Why Serve? : Part-7. Swami Chinmayananda.

 ===========================================================

==============================================================

Friday, January 28, 2022. 06:00.

Address At Leslie Sawhny Anniversary Function On 15th May, 1983

Part-7.

================================================================

The selfless work you do becomes spectacularly beautiful and rewarding to the community and society. Thus, you are rewarded, your work becomes splendid, and the society and the community, nay, the world around really gets benefited by such truly selfless work. This is the reason why every prophet's work blesses people for generations. They, in their own times, seem to have done almost very little, but as centuries roll by, they gather a strange and mysterious momentum of their own. Compare it with the work of a Stalin, or a Hitler or a Mao. All of them also worked. But when they died, the world immediately rejected them. Their graves were opened up! The very monuments built upon their tombs were pulled down in anger and hatred !

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 I am not trying to tell you that they worked at a spiritual level; but we can understand at our own intellectual level that their minds and intellects had not a trace of ego. They wanted nothing, expected nothing, demanded nothing, desired nothing but the sheer joy of serving. They did it all in Love. And you see the secret dynamism in such work of pure, selfless love.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And in our life, we live just the opposite. At all levels, in all professions, we have become the most notorious people in the world, extremely selfish, totally unconcerned for others. When you have this kind of citizen, there is neither a city nor citizen. This is not the way to live. This way we are only bringing about disintegration again and again. Our communal vitality is lost; we are becoming a population, that is all.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A geographical area where a population lives is called a country. A geographical area where a people live is called a nation. By merely mentioning the work "national", as in national integration, national progress, or national program, we. do not become a nation. An area becomes a nation when a people come to live and strive therein; a land where a population survives is not a nation. How are we to turn a population into a people? This is nation-building, and thereafter we can accomplish all economic and political plans most effectively for the development of our society.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But where is the nation today? It is a geographical area no doubt, where a confused society or a population is living. To bring about that harmony, not at the physical level, but a harmony of thought, harmony of goal, harmony of inspiration, is to build a nation. This is based on scientific truths, rational and consistent. The nation-building should necessarily have a goal for the whole nation, with which each one can get himself inspired. It is only with such a devoted goal in life that we can surrender our ego and our selfish desires, rise above them and come to live like angels upon the earth; in such a community, in the highest spirit of inspired joy, everyone can work and grow in mutual happiness.

Why serve? It is for you to realize now.

*****

==============================================================