You have said that remembering yourself as a being, rather than as a personality, is the first step towards real service.
Yes, real service must come from who you are, not your conditioning, your ideas or the concepts you have picked up from religion or politics.
Is there a further step?
Yes. A work group is able to invoke special states and qualities which are in some way needed and may not otherwise be available. You could say it is a larger remembering.
Qualities such as love and compassion?
Those are the popular ones. There are others, such as glorification, objective sorrow, loyalty, joy, steadfastness, protectiveness, understanding, truth, retribution. There are also qualities that have no name in English. Each is a manifestation of our origin and a means by which it comes to know itself and its possibilities through us and the world.
A genuine work group is a repository for the possibilities that exist in human beings and humans are an expression of the possibilities that exist in the universe.
I use the word repository intentionally, to indicate that these qualities can find a place in us, probably a temporary one, but they do not come from us and they are not developed by us. Just as we have being, the universe has being. From a certain point of view, there is only one being.
This is not work that can be done by us individually?
Not in my experience, although individual practice also has value. Each of us is too limited. We need more than one. We need to acknowledge otherness to create a large enough space for higher qualities to descend. Matthew 18:20 says: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” The participants cannot be of the same type. There must be a proper place for them to perform their service, a place which has been prepared in advance. Names are also important.
The prophets were invocants and they used their work circles to call down something that was needed. They unfolded our possibilities as beings. In a small way, their work can be continued. They left instructions on how to repeat what they did. They tell us to call upon higher powers in order to establish a communication. It says in the Koran: “Remember Me and I will remember you.”
Religions have work ideas embedded in them but these ideas must be separated from the many foolish notions added by meddling humans.
