1
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Is there a Buddhist approach to get new friends?

2
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I mean, I heard your recent talks on the Sutta study.

3
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As I see it, the one way to get new friends arises from purity and the Eightfold Noble Path, right?

4
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To get a new set of friends, where you

5
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You've got some friends who you realize are not friends at all, but are enemies, a wolf in sheep's clothing.

6
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So what do you do to change that?

7
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Well, this kind of conflict that we're talking about is a big part.

8
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When I started practicing meditation, I lost all my friends.

9
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And a lot of that was due to the conflict that I wasn't at all interested in compromising.

10
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I'm just very keen on changing my life.

11
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So at first, I thought I could do it.

12
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I could bring my friends along.

13
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And so I tried my best to encourage them in it.

14
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And absolutely none of them were interested.

15
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There were a couple of old ex-girlfriends who I managed to convince.

16
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But I don't know how pure the intentions were there.

17
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They weren't completely impure intentions, but they certainly... And I got a couple of people involved temporarily.

18
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One person actually went on to do a Goenka course.

19
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But yeah, so the conflict is a big part of it where you don't compromise.

20
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When you stop compromising, your friends change very... your social circle changes very quickly.

21
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I don't think you should seek out new friends particularly.

22
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You might want to seek out a meditation teacher, which is considered to be the best friend, someone who can guide you.

23
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So that friend that we talked about yesterday, the one who gives advice, gives guidance.

24
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I would seek out that sort of friend.

25
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But if you can, if you can find a Dhamma group, if you can put together a Dhamma group even, that would be something interesting to try.

26
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I actually thought we could put together some sort of package where, like the Goenka tradition, where we have this package and you pick up the package and it's like a do-it-yourself Dhamma group.

27
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So ways and means of putting together your own meditation group.

28
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Um...

29
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Yeah, we could do that even.

30
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That's something interesting that we could even do on the SiriMongolo site.

31
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Anybody who wants to start a demo group, we could give them a subdomain or a page of their own, and it would have all sorts of tools on it or something, setting up a group and, I don't know, whatever, someone would really need is someone who can figure out how to put that together to allow people to just set up their own group and

32
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attract other like-minded people in their area.

33
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That's maybe the next iteration of SiriMongolo.org, but I need some help.

34
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I'm not really going to be able to expand upon the website.