The Servant Relationship

People who are dominantly emotional yearn for continuous emotional satisfaction — not only occasional delights. They need to feel they have constant meaning and value to others. They want to give and receive love every day.

Progression of Moods

Now the relationships with higher consciousness become especially interesting. Your higher consciousness can fulfill you in deeply personal ways. While the experience of awe creates an ongoing well being and a tenderness of perspective for all created things, you, nevertheless, will likely ache for a more personal relationship with higher consciousness.

It should be emphasized that these moods of relationship may not occur in the sequence developed in these chapters. However, they generally do. Most often, one mood matures into another, and each mood builds upon the previous relationships. Most seekers find it impossible to have advanced moods without first having been developed in each earlier mood. Your progression in these moods means, in addition to receiving numerous other great benefits, that you will never be lonely again. Higher consciousness will not only prove itself a most thoughtful and delightful companion, it will also make your life and friendships with other people extremely interesting and enriching.

 Sustaining the Moods

Please remember that all your relationships with higher consciousness always involve a mood or momentum of your refined emotional nature. As your emotions are freed from hatred, jealousy, and anger, and your various separate feelings are coordinated into one dominant tendency, then these relationships become possible. If your practice of any mood does not have emotional thrust and continuation, you will not experience a true relationship — not even if your mind thinks of countless, lovely images which it enjoys entertaining. While your mind must cooperate, these moods essentially involve a continuous flow of feeling.

At first it may be difficult to sustain one of these relationships for more than three or four minutes. An hour of a mood is truly a big event in your life, and if you normally have very scattered feelings, you may feel fatigued from the amount of energy required to maintain a beginning mood. Keep in mind, though, that with practice most moods are possible for you, and you can — especially after the awe experience — live in a mood. That is, your relationship can go on and on and on, day in, day out.

Moving Forward — The Next Great Level

You will notice, when you experience the mood of awe and enter into this relationship with the higher consciousness, scarcely any effort is required to sustain the relationship — to live in a degree of awe and wonder. Your experience is so profound it frees you of petty emotions and thoughts; all you have to do is nurture the mood. You simply protect your mood from distractions or irritations which, for one reason or another, make you desire to live in fear, anger, or jealousy once again. With practice you learn to patiently ward off all potential disruptions of your emotional focus and return to your clear, strong mood.

In order to prepare yourself for a more advanced and potentially gratifying mood, recall the awe mood, specifically. You first make the effort to be more conscious and develop faith through keeping good companionship — outside and in — and then suddenly your being opens into the first mood. You realize your relationship with the infinite, omnipotent, incredible source of existence. Beholding that greatness, being touched by such immensity, awe fills your being.

The Next Great Event

The sense of awe humbles your ego, flooding your mind and heart with an astonishment which is exhilarating. You now know, more than ever before, there really is a higher power. You know its reality to the roots of your toenails. You know, vividly, that as small and limited as you are now revealed to be, you can nevertheless have a relationship with the higher consciousness. Your finite nature can have an ongoing relationship with the infinite.

As the mood of awe relationship continues you learn through experience the nature, love, and power of higher consciousness. This regularly accessible consciousness reveals such intelligence and wisdom to you that your mind feels infused with great ideas and increased clarity of thought.

Confidence and a sense of worth develop within you. Also, your relationship with higher consciousness increases your emotional range and you become capable of deepening love. Each of your faculties is enriched through the rush of higher consciousness which you are experiencing. The awe relationship matures and develops you.

Beyond Awe

One great, exciting day you go beyond the awe mood. Propelled forward through the development of your awe relationship you become fit, and eager, to grow into the next mood of higher consciousness.

Do you have a tendency to dominate others? In the quiet of your mind, would you secretly like to rule or control your part of the world? Even when you have little chance to dominate some situation, do you critically sit on the sidelines, your mind storming with your desire to control — to have matters done your way?

As the awe mood matures you, you will conclude the Lord of your heart, or the higher consciousness, is more able and wise than you are in your personal will and limited opinion. As you grow in relating to higher consciousness, it becomes progressively more obvious that higher consciousness is superior to you in many ways. You discover higher consciousness is more knowing, loving, and capable than you are, to say the least. In the humility which develops from your frequent experiences with higher consciousness, you also conclude you don’t want to dominate others or be a subtle tyrant anymore. You no longer feel you’re right, or fully knowledgeable, about almost everything.

A Powerful Conclusion Dawns

In a way, you come to appreciate being little and you no longer expect yourself to be all-knowing. You enjoy turning toward your great higher consciousness with your problems and emotional wounds because you find you can be inspired with good judgment and your wounds are healed.

Humility changes you. One day, in your awe state, a powerful conclusion dawns in your mind — profoundly. You joyfully realize you would love to serve your higher consciousness and its purposes. You delight in the transcendental insight of responding to Infinity with your humanity — in a human way.

And why not relate in a more personal way — how else can you respond? After all, your whole being craves to respond to such light and love. You have never experienced anything in life which comes close to being so good to you and you ache to respond in some satisfying, deeply giving way.

The Higher Will

Further, intuitive flashes while in the awe mood have proven right for you time and time again. Also, the satisfactions of expressing the greater wisdom of higher consciousness are so much more pleasing than those lonely and often anxious decisions made in regular states of consciousness. More and more, you find yourself developing a fondness to know what the higher consciousness wishes. Maturing in this relationship, then, on that special day, you’ll turn to the higher consciousness and start asking, “What is the higher will?”

As days and weeks go by, you strive to realize and correctly interpret the higher will in your life. You find your life much improved, and your mind becomes almost worry-free. You gradually develop confidence in your aptitude to contact the will of the higher consciousness and to forthrightly do it. This is a most important time of your life in that you, through much development, give up asserting your egoic, personal will on others or on life itself. You seek to know a higher, more conscious, will; and you desire to live in harmony with it, serving it as best you can.

Surrender

Finally, you may even go so far as to choose to surrender yourself — that is, lovingly, give over your life in service of this higher consciousness which is so important to you.

You live no longer covertly wanting to rule your world, but simply to be a good servant. You desire the higher consciousness to govern your life in its love and wisdom.

To Be of Service

You yearn to be of service to the higher consciousness and to improve daily in your ability to serve it. The joy of your life becomes this surrendered relationship. You live to serve! As you look at other people, you see their essence tenderly and you yearn to serve them — perhaps materially, perhaps in a word or a thought, perhaps in an act of kindness or in a concerned prayer. You turn to your “master” — the higher consciousness — often and lovingly. Always sensing its presence, you seek to know what love and the higher wisdom wish of you from moment to moment, day to day.

This “servant to master” mood of relationship is not for the fainthearted, nor for those prone to fantasizing that the higher will is motivating all their personal desires and egocentricities. The servant mood is for the mature, those who are healthy and balanced in mind. Candidates for a servant relationship with the higher consciousness must have character, humility, and bravery. They need to be devoted and sane servants of the higher self, while being tempted to live selfishly once again, and while being menaced by those who stand against their values.

You Get Pizazz

In this mood of service, extra talent and potential becomes immediately available to you, and more capabilities also are bred in you along the way. When you are consolidated in the servant mood, you seem to have twice the energy you had before. You tend to be able to outwork others so much it’s embarrassing. Emotionally you yearn to feel you’re giving the finest service of which you’re capable. You feel keenly alive. There is dash, pizazz, in your actions, thoughts, and feelings. Your personality becomes magnetic and people who knew you before wonder what has happened to you. It’s as if you had broken out of a shell!

In the servant mood, you’re never bored and you’re never lazy. At the same time you’re devoted to your quiet, life-enriching times spent “alone” with your wondrous companion — your masterful higher consciousness. You feel your life has become meaningful and you have a genuine eagerness to know what’s going to happen next. You’re excited about what this loving and conscious higher self will want you to do. You have a joyous willingness to go to the ends of the earth or, perhaps, to stay in one town, village, or city, for the rest of your life — whatever pleases the higher consciousness.

 A Change of Motive

Your steps have a spring to them, your mind is resilient. Problems don’t have the impact they used to. You can bounce back from troubles to engage once again in helping to create a better world. Your motive of service mainly for a paycheck is gone. Certainly paychecks are important, but your motive is to please the higher consciousness.

You strive to live in attunement with the higher will, considering and exploring how best to act. You seek, through study and fellowship with enlightened people, to become a more perfect and able servant.

Most of your anxieties go away. You’re not alone nor do you feel compelled to try to dominate circumstances and others anymore.

As your relationship develops, you find yourself becoming more and more the person you sensed you could be. You feel you are living by a deep, inner motivation now and not one that you presupposed or artificially constructed. When people flatter you, you secretly smile and realize they are giving you credit for something the higher consciousness has actually brought about. You humbly give the praise or acclaim to your higher consciousness and with gratitude go forward.

You feel, as you talk with others — especially loved ones — a deep wish that they could know the happiness in which you are now living. You have become a grateful servant.