Love and serve²⁸

Love and serve; serve and love. We love God. We serve God. When we love God, we see. When we serve God, we feel. What do we see? We see God’s Face. What do we feel? We feel God’s Heart. God’s Face inspires us. God’s Heart illumines us.

Inspiration has many, many friends. Of all its friends, aspiration is by far the best. Illumination has many, many friends. Of all its friends, perfection is by far the best. Aspiration is our heart’s inner cry. Illumination is our life’s outer smile. The inner cry climbs high, higher, highest and tries to become devotedly, soulfully and unconditionally one with the ever-transcending Reality. The outer smile spreads all around and tries to manifest Divinity, Eternity, Infinity and Immortality.

A true seeker is he who continually wants to grow, glow and flow in the Heart of the Absolute Supreme. He loves God and serves God not because God is all powerful but because God is all goodness. He loves God because he knows that without God he does not exist. He serves God because he feels that without him, God does not exist.

At every moment, a true seeker has to love God and serve God with a pure heart and a clear mind. A heart of purity and a mind of clarity each seeker must possess in order to accelerate his inner progress and outer success.

A true seeker offers to God what he has and what he is. What he has, is ignorance. What he is, is a gratitude-heart. When he offers his gratitude-heart, he becomes a chosen instrument of the Supreme. A chosen instrument at times pleases God in his own way; at other times he pleases God in God’s own Way. There comes a time when the chosen instrument is transformed into an unconditionally surrendered instrument. An unconditionally surrendered instrument of God pleases God at every moment in God’s own Way.

There are two worlds: the world of desire and the world of aspiration. In the aspiration-world, there are three things that we have to discover: divine love, divine devotion and divine surrender. Today’s human love is tomorrow’s frustration and the day after tomorrow’s destruction. Divine love is today’s illumination, tomorrow’s perfection and the day after tomorrow’s satisfaction, complete and perfect. Human devotion is nothing short of unconscious, unrecognised attachment. Divine devotion is conscious, spontaneous and continuous dedication to one’s own higher existence-reality. Human surrender is the surrender of a slave, a forced surrender. Divine surrender is totally different. In divine surrender, the finite recognises and accepts the Infinite as its very own. The drop enters into the ocean and becomes the ocean itself. In divine surrender the unlit, the obscure and the impure part of us enters into the illumined and illumining portion of our existence. Our ignorance-world enters into our wisdom-world; the little “i” merges into the infinite “I,” which is the Universal and Transcendental Consciousness.

Before we enter into the aspiration-world, we remain in the desire-world. When we live in the desire-world, greatness is of paramount importance to us. Even when we first enter into the aspiration-life, in the beginning the message of greatness at times looms large. But the real message of the aspiration-world is goodness. Desire cries for greatness; aspiration cries for goodness.

Greatness has two standards of existence: a higher and a lower. He who is great consciously or unconsciously wants to remain an inch higher than the rest of the world. But he who is good wants to remain consciously, soulfully and devotedly one with all human beings to love and serve the Supreme in them. In this feeling of oneness, perfection dawns and, in perfection, what looms large is Eternity’s Satisfaction.

Julius Caesar declared: Veni, vidi, vici — “I came, I saw, I conquered.” This is the height of the greatness-world. But the height of the goodness-world is totally different. It comes from the inmost recesses of the seeker’s oneness-heart and declares: “I came into the world, I loved the world, I became one with the world.”

This expresses a real acceptance of life, not a rejection of life. True spirituality is the acceptance of earth-life. A true seeker is he who accepts life, transforms life and perfects life so that the earth-life can become a conscious instrument of God. Earth-life is constant thirst, constant hunger. This hunger is the soul’s eternal hunger to become inseparably one with the Highest, and then to manifest the Highest here on earth. True spirituality advocates both God-acceptance and life-acceptance. In true spirituality, the seeker first tries to realise God and then to manifest Him in and through his own life.

When the seeker is on the verge of realisation, he sees goodness within and goodness without. On the strength of his goodness, he feels a true and abiding satisfaction. But God-realisation cannot be achieved overnight. It is not like making instant tea or coffee. True spirituality is a slow and steady process. Slow and steady wins the inner race. Gradually the seeker makes inner and outer progress. In true spirituality, this progress offers the seeker at every moment a sense of satisfaction, and satisfaction alone can immortalise him. In the beginning of his spiritual life, the seeker finds success. This success inspires him; therefore, he makes friends with it. But the same seeker, when he is advanced, feels only the necessity of progress; for success is a short-lived experience, whereas progress is continually carrying him into the everlasting and ever-transcending Beyond.