Why Everything Is Literally All About Giving & Receiving
As the Wisdom of Kabbalah explains, in the ancient Mesopotamia, after studying the world around himself, Abraham discovered that reality consists of two desires. One desire is to give and the other is to receive. He found that everything that has ever existed, that exists now, and that will exist is an outcome of the interaction between these two forces. When the desires work in harmony, life flows peacefully along its course. When they collide, however, we must deal with the fallout—calamities and crises of great magnitude.
Through these discoveries, Abraham understood how the universe and life had started, and how they evolve. Our universe was born approximately fourteen billion years ago, when a massive, never-again-repeated burst of energy exploded out of a minuscule point. Astronomers call it “the Big Bang.” Just as a seed and an egg join to form an embryo at the moment of conception, the universe was “conceived” when the desire to give and the desire to receive were first joined together in the Big Bang. For this reason, all that exists in our universe is a manifestation of the joining of the two forces.
Just as a cell in an embryo begins to divide and create the flesh of the newborn immediately after conception, the desire to give and the desire to receive began to form the matter of our universe immediately after the Big Bang. Then, through a process that spanned billions of years, and that to an extent continues today, gases alternately expanded and contracted, galaxies were created, and stars were formed within them. Every expansion of gas was a consequence of the desire to give, which expands and creates, and every contraction was the result of the desire to receive, which absorbs and contracts.
Expansion and contraction form the endless ebb and flow of life, propelled at one moment by the desire to give, and at the next moment by the desire to receive. Whether it is galaxies, suns, and planets merging to form our universe, or cells, tissue, and organs combining to form a human being, this interplay of desires is at the heart of creation.
As with the stars, Planet Earth evolved by expansion and contraction through the interaction of desires. When Earth was first formed, its surface reflected the flow of expansion and the ebb of contraction. Every time the desire to give prevailed, Earth’s sweltering interior would burst into rivers of melted lava. And every time the receiving force prevailed, the lava would cool and form new swaths of land. Eventually, a strong enough crust was formed over the Earth to allow for the emergence of life as we know it.
If we search deep enough, we will find the same two forces—giving and receiving—within every being ever created, weaving their magnificent garment of life. In the weaving process, the desire to give first creates matter, as with the Big Bang or a newborn baby, and the desire to receive gives the matter shape, as with the stars and the differentiating cells in organisms.
Did You Know Humanity Is the Result of Billions of Years of Cooperation?
The story does not end with the creation of the universe. When a baby is born, it cannot control its hands or legs, which seem to move about erratically. However, there is tremendous importance in these seemingly erratic movements: after many repetitions, the baby gradually learns which movements get results and which do not. Unless the baby tries, it will not learn how to turn over, crawl, and eventually walk. In a baby, the life force (the desire to give) creates movement. But it is the desire to receive that gives that force direction and determines which expressions of the desire to give (movements) should stay and which should not.
The same principle can be applied to Earth’s early childhood. As the earth was cooling, particles driven by the desire to give moved randomly about. The desire to receive caused these particles to contract and form clusters, and only the most stable of these groups survived, forming atoms.
Atoms, too, moved about randomly because the desire to give within them was tossing them erratically, and the desire to receive gradually formed more sustainable groups of atoms. Those were the first molecules. From here, the road to the first living creature was paved.
During creation, these desires cooperated to create increasingly complex creatures. Uni-cellular creatures came first. Then, these creatures learned to cooperate so they would increase their chances of survival. Some cells excelled in breathing and became in charge of providing oxygen to all the other cells. Other cells learned to digest effectively and became responsible for providing nutrients to the rest of the cells in the “colony.” Some cells learned to think for everyone else and became the “colony’s” brain.
Thus, multi-cellular creatures were formed where each cell had a unique role and responsibility, and depended on the rest of the cells for its livelihood. This quality is what characterizes complex creatures such as plants, animals, and most notably, man.
Is Man Above Nature?
Layer by layer, life evolved peacefully in its course. Then came humans. The first humans were more like apes. They ate what they found on the ground or in the trees, and they hunted what they could. They cooperated, but they acted purely on instinct.
But humans are not like other animals. They discovered that to increase their chances of survival, they should focus on developing their intellect rather than their bodies. As a result, they learned how to make weapons for hunting, instead of using their hands or rocks. They also learned how to use vessels for gathering and storing food. Over time, humans improved the use of their intellect, which enhanced their chances of survival even more. Thus, gradually, the human race became ruler of the earth.
The ability to use tools to increase food production and to build better shelters offered us a unique possibility, unavailable to other creatures: we found we could change our environment to fit our needs, instead of changing ourselves to fit nature’s dictates. This has been the key element in the evolution of humanity ever since.
The realization that we could change our surroundings to suit our desires changed the future of the human race forever. We were no longer dependent on nature, but on our own resourcefulness. That tipping point was the birth of what we now refer to as “civilization.”
The dawn of civilization, approximately ten thousand years ago, was beautiful. We improved our hunting tools, developed agriculture, invented the wheel, and saw life merrily rolling along from good to better. The only hitch in the ability to constantly improve our lives was that this ability made us feel far more powerful than we really are; we began to feel superior to nature, and this would prove to be the root of all ills.
How Two Desires Within a Person are the Key to Unlocking Increased Pleasure
Earlier we said that the desire to give creates matter, and the desire to receive gives it shape. Humans are no exception to the rule: we receive our life energy from the desire to give, and we are formed by the desire to receive. However, since we learned that we could change our surroundings to suit our desires, we have been focusing entirely on the desire to receive. We have become ignorant of the fact that we receive energy and life not from the desire to receive, but from the desire to give.
Human beings are a special species: since we realized that we could change our surroundings to our benefit, we have been developing increasingly sophisticated ways to do so. We have learned that we can use our intelligence, instead of our physical strength, to enhance our pleasure.
Yet, to enhance it effectively, we need to know what parts of nature we can change, when we can change them, and how. For example, agriculture is a change of nature because instead of picking wild oats, for instance, we can domesticate them, grow them in a field, produce many more of them, and collect them more easily. But to avoid doing harm to the environment, farmers must take into consideration numerous pieces of information, to make certain that they do not jeopardize its overall balance.
And to be able to maintain that balance, we must be aware of all the elements involved in the making of the environment, and first and foremost, of the desire to give and the desire to receive, and how they interact. Otherwise, it is as if we were trying to build a house without knowing how to make a strong and stable foundation, or planning the number of rooms without knowing how many people will be living in it.
The interplay between the two desires eludes us because it is the very basis of our make up, and therefore resides at a level deeper even than our consciousness. But once we understand how these desires interact with each other to create life, we can put this information into practice and discover how to benefit from doing so.
At the same time, if we build our lives taking both desires into account, our common sense will often be challenged. We will find ourselves considering actions and attitudes that seem to make no sense to our desire to receive, which wants only to receive. For example, what good would it do for me to give something to someone that I don’t know, don’t care for, and who would never return my favor? It makes no sense to my desire to receive.
If you suggested that by doing so I would come to know the other half of reality—the desire to give—and that I would understand how the force that creates life works, I would probably suggest that you needed to see a therapist, rather than recognize that what you are telling me has value.
Why Life Is Hard Without the Desire to Give
To understand why our ignorance of the desire to give is so harmful, we can think of the relationship between the desire to give and the desire to receive like the relationship between a mother and her child. In a healthy relationship, the baby knows her mother and knows to whom to turn when she is hungry, cold, or tired. But what if the baby had no mother? To whom would she turn to satisfy her needs? Who would feed her, clothe her, keep her warm and love her? She would have to take care of herself. What would the chances of survival be for such a poor child?
Ever since that fateful day when Nimrod chased Abraham out of Babel, some 4,000 years ago, humanity has been like that baby, trying to lead life as best as it could. We have muddled along, but we have detached ourselves from the desire to give, the life-giving force that nurtures us and the rest of the universe.
Like a motherless child, we have been deprived of guidance, trying to learn how to survive by trial and error. In our efforts to find a sustainable order in life, we have tried living in clans, slavery, Greek democracy, feudalism, capitalism, communism, modern democracy, fascism, and even Nazism. We have sought solace for our fears of the unknown in religion, mysticism, philosophy, science, technology, art, and, in fact, in every area of human engagement. All of these ideologies and pursuits promised us a happy life; none have kept that promise.
Without being aware of the desire to give and the need to balance ourselves with it, as do all other elements in nature, we have been acting solely on our desire to receive. Thus, we have created deformed societies rampant with exploitation and tyranny.
It is true that humanity has made many great achievements, such as modern medicine and abundant food and energy production. But the more we have advanced, the more we have misused our achievements, ever widening the gaps between us and increasing social injustice.
It is no one’s fault that human societies are deformed and inherently unjust. Without knowing about the desire to give, we are left with but one option in life: to receive what we can whenever possible. Hence, those who are exploited today will be exploiting tomorrow, if they come into power, because when we work with only the desire to receive, then all we want is to receive.
“From The Big Bang To Now: What Humanity Needs Most Today” is based on the book, Bail Yourself Out: How You Can Emerge Strong from the World Crisis by Dr. Michael Laitman.
