Change the paradigm of your life. Move from the selfish demands of focusing on what is good for yourself, personally, and ask questions of a different quality. What can I do for the people around me? How can I help and serve people? How can I help the society in which I live?
Sathya Sai Baba paid great attention to service. He preached ministry, but more importantly he demonstrated it in his life. It was difficult for me to understand his philosophy of service, as it seemed to me that the most important thing to do was the practice of deep meditation and mantra.
I perceived Sathya Sai Baba’s talks about serving in society as meaningless moralizing. Much later, I gradually understood the meaning of these wise instructions. It was difficult for me to grasp his instructions on the importance of service because I perceived the spiritual path as being one of only meditation and prayer.
True service arises from a sense of unity. Much later, truths began to open up to me about the spiritual process being the whole of life. Everything we think, say, and do is an aspect of divine evolution.
Christianity and Buddhism place great emphasis on the motivation of love and compassion. For example, meditation instructions in Buddhism are not based on describing meditation techniques, but on awakening the right motivation for practice. Real love and compassion are shown in service, not just in beautiful words.
You practice meditation in order to know the true nature of your consciousness. Spiritual practice is carried out not only in order to gain enlightenment for oneself personally, but in order to, after gaining perfect wisdom, help other people embark on the path of spiritual research and also gain liberation from suffering.
Practicing meditation in the name of gaining spiritual benefits for yourself is absurd. In meditation, the personality, which at first seeks to practice meditation personally for itself, dissolves.
In Christianity, enlightenment is called salvation. What difference does it make what word we use to label higher wisdom? All of it is a play on words. The path of personal salvation ultimately leads to service, because in the path of salvation the separately existing human consciousness disappears – it dissolves in the universal Christ Consciousness.
The original true motivation for salvation is service. A person who has received the gifts of the Holy Spirit embarks on the path of preaching the
