Service: Ideal and Aspects

Someswarananda

Who Serves

Whom and Why

INTRODUCTION

From highest Brahman to the yonder worm,

And to the very minutest atom,

Everywhere is the same God, the All-Love,

Friend, offer mind, soul, body, at their feet.

These are His manifold forms before thee.

Rejecting them, where seekest thou for God?

Who loves all beings without distinction,

He indeed is worshipping best his God.

Awake, arise, and dream no more!

This is the land of dreams, where karma

Weaves unthreaded garlands with our thoughts

Of flowers sweet or noxious, and none

Has root or stem, being born in naught, which

The softest breath of Truth drives back to

Primal nothingness. Be bold, and face

The Truth! Be one with it! Let visions cease,

Or, if you cannot, dream but truer dreams,

Which are Eternal Love and Service Free.

Swami Vivekananda

There were two brothers, one was married, and other was a bachelor. They owned a farm and shared its produce fifty-fifty. The soil was fertile and they reaped a rich harvest every year. All went well for a few years. Then something extraordinary happened.

The married brother began to wake up with a start from his sleep at night and think, ‘It’s not fair. My brother isn’t married. He needs to save much more for the future than me, a married man with a wife and five kids. I have all the security in the world. But what security has my poor brother? Who’ll look after him in his old age? My kids will care for me when I am old. My brother’s need is greater than mine.’ With that the married man would leave his bed, steal over to his brother’s granary and pour there a sackful of his own share of grain.

Now the bachelor brother too began to get these nightly attacks. He would wake up from his sleep and think, ‘It’s too bad that I should accept an equal share of the farm’s produce as my brother who has a family to maintain. I am single and my needs are minimal. He has got to support his wife and children. He deserves a larger share.’ So this brother would get up, take a sackful of grain from his stock and empty it stealthily into his brother’s granary.

Once it so happened that they got out of the bed at the same time and ran into each other, each carrying a grain-filled sack on his back!

Years later, when the townsfolk wanted to build a temple (the story of the two brothers, who had passed away, had leaked out by then) they chose the spot where the two brothers had met that night. ‘This is the holiest of all places in this town,’ the elders said, and a temple was constructed there.¹

This story can serve as a good starting point for our discussion. Yes, service is indeed a holy act and the place where service is done is a holy place. Above all, only a holy person can give true service.

Why ‘true service’? Is there any such thing as false service? There is, but of course it is not called by that name. That complicates matters. So we must begin by identifying the distinctions between the two varieties of service.

One variety of service we are all familiar with. It is something good done for others prompted by the feelings of duty, pity or guilt, or by the conscious or unconscious desire for name and fame, or for happiness here and in the afterworld, or just as a kind of social ritual. ‘Service’ is a misnomer really for such an act; ‘good work’ is perhaps a better name. ‘Good’ because it does help the person served to some extent and may bring a momentary feeling of satisfaction to the person who serves. But that’s all it does and no more. It brings lasting fulfilment to neither of the two. Nor does it bring the joy of freedom. It is possible to do such ‘good work’ and yet remain selfish, arrogant, frustrated, ambitious (in its negative sense), and immoral. Spiritually speaking, this variety of so-called service perpetuates ignorance and, in the long run, helps neither the individual nor society. It is clear that there is nothing particularly holy about this work. If we must call it ‘service’, then we had better qualify the term with the adjective ‘false’.

But there is the other variety of service which elevates the individual and benefits society. This service is not the result of pity, duty, guilt, or desires. It is the result of the perception of oneness, of identity, with the person served. There is no hesitation or calculation before doing this kind of service. It is a spontaneous act which comes to one as naturally as breathing. It is free even from the idea ‘I am serving so-and-so,’ or ‘I am doing this service.’ It’s a free offering with no strings attached. Both the giver and the receiver feel blessed and uplifted. This is service, and to distinguish it from the much-too-common variety described earlier, let us call this ‘true’ service. This is the kind of service saints and genuinely holy men and women do. What this means really is that if you and I are able to extend this kind of service to everyone and everything around us, we too shall become genuinely holy.

Perception of Oneness

Perception of oneness is the mother of true service. But how many perceive oneness? We only see multiplicity and distinctions everywhere. No two things are exactly identical. Yes, even twins are not identical in every respect. The basic distinction we observe is between this person who is me and everything that is other than me—the distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘not-I’. I am different from the rest and the rest differ among themselves. If there is someone called God, He too is different from me just as He is different from everyone and everything else. Differences galore everywhere. Where is oneness? I can perceive oneness, only if there is oneness. And if it is true that oneness exists, the question is, why do I not perceive it?

This is the fundamental question before Vedanta and its answer to this question is the only sensible answer that can be given: ‘You don’t perceive it because you don’t want to perceive it. You are ignorant. If you close your eyes and deny the sun because you don’t perceive it, does that mean the sun doesn’t exist?’ This can be countered, of course, by saying that everyone sees the sun and the denial by any individual would be clearly invalid and unacceptable. But such is not the case with oneness. The fact is, no one sees oneness, though quite a number of people talk or write about it. The perception of the many is a universal experience and so cannot be wished away by simply saying that it is the result of ignorance.

Vedanta teachers flatly deny this. They say that it is quite okay to say, ‘I do not perceive oneness,’ but what right has one to claim that no one perceives oneness? If something is true in my case, must it be true in every other case also? If I am a fool, does that mean everyone in the world is also a fool? (It’s another matter, of course, that no fool believes he is a fool.) I am not the standard by which the world ought to be judged. So the claim ‘no one perceives oneness’ is unacceptable. Vedanta teachers concede, however, that the number of people who perceive oneness is extremely small, almost microscopic, as compared to the billions who perceive the many.

We may ask why these handful of people who see oneness are right and the legions who see the many are wrong. For all we know, those who keep seeing oneness may be just cranks, even if it is granted they are not pretending. To this Vedanta replies by saying that, apart from the fact that the truth of oneness is validated by our ancient scriptures² and is today also being admitted by modern science,³ the experience of oneness is known to have brought those people total, irrevocable fulfilment, joy, freedom, and perfection. This could never, never have been the result of a false experience. The experience of the many, on the other hand, is never known to have brought complete fulfilment, bliss, freedom, and perfection to anyone. On the contrary, as we know from our own life, it perpetuates the sense of incompleteness, bondage, imperfection, and the alternating experience of fleeting happiness and sorrow. These are the very things every one of us is struggling—consciously or unconsciously —to overcome. If the experience of oneness can help us overcome these—and we know it has helped a few brave and determined souls in every generation—our common sense will tell us that there must be something wrong with our present experience of seeing the many. That ‘something wrong,’ says Vedanta, is ignorance.⁴

When did this ignorance come? This question has no answer. (By the way, just because we are able to formulate a question doesn’t mean it has got to have an answer.) If a child is ignorant about the number of gold medals the United States won at the Barcelona Olympics and asks, ‘When did this ignorance come?’ what answer have we? All we can do is to tell the little one, ‘I do not know when your ignorance came, buddy. But I can tell you how you can remove it.’ Then we pass on to him the knowledge we have of the number of gold medals and the child’s ignorance vanishes. That is exactly what Vedanta teachers say: ‘Don’t bother about when your ignorance came. Recognize its presence and focus on how you can get rid of it.’

The method is simple enough, at least in its description. Where else need we go for this than to Sri Ramakrishna and Holy Mother? Here are Sri Ramakrishna’s words:

If one thing is placed upon another, you must remove the one to get the other. Can you get the second thing without removing the first?⁵

And here are Holy Mother’s:

You have rolled different threads on a reel—red, black and white. While unrolling you will see them all exactly in the same way.⁶

Plain common sense, isn’t it? The knowledge of our true Self is covered by ignorance. To get knowledge, ignorance has to be removed first. This is what Sri Ramakrishna’s words seem to signify. Holy Mother’s words deal with the steps that separate knowledge from ignorance, and she says that you have to go back the same way you came. From the experience of oneness we have somehow come today to the experience of the many. If we only know the steps that have brought us down from the heights of oneness to the depths of multiplicity, we can then go upward by tracing the same steps in the reverse gear.

From the One to the Many

Vedanta says that in the beginning there was only Being, the Self, one without a second. The Self was all that existed. It was complete (pūrṇa), eternal (nitya), infinite (ananta), indivisible (akhaṇḍa), pure (śuddha), conscious (buddha), and free (mukta).⁷ Then something mysterious seems to have happened. ‘Mysterious’ because it was quite irrational. A kind of division suddenly took place in what was really indivisible. The Self, the one and only reality, somehow became fragmented into three apparently different entities: God (also called paramātman, the Supreme Self), the world (sometimes called anātman, the non-Self), and ‘I’ (called jīvātman, the individual Self).

When cracks appear, they have a tendency to spread. So a further fragmentation of these entities was inevitable. The world got divided and subdivided into countless number of objects and creatures of all sizes, shapes, colours, and characteristics. Identifying accurately any life form can be quite a daunting task. Biologists have to consider at least the following twenty subdivisions to classify any creature accurately:

Kingdom, Subkingdom, Phylum, Subphylum, Superclass, Class, Subclass, Infraclass, Cohort, Superorder, Order, Suborder, Superfamily, Family, Subfamily, Tribe, Genus, Subgenus, Species, and Subspecies.⁸

Quite a formidable list this! And let us remember, this deals with only living creatures. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, oceanology, and a hundred other sciences deal with the world of inanimate objects. The extent and variety of divisions in the universe are too mind-boggling.

Subdivisions took place in the individual Self too. To begin with, there was the obvious division into body and mind and the not-so-obvious estrangement of the two from the inner Self (pratyagātman). The mind was subdivided into the unconscious (called id) and the conscious (called ego). These divisions were peculiar. They divided the personality without taking apart the individual fragments. It was something like a marriage on the rocks but the unfortunate couple continuing to live under the same roof. Naturally this gave rise to stress and strain. The body and mind were separate but they continued to influence each other. The unconscious and the conscious parts of the mind were divided but they continued to pull and drag the individual, often in mutually opposing directions.

The net result of all these multiple fragmentations was that the Self became limited and localized. It became identified with a body and a mind and alienated from everything else. Its identification with the body and mind too was not stable. Sometimes it identified itself with the body, sometimes with the mind, sometimes with both, and sometimes with neither (as in deep sleep). The person became alienated from the spiritual essence of his being and, worse, did not even know that he was so alienated. The conscious part of his mind became alienated from the unconscious as well as from the world around.⁹ In this way the Self became even more narrowed down as it got identified not with the whole personality but only with a fragment of it at any given time. The other fragments thus remained alienated, and it is they who destroyed man’s peace, upset his harmony, and robbed him of the sense of fulfilment and wholeness. Thus man became, so to say, alienated from himself.

Much has been written about self-alienation. Some of the best minds in the fields of spirituality, philosophy, psychology, and sociology have pored over the problem of alienation. Their interpretations varied because their ideas of the Self varied and also because their perspectives and approaches were different. Nevertheless, they have come up with valuable insights and have enriched our understanding of this central problem of human existence.¹⁰

We have seen how we descended from the state of oneness to the state of mutually conflicting many. From the one to the many the descent is complete. The fall of man—allegorized in the story of Adam and Eve—was from the state of oneness. From one has emerged the many and the many must merge back into the one. The fallen man must rise again. The upward march toward unity must begin. The broken fragments constituting ‘the many’ must be joined, the divisions must be cemented; in plain words, alienation must be removed. It is here that service comes into the picture.

From the Many to the One

There are two approaches to the problem of overcoming the many. First the traditional approach.

The Traditional Approach. When pieces have to be joined together or when cracks have to be mended, we use an adhesive. Love is the adhesive that joins the many into one, complete whole. Love grows in an unselfish person and expresses itself through service. So first and foremost we must all become unselfish and force ourselves to sacrifice for others and to do good to others.

This is the Judeo Christian or, more specifically, modern Western approach to social service. With the almost global proliferation of Western technology and, along with it, Western values, this approach is today found even in many parts of the Eastern world. Here the Self is objectified and certain moral rules are thrust upon it. The person is expected to become unselfish, loving, charitable, and so on. The aim is to become someone different from what one is. This involves needless struggle and usually produces inner conflicts. Moreover, one seldom succeeds fully in the struggle to become this and that. People go on trying to become unselfish and, to prove the point, doing good to others, but in the process create a lot of unhappiness for themselves and others.

Most of the efforts at social service in modern times show this phenomenon. In the West, social service is more organized and, in a sense, it comes naturally to Westerners as a result of years of social discipline and upbringing. Thousands of small and big institutions and millions of men and women, young and old, are engaged in volunteer services of every kind. One would expect that, with so many unselfish people around, the society there would be ideal. Would to God it was so! But we see that in spite of all the so called unselfishness of the modern man and woman, divorce, violence, rape, drug addiction, neurosis etc are steadily increasing and the social structure is crumbling in many parts of today’s world.

How do we explain this strange phenomenon? Why should such a thing happen? Vedanta provides the answer. When self alienated people do social service, they only increase their self-alienation and, consequently, their selfishness. Those portions of man’s personality from which he is alienated act like enemies¹¹ and he develops a kind of hatred for them. But they are all parts of his own self and his hatred is really a subtle kind of self-hatred. This produces inner insecurity and the fear of facing oneself.

Self-hatred can manifest itself in two