Seva – The Playground of Transformation
Many years ago, the Master was coming for an impromptu visit. Filled with joyful anticipation, a few of us were silently doing our assigned seva of setting up chairs in a half-built structure at our new Science of the Soul Study Center. Oh, what a blessed day it was.
Suddenly, a man came striding up the middle aisle, shouting in an imperious tone, instantly annihilating the peaceful atmosphere. “Get out of here! Get out! Get out of this building immediately and don’t come back, or you’ll be thrown off the property!”
The sevadar violently flung out his arms as he walked, as if to physically shove us all out of what now appeared to be his building.
Several events took place in the aftermath of that horrible moment. A seeker who had been helping us quickly left the property, perhaps never to return. A new initiate burst into tears and wept for hours. And I, in my great wisdom of thirty years on the path, began to question the Master’s judgment…
Why, I asked him over and over in my mind, do you place such hard people in high places? You have so many gentle, loving professionals in your sangat; why not place them in these seva positions, so that their peaceful presence can pervade these properties, blessing all who enter? Would it not be better to bring in these bright spirits, who radiate happiness and create a sunny atmosphere wherever they go?
And why, I ranted on in my mind, do these properties, which should be centres of love, light, and selfless service, instead seem to be plagued with a deadly case of the “P’s” – pride of position, possessiveness, and games of politics and power? But then, does a saint ever do anything without a divine purpose?
In the children’s book The Little Soul and the Sun, a soul who lives with God tells him that he wants to experience himself as forgiveness. God tells the soul that he will have to leave God’s realm of light and go down to a land of shadows to have this experience. Out of love for the soul, another soul offers to make a great sacrifice to come down with him and do something unkind to the soul, so that it will have an opportunity to know itself as forgiveness. The sacrificing soul asked only that in that hour of darkness, the soul remembers that the act was done out of love. The soul gratefully promises to remember, and off they went on their adventure of forgiveness, and that was the end of the story.
Thus begins our story of seva…
The Master offers us the opportunity to do seva, which we can think of as a playground of transformation. And so, we set about working together to raise a building, weed a garden, publish a book – or so it seems. But if we had the eyes to see through the fabric of maya, we would see the divine wisdom and workings of a living mystic, and the transformation taking place within every one of his sevadars. Working together doing seva is a powerful way for us to grow spiritually, to grow humility as we gradually realize that the Shabd Master is the Doer, the director who has assigned all of us different parts to play. He is doing his seva through us.
Someone once said that seva often has a bumblebee in it. We go into seva seeking sweetness and sunlight, flowers and fragrance, but sometimes end up running for our lives with a sting on the end of our noses.
Yes, we all prefer to associate with those gentle, smiling souls who lovingly stroke the fur on the heads of our false selves. But the harsh words and unkind actions of difficult people in positions of authority can force the transformation of many people so quickly. Those troublesome sevadars help us realize that, to handle the situation successfully, we will need to call up far more love and humility within ourselves than we currently have.
If we have the courage to persist in our seva and not run away, we could grow the capacity of our love. We develop more acceptance, patience, and understanding. We learn to stop instinctively reacting from our ego and begin to respond more thoughtfully, from the quiet power of our soul. We begin to realize that there is no circumstance that enough love cannot conquer.
Maharaj Charan Singh wrote in Quest for Light: “Nobody ever does us any good or bad thing, nor can any person offer us insult or bestow honour on us. The Master moves the strings from inside and makes people behave towards us according to our karmas.”
Sri Swami Satchidananda said:
Nobody can cause us difficulty without God’s will. These people are simply acting as instruments of God. He uses them to give us some experience. It is all for our education and for our benefit. If we think that way, we won’t project a negative vibration toward the people we feel are causing us difficulty. Instead, if you treat that person as an instrument of God, feeling God is doing something to me through that person but that person is beautiful, then there is no negative feeling, no negative person. Then it is easy to love.
Guided Relaxation and Affirmations for Inner Peace
Perhaps an angel is hiding behind the mask of our tormentor, a shining soul who agreed to put on a dark cloak and play the part of a villain as a divine favour to us. Perhaps the people we react to so intensely have been chosen by the Master to play an important part in the drama of our destiny. They may be the ones to help us see the darkness still hidden within ourselves so we can become free of it. Could they be the thorn in our side that helps the Master bleed away, drop by drop, all that is not God in us?
Maharaj Charan Singh explains to us in Spiritual Discourses, Vol. I:
If you can take what comes to you through Him, then whatever it is, it becomes divine itself; shame becomes honor, bitterness becomes sweet, and gross darkness clear light. Everything takes its flavor from God and turns divine, everything that happens reveals God. When a man’s mind works that way, things all have this one taste, and therefore God is the same to this man, alike in life’s bitterest moments and its sweetest pleasures.
Let us thank the Master for sending us those who appear to speak and act harshly, to help us wash away the last dark stains of our karmas. In truth, they are not tormentors but divine messengers delivering an invitation from the Beloved to become true sevadars. What is a true sevadar? A clear channel through which the Shabd Master’s mercy and love flow in a ceaseless stream of selfless service.