Gratitude

I asked my heart recently what to write my next blog about and the word gratitude arose.

This will be a good exploration for me because I have had some trouble with gratitude these last few years because of health issues. I experienced periods with a dark, serious, heavy outlook and could find no gratitude in my heart, but I did find a lot of anger!

We can be grateful about many things. A nice house and beautiful things in my house. A nice car. Enough money. Good health. Great friends. A good job or career. Engaging interests. A satisfying religious or spiritual path. A beautiful environment.

But meditating on gratitude, it became clear that gratitude for me is ultimately not so much about things or even life circumstances but about the life force, that beautiful life force flowing upwards in the body, like armies of marching ants. That dragon breath that fills the universe and our bodies, and animates and gives life to everything, a rich cornucopia and infinite possibilities that is the celebration of just that: life.

Simple.

We can be grateful about all the things and circumstances in our lives and that is valid and good, and very important, particularly our health. The heart is grateful for all things, material and immaterial, and also feels pain deeply about suffering. But it is particularly the separated ego that will be grateful for good things and good circumstances.

I come to this thread again that runs through all my blogs, and it is the division between a separated consciousness, the ego, and the totality of being or pure consciousness. Here the ways do part.

The ego is grateful for good things and a good life, but beyond the ego there is a grand universe of life and being. Here, what is good and bad blurs. Happiness and suffering blur. Distinctions and divisions blur.

Gratitude can give rise to feelings of joy and love and catapult us into our hearts and elevate us into a different level of consciousness where more of the same exists, and, very importantly, a different perspective on life.

For me, gratitude is love. The life force is joy and love. The bubbling of this life force upwards in the body is called self-arising joy in Buddhism. It is a form of ecstasy and I see it as the awakened field of the body.

A friend who lives in nature summed this up nicely when she said how beautiful it was exploring nature and how her heart was singing. Indeed, singing with joy – in gratitude.

The two perspectives represent two different worlds, the one encompassing the other, the world of the heart, the totality of being, enveloping the world of the ego mind. One, in the end, in spite of my earlier comment about division.

The next day, I have an experience of gratitude that is love. I am walking along the top of a beautiful ravine with a creek flowing through the bottom and with bushes and trees surrounding it starting to come into leaf. I encounter a young buck eating grass on the slope. He is comfortable with my close presence. Birds fly around and sing and call. I wonder to what? Are they singing and calling about the exhilaration of flying? The sheer exuberance of life? Are they singing their appreciation for the return of spring and life budding?

In the past, a foal was born on my property and one day we went riding with her mother and the foal. It was a sight to behold to see her running around with abandon and whinnying and feeling the exuberance and exhilaration of this new, spectacular life.

What the foal and the birds show is the appreciation and celebration of life. Not that they have a big nest or a lot of food, or that the trees are particularly abundant or beautiful, or that the mother is good looking, or that they have a nice shelter and big, fat worms. No, it is the exhilaration of life. Just that.

Animals vocalize their gratitude for nature and life. Birds sing their songs of love to the rising of the sun after the rest and darkness of the night. We can be grateful also for the falling of darkness, giving us rest, and revealing the glittering gems in the sky, an immense, mysterious cosmos surrounding us. And for the depth of the blue sky, deep blue oceans, flowing silver rivers, mighty trees, happy flowers, and the sentinels of the mountains. But also, even though it is not comfortable, the rage of tornados, roaring storms, the barrage of hail, slashing rain, and freezing snow and ice.

Spectacular, raw life.

Nature is love. I feel love in nature and in my environment. It is everywhere: in the sky, the land, the trees, the flowers, animals and people. Nature is our nature. We have separated out much from our nature, that is why it is so nurturing for us to be in physical nature.

At the level of the life force and gratitude being love and joy, we enter the deeper realm of our being. Here we commune with our hearts, with God, with the infinite awareness we are. So ultimately, gratitude is love and joy, the experience of being, and communion with our alive hearts. It is really not about things or circumstances.

When we are transported to our hearts through the joy and love of gratitude, we enter a different realm. Here, in the heart, the world looks different and takes on a different meaning. The heart sees love and connectedness everywhere, but it also sees the distortion of love everywhere, doing its destructive dance. This causes the heart acute pain, a sharp thorn tearing it. But if the heart remains open, the pain can be absorbed in it and give it further depth.

I realize that gratitude, like hope, faith and trust (discussed in a previous blog), is a moot point in the end. Because when we live in the heart, we are this. In the heart, we live gratitude and the love and joy it is. However, I don’t mean to say to not be grateful!

Writing this blog, the word gratis comes up. It relates to gratitude. Gratis means for free. We have to give nothing in exchange. The most simple, magical and important things are free, such as life. I was freely given life, and you were too. We can freely make new life. It costs nothing and it is a great pleasure. We can plant life and see it grow. We can nurture life in our children, animals, and nature, and in ourselves. The most priceless thing is free and that is life. I am grateful for that. For life and its experiences. For its beauty and ugliness. For its love and pain. Life is really unspeakably awe-ful, wondrous and beautiful, and horrific.

Gratitude for the simple things in life is important. And the simple things are the most important, such as life, water, food and shelter. In my part of the world, we take these things for granted. My parents lived through WWII. My mother and her family were starving in the Netherlands but they made it. I have never experienced this. I always have had enough and I don’t know hunger, thirst or any other lack. What a blessing and something to be very grateful for. The peace and abundance we have is fragile. It doesn’t take much for society and civilization to break down and degenerate into unimaginable violence.

You are probably familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It shows our basic survival needs at the bottom and culminates in self-realization.

We could take the pyramid as an analogy for existence. Now imagine the pyramid shown as the tip of a much larger pyramid. The basis of this pyramid is our pure consciousness and formlessness. The next layer up is cosmic forces and soul and its experiences that produce belief, thought, emotion and action. The tip of this pyramid is the pyramid shown where we now have physical bodies with survival needs, psychological needs and the culmination of self-realization. Self-realization is knowing who we are and that is the pure consciousness at the basis of the pyramid. Another analogy for this is the beautiful form of a detailed ice sculpture that is made from formless water.

We experience gratitude for different things based on where we focus in the pyramid. The ego is grateful for good material things and circumstances, the top part of the pyramid and some of its layers. The heart and soul are also grateful for these things, but have a connection to the deeper blessings of life like the life force, life itself, pure consciousness and the love and joy it is. All the rest is gravy or suffering.

It can be difficult sometimes to feel gratitude. I know! And that’s okay. Life is a big wave with peaks and valleys. It is a challenge to learn to love everything in our lives, to liberate these things, particularly what we deem to be bad. The spiritual ego tells us that we should feel good and be over things or be okay with everything. What a crock of nonsense! But I also know that if I embrace whatever circumstance is upon me, whatever thought I may have, whatever feeling I may have, whatever I may have done or not done, and approach that with compassion and nonjudgment and sit with that silently, I will enter the heart where I will find love, peace, and acceptance, as well as the joy and love of gratitude.

Travelling spiritually through a black hole is a good analogy for this. We enter the black hole of what needs to be liberated, and as we are there and sit with this and travel deeper into the black hole, we will find that the bottom will drop out. We will break through into the light at the end of the tunnel, and we will enter that vast field of awareness that we are and is filled with gratitude.