Is there a Buddhist approach to get new friends?
I mean, I heard your recent talks on the Sutta study.
As I see it, the one way to get new friends arises from purity and the Eightfold Noble Path, right?
To get a new set of friends, where you
You've got some friends who you realize are not friends at all, but are enemies, a wolf in sheep's clothing.
So what do you do to change that?
Well, this kind of conflict that we're talking about is a big part.
When I started practicing meditation, I lost all my friends.
And a lot of that was due to the conflict that I wasn't at all interested in compromising.
I'm just very keen on changing my life.
So at first, I thought I could do it.
I could bring my friends along.
And so I tried my best to encourage them in it.
And absolutely none of them were interested.
There were a couple of old ex-girlfriends who I managed to convince.
But I don't know how pure the intentions were there.
They weren't completely impure intentions, but they certainly... And I got a couple of people involved temporarily.
One person actually went on to do a Goenka course.
But yeah, so the conflict is a big part of it where you don't compromise.
When you stop compromising, your friends change very... your social circle changes very quickly.
I don't think you should seek out new friends particularly.
You might want to seek out a meditation teacher, which is considered to be the best friend, someone who can guide you.
So that friend that we talked about yesterday, the one who gives advice, gives guidance.
I would seek out that sort of friend.
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.
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.
So ways and means of putting together your own meditation group.
Um...
Yeah, we could do that even.
That's something interesting that we could even do on the SiriMongolo site.
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
attract other like-minded people in their area.
That's maybe the next iteration of SiriMongolo.org, but I need some help.
I'm not really going to be able to expand upon the website.