sevā [service, servitude, hommage, devotion]
The word sevā is often translated with the word service. Sevā is indeed service, but in the Bhakti tradition, it is much more.
In everyday experience, service is a common idea. In its most simple form it refers to a transaction: this for that. I do something for your benefit in exchange for something you do or provide for my benefit. There is an action and there is a reward, either material or immaterial. This action is commonly called a service.
In material form the benefit we gain from a service might take the form of money or some other object of value, perhaps even another service. The reward can also take an immaterial form as some kind of recognition or honour, perhaps a moral reward, or some other kind of intangible satisfaction.
Sometimes service refers to action done under material constraints of power. We render service not because we choose, but because we are subject to the power of an other.
In the Bhakti tradition sevā is the highest form of religious practice. It is the most elevated express of devotion, the purest relation to the divine.
In stark contrast to service done in the mundane, everyday mood, sevā in religious practice is action done without the expectation of reward, payment or compensation. It is action take without ego, self-less action. It is action as gift, as generosity, as love.
The cornerstone of religious fulfilment is self-less sevā to God. By serving without egoistical interests we come closer to the divine, both within us and beyond us. This is because by erasing the ego as the main actor, the soul emerges from its ego-coverings and becomes active. Selfless means soulful. Since God is soul, present in the heart of every living being, coming closer to our soul means naturally coming closer to God.
This oneness with the soul through sevā has other spiritual consequences. Servie to God in our everyday lives means sevā to soul itself, to all souls. Bhakti teaches that our individual souls are part and parcel of the soul of Kṛṣṇa. A part of the divine is living in us. When we serve purely an individual soul we are serving simultaneously Kṛṣṇa.
It is because sevā is the highest form of religious action that devotees in Bhakti venerate the mood of the maidservants of Rādhā: mañjarī-bhāva. On the spiritual plane the mañjarīs are the pure servants of Rādhā, the goddess of love, the lover of Kṛṣṇa.
The mañjarīs are perfectly ego-less pure servants. They wish nothing for themselves. They desire completely and exclusively what their mistress Rādhā desires, to unfold in eternity her love for Kṛṣṇa.
In this way we can understand that the highest sevā possible, for the mañjarīs and therefore for all of us, is the sevā to divine love and its eternal manifestation in the loving practices of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa.
Our highest sevā is to assume the mood of the mañjarīs, to serve Kṛṣṇa by serving Rādhā. By serving the divine beloved by serving the divine lover, we become the servants of divine love. In this sevā the mañjarīs are our model and inspiration. The greatest sevā, the transcendental service offered to every living being as a gift from Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu, is the service of divine love—prema—at every moment of our existence. When immerse ourselves in mindfulness of the divine love we serve, then everything becomes sevā.