Path of Service as a means to Inner Peace

In pursuing the path of action, I have begun to see recognizable stages in the transformative process. At first I saw myself as a separate entity full of needs and desires. My identity with these desires left me very attached to the fruits of my actions and thus willing to manipulate things and people, as if they were objects, to realize my goals. Then, with just a little awakening, I saw that the desires were unending and even the gratification of them was leaving me in an unsatisfactory alienated state. I saw that I would always be dissatisfied as long as I was caught up in my desires, and that under these conditions my actions could not express the highest level of compassion.

As I understood my predicament more clearly, the desire for liberation started to supplant other desires. This was the beginning of the path of action. Through mindfulness training I began to cultivate the part of me that was not identified with the desires. Desires arose and passed by with little clinging on my part to them. During this period my aversions and attractions, born of desires that remained, became painfully apparent. At first I was hard on myself for being so caught in the desire mind. With time, however, compassion toward myself began to develop, and I was able simply to note the arising of these various feelings of attraction and aversion. I found myself less affected by the success and failure of my efforts in each task. The ability to witness my reactions to these results increased. A quality of equanimity began to arise. I also noticed that each time an action was carried out even partially selflessly, it strengthened an identity with some force greater than myself and helped to free me from thinking of myself as separate.

Now I notice two things developing simultaneously. The first is an impersonality in my actions, almost as if someone else were performing them. There is a sense of my being an instrument of some compassionate force or mind deeper or higher than my own separate mind. It is difficult to describe. Sri Aurobindo, a great Indian holy person, spelled out in precise detail just how our minds surrender into and are supplanted by the higher, more universal mind. One way of describing what I experience is that it is as though I am a node in a large network of compassion. The biblical expression "Not my will but thine" reflects this moment-to-moment experience.
The other emerging quality is an intensification of the love that permeates actions. The universe of forms has become increasingly imbued with a radiance, an awesome, often bittersweet beauty, that makes each of my actions in the world feel like an act of devotion. Because it is new to me, I am often surprised by the feeling of love for other people, animals, and the earth that arises, often when I least expect it.

This feeling of treasuring other beings and serving them as the beloved makes me want to perform my acts even more skillfully, making each act an offering of beauty. The act of love draws me closer to whoever or whatever is before me, and with this closeness comes an intensification of empathy and joys and sufferings. Out of this arises a desire to alleviate suffering in the best possible way. Whether I am at the checkout counter in the supermarket, sharing a moment with a person facing a terminal illness, protesting in a political action, or dealing with a policeman who has stopped me on the highway, it is all a dialogue with the beloved, our interaction being a vehicle through which we meet and are together. This love grows until, as mystic poets have suggested, it could "start to equal the love that a mother has for her baby, that a miser has for her or his money, that a person has for her or his lover."

Seeing the world as the many faces of the beloved, and experiencing myself as an instrument of some higher compassionate force of mind, feels at times as though the beloved is serving the beloved. Where am I in this process? In the beginning, I felt that I was doing it. Then I felt that I was observing it. And now I sometimes find myself absent and the compassionate action just occurring, rising out of the momentary conditions of the situation, having little to do with me at all. Reflecting upon these moments, I have a better understanding of the mystical adage "Out of emptiness arises compassion."

Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush
Compassion in Action:
Setting Out on the Path of Service.
New York, Bell Tower, 1992

Today motherhood is seriously undervalued as an occupation, much less a spiritual path. Nonetheless, there are few things that challenge and stretch a woman quite as much as being a mother--a fact which is more fully appreciated in other cultures and in other times.

Selflessness

Everything which endures can only do so because
Eternal Consciousness gives it sentience.
A mother who gives herself completely to her infant
meets herself in the dark and finds fulfillment.
In the hours between midnight and dawn, she crosses
the threshold of self-concern and discovers a Self that
has no limits. A wise mother meets this Presence with
humility and steps through time into selflessness.
Infants know when their mothers have done this, and
they become peaceful.
Who, then, is the doer? Is it the infant who brings its
mother through the veil of self-concern into
limitlessness? Is it the mother, who chooses to hold
sacred her infant's needs and surrender herself?
Or is it the One, which weaves them both through a
spiraling path toward wholeness?
You can sit and meditate while your baby cries
himself to sleep. Or you can go to him and share his
tears, and find your Self.

Vimala McClure
The Tao of Motherhood
Nucleus Books, Willow Springs, MO, 1991

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Working with the dying is a very special path of service, as is healing. Both of these areas deserve their own (exceedingly large) websites.

These handouts are from a hospice talk which focused on the Tibetan Buddhist view of death.

Inner Peace

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