Part I

Service¹

Dear seekers, dear sisters and brothers, I wish to give a short talk from the spiritual point of view on service. I am a seeker, and I feel that a seeker is under a divine obligation to be of constant, dedicated service to mankind. I serve humanity, not because I am helpless, but because I long to be deathless. When I become deathless, I serve both man and God. I serve man, the unrealised God; I serve God, the unmanifested man.

My service has to be unconditional. My unconditional service is my transcendental Freedom. My transcendental Freedom is my eternal satisfaction. And my eternal satisfaction is God’s universal manifestation, the manifestation of Divinity’s Perfection and Reality’s Immortality.

Service is love and love is service. When I love God, humanity cheerfully loves me and God blessingfully serves me. When God serves me, He serves me with His boundless Concern, and when humanity loves me, it loves me with its dedicated, immortalised oneness.

As a seeker, I serve both earth and Heaven. I serve earth with my inspiration-race. I serve Heaven with my aspiration-face. My inspiration-race and my aspiration-face have a common source: God's Grace, His infinite and unconditional Grace. God's Grace enables me to have a free access to my soul.

I frequently go to my soul’s realm, for my soul has given me permission to take anything that I want from there. Such being the case, I take my soul’s purity and offer it to my body. In this way I serve my body. I take my soul’s dynamism and offer it to my vital. In this way I serve my vital. I take my soul’s light and offer it to my mind. In this way I serve my mind. And then I take my soul’s delight and offer it to my heart. In this way I serve my heart.

I serve my inner existence with faith, love, devotion and surrender. Faith is my reality. Love brings me the message of universal Oneness. Devotion makes my existence on earth sweet. Surrender to God’s Will makes my life constantly meaningful and fruitful. I serve my outer existence with concentration, meditation and contemplation. Concentration means the one-pointed focus of attention on an object. First we concentrate on an object, and then we grow into it. Meditation means the invocation of vastness within our hearts. Contemplation means the absolute, inseparable union of the seeker and the Sought, the lover and the Beloved.

I serve the desiring man with my renunciation-light. This renunciation-light I get from my prayer, my meditation and my love of Light and Truth. I serve the aspiring man with my Realisation-height. This Realisation-height is my oneness with the Source, which is all Light and Delight. This oneness I discover only in and through my self-giving. I serve the liberated man, the man who is freed from the meshes of ignorance, with my earth-bound cry and my Heaven-free smile.

I serve the unknown with my imagination. Today my capacity is imagination; tomorrow my capacity will be aspiration. Aspiration is the inner flame within us that climbs up to the Highest and then comes down to offer its divine wealth to the world at large. Today imagination is my capacity; tomorrow aspiration will be my capacity; the day after tomorrow realisation will be my capacity. And in realisation, God-revelation and God-manifestation can take place.

The state motto of Arkansas is “The people rule.” Here we see the importance of collectivity. In the spiritual life, we have to go together in a collective, unified way. Individual assertiveness has to be totally negated; collectivity has to be constantly embraced. And what is collectivity, but the song of oneness. It is our oneness, our inseparable oneness with the vast, that rules. If we are seekers, then we will feel in our inner life a connection with the entire universe. We will feel that we exist not for ourselves alone, but for all. I give to you what I have; you give to me what you have. It is through reciprocal self-giving that we exist. Oneness is the flowering of our reciprocal self-giving. What we call self-giving today, tomorrow that same thing we call God-becoming. God is the root of the tree and He is also the branches, leaves, flowers and fruits. By collectivity we mean the leaves, flowers, fruits, branches, trunk, root, everything. Inside this collectivity is the divine Harmony, the all-loving, all-illumining, all-fulfilling Harmony of the Supreme.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Fifty Freedom-Boats to One Golden Shore, part 4, Agni Press, 1974
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/ffb_4