We come to this point where we realise that the body-mind must act, must do its part, and the attitude then becomes one of service. At least that’s how it sorted itself out in my head.
Who do we serve?
For a lot of us, the familiar term karma yoga pops up. We see this as service to those who need help. So, we get busy cooking and serving food to poor beggars at temples, or distributing blankets to homeless pavement dwellers. We do this from 8 AM to 11 AM on Saturdays. The remaining one hundred and sixty five hours of the week are spent as they always were.
Food to the hungry or medicines to the ill are indeed acts of service. But in my eyes, you have understood nothing if you separate out the karma yoga compartment and the rest-of-life compartment into separate boxes. Once again, one needs to return to the basics: everything is Ma. Not just the hungry or the ill.
So, when your pesky little niece wants you to come and change the TV channel so that she can watch the infernal Doraemon series for the millionth time, you must serve her. Go change the channel. If you feel she shouldn’t watch so much TV, go distract her by playing with her.
When you enter your office cabin and are about to settle down with a coffee, and your insecure, jealous colleague, who has elevated baiting and taunting you in public into a performance sport, comes to your door, leans against the wall and throws a dart at you just to see you squirm, you have to think, “How can I serve him?”1 At this point, you must recognize that how you react to him is not about you, it must be firmly about him.
You cross a traffic signal before it turned amber, but the traffic cop waves you to the kerb and rudely asks to see your licence. You must ask yourself, “How can I serve him?” Your maidservant sweeps the floor, reaches the spot where you are sitting, and you get up and make way to let her sweep. You serve her.
All this may sound very theoretical. But if I think a bit, I realise that there is no escaping this. One serves only Ma. In every being, one serves only her. Ma never picked and chose, she never gave me the freedom to pick and choose. Anything less than this is just three-hours-a-week of feel-good compartmentalised play-acting, which may, at worst, be self-serving ego boosting instead of service. The entire point of karma yoga is to dissolve the ego by shifting the focus to others, and ostentatious serve-the-needy rituals may land up reinforcing the ego instead.
The temple and the hospital
The RKM monks understand this very well. They have this Bengali phrase “Shiva gyaane jeeva seva”, which, translated, means “serving living beings treating them as, and knowing them to be, Shiva”. The RKM runs many hospitals. In one of his talks, a monk explained their approach to serving patients. A young monk who is assigned hospital duty for the first time is put through a brief orientation like this:
- Senior monk: Do you go to the temple to pray every morning?
- Novitiate: Yes, maharaj2.
- Senior monk: Do you bow to the images of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Ma Sarada, Swami Vivekananda?
- Novitiate: Yes, maharaj.
- Senior monk: Do you offer flowers and bel leaves to the images?
- Novitiate: Yes, maharaj.
- Senior monk: Do you sweep and clean the temple floor, tidy up things?
- Novitiate: Yes, maharaj.
- Senior monk: Excellent. Now when you go to the hospital, you must remember that the hospital is Thakur’s temple. Thakur wanted it this way. Remember that the patients are actually Thakur Ramakrishna, Ma Sarada, and Swamiji, who are merely appearing as patients to you. The medicine you give them, the food that you put into their mouths, are the flowers and bel leaves, in other forms. The kind words you tell them, the help you give them, is just a different prayer, similar to the puja mantra you recite in the temple. Do you understand?
- Novitiate: Yes, maharaj.
Thus is service rendered.
Service and real-world roles
The immediate question that pops up is: how am I serving the young officer who I am hauling up for poor performance, the officer I am sacking for gross unprofessional conduct, at the workplace? They are not just needy patients.
The only answer which works for me is that you sweep dirt off the temple floor, but this does not make the dirt any less of Ma than gold coins or puja3 flowers. Sweep the floor with reverence both for the temple and the dirt. Look at the dirt, pick it up gently, and put it somewhere where it may live without getting in the way of the temple visitors.
Incidentally, the monks of RKM run their schools, hospitals, and other institutions with great professionalism, which includes hauling up and occasionally sacking employees who fall afoul of codes of conduct. Many great self-realised masters have fought court cases to fight against what they saw as unfair exploitation or greed. Nothing namby-pamby about inner realisation.
What happens in service
You don’t do a favour to anyone by serving them. Ma does me a favour by providing me an opportunity to serve her in the form of others and, at least temporarily, keeping my ego aside.
There is no difference between puja and service.
The point of doing service seems to be to use the actions to get our minds away from our self-centred state, into a state where “the other” becomes primary. In service, the “other”, the recipient, is a mortal being. In puja, the recipient is Ma or God or whatever else you call her. That’s the only difference.
If you see everything and everyone as Ma for all your waking hours, do you need to perform feeding-the-needy service separately? I don’t know.
When one works 16 hours a day in the spirit of service, physical tiredness seems to abate. I suspect this is because tiredness for us is rarely purely physical, it’s a side-effect of our self-centred state of mind. As we lose our self-centred state, tiredness too seems to reduce.
Does the rock too serve?
Does the rock lying by the wayside too serve?
I have been thinking about this, to the extent thoughts can help me understand some of these things.
I feel that we all serve by doing whatever are our roles in this material universe. It is the rock’s role to lie by the roadside, it does that.
The next question which I face is: in that case, what is the difference between doing whatever we would anyway want to do based on our desires and fears, and doing what a sage does when he serves those around him? I feel the difference is the attitude. The sage sees his body-mind apparatus as not him, and sees Ma in everything, and then does whatever he does. Even if he breathes, he knows that the breathing is as per Ma’s will, so the breathing too is service. Ma’s will be done.