How can a person be his own friend?

How can a person be his own friend? People do not ask this question too often, or they don't even ask it at all; but it is so important to be your own friend.

The idea of the possibility of friendship with yourself dawn in your mind when you suddenly realize that you have a physical body that you can care for, be totally careless toward, or even be the enemy of.

People do not realize this too often. You must be fairly advanced to suddenly see that the body is not you, but is a living entity. How can you hurt or hate such a complicated mechanism given to you? But you do this so often. For example, if you dope your body, pour a few bottles of alcohol down its throat, or with an immoral life force upon it syphilis and gonorrhea, how can you call yourself the friend of your body?

On the other hand, when you nourish your body with the right food, give it proper rest, use its energy goal-fittingly, and protect it from various dangers and diseases, how can you call yourself an enemy of your body?

Thus it is possible to be a friend or an enemy of your own body.

But the story does not end here. When man advances, he will realize that he is not his emotions, but that he has an emotional body or an emotional nature. Also, he will realize that he can be the friend or the enemy of his emotional body. If he uses his emotional body to express hatred, fear, anger, and revenge, then we say that such a person is misusing his emotional body and damaging not only his emotional body but also his physical body.

Every negative emotion causes great damage to the astral centers and forces them to close their petals and be inactive. Also, negative emotions produce disturbances in the nervous system of the body and create certain poisons in the nerve channels, which spread into the glands and cause glandular malfunctions.

How can one be friend of his emotional nature if he does not care for the welfare of his astral apparatus? If a person is travelling with a boat, he takes care of the boat so that he safely reaches his destination. But if on the open sea he takes a hammer and begins to make holes in the bottom of his boat, we call such a person the enemy of his boat - the enemy of his body - or we call him insane.

People must be very advanced to be able to see that they are not even their thoughts or their mind. Once a person realizes that the mental body is a mechanism through which he formulates his ideas, visions, and feelings and in which he accumulates knowledge, he can use his mental body constructively or destructively and become either an enemy or a friend to his mental body. Can a person be the friend of his mind or mental body if he wants his mind to be occupied with separatism, to cultivate vanities, and to produce illusions?

Those who are friends of their mental body cultivate it with knowledge and train it with concentration and meditation. They make it inclusive, clear, tolerant, and especially diligent and watchful.

-Torkom Saraydarian
(Challenge for Discipleship)