The Autonomous Server
Serving and Loving are Connected
Recently, I took the firm decision to serve. It never came to my mind earlier in life. I took living for myself for granted.
I found it already a challenge to serve myself well, for in fact I did not serve myself well over all those years. Not even myself. So how could I even in a dream serve others?
But honestly, when you are on that track, there is an end to it, there is a point where you are fedup to serve only yourself. Life becomes boring and in fact, meaningless. Now I clearly feel that my new service attitude adds meaning and purpose to my life.
In hindsight it is daring to find out how, at the brink of old age, I was able to change my basic life paradigm from self-serving to serving!
I namely think that such a change is not haphazard and can only come about when certain conditions are met, and certain other conditions are no more met.
What got me there? First of all, illness! I had been developing a heart disease or coronary condition that somehow was marked by a congested main artery. That caused me lots of discomfort and I had to definitely stop drinking alcohol — while I was a wine lover all my life! It took me several years to really stop drinking and every time I restarted, my body would revolt and throw me a tantrum with pain in my heart on the go and sometimes a whole night through when sleeping was impossible as the condition was paired with hypertension.
It was only after curing the disease with the help of Chinese herbal medicine and Spiritual Declarations (positive affirmations, prayers, suggestions or however you may want to call using the power of the spoken word) that I saw with some clarity that this disease was somehow only the reflection of my self-centered mental setup.
And second, and as a result of that journey with an afflicted heart, I would reflect if there is ‘heart’ really also in my thoughts and feelings. And I found there was not much of it. So I quite deliberately began to put my heart into relationships, very few ones, as my life is basically a lonely one, but I saw that there was a tremendous blooming up of something I cannot put in words. And as a result of that something that other people might call ‘love,’ I got an incredible sense of comfort, a non-material comfort I mean, a comfort felt in all of my being. That feeling of deep comfort, I would also want to call it ‘enrichment’ or ‘gratification.’ And suddenly I got a felt sense what love really means.
And then I was baffled. ‘So there must be a connection between love and serving others,’ I reasoned, ‘as before I put my life to service, I never had that expansive feeling, that inner space, that tremendous sense of comfort.’ But why is that?
Are we perhaps here on earth for the sole purpose to serve? I was then reading again Dr. Raymond Moody’s research on Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) and suddenly all became crystal-clear to me. A major percentage of the people who went through an NDE said that they had learnt through the experience that we are here for learning to love, and that love is the only thing that really counts in the universe.
Strangely, I had read that book already twice before and had not been able to make something out of those statements. They would not resonate with me, or resonate as cliché-like. I could not really get the real meaning out of them.
That only changed with my third and I think final lecture of the book, the recent one. Finally I have understood that there is a meaning that connects all our lives for that meaning or purpose is common to all of us — and that is something I really never knew before. That common purpose is to become more loving, and we become more loving through serving, apparently. I am curious how this will manifest further down the road, how serving will open my heart even more for love, thereby hopefully giving it a definite healing!
And the final thought … that comes to mind as a question … is of course … ‘is not every heart disease caused by a lack of heart in our lives, a lack of heart put into people or a cause, or into serving?’
When I contemplate that possibility, and look at psychosomatic research, collected and published by physicians like Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Alberto Villoldo or Dr. Larry Dossey, I find this etiology really makes sense, and this, then, would be the catalyzer for developing a true prevention of heart disease by teaching people how to use their heart positively, how to use it by ‘putting it into’ engagements, causes and relationships, and by learning to serve …
