The life you are living is giving itself to something. What is your life giving itself to? See what your life serves, and then you have the choice. Do you want to serve suffering, or do you want to serve joy, love, and truth?
What you are serving is where your attention is. Where your attention is reveals what you are supporting with your thoughts, your activities in life, your hopes, your frustrations, and your story.
What are you serving? Check and see. Are you serving some idea of who you think you are, who you think you were, or who you think you should be? Are you serving some idea that your mother, father, or culture has of you? Are you serving some idea that you are the sum total of your good and bad experiences? Or are you serving that which is before all ideas?
Narcissism is the result of serving ideas and images of yourself. Both positive narcissism and negative narcissism are filled with suffering. Suffering can be disguised as pleasure as well as pain.
You must be familiar with narcissism. It is a holdover from when you were two or three years old. In each lifetime of being two or three years old, narcissism is reinforced and then nourished throughout a lifetime as an ideal of freedom and power.
The therapeutic community has identified an “inner child.” Inherent in the concept of “inner child” is an image of victimization or power, enslavement or freedom. These are only mental images. If you serve these images, if you bow to these images, whether positive or negative, you must tell the truth about what the results are. Just tell the truth; that is all.
You have the opportunity for your life to be lived beyond subservience to conditioning and beyond rebellion against conditioning. A life freely lived.
See for yourself. Notice in a day or even in an hour what you are attending to, what you are supporting, feeding, or denying. See for yourself.
My whole life I’ve had feelings of duty and responsibility and a need to be of service. But I also have a massive fear about whether I’m doing it the right way, and this in itself has become a block.
Yes, your idea of responsibility is a burden. True responsibility means the ability to respond. Ability to respond must be free, spontaneous, and intuitive. If it is burdened by the weight of past concepts of what responsibility should look like, feel like, or how it should be received, it is not true responsibility. Any image or imitation of responsibility is a burden.
True responsibility is joyous. It is the willingness to surrender and be who you are, without any idea of what that is. Yes, some fear may arise in that, but if you meet that fear, you will discover it to be nothing. If you serve that fear, then once again you are shouldering some idea of duty or responsibility. To be responsible is to be true only to the deepest command of your being.
There is no way of knowing the effect your response will have. Whether you never move off a couch or whether you travel the globe and never stop speaking, whether you are a public figure or a private figure, all are secondary to responding to that deepest command. If you are willing to meet whatever occurs in your responsibility to that command, life is naturally and joyously served. The burden appears when you ignore that command with ideas of what responsibility should look like. Put your burden down. Stop contributing to the burdens of the world. Be true to who you are, and you will quite mysteriously and miraculously be placed exactly where you must be. Then you will know the deep joy of responsibility.
Some people have expressed fear that they won’t take care of their children properly if they serve truth. What better gift can you give your children than your awakening? If you are true to truth, the world can receive awakening from you. If you compromise truth, compromise is what your life is serving.
What is your life serving?
I am not suggesting what the form should be. It honestly doesn’t matter. Be a mother, a clerk, or a bum. All forms are included in truth. When you are true to truth, truth is transmitted, whatever the form. If your students are to be bums, fellow shoppers in the grocery store, or your children, what you will transmit is the truth of your responsibility to the deepest command of your being.
Being true means refusing to cling to any idea of what your life should look like. What freedom! Aren’t those ideas burdensome? Perhaps some of them are totally in alignment with truth. You cannot know until you are willing to give up all ideas. Then you will see that what is in alignment has no weight, and what is not in alignment is too heavy to fly with you.
Joyous service is not a burden. If it is a burden, stop. Carrying a burden indicates that responsibility is being dictated by some mental concept. In the joy of true responsibility, service is not for an instant separate from surrender, vigilance, self-inquiry, and devotion.
When you see yourself in another form and that form is suffering or confused, what is in the best service of truth?
To be absolutely quiet. Quiet provides the only true help, and from the depths of quietness, either particular action or nonaction will naturally arise. No thought is needed for direction. Anything else is involvement in a particular story of suffering. As long as you are involved in the particular story of suffering, you are overlooking what has never suffered. Recognize what is whole and complete, now and eternally. True recognition is the mother of all acts of compassion.
Quiet holds the whole spectrum of behavior. There is a ruthlessness and relentlessness to compassion, as well as a gentleness and lightness. The whole range of experience can serve truth.
I recognize that what binds me to the world of appearances is a devotion to worrying about the state of the world and hating the violence that characterizes much of human interaction. I have a fear that things will get even more crazy if I and many others let go of protecting what we think of as inalienable rights.
What you are exposing is really a lack of trust. You fear that if you let go of your thoughts and conclusions, you will be irresponsible or not fulfill your service to humankind, the planet, and all species.
Your fear is not based on reality. It is based on your devotion to worrying. It is based on devotion to recounting all the times you have trusted your thoughts, emotions, and interpretations, and they have been proven to be mistaken. In that conclusion, you equate thoughts, emotions, and interpretations with the truth of who you are.
Thoughts, emotions, and interpretations appear in who you are. As long as you identify yourself as any thought, grandiose or lowly, or any emotion, sublime or horrible, or any interpretation, profound or mundane, you overlook that which can be totally, completely, absolutely trusted.
You see how unnecessary most of the suffering is, and you desire to put an end to suffering. This is a beautiful and true desire. The mistake comes when you trust your thoughts, emotions, and interpretations about how it should be done, what you should do, how much you should do, and what it should look like. These thoughts, emotions, and interpretations may arise, yet if you place your trust in the unknowable mystery of perfection, you realize a flexibility and openness beyond both responsibility and creativity.
There is no particular formula for how help is given. Look at Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Mother Teresa, and you see lives of action, commitment, and integrity. Look at the Buddha, Ramana, or Saint Theresa, and you see lives of contemplation and apparent inaction. Who is to say one life is right and another is wrong? As long as you have any idea of what it looks like to serve, you are simply overlooking the opportunity to absolutely trust that the intention to serve reveals the discovery of that which serves. The “how” appears naturally from intention and discovery.
I am familiar with this dilemma. I remember weeping at the impossibility of doing what I saw must be done in the world. I know the worrying. I know the torture and the horror of the way we treat one another. I also know the possibility of surrendering to not knowing, to giving up the idea of how “you” must do it. Let it be done. Let your form be somehow mysteriously used with no idea of how that should be.
If Mother Teresa thought she should stay in a convent and live a life of contemplation, what a waste. If Saint Theresa thought she should be working with lepers, what a waste.
Give up worrying about what you are doing, and discover who you are. Then see if that is not trustworthy. You cannot know by checking your thoughts, emotions, or interpretations. You can know by checking eternal truth. A life lived from the question “How can I be used?” not knowing how, but continually discovering how, is an open life. It is a life that radiates trust in who you really are. What a life!
Trust is rare, and trust is your opportunity. You are actually in a position to trust. You needn’t be concerned every moment with where your next meal is, your shelter is, or if your family is safe. Not having to be concerned with issues of immediate survival is a great privilege, a great opportunity.
See where your concerns are. See if your concern is with something from the past or with being used by the truth.
These are serious questions. They are not casual. Ask yourself what it is you really want so that when this lifetime is finished, it is cleanly finished, completely finished, freely finished.
Last night I had a really powerful dream in which I built a huge bonfire. I would drench one flame with water, and another would pop up, until finally I was totally exhausted. I woke up and I said, “Let it burn.” I just surrendered to it, and everything has been so wonderfully different since then. I want to do more for everyone. I pray to heal them.
The healing for everyone is your willingness to experience this fire and not dampen it. This fire is the answer to your prayers. Realize that a shift in the prayer has taken place. Rather than a prayer of supplication, offer a prayer of thanksgiving, a prayer of gratitude, a prayer of service.
Do you mean a prayer of being?
Being is not separate from true prayer. Gratefulness, devotion, and love are not separate from true prayer. As the removal of the mental veil reveals harmony and love, prayer becomes a great song of thanksgiving, and the rest of your life can be lived honoring that. Honor the fire. Honor the removal of the veil. If you go back again to the old prayer of pleading, you dishonor what has already been revealed.
Let your whole life be prayer. You cried out. You begged for help. Help appeared for you as fire. The spiritual fire burns up suffering. It is the fire of realization. It is the fire of awakening. Live in greatest thanksgiving for what has been revealed. Otherwise, the mind starts its searching activity again.
Don’t pick up the old patterns of mind. Your prayer was stronger than the dampening, and all burst into flame, the flame of realization. Honor this fire and let it guide you.
I feel drawn to service like a moth to a flame, but there is fear too.
The fire calls. The fire disintegrates all notions of server and served. If you answer this call with full attention and no idea of what the call should give you, your life will be a reward. Somehow, mysteriously, your life will be of service.
Let the call have you. Let it have your fears, your ideas, and your plans. Let it have all.
Let the fire burn so brightly that it lights up the night.
Christ is sometimes seen with a burning heart. What is the meaning of that?
No amount of talk about it will satisfy you.
Isn’t knowledge the greatest purifier?
In this instance, knowledge is the obstacle. Something known, some concept, is the obstacle. Satisfaction comes from direct experience. You have to discover the burning heart within you. You have to peel off the protections of conceptual knowledge so that you can discover what is beyond knowledge. You must discover that in which both knowledge and purification burn.
I guess I’m looking for resolution.
If you are looking for resolution through conceptual knowledge, you are looking in the wrong place.
So just remain in the feeling of the burning heart?
Dive into the center of that feeling. Don’t waste any more time on the concept. Then your life is the resolution you have been seeking. You won’t be asking anyone about a burning heart. You will be broadcasting your own burning heart, in words or not, in knowledge or not.
Knowledge that is innocent of the past, knowledge that is realized, revealed, alive, is truth.
I guess human nature is to use knowledge to move away from pain.
Yes, always trying to find out how to fix rather than to be. How to fix is called knowledge. For a moment, give up fixing and burn. There is no resolution until you are consumed.
When you are willing to burn, when you are willing to be consumed, when you stop fighting the call of your burning heart and just surrender into that, you realize you are that—not conceptually, but in reality.
Yesterday was the last day I had with someone who means a lot to me, and I was experiencing a great deal of pain. I went to satsang and just trusted and accepted the encouragement you gave us to surrender absolutely. When I looked into the pain, the peace was really there! I hope to serve that peace with my life.
You do serve that. Your report serves that. The willingness to surrender and to ask “Is this true?” is already service. Then you see for yourself. Recognize that truth is being given freely and completely, everywhere you look, and the more you give it, the more you discover it. It cannot be hoarded. It cannot be saved. If you give it to everything you see in every moment, you discover something unspeakable.