To Rule or to Serve
Creating what one wants generally has meant visualizing, imagining, dreaming, craving, longing, praying and begging. There is another way to create without asking for anything, without ever thinking about anything, where things just happen.
But, before we arrive at that, a little bit of fired-up movement is needed. People who have never been on fire will not know the coolness of water. People who have just lived their life in a half-hearted manner, sedately, can never know the other way. Becoming a fanatic at least for a while can be useful for your energies to reach a boiling point and get moving. Then, to transform them into something else is very easy. That is the whole purpose of karma or action.
Why a sadhaka (spiritual aspirant) chooses action is just for this reason. We are going to perform action anyway. Now we have the choice whether we want to perform Hitler's or Mahatma Gandhi's type of action. Whichever way we feel is best right now, we do that. That's all there is to it. Anyway we have to perform action, so let us do it whole-heartedly, and let us choose the form of action that we want to do.
Do you know the self-image that you want? Do you want to rule the world or do you want to serve the world? Ultimately, that is the choice. Normally, everybody wants to rule the world. It is just that, because a man is half-hearted, he does not get to rule the world, so all he is able to do is rule his children, wife or something like that, but what he really wants is to rule the world. The fool doesn't have the capacity or the intensity to do it; otherwise, he would be a potential Hitler. If the man who physically abuses his child or wife because they don't conform to his ideas is made the king of the world, he will use a sword instead of a stick. That's all. It is just that he is incapable and doesn't have the intensity to rule the world; otherwise, he is already the ruler.
Now the choice is just this—either to rule or to serve. Whichever kind of image you think is most harmonious, the closest to Divinity and closest to realization, that kind of action you choose. Every moment, do it with tremendous intensity, without giving it a single moment's break. Then a day will come when action is not needed anymore. A man who does not know action—real action, intense action—can never move into inaction. If you try to, inaction will just become lethargy. Only if you have known intense action can you know inaction. People who are always resting in their life must be experts about rest, isn't it? But that is not the truth. Only a man who works intensely can know what rest is.
So this non-doing business, if you really want to know it, first you must discover what doing is. You have not done that yet. In every waking moment of my life, unceasingly I pursue this work of offering myself, physically and mentally. Unceasingly I pursue it twenty-four hours of the day, every waking moment and even in my sleep, with tremendous intensity. It is only out of that, that all of this has happened in my life. It has become so powerful simply because it does not mean anything to me, but for twenty-four hours, I am at it. Now this has a different kind of power. That is the whole meaning of sacrifice. It is only out of that something else happens—both inside and outside – which can never be put into words.
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