THE AUTONOMOUS SERVER

The
Autonomous
Server
Serving and Loving are
Connected
by Peter Fritz Walter
______________________

Recently, I took the firm decision to serve. It nev-

er came to my mind earlier in life.
I took living for myself for granted. I found it al-
ready a challenge to serve myself well, for in fact I
did not serve myself well over all those years. Not
even myself. So how could I even in a dream serve
others?
But honestly, when you are on that track, there is
an end to it, there is a point where you are fedup to
serve only yourself. Life becomes boring and in fact,

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 THE AUTONOMOUS SERVER

meaningless. Now I clearly feel that my new service

attitude adds meaning and purpose to my life.
In hindsight it is daring to find out how, at the
brink of old age, I was able to change my basic life
paradigm from self-serving to serving!
I namely think that such a change is not haphaz-
ard and can only come about when certain condi-
tions are met, and certain other conditions are no
more met.
What got me there? First of all, illness! I had
been developing a heart disease or coronary condi-
tion that somehow was marked by a congested main
artery. That caused me lots of discomfort and I had to
definitely stop drinking alcohol—while I was a wine
lover all my life! It took me several years to really
stop drinking and every time I restarted, my body
would revolt and throw me a tantrum with pain in
my heart on the go and sometimes a whole night
through when sleeping was impossible as the condi-
tion was paired with hypertension.

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It was only after curing the disease with the help

of Chinese herbal medicine and spiritual declarations
(positive affirmations, prayers, suggestions or howev-
er you may want to call using the power of the spo-
ken word) that I saw with some clarity that this dis-
ease was somehow only the reflection of my self-cen-
tered mental setup.
And second, and as a result of that journey with
an afflicted heart, I would reflect if there is ‘heart’ re-
ally also in my thoughts and feelings. And I found
there was not much of it. So I quite deliberately be-
gan to put my heart into relationships, very few ones, as
my life is basically a lonely one, but I saw that there
was a tremendous blooming up of something I can-
not put in words. And as a result of that something
that other people might call ‘love,’ I got an incredible
sense of comfort, a non-material comfort I mean, a
comfort felt in all of my being. That feeling of deep
comfort, I would also want to call it ‘enrichment’ or

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‘gratification.’ And suddenly I got a felt sense what

love really means.
And then I was baffled. ‘So there must be a con-
nection between love and serving others,’ I reasoned,
‘as before I put my life to service, I never had that
expansive feeling, that inner space, that tremendous
sense of comfort.’ But why is that?
Are we perhaps here on earth for the sole pur-
pose to serve? I was then reading again Dr. Raymond
Moody’s research on Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)
and suddenly all became crystal-clear to me. A major
percentage of the people who went through an NDE
said that they had learnt through the experience that
we are here for learning to love, and that love is the
only thing that really counts in the universe.
Strangely, I had read that book already twice be-
fore and had not been able to make something out of
those statements. They would not resonate with me,
or resonate as cliché-like. I could not really get the
real meaning out of them.

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That only changed with my third and I think fi-

nal lecture of the book, the recent one. Finally I have
understood that there is a meaning that connects all
our lives for that meaning or purpose is common to
all of us—and that is something I really never knew
before. That common purpose is to become more
loving, and we become more loving through serving,
apparently. I am curious how this will manifest fur-
ther down the road, how serving will open my heart
even more for love, thereby hopefully giving it a def-
inite healing!
And the final thought … that comes to mind as a
question … is of course … ‘is not every heart disease
caused by a lack of heart in our lives, a lack of heart
put into people or a cause, or into serving?’ When I
contemplate that possibility, and look at psychoso-
matic research, collected and published by physi-
cians like Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Alberto Villoldo or
Dr. Larry Dossey, I find this etiology really makes
sense, and this, then, would be the catalyzer for de-

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veloping a true prevention of heart disease by teach-

ing people how to use their heart positively, how to
use it by ‘putting it into’ engagements, causes and re-
lationships, and by learning to serve …

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