Everyone should act up to the motto: Help Ever, Hurt Never. Every educated person should engage himself or herself in selfless service to society with humility and a pure heart. All academic distinctions or even observance of spiritual practices are of no use if there is no love in the heart. Love and compassion are inherent in every person. Each has to share this love with others. Failure to share one's love is gross ingratitude to society, to which one owes everything. One should give one's love freely to others and receive love in return. This is the deep significance of human life.
To purify the mind, one should nurture noble and sacred thoughts of service to others. One who does not hurt anybody and has feelings of love and compassion to fellow beings is the greatest of men. That is why sage Vyasa gave the essence of the eighteen Puranas (scriptures) in the aphorism: Help Ever, Hurt Never.
Help rendered, however small, if it comes from the deeper urges of service welling in the heart is as good as the offer of life itself.
Look about for chances to relieve, rescue or resuscitate. Train yourselves that you may render help quickly and well. Seva is the most paying form of austerity, the most satisfying and the most pleasurable. It springs out of Love and scatters Love in profusion. To help the helpless is the only way to please Him, to follow and reach Him.
Serve people with no thought of high or low; no Seva is high, no Seva is low, each act of Seva is equal in the eye of the Lord. It is the readiness, the joy, the efficiency, the skill with which you rush to do it that matters. Train yourselves to serve God by serving man, in whom there is God installed in the heart. Convince yourself that the seva of man is worship of God.
Efforts to serve must spring from agony at the suffering of others and the service must be genuine effort to get rid of that anguish. Do not worry about the result. Help as much as you can, as efficiently as you can, as silently as you can, as lovingly as you can, leave the rest to God, who gave you the chance to server.
You should make every effort to avoid harming others in any circumstance. You are only hurting yourself when you hurt others. You should not use harsh words. When you develop human values, you can be free from diseases and even enjoy good health with God's Grace.
Ahimsa, the virtue of non-violence involves much more than abstention from injuring living beings. One should desist from causing pain to any living being not only by his deeds but even by his words and even in his thoughts. One should not entertain any idea of hurting or humiliating another.
Service to man will help your divinity to bloom, for it will gladden your heart and make you feel that life has been worthwhile. Service to man is service to God. For He is in every man and every living being and in every stone and stump. Offer your talents at the Feet of God; let every act be a flower, free from creeping worms of envy and egoism and full of fragrance of love and sacrifice. If you have the talent, use it for the glorification of God and do it by uplifting man. A manishi (ordinary man) gets transformed into Maharishi (sage) by engaging in selfless service.
You have to transform your life through service. You should give no room for arrogance or self-interest to the slightest extent in your service activities. Install in your heart the feeling that the service you render to anyone is service to God. Only then does service to man become service to Madhava. Hence you should scrupulously follow the maxim: HELP EVER, HURT NEVER.
Ref: Divine Discourses:
|Apr 10, 1967| Jun 10, 1981|Jan 29, 1994|Jun 5, 1994|Digest Vol. I p135|Digest Vol. II p292|
