The Gift of Selfless Service
In this holiday season, we often give to charities as an act of service. While this is certainly generous, there is another form of giving that can really open us to a deeper consciousness and propel our spiritual growth.
We have been given the opportunity to know and love the Divine—to experience a lifetime of growth and celebration. In return, we offer our gratitude and selfless service in appreciation for the Grace we have received.
Selfless service, or seva, comes from an open heart and is centered in a profoundly simple place within. The desire to serve arises from the merging of our heart with the heart of God, in a state of complete surrender. Selfless service is simply the natural expression of the love, gratitude, and devotion we feel. We can’t help but think, “How can I give back to the life that has given me this joy?” Nityananda expressed this beautifully when he said, “As is your devotion, so is your liberation.”
Service is a reflection of the awareness we connect to in ourselves and what we express in our actions. We serve because it frees us to know our Divinity. Our ego keeps us from this Self-knowledge, and it is fear of losing ourselves that keeps the ego functioning. We live in a box, which defines our life in many ways. We get trapped in patterns, thinking, “This is what my life is. This is what I can or can’t do, and this is what I will or won’t do.” If we wish to extend past these preconceptions, we must exert some effort to break free, because we all carry a resistance and an unwillingness to change. We must huff and puff and blow our own walls down, and not accept the smallness.
Giving From an Open Heart
One of the primary ways we can knock the walls down is by deciding to truly give of ourselves—and to do so when it’s wanted and needed and especially when we don’t want to give. But we do give, because it expands our boundaries. It really requires that we open our hearts more. Isn’t this what we say we want? We get past our limitations when we serve and surrender.
The restructuring of our consciousness involves finding a deeper inner awareness, tuning in and feeling it in ourselves, and then extending it outward from our center. When we serve somebody, we are allowing the openness we found inside to expand and make contact with another person. This is how we nourish them. We are creating a flow with our own life in whatever situation we encounter.
It is sometimes difficult to feel the flow in ourselves, and it is sometimes a challenge to connect the flow with our life. We have to really extend past ourselves. This is not different from our inner practice, but now we are stretching into the world, and this interaction takes the form of offering love and service. Surrender and service are the easiest things to do if we open our hearts and tune in to the Divine. Then it is not even “you” giving, but simply Divinity flowing through you, shedding light on everything.
Living beyond desire and attachment does not mean we do not care. Be passionate when you care about something. Be passionate from an open heart and with an open hand. This is the foundation from which we can really serve, because we are not concerned about what we are going to get in return. The work of a liberated person is simply to give, and we can only do this when we have freed ourselves from the selfishness of our own need.
Dissolving Our Boundaries
The experience of living in the flow of life and energy dissolves all sense of something “happening to me.” It dissolves duality itself—the sense that there is “me” and something “other.” As we grow, we continually reach into the experience that there is unity in life, and yet part of us retains the feeling of separation.
To create a more permanent connection with the Divine, we make an effort to reach deeper inside. We meditate more, and at the same time learn to extend past our boundaries, past the place where we feel the discontinuity between the Unity within and the loss of that Unity when we engage the world. It is through service that we start to dissolve our separation, those subtle veils of duality.
The concept of service can be boiled down to one simple statement: Selfless service is about giving what is wanted and needed and not what we want to give. That is exactly why it breaks down our boundaries, because in order to really give what is needed, we have to get past our limitations. We have to get beyond the resistance to giving. Service requires us to open up and push through these boundaries, using the power of flow.
Getting Bigger
What happens when we do that? We get bigger—which is the prerequisite of moving from an awareness of life as energy to experiencing life as pure Presence. We begin to move into a state where our identity is dissolved, and we can have a life that is simply an expression of consciousness, of higher awareness. That is a good reason to break down our boundaries.
So although selfless service is getting past ourselves and giving to others, we are, in fact, the ultimate recipient. In the state of non-duality, there is no concept of, “I will give here, but I won’t give there,” or “I won’t give this or that part of me.” The work is to give from the state of pure Oneness and pure understanding of the unity of life.
We must become the consciousness we seek. In other words, we have to give from a place of unconditionality in order to experience unconditionality. How can we ever experience this if we function from condition? It is not possible. So in a sense we are expanding beyond our capacity to understand. The fact that our life is requesting that we function on a higher level is an extraordinary gift.