2018-09-14 - The Path Of Service ================================ Serving Together All sincere efforts at spiritual development have as their aim the steadily increasing ability to bring through or release our essential nature in some form of service to others. This service work is the most important part of the spiritual path and the means of giving back a fraction of what has been given to us... The things we value so highly about ourselves are generally not the things that are viewed as being of most importance from the perspective of our soul. Since most of us are still largely living within the confines of the material world, we tend to place a more material interpretation upon our lives and our service work. In this way, we err by putting the cart before the horse. Someone once said that people who have had near-death experiences report that when they passed through the portal of death they came to realize that the only thing that matters in life is the amount of love that we have expressed and shared with others. That's it. The external aspects of service therefore diminish in importance as we learn to serve in a more subjective fashion--silently, behind the scenes, and with our group. Gradually we develop the capacity to "stand, not only in spiritual being, but together with others, working with them subjectively, telepathically, and synthetically." We learn that it is not the outer achievements that matter--our job or outer service projects, our creative work, the force of our words and our personalities. What matters is something else, something subtle, less tangible, that happens largely within the silence of our own hearts and minds, related instead to the group aspect of our lives and work. When we place the emphasis upon the soul, upon the inner recognitions, we learn to work and follow in the footsteps of the great servers whose lives and work stand as models to us all. There are currents of energy that become available to us, especially as we learn to work with groups and feel ourselves to be part of a vast and intricate pattern of relationships. --Kathy Newburn p.s. A note on utility value versus intrinsic value: > All creatures have existential value, although they may not > fulfill the immediate need to human beings, or we may not be aware > of their intrinsic value. This existential value is sometimes > specific, sometimes collective, and sometimes both. It may be > mentioned here that non-human creatures have the same existential > value as human beings. tags: article,inspiration,spirit Tags ==== article inspiration spirit