The Lying 8 – Thoughts about Giving and Taking
My wife is a piano teacher. Yesterday evening she told me that one of her students just had been very fascinated. The student had experienced that she was using different faculties in playing – imagination, hearing, sense of touch – and my wife had explained her how there is an interplay of these. The student was very grateful and told my wife: “You are always giving me so much.” My wife answered: “I give what I have, and in giving it starts flowing. When you keep it to you, the flow is stopped, and also when you just keep on receiving without giving.” And she told me: “It is like a lying 8, the sign of infinity. It keeps in motion, when you give, without expectation to receive something in return. It is an energy circulation.”
In the “Spiritual Psychology” meditations by Dr. Ekkirala Krishnamacharya, one meditation says: “Bliss lies in giving, not in taking…” It is a deep principle and only little understood today. Many are craving for getting and taking – money, power, love, ideas, emotional affection… In this attitude the free flow is absorbed by you. And when you give out of an expectation to get something in return, you get frustrated, when it doesn’t happen and feel burnt out.
Some time ago I had issued a number of the Good Will in Action on Giving and Taking, where you find some more thoughts about it.
