The Same

"As you love your own body, so regard everyone as equal to your own body. When the Supreme Experience supervenes, everyone’s service is revealed as one’s own service. Call it a bird, an insect, an animal or a man, call it by any name you please, one serves one’s own Self in every one of them.”
“…this body has lived with father, mother, husband, and all. This body has served the husband so you may call it wife. It has prepared dishes for all so you may call it cook. It has done all sorts of scrubbing and menial work, so you may call it a servant. But if you look at the thing from another standpoint you will realize that this body has served God, for when I serve my father, mother, husband, and others, I simply considered them as different manifestations of the Almighty, and served them as such. When I sat down and prepared food, I did so as if it were in a ritual, for the food cooked was, after all, meant for God. Whatever I did, I did in the spirit of the divine service. Hence, I was not quite worldly, though always engaged in household affairs. I had but one ideal, to serve all as God, to do everything for the sake of God.”
“…My consciousness has never associated itself with this temporary body. Before I came on this earth Father, I was the same. I grew into womanhood but still I was the same. When the family in which I had been born made arrangements to have this body married, I was the same. And Father, in front of you now, I am the same. Even afterwards, though the dance of creation changed around me in the halls of eternity, I shall be the same.”
“Ma is (I am) here, what is there to worry about?”
-- Anandamayi Ma (1896 – 1982) was an Indian (from Bengal) spiritual leader. Sivananda Saraswati of the Divine Life Society described her as "the most perfect flower the Indian soil has produced."