Who is Your Best Friend?

 

Dr. Frank Morales, Ph.D.

(Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya)

Do you have friends?  Of course you do!  Who doesn’t have friends?  To even pose such a question would seem silly to many of us.  As human beings, most of us are social by nature, and we need to express our need for relationship in the form of our many friends and loved ones.  Most of us even have one or two people who we would call our very best friends – people whom we trust completely, and who we know are always there for us in times of trouble. 

While almost all of us can say that we have truly good friends, however, the truth of the matter is that most of us have no real knowledge about who our truly best of friend really is.  The very best friend that we have is the same one whom we tend to ignore the easiest.  Indeed, most of us spend much of our lives running away from our very best friend as fast as our little feet can take us.  That very best friend in your life is Bhagavan: God.  It is God who is not only your very best of friends, but who is responsible for the friends that you do have now. 

Accepting the reality that God has given us the gift of friendship in our lives, I want to pose an interesting question to you.

Think of the very closest friend that you have in this world.  This person cares about you and would do anything for you, right?  Of course he would.  Well, this is my question:  Do you have any friend or loved one in the world, including even your very best friend, who you can say will never abandon you?  Do you have a friend who, in fact, will look after you and follow you as you traverse lifetime after lifetime, sometimes being in male bodies and sometimes in female bodies, sometimes in the body of a slug or sometimes in the body of a king; who will be there as a silent witness seeing you in your best of times, but also seeing you when you’re at your very worst?  If you answer this question honestly, you know that there is absolutely no one – however much they may truly love you – who would be willing to do this for you.  No one. 

Yet you do have such a friend.  God as Antaryamin (the Inner Witness) patiently and lovingly accompanies us as we journey from one life to another.  Bhagavan (God) doesn’t ever judge us or abandon us.  Rather God chooses to reside ever-present within our hearts as the silent witness of our actions, emotions, and thoughts, observing us in our good times, and at our very cruelest and most selfish times.  Yet, even more so than the most loving parent we could ever imagine, God never gives up on us.  Instead, He waits patiently and lovingly, our True Friend, yearning for us to come to the realization that we are never alone.  He waits for us to quiet our mind, to still our uncontrolled desire for selfish pursuits, and to turn to Him and His loving embrace. 

To know this Eternal Friend, we must cultivate love and devotion (bhakti), for this is all that God asks of us:  that we make Him the priority in our lives, and that we try to love our very Best Friend as He loves us.  This friend has written us a letter of love called the Bhagavad Gita.  Read Bhagavan’s letter to you, love Him, and live His Dharma daily.  Thus you will know more joy, more peace, more fulfillment, and more bliss than any human friend can ever give you.  You will directly experience the love of Bhagavan. 

About the Author  

Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya (Dr. Frank Morales, Ph.D.) is an American who has been studying, practicing, and teaching Dharma and Yoga spirituality for over 30 years. He is also an initiated Hindu priest and Acharya (Spiritual Preceptor).  He is the Founder-President of the International Sanatana Dharma Society (a dynamic world-wide movement dedicated to teaching Dharma spirituality) and the Resident Acharya (Spiritual Teacher) of the Hindu Temple of Omaha, Nebraska.  He has a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a B.A. in philosophy from Loyola University Chicago.  He has lectured on Dharma at dozens of top universities, including such prestigious institutions as Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, Cornell, and Northwestern.  He has also served as a consultant for such Fortune 500 companies as Ford Motor Corporation and Lucent Technology.  Currently recognized as one of the nation’s leading authorities on Yoga spirituality and meditation, he is recognized by the global Hindu community as one of the leading Hindu Acharyas (Spiritual Preceptors) in the world today.  With a very large international following of both Indian and Western students, Sri Acharya Ji is especially renowned for his highly authentic and radically transformative approach to Dharmic spirituality, his authoritative and scholarly method of teaching, his clear emphasis on serious spiritual practice, and his ability to provide his students with a profoundly direct experience of self-realization and of the Divine.  Sri Acharya Ji’s students, followers, and supporters number in the thousands in both the Indian and non-Indian communities. 

"Dr. Frank Morales represents the Sankalpa [the will] of the Hindu people and the cause of Sanatana Dharma. I urge all Hindus everywhere to give him your full support, assistance, and encouragement in his crucial work. He needs and deserves our help."

- Dr. David Frawley (Oct. 14, 2007)

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