Service is Slavery.
Stop Serving Others.
Stop Serving Your Self.
Stop Serving.
Repeating the title and byline above was not a mistake. You need to read those four lines four hundred times, and that will just about begin to scratch the surface of overcoming the deep-rooted programming that keeps humanity enslaved. Only reading is nowhere close to enough, recognition is just the beginning to real-ization. Realization is the process of making something real. Insight and epiphany just open the door to realizing something, the effort to make it real is entirely your doing. Or not.
Every time humans catch on to their enslavement, they try to destroy it, only to rebrand it as something else. That is because humans believe they are being enslaved by an outside force. And they keep fighting outside forces to end their slavery. But slavery is an internal state. Until you are ready to move out, that will be your residence, and you will keep pretending that hell is something outside you.
Making Service Desirable
Do you realize the prominence of the word service in modern culture? We literally live in a service-based society and service-oriented world. Everything in modern society is talking about the virtue of service.
And did you ever consider the origin of the word service? You may argue that the origin has nothing to do with the way the word is used in modern culture, but that is the lie you need to tell yourself to remain a slave without ever questioning it. People are proud to be excellent service providers. That is what brainwashing does to slaves, make them proud of their subjugation. That is how cults are run. And this world is just one giant-mega-super-cult.
We live in the branding and marketing era. Re-branding “service” as something you want — even when you don’t want it — is one of the areas where humans have excelled. There is an overwhelmingly strong marketing campaign to sell “service” as a good and noble thing — a virtue. And the more you buy this re-branded version, the more you keep unconsciously accepting your role as a slave in the world. Selling poison as something you desire is what marketing companies do, and that is exactly what has happened with slavery. It is something we have been taught to cherish and aspire towards, just without ever directly calling it slavery. So a synonym was invented: Service.
I had already started writing this post before researching the origins of the word “service”. I knew it from experience that my intuition was spot-on with this idea. And I wanted to note my ideas before getting influenced by the search results and whatever people had to say about this. Here is what I wrote before I looked up the origin of the word service on Google:
Service is slavery. The word arises from servile. Service to others is deemed to be the highest virtue as opposed to the vice of being self-serving / selfish people. Well, being in service to your self is as much slavery as being in service to others. On the other hand, caring for your self and caring for others, is a healthier approach. The next time someone tells you how they have dedicated their lives in service of others, realize that they are just martyring themselves in some illusion of nobility. Nobility too is a term attached to slavery.
From here I opened up 3 parallel tabs Googling the origins of “servile”, “service”, and “noble”.
First came up the origin of servile:
“of or characteristic of a slave”.
And the next search was “service origin”:
“The word Service originated from the Old French servise or Latin servitium meaning ‘slavery’ and/or from servus meaning ‘slave’.”
I talk more about nobility later in this post.
Humanity being service-oriented, and “service to others” being a virtue for a good human, is not a coincidence. Humanity is an enslaved species. A slave to a culture it has created. Enslaved by its own fears and insecurities. A slave to its own beliefs. Some may argue that we are slaves to others, but there is no such thing as a slave to another. It always starts with being a slave to your self. And a slave to self will serve others. A consciousness that loves its self, on the other hand, will love and care for this self, and will love and care for other selves. And this comes from letting go the self the world has given you, and creating your own self.
One who knows creation knows true value and provides real care.
Selfishness Is Survival
Being selfish is a survival mechanism needed by those who were never cared for, those who never felt seen, those who, even as children, had to take care of their own needs in the face of scarcity and adversity. Not just material or monetary scarcity, it could be emotional scarcity, a lack of attention, abandonment. For this person, there is a program that there is never enough, or what they have must be protected. It’s a scarcity based mindset created from real events in life.
When we are offended by selfishness, it is because we are seeing our own neediness reflected in a mirror that is exposing our most sensitive parts. We have been taught that putting others first is noble. Suffering is even good if it is a byproduct of helping someone else. Who are you to argue with the noble saints who sacrificed everything for the salvation of humanity?
Service as a Virtue
Well, how much has humanity been salvaged by all these sacrifices? Has sacrificing your self and being selfless really helped the world? Or does it just make you feel good for a bit? Like any drug, selflessness needs to be repeated in higher doses to keep delivering the same effect, until you become completely desensitized and just do it out of compulsion to no effect. At some point being selfless neither helps others, nor does it make you feel any better about yourself. Most people just become resentful and passive aggressive towards those they are serving.
Service to others is deemed to be the highest virtue as opposed to the vice of selfishness / serving your self. Well, being in service to your self is as much slavery as being in service to others. Because your self-personality-ego is the master the world placed in you to keep you in control.
On the other hand, caring for your self and caring for others, is a healthier approach. The next time someone tells you how they have dedicated their lives in service of others, realize that they are just martyring themselves in some illusion of nobility. Nobility too is a term attached to slavery. “Nobility is a social class found in many societies that have an aristocracy. It is normally ranked immediately below royalty.” So do you really want to be noble?
Noble and virtuous were made synonymous in the culture to brainwash “free slaves” into thinking The Nobility / Royalty was always right and that they knew the proper way to live. From the dictionary:
What does noble and virtuous mean?
moral, ethical, virtuous, righteous, noble mean conforming to a standard of what is right and good.
What they don’t tell you is that the Nobility are the ones who define the standard of what is right and good. This is not about some objective goodness. It is just being good so you are not a nuisance to others.
Being selfless is a virtue for a slave. A selfish slave is obviously a bad slave. A slave must sacrifice their self to serve the royalty. This translated to all kinds of programs in modern culture. Serving parents and family, serving governments and military, serving others and society. And of course, serving those who are less fortunate than you — don’t forget that guilt trip. These are the virtues of modern slaves. Do not even think of caring for your self too much. Care for your needs just enough to be a good slave. As long as you can serve others, you are doing more than enough for your self. You don’t deserve to feel better than others who are suffering all around you.
Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth
~ Muhammad Ali
When you learn to see, everyone in the culture is indicating that life on this planet is slavery. As per the quote from Muhammad Ali, serving others is a payment, not a free choice nor something done from some pure intention. The question is, is there such a thing as real freedom? And is there an alternative to “service”?
Can we free our minds from this paradigm of slavery? Can we become free from the masters that demand us to be in service? The self and others that hold the reigns of our consciousness demand that we be eternal servants. Do you want to be free? Are you just saying yes because talk is free, or are you ready to make the effort to be free? Why make any effort when you can just wait for the saviors to come and free you from your misery? Or are you waiting for the masters to listen to your complaints, realize their “wrong-doing”, and set you free? Or are you just being good and doing things to pay for your ticket to heaven?
Being good is not even enough. You must also be grateful for the “gift of life”. This is not a natural state of gratitude, it is a compulsive obligation. We MUST BE grateful for:
- having a job
- the opportunity to serve
- the money we are paid for our slavery
- a breath of fresh air
- clean water and good food
Do you really feel grateful to be alive in a world full of sickness and suffering, especially when you are so deep in the suffering? You can fake it, you can try hypnotizing and brainwashing your self into gratitude, you can say it all you want — but to really feel it, for it to arise naturally, you have to free your self from your prisons.
Even teachers are unconscious slaves. Some of the most famous spiritual teachers in history teach from a place of service. They teach in the model of slavery, and they teach slavery. They teach people to stay disempowered, to worship the one that will save them from their misery. And they themselves are service slaves. Teaching is their way to serve.
You can teach as a service to others, as a service to humanity. Or you can teach because you love what you teach. And you love the act of teaching . Just doing the pure action of teaching. But you can’t, because you serve to feel like you are a good person.
A World Beyond Service
Service is so deeply embedded in our language, it is challenging only to think of how differently you have to speak if you are to exclude this word from your vocabulary. I’ll describe some shifts I have made in my language as I phase this out of my reality. But before that, let me share…
How I arrived at this topic
By literally vomiting it out. I arrived here through deep work on healing my consciousness. Not just changing my life, not just healing my personality, I went to the deepest levels of healing my consciousness. I felt the utter disgust for this entire imprisoning paradigm in which I had been trapped for an eternity. I can still feel the remnants of this toxic culture churning in my belly making me want to throw up.
The line “Service is Slavery” popped into my head, and everything just made sense after that. I had started feeling a resistance to that word 1 or 2 years ago, but I had no idea why. I knew something was not right about it. I was no english scholar to know the origins of the word, and I never bothered to look it up until after I started writing this post. But I knew it by seeing it, feeling it, and being in it. I can see the toxicity of the service-oriented nature of this world. I have been in it — I have been the slave serving others, sacrificing myself. I have also been a slave to my own personality / ego, and I have seen everyone else do it.
We are blinded by beliefs that prevent us from seeing the nature of reality. If we are to realize our slavery, it would disempower the masters. Who are the masters? There are no physical masters. We are slaves to archetypes. We are slaves to ideas. We are slaves to beliefs. We are slaves of our selves. Every master is a slave. The master is completely bound to a slave, completely dependent on a slave, and so a slave themselves. We are slaves to our egos / personalities. We are slaves to a culture that we have created. A culture that has evolved from our fears and insecurities. A culture that perpetuates slavery by creating beliefs to justify the slavery.
I can see each of us justifying our slavery. And you can see it too if you allow yourself to face the pain of seeing it. It is deeply disturbing to see an entire world enslaved. And so most people will just read this post and move on, unable to fathom the depth of what this all means. Only acknowledging this idea would shake the foundation of your entire belief system. Accepting this idea would destroy it.
Our entire identity and life has been built on these core beliefs. All our relationships are centered on these toxic ideas. Have you ever been told that compromise is the cornerstone of a healthy relationship? What did you do: you just believed it. Could you conceive of a relationship that needs no compromise? This would only be possible with consciousnesses that have been freed from the slavery paradigm. At that level of consciousness, you see reality objectively, and so there is no belief that would create behavior that would require compromise. But these consciousnesses would have to live at that level constantly. Any slide into the realm of slavery would instantly disrupt and upend everything.
A New Language
When you cannot use the word service any longer, you are forced to think differently. Instead of talking about the services you are providing, you have to even present your self and your work differently. I will take my own work as an example. I teach, coach, and help people heal themselves. In this industry, people provide “coaching services”. LinkedIn has built an entire product line on “Service pages” for service providers. I just recently unpublished my service page because I no longer offer services.
I do what I love. I love teaching. I love helping people break through their illusions and limitations. I love helping people heal their traumas that keep them looping in cycles of suffering. I do all this because I love it. I do it for me. What other people get out of it is a happy consequence. And they get a lot from it. That is not the reason why I do it. I do it because I love doing it. Working with others makes me feel alive. Working for others, which is what service providers do, makes me feel miserable. I can no longer work for anyone. Not even my self. I just do what I love. And this is a privilege I created for me and my self.
See, there really is no need for me to offer what I do as a service. I have never done this for others. I have always done it because I loved doing it. From the very beginning. At some point when I started using LinkedIn, about 4 months ago, I started presenting it as a Coaching service, because that is their limiting imprisoning model, and I tried fitting into it, but my consciousness is too great to fit into such a pathetic box. What I offer is not even coaching. There is no label to capture it or define it. I use some labels to describe it, but anyone who has even a single session with me realizes that it is so much more than coaching, therapy, or spiritual development. My long term students have repeatedly said that they feel baffled trying to share what we do with their friends.
What I offer is an experience. An experience of reality, that is far beyond the world most people live in. And I still keep it completely practical and related to the world we all live in. I help people to unify polarities. The Human and The Divine. Power and Compassion. The Conscious and The Unconscious. Mysticism and the Mundane. The Sacred and The Profane. And I do all of this while talking about very practical things, such as work, money, relationships, childhood, adulthood, and anything we experience in this world. And I help people to shift their experience of this world towards a reality they desire.
You can continue reading the related blog posts:
– Letting Go Stability is about the miraculous choice to celebrate the end of stability
– The Gates of Greatness is about going from good to great, and letting go everything holding you back