Kabbalah: How to recover our connection with the Cosmos (II) Give and receive
When we feel a disconnection with the cosmos and our life loses its meaning, the wisdom of Kabbalah can return us to a state of fulfillment, in which the universe and ourselves recover the original harmonious unity.
We feel elevated to the upper worlds, without losing our earthly connection.
What is the secret of this?
As I said in previous posts, and as our sages have said for centuries, the wisdom of Kabbalah can be summed up in a simple commandment that many great religions and mystical currents have adopted throughout history: "Love your neighbor as yourself "(Leviticus, 19:18)
Is that possible to achieve in our life without being a saint, it is to say, for a normal person like you or me? And does it really work? Can one get lost on the road? How to correct our eminently selfish nature?
In a few words, ¡Yes we can! Through study, work in a group, with the books of Kabbalah, with a teacher, and of course, with all the will of the world.
It is something that should not be impossible if one is desperate for a crisis in life, because: what can you lose if you try hard? A few months of study, a year?
The detail is that if we succeed, we gain a new life, the connection with eternity, and after that, one can say (I say it every day) "It has been worth coming to this world to live this life exactly and not other."
Of course there are difficulties, one can get lost, there is much confusion, and diverse methods and different religions can offer doctrines that can lead us to the abyss, usually with good intentions but with nefarious results.
As the precept "Love your neighbor as yourself" is directly linked to giving and receiving, we will analyze four (4) aspects of giving and receiving, from the point of view of Baal Ha Sulam, perhaps the greatest cabalist of the twentieth century, who was the father of Rabbi Baruch Ashlag (RABASH), who in turn was the teacher of my master Michael Laitman.
Phase 1: Receive by receiving
Our essence, and that of most beings, entities and things in the universe, is to receive, to consume, to be able to live.
Only God, or the infinite, the Ein Sof, is perfect, total, complete, and does not need anything, because from Him the Universe we know is created.
All other beings have what is called the desire to receive, a vessel that wants to be filled with light, a stomach that wants to be filled with food, an ambition that wants money, we also want home, sex, luxuries, and we have an ego who wants recognition to inflate himself.
The stages of a human being's life are also like these phases, and in its first stage, the child only wants and knows how to receive by receiving, because yes, because his ego is huge, pure. The mother gives everything without asking anything in return because she is a mother (curiously, it is the third stage of giving and receiving, which we will see later).
The child has not developed the sense that others also exist and that they can resist him when competing for objects of desire, may be it the mother's love (Freud) or the resources that exist in the world and which we need to live.
If one does not develop the sense that the others also exist, that they oppose us because they also have desires, that they can be violent when at the time of competing for goods and resources, then we do not mature. We remain like an eternal, capricious child, and unless we are the son of a billionaire like Carlos Slim, our life surely will a hell of clashes and collisions with others.
It is no a secret that one of the great problems of humanity is the large number of psychopaths in charge of companies, financial holdings, mafiosi, heads of state and high religious offices, which basically have not overcome this stage of wanting to receive and seize everything without giving anything in return.
And this behavior is not only individual, it can become the corporate culture of a company, of a state, of a religion, with terrible consequences for the rest of human beings.
In the economic field, this would be the essence of savage, ecocidal capitalism, which is destroying the planet's resources and irreversibly contaminating it.
This stage should be surpassed towards the 11 years in the girls (when they get developed as young women), and towards the 13 in the children (the age of the Bar Mizva). At that moment, children become adolescents, and a complicated process of socialization begins for them, in order to learn how to survive in society.
Phase 2: Give only to receive
This second stage resembles commerce. We discovered that we can give things and receive something in return. If we give some coins, we receive a fruit, a coffee. The principle of the market is our first way of socializing, of dealing ourselves with the others without coming to a violent struggle, to a war.
It works with material goods, but it is very complicated with spiritual goods, with what we call love, because it can end in manipulation: I give you sex so that you give me money, I tell you that I love you to manipulate you, to make you feel guilty when I claim you do not give me exactly what I give you.
In this way, when the intention is to give to receive, the more one gives, the more dangerous and pathological a relationship can become. Two people end up competing to see who gives more, as in an auction, and who gives less can feel bad, you can get sick, your self-esteem goes down.
It cpuld be a camouflaged violence, it is to say, may be the case of a millionaire husband who gives everything to his wife, and since she can not give him the same because she is financially and laborly disadvantaged, then she feels increasingly worse, and the husband feels legitimized when he goes out to look for what he does not find in his house with his wife. Or vice versa.
To put as objective, as intention, as kavaná, the giving only to receive, is, according to Kabbalah and Baal Ha Sulam, a teenage stage of life, and of the development of Humanity.
There are two other interesting ways to focus on giving and receiving, which come from the higher worlds, and which are more the goal of Kabbalah and of many mystical thinkers. Let's see.
Phase 3: Give without expecting anything in return
A third phase is to give without expecting anything in return.
As we said, the essence of living beings, including humans, is the desire to receive, because we are incomplete, finite.
Only God or the infinite, who do not need anything, lack the desire to receive, and therefore can give, without expecting anything in return.
So to aspire to give without receiving anything in return may seem very high and noble, because one wants to equal oneself in form with the Creator.
But it is unreal, a juvenile, adolescent illness, a very arrogant and dangerous idealism. One can wake up ruined, bitter, if one discover that have spent all the entire life giving without receiving, and that we have wasted our life time, that we have been idiots.
It is an attitude and an intention that certain saints (not Kabbalists, of course) seek: to be equal to God, to completely annul the ego, not to desire anything but the welfare of others and the Universe.
The part that has to do with killing the ego is similar to certain Eastern Buddhist doctrines, to asceticism.
The Essenes and early Christians tried to practice this doctrine, which was later called by Engels primitive communism.
It is a weapon of dangerous manipulation in a totalitarian communist regime, when they tell you that if you have individual desires you are bad, an egoist, an enemy of the people.
That is to say, this type of communism wants to kill the essence of the human being that is the desire to receive, and for that reason the dictatorships of the left have historically been worse, bloodier, more painful than those of the right.
So, if you hear someone who calls himself a Kabbalist, recommending that you suppress the desire to receive and live only in the desire to bestow, beware of him. That state is very high, it is true, but it can not be achieved by human beings, only by angels, or by the Creator.
We have to always count on our selfishness, with our desire to receive, and instead of amputating it, to suppress it, as the oriental gurus suggest, we have rather to correct it, so as to make it beneficial for all, for us and for the rest of Humanity .
It is a more realistic, more attainable vision, and it is the essential technique of the wisdom of Kabbalah. That's why Michael Laitman says that Kabbalah is a practical science, not only because it has a very precise technique to correct our deficiencies and reach the upper worlds, but because as we practice it, we begin to see realities, lights, energetic and spiritual movements, that before beginning to study we did not even suspect that they existed.
Phase 4: Receive to be able to give more
According to our sages, according to Baal Ha Sulam, this is the most exalted stage that human beings can reach.
It is about understanding that we can not live without our desire to receive, our reception vessel, and that we must correct it in order not to get sick, to get the disease of sadness and nonsense that spread throughout the world.
To correct the desire to receive, the vessel, in Hebrew is called Tzim Tzum, or restriction.
We say to our ego, to our vessel: OK, you can receive, but in order to give more to the others.
How is this?
Well, let's remember the initial commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. That means that you have to love yourself as much as you love others, that the argument is the same for both parts: love for others, but for yourself as much as for them. Or even more, if you want to bestow.
So, we change our intentionality, we think and meditate, we fight hard against our infantile ego, to understand that we are connected with other beings, with other souls, with the rest of the universe, and that in order to recover unity we must bestow, give.
That is, we must be cooperating cells, and not cancer cells that devour themselves and other healthy cells. Planet Earth, Gaia, is homeostatic, seeks balance.
Only humans are able to break that balance, that is why we have become cancer cells on the planet, and although we are hardly going to end life on Earth because many species can survive a nuclear holocaust, we do have the capacity to destroy ourselves as a human race.
This change in intentionality can allow us to correct the receiving vessel little by little, enlarge it more, make it more resistant, so that each time we can receive more, without getting sick, because if we receive more light than we are prepared to receive, we can die
That is why Kabbalah does not have anything against prosperity and wealth, but, on the contrary, promotes it, provided that whoever seeks and wants it, whenever he wants it to bestow, to be able to give more.
Change selfishness by altruism, that is the secret. It is not about suffering, about amputating the ego, about becoming a hermit and an ascetic behind the texts.
It is about living life fully, intensely, and through the correction of the ego, through this fourth way of receiving to be able to give more, to reach a state of fulfillment, of happiness both in full material and spiritual, complementing both harmonically .
Imagine you have a partner and you say: "I want to receive sex from you, but in order to give you more and more love ..."
Or that you are an entrepreneur, like Bill Gates, and at a certain moment you say: "Yes, I want to receive more and more, but to be able to give more, to be able to create foundations to help alleviate hunger in Africa, to create museums and universities ... "
In the economic field, this does not even resemble a social democracy, but the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism described by Max Weber.
One thing that Weber could not grasp, is that there was a great Jewish influence in this vision of giving and receiving poposed by the Puritans, who inherited it from the Kabbalistic thought that secretly permeated Northern Europe and the United States.
In summary, the four phases or stages resemble not only the evolution of a child, but also the different ages of Humanity: childhood, adolescence, youth, and full maturity.
But that full maturity is another topic of discussion, it has to do with the doctrine of Massiach (the Messiah) and the debate about whether or not we really live in a pre-messianic era, like those that the desert prophets envisioned.
That will be subject, perhaps, of a future post.
Shalom!
Óscar Reyes-Matute
(Samuel Ibn Motot / שמואל אבן מתת)
Video recommended:
Kabbalah Giving and Receiving, by Tony Kosinec, Bnei Baruch
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Brilliantly explained! The video is great too, very concise.
B'Ez"H, may we all develop the master trait of "desire to receive for the sake of bestowal..."
Resteemed!
Thanks haver! Tony is the most brilliant English speaking disciple by Rav Laitman. Keep in touch. B"H!
מתת
He sure is great. I have been listening to him for years too. Side note, I think I heard him on the radio as the voiceover for something...
Stay well!
Yep! Now he is teaching via Facebook, streaming connection with the students of Bnei Baruch all around the world. Wonderful!
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