The following is an excerpt from one of Bears' talks with volunteers.

What would it be to really serve somebody?

I keep thinking about the word "service" and how in our culture it is seen as a sacrifice rather than filling ourselves. You'll often hear people say, you might even hear me say if you come to one of my classes: "You can't love anybody else unless you first love yourself. You can't really be accepting with someone else until you learn to accept yourself." And so it begins with you.

I feel that, perhaps more than any other program that we do here the volunteer program is all about learning to love. And it's learning to love through the idea of serving.

By becoming a volunteer here, you are really deciding that, whatever it is you are doing, you are ultimately serving people - oftentimes people who are having incredible difficulties, or families coming to help children with special needs. By coming to a place where perhaps they can have hope, these people can have inspiration and learn tools to dramatically deal with their circumstances and turn their lives around in a much more loving and happy way than they ever imagined.

If your intention was to volunteer for two months, I want to encourage you to be fully immersed, to see what it will really feel like, and what benefits you could ultimately derive by choosing to put yourself in a service position, in a loving position, with your fellow human creatures.

There is clearly something wondrous about giving and requiring nothing in return. The wondrous experience is in the giving. And it's the same metaphor, because the giving or the service is the same as loving.

So, what would it be if every one of us spent two months of our lives, two years of our lives, whatever it might be, really exploring the idea of serving others and giving to others in the most dedicated, passionate way, and seeing what comes by putting ourselves in that position. I believe that it would probably mitigate 50-75% of human emotional neediness, because I think there would be such a lesson to be learned by daring to do that for ourselves. The lesson would come from the fact that when we do that, we would come to understand even more deeply, sincerely and pointedly that those kinds of experiences that we are yearning for - peace of mind, internal comfort, ease, love, communion with others, communion with God, communion with ourselves - are experiences that are internally germinated, but we've been so busy pointing outside or grabbing outside to get the experience, that we have lost the understanding of our own authorship in the whole process.

This volunteership that you've entered into for two months gives you a lavish time to explore the whole idea of what it would be like to really give. In return for your service, the Option Institute also wants to serve you in the form of classes, teachings, and time to learn and grow. The classes that we will do with you will give you much time to reflect, look at yourself through your experiences, and use your experience, hopefully, as maybe one of the most profound learning opportunities that you will have in your life.

Open your heart to people and your ability, capacity, and wellspring to embrace them just grows bigger and bigger. It's a little bit like an artesian well. Rather than the experience of serving and loving somebody being a diminishing experience, it actually is an enhancing and recreating experience on a very personal basis.

So, how amazing that you dared to put yourself here, in this environment that reflects on some of the primal beliefs that most of us grew up with, and challenge those beliefs not out of disrespect but out of perhaps trying to find simply a more wondrous way to live, a more wonderful way to be.

  —Bears (Barry Neil Kaufman)