Posts tagged service

Edgar Cayce answers…

On health, healing…

Know that all healing forces are within, not without! The applications from without are merely to create within a coordinating mental and spiritual force.

Remember, the body does gradually renew itself constantly. … Hold to that KNOWLEDGE- and don’t think of it as just therapy-that the body CAN, the body DOES, renew itself!

Which of my aptitudes should I follow for the greatest success in life, financially?

Forget the financial angle and consider rather which is the best outlet for the greatest contribution you can make towards making the world a better place in which to live. Efforts should never be expended purely for mercenary reasons. Pecuniary gains should come as a result of the entity’s using his abilities in the direction of being helpful.

Please give a detailed account as to how I can best serve humanity.

In those ways that open to you day by day. It isn’t always the individual that plans to accomplish some great deed that does the most. It is the one who meets the opportunities and privileges which are accorded it day by day. As such opportunities are used, there are better ways opened. For what we use in the way of helpfulness to others, increases in itself. Begin with what you are!

Where is the safest place to live?

Don’t worry so much where you live but how you live. Make the family of man [humanity] your family as well.

Edgar Cayce (March 18, 1877 – January 3, 1945)

Einstein’s practical wisdom

A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

For the most part we humans live with the false impression of security and a feeling of being at home in a seemingly trustworthy physical and human environment. But when the expected course of everyday life is interrupted, we are like shipwrecked people on a miserable plank in the open sea, having forgotten where they came from and not knowing whither they are drifting. But once we fully accept this, life becomes easier and there is no longer any disappointment.

It is high time the ideal of success should be replaced with the ideal of service … Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

— Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955)

Celebration and service — a message for the new year!

2008 is gone. And here comes one more year. New year wishes everywhere, messages for the new year, resolutions, celebrations everywhere. 2008 was as good as any other year, but it also had its woes. Terrorism rising its head, natural calamities, conflicts,… and it doesn’t feel good to see so much of hatred and hopelessness in the minds of people. When you look at so much of suffering, and the truth that all joys (and miseries too) are evanescent staring at our face, shouldn’t we be feeling guilty? How can we celebrate the new year? Shouldn’t we be mourning instead? Does celebration have any meaning?

Well… Sri Sri Ravi Shankar says we should celebrate. He says,

Yes, you will feel guilty when your celebration is aimed at gratifying yourself. But if the intention is to uplift everyone in your area, just do it. Don’t delay it. We will never feel guilty if we our celebration takes people out of their gloomy moods. This celebration becomes service and there is no guilt. And when your service becomes celebration, there is no ego and pride in it.

Get this. When celebration becomes service, there is not guilt. And when service becomes celebration, there is no pride.

Let us celebrate with this one intention that let’s bring home the (Spiritual) Knowledge to everyone — that life, events are impermanent. What is permanent is our spirit, our consciousness. It has no birth and death. Life at a higher plane is eternal and so celebrate every moment knowing that every moment is a gift to us.

And today’s The Hindu comes with a beautiful cartoon from Surendra…
Welcoming 2009 -- A cartoon by Surendra

What an apt way to send off 2008 and welcome 2009!!!

I wish everyone a very happy new year! Let’s serve and celebrate!!! :)

What is the best way to help and serve people?

A questioner asks J. Krishnamurti, “I want to help people, serve them. What is the best way?”

And Krishnamurti replies,

The best way is to begin to understand yourself and change yourself. In this desire to help another, to serve another, there is hidden pride, conceit. If you love, you serve. The clamour to help is born of vanity.

If you want to help another, you must know yourself for you are the other. Outwardly we may be different, yellow, black, brown or white, but we are all driven by craving, by fear, by greed or by ambition; inwardly we are very much alike. Without self-knowledge, how can you have knowledge of another’s needs. Without understanding yourself, you cannot understand another, serve another. Without self-knowledge you are acting in ignorance, and so creating sorrow.

….

To help another, you must know yourself; like you, he is the result of the past. We are all interrelated. If you are inwardly diseased by ignorance, ill will and passion, you will inevitably spread disease and darkness. If you are inwardly healthy and integrated, you spread light and peace; otherwise you help to produce greater chaos, greater misery. To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

(Ojai public talk. 11 June 1944)