Working at the garden at Ramagiri Ashram.
This week, we’ll look at Putting Others First, one of the more nuanced of the eight points. How you put one person first is not necessarily how you will put the next person first – and it will even vary with the same person from situation to situation. Putting others first is a direct way to reduce our self-will. Easwaran reminds us that reducing self-will can help us to still our minds and unify our consciousness:
In the great climax of meditation, when self-will is extinguished and the mind becomes still, you see the whole universe as the manifestation of God’s love. You love everybody now because you see the Self in them, and not only human beings but animals too – elephants, sea lions, sparrows, every living thing. Wherever you go, you’ll see only unity.
You may already be putting others first in many ways. This week, see if you can take the opportunity to do one focused selfless act. Perhaps you can help a friend or family member with a physical project in the yard or garden. Or maybe, you’ll take some time to write the mantram for someone going through a difficult time. Decide what is right for you. Give it a try, reflect on the experience, and let us know how it went!
Reading Study
The following excerpt is from Seeing With the Eyes of Love by Easwaran, pages 95–97. Please feel free to share particular lines or sections from the following excerpt that stand out to you, and tell us how they might apply to your own life. We’d love to hear from you!
In a sense, desire is the single most important word in this passage from The Imitation of Christ. Thomas is saying that through the choices we make in everyday life, we can strengthen the desire for spiritual awareness – the upward drive. For example, we can read uplifting books instead of spy thrillers. We can steep ourselves in the lives and writings of the great mystics until they haunt our very sleep. And we can spend time with others who share our desire for spiritual growth.
At the same time, we can withdraw our energy and attention from those activities for which the downward impulse clamors. We can stay away from violent and sensate motion pictures. We can forgo our Saturday morning perusal of the mail-order catalogs in order to give the time freely and generously to our family. We can help staff a shelter for homeless families, or volunteer to drive meals to elderly people who are housebound.
Every deep desire is a prayer, whether you spell it out to God or not. Desire is power, and when you have a deep, strong, unified desire, the power of that desire will drive you into action. If that desire is selfless, immense creativity, initiative, and courage will pour into your hands. This great surge is the Lord answering your prayer – not from somewhere outside, but from deep within.
The Lord answers every selfless prayer, but the initial unification of desires is up to us. Many people who try meditation complain about their inability to make real progress, even though they have been meditating for some time. I always point out that the driving force that takes us upward is the power of desire, and therefore it is essential to recall desires from wasteful channels. I am not talking about right or wrong now, or moral and immoral. Even a little desire has a lot of power packed in it. We have accumulated a tremendous store of scientific and technological know-how in today’s world, but very few of us suspect that it is in our desires that all our power lies. Unfortunately, most of us have no way to get at all this power. The sages tell us that if we can find a way to reach those desires in the depths of our consciousness, we will have the equivalent of a powerful booster rocket. One by one, we can recall our vital energy from sensory cravings and selfish desires and unify it through the practice of meditation into one great, shining, powerful desire that will take us right up into higher consciousness: blast off from Cape Kennedy, right there inside!
The fascinating thing about all this is you aren’t always aware that you are dislodging a long-standing compulsive desire until after the fact. You are trying to go deeper in meditation, and the very intensity of your effort pulls energy in from wherever it can. You don’t give up smoking; smoking gives you up. You don’t give up alcohol; it gives you up. If you go deep enough, where the cravings lie, and are able to withdraw energy from those cravings, those urges cannot trouble you again.
Unfortunately, the conspiracy today is to inflate those desires. Through the talents of the advertisers we are encouraged to indulge them, intensify them. It’s for our own protection, then, that we develop the skill of deflating desires. There is nothing more satisfying. Among my own friends, I have watched with delight as addictive desires slowly deflate like so many balloons. You can almost hear the air hissing out. I have been able to anticipate this and say, “In a few weeks’ time the balloon is going to be flat. Don’t cry. Be glad!”