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Discovering Service
By Tony Murdock, M.A.
“If
you want peace of mind, you shall have to serve others to
the best of your ability.”
This was
the advice Swami Vivekananda gave to a junior monk when he
complained about restless meditations. Similarly, when
the devotee Surendra told Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda’s
guru, that his meditations on the Divine Mother were not successful,
Sri Ramakrishna stressed the importance of balancing meditation
and contemplation, on the one hand, with the practice of ritual
worship, pilgrimage, and service to living beings, on the other
hand. Indeed, both Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda emphasized
repeatedly that in these times the traditional vow of personal
liberation through meditation only is not enough to realize
God; one must also take the vow of service to others to experience
God fully. Swami Vivekananda tells us that, in fact, service
to the living God in man (and woman) is the goal of life.
Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda could easily have been directing their
advice to me. For years I have been a student of yoga and meditation, but it
was not until recently that I realized that my own spiritual practice was unbalanced.
I was placing too much emphasis on my own daily meditations and yoga practice
without giving any conscious consideration to the importance of the spiritual
discipline of service to others.
Intrigued and motivated to discover more about how to serve others, I started
my journey to find balance in my spiritual practice.
KARMA YOGA
I
first turned to Swami Vivekananda’s lectures on Karma
Yoga. In his lectures, Swami Vivekananda defines karma yoga
as “knowledge of the secret of work.” It is “…a
system of ethics and religion intended to attain freedom through
unselfishness, and by good works.” One who attains freedom
while living “…sees the Self in all beings and
in that consciousness devotes himself to service…”
Those who practice karma yoga regard the inner struggle to
perform true service as a form of tapasya (austerity). To fully
understand the path of service, we must first realize that
this is the path of action. Contemplation on the Atman is important,
says Swami Vivekananda, but working for the sake of others
with non-attachment is as difficult as any tapasya, and produces
identical results. Every act of service that is performed in
the true attitude of self-surrender and non-attachment moves
us toward the goal. The ideal karma yogi is at peace within
himself even in the midst of the most intense activity.
NON-ATTACHMENT
Swami Vivekananda urges us to approach the path service as
a privilege. When we give ourselves in service, we are actually
performing a service that is a blessing to ourselves. The key
to receive this blessing for ourselves is to give with non-attachment.
“If
you can invariably take the position of a giver, in which
everything given by you is a free offering to the
world, without any thought of return, then your work will bring
you no attachment. Attachment comes only where we expect a
return.”
When we
attune ourselves to God within us and allow Him to operate
through us, and when we realize that all fellow beings
are expressions of Him, then we know that it is God within
us allowing us to serve God in others. We are just the vehicles
of God’s own service to Himself.
SELF-SURRENDER
AND SELF-SACRIFICE
To remain unattached to our actions, and to allow God to serve
through us, we must serve God in the spirit of unselfish action
and surrender the fruits of our actions to Him. This is not
an easy process. It takes constant practice.
With self-surrender there is self-sacrifice. We must be prepared
to sacrifice everything to God, and the best method to sacrifice
ourselves to God is through service. As the attitudes of self-surrender
and self-sacrifice mature so must our inner prayer. “Thy
will be done.” To feel that we are doing God’s
work, we must witness our actions with non-attachment, constantly
offering all fruits of actions in an eternal sacrifice to God,
our Master, while at the same time constantly loving Him and
feeling that we live in His holy surroundings.
SERVANT RELATIONSHIP
We
must always strive to understand what God’s will
is for us. We must always ask, “How can I serve You today?” Sri
Ramakrishna affirms that a true servant of God will often develop
the attitude of a servant towards the Master (dasya),
“The samadhi attained through the path of Bhakti is
called cetana samadhi…God is the Master; the devotee
is the servant. God is the Beloved; the devotee is the love;
God is the Food, and the devotee is the enjoyer. I don’t
want to become sugar. I want to eat it.”
Sri Ramakrishna
is telling us that the servant/master relationship can lead
to a joyful interplay between the devotee and God,
in which the personal ego is freely surrendered to the direction
of God’s will. In this process, the ego attains a wonderful
feeling of oneness with God. As we serve our fellow man, we
must feel that we are serving God our Master, who is both within
us and within the people we are serving.
MEDITATION AND SERVICE
We
are told that there must be a balance between meditation
and
acts of service. In their enthusiasm, some devotees want
to spend day and night in meditation and contemplation. “Meditation
is not possible for sluggish people,” says Swami Brahmananda,
another disciple of Ramakrishna. He stresses that these efforts
must be balanced with good works. The results of good works
will clear the path for higher realizations.
And the opposite is also true, stresses Swami Brahmananda.
In one's enthusiasm to perform good works, one must not allow
the pressure of work to be an excuse to limit one’s meditations.
Restlessness of the mind is the real culprit. Therefore, contemplation
and action must be combined and balanced in one’s individual
sadhana.
COMPASSION
Compassion
also plays an important role in the process of service. According
to Sri Ramakrishna, compassion is due to
God’s grace.
“Compassion is the love one feels for all beings of
the world. It is an attitude of equality. If you see anywhere
an instance of compassion …know that is due to the grace
of God. Through compassion one serves all beings …Daya
(compassion) makes our hearts pure and gradually unties our
bonds.”
He further
emphasized that we should not only have compassion for all
living beings, but we should serve man especially as
living expressions of God. Indeed, he says that “he who
has no compassion is no man.” It was Aquinas who said
that “no one becomes compassionate unless he suffers.” As
our contemplations take us inward, we are faced with our own
pain and inadequacies. It is only when we can have compassion
for our own sufferings that our compassion can move outward
with empathy to serve our fellow man in his sufferings. Our
deepening realization of the interconnectedness of all living
beings puts us in direct contact with the universal sufferings
of others, and this motivates us into compassionate service.
We will learn through our own struggles and sufferings to develop
empathy for the sufferings of our fellow man. From this we
can cultivate, by God’s grace, the right attitude of
compassionate service.
Matthew Fox explains this process in similar terms. To develop
true compassionate service, says Fox, we must develop a balance
between introvert meditation and extrovert meditation. In introvert
meditation, we discover that God is within us; in extrovert
meditation, we move toward organic wholeness, an understanding
that God exists all around us, and that we are a part of His
wholeness. Extrovert meditations are required to move the richness
of the solitude discovered in introvert meditation outward
through work and action toward a celebration with life and
a feeling of compassion for life, not an ascetic denial of
life. Compassion becomes meditation when we grow in the attitude
that we are serving God in all beings.
Thomas Merton also observed that compassion leads us to this
wholeness. “The whole idea of compassion, says Merton, “is
based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these
living beings, which are all part of one another and involved
in one another.” To understand this, we must observe
life with the spiritual discipline of a meditator, and eventually
we will come to realize that God within us is linked to God
in nature around us through our compassion. The art of compassionate
service then becomes a working meditation, a worship of God
in all we do.
WORK AS WORSHIP
Swami
Vivekananda instructs us to develop the attitude that all
activity, work,
and service is the worship of God. “When
you are doing any work, do not think of anything beyond. Do
it as worship, as the highest worship, and devote your whole
life to it for the time being.” He reminds us that we
cannot get away from work. We are always working physically
and mentally; even our breathing is work. Worship cannot be
confined to our meditation hour, our week’s hour at church
or temple, or our time of prayer. All activity must be approached
with the conscious attitude that we are worshipping God in
that activity. If we can develop the attitude that all of our
work is His work, then we must make greater effort to be skillful
in that activity, as if it were a meditation. Since God is
in all and is everywhere, our attitude of worship must be extended
to the service of God in all living beings, especially man.
Swami Brahmananda adds this comment: “If a person in
able to meditate well, he is able to work well also.” Approaching
our work as worship becomes a form of meditation. By paying
full attention to details, we develop skill in action, and
will teach or perform the best posture, or peel the best potatoe.
We can do this when we place seventy five percent of our mind
on God, and twenty five percent on the act of service we are
performing. Just as we worship the unmoving image of God in
the temple, we must worship the moving image all around us,
and in all we serve.
WORK THROUGH LOVE
Swami
Vivekananda tells us that more than all else we must “work
through love.” Every act of love brings peace and blessedness
as its reaction. And love, when freely given in service to
others, makes us calm and unattached. Jesus commands us to “…love
the Lord your God with all your soul and with all your mind,” and
with no less fervour, to “love your neighbour as yourself.” Real
love is self-giving, and as we love God through ourselves and
through our neighbours, we come to realize that we are mere
instruments of God’s love. We must surrender to His love
and learn to approach every situation with His love. We must
love to serve God and His purposes, and allow His divine love
to do perfect work through us. To a bhakta, or lover of God,
there is one love that permeates all. In one who truly loves,
there is no dualism, or separateness, or ego differences.
SERVE LIVING GOD
Swami
Vivekananda knew what he was doing when he gave his lectures
on karma
yoga to audiences in the United States in
the late 1800’s. He was planting seeds he knew would
one day bear fruit, with the proper cultivation. The ‘work
ethic’ is so deeply rooted in the psyche of our North
American society, yet we have little understanding of the tremendous
secrets that can be revealed with the right attitude towards
work.
Our personal yoga and meditation practices can be enriched
beyond comprehension once we learn to serve the Living God
within us and within our fellow man. As we constantly strive
to perform true service with the right balance of meditation,
compassion, unselfish action, self-surrender, self-sacrifice,
worship, and love, we must keep in mind that we are God’s
servants, doing His work.
Swami Vivekananda’s view on service can best be summed
up in his poem, “The Living God.”
THE
LIVING GOD
He who is in you and outside you,
Who works through all hands,
Who walks on all feet,
Whose body are all ye,
Him worship, and break all other idols!
He who is at once the high and low,
The sinner and the saint,
Both God and worm,
Him worship – visible, knowable, real, omnipresent,
Break all other idols!
In whom is neither past life
Nor future birth nor death,
In whom we always have been
And always shall be one,
Him worship. Break all other idols!
Ye fools! who neglect the living God,
And His infinite reflections with which the world is full.
While ye run after imaginary shadows,
That lead alone to fights and quarrels,
Him worship, the only visible!
Break all other idols!
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