Friendship?

[Tariq]

What's your take on friendship guys?

Do you view it as beneficial or do you think it brings more harm than good ( i.e by making you rely on friends to help you do stuff or you raising expectations about  them...)

Do you think being a lone wolf becomes necessary at some point of one's developpement?

 

[Joyous]

I think you need to see you're friends for who they truly are/believe they are. then make a decision. if you hanging around a funny guy for example. but he's negative condescending and judgmental. then you'll either accept it or fight it.. 

[philosogi]

@Tariq Depends on the friends! Also, you can bring consciousness to the friendships, and steer them in the direction you want. If you don't want to just rely on them to help you do things, don't rely on having them help you with things. If you don't see it healthy to raise expectations for them, don't. I wonder where that leaves you with the friendships? 

Friendship is a funny thing. I think a lot of people have friends to decorate themselves "look I have like 800 friends on facebook and I go out every weekend and have lots of .... etc, and look at all my photos to prove it" and other people have friends to alleviate their own emptiness/loneliness. What does that leave for friendship? I think that if you have a genuine care to hear what the other has been thinking/doing, it's reciprocal, and doesn't revolve around a soft addiction, then it's a pure friendship. It's a very rare connection!

[Tariq]

55 minutes ago, philosogi said:

@Tariq Depends on the friends! Also, you can bring consciousness to the friendships, and steer them in the direction you want. If you don't want to just rely on them to help you do things, don't rely on having them help you with things. If you don't see it healthy to raise expectations for them, don't. I wonder where that leaves you with the friendships? 

Friendship is a funny thing. I think a lot of people have friends to decorate themselves "look I have like 800 friends on facebook and I go out every weekend and have lots of .... etc, and look at all my photos to prove it" and other people have friends to alleviate their own emptiness/loneliness. What does that leave for friendship? I think that if you have a genuine care to hear what the other has been thinking/doing, it's reciprocal, and doesn't revolve around a soft addiction, then it's a pure friendship. It's a very rare connection!

Yes!

I have the privilege of knowing some people who genuinly care about me and my well-being and I do love them too.

Some of them are into this self-actualization work and most of the time when we need to take some big action that's very far out of our confort zone we do them together (like Socializing with strangers or meditating for long periods of time).

The simple fact of having that kind of support gives one an extra push to stick to his plans, but isn't that some kind of cheating ?

Because you're not gaining as much discipline as you would if you did it by yourself 

[philosogi]

1 minute ago, Tariq said:

Because you're not gaining as much discipline as you would if you did it by yourself 

Only if you can't do it as readily alone. But it's a skill that can be practiced. You could try going a week or a month with the same discipline as you would with your friends. Does your higher self want to do this? Is there resistance? Why?

2 minutes ago, Tariq said:

The simple fact of having that kind of support gives one an extra push to stick to his plans, but isn't that some kind of cheating ?

It's not "cheating," (that implies that there's one way or system of searching for truth) it's just not as effective. Make sure it's not your ego speaking, thinking that there's some extra merit you get from - self praise or others - if you do it alone.