Friendship is one of the great comforts to our lonely space-time psyche souls. It gives a sense that we are not alone and that someone really cares. The trouble is such relationships may have the seed of destruction planted within them from the beginning. Once we realise this it’s not surprising that we look back on our lives to see the wreckage of close friendships littering our past. So how come? Well, here’s a few thoughts on friendship and why they can so often explode further up the road.
My premise is that the psycho-spiritual attachments known as friendships are built upon desire. I guess that I’d better explain. Well, when two folk meet something can just click straight away. So what is this relational resonance? Well, may I suggest that it’s the mutual recognition of similar desire frequencies. We are creatures of desire, both transmitters and receivers of subliminal unconscious desires that flood our being. On meeting some folk we are immediately repelled and withdraw ASAP – our lower consciousness has picked up a discordant desire frequency, one that if received will spell negativity and relational disharmony. But what of the one we meet who seems to tune into our own desire transmissions and feels at ease? Well, such encounters can birth what we call a friendship, a flowing together towards an unspoken goal or desire object.
Now when this occurs, things go swimmingly for a while, perhaps even years! Yet, at some stage a crisis is usually reached in our mutual attraction. How? Well, here are a few possible answers.
After we meet someone who both receives and transmits desire similar to our own, a process of mimesis or imitation is immediately triggered. We want to be more like the other, our friend, and absorb every last drop of their desire transmissions. The same goes for our friend. Over time, we become more and more like each other; in fact on a psycho-spiritual level we becomes doubles or clones on one another. Outwardly our lives may appear different but inwardly we are set on the same desire course with a common object feeding the intensity of our desires.
Now it’s not long before trouble sets in and we become Monstrous Doubles for each other. Why? Well, we have become so identical that a glitch enters our relationship and we see the other as an external Self, one that must be absorbed at all costs. Now once we both set out on this new mission of absorption, we see our friend in a new light, as a rival to our very sense of Being. A rival that must totally be absorbed through control or killed off in a relational field of battle. Of course we sense in each other this new dynamic within our hitherto rose garden of friendship and respect, birthing a deep suspicion of the previously loyal other.
If we choose to absorb the other, by making them our desire slave, i.e. whipping their sense of individuality and self-worth, they may submit and enter into deep depression or they may react by attempting to absorb us in turn. Either way, the original nature and mutual respect of the friendship has well and truly gone, morphing into an ever-increasing battle for psychological survival.
Alternatively, we can both come out, desire guns blazing and have an almighty row that leads to the end of our friendship. I doing so we are attempting to kill off or destroy our image in the other. We can no longer live with this outside Self, one who is now rivalling us for our sense of self worth and esteem. The outcome of such an encounter is usually the end of the relationship, as one of the parties leaves the communal herd and goes looking for another with similar desires to their own. Like two rivalling stags there can only be one winner, albeit a wounded and scarred one.
Hence, is it a great surprise that such friendships often explode within the metaphysical desire fields of religious communities, where desire is almost deified as the meaning of life, albeit in the context of the Divine. Many never recover from the disillusionment of such crash wreck friendships. As well as the friendship, all desire to experience the Divine is kicked into touch as we turn our backs on all that kinda God stuff.
We walk as the walking wounded, with our wounds being the open sores of disillusionment and a sense of betrayal. And yet it is really no-one’s fault, for skewed imitative desire is part of our common human wiring. Once we take to the dance floor of mutual desire a fall must eventually ensue.
Are there any answers to our relational predicament? Well, I believe so, those observed in the social relationships of Yeshua bar Yosef, but more of that next week.
PS. If my thoughts on desire have set you thinking you might like to pop over via the link below and have a wee look at my book, ‘MATRIX MESSIAH’, which examines subliminal desire, rivalry and relational violence before presenting the Nazarene’s radical but effective solution.
Hi Dylan:
I like your perspective here. A totally different view on why friendships end. I can see where a few of close friendships may have imploded using some of these hypotheses.
Thanks Chris. Yes, most friendships that are initially built around a form of hero worship, eventually explode as the desire rivalry kicks in,leaving most folk astounded. ‘But they were like brothers’, or ‘Yet, they got on more like sisters’ is the tell-tale sign. Monstrous Doubles where one has to be expelled and one declared the metaphysical victor.