The Choice

[Ankh]

The difference I see is that balanced service to others seems like it automatically results in service to self (because it regularizes and harmonizes the lower centers), but service to self only results in service to others through the efforts of those others. In other words, the "victims" of the negative entity can choose to respond positively, but they could also remain unpolarized or choose to respond negatively.

I think that service to self automatically results in service to others too. Since we are One, and there is no distinction, negative polarity, when offering the love as they know it, when trying to sway third density, is offering the catalyst of this polarity to third density, i.e. still serving others automatically. But it does so in its own way, and there is definitely a difference between these two paths.

I liked what you wrote here:

I see it as a difference between theory and practice. In theory, there's no difference between serving self and serving others. In practice, one path is more efficient and the other has constant difficulty.

Maybe, seen from sixth density or grand scheme of One Creator (or something like that), there is no difference between these two different ways of service to One Creator, but in densities below mid-sixth, there is a difference. There are two paths after all and they are different. As Ra said - some enjoy sunlight, beauty, joy and having a picnic there, and others enjoy another sort of picnic, that of darkness, difficulties, pain and suffering of others. Ra then continues: "It is free will of each entity which chooses the form of play, the form of pleasure." (19:17) And we are in the density of Choice, where our free will is about to choose the form of play, or pleasure, or progress towards One Infinite Creator.

The choice, or polarization, is perhaps a bigger concept than these simple words: service to self or others. I think that Tenet was right about it. But service to either self or others is definitely within this concept of Choice/polarization, but there is more to it. For instance, from today's Q'uote:

Serving someone is not necessarily pleasing the entity. Serving someone is not necessarily doing anything to, with or for an entity. Serving someone is fundamentally the awareness that you and the person you are serving are one entity, united, singular and absolutely equal. Rejoicing in the apparent differences, a servant of the light relates to other selves as “themselves,” knowing that the self and the other-self are a certain kind of entity, citizens of eternity, dwellers beyond time and space, within a universe that is as wide as infinity and as small as the interior of the human heart.

I guess that maybe we will never fully understand this concept in its entirety while still here in 3D behind the veil and quarantine, crawling in this confusion and darkness with a little candle, trying to find the "light"?