The Secret of Self-Offering
Watch this inspiring Sunday Service talk with Erin Vinnacco, recorded at Ananda Village on October 29th 2023.
"God is right here, ready to help you. All you have to do is ask!" Erin shares how God is ever willing to support and help us, always ready by our side. By offering ourselves fully to God, we can find the joy we seek. She explains why, in a world where often "keeping what is mine for myself" seems the way to go, giving and thinking of others will lead to greater happiness. "Giving and receiving is just one flow."
The reading for this week from Swami Kriyananda's book Rays of the One Light is
"Why Tell God Anything When He Knows Everything? Why Offer God Anything, When He Has Everything?"
Truth is one and eternal. Realize oneness with it in your deathless Self, within. The following commentary is based on the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda.
Jesus Christ teaches as the ideal prayer one that addresses very human demands to God: “Give us this day our daily bread,” “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” and, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
Jesus himself says, just before suggesting this prayer, “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.” Why, then, his recommendation that we pray for anything? The answer is that we should offer ourselves up in acceptance of His abundance. Don’t pester God, as though pulling constantly on His sleeve to get His attention. Approach Him with the confidence of a child in its parent. And in that spirit, then, ask Him lovingly, but with complete trust, as though demanding your birthright, and without the slightest doubt in your mind that He wants only your best. For you don’t have to persuade Him, the way a beggar or a stranger might. You are His own child.
God knows everything already. He knows what is in your heart. It is you who need to clarify your feelings, that you attune yourself to Him in turn more clearly. For only by such clarity will you be able to receive perfectly what He gives you.
For the same reason, we need to offer ourselves to Him not because He needs anything from us (except, as Yogananda said, our love, to complete His love for us), but because by self-giving we expand our awareness from its confinement in the little ego, outward to infinity.
“Those who partake of the nectar remaining after a sacrifice,” says the Bhagavad Gita in the fourth Chapter, “attain to the Infinite Spirit. That person, however, who makes no sacrifices never truly succeeds in enjoying even the blessings of this material world; how, then, could he attain happiness in subtler realms?”
Thus, through holy Scripture, God has spoken to mankind.
