How Can I Help?

Key Takeaways

1. “How can I help?” is a timeless inquiry of the heart.
2. In service, we taste unity.
3. Caring for one another, we sometimes glimpse an essential quality of our being.
4. Will we look within? Can we see that to be of most service to others we must face our own doubts, needs, and resistances? We’ve never grown without having done so. This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve fought the inertia of conditioning.
5. The reward, the real grace, of conscious service, then, is the opportunity not only to help relieve suffering but to grow in wisdom, experience greater unity, and have a good time while we’re doing it.
6. ~ The most familiar models of who we are—father and daughter, doctor and patient, “helper” and “helped”—often turn out to be major obstacles to the expression of our caring instincts; they limit the full measure of what we have to offer one another.
7. So often we deny ourselves and others the full resources of our being simply because we’re in the habit of defining ourselves narrowly and defensively to begin with.
8. 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.
9. To study the Way is to study the Self. To study the Self is to forget the Self To forget the Self is to he enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barrier between Self and Other. DOGEN ZENJI
10. As we become less identified with any single aspect of the separate self against another, we’re freer to know which among them all is most appropriate for a given situation. It’s as if we can be anyone to anyone. Resting behind all roles, we can also be, as it were, no one to no one—that is, we can create a space where whoever we’re with has the best chance to come out from behind their self-image. No costumes, no disguises; come as you are.
11. 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 dying in terminal care wards. We pay to push suffering away. But privacy exacts its costs. How quickly, for example, it turns to loneliness and alienation. Our defense against one kind of suffering, ironically, turns out to have invited in another. We may somehow feel safe from the troubles of the world, but we also begin to feel dry, empty, and alone in our insulated havens. Gone is the mutuality and spontaneous support that arise naturally when lives are led in common.
12. “The greatest sin of the age,” wrote the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, “is to make the concrete abstract.”
13. Compassion follows lawfully as we open to the experience of suffering.
14. For one receiving help, it can be immensely useful to become more conscious of the habitual ways in which we react to our suffering and the help offered to alleviate it. Just seeing these patterns clearly may allow us to discard reactions that cut us off from others at a time when we need them the most.
15. Chances are, if you can’t accept help, you can’t really give it.
16. But perhaps there will be nothing we can do. Then we can only be, and be with the person in his or her pain, attending to the quality of our own consciousness.
17. What’s crucial is that this awareness allows us to hear, along with everything else, whatever it is that’s going on inside us. Our own mental reactions are equally objects to be observed as anything else in our field of awareness.
18. Ultimately, this kind of listening to the intuitive mind is a kind of surrender based on trust. It’s playing it by ear, listening for the voice within.
19. 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.
20. The moment the act requires a definition of the roles involved, we risk entrapment.
21. But there is another dilemma of the diploma: help becomes know-how. Obviously training is valuable. We want our lawyers, counselors, and teachers to know what they’re doing. Yet to identify them only with their know-how is to shortchange all and turn our relationship into a transaction between one who knows and one who doesn’t. Patterns of behavior get frozen. The aura of know-how in the helper can undermine our confidence as the helped in defining issues for ourselves.
22. 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.
23. When we see that service is not a one-way street, we find that those we are helping give us a continuous stream of clues to help us escape the prison of our self-image. More than simply letting us know what might be working or not, they help us when they question our very models of ourselves. They snap us to; they may even see right through us. And if we can take it, it’s a blessing. We may feel a little foolish, but ultimately, we’re grateful.
24. Having surrendered into helplessness we can now get on with help.
25. And so at a certain point “helper” and “helped” simply begin to dissolve. What’s real is the helping—the process in which we’re all blessed, according to our needs and our place at the moment. How much we can get back in giving! How much we can offer in the way we receive! But even “giving” and “receiving” now seem artificial. Where does one begin, the other end? They seem to be happening simultaneously.
26. There’s one thing I’ve learned in twenty-five years or so of political organizing: People don’t like to be “should” upon. They’d rather discover than be told.
27. What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated?
28. We’re here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.
29. Nothing may be more important, in all this, than being gentle with ourselves.
30. If we accept that the ends of our actions often prove unknowable, we’re also freer to be focused on the process of our work as it’s happening.
31. Service, from this perspective, is part of that journey. It is no longer an end in itself. It is a vehicle through which we reach a deeper understanding of life. Each step we take, each moment in which we grow toward a greater understanding of unity, steadily transforms us into instruments of that help which truly heals.
32. We can, of course, help through all that we do. But at the deepest level we help through who we are. We help, that is, by appreciating the connection between service and our own progress on the journey of awakening into a fuller sense of unity. We work on ourselves, then, in order to help others. And we help others as a vehicle for working on ourselves.

What I got out of it

1. The reward, the real grace, of conscious service, then, is the opportunity not only to help relieve suffering but to grow in wisdom, experience greater unity, and have a good time while we’re doing it.