Helping the world – really helping the world.

SRF Walrus

Mt. Washington, Ca

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SRF Walrus > Messages to Mother Center > Helping the world – really helping the world.
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KS
Unregistered User
(2/3/02 7:55 am)
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Helping the world – really helping the world.

Aren’t we special! We attended a meeting at the United Nations on world peace. When I read the message below I just had to comment!
pub78.ezboard.com/fsrfwal...D=12.topic

Training SRF to really be part of humanity is going to take quite an effort (and provides plenty of room for sarcasm). OK, I guess we shall begin the lesson.

Beginning class: helping humanity, service, and saving the world

Overview
In various places like your magazine, lectures, and VL Appeals, you (SRF) present your ideas on community service and brag about participation in a meetings. Fine. However we need to separate out the two. Attending a meeting at the UN is not community service. It is not service in any form. Those meetings are primary political and in some cases an effort to influence public policy. Please don’t brag about it, or put it in the next SRF magazine. You are totally clueless about humility. Your need to increase you stature in the world has nothing to do with Master’s message and helping people.

Your internal ashram policies don’t allow real community service and need to change. You refuse to allow monastics out in the community to help (I realize few would want to anyway) and don’t even encourage it much in the membership.

What is NOT community service?
1. Working as a monastic (or employee) for SRF in an office is NOT community service. It is difficult to call it service at all due to the material compensation. Yes, even the monastics are provided room and board, access to cars, medical plans, retirement, etc. They are compensated for the work they do.

2. Dear SRF, allowing for announcements in the temples at Thanksgiving so that devotees bring in food and clothing for the poor, does not constitute service on your part. Please don’t brag in VL appeals and the magazine that you are involved in service with these efforts.

3. You call the monastic life a “life of service”. Please explain how that works? What delusion. Some of you feel you are serving by gutting out the abusive behavior (and surfing mornings at Lake Shrine).

I was going to list more examples but I can’t even think of many examples where you try to fake community service!

What IS community service?
Community service involves helping people. It is associated with a selfless act and provides something for people from the heart, something they need and probably can’t provide themselves. Imagine allowing the monastics, or requiring the monastics, to spend a Saturday painting one of the SRF temples or helping on a temple clean up day? I realize the fear in the hearts of the nuns that they might be molested by the members or members might see them eating, so they could come on a week day? I know Saturday is their day off, but giving up time is the kind of thing real people really do when involved in service. They make sacrifices to help others. Sometimes it is inconvenient.

Having the monastics help the poor in a “soup line” in downtown Los Angeles is SERVICE. Helping drive old people in the communities Mt. Washington, Encinitas, or Lake Shrine areas to doctor’s appointments and such is SERVICE. Being assigned to do it with a fellow monk is not the same thing.

Does any of this make sense to you all?

Helping to build a computer network for a local school is SERVICE. I know you gave a local school money for a computer network (so you could impress the neighbors) but handing out member donations is not service. I hope you can some day see the difference.

Helping the local fire department, Red Cross, or community church are all good ideas for service. Volunteering to help at Convocation, Youth Program, and the local temples is SERVICE. Being forced to hold a camera at Convocation, then being given the week following Convocation off work, is NOT service. Being forced to give a Thursday lecture is not service.

Here is how you get started
I would suggest that you get started by learning to think of someone other than yourselves. Be nice to the poor @#%$ member employee working with you. Trust him/her enough to tell him some deep SRF secret like the schedule for the monk’s shuttle or what the nuns are having for lunch that day. Little by little start to address them by name and when you reach out in kindness to an ashram pet, think to look over and have a kind word for your co-worker.

Next comes the real hard part! Walk out to the front gate, open it, and take a few steps outside the gate. If you are not shot and are not overwhelmed with desires, pause a moment to absorb it. Then rush back in. But day by day build up to an hour or more. Now you are ready to try this with …. Yikes….. non-members! Careful as you are not a rock star with these people, but it is possible to adapt to people on a peer to peer basis.

Don’t run right back and produce a post card telling members you helped someone. Just keep it to yourself. Try spending a day a month doing some unselfish humble service. Make up the work time evenings and weekends. People really do find time for these things and it really does open up the heart.

Try it. You’ll like it.

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