Santa Clara Meditation Happiness & Coexist – Do we need friends in life?
I have an old friend back from my freshman year of college. We had the same major. When my friend was a sophomore in college, he was sent to prison for a political crime. He was caught demonstrating for the democratization of Korea in the 1990s. After that, my friend and I had a lot of twists and turns in our lives. We meet once a year for a drink. When we turned 46, at one of these meetings, we looked back at that time when we were very young and inexperienced. The world then seemed to be full of absurdity and exactly divided into black and white. Twenty-five years later, my friend and I are living in our own different worlds.
If you look closely around you, there will be a wide variety of people living their own different lives. I also used to look at my friends’ lives and judge them too easily as to whether their life was good or bad. For example, my friend who went to prison is unconsciously thinking that he is always a poor friend to me and a friend whose life is not going well.
“People really do like seeing their best friends humiliated; a large part of the friendship is based on humiliation; and that is an old truth, well known to all intelligent people.”
― Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, The Gambler
Why do we need a friend? As Dostoevsky said, do we need a friend to satisfy our own happiness and feel superior while a friend is experiencing misfortune? Obviously, we all know we have had these feelings and these negative minds within us.
- I started meditation and abandoned my negative mind
After meditating and reflecting on my life that I have lived only for myself, I started abandoning my self-centered mind. I was able to sincerely wish for the happiness of others around me. There’s something my father always said. “If only you were happy and People around you were unhappy, is it real happiness? When everyone around you is happy, you can be really happy too.”
- We are all one.
Everyday, the news about the coronavirus pandemic is making our hearts blue. Especially the recent news from India. Through this pandemic, we realized how helpless human beings are in the face of death and that so many things we make up in society are meaningless. Status, the gap between rich and poor, borders, genders, ages, races, social system…. We are witnessing the collapse of human-made things in the wake of this pandemic. What my father said rings true.. that he wishes my neighbors happiness, as we are all one. The world is telling us that we have to live as ‘us’, not ‘you’ and ‘me’.
- Let’s restart together
I hope that my friend who spent time in prison in his 20’s will rise up and start again after overcoming his past memories. I hope my friend and I, who have only lived half of our lives in the era of Centenarians, will be happy together. To do that, my friend will help me and I will help my friend. When that friend is happy, I’m also happy. My life is rich and comfortable but my happiness is false if I have a hungry brother. Coronavirus pandemic made us realize how tightly connected the whole world is. Maybe this pandemic is a golden opportunity for our humanity to leap forward in the right direction.
My friends are me, not separate from me. Peaceful coexistence is possible when ‘you’ and ‘I’ become ‘us’. When the self-centered mind that only ‘I’ know is thrown away, we can all be of one mind and help each other.
by Donna Seo
