Fear of exploitation prevents us from taking the subservient position. It makes us snap at our friends, backchat our parents, rebel against teachers, keep the dust off our collars in the workplace.
Such a philosophy makes sense in this world. You can’t be a doormat. You’ll just get mowed over. Its about asserting yourself; showing the world who’s boss. Forget equality. Today’s society strives for supereriority – whether its between husband and wife, blacks and whites, rich and poor, the ugly and the uglier.
If relationships in which two people truly regard the other as a worthy equal are hard to come by, the relationship between servant and master is virtually extinct. Who wants to be a servant? Who wants to be at the unreliable mercy of another mortal?
However…
Spiritual life has the compulsory component of accepting a bona fide spiritual master. There’s no getting around it. You have to learn from someone who already knows the Absolute Truth. Just as he learnt it from someone who already knew. Speculation is a fool’s method of learning. Spiritual knowledge doesn’t originate from puny mortals and randomly end up at God. Spiritual knowledge descends into this world from God initially, and then via disciplic succession. Its much like the Priory of Scion, in which very special individuals carry down the precious knowledge of the spiritual realm, through the generations, without altering it in any way*.
The process is then to serve such a qualified spiritual master, and invoke his/her mercy so that you can receive the full Truth. The full Truth not widely available. You have to want it.
But rather than being a form of degradation, the servant-master relationship that a disciple shares with his spiritual master is full of indescribable sweetness. The disciple serves because he wants to serve; drinking up the words of his spiritual master with a heart full of gratitude and almost disbelief at his privileged position. And the spiritual master protects him with honest affection, by giving him access to the spiritual reality.
Spiritual life is the opposite of material life. Progress in this world means to always struggle to be at the top or hide yourself if you’re not.
To progress towards full spiritual understanding, one needs to become a servant of his spiritual master. And its wonderful.
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*There are currently four intact disciplic successions. The International Society of Krishna Consciousness has made one of those, the Brahma-madhva-Gaudiya sampradaya, very widely available all over the world
