The Spiritual Status of Help
By Karmayogi
The impulse of help makes one
human. The phrase Good Samaritan is age-old. One offers to help another because
the impulse of Selflessness is active. Society exists because of such help,
which is often mutual help. Before the society created a government and its
departments like police, justice and fire service, society existed as a collective
because of the individual and collective impulse to help one another. If help
is not there, there will be no society, no family and nothing worth living for.
As everything else, the helping tendency has its other side. Man is endowed
with ego. He is run by his ego. That too has good as well as bad sides. One
important thing about the ego is that it is extremely clever. Man is a
perennial victim to his ego's artifices.
Whatever we want to do for our progress or soul's progress, which is to
blunt and dissolve ego, the ego has the ability to come forward and offer to do
it itself. When we want to appoint a storekeeper, someone comes forward to do
it. We are thankful to him, but do not realise that he has done so to steal
without being observed. Generally, such tricks never come to the surface. We
often hear people say during a discussion on surrender to the Divine,
‘‘Explain it to me clearly, I can then follow it.'' The
point is that when he RIGHTLY understands and follows it, he follows his own
understanding, not the Guru to whom he must surrender. It is a subtle
camouflage, very difficult to see through. When I want to surrender to the
Divine, I never see that my ego comes into the picture and offers to do the
surrender on my behalf. I am unaware of it as I am identified with my ego. To
the end, I won't be able to discover that my ego got the better of me. When
we genuinely wish to help another, the ego enters the picture in a subtle
fashion and offers the help. We miss seeing it. It is an invariable rule in
human relationships – with very rare exceptions – that the beneficiary never
fails to offend the benefactor. Inside the family and close friends group, ALL
the problems arise ONLY from this rule. If one does his duty pleasantly without
fail within the limits of the other person's good will, such an
aberration is avoided. In intimate relationships, the idea of generosity is
strong. One wants to give rather than take. Once it crosses the limits, the
horrible rule I now described comes into operation.