Love
Try to find someone who really belongs to us, and to whom we can really belong – forever.
Maharaj Charan Singh207
The foundation of every spiritual path is a relationship of deep love between master and disciple:
I heard from my murshid, from my initiator, something which I shall never forget: “This friendship, this relationship which is brought about by initiation between two persons, is something which cannot be broken; it is something which cannot be separated; it is something which cannot be compared with anything else in the world; it belongs to eternity.”
Inayat Khan208
When we truly love the master, we eventually become one with him. The Sufi term for this is fana fi al-sheikh, meaning “annihilated in the master.” Annihilation here refers to the dissolution of the ego; when our ego dissolves we will automatically merge into the true master – the Shabd. The true master, in turn, is fana fi al-Allah – annihilated in God or united with God. Therefore it is through our love for the master that we come to love and eventually merge into the unknown, unseen Lord.
To love the guru is to love God. Perfect your love for the master. As the master is saturated with love of God, when we love the master we will automatically become filled with the love of God.
Maharaj Sawan Singh209
The bond between master and disciple begins even before initiation – it begins the day we place our faith in him. This bond is then cemented during initiation, and it strengthens with every small act of service to the master.
Love for the master
What does it mean to love the master? Great Master says, “Whenever we
have a desire to express our love for someone, we should try to discover
what kind of love the beloved would prefer. We should then inculcate in
ourselves those qualities or actions by which the beloved is pleased.”210 So we look for a way to love – not as
we want to love, but as the master would want to be loved.
Hazur Maharaj Ji gives us a definition of love:
Love means obedience. Love means submission. Love means losing your identity to become another being. That is love.211
Here Hazur places before us a continuum of love: obedience, then surrender, and ultimately union. In the early stages, love means obedience – we learn to put aside our own wants and desires and simply obey the master. The fruit that ripens through consistent obedience is the state of surrender. And the fruit of surrender is the ultimate goal of love – union.
Hazur’s descriptions of obedience, surrender, and love all share the same thread – losing one’s identity, merging with the beloved, becoming another being:
Driving your ‘self’ out of yourself and merging your will with the will of another, that is obedience.212
Eliminating your own self and becoming another being is submission, is surrendering.213
We have to lose our own individuality, eliminate our ego, and become one with the Father. That is love.214
Where do we stand on this continuum of obedience, surrender, and union? Clearly we’ve not yet united with the beloved, or we wouldn’t be here, feeling separate. Nor have we completely surrendered – most of us are not yet able to consistently obey the master without hesitation. So we might ask ourselves: Am I at least obedient? If we are not, then this could be our starting point. At our present level, love means obedience.
This simplified definition of love can be helpful. Lofty spiritual goals like union, longing, surrender, humility, and detachment can feel overwhelming and out of reach. It is a relief to know that love is something we can immediately practise.
Christ makes the essential connection between love and obedience:
If you love me, keep my commandments.
Bible, John 14:15
Our master’s commandments are the four vows. So for us, to love the master simply means to obey the four vows implicitly.
Baba Ji offers a lens through which to view love and obedience. During a question and answer session with young adults he was asked, “Master, what is true love?”
He answered in one word: “Sacrifice.”
The master is telling us that love means sacrifice. This is not a different definition of love; it simply means that obedience involves sacrifice. Kabir Sahib has said, “Do you want to drink from the cup of love? Then surrender your head to the master.”215 Of course, this is not to be taken literally; it means we have to be willing to make extreme sacrifices for love.
But what is extreme sacrifice? On this path we are not called upon to make extravagant, overt gestures of sacrifice. We are not asked to leave home or abandon our responsibilities. The sacrifice required is actually far more difficult: we are to live in this world, fulfil all our responsibilities, and, in the midst of our busy life, make scores of little sacrifices every day to bend the mind Godward.
These sacrifices are often hidden in the small details of daily life. Each time we serve the master with the mind – each time we turn away from a temptation, distraction, or indulgence, or forego instant gratification in the cause of our higher goal – it is an act of sacrifice, obedience, and love.
Love is the path of complete self-sacrifice and giving one’s heart away.
Maharaj Sawan Singh216
If love means obedience, then inner seva – meditation – is essential. Hazur plainly states, “If you say you love the Master without meditation, you are just deceiving yourself.”217 Once someone asked Hazur how disciples could grow their love, and he responded:
Meditation creates love. It strengthens love. It deepens love. It grows love. Ultimately, it illuminates you and makes you God.218
The disciple followed up and asked, “So by doing meditation, we are loving God?” Hazur replied, “That is the height of love.”, At another time someone said that he wanted to surrender unconditionally to the master but didn’t know how to develop absolute love and devotion. Hazur replied:
The only way to strengthen love is by meditation. There’s no other way, because the love which we get by experience cannot be compared to any other type of love. Intellectual love is all right. Emotional love, which is influenced by other people, is all right. Any type of love is all right, but nothing can surpass the love of your own experience; and for that experience, meditation is necessary. You can build love and devotion only through meditation, not otherwise.219
Meditation is the highest expression of our love for the master. It takes us beyond the realm of the limited, beyond tears and emotion. It is a wordless expression of love in that quiet place within, where our heart speaks and his heart listens and responds.
If we were on a beach and the master asked us to dig a hole in the ground and told us that no matter how deep a hole we made, he would fill it with his love – would we not get to work immediately and dig with great enthusiasm? This is the gift he has given us with meditation. The more we dig – the more effort we put into our meditation – the more receptive to his love we will become. If we dig a little and offer him a cup-sized hole, he will fill it to the brim with love; if we put in more effort and dig a deep well, he will fill that to the brim with love. The master is an infinite ocean of love, and tides of grace keep washing over us. How much love we feel depends not only on his grace, but on our effort – on our own receptivity.
bhari bhari pyaala prem ras, apne haath pilaayi,
satgur kai sadikai kiya, Dadu bali bali jaayi.The master fills, and fills to the brim, the cup
of love and offers it with his own hands.
Dadu surrenders himself to such a master,
he sacrifices his entire being to him
again and again.
Dadu Dayal220
If meditation is the only way to develop true love, where does physical seva come into the picture? The practical fact is that we can’t meditate all day, and even with our daily responsibilities we still have spare time. Seva, then, becomes an additional way for us to nurture that love, to remain in an atmosphere of love throughout the day. And this supports the next day’s meditation.
Once a disciple asked a mystic, “Master, what is love?” The mystic tapped his forehead three times and replied, “Attention, attention, attention!”
Mystics frequently remind us that whatever we give our attention to, that is what we come to love. So when we give the master our time and attention through both inner and outer seva, we are building a relationship of deep love.
By serving the master, our heart attains union with his heart.
Maharaj Sawan Singh221
Somewhere between surrender and union on the continuum of love, there is an advanced stage known as bireh – longing. When the soul has completely surrendered but has not yet been able to unite with the beloved, it becomes consumed with an intense longing. It is this pain of separation that finally propels the soul into union.
Gripped by intense longing, great mystics have written beautiful poems of love and longing. When we read these poems we feel inspired but also deeply aware that we are far, far away from this state of being. We may experience small tastes of bireh each time we get a few moments in the physical presence of the master and are then separated from him. But we experience this longing not only when he comes and then goes. Bireh is the longing that naturally grows in intensity with our meditation and seva.
In order to meet the beloved, intense longing comes first, in the same manner as flowers bud and bloom on a fruit tree before it can bear fruit. Where there are no flowers, there can be no fruit. Similarly, where there is no bireh there can be no meeting with the beloved.
Maharaj Sawan Singh222
The relationship of true guru and disciple must surely be one of the great mysteries of life. We discover that in this relationship it is both a matter of falling in love – surrendering one’s ego to a higher power, and at the same time a matter of rising in love – exerting intense effort to reach the Beloved.
The continuum of love is not a straight line, however – a stage of obedient effort, followed by a stage of surrender, then longing, and finally union. Rather, it is circular. Consistent daily acts of obedience chip away at our ego and encourage the mind to surrender. As surrender grows, it fuels the desire to obey the master more and more – which in turn further increases surrender. Thus, obedience and surrender feed each other in an expanding cycle; and with this the longing for union slowly grows. A lifetime of obedience and outer surrender eventually leads to inner surrender, true longing, and ultimately to union. This is the continuum – an ever-expanding spiral of spiritual love.
The more we love, the more it grows.
Maharaj Charan Singh223
As love for the master grows, we may feel a natural urge to express it outwardly, because this is how we’ve been conditioned by the world. But spiritual love is different from worldly love – as it grows, it moves deeper within. Hazur advises: “A lover never advertises that love.”224
Well, if there’s love, there is nothing to speak about, and if you speak, there is no love. Love loses its depth when you try to express it. The more you digest it, the more it grows. It is more to experience than to express.
Maharaj Charan Singh225
The master doesn’t need to be shown how much we love him; he knows. A story from the time of the mystic Tulsi Sahib illustrates this. When a group of women heard that their master was visiting their town, they immediately dropped the work they were doing and rushed over to greet him. When they saw Tulsi Sahib, they bowed in reverence. But they had hurried from their work without thinking to change their clothing, so their clothes were soiled and wet with perspiration. Disgusted, a sevadar told them, “Sisters, your clothes smell! Go sit at the back.”
Tulsi Sahib gently corrected the sevadar, saying, “You have no idea of the sweet scent of their love and devotion. You do not know with what feelings they have come. You may have noticed a bad smell, but it did not come to me.”226
The lesson in this story is that the master sees our heart. But there is a secondary lesson here, too: when we do seva, we don’t want to judge other disciples by their outward appearance or behaviour.
A similar incident occurred at a large centre that was busy with preparations before the master’s visit. One sevadar was looking to do some seva, and the coordinator showed him a wooden ramp that was slippery, a potential hazard in the wet weather. He told the sevadar to attach some non-skid material onto the ramp to create a less slippery surface. He gave the sevadar the material and showed him how to attach it with screws along the edges of the ramp.
The sevadar set about the task with great dedication. When the coordinator went to review it he was surprised to see that instead of one row of screws along each edge, there were rows and rows all over the ramp, so many in fact that the goal of creating a non-slippery surface had not been properly achieved. It was still slippery.
A few days later Baba Ji came to the centre. During his inspection of the construction area he went to the ramp. He looked at it for a moment, said, “Very creative!” and then resumed the tour. Looking back on that incident, perhaps, the coordinator reflected that there was a profound lesson for him, too. “It’s not about the goal, it’s about the journey; it’s what is in our hearts.” This particular sevadar was doing his best. His heart was in the right place. The master saw the selfless love put into the seva, whereas we see only a ramp with too many screws.
The master sees our love, and yet somehow we find this hard to believe. So we may feel the urge to demonstrate our love through some visible means, at the very least through tears. And if there are no tears – if we don’t feel overwhelmed with emotion – we may judge ourselves and conclude we have no love. But how can there be no love?
When we feel we have no love, it means we are not satisfied with the depth of the love we have. That doesn’t mean that you have no love at all. Otherwise you wouldn’t think about it.
Maharaj Charan Singh227
There may be times when we look at a fellow sevadar’s love for the master, compare ourselves, and find our own love wanting. But Hazur reminds us never to compare ourselves with anyone else:
So many of you tell me in interviews that you don’t have love. I don’t understand your concept of love and how you analyze and measure it. There is nothing to think about love. Love is just there. Our problem is that we compare ourselves with each other. We think that person is more in love than I am and I should be like him. But nobody knows anybody at all.228
At times we may look at the master’s love for us and make judgements – he loves this other sevadar more than me; he loved me more before but he doesn’t love me as much now, and so on. But the master’s love for us is steady and unchanging – it is infinite. Rather than overwhelm us with that boundless ocean, the master simply provides a mirror – he reflects our own love back to us:
You see your own reflection in the master. If you have love and devotion, you will feel he’s in love with you – he loves you. If you are indifferent to him, you’ll feel your master is indifferent to you. This is our own reflection.
Maharaj Charan Singh229
Our understanding of love is limited, so we tend to calculate, analyze, and worry. If, instead, we would simply make the necessary sacrifices to obey the master and give him our time and attention, love for him will automatically bloom within us. It will reflect in our words, our deeds, our character, and our very way of life. This is the highest form of service. This is guru bhakti, devotion to the master. This is love.
gur ki seva gur bhagat hai virla paaye koye.
Service to the guru is devotion to the guru.
How rare are those who obtain it!
Guru Amar Das230
Perhaps the greatest test of our love occurs when the master passes on from the physical form, and we have to accept a successor in his place. It is natural that the master’s relatives, friends, and the sevadars closest to him would have become attached to his personality, so when that painful time inevitably comes it is difficult to accept that anyone else can take his place.
For quite a while after Great Master passed on, many of his long-time sevadars were not able to accept Sardar Bahadur Ji as his successor. Some even left Beas, unable to bear a Dera bereft of their beloved master. But what would Great Master have wanted? He would have wanted his most loving and trusted sevadars to put aside their emotions, be obedient, and surrender to his will. He would have wanted them to stand by Sardar Bahadur Ji’s side when he most needed their support as the chosen successor.
The master urges us to give precedence to the teachings over our emotions. The teachings remind us that the physical form of the master will leave us one day, but the Shabd form will continue to guide us through the successor. The teachings remind us that love means obedience. If we have faith in the master, then we can have faith in his choice of successor, no matter what our mind may have to say. And when we give the new master our wholehearted support, even as our hearts are full of grief at the loss of our own master, our obedience is an act of great love.
He is the helmsman of your life now, and he has only your happiness and best interest at heart. By his mercy, he is bringing you to him as swiftly as possible to give you all he has.
Maharaj Charan Singh231
The master embodies love. With the tenderness of a parent he takes us by the hand and slowly coaxes us, nudges us, pushes us, teaches us the meaning of true love, and brings us home.
Love for seva
As love for the master grows in our hearts, we want to share that
love with others through service. Hazur often spoke of the circle of
love and service: love makes us want to serve, and the more we serve,
the more we love. In a question-and-answer session, Hazur once said that
without love you can never do service. Service creates love. Service
starts with love. Service strengthens love.
The more we serve, the more we discover a deep love and reverence for seva itself – not just for the ‘doing’ of seva, but for the way it connects us so intimately with the master and with our meditation.
Many of us have a great zeal for seva; we spend hours and hours of the day doing seva with great dedication, and we devote years of our life to seva. But love for seva goes beyond zeal, passion, and emotion. Love is steady and enduring – it doesn’t diminish when seva doesn’t go our way. Love is obedient – it doesn’t try to bend seva to our will. And love is selfless – it doesn’t make demands of the beloved.
The Indian epic Mahabharata offers a beautiful lesson on love of seva. Arjuna once asked Lord Krishna, “Lord, why do people consider Karna to be more generous than Yudhishthira?* Neither has ever refused when they’ve been asked for something, no matter who has asked for it. So why is Karna considered greater than Yudhishthira?”
Lord Krishna said with a smile, “Come, I’ll show you why.”
Disguised as poor priests, the two went first to Yudhishthira’s court and asked for a large quantity of sandalwood sticks to conduct a yajna, a fire ceremony. Yudhishthira immediately sent his soldiers to all parts of his kingdom in search of sandalwood sticks, but it was the monsoon season and all the trees were wet. The soldiers returned to the palace with drenched sandalwood sticks, which couldn’t be used for a yajna.
Still disguised as priests, Krishna and Arjuna then proceeded to Karna’s court and asked for sandalwood sticks. Karna thought for a while and said, “It has been raining for several days so it will be impossible to collect dry sandalwood sticks. But there is a way. Please wait for a while.” Karna then cut down the doors and windows of his palace, which were made of sandalwood, chopped them, and gave the dry sandalwood sticks to the two priests.
They accepted the offering and left his palace. On their way back, Krishna said, “Do you now see the difference between the two, Arjuna? Had we asked Yudhishthira to give his doors and windows for our yajna, he would have given them to us without a second thought. But he didn’t think of it himself. We didn’t ask Karna for his doors either. Yudhishthira gives because it is his dharma, his duty. Karna gives because he loves to give. This is the difference between the two, and why Karna is considered greater.”232
This story invites us to reflect. Do we serve because it is our duty, or do we serve because we love to serve? Baba Ji has said that seva is easy for one who wants to give and difficult for one who wants to take. He is pointing out that the more we want to give – the more we love to give – the easier seva becomes.
When we serve because we love to serve, we will find ourselves going that extra mile in seva. If we are told to wash dishes, we will not just give the dishes a superficial wash to get the job done; we will wash them until they sparkle. If we are told to pick up someone at the airport, we will reach there well before time, greet them warmly, help them with their bags, and see to their every comfort until they are safely dropped at their destination. If we are asked to cut vegetables, we will not just cut the vegetables; we will also help wipe down the counters and sweep up the kitchen, if such help is useful.
And when we serve because we love to serve, we will do the seva with love.
So seva is always done with love, otherwise it’s not seva. Seva is not mechanically working with your hands. Seva is our intention to please another person.
Maharaj Charan Singh233
If we approach seva as a mechanical task, we will get a mechanical result. The more love we bring to seva, the more we will please the master and the more love and joy we will take back within us. This is what happens when we fall in love with seva – our work no longer feels like a chore or a duty. It is pure joy. Then, as was the case with Karna, it becomes natural for us to go beyond the call of duty and do the seva with love.
The sangat does not do all this seva with the expectation that they will be rewarded, they do it out of love. Seva is love; they never ask for anything in return. And whatever the inconvenience, they never complain. They are always contented, always happy to do the seva.
Maharaj Charan Singh234
When we fall in love with seva we become less obsessed with outcomes; instead, we feel contented with the journey itself, with the process of doing seva. In one overseas centre, preparations were in full swing for an upcoming satsang weekend. Sevadars from different local centres in the area had worked together for weeks to prepare for the satsang. The hall had been prepared, accommodation and food arrangements had been organized, seva teams had been created and briefed, satsang speakers had been lined up. All was in readiness for the arrival of the sangat. But just two days before the satsang weekend, they received a call from their representative informing them that Baba Ji had made a sudden plan to come to their country that very weekend. The sevadars were requested to inform the sangat that instead of coming for the satsang weekend, they should now go to another city where the master would be giving satsang.
The sevadars did as they were told. Later, after the sangat had been informed and after everything that had been arranged was cancelled, the sevadars sat together and talked about it. They were all thrilled that the master was coming. Then the conversation turned to how they felt about the cancellation of the weekend they had worked so hard to prepare for. They were surprised to realize that the purpose of their seva had already been fulfilled. The seva had created an atmosphere of love, harmony, communication, and friendship among the sevadars; the seva had brought each one of them closer to the master. The seva had served its purpose, even though the satsang weekend itself was never to occur.
Only the saints know how it is that they accomplish their work in this world. The seva performed on their behalf by their disciples is infused with a coherence and serenity which is difficult to describe. And the atmosphere of love lifts us out of our little selves into a greater awareness of the master’s presence.235
We feel this atmosphere when we come in contact with some of the amazing sevadars who have so much love for the master and for seva that we are humbled and inspired simply by observing them. A well-to-do woman once went to do seva in the langar at the Dera. Before entering, she stopped outside the door to take off her footwear. At the same time, another sevadar came by and took off her footwear. The woman noticed that this sevadar’s simple rubber slippers were held together with stitches in six different places. As they worked side by side in the langar, they began talking, and the woman discovered that this sevadar would save up all her money to be able to afford the train ticket to come to the Dera for her regular seva. She saved money not to buy herself a new pair of slippers, but to buy a ticket so she could come for seva.
You must have witnessed so many ladies cooking, how they cook just by the side of the fire. In winter it is all right, but imagine the months of June and July when it is so humid and hot. You cannot see the fire, you cannot sit near it and yet they cook even more than what you have witnessed here. And yet they are so happy, so contented. The spirit to serve the sangat is always there with them. It is all Baba Ji’s* grace, you see.
Maharaj Charan Singh236
One sevadar reminisced about a fellow sevadar’s love for seva. This person had been entrusted with the keys of her local centre because she was punctual and responsible and could be trusted to be the first one to arrive. Over the years she worked in many different departments, and she was not choosy. When there was a construction project at the centre she would move bricks; when dishes needed to be washed she would do that. In her mind seva was seva, and one did what one was given. This philosophy was tested when she was asked to work in one of the financial departments. As a housewife who had never worked outside the home, she was terrified by the idea of writing cheques, processing invoices, and logging debits and credits. But she ignored her fear and did this seva for many years.
As a regular sevadar she was committed to go on jatha duty, when a group of sevadars from her centre would travel together once or twice a year to another centre or to the Dera and perform open seva. This seva was quite strenuous; jatha sevadars typically travelled by bus throughout the night and reached their destination in the early hours of the morning. They would start doing seva soon after they arrived. Jathas typically do seva throughout the day, then travel back by bus, either the same night or the next night. If you had asked this sevadar – at her age and with her health problems – if she wanted to go on jatha duty, her answer might have been “no.” Nevertheless, she happily did it, no questions asked, and enjoyed herself, too.
This sevadar is over seventy years old and she offers an inspiring example of love for seva. From her we can see that our feelings towards seva are not always constant – sometimes we enjoy it, sometimes not so much. Perhaps the only way to learn to love our seva is to keep on doing it, even through those times when we are not liking it very much. Then, over time, true love for seva comes as a gift from the master.
gur parsaad mera man bheejai
eha sev bani jee’o.With the Lord’s grace is my mind inebriated:
This, indeed, is the service I render to my God.
Guru Amar Das237
When we do our seva with love, it seems we even have the power to move the master. In August 2010, when floods devastated the city of Leh and several villages in the mountainous region of Ladakh, the RSSB organization moved in to help. They were informed that the immediate need was shelter for the villagers, because winter was just around the corner. A request for sevadars was sent to various satsang centres, and immediately a few seva teams were transported to Leh, along with materials for shed construction. When they reached Leh they were dispatched to different villages to build sheds. The places where they were sent were in remote areas where the devastation was extreme and aid could not easily reach.
Some time after the work had begun, the head sevadar received a call: Baba Ji would be coming to Leh in four days to review the progress. Since it was not possible to complete all the sheds in such a short time, he decided that they would try to complete at least one shed to show the master. He called the sevadars together and told them that the master was coming, so they should try to complete their shed in four days. The sevadars agreed and returned to their task with intense energy.
News soon spread that Baba Ji was coming and one completed shed would be shown to him. Seva team leaders from the other villages called the coordinator and requested that they too be given an opportunity to finish their sheds in time for the master to see. The coordinator explained that his decision had been made keeping in mind the logistical challenges – work had to be done at a very high altitude, with limited facilities, and in a very short time. It was going to be very challenging, even for the team to which the task was allotted. He didn’t think it would be possible for those sevadars to finish the sheds in time. But the other seva team leaders asked him to give them the opportunity to at least try, and so he agreed.
Baba Ji reached Leh. Since all the sevadars had worked so hard, the plan was to take him not just to the first village, but from one village to the next. But getting to the villages was not so easy. The roads were so muddy that the air-conditioning vents in the cars of the travel party got clogged with mud; at the same time, it was impossible to lower the windows because the stench of dead animals was too strong. These were the conditions under which the sevadars had been working.
Driving through this devastation, the travel party reached the first village, where they found that the sevadars had worked very hard and completed the shed. The local villagers were sitting to one side observing the frenzy of activity, amazed at the pace at which the sevadars had built the shed. When Baba Ji reached the village, he first greeted the villagers sitting to the side of the shed and then gave darshan to the sevadars.
The same scenario was repeated in each village – the sevadars had worked very hard and the villagers were deeply moved by their dedication. Baba Ji finished his inspection of all the seva sites and returned to Leh. In the evening, the seva team leaders called the coordinator and asked if Baba Ji would be giving satsang in Leh. No such plan had been made, but when Baba Ji was asked, he agreed to hold satsang the very next evening. The sevadars rejoiced and started making plans to travel to Leh for satsang.
When the villagers found out, they said they too wanted to attend the master’s satsang. This request was made by the villagers in every village! But these were poor people who’d lost everything in the floods. It wasn’t possible for them to travel to Leh and back. Once again, the seva team leaders called the coordinator about the villagers’ request. A decision was made that RSSB would take responsibility to bring the villagers to Leh for satsang, feed them, and then take them back to their respective villages.
The next day the sevadars and villagers reached the satsang venue in Leh. The hall was resounding with the singing of shabds. The whole atmosphere was charged with love for the master. Then Baba Ji arrived. Before starting satsang he said a few words to thank the sevadars. He said he was very happy with the seva they had done – he was very happy with them. He said he had no words to express his gratitude. As he said these words, he began to choke up and couldn’t speak any further. After a few seconds, he cleared his throat and tried to begin the satsang but was again so overcome with emotion he couldn’t speak. Finally, he indicated to the pathi to start singing shabds, and he didn’t give satsang. Although they didn’t hear a satsang, the villagers were so moved by this spectacle of love between the master and his sevadars that many later requested initiation.
saachi preet ham tum syon jori,
tum syon jor avar sang tori.
jah jah jaa’u taha teri seva,
tum so thaakur aur na deva.In true love am I attached to you, O Lord,
And having fallen in love with you,
I have broken away from all else.
Wherever I go I remain in your service;
O Lord, there is no other master like you.
Ravidas238
The master is a conduit of the Lord’s love for us. The miracle of our life is that we can experience this love and that we have the opportunity to reciprocate it through seva in all its myriad forms.