Question: When should we give to those who ask of us and when should not?

Answer: Jesus said regarding this the following: give to everyone who asks of you. At the beginning, doing in this way makes sense; it is good for a start. We shall make mistakes and it will give us pain. But in this process we shall learn altruism and self-sacrifice, as well as the wisdom expounded in the Bhagavad Gita on this issue. In particular, it says that gifts can be tamasic, rajasic, or sattvic. So I refer you to the Bhagavad Gita. It expounds the wisdom, which we have to master as a result of practice of giving away.

If we do not give away, we will never master Wisdom, not to mention Love.

Yes, our love may be unwise, but we have to start with something, do you understand? This will be at least something, some kind of love. And only when we start loving people, we start learning how to do this. If we have never loved before, if we live with consumeristic attitude toward other people, what kind of wisdom we are talking about? When we start giving away, when we start making mistakes, when we see that our love produces an effect different from what we expected, when we see that our love makes other people suffer, then we get a chance to learn to love wisely. One cannot learn anything without doing it. This is unavoidable: we unwittingly inflict pain to others, inflict pain to ourselves. In the long run we shall master the wisdom of love, and later — the Love with which God loves people.

But, we know that God not always seeks to remove somebody’s pain; sometime it is the other way around — God creates painful situations for people’s bodies in order to save them as souls! But we should not try to imitate God in this right now; in this respect we are on the other pole in relation to God. At the moment, we have to learn giving away, cordial love, and service. This is why Jesus said to us: give everyone asking of you! But in another case He said: do not throw pearls to swine and dogs, otherwise they trample them will attack you. As to the truth here, we have to find it ourselves through the practice of giving away.