Book Notes
Divine Love and Selfless Service
(Compiled from Sai Literature)
This small book (110 pages) is split into two main sections - exerpts from Discourses on Divine Love and how this is the essential nature of the human person, and exerpts from Divine discourses on selfless service.
The following chapter headings indicate the contents generally:
- Introduction
- Truth and Love
- Unity in Celebrating Eshwaramma Day
- From Faith Develop True Devotion
- Develop Love to Experience Divinity
- Latent Divinity
- Hospitals are more to serve the Poor and ready to serve Free Medical aid
- Money and Virtues
- Magnetic Power
- Power of Love
- Service with Love is the Royal Path to Realize God
- Recognize the Fundamental Principal of Oneness
- Service, Love and Sacrifice
- Love and Service will Save Mankind
- Service: Responsibility to Society
- Morality: Foundation of Progress
- Wings for Flight to the Divine - Love and Service
- Sai Love
- Love can Unite the Entire World
- Service to Mankind is the Greatest Sadhana
- Service: A Gift of Love.
- Conclusions from Baba's teachings
The following is taken from the concluding essay in this book.
Among the various spiritual disciplines, or sadhanas, we commonly cite meditations, devotional singings or study of holy-books. Yet service is a potent and complete sadhana. Selfless service is a path to God-realization.
When service is performed from compassion without desire for reward or recognition, it can be a source of unlimited joy. When we practice that discipline, we come to see that God is every where. When we find the Lord every where, we know that we too are God. Service activities are to be undertaken not for the sake of the Sathya Sai Organization nor for the sake of the Society. They are purely and essentially for your own sake to transform your own lives and redeem yourselves.
Whatever our creed ,service opens our heart and lets the divinity emerge. Service to man is service to God,for God is in every man and every living being.
Service is an excellent arena for the reduction of EGO. In service, we must consider the needs of others. We must learn to accept criticism and to persevere despite all obstacles
This spiritual proving ground enables us to see if we have been successful in reducing our anger, impatience, and greed. It allows us to gauge the depth of our compassion and understanding Spirituality should not exist only in our minds: spiritual principles must be practiced and made strong by the courage of our convictions and self-sacrifice.
This type of service reforms us into images of divinity. The task of eliminating the self-serving ego is not quick or easy. But through service, we learn to negate the pull of the senses toward the objects of wrong desire Attachment to material pleasures inflates the ego and makes it difficult for us to experience the atma As a cure to this tendency, service is ideal.It reduces the attachment and keeps us mindful of the nature of others and all the kingdom of nature.
Eliminating the mind's pull toward desire is a major aspect of spiritual endeavor. The benefit of service is that it directs us away from too much self-concern. It is one of the few practices which allows us to escape from the cycle of concentrating on our own needs.
$2 from Sai Books, 24 Kenilworth Ave, Wonga Park, 3115,
Margaret and Randall McDonald
email books [at] saiaustralia.org.au
Phone (03)9722 1740