A Living Tantra reader asked: How do you determine when you are genuinely serving somebody as opposed to rescuing them? This question rests on the assumption that serving and rescuing are activities motivated by fundamentally different Views.

Many people try to rescue their family and friends from situations that are none of their business, not their responsibility, or both.

The habit of inappropriately rushing to rescue others from some real or imagined harm is a compulsive response based on egotism. The rescuer may try to convince everyone that her or his actions are selfless, but just try forgetting to bow down and say “thank you,” and the supposedly absent self will rise up demanding its due!

You may also find yourself being berated by this supposedly “selfless” rescuer if you fail to improve or change due to his or her efforts on your behalf.

Some people indulge in rescuing behavior in response to the insistent requests of others who don’t want to, or don’t know how to, take responsibility for their own actions. For instance, the friend who constantly bends your ear about the same relationship problem, or constantly asks you to bail them out of some difficulty of their own making. In this situation, the rescuer is still acting out of egotism: You are afraid someone will think ill of you or get angry at you if you don’t “help.”

Compulsively rescuing others is draining. You constantly give away your energy in trade for some nourishment you imagine you will receive in return. But since you are in a state of fantasy and fixation, you never get back what you want. And you don’t even know what you actually need. Exhaustion is the inevitable result.

Service, on the other hand, may be physically tiring, but it is fundamentally nourishing for a whole situation, one that includes you. The key quality of service is that it is reciprocal: it is an embodiment of the understanding that we live in continuity.

Two Sanskrit words convey the sense of service as reciprocity in a state of continuity: sevā and dāna.

Sevā is selfless service without attachment to the fruits of one’s labor. You just serve. The activity is complete in and of itself without any other reward. You don’t have to try to enjoy it, or grin and bear it. You aren’t striving to be good or nice. You are just expressing the natural devotion of Self to Self. You are Self serving Self. There is no difference between you, the act of service, and the one being served. Everything flows like a beautiful, precise dance of devotion. There is no other joy to be sought. This is pure seva-ānanda.

Dāna is giving. The real meaning of dāna is nothing less than the total reciprocity of the world, of Reality. As Paramahamsa Satyananda Saraswati said in satsang: Dāna is not charity. Giving is not charity.

We have individual experiences, we enjoy manifest life, because the essential nature of the world Self is to manifest itself as a state of communication and devotion. To give is to express this natural state. The dualistic world is nothing but a theater of reciprocity. When we refuse to join in, when we only want to take, we are expressing ignorance of our essential nature.

When we are in a state of ignorance, we count, we measure, and we hold onto our things: our ideas, our beliefs, and our selves. We hoard the evidence of our ignorance as if it were our greatest treasure.

When we are relaxed and embodying the wisdom of the natural state, we give and we receive, and these are the same. Again, it is like a dance. Self meets Self and there is the dance of exchange. It is pure joy. This is the lila of the world.

Until we are in a state of more relaxed awareness, it is difficult to participate easefully in service and giving. We are always analyzing situations, measuring people, and calculating what we will get if we agree to serve or give. We are in a painful state of tension. We are missing the nourishment we so desperately crave, and we express our hunger through our stinginess and hoarding.

We are actually never stingy. We are just hungry and ignorant.

We can begin, however, to discover real nourishment by taking small steps to meet Reality. We can give without thinking, judging, measuring or analyzing.

For instance, we can undertake the practice of simply giving to one random person a day. We can give money to a person on the street who asks us for help. We can give a kind word, or some service. We can do this indiscriminately, without any evaluation. We just do it. Then we can see more clearly our own tension, and we can begin to experience the ānanda of true giving.

We can stop rescuing and reclaim our misspent Shakti. When we are not so drained by inappropriate, egoic service and giving, we can feel more free to serve and give with ease and with a more correct View.

We can cultivate gratitude. This is a vital point. Gratitude opens the heart and the door to experiencing true seva-ānanda and the wonderful dance of giving and receiving. This can be done in many ways, but a good method is to identify an overlooked or under-valued source of nourishment that is already a part of your life and cultivate gratitude for that.

The core View is that service and giving are primary expressions of the world Self. We are not learning or inventing these qualities because they are “good.” They are expressions of the non-ignorant Self, the realized Self. They are natural activities of the open state of awareness. We discover true service and giving through our unfoldment as human beings.

In Matriseva,
Shambhavi

Related Posts

• Giving and Receiving
• With God to Our Right
• Seducing the Guru