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Thanks.
Me again?
You must have had a good lunch.
I just want to feel you for a minute.
Let me take a minute to orient the people
who are listening to these lectures on DVD.
In the first lecture of this series
I talked about the path to personal responsibility.
It’s a rite of passage that can arouse anger and shame.
But unless your goal is set on being taken care of,
or becoming a victim,
taking personal responsibility for your life is a necessary process.
The power in personal responsibility
is that external causes no longer produce internal reactions.
Your personal responsibility restores your choice
as to how you react to people or events.
You are source.
In Avatar®, we call it living deliberately.
The second lecture, the path of compassion,
was about choosing wise beliefs
and reconnecting with your heart consciousness.
Head consciousness, or intellect, and heart consciousness
need to work together.
When they separate from each other, you find the heart-dominated person
who proposes marriage to death row serial killers,
or the head-dominated person who
argues the justification for racial genocide.
They need to be balanced:
discernment from the head, compassion from the heart.
And the gains that are available from awakening personal responsibility
and integrating head and heart consciousness are priceless;
they are inner journeys that require honesty and determination,
but they’re journeys that we all have to take.
Now we are going to talk about the third path,
which in a way is the most important path in the human drama,
the path to service.
Ideally, service combines
personal responsibility and compassion with action.
Your life is your true spiritual path,
and being of service is the secret to how you make progress on that path.
The good news is that the path of service is
exciting, challenging, and it’s rewarding.
This is the frosting on life's cake.
Service takes you beyond any mental nirvana.
Its rewards are incredible, amazing, unbelievable…
and I know I shouldn't use that word around Avatars.
But you’re just not going to believe how profoundly rewarding
the giving of selfless help can be.
Something very high, and spiritual, and mystical
within us is born when we help even if it’s at the cost of self-sacrifice.
Awakening this viewpoint is something like jumping into a cold ocean,
but after the complaints and the protest,
it becomes clear that service to others is what we were born for;
this is the front line of life.
Service makes our existence valuable.
I see that some of you are thinking,
"OK, Harry, if that's the good news, what’s the bad news…?"
Here's the downside,
the path of service is so alluring,
and it’s so genetically inherent in our race,
that some people embrace it
before knowing anything about personal responsibility or compassion.
That makes it potentially dangerous.
The instinctive hunger to serve,
to be assigned a duty and to commit to it at whatever cost,
is so strongly ingrained in our species
that it overrides our common sense.
The terrorist who willingly straps a bomb to his body
is caught up in fanatical service,
but is completely numb to personal responsibility and compassion.
Vengeance has hijacked the suicide bomber's desire to be of service.
Unscrupulous leaders, intent on control and domination,
have taken advantage of the desire to serve
and marched millions of young soldiers off to kill each other.
They die gallantly, but stupidly,
in service to this or that belief, or
because of some national insult,
or over a piece of contested real estate.
War is an exploitation of the desire to be of service.
And it ruins the lives of individuals whose sense of personal responsibility
and compassion are either undeveloped
or they have been suppressed by indoctrination.
Any individual who skips over the personal responsibility and compassion
elements and rushes into service for a cause is at considerable risk
for disappointment, exploitation, or worse.
Problems inevitably arise when moral responsibility is asked
to take second place to succeeding or completing a mission.
This applies to individuals,
it applies to societies,
it applies to whole nations.
Service is an action,
and all actions have consequences.
Cause and effect.
And acting without responsibility for the consequences
is a suitable definition for stupid.
It is what a machine does;
it’s not what a human being should do.
For a long time a major segment of Earth's population
have been coaxed, or forced, to engage in services that are destructive,
ill advised, and ultimately self-sabotaging.
Read your newspaper,
watch your TV;
you will see people striving for things that they don't need,
hurting others for things that they really don't want,
and following paths that in the end may kill us all.
So that’s the bad news about this inner desire we have to be of service,
without harnessing it to personal responsibility and compassion,
it’s subject to being manipulated toward destructive ends.
So the solution to shaping this powerful dynamic into something
that benefits our species, rather than destroying it,
is to encourage the inner journeys that increase
personal responsibility and compassion.
And you do that by making more Avatars, Masters, and Wizards.
Do you see how important that is?
In a real sense the path to personal responsibility
and the path to compassion
are prerequisites for service to others.
And the best service to others that you can deliver
is to increase their personal responsibility and compassion.
This is not just a circular process;
it’s an ever-widening spiral that will eventually
define an enlightened planetary civilization®.
Somebody will declare a war and nobody will show up.
This is the reason that we keep growing.
We’re using our free attention to free more attention.
I think it is safe to assume that everyone in this room
has achieved a high degree of personal responsibility
and is well along in the process of integrating
head and heart consciousness.
So it’s time to get busy serving somebody.
"Yes indeed, you're gonna have to serve somebody,
Serve somebody
It may be the devil or it maybe the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody."
Serve somebody
"Yes, you're gonna have to serve somebody,
Serve somebody
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody."
Serve somebody
My apologies to Bob Dylan…
If you look up the derivation of the word “serve”
in a good unabridged dictionary,
you will find this:
Serve evolved from the word deserve.
The English commoner had a habit of
dropping off the first syllable of a word,
so instead of saying "had a habit," they would say "ad a bit."
And when they said the word de-serve,
meaning to be worthy of something,
they would just say 'serve.
So at the root of service is the idea
that the person, organization, or country
that you’re supporting is deserving and worthy.
In the middle ages this determination was easy.
It was based on a person's condition of birth or performance of noble deed.
The code of chivalry,
which was followed by the medieval knights and the royal gentlemen,
were instructions as to who should and who should not be served.
This began the enforcement of codes and laws
requiring that people serve certain parties,
and this is the beginning of indoctrination,
and of course, it’s also the end of
personal responsibility and compassion.
Chivalry died a deserved death,
but its faults were passed on to future generations.
Military generals replaced knights and kings
and the intention to unconditionally defeat their enemies
made compassion a weakness.
Coming into the 20th century,
compassion was replaced by the “rules of engagement”,
which instructed troops as to how much force they could use.
Personal responsibility was reduced to following orders;
and self-restraint in obeying destructive orders,
was considered insubordination or treason.
During the reign of terror in France,
in the late 18th century,
executioners who were ordered to kill prisoners
were forbidden to make eye contact
because if they made eye contact with their victims,
they might later feel remorse.
So in order to get a sane person to perform a violent or a destructive act
personal responsibility must be made subservient to official orders.
Morality suddenly takes on an Orwellian character.
“Thou shall not kill…
unless ordered to do so.”
And the justification for all evil deeds becomes,
"I was only following orders."
As an aside here,
nobody has officially asked me to amend the Ten Commandments,
but if they did,
the 11th commandment would be:
"Thou shalt eat what you kill."
Handle a lot…
So do you see the problem?
It grew first from a deterioration,
and then later an indoctrinated repression of
personal responsibility and compassion.
These are qualities that we must restore
if we’re to survive as a species.
You are not the first group to understand the problem,
but you can count yourselves among the few groups
who have ever undertaken to do anything more than talk about it.
Give you a hand for that…
The good works and service that you contribute
as an Avatar Master do not require justification.
You don't need to make up a reason for why you do them.
The only question that needs to be asked is:
Are the actions that we are engaged in
improving people's personal responsibility and compassion?
And an Avatar Master will have no problem
answering “yes” to that question.
Forgiveness and kindness awaken compassion;
confession and goodwill increase personal responsibility.
"Yes, you're gonna have to serve somebody,
Serve somebody
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody."
Serve somebody
What a great song,
by one of the best poets of our generation.
There are two broad categories of service:
service to self,
and service to others.
And beyond showing some rational care for self,
service is mostly concerned with actions
that other people, people of goodwill, will find valuable.
You know what the best thing about service to others are,
two best things?
One, we can do it together.
And two, we can do it for each other.
Mutual support builds powerful teams.
People who only serve themselves
end up poor, alone, and unhappy,
because someone who only serves him or herself
is serving an unworthy person.
Here’s the unconscious computation:
is a selfish person worthy of service?
No.
So service to self is a weak motivation
and produces very little of value.
It will come as no surprise that drug addicts, and criminals, and the insane
are self-absorbed and care very little for anybody else.
And their road to recovery begins the day they hit rock bottom.
If you only delay their fall, you may not be helping them.
This is tough love, but sacrificing yourself
for people who are not ready to change is not a good idea.
There are many people with good qualities
who are struggling with life and who would benefit from your services.
Discernment is the head's contribution to the heart's compassion.
And without discernment,
service to the unworthy quickly becomes exhaustion
and the result is no one is served.
So sometimes it is necessary to do a sort of reverse triage
and help those who only need a little attention and direction
rather than waste your help on a hopeless cause.
Creating an EPC requires that we employ our efforts strategically.
Service to others from the head is smart business.
Service to others from the heart is an expression of care and love.
And when you combine these,
your service takes on the quality of leadership.
Service to others is the core duty of any position of leadership.
And if you are not actually in-charge,
you can at least be a good example for others to emulate.
A psychologist from the University of Chicago
recently wrote a book about the contagion of behavior
in social networks.
He discovered that people's behavior
not only affected the people they were around,
but affected the people around the people they were around,
and also affected the people around the people
who were around the people who were around the people.
So setting a good example has three levels of influence.
And that's more power than a lot of leaders have.
The people who incorporate personal responsibility and compassion
into their lives will produce valuable products,
and services that will benefit de-serving people.
Helping people with good qualities, and contributing
to important social goals, is smart.
Do it and you will find more energy,
more excitement, and more joy
than in anything else in life.
And I'm not the first one to observe this.
One of the maxims taught by the Church of Latter Day Saints
is that those who live only for themselves
eventually shrivel up and die,
while those who lose themselves in service to others grow and flourish.
And even the 4-H youth organization,
which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, teaches:
"Finding one’s self begins with losing one’s self in the service to others."
Unfortunately there is no mention of compassion or personal responsibility,
but they do understand the desire to serve.
Mother Theresa, who founded the Christian Missionaries of Charity,
left us this wisdom in a poem:
One of the basic tenets of Buddhism says:
All suffering comes from the wish for one’s own happiness.
Jesus Christ taught:
One cannot serve God without simultaneously serving one's neighbor.
So your primary of service,
"I am contributing to the creation of an enlightened planetary civilization,"
is putting into action some very old wisdom.
Personal responsibility, compassion,
and service to people of goodwill, are the cornerstones of Avatar.
Increase them in proportion to each other
and the seeds you plant will grow.
I know in my heart that future generations will thank you.
And I also thank you
At the beginning of these path lectures I set out to clarify
some of the basic theory and the intention behind the Avatar Materials.
I hope, if even between the lines,
I have accomplished that in some small way.
Thank you for listening and supporting me.
Have a great day.