The Need for Relationships

It's the Fourth of July. Everyone will be gathering at the Rec Center tonight for fireworks, a party. They'll see their friends, familiar faces with whom they share countless memories. 


I've never gone to public school here. Over the years I have accumulated a few close friends, but when it comes to their friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, I'm lost. 


Because of this I've never been one for big, social events. I just feel out of place. 


Any road that leads away from material entanglement is a lonely one. A poem by Byron Herbert Reece comes to my mind.

I go by ways of rust and flame
Beneath the bent and lonely sky;
Behind me on the ways I came
I see the hedges lying bare,
But neither question nor reply.
A solitary thing am I
Upon the roads of rust and flame
That thin at sunset to the air.
I call upon no word nor name
And neither question nor reply
But walk alone as all men must
Upon the roads of flame and rust.  

Sadhu Sanga is important in Bhakti Yoga for this reason. Spiritual advancement without association of devotees is impersonal. It will not lead to the Goloka Vrindavan, where you will serve with other devotees. If one merely advances spiritually and not personally, emotionally, he will find himself in the impersonal Brahman. And he will fall back down to to earth for the very reason that he craves association, relationship, love. 


Human nature is so conducive for building relationships, that it is extremely difficult to grow in Krishna Consciousness if our natural impulse to build relationships is taking us in the other direction. The answer then is to use the instinct to build relationships for good, and this is done by surrounding oneself with devotees so that one becomes attached to them.

Every learned man knows very well that attachment for the material is the greatest entanglement of the spirit soul. But that same attachment, when applied to the self-realized devotees, opens the door of liberation.

~Srimad Bhagvatam 3.25.20