2. GIVING AND RECEIVING

Now we come to an interesting topic, which is the relation between Giving and Receiving.

The question is, "does there exist a true giving if there is no desire to receive on the part of the recipient?"

If we are talking about giving food to a hungry person then it is obvious that there is a desire to receive, but what does it mean when the gift given on the part of the Life Force is life itself at conception? There is certainly at that moment a desire to survive so that we can consider as correct and natural giving, in its non-intentional sense.

But that gift entails the Survival paradigms which are noble and correct. While we can say that man receives the seeds at birth, it is not long after that Gladness for the Gladness of others, true Compassion, Benevolent Affect and Equanimity vanish in the face of Social power, the errors of religion and Education.

So although the gift is well-received at birth it is afterwards rejected. What about the gift of Wisdom...? That too shares the same fate, yet the seed was planted and we retain the capacity to come close to our birthright if we have, as Dharma declares, "a base of virtue, the energy, and the sagacity to reach out with courage to receive the Truth."

Now if we are born with the programs of the Life Force intact and the expression is correctly linked with cognition, then all we can receive are the physical requirements of life and the development of the survival qualities. We have no natural requirement except a natural curiosity to know the truth.

In order to seek the Truth we must be empty and furthermore be aware of that emptiness. We know that the arousal of Duality and Identity generated an emptiness or a rejection of the true way of human survival.

In the biblical sense, we must say then that Eve was empty when she accepted the advice to pick the apple of Knowledge and Adam must have been empty to join her in the Truth quest. We must also assume an experience of loss.

The question is, how does the Kabbalah deal with that problem?

The rise of Identity may be represented by the presence symbolically of the serpent, but philosophically we must go further than pure symbolism.

It assume,s as we might, in our original human survival paradighm the natural impulse to share with others, but from that point we depart.

The Kabbalah tells us that the creation of the vessel in its original form in the moment of "En Sof," the divine origin of all created existence, in contrast to the Ein (or Ayn) Sof, which is infinite nothingness before that moment, did not completely achieve its end.

What happened?

We have a rather complicated though elegant explanation which we must explore.

The desire to Impart by every living human was the second stage of creation and was followed by the third stage in which the vessels all desired to share with one another. Each one therefore emptied itself for others and became empty. Thus arose two factors: the knowledge of prior fullness and the desire to be filled, which is considered the fourth and final stage of El Sof.

It is difficult to conceive of any moment in human evolution where all human creatures were figuratively fully sharing with each other, so we must look for a better symbolic explanation, for conceptually viewing human creatures rejecting receiving in order to give appears rather unlikely. We could say perhaps that the receiving itself may be considered as an act of benevolence in and of itself, for it is effectively an act of subtle return of benevolence. So we can imagine in this perfect "Eden" that receival was never rejected but the joy of receiving as gladness allowed gladness in the giver.

But how did the emptiness then occur? Well, first we must realign our ideas. The gift given was never a thing in and of itself... what was given was the "act of benevolence", or better still, the aura of prevailing benevolence. There was no compassion, for there was no suffering.

That then does not imply that everyone was running around giving but that an aura of benevolence prevailed. The desire to receive then must have arisen in the desire that the person receiving fully accepted the benevolence directed at them (regardless of the nature of that benevolence).

Within true Dharma, equanimity is defined as giving regardless of the consequences of that giving. In other words, the giving is sufficient without the arousal of an Identity experience. 

The only thing that we can suggest at this point is that there was the arousal of Identity un-fulfillment in receiving.

We could speculate upon the nature of that un-fulfillment but it is not useful at the moment.