How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated?

But affluence has bought us privacy, and the apparent power to guard it against the encroachments of other people’s adversity. As individuals and as a society, we set up lines of defense. We isolate poverty, old age, and death so that we need not confront them in our daily lives. The poor are off in ghettos, the elderly in retirement homes, the dyi

Chances are, if you can’t accept help, you can’t really give it.

We’re here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.

The ability to avoid being entrapped by one another’s mind is one of the great gifts we can offer each other. With this compassionate and spacious awareness, and the listening it makes possible, we can offer those we are with a standing invitation to come out from wherever they are caught, if they are ready and wish to do so.

“The greatest sin of the age,” wrote the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, “is to make the concrete abstract.”

Compassion follows lawfully as we open to the experience of suffering.

The philosopher Gurdjieff pointed out that if we wish to escape from prison, the first thing we must acknowledge is that we are in prison. Without that acknowledgment, no escape is possible.

Unity, not separateness, is our starting point. And while our ego doesn’t disappear, its importance is certainly put in perspective as a result of having experienced a higher Self.