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A Therapeutic Dilemma 83 MORALITY AND RIGHT LIVING
Lead a just and moral life. Teach your children about the deeper meaning of life and the importance of morality and devotion. In praise and adoration, sing to God with your family and with a devotional group in your community. Spend time in service to others, giving charitably of your time and love. Take pilgrimages to holy places. Speak softly and sweetly; be kind and loving to everyone. Feed the poor. Prepare for your last moment, when you will leave this world and stand before God—ready to show that you knew the deeper purpose and meaning of the precious existence given to you and that you used your time well.
Devotion brings the strength and inspiration to carry out the necessary spiritual work that leads to salvation. This spiritual work consists of a new appreciation and more intense practice of morality and the leading of a just life—in a way not yet comprehended by Western psychology.
The true practice of morality means constant awareness of what is important and what is not and requires the courage and discrimination to renounce the temporary and trivial in favor of the eternal and everlasting. It is a struggle between self-gratification and self-sacrifice, between selfishness and selflessness. It is in the heat of this struggle that pain, fear, desire, ego and duality are transcended: self-gratification and bondage to the pleasure/pain principle are renounced in favor of establishing righteousness and selflessness. Hence morality and its expression in selfless service purifies character, expands love and is the path to transcending duality.
Sai Baba says that morality and right living are the expression of love in action:
Love is central. Love in thought is truth—that which is always the same and beyond beginning and end. Love in feeling is peace, bliss—being unaffected by the sorrows or joys, the ups or downs in life. Love in understanding is non-violence and respect and reverence for all creation. Love in action is morality and right living—the giving of selfless service to all in need without desire for reward.
When this love takes the form of selfless service, and selfishness is


































































































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