When is our friends’ influence helpful and when unhelpful?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
thank you what is the role of friends around us, people around us when is that as a resource useful or when is it not useful yeah actually we are social creatures that means we live in a social circle and we are influenced by the social circle around us now how exactly that social circle will influence us that depends on what kind of social circle it is so if we have devotee association and not just devotee association even within devotee association also some devotees are very negative, some are very critical some devotees are more positive and more encouraging so we have to know that I want to go closer towards Krishna and in my attempt to go closer towards Krishna those who help me in that that association is favorable those who discourage me in that that association is unfavorable so the characteristic of is that we accept that which is favorable and we avoid that which is unfavorable so based on in association also rather than just stereotyping a social circle we can find out within social circle those people who encourages, those who are influence on our bhakti is positive and we we take their guidance, we take their inputs and based on that we make decisions so sometimes many times actually getting a perspective of somebody else on that situation is very helpful because we are seeing things from our limited perspective and we are often too emotionally invested in a particular issue to see it properly somebody who is not so emotionally caught up in that situation, they may see certain things hey I didn’t think about that at all I can do this also I can act in this way so definitely association is if good association can help us to discover choices which we didn’t know we had also and then we can act on those choices which will turn out to be much better than what we would have thought earlier so the good association basically helps us to get out of our mind because our mind is just saying this, this is like this this is like this, this person is like this this is like that but then good association helps us to see actually this is the situation this is the mind and I am here we are able to see the mind also we are able to see the situation also we are able to see ourselves and then we can act more wisely does it answer your question?