Serving others

First of all we have to become spiritual ourselves, and only then can we try to raise the consciousness of others. If we are spiritual, then we have to become more spiritual. If we have a little light, then we have to acquire more light. As soon as we come out of our house, we are facing a destructive world; we are entering into the battlefield of life. While in the battlefield we have to be prepared to fight against our enemy. Here our enemy is ignorance.

Just because we are sincere, just because we are following the spiritual life, we feel that we have considerable ignorance within us. So first we try to conquer our own ignorance — the limitations and bondage we have inside us — and then we come into the world and try to fight the ignorance of others. But actually we do not fight; we only try to illumine.

In the ordinary world when we see an opponent, we try to conquer him by hook or by crook. We try to destroy that person and show our supremacy and then only do we feel that we are satisfied. In the spiritual life, we feel that everything is part of God; so we don’t have to destroy our opponents, only we have to illumine them. Unless and until they are illumined, we are not totally satisfied. Here is the difference. In the spiritual life, unless and until we have illumined the world at large — the world around us and before us — we are not satisfied.

Now, in order to do that, we have to prepare ourselves. We prepare ourselves by feeding the soul. If you have to fight against someone, you strengthen your body. You take exercise, you eat properly and in this way you strengthen yourself. As you feed the body in order to be strong physically, so also you have to feed the soul in order to strengthen your inner being. And how do you feed the soul? You feed the soul by aspiring. Aspiration is the real spiritual exercise. When we aspire we energise our being, our entire inner existence.

So every morning before we enter into the world arena, we energise ourselves through prayer and meditation. Before we leave our house and go outside, we pray and meditate to strengthen our inner existence so that we can brave the buffets of life. It is from inside that we come out.

If you want to help the outer world, early in the morning during your meditation you can offer goodwill. If you feel that your near and dear ones are not at all spiritual, then it will take a long time to help them with their problems in the material world. But if they are spiritual, it won’t take much time. The cure depends on their disease and the amount they are suffering.

You have to know that when the morning dawns, the divine within you comes forward and you see what kind of life you are leading. If you have good thoughts, divine thoughts, then immediately you get a kind of inner joy and inner cheerfulness. But if you have undivine thoughts, jealous thoughts, suspicious thoughts, then immediately you feel miserable.

If you have a good thought, you have to feel that it is coming from a good world. And if you have a bad thought, you have to feel that it is coming from a bad world. When you have a thought, consciously or unconsciously you are entering into a world. Now, if it is a divine thought, then you can bring your dear ones into this divine world with you.

From your aspiration, from your prayer, from your meditation, you create a world of your own. It is not that you are in the world of fantasy. No! It is the world of reality. As you aspire you enter into a higher world, a broader world. In that world you can embrace your near and dear ones and the entire outer world. It is on the strength of your own achievement, your own realisation, that you accept the world and change the face of the world. The higher and deeper you go, and the stronger you become, the sooner you are in a position to change the face of the world.

Let us go back to the world of Light and Delight, where there is no death, only Immortality. This is the world that our soul came from. Let us become one with the soul and fly with the wings of the soul. This world is within us, inside the inmost recesses of our heart, where Light and Delight are constantly playing.