Sri Yukteshwar said, when someone was balking at some area of service, “When you are too good for this world, you will be adorning a higher one”. And you can just in that word “adorning” get his sarcasm, his dry humour. So, he said, “As long as you breathe the free air of Earth, you’re under obligation to render grateful service.”
God Is the Doer
But how do we do this properly? How do we do it with the thought that God is the doer?
There are two mistakes that one can often see made in the service and in approaching activity in the world-
One is kind of a passive quality-“Well God will do it; God will take care of it; this is Master’s work and it’s all going to be fine.” Well! You know, there’s that joke that Swamiji shared with us about the Irish farmer who had a beautiful farm. And the Priest comes and said, “Oh what a beautiful farm you have brother! What a beautiful farm God has made! The farmer said, “Well it may be true, Father! But you should have seen it when God had it all to himself!”
Master often praised one of his most advanced women woman disciples, Durga Mata, and he would give her amazing assignments of things to do.
Serve Dynamically
Once, she and some of the other monks were painting a wall and the monks were (action: painting with less energy) just really trying to think of God, which is good. But she was thinking of God – and she was dynamically brushing. Master looked out the window and saw her and said, “That’s the way you should do it”.
Then he told this nun, Durga Mata to go and work in auto shops to help. He had an idea, he had actually been the first to think of a Motorhome and he had an idea of taking the chassis of a van and then it needed to be welded. He had her going for months to a mechanic auto shop to do the welding, the greasing, the assembling of this motorhome – and she was a nun, working with all these a lot of mechanics!
But he was trying to tell her if you do it actively, dynamically, with higher consciousness, that’s how we find God!
And so, one mistake is to be too passive and think, “Oh God will do it!”
The other mistake people make is that by saying, “I will do it with my brilliant mind, with my magnetism, with my dynamic energy!” And you know it never works out. It just doesn’t work out that way because God’s the doer.
God is doing this through me
Another one of Masters great disciples, his foremost, Rajarsi Janakananda after seven years of practice of Kriya yoga, went into Samadhi, the highest state of God realization.
And Master one time said to him, “Don’t forget where your power comes from Rajarsi”- Just like a little child, (he was a self-made multimillionaire), he said, “I won’t Master. It comes from you”.
Do always remember, if we do it with the thought, “I am going to accomplish this,” even “I am going to do it for God,” there will always be a diminishing underlying energy. But if we can think, “God is doing this through me”, then the power comes and the attunement comes and the flow of energy comes.
That’s why Master said that there were two highest prayers- one was, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind and with all thy strength and thy neighbour as thyself.”
And the other is, I will Reason, I will Will, I will Act but Guide Thou my reason, will and activity.” Guide Thou! I will do it, but you guide it, guide Thou my reason, will, and activity to the highest end of all things.
So what does that mean? It means with our hands and our feet and our speech, we’re dynamically serving God. We’re giving it all that we’ve got. With our mind we’re trying to draw superconscious solutions to the problems that face us in our life.
This is an excerpt from a Satsang with Nayaswami Devi at Ananda Village, CA on March 10, 2019
You can watch the video here https://youtu.be/866AI3DVgf4