjuna,"O best of the Kuru dynasty, without sacrifice one can never live happily on this planet or in this life: what then of the next?" Sacrifice is to make something holy and the mode of that is devotion. Devotion to one's friends is to make the relationship divine and essentially certain and in some cases, eternal. All too often  people that have any sort of relationship do not strengthen the bonds(if any) that tie them. This is where devotion, and in a purer sense, sacrifice comes into play.

I do not live in an area where sacrifice, devotion, loyalty, honor, or really any virtues are the mode and blueprint that operates within people. Hell the time period is of a different sort; capitalism, hyper-individualism, and the pleasure principle operate at a mind boggling speed and these things condition the populace to Be a certain way. Most people do not grow up to learn how to Be from the heart and to attune themselves to self-reflection and even I have as of late have fallen to automatic impulses and bullshit behavior. With all this said this creates a situation where meaningful relationships, friendships, are hard to come by and form. Even relationships of the Blood tend to lose their force and families get torn apart! What is to be done to turn the tide?

Answer: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Martin Heidegger, Vedic Philosophy, German Philosophy, Goethe, Greek Philosophy, Bhagavad Gita, Bathory