A Brief Friendship

    “I used to read books on meditation,” he told me in a matter-of-fact way, “a real poet of my time, but now I’m into the big guy,” he gestured to the sky and added, “God. God is the true king,” and he showed me his house, he had just moved into the neighborhood, just across the street from my house.
    He was a big man, with big shoulders and long hair. He was a construction worker in Los Angeles, of all places. He arrived with a big family too. A family of eight. After a few days however, I saw what was happening: there were 2 families living in that house. Something that was becoming quite familiar in our neighborhood of foreigners and migrants, an end of times melting pot.

    “God is the true king,” he would tell me another day, as he took the sun in his balcony. “I arrived at that conclusion after years of hardship and failure. I noticed I might as well surrender to him and stop playing around, you know what I mean?”

    “Meditation is cool and all, but you become disconnected from life, a bit aloof and my wife doesn’t like aloofness. She threatened to leave me if I continued on that path. Three day retreats, yeah right, not for me.”

    “Meditation is for hippies,” he would say on another occasion, “you know what I mean, not for me. I got a family and a dog.”

    Some time later, by accident, we started having some exchanges via the WhatsApp application. That is, I introduced him to some of the masters that had been instrumental in my spiritual path.

    “You should read up on Advaita,” I told him, and I would send him some links to videos so he could catch up on his spiritual knowledge and maybe have a alternative perspective on the truth, that way we could have a topic of conversation when we met by chance. I wasn’t too involved with reading and preaching the Bible at the time.
    It didn’t last long, however, our correspondence via WhatsApp, even though we were neighbors. Apparently his wife got a hold of his phone. And that was the end of that.