The Yoga of Selfless Giving

A human being is composed of many different parts. We tend to think of ourselves as being one solidified whole, but that's not true at all. On the surface, when you look at the ground, you may say, "Well, I see the ground." But if you go beneath it you'll find that underneath the surface, the grass and the immediate dirt, the layers of topsoil, there are layers of granite, bedrock. If you go deep enough into the core of the earth, there's molten lava, mineral deposits, all kinds of things. When we see the surface we might say, "Well, this is all there is."

So the human being is composed of many substrata. You are not one self. You are an aggregate. You are a collection of selves or energies that have bonded together. Just as the electrons and protons and neutrons bond together to create an atom, so you are an aggregate of energies. These energies form in a particular configuration and we say that this is your personality, your being; it's what you are. When we alter that aggregate, when it changes, then you change.

Think of yourself as sand. The sand is lying on the beach and it has a particular pattern. Suddenly the wind comes along, the wind of dharma, and blows it around - it takes a whole new shape and a whole new form. Human life is like building sandcastles on the beach. We build a sandcastle, we create what we think is a perfect life, and the tide rolls in, the ocean comes in and sweeps it all away and washes it all clean again. This is death. Then suddenly we find ourselves on the beach again and we're building something new, and then the ocean sweeps it away again and again and again. The ocean is eternal existence, eternal consciousness. And we sit on the beach, building.

You are composed of the physical body; the mind which thinks and analyzes; the heart which loves; the ego, the sense of identity, of I-ness. Then there are many, many different selves beyond these selves, different voices from the past, selves of past lives. And if we look further we see that we actually contain all of existence, that everyone who has ever been or will ever be is in some way contained in our consciousness, in our awareness. Our awareness is not limited to what our mind thinks. It extends like the ocean, all-where. Like the sky, it's endless.

The sky contains planets, stars, galaxies, far beyond our imagination. It is the net that catches them all. So our consciousness contains many stars, many galaxies, many worlds. At the moment you may be only aware of what's going on on one planet, but as you stretch your awareness, as you see, you become aware of all the divergent worlds, all the divergent existences that have ever been or will ever be. You see that they're all at your disposal, that they're all part of you. As you progress in your self-realization you'll discover that there isn't really anything that you aren't, that you can take on any mood, any action, any personality form, be it of this world or any other world. You have no fixed self. This is only an illusion and this is the illusion that causes you to feel pain and suffering, sorrow and frustration and despair.

At the end of being is nonbeing. At the end of life is death. Beyond the ocean is something else - hard to describe, but also a distant cousin, another part of your being - nirvana, eternal awareness. But let us not concern ourselves with nirvana as yet. Let us come back from our celestial journey throughout the cosmos to this solar system, this planet, the person who's listening to this voice - their life, their problems, their hopes, their joys, their agonies, their victories and defeats, their life and their death and that which lies between - you.

You suffer because you try to fulfill yourself. You think of yourself in a limited way. You think that "I am this, I am that, I am not this, I am not that." But who is it who tells us what we are? Where did we get this sense of what we are? True, the sense of self was given to us by the world, by our parents, where we grew up, our friends, the things we read, our experiences, all of these things were given to us. But we're the one who holds them together. We're the one who can let them go. We are time. We are the sense of place and position.

So in awareness we lose and find ourselves again and again in the cosmic shuffle of existence. Now you have found yourself here and you have a sense of what you are and what you like and what you don't like. And whenever you strive to fulfill yourself, to do something for yourself, all you do is imprint, more and more strongly, that sense of identification. In other words, the problem that we're facing, the reason that we're not happy, is because we see and feel and believe consciously and subconsciously that we're separate from God, from eternal awareness. As long as we do that, we can't be happy. If the bird is used to flying and you put it in a cage, it won't be a happy bird - it wants to fly; it's its nature.

So if your nature is infinite awareness, if you were the cosmos itself, and suddenly you find yourself trapped in a body, in a mind, living in a place, being subject to birth and death, suddenly there's a lack of happiness, there's a lack of freedom. No matter what you get, you'll never be happy because these are all trinkets. They can amuse you for a little while, but you know and I know that you can only be really happy when you become what you really are. And as long as you just try to fulfill the personal self, you make that personal self stronger, you define it more and more, you prevent yourself from doing and being what you really are. It's as if someone is trying to awaken you and every time they try to awaken you, you take a sleeping pill, and then another and then another. You go further and further asleep.

So when we just try to fulfill ourselves, even though our inner voice, the truth that we know is within us, tells us to wake up, to live, to become all that we are, still we run from it, we hide from the white light of eternity. We hide in relationships, we hide in material possessions, we hide in ambitions, secret desires, hates, frustrations. We hide in our jealousy, we hide in our self-pity, in our insecurity and more than anything in our vanity and our egotism, in our self-doubt. We define a world, we build a house, then after building the house we enter into it and we never leave it. We forgot that we were the ones who built the house and because we built the house, we can leave the house. We could create a new house, a more beautiful house, or we could leave the houses and go someplace else.

Yoga is the process of first becoming aware that you've trapped yourself inside a house that you've built, even though you've forgotten - it was years ago and you've forgotten - that there's even an out-of-doors. You just are in the house, once in a while you can look out of the window. In yoga we first become aware that we're trapped, that we're dreaming and not awake. Then we leave the house, which is a limited house, and we build a more beautiful house and we live in that for a while. And we leave that and we build a more beautiful house, again and again and again, until we have the most beautiful home of them all. Then one day we leave that house and we give up houses altogether and we go someplace else, someplace eternal and infinite. That's nirvana, eternity, full awareness of God. We become God. We don't need houses then. We are the stuff that dreams are made of at that point.

So whenever we just try to please ourselves, all we do is cover up another window in the little house that we're stuck in. Whenever we do something for someone else, we affirm that we are not simply in it for ourselves, that our self is not limited to the one who's with us now, but our self is someone else, is everyone else. Self-giving opens up the doorway to the other world. It is the way of freedom. Naturally, in order to practice the yoga of self-giving we must learn to meditate. Without meditation there's no self-giving, there's no sense of how to give, what to give or that we should even give.

There's a treasure that we want. It's deep down under a lake, but the lake has waves and waves and we have no idea where the treasure is located. So first it is necessary to stop the motion of the waves. Once the waves stop and the water becomes smooth and clear, then we can look down into its depths, we can see down into the water and locate the treasure. Now, once we've located the treasure it behooves us to go down into the water and get it out, to bring it up to the surface, and then to share it with our friends, keeping enough just to keep ourselves in this world and to have whatever we need but then giving the rest away.

So it's necessary to find the treasure first. When you meditate you stop thought, you smooth the mind. Otherwise it's impossible to know where the treasures of eternity are. As long as the mind is active and filled with thoughts and ideas and desires and jealousies and all types of emotion, we really can't get a sense of where to go or what to do. We just follow what we see in the world, but that doesn't do it. It isn't enough. We must be in touch with the deeper self. So we practice meditation each day, several times a day. At first it may seem difficult but soon you become quite adept at it. As you meditate you find a deeper joy, a more beautiful awareness, entering your life every day. You become conscious that there are realms beyond sight and sound and that the very essence of existence is within us, not within our bodies or minds, but within our awareness. The dream fades a little bit and reality comes a little bit closer.

Now, once we've done that, then we begin to practice self-giving. Self-giving means that we have to understand the nature of giving. As we meditate this becomes more clear to us. When most people give, they give conditionally. They give expecting a return on their investment. They give with a sense of attachment: "Well, I'm going to give so and so this at Christmas because it will make them happy. If I give Susan a new Cuisinart then she'll be happy. If she's happy then she'll be thankful to me. If she's thankful to me, my life will be better because we'll get along better. She'll do something for me." In other words, there's a sense of return on our investment.

Very often people give to others to control them and dominate them. The parent gives the child something - possessions, a new car, money. When the parent does this, while on the one hand they're giving just because they want to give, on the other hand it exercises control. They know that the child depends on them. They know the child wants these things and therefore the child has to do what they want. Otherwise they will withdraw the favors and the presents - manipulation, domination, no happiness. Sickness. Psychic sickness.

In real self-giving we're inspired. We don't think about time or place or condition or practicality. We sense that we need to make a gesture, an offering. We give someone something; whether they acknowledge us or not is not important. We gain enough joy just from giving to fulfill ourselves. This is basic self-giving. As you meditate each day the selfishness will leave you. You will find that you will be able to give purely and freely. As with loving, it's best to love with attachment than not to love at all. So with self-giving it's best to give somewhat selfishly than not to give at all. That's one of the steps that we climb on the ladder on the way to selfless giving and selfless love - this selfish giving and selfish love.

Still it's necessary to go further, to expand our awareness, to become conscious of our own immortality and our mortality. How do we do that? True, we could go out and give people a lot of presents. Would that give us a sense of perfect awareness? No, certainly not. That sense of perfect awareness will only really come when we begin to give in a more spiritual way, when we not only offer a small present but our whole life - when we give that away.

The yoga of selfless-giving is a yoga of choice. The primary choice we make is not what to give, how to give or where to give, because we feel that we could fool ourselves. We could think that we're giving selflessly and actually be giving very selfishly. What we're really trying to do then is to become perfect givers. The idea behind this is quite simple.

Right now we don't see that we are God, that we are infinite awareness. We're not aware of the joy of our own immortality. When we give to someone else, something interesting happens. If we give purely, it opens up a doorway in our heart and it gives us the vision to see that those we give to are God. As we serve others and work for others we become happy, but we also see that the transcendental reality exists within those we give to. As we see this in others, then suddenly we see it within ourselves. Then we see that that one light, that one unified reality that we see in others, is the same reality that is within ourselves, that we are one. We are one with those whom we give to. We are one with all of existence.

Attachment is the largest problem. We become attached to things because we desire them. Desires are neither good nor bad, only thinking makes them so. Some spiritual teachers have advocated running away from all desire. From my point of view that's not necessary. What's necessary is not to run away from desire, nor to run towards it. Running towards desire is as much of an attachment as running away from it, in my estimation. Rather, what is necessary is to discriminate and to determine if a particular desire is proper for us.

We are going out to buy a car and we go from place to place. We look at the DaTzuns, Toyotas, BMWs, Chevrolets, Chryslers - we have to find the car that suits us. We might see a car that's very flashy and we want it very much and we can't afford it. But if we buy it and we get saddled with these very expensive payments, we won't be happy. Perhaps we were supposed to use some of that money for our education, for our families. But no, we had to buy some flashy car. We did the wrong thing and now we'll suffer because of it. We know we didn't do what was right. Whereas there may have been a car that wasn't as expensive but that was quite good, perhaps even a used car that would fulfill our needs for now. It's more than adequate. It'll get us where we need to go.

There's nothing wrong with having a car; the desire to have a car is not necessarily bad. Rather, it's just doing it in the proper way, finding which desire is in harmony with the will of the infinite. If you have a great deal of money and you can afford it, you can get yourself that flashy car. It's not a problem. It might be fun. It's a question of discrimination. There are many possibilities in life, but we have to match the proper possibility with the proper time. As you meditate you will come to know what is right, and as you practice selfless giving you'll gain the strength to do what is right.

The highest and best type of giving is done without attachment. Attachment means that the limited self has determined to hold onto something. Now, this is impossible. You cannot hold onto anything in this world. The very nature of this world is transitory. Everything here comes and goes. Nothing lasts. Not even you in your current form will last. It seems absurd to try and hold onto something, to derive our happiness from it, when we know we're going to be parted from it and therefore become unhappy. But this is what we do. This is attachment.

Unattachment doesn't mean not having things or loving or having emotions or being in the world or having possessions. It simply means that we're unattached. We realize that everything comes forth from God and everything returns to God, that something is in our life as long as it should be and we enjoy it. And then when it's removed from our life we're perfectly happy too, because our real happiness was not coming from possessions or people or experiences but just from pure being. If you're happy just to be, then the world can come and give you everything and that's nice. The world can come and take everything away and that's nice. It really doesn't matter because you're innately happy. That innate happiness comes and develops in self-giving. When we practice selfless giving we open the doorway to that happiness.

Selfless giving isn't drudgery. It doesn't mean that you have to go do unhappy things for hours and hours on end. As a matter of fact, selfless giving won't work then. Selfless giving is not martyrdom, it's not particularly painful. It's good clean fun. In selfless giving we're inspired to do something for someone else, to do something for our country, for our world or for God.

We can tell a person's level of spiritual development simply by watching how much they give, how they give and to whom they give. The sign of an advanced spiritual person, of course, is that they've affixed themselves to a spiritual organization and they practice their selfless giving on a spiritual level. Someone who is not quite as evolved would be giving in a more material way, perhaps to their society through political involvement, something like that. Someone who is not quite as evolved as that might practice their self-giving simply within the bounds of their own family. They try to be a good wife, a good mother, a good husband, a good child, something like that.

We live in a world with many, many billions of persons, beings who are all at different cycles, all in different stages in their progression through their incarnations. But a spiritually advanced person, one who's already been through many lifetimes and has kind of worked those things out, practices their selfless giving in a spiritual realm. They're no better than anyone else. We can't say that the person in graduate school is any better than the first grader. Each one is in the proper place at the proper time, but they certainly conduct themselves in a somewhat different way.

So if you're an advanced seeker, meaning that you meditate, that you seek consciously, then it's necessary for you to affix yourself to a spiritual group. Find that person in this world whom you feel you can learn the most from spiritually and go and apprentice yourself to them. They will show you how to give selflessly. As a matter of fact, when you really want to learn anything, and in particular selfless giving, the best and most important thing to do is simply to observe, to be around, someone who practices selfless giving perfectly. People who give of themselves are inspirations. If we think of Albert Schweitzer, Gandhi, Lincoln and many, many others, not all of whom were famous, we're inspired. We feel that the people who were the most outstanding in this world are those who have given the most of themselves. Self-sacrifice is the highest of all human qualities.

If you really want to learn the art of selfless giving, though, find a spiritual teacher. Find someone who's crossed beyond the boundaries of life and death and who's entered into the sea of nirvana, into the sea of perfection, that ocean of immortal God-consciousness. The reason I suggest this is, the person who knows more about selfless giving than anyone else is not because they have entered into that ocean but because they have returned from it. You see, it's very, very hard, my friend, to attain liberation. It takes countless lifetimes of work and self-giving and meditation. And once you've attained liberation, it's not necessary to come back into this world. You can just stay one with God in immortal consciousness and ecstasy forever. But some persons choose, even after they've had that experience, rather than stay in that immortal bliss all the time, to come back for others. They don't have to. Christ didn't have to, Buddha didn't have to, many others did not have to. They reached a plane in their awareness, in their lifetime, when they could have just gone off and meditated by themselves but they came back to teach, they came back to give, they came back to die, to suffer, when it was no longer necessary for them to do so.

It's one thing to give because you need to. It's another to give when you don't have to at all. The greatest souls in this world, in a sense, or I don't know if they're the greatest souls but let us just say that the most giving souls are those who give when they don't have to give, who could just walk away from this world and its suffering and merge with eternal existence and bliss forever - a bliss far beyond your understanding, an ecstasy beyond description, a beauty and light that surpasses all knowledge and all things in this and all other worlds; this is what it is like when you cross that boundary into immortal perfection that we call God realization and nirvana - and to come back from that to ease the pain and suffering and misery of others, to talk to those who will belittle you, who will not understand you, who will not listen to what you have to say, but to do it anyway, to serve out your time in this life. If you are fortunate enough to meet such a being then you will really learn selfless giving, just by being with them, just by watching them. Because you'll see that every second, every moment of their awareness is directed towards others, and also they have the power to change and transform the lives of others.

So if you really want to learn selfless giving, it's really necessary to be around such a person, and not simply to be around them but to observe them carefully, to watch what they do, not just on the surface, but within, to try to understand what motivates them. What motivates someone who's become wealthy to go out and work in the ghetto with those who are poor? What motivates one who has perfect health to go and work with the sick? Because if you understand that, then you'll understand the root and cause of all existence, that life itself is self-giving. We're not given this life just for our own purposes or our own amusement and pleasures.

It's fine to be happy. It's a material world; you should have all the things you need. If you need a family, if you need friends, houses, cars, careers, if you need to be famous, whatever you need to be, be it. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you have or what you do. It's your motivation that counts. Because if you have improper motivation and have everything in this world - you may have perfect health, wealth, friends, loved ones - you'll be miserable. As you grow older you'll watch it all erode before your eyes and soon it'll be gone and death will swallow you up, only to come back again and experience the same thing again and again. Death is not a release. Death is just a hyphen between incarnations.

So one day after many, many lifetimes of being shuffled around this old world, of seeing the up and down of it, we get wise. We decide that the fun in life is to give. And as we do, we become happier and happier. We go and join a spiritual community. That is to say, we study with a teacher and our friends are the other students, people who, like ourselves, wised up a little bit after enough lifetimes and learned that the fun of life is giving, and we begin to work for humanity together.

A spiritual teacher always has a journey and we hop onto their journey; we travel with them. Their journey is, for a course of years in this world, to try to bring light to others, so we help them with their work. If you want to become a great silversmith, you have to apprentice yourself to a master silversmith. Gradually over the years you will learn the art. One day you'll be the silversmith, perhaps, and you'll have apprentices or you may not be interested in apprentices. You might just make things.

So we come to the spiritual teacher and we help them in their work. We help them reach others, inspire others and we watch them. We watch the little drama that goes on in their lives, on this cosmic stage of existence. We watch them deal with the public. We watch them deal with the students. We watch this magnificent process and we learn. We're witnesses to immortality. And as we watch, our heart opens because we're inspired by the self-giving. We're inspired by the God that we see in others and suddenly we find ourselves changing. We find ourselves giving more and more, sleeping a little less and working a little harder. We find that our lives become rather amazingly beautiful, that they're deeper and more conscious - things that I can't put into words but that you will feel as you walk along the pathway to enlightenment.

Selfless giving is something that, in my estimation, begins at home. I feel that there are lots and lots of opportunities for you to give of yourself all the time. I don't think you have to travel to India to learn selfless giving. I think that selfless giving is right where you are now, that there's always an opportunity. There's always someone to help, there's always some way in which you can perfect yourself through service to others.

In the beginning we have a sense of giving in small blocks, units. We give part of our time or part of our energy to someone else to help them prosper. But as we advance we become aware that we really want to give perfectly and that even though we're giving somewhat selflessly, there may be subconscious motivations. Part of our selfless giving may actually, subconsciously, be selfish.

So we approach God. We sit in meditation and we feel eternity and we say to eternity, "Eternity, I don't know what's right or wrong, good or bad. I may be doing what's right or I may be deceiving myself. So instead, what I'm going to do is give my life to you. Giving my life to you may mean leading a very ordinary life or it may mean leading an extraordinary life. It may mean having a family and a career or it may mean going beyond all that to just work for others. It's hard to say. Rather than making a decision myself I'm going to let you decide for me. I'm going to give my life to you, to do with as you will, because I know that you are my self, you are my very being. When this life ends I will be absorbed back into you. I have come forth from you. You are all good and you know all that there is. So please act in me and through me at every moment and every second. Let me be but an extension of your being. Teach me how to give and love selflessly, at all times."

When you have this attitude, when you pray and meditate with this feeling, then you will give selflessly and then you can view everything - everything in your life is part of your yoga of selfless giving. Your yoga of selfless giving is not confined to just several hours a week when you do something for a spiritual organization or do something for someone else. Rather, your selfless giving involves everything and everyone in your life. Remember, it's attitude that matters most. For example, let us say that what you're trying to do is achieve God realization. You want to achieve self-realization, to become fully conscious, to be like Christ or Buddha or Krishna or Ramakrishna. You want to become a perfected enlightened person. Now you could want to do this just because it would fulfill you or you could feel no, rather than just do this to fulfill myself, I want this to occur because if it does, look how much more I can do for others.

It is much more likely that you will attain liberation if you want liberation for others than just for yourself, because it's a long journey and along the journey you'll get tired. And when you get tired, if it's just for you yourself, you'll reach a point where you'll say, "Well, I really don't want it that much." It's a sour grapes routine. "Oh, it couldn't be that good, I've come far enough, let me rest, I'm tired." But if, when you're very, very tired and you're about to give up and you think, "Well, yes, I could give up for myself but no, there are others whom I will be able to help and they're waiting for me and if I don't complete my task, if I don't do this perfectly, then what about them? They'll suffer." Then you'll pick yourself up, no matter how tired you are, and go forward again and again and again, until you've reached liberation.

If you've set your sights on liberation, on full knowledge of eternity, then you can feel that everything you do in your life can contribute to that. If you work, when you go to work, you should feel that your work is meditation. You should feel when you get up to go to work each day that you are offering it to eternity, and if you can only do it perfectly it will strengthen you. It's part of your yoga. It's like trying to meditate perfectly. When you're with your friends, feel that you're not just with your friends but rather you have an opportunity to serve these people - sometimes by listening, sometimes by talking, sometimes by not talking to them about spiritual things, not thinking that you're so knowledgeable that you can tell them how to improve their lives, but just by being - by being compassionate and understanding, sometimes by being tough. But if you meditate deeply you'll have a sense of the right way to act in all situations with all people. It'll just come to you naturally from your deeper self, from the depths of your being it will flow forward. Whereas if you don't meditate deeply, how can it happen? The message can't get through. The messenger is blocked. Learn to use everything in your life as part of your selfless giving. There's no situation that you can become involved in that you can't use for part of your selfless giving.

Let us consider eternity. Eternity is selfless giving. Think of a star. A star burns up its very substance to give light to others. You need to be like a star. Eternity sends forth all of the worlds, all of the beings we see, the very fabric of existence. Eternity gives life to all and sustains all, transforms all on the wheel of dharma, the wheel of birth, death and rebirth, until all attain perfection. Eternity does nothing but give, therefore it is infinite.

In the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, it is explained that everything eventually must turn into its opposite. Whatever you do, sooner or later, its opposite will occur. This is the nature of change. That which is high will become low. That which is distant will become near. Your good luck will become bad luck and so on. However, there is one way to avoid the change and that is through constant giving. When the good energy is moving, when the cycle is going in the right direction, if you keep sharing the good energy with others, more and more all the time, then it need not ever turn into its opposite. It's only when it reaches the high point, the zenith, that the law of change dictates that something must turn into its opposite, into an opposite movement. So in your life, if you just keep giving to others, constantly and ceaselessly and endlessly, if you don't really take thought of yourself and your own welfare and your own awareness but just give and give and give, beyond exhaustion, then your life will always be a constant progression. It need not change into its opposite.

Selfless giving is the art of living, as I suggested at the beginning of this discussion. Most people don't live very well. They live very selfishly and when they suffer, it's because they brought that suffering on themselves. But you have an opportunity to be different. You have enough time, enough knowledge and enough volition to be different. You may be 16, you may be 65, it doesn't matter. All you have is all the time in the world - no more and no less. If you begin today you can change your life forever. You can change your life into forever, into immortal awareness.

Selfless giving rounds the edges in spiritual practice. Many people can meditate very well but they're still very egotistical. You go and see the spiritual teacher and you watch them meditate and you feel power from them, but then you see that they're really egotistical. They're not delicate and gentle and kind to those around them. How can this be? How can they go into these higher states of knowledge and still be egotistical? It's because they haven't achieved an integrated realization yet. There are still some rough edges of the self that have to be smoothed out. Selfless giving smoothes out the rough edges, unties the hard knots. Meditation is not enough. Meditation and selfless giving must always go together. They work together to create immortality.

Selfless giving is downright fun. When you're going through a difficult time yourself, when life is not pleasing you - you're depressed, you're discouraged - forget about yourself for a while. Go do something for someone else. This is the fastest way to pull yourself out of a negative state of consciousness. You could sit around and feel sorry for yourself and be miserable, or you can simply pick yourself up and go out and do things for others. Don't expect always to be inspired. Sometimes you have to inspire yourself. You could go outside today and have a glum face and be unhappy and miserable and feel sorry for yourself, or you could put a smile on your face and go out into the world, even though you don't feel like it. That's selfless giving

Selfless giving is not convenient. It doesn't mean that today we're struck by a mood and we're inspired and we're going to go help someone else. Selfless giving, real selfless giving, involves commitment - the commitment to make others happy whether we feel like it or not, without complaining and without indulging. This is the higher art of selfless giving.

It's nice to give when you're inspired. That's the adolescence of giving. We feel good; we're inspired. We don't feel good; we're not inspired. But in real selfless giving, mature selfless giving, we always give. We have a certain standard that we uphold in our consciousness that we never allow ourselves to slip beneath. As a matter of fact, we're raising the standard all of the time. We're giving in a deeper, more pure way, all the time. So when you really give selflessly, after a while it becomes automatic. If you are unhappy, if you're discouraged, be that way in your bedroom, by yourself, but whenever you leave your room to come out into the world, in real selfless giving, we push all of that aside and we smile and give love to others.

In other words, what I'm suggesting is that selfless giving is not just our actions, it's not just that we go and spend time with others or work for them, but selfless giving extends itself to our emotional makeup. We could be unhappy and discouraged for ourselves, but if we're trying to be in a high vibratory state so we can really be of service to others, it's necessary to be happy. We can be happy even if we don't feel like it, as part of our selfless giving. We can't allow ourselves to be depressed or discouraged. There are people who depend upon us. There are things to accomplish. We only have a little bit of time in this world before death swallows us up. We must bring light to as many people as possible. Who has time to indulge in self-pity or in moral recriminations, in guilt, in feeling sorry for ourselves? In advanced self-giving you feel you have no time for this. You just push those emotions out. If you were just being yourself, you could indulge, you have time to be unhappy. I don't have the luxury of time to be unhappy. I have too much to do. I have too much to accomplish. Who has time to be unhappy?

When you're young and you're not feeling well, you may not go to school. You mother will keep you home because you're ill. When you're an adult you have to go even if you don't feel well. You have to work. It's necessary. This is growing up. This is maturity. So you may not feel like giving selflessly, but it doesn't matter. You have to do it anyway. This is if you're an advanced spiritual seeker. If you're a beginner, if you're just learning how to meditate and just beginning to gain control of your life, let alone give the whole thing away to eternity, then you can just kind of be yourself and be inspired and be a happy creature. Give when you want to, love when you want to, meditate when you want to. But when you enter into the professional league, when you become of interest to me or other spiritual teachers, that's when you get serious about it. You don't need to be pampered anymore. You just want to learn and give and become godlike and live your life for others. Then come and see me, come and talk to me, when you get to that point. Then I'm interested.

I work with beginners, I work with all sizes, shapes, forms and dimensions, physical and nonphysical, but the ones I'm looking for are the ones who have gotten steady enough not to need all the time and the attention, who aren't in it for the glamour, for the rush of light, but have committed themselves to self giving and their self giving is not just their physical work, but the way they handle themselves, the way they conduct their emotional beings. Such a person I'm interested in. Such a person I can bring quickly to self-realization. Others must first work their way up the ladder of consciousness just to reach that point, where not just for a day or a week or a month, but for a whole lifetime, they'll have fun. They'll be themselves, but they'll also maintain a standard of self-giving, of conscious control and awareness. These are the persons who have the most beautiful lives on earth. These are the ones who do so much for others.

So your spiritual journey and your spiritual welfare are really dependent, in my estimation, upon two primary factors: one, your ability to meditate well and two, your ability to give of yourself. You'll find the two go hand in hand. The more you meditate, the more you'll give of yourself, and your self-giving will take an ease and a form and a shape, a beauty and a knowledge, that will make it real self-giving. The more you give of yourself, the better you'll meditate. You must do the two. Some people make a terrible mistake. They just give of themselves and don't meditate and they burn themselves out. They get exhausted and after a while they overdo their selfless giving. They don't have any fun with it anymore and they just go at it doggedly, day after day, thinking they're doing what's right, and they're not at all.

As you meditate and provide time for yourself to meditate, you renew yourself. You come back to that inner wellspring of existence in your meditation and you feel beauty and light. You remember why you're giving of yourself. It's fun again. It keeps you balanced. Then you can go out into the world and practice your selfless giving. But you must meditate. Again, just meditation without selfless giving is not enough. You may go into very high states of consciousness, but the rough edges will be there. No liberation will occur because there may be lots of selfish motives lurking within the self that you don't see. In order to work those out, we practice selfless giving.

The two go hand in hand - whether you're an absolute beginner and you're just trying to meditate for a couple of minutes a day and just think nice thoughts about other people and help them once in a while; or you're an advanced seeker who meditates with perfection in their whole being several hours a day, who's seeking a spiritual teacher or who has one, who's dedicated their life to the infinite, but not just as a formality or because it's the right thing to do but because they really want to, who not only works for others but does so with a smile and with inspiration, with cleverness, with laughter and humor, and who is not all caught up in themselves. That is to say, the person is not thinking, "Oh how wonderful I am, I just have given my life to God and to others."

There's no subtle vanity or egotism, but they're just a regular person out there doing the best they can for others, using the advanced knowledge they get from meditation and from their spiritual teacher to just try to do a better and better job for humanity, without feeling they're important, with the recognition that this world existed fine before you were here and will exist fine after you are gone. Such a person practices the art of selfless giving. They're free from attachment, happy, progressive. And even on those days when the dark winds blow and we find ourselves turbulent and upset, they go out and act as a professional. They do a good job anyway. They have a high standard. Such persons are true karma yogis. They practice the art of selfless giving as it really should be practiced.

So give more and more of yourselves. Don't hold back. Life is so short and there's so much to do. Align yourself with others who seek what you seek. Meditate deeply. Play with your life, have fun with it, and do what you can for others along the way. Don't expect others to admire you or appreciate you or understand you. Just do what you can, that's the joy. Don't wait for a return on the investment. Just give, give, give. But don't burn yourself out either, because if you burn yourself out, then what good will you be for anyone else? If you burn yourself out in two years of intense selfless giving, what good is that if you could have given of yourself for another 20 years and done much more? While it's good to be interested in the short-term growth, consider the long term. Set yourself up well. Get the things you want. If you want a house, car, friends, these things are not wrong. There's nothing wrong with the material - God exists in the material and in the spiritual. It's really all one, but don't be attached to them. They come and they go.

You're out as a child playing in the world, and you're playing with your friends and you're absorbed. But then your mother calls you. It's time to come home. And then you leave your friends, you say goodbye and you come home. So God, the infinite mother, has set you in this world to play and have a nice time. Play nicely with others, be kind to them, help them, love them. But always remember, when mother calls it will be time to go home. And She will call one day.