Humans are composites of higher and lower, light and darkness, and it matters which one you serve.

If someone’s operating from their lower half, meaning they are driven by their ego or shadow, their strongly STS parts, and you “serve” that in a blind and dumb way, then you’re feeding that, enabling it, and it will grow stronger at the expense of the higher part retreating or being cut off.

Conversely, if you do ‘tough love’ with this person, meaning denying their lower half the feeding it wants, and instead aim your actions at whatever strengthens their higher half and weakens or disciplines their lower half, then you’re serving in the correct way. You’re then restoring balance and enabling true free will for them. Otherwise their true core is being held hostage by the demonic, robotic, or animalistic impulses of the lower half.

So service should ultimately serve the light within a person, not their darkness. Sometimes yes you end up helping the lower half to indirectly assist the higher part. For example, someone’s starving and asks you for money or food. If you feed them, you’re feeding their animal body which is technically STS in nature… but in being full, if they can then think more clearly and feel energized enough for them to act more like their better selves, then you’ve ultimately served the light within them. On the other hand, if they were lying and wanted money for drugs, you’d have been enabling their dark side once again.

If you were to write a little inspirational book, you might think what’s the point if everyone around me seems STS. The answer is that it’s not everyone, and not everyone is purely STS all the time. There are certain people who, at certain times, have a pang of intuition or compassion or inspiration that comes from the spiritual. Maybe they come across that book in that moment, and it inspires them so much that they commit to being better people and not get beaten down by the dark impulses. So in that way, you helped stoke the spiritual fire in them. Even if they aren’t saints yet, even if their current state is still STS, you nudged them toward the STO destination.

Where you are right now, and where you’re going, are two different things. You can be on the south side of town but walking north, or south side of town walking further south. We may all be on the south side of town overall, but some of us are heading north toward STO. Those are the ones worth investing in.

So we have to consider not only where a person is in terms of their darkness:light ratio, but what direction they are moving. Some want to grow their light. Some want to grow their darkness. Someone who’s hit rock bottom and wants to turn their life around for the better, is more promising than someone in the vanilla middle zone who doesn’t care and is in fact slipping from apathy and ignorance.

And, we have to discern which part of them is light, and which part is dark, and make sure not to feed the dark part at the expense of the light. If the light in someone cannot be reached, then there’s nothing you can do for them other than deny their darkness its freedom to grow and exploit. In extreme cases, like a psychopath who’s an immediate danger, that can mean putting them down like a sick animal. If that saves an innocent life, such use of force has an STO-like effect in terms of preventing something that would have increased imbalance.

Tom Montalk - https://montalk.net/about/143/e-mail-qa