Falling into Your Service Activity

Saving Earth Newsletter 84

Saving Earth Newsletter 84

Falling into Your Service Activity

The Problem of Attachment

One of the greatest challenges facing the new practitioner is the problem of attachment.

We’ve been discussing how to Discover and Create your Service Activity for seventeen posts. By now it is obvious that that work takes a great deal of effort. This effort includes investing our Soul, mind, emotions, and body into creative Service to The One Life.

Quite naturally, by the time one’s Service project is up and running, one is not only invested in it but more than a little attached. This is a serious problem.

Becoming attached to one’s form of Service is a problem for a very simple reason.

The more attached you are to that form, the more you obstruct your Service.

This is because, when you become attached to the form of your Service:

· You Fall into that form and are trapped in it,

· You stop growing,

· That form stops developing, and

· You and your service become obstructions to The Plan

Imagine your service activity is a river boat. Designed to carry cargo in quiet, shallow water, that boat is completely unsuited to the deeper waters and higher waves of the ocean. Thus, when you identify with that boat and become attached to it, you refuse to move on to a new vessel. You have limited where you can go and what you can do.

Oh, there’s nothing wrong with being dedicated to and focused on The Work. The problem arises when your focus moves from identifying as The Soul Serving The One Life, to identifying with and Falling into the form of your service. When this happens, the conscious creative process stops, your service activity crystalizes (stops growing), and you become trapped in it.

Trapping your self in a form, any form, limits your capacity to that of that form. That form becomes your vehicle through which you think, feel, and act.

Now, consciously adopting a form temporarily can be very useful. Like hailing a self-driving taxi, the right form can get you from where you are to where you are going. However, once you get to where that vehicle was taking you, it is time to get out of the car.

If you identify with and as that vehicle, then it takes over. You are then trapped in that vehicle, unable to move on to your next step.

We’ve seen this, for instance, in the waves of Ageless Wisdom Teachings that began appearing in the late 19^th century. Each of those waves was designed for the students and workers of the time and place in which those Teachings appeared.

Oh, the outer form of the Teachings could have been renewed or updated for each new wave of students and workers. But that would have required that the majority of those workers remain identified as Soul, and thus (as Soul) able to recreate those Teachings. That cannot happen when all but a handful of those would-be workers become attached to the form of those Teachings.

For instance: In the late 19^th century Madam Blavatsky brought The Ageless Wisdom to the West as Theosophy. Despite its problems, it was an excellent body of teachings for its time. However, many students of Theosophy became identified with and attached to its original form. As a result:

· They regularly “purified” theosophical groups of any “non-theosophical” influences.

· They rejected any attempts to take theosophy to its next step.

Imagine what would happen if science had done the same thing. If, for instance, they had enshrined the discoveries of Newton, and rejected any and all updates to Newtonian Physics, we would not now have electronic devices.

Now, Theosophists were not alone in this. Each successive wave of Wisdom Teachings has done the same thing.

For example: Alice A. Bailey brought through a new wave of Wisdom Teachings from the early to the mid-20th century. Those new Teachings had a higher frequency and were much better organized than what had come before. They also included an expression of The Love Aspect of Divinity that had not been Seen in previous expressions of The Wisdom.

Rather than embracing those new Teachings, Theosophists expelled Alice from their Society. [1] In later decades, they periodically purified their lodges of all “Bailey” influences.

Lucille Cedercrans brought through another wave of Wisdom Teachings in the 1950’s and ‘60’s. Those new Teachings emphasized Serving The One Life through conscious creative activity and offered a step-by-step program for learning how to do so.

Rather than embracing those new Teachings on Service, Bailey students vilified them as simplistic and inaccurate. They failed to recognize that the emphasis on creative service produced a different, and equally valid, perspective.

Beginning in the early decades of the 21^st century, yet another expression of The Wisdom has begun to come through. This expression is less a Teaching and more a Practice. It is a method of Serving The One Life.

Most Cedercrans students have been unable to make the transition and are (like their predecessors) being left behind.

This inability to recognize the new expressions of The Wisdom is largely due, in each case, to identification with and attachment to the form of the Teachings. That attachment to earlier forms prevented students of Truth from recognizing and adopting new expressions of that Truth.

This is true not only of all spiritual teachings, but of all forms. Whether mental, astral, vital, or physical, attachment to the form cripples one’s growth and one’s Service The One Life.

There is a simple Buddhic technique for dealing with this tendency.

When you purchase a ceramic bowl, imagine that bowl broken. Build the detail of that image until it appears absolutely real and is a permanent part of your relationship with that bowl.

As you do so, recognize that you are imagining the inevitable fate of the ceramic bowl. You are not creating or influencing that fate in any way. You are simply accepting it and thereby preventing yourself from becoming attached to its current form.

While this exercise inoculates you against becoming attached to a physical form, another exercise is needed to prevent attachment to your service activity. A simple version of that exercise is as follows:

As you create and perform your service activity, recognize in your:

· Soul,

· Mind,

· Emotions, and

· Brain,

that that activity will eventually become outmoded, and your Soul will be Called to leave the old form behind and move on. Build the awareness of this recognition until it becomes part of your relationship with your service activity, and you are ready to receive The Call when it comes.

When your awareness reaches and remains at the point where you are ready to abandon the form of your service activity, and move on to a new one, then you are inoculated against this form of attachment.

In a future lesson we will discuss how to dissolve attachments to old forms by becoming attached to something else.

This is how we will save the world.

In our next Newsletter post, we will continue to explore how to Serve The One Life.

May the Light, Love, and Power of The One Life be with you.

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[1] See: The Unfinished Autobiography, by Alice A. Bailey.