“Service is the spontaneous effect of contact with the soul. This contact is so precise and stable that the life of the soul can flow into the instrument that it is forced to use on the physical level. It is the way in which the nature of the soul can manifest itself in the world of human affairs. Service is not a quality or an action, it is not an activity for which one must fight strenuously, nor a system to save the world. This distinction must be clearly understood, otherwise the whole attitude towards this very important demonstration of evolutionary success is distorted. Service is a manifestation of life.”
It seems that this passage from the book “The Way of Service” fits perfectly with the situation we are experiencing.
By now we know well that if “service is the spontaneous effect of contact with the soul” one of the ways to achieve that contact is precisely the service itself, which becomes in this way, both consequence and cause. Service is therefore a temporary tool to accelerate that contact, “acting as if” we were already realized souls.
I believe that each of us, at one time or another, has asked ourselves, “Am I really serving as the soul would do? Or, without realizing it, my service has become just a creation of my personality, a response to motivations that are not really those of the soul?”
Service in action
Since the service involves an action that takes place mainly (because there is also internal action) in the world of forms, it tends to be affected by all the mechanisms typical of that plan: automatic behaviors, lack of sense of proportions, attachments to certain modes, doubts, haste, various compulsions… Generally, all these conditionings are even more present precisely in those who have long devoted themselves to a service task, while the intent of the response to the soul is more alive in those in whom this aspiration is more recent.
Just as this time of interruption of ordinary activities can be useful for each person to review and reconsider their way of life, it is even more so for the server to review and renew his own way of serving.
If social life is generally subject to routines and automatic patterns of action, these are even stronger in group life: precisely in order to collaborate, groups have to build rhythms, modalities, procedures, that everyone adheres to due to the need for integration, but which over time have become so strong that they seem unchangeable. In this case it is worth a deconstruction of the integration of the group.
Thus, the complete or partial suspension of ordinary group activities and our individual tasks, or even just the need to invent different ways of carrying them out, is coming to meet us in order to re-calibrate our life of service; in an even deeper sense, to re-verify our relationship with the service and ask ourselves whether it, today, corresponds with our intent to live the life of the soul through it.
The ageless relationship between Spirit and Matter
On the spiritual path one of the great points of understanding and achievement, but also of challenge, is – and has been in all ages – the relationship between spirit and matter. By its very nature spiritual realization involves a gradual detachment from the world of forms, an ability to abstract on one another, to pull itself out of the links of that world, so that our deep identity is gradually free of it and does not depend on any external circumstance. Which is not to say not to have to deal with forms, which, indeed, if so we would become ineffective and powerless beings. Instead to regulate the relationship with that world so that our spirit can fly freely in subtler and wider spaces.
It is not the quantity of things we do that brings us closer to the soul, but how much we manage to establish ourselves in this field of inner freedom, which fosters contact and exchange with many different beings and on many levels; it is the ability to cultivate a broad and creative thought; and knowing how to engrave new and positive furrows in invisible space.
I think many have seen this time of isolation and rest as a chance to feel more free from the usual patterns of action, just to dedicate ourselves more to the inner dimension of service life.
In other words, through known symbols and that illuminate the idea, to be more Mary than Martha: more silence, calmer, more time to think, to read, to study, to meditate, to contemplate…
Can we do it?
Personally, I realized that I tended to verify “my Mary” through Martha’s criteria: “What did I do today? How much did I meditate? What have I learned? Have I used this day well?” and so on, and to get to the end of the day almost never satisfied with the use of my time. After a few days I realized that I wanted to live Mary, but I dragged behind myself the evaluation criteria of Martha, who continued to interfere with Mary, limiting her possibilities… Martha, Martha… On the opposite, the soul uses very different assessment parameters and, if we are not aware of them, the most “frequented” ones, both individually and collectively, tend to predominate.
Then comes control, the need for control on the part of the mind: is this isolation right? How long will it last? What am I going to do next? What’s going to change? What if nothing changes? For our mind, trained to predict, plan, hold the reins, it’s hard to be in a situation where we can’t know anything specific and we have to live day to day, with what the moment presents to us.
And what about the need to be sure that our points of reference, those conquered over so many years and so many efforts – even that of the group – do not dissolve? This fear leads us to want to find substitutes, something that makes us feel that everything remains as firm as before, and for this everyone works with his alternative modes, which sometimes become even more congested than we experience in normal life.
And yet, to meet Mary, we must let go of Martha, there is no other way. The “too full” of everything, even of stimuli that we consider “good but too many”, is a conditioning that we have developed having been immersed for decades in the world of matter; this, by its inherent nature, tends to multiply and extend to fill every space. And we humans suffer the proactive force of it, bending to its unconscious purpose, instead of enacting our conscious limitation. Therefore, it is only with a conscious decision that we can stem the innate tendency of matter to propagate: taking a step back and placing ourselves closer to the bright and unfathomable spaces of the “cloud of knowable things” and not yet known.
Here, let us try to enter the order of ideas that is not the virus, it is not the government, which confines us like this and forces us to do without our points of certainty: instead, our soul seeks, asks, expects to pour more into our lives. And that you don’t miss this opportunity!
So the real question is: how to learn to be in those “empty” moments, in that silence, with an inner fullness of meaning, value and life?
As we have relied mainly on matter, including that of our conditioned thought, it is now a question of trusting that the aura that is being created in our homes, in our environment and in the world, is already rebalancing relations – between human beings, between us and nature, between us and time. And that from this kind and almost imperceptible work of re-balancing, new and more suitable forms will arise in due course.
For now, it is only a question of “staying and loving”, with the certainty that this is what our soul and that of humanity craved in order to be able to make a space in our busy lives.
Marina Bernardi
April 2020