How Do We Serve?
Whatever we do in his service should be saturated with deep humility, love, and devotion.
Maharaj Charan Singh68
Once we are committed to doing seva, the paramount question becomes: How should seva be done? The rest of this book is devoted to a deeper exploration of this question. But the short answer is that we try to serve in a way that pleases the master:
Seva is to please another person. If the person whom you are serving is pleased, then your seva is beneficial.
Maharaj Charan Singh69
Perhaps it is only after years of doing seva that we learn the most important lesson of all: Seva is not about what we do, it is about how we do it. Seva is not about this project or that project, this task or that task. In fact, the task doesn’t matter. What we offer in seva is not our skills and talent. What we offer is our love. There is a beautiful term in Hindi and Punjabi that captures this concept: seva bhav. Seva bhav literally means the attitude of love with which we do our seva.
The purpose of all seva is to bend the mind towards God. This is why physical seva is truly seva only when it is infused with the right attitude of mind.
sa seva keeti safal hai
jit satgur ka man manne.Fruitful and rewarding is that service
which is pleasing to the guru’s mind.
Guru Ram Das70
And as Great Master wrote in Philosophy of the Masters:
A disciple should serve his master without arrogance and without any idea of reward, and always with the aim of pleasing the master. By this method his mind will always be contemplating the master. And if you contemplate on a person intensely, you will one day imbibe the qualities of that person.71
To learn how to do seva with love, we only have to look to the master. As a sevadar of his own master, he is a living example of how seva is done. The master manifests the qualities of a true sevadar – qualities like responsibility, dedication, self-discipline, obedience, surrender, humility, selflessness, detachment, balance, patience, kindness, inclusiveness and, above all, love.
Although this appears to be a daunting list of virtues, and we are far from perfect, we need not feel disheartened. Even if we are a long way from the ideal, it is still wonderful to have the opportunity to aspire to it. We place that objective before us – to absorb the qualities of a true sevadar – and work to realize them in ourselves.
We learn not just from the master, but from one another. When we come to seva, we often have to unlearn everything we’ve learned in our worldly roles, because seva has a different purpose. Here we are not trying to learn skills, but how to serve one another with love.
Over the years, we come across many sevadars whose attitude towards seva inspires us – the ones who are willing to take on a responsibility no one else wants; the ones who are invisible, who quietly do their seva rather than pushing themselves forward to impress; the ones who are unfailingly kind to others, even when stressed; the ones who take the smallest suggestion from the master as an order to be obeyed. There is so much we can learn from one another.
As we begin to understand the qualities that make up doing seva with the right attitude of love and service, we realize that this is something we will never be done learning. Each time we peel a layer we find there is more to be discovered – about the master, about seva, and about the inner journey. There is infinite scope to improve our approach to seva; there are infinite ways to grow in our love. It is the work of a lifetime.