VAGDEVI SPIRITUAL PROCESS [#16170] THE PATH OF SELFLESS SERVICE IS NOT SMOOTH

Those who have ever ventured to dedicate a part of their lives to selfless service out of compassion or just for making their lives more meaningful than it had ever been in the past rarely found it to be a smooth sailing. In fact, most of those who try to venture into it, abandon it after a few setbacks.

With much selfishness and greed prevailing in the societies, the societies look at those who try to serve others without any self-interest with considerable disbelief. The efforts of those who serve selflessly are often interfered with, either with a view to investigating about the personal interest of the one who serves selflessly, or with an intention of disrupting it, under some pretext, partially or completely. The conditions differ from one society to another. In general, the people from wealthy societies are rather supportive of well-meaning efforts of selfless service, but the people from the poorer societies are very skeptical about them. Notwithstanding the differences in reaction of the people it is very difficult to say which kind of society would respond more to the selfless efforts for implementing a social reform.

There is no doubt that there is no substitute for selfless service, because it has a cascading effect on the people who are involved in the efforts of selfless service whether as a contributor, supporter, sympathizer or receiver of the service. No intervention of a welfare state or political protection can be as effective as people’s enthusiastic participation in selfless service.

There are a few very crucial issues that one must stick to, while committing to selfless service.  The first and foremost is that it must be perfectly selfless, with not even a desire to derive some satisfaction after having reached a milestone. Then, one must continually think of the pain of others one is trying to free them from. It means one must be fully settled on the thought of the pain that is to be eradicated, without having to be reminded about it. To clarify, one must possess a constant knowledge about how painful it is to be poor; that is; one need not see a documentary film on poverty to realize what pain is. The third thing is that one who is serving selflessly should never think it is because of him that someone in pain is getting rid of his pain. In fact, selfless service must always be viewed as an opportunity for self-improvement rather than anything else. The selfless service gets a qualitative boost, if one supports and helps someone else carrying out selfless service without expecting anything in return.

Perhaps, the one who serves selflessly must be somewhat selfish about the criticism he faces. He must constructively respond to such parts of the criticisms that help him rectify his errors, and reject those parts that praise or condemn him. Yet another crucial aspect of selfless service is that it can never be treated as having been totally accomplished.

One may form an opinion that selfless service is some kind of a theory or ideal that cannot be fully realized. On the contrary, selfless service is a practice that grows up with the one who serves selflessly to become an ideal for others to follow. This is an expression of the spiritual aspect of the human being that is visible to only those who have developed an ability to see what is worth seeing. 

PROMOD KUMAR SHARMA

[The writer of this blog is also the author of “Mahatma A Scientist of the Intuitively Obvious” and “In Search of Our Wonderful Words”.]