Namgyal Rinpoche – on ‘Giving’ – from the early 1970’s:
“To the human being, for all practical purposes, love is giving. It is giving from the parent, or the teacher, or from friends, of two things: one is physical sustenance, and the other is mental sustenance.
Rather than attempting to define the ‘undefinable’, perhaps we can talk about what love must do. You must feed the hungry if you love, you clothe the naked and you visit the fatherless in their affliction. That is considered to be the summation of charity.
Unfortunately the word charity has rather a bad connotation, linked now with ideas of commodity and superiority. The origin of the word is from the Latin – ‘caritas’, which means simply, love. It suggests that you do something.
You don’t just meditate, you transmit it, move it into the karma level, the enlightenment mind at work.
Let us suppose that you want to be actively involved in love. The first step of this discipline – and it is possibly the greatest of all disciplines – is to begin at the physical level.
All of you are mothers, one to the other, to some degree. If the mother loves the child, or if you love one another, there is giving of physical sustenance.
This has become confused with the giving of commodities. To give physical sustenance you should hold one another. Not that you hold on to, but that there is some kind of contact, a physical warming. That is sustaining. It warms the cells of the body directly. It may transmute energy – it may even promote physical healing.
You also give, especially to a child, physical food. You should share food. One of the great symbols of the early Christian teaching was the Agapé, the love feast. Beings greeted one another with a physical kiss which – and not merely symbolically – contributed to the flow of love. Then they ate together, shared wine together. They partook of the Lord’s Supper, which later became the Mass and the Eucharist.
Now the church is trying to bring that back to what it was originally, eating together with the Lord. When you share together communally, at the physical level, you can be led into the experience of the Lord, the shining, the higher. You are prepared for the development of love.
Greet each other sincerely, by physical contact. Shake hands, yes but also greet each other with embrace. If you do that in a pure state of mind it will not lead into sexual distortion, because it won’t be that kind of action. It will just be warm human contact. And it won’t be just mental contact!
Other things follow in their due order, like the giving of clothing and the sharing of goods to at least ensure that the level of physical love is entirely covered.
Once a week beings should come together communally to share their involvements.
Any of these suggestions can be accepted or abandoned as you wish – they are intended as directions for consideration, not as rules…”