Gratitude and Easy Living
Gratitude seems to be a cornerstone of a wide variety of developmental systems.
Often the primary recommendation of spiritual traditions and the foundation of prayer. In the mysticism of a variety of religious systems it is often stressed that remembrance is the highest form of communication with deity. Remembrance in this form is something like gratitude with an element of acceptance: Be thankful for the good don’t be bitter about the bad: remember God as an exercise of faith in the purposefulness of existence.
The reason for this in empirically psychological terms, seems at first somewhat obscure. Life is hard. We all struggle; the Buddha formed his ideological system around the concept and the idea is a foundational concept in the religion of Islam. Terrible things happen in the world and a large part of the population is morbidly fascinated with it, pessimistic and cynical. On the other hand there is an equally large reactive tide of forced wishful idealism, a cheerfulness which only seems to promote and perpetuate ignorance and naivety.
While it’s clear that without some element of positive intention in our outlook and actions, there is no way forward. There must always be a touch of hope in our realism. Religiously expressed has the need for faith. Without it we are stagnant at best. Wishful hope, however, does us as much of a disservice as actively seeking regression. It blinds us, not only to the true situation, but also to the actual possibility of a solution and how to go about achieving it.
Photo by Josh Sorenson from Pexels
The need for gratitude as expressed across cultures has culminated in the somewhat trite affirmations of the post Freudian new age syncretic spiritual outlook, without very much understanding of how and why. In hard times one can often be told, "Well, at least you've got your health," but what if you don't? What if, like me, undiagnosed and overwhelming ill health is the genesis of one's strife. It does no good to implore someone to value the good when there is no good to be seen. To tell a homeless person that he is blessed and God has a plan for him does little to help him cope with his situation or begin to progress out of it.
The practical application is important to me because I feel that in this present technological age, systems relying to heavily on obligation and blind obedience can not stand up to our need for subjective empirical validation.
During really dark hard times in my life, the idea of true recognition for the positive aspects of my situation was impossible to acknowledge. When things got subsequently worse there was an inescapable yearning, mixed with some understanding that they were not that bad before. Nevertheless, the ability to now feel gratitude is marred by my desire to just get back to when they were marginally better than now and find away to go beyond. In times of 'grace' and 'blessings' I was overcome with relief and aspiration for for further improvement.
It’s easy to oversimplify theses changing emotions in hindsight, and see the foolishness of it. Having been through this process over and over again, in what I now think of as something of the emotional equivalent to the forging process of iron, I ask myself why the need for gratitude?
What would a thankful outlook have given me? What does it offer now?
I have concluded that true heartfelt gratitude has very little to do with acknowledging and valuing the positive and everything to do with understanding and properly making use of hardship. Appreciation offers a sense of openness to the moment. To make gratitude a core principle, is the foot in the door to allowing our experiences, especially challenging ones, to mold and form us.
This is where I feel the relationship with traditional deistic philosophical systems is most apparent. The idea that God has a plan for us is acknowledgement of our need for improvement. Our experience is, if we allow it, a training ground. There is purpose in our advancement through time. We have no need to decide what’s best for us, to trust a guru or adviser. The value in having a teacher is unrelated to the idea of being taught or guided, but is an avenue that allows us an objective view in order to transcended our conditioned biases. If we let our own participation in our subjective experience form and train us in the core, any advice is directly validated by our own experience.
In order for this to be possible, openness and clarity are essential. This is what gratitude is about: the ability to truly accept the most harrowing ordeal as the most fruitful ground for advancement. The single and only point of light in an utterly dark tunnel of repeated human folly. I do not mean this pessimistically, but in the sense that evolution is inescapable.
In some sense, gratitude has nothing to do with the good life. Nothing to do with valuing the positive. It is the almost superhuman power to see the benefit of hardship - often in retrospect - not just to comprehend - but to viscerally sense one’s own transformation. To gain utter certainty that there will be no going back to the past struggles because the future holds nothing but new struggles and the liberation achieved in overcoming them. Without this attitude, we will be put in the fire, beaten and shoved into ice water over and over again.
Gratitude is not just recommended for a more joyful life, but is the essential outlook for escaping constant anguish and torment.
Here's a song to lighten the mood:
KBong - Livin Easy (feat. Stick Figure)
Listening to your song as I write my reply:)
I think I understand what you're writing about gratitude and for me in those dark times, I don't think I can feel gratitude along with sheer anxiety, but I am able--after-the-fact--to feel gratitude for all of the difficulties that have grown me in profound spiritual and psychological ways.
In my experience, many people would rather do just about anything than be carried away into the hot flames of their psyche's for that pounding on the anvil as you've described it. I've often similarly thought of relating with others as grinding gemstones on a wheel.
I believe gratitude is increased when we exercise both bravery in venturing in deeper (or, just letting ourselves experience the emotions that come along with the struggles of being human) and when we practice self-acceptance in the moment. So, I would say that is what I attempt to do, try and shift my perceptions, see what my blind spots might be, go easy on myself knowing that only I know my own physical or mental capacities at any given time and to know that whatever is presenting itself to me in that moment is probably exactly what I need to focus on--even though it seems never to come at a convenient time.
I listened to a great podcast the other day and scribbled some of the main points down, including:
Healing the world that touches you
Finding the light in each moment
We are exactly what is needed here in the world
Perhaps you, like me, find you are reflecting and reading and working and reaching and have some aspect of you that feels you must prove your worth, or the worth of your studies and endeavors, the days you might feel ill of health and watch birds out the window?
Anyway, I do and the above was affirming to me and I hope you too, that we are contributing and doing just as we ought to be in pursuing our spiritual growth.
How you desrcibed it I think is what I was getting at...
The feeling that comes after challenges is of true value. It can be really hard but when I realize the value then there is a very positive aspect, a kind of joyful satisfaction. Yes, and affirmation of the moment. The process paves the way for a more confident approach to future challenges. Thanks for the comments :)
Yes, I went the lines with you.
Gratitude towards the hardship of something happening to us gets us to have the needed insights. To be thankful for a statement directed to us which is neither nicely said nor uses sweet expressions is not something we are used to. The habit that niceness must be expressed nicely is a false understanding of someone supporting us.
Going through a struggle is a phase in which one deeply seeks for wisdom. When I talked to people during my own crisis I got aggressive, impatient and sad after almost every encounter. In fact, the best advice I am listening to today is to ask of not talking so much about my conditions when I think of a person as an unwise one. People litter otherwise my mind with all kinds of opinions and advice.
If an advice comes unasked it's even worse. To advise a beggar to be grateful for his sheer existence, yes, that does not make any sense.
It sounds with me as you say "It is the almost superhuman power to see the benefit of hardship".
My own feeling of gratitude happens for example every time I am feeling kind of dark that I think to myself: "This is for sure going to pass". For some reason formulating this exact sentence in my mind produces a light state of being and immediately I feel at ease. I never would have thought that this simple mantra works so well. I had to practice it a while (get used to use it) and was the first one who got surprised by its efficiency.
You describe here very well the poles of tension. Have you heard of the "Square of values" from Friedemann Schulz von Thun? I use it a lot to identify the "negative" tension spaces between two poles. But to make it more complete (dimensional) there are not two but four points involved.
CYNISM is the negative result of exaggerating to make fun out of people. In the deepest sense a cynic does not take him self serious at all. Whereas making fun I connote here positively as symbol of HUMOR. It's the habit of exaggeration to the "dark side" to form cynicism out of it. A person who tends to be cynical a lot must learn therefore to take himself serious. SERIOUSNESS is the sister quality of humor. Now, if a person tends to be serious all the time and never finds something funny he/she exaggerates into deadly EARNESTNESS. This tendency then needs support in order to develop towards a more humorous approach. Now the square is complete.
I think it has a captivating logic if one can identify a certain character problem in oneself for which one needs development assistance in the other direction. I hope you can find something of value in my reply.
But I observe this poles in my society, too.
Thank you for this consoling and wise text. It does do me good to see that there are other people feeling and thinking in a similar way.
There is a lot for me to digest in your reply...
I'm glad you understood my post so we'll. I was a little afraid my style of writing is too obscure. I struggle to make clear points but at the same time I'm finding my feet in this form of expression.
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I find you very clear. And I like how you also use concrete examples.
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