Most seekers are interested in enlightenment only for their own sake, only for their own personal liberation. Indeed, when we begin the spiritual life, the most important thing to us is our own happiness, our own personal experience of expanded states of consciousness, our own enlightenment.

But there comes a time when some of us begin to recognize that spiritual experience is not only for our own welfare.

Because we have gone deeply into the spiritual experience, we have discovered something sacred. It is the recognition of an obligation, an obligation that literally commands us to cease to live for ourselves alone, but instead to live for the sake of the whole.

In that obligation, it becomes apparent that this life is not our own in any personal sense, and that true liberation can be found only when this life is lived not for our own happiness but in the service of a cause that is always greater than ourselves. (Andrew Cohen)