Published on November 18, 2008
in General.
Today I was thinking of how service as a spiritual practice is seen somehow as lower or less spiritual than say meditation or renunciation. Service is considered to be more of a religious practice whereas meditation etc. is spiritual, deeper.
Our tradition very much defies this notion. If service is directed to the center or the absolute, we consider it the height of mysticism and experiential spirituality. It’s all about transcending the mind, the senses and the false identity they afford, but that’s only a side product of connecting with the infinite. Service is a way ( a very powerful way) of connecting with others. Serving others surely brings us closer to them. And when you direct that service towards the center according to the directives set by mystics who have experience of the truth, it will bring you closer to the truth.
Service is understandably hard to recognize as a spiritual practice, though, because a lot of service and worship is done with material motives, and that amounts to nothing more than religiosity. The defining principle is the consciousness you do your service in. If it’s not motivated by material desire or power in the form of spiritual charisma, then it will have the power to attract the mystical reality, otherwise not.
Published on November 11, 2008
in General.
I got back to our monastery Audarya in California a couple of months ago. Costa Rica was quite an adventure, a lot happened in four months. Anyway, this entry is not about that, but about my trip back to the States. Here’s what I wrote at George W. Bush International in Texas during my layover on a beautiful day in September 2008:
Flight CO846 from Costa Rica to San Francisco. I was observing an elderly flight attendant as she was serving out the breakfast plates for the travelers. She tried to smile but it seemed to me like her stomach turned every time she raised the ends of her lips. She seemed disgusted with her job, with people, with those trays and endlessly uttering questions like, “Anything more to drink?”, or “How many persons are in your party?”.
She was serving the passengers, they were enjoying the free drinks and crappy Hollywood comedies. She was biting her lip and trying to forget her aching legs and back by the force of thoughts of the next pay and how she would spend it.
I was thinking of how most of the time we only accept doing service to others because we get some power to enjoy from that. Most work is some form of service. You work for the factory owner; you beep the customers’ groceries at the cashier; you serve your art director’s vision in a design agency; you clean up after people who have more money than you; you drive drunk people around the night-lit cities with a little yellow light on the roof. . . A big part of our waking time is spent working, and we do it all to get money. If you break it down, money really is a form of power. It’s an agreement of society for a concrete symbol of power. You serve(=work) for some time and save money, and then you can have the upper hand for as long as your financial batteries have some juice in them. And then it’s back to the factory again.
Service is seen as something obligatory that we have to do to gain some power to do what we really want to do. Money/power enables us to have leisure, luxury, enjoyment, dominion, freedom.
From this perspective being a servant is the most unwanted thing in the world. It means you’re trapped to fulfilling others’ dreams and desires instead of your own. Being just a servant is the most meaningless, lowest, pitiful position one could imagine.
As these thoughts were bouncing around in my head while secretly observing the flight attendant, I was chuckling to myself. My whole life is about service. I’m a low-life according to a worldly standard! I’m supposed to be miserable and unfulfilled according to how power and happiness are linked together in this world, but I’m anything else but unhappy. What’s wrong with me?
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