A: Without trust and respect, how can you have friendship ? I really don’t know! But, look, sir, first of all why do you need a friend ? Is it because you want to depend on him, rely on him, have companionship ? Is it out of your loneliness, insufficiency that you depend on another to fill that emptiness and therefore you are using another, exploiting another to cover your own insufficiency, your own emptiness, and so call that person a friend ? Is he a friend in that way – using him for your pleasure, your comfort and so on ? Go into it, sir, don’t accept what I am saying. Most of us are so lonely, and the older we get the more lonely we feel and discover our own emptiness.

When you are young, these things don’t occur to you. But as you grow to maturity – if you ever mature at all- then you discover for yourself what it means to be empty, lonely, to have no friend at all because you have led a superficial life, depended on others, exploited others. You have invested your heart, your feelings in others, and when they die, or go away, you feel so lonely, empty; and out of what emptiness there is self-pity, and you dream of finding somebody to fill that emptiness. That is what is happening all the days of our life.

Now, can you see this and learn about it ? Learn what it means to be lonely and never escape from it. Look at it, live with it, see what it is implied, so that psychologically, inwardly, you depend on nobody. Then you know what it means to love.