The Seva of Meditation

Every satsangi is blessed with the gift of seva because the most important seva of all is meditation and we all have the ability to do this. Meditation is the seva that the Master cares about the most.

The real seva is practising our meditation day in and day out, going through the dry periods, the times when we are so tired that we feel it is impossible to carve out the time, but do anyway; the times when we would like to be doing almost anything else, but manage somehow to give time to meditation anyway. When we do all this, even if we get nothing tangible in return – no feeling of spiritual development, no rise within – we are doing a seva that the Master appreciates. Soami Ji says in Sar Bachan Prose:

After initiation by the grace of the Satguru into the mystery of holy Nam, one should do his best to practise it, and continue to develop love for the Satguru and faith in him.

The Lord has ordained that we must seek a perfect Master and be initiated by him while both are living in the body. Then, through meditation, we must please the Master and develop love for him. Soami Ji continues:

So long as there is life (so long as you breathe) you should go on with Guru bhakti. Devotion to Guru is devotion to God. This should be done without asking anything in return. He is all-powerful and will bestow on us anything he likes, when he sees fit.

When a disciple asked Maharaj Charan Singh how to develop love for the Lord, Hazur explained:

Brother, practically it comes when it comes. You do not have the power to develop it. When his grace is there, it just comes; but the practical step that we can take to develop our devotion to the Lord is to meditate, to build that atmosphere around us of devotion for the Lord by reading books, by satsang, by discussion and by having harmonious meetings. By helping each other, we build that atmosphere around us in which, then, we start giving; and we find that the more we give our devotion to the Lord, the more it grows every day. The more love we have, the more it grows. But the only practical step that we can take is to be honest in our meditation, for then devotion and love come automatically.
_{Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II}

No meditation is wasted. Everything we do in Sant Mat has to do with meditation. Every other type of seva we do is done to encourage that meditation, to give the inspiration to meditate and thus, create that bond of love between the Master and the disciple. You might say that meditation is the seva that really matters.

Absorbed in his love, they dedicate
every breath of their lives
to remembrance and contemplation of him.
_{Sultan Bahu}