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Chapter 15
THE INTEGRAL YOGA: SEEING THE LORD EVERYWHERE
84. The Triad Of Service
8. We see countless objects in the world. They are to be divided into three categories. When a bhakta gets up in the morning, he has only three things in mind. First, he remembers the Lord. Then he makes preparations for His worship. The bhakta is the servant, while the Lord is the one who should be served. The rest of the creation is the means of worship. It exists to provide flowers, incense and sandal paste for the worship. This is the triad of service. This is the teaching in this Chapter. But normally a devotee worshipping an idol does not look upon everything in the world as means of worship. He picks and chooses a few things. He goes to a garden and fetches a few flowers, brings a few incense sticks, prepares some food-offerings. This is not in keeping with the teaching in this Chapter. All the means of doing penance, the means of doing karma constitute the means for the Lord’s service. Some of these may be called flowers, some may be called incense and so on. The idea is to make all the actions the articles of worship in this way. Nothing exists in the world except these three: the worshipper, the Lord and the means of worship. The Gita is infusing the spiritual discipline of non-attachment (vairagya), which it wants to impress on us, with bhakti. Thereby it is removing the arduousness in karma, the ‘action-ness’ in action and rendering it easy. 9. When someone in the Ashram has to do more work, he never thinks, ‘Why should I do more work?’ There is great significance in this. If a devotee gets an opportunity to worship for four hours instead of two, would he complain about it? In fact, he would be more delighted. This is what we experience in the Ashram. We should have this experience everywhere in life. Life should be fully devoted to service. There is the Purushottam (the greatest Person, the Supreme Self) to whom service is to be rendered, and there is the akshar purusha (the imperishable person)[1], the eternal servant, who knows no weariness and who has been serving since the dawn of creation. He is like Hanuman, who is ever standing before Rama with folded hands. Hanuman knows no weariness. The servant, who is deathless like Hanuman, is also everready for service.Akshar purusha is such a lifelong servant. He says, “The Lord is ever there and I, the servant, too exist for ever. If He is deathless, so am I, the servant. Let us see whether He gets tired of my service or I get tired of serving Him! I shall follow Him in all His incarnations. If He is born as Rama, I shall be born as Hanuman. If He is born as Krishna, I shall be Uddhava. Every time He comes into being, I too shall be born.” Let there be such a lovely emulation. Akshar purusha, the imperishable person, serves the Lord in this way age after age. It should always be borne in mind that He is Purushottam, the Master and the bhakta is His obedient servant; and the whole creation, which changes every moment and presents itself in innumerable forms, should be made the means of worship, the means of service. Every act should become the worship of the Lord. |
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References and Context
- ↑ We have already referred to the concept of Purusha in the footnote in Chapter 7.2. 'There are two persons in the world—the perishable and the Imperishable', says the Gita (15.16), 'All the contingent beings are perishable and the unchanging is called the Imperishable. It also speaks of the third Purusha—the Purushottam. The Gita's speaking of three Purushas or rather a triple status of the Purusha differs from the standpoint of traditional Sankhya.