Internal necessity may also be different in different people. All people in one form or another search for unification with something larger than themselves, and they all experience a need for service. We are thus constructed, and even if it seems to you that egotists do not serve anyone, do not doubt that as an object of service they have simply chosen themselves. The need for unification, merging with something larger than you yourself, is a distorted need for the return to God, for disappearance in Him. For the return to a lost paradise, to employ the Biblical symbol. To be a member of a family, team, order, political party, VKontakte group – all of this is a manifestation of that same yearning to once again become part of a whole, losing your sense of alienation and the burden of one’s own “I.” To be united, to cease to be separate – this is what all people, without exception, really need. They search for external unification, but only mystics come to what is impossible to find outside – they unite themselves with God, ridding themselves of the cursed separation.
Service is a means of sustaining a connection with the whole, and therefore some must serve the family, and some their favorite rock group or terrorist underground. The need for service explains why people are prepared to die for the sake of an idea. The explanation is simple: each of them has chosen for himself an object of service, with the existence of which he has totally identified his own existence as well. If I must die so that an idea lives, that means it is to be. All of this is an echo of the true need for service, in self-sacrifice and merging with the Whole. The problem is that only by working on oneself and freeing oneself from desires and the idea connected to them can one come to true service. As long as you serve ideas, you are blind, but in order to acquire vision, which can lead you to real service, you must seriously work on yourself.
True service begins when you can follow the Will of God, manifested personally and specifically to you. Understandably, you can speak here of psychological disturbance, but as I have already written, mystics are distinguished from the insane by a far higher degree of sanity. In fact, they are distinguished from ordinary people by a higher degree of sanity as well. But even before the possibility of accepting the Will of God appears, life out of necessity may reveal to you those necessities whose role for your life was nearly completely hidden. Working on himself, advancing along the Way, a person discovers in himself needs that are in no way explained by ideas or desires. Thus, someone is drawn to preaching; some to sharing being, and someone else, to oppose the Darkness. All of this is discovered only upon awareness of the level of your true needs, and all of this is related to what is called the predestination of a person in the Work. It must be revealed, and it is revealed in service to God, in following His Will. You may see and feel your predestination, but until the time comes for its realization, until you and all the necessary circumstances mature, it cannot be embodied in reality.
Thus, becoming aware of the need in service of also ridding yourself of yourself, you may come to a renunciation of your own will (read: wishes) and accept the Will of God as your own. From this moment, you live with the desires of God, and participation in their fulfillment is the engine of your life. This is a later stage of the Way, but work continues on it with desires, only now you are led by the Will, and in part you serve the Lord, and in part He serves you, leading you through situations in which you can finally purify yourself and rid yourself of remaining desires.