"That which you can earn by service
you cannot get even by sadhana.
"
One who is disciplined alone is a disciple. In the ancient tradition, there are so many definitions for, who a disciple is - one who serves, one who learns under a Master, one who is obedient. But our concept of a disciple is a total one. When Babuji said 'discipline', He did not mean worship of a Guru, or cooking his food, or pressing his feet at night. That is by way of service, you see. Service is one expression, one way of expressing one's love, and at one end of the service we have the servant who works for a wage, for a living, and the other end we have the Master who serves without getting perhaps anything in return except the satisfaction of the work done and the satisfaction of fulfilling his own Master's orders.
So it is not important that you should serve your Master in many ways,
but it is important that you should serve yourself and by serving yourself
under His instructions, with His teaching, by adopting the practice that
He gives. When you become that which He wants you to become, that is the
greatest service you can do to the Master. All the rest is trivial. I mean
in the sense that anybody can do that service; anybody can cook food; anybody
can wash clothes. Sometimes we find well-to-do people washing the Master's
clothes and they take a lot of pride in it. Justifiably so, because they
never washed even their own clothes. So they feel a sense of happiness that
"I have done something which I was never able to do. All for the love of
my Master." Good. But service done in that sense is something less than
what it should be because when one serves, one should not be conscious of
service. "I serve," that idea should not be there. It should be something
natural, spontaneous, like a mother looking after her child, the baby.
She does not say; "I am serving the baby." And the baby accepts all that
service without being conscious of it being served. So when the disciple
is able to serve the Master in such a way that neither of them is conscious,
one of serving, the other of being served, I think that is the perfect relationship
between the Guru(Master) and the Shishya(disciple).
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