Gratitude

If you want to be treated more fairly and to be loved and adored, you must be the change you want to become in the world. You must be fair and you must emanate love and adoration, not just for other people but for places and things. I’m talking about gratitude.

We all love the grateful. Grateful people are thankful no matter what their circumstances. They take nothing for granted. You may be a jerk (here I am, the pot, calling out the kettle) but they are grateful for you. They uplift everyone and everything in their presence. Gratitude is powerful.

Think of the most grateful person you know. If you don’t know of anyone who emanates gratitude, consider the example of Jesus Christ. No matter what happened, Jesus was grateful to his father, God, for the opportunity to experience life. While on Earth, Jesus performed miracles that came from a well of power whose source was the connection forged with ultimate gratitude. Jesus knew himself to be poor but he preached gratitude nonetheless, because he was able to appreciate his circumstances and the lessons they offered while he was on Earth. Jesus had no fear of death despite the fact he was tortured to death. His gratitude overcame his fear.

We All Have to Start Somewhere

I’m not rich and my lifestyle is fairly modest. Nevertheless, I am nowhere near as poor as Jesus and chances are neither are you. We can either wallow in guilt and consider ourselves sinners, or we can appreciate our surroundings at every moment.

To appreciate is to raise in value. Value is not strictly material. A wise entity once threw me a bone. It said that genuine gratitude from the heart sublimates everything it touches by the power of seven. I have parsed this to mean that an act of genuine gratitude blesses the giver and the receiver across seven planes of existence. When a little boy gave his small portion of fish and bread to Jesus, via the power of his selflessness and Jesus’s gratitude the fishes and loaves were transformed into a hearty meal for five thousand people. The loaves and fishes example is an extreme one meant to illustrate a point. If you give everything you have out of the goodness of your heart, God will bless you and keep you no matter how bad things get. If you are compulsively generous, you will be rewarded with a kind of generosity to which no form of material wealth can compare.

Start where you are and thank the bed you slept in. If you have time or if there is not someone still sleeping, make the bed as you thank it. Making the bed is an act of appreciation and love. It restores the order of the bed and in effect “seals the deal” of the appreciation you express. A heartfelt thank you to the bed, whether or not you slept well, tells it that you don’t take it for granted that you have a soft, warm place to sleep at night. It vicariously thanks the place and time where you live for sheltering you, especially if bombs were not raining down or if natural disasters weren’t attempting to wipe your residence off the map.

The Dollar Tree Egg Roll

Another potent ritual is to thank the food you eat for its sustenance, even if it is a Dollar Tree egg roll that you cooked in the microwave for lack of a better alternative. Someone grew the cabbage, threw it into a dangerous machine for slicing, and oversaw the frying, cooling, and wrapping of the egg roll. To be grateful for the egg roll and all those who brought it to you is to accept both the benefits and drawbacks of our era. Convenience food is nice in some ways. Gratitude for it means amplifying the good aspects of the egg roll and shifting focus off the bad. Yes, the egg roll is not healthy. In an ideal world, I would be handcrafting my own egg rolls with cabbage, carrots, and onions grown in my garden. I do have the good fortune of owning a garden. I have yet to grow the vegetables and gather other ingredients to make egg rolls. Instead of focusing on the egg roll’s calorie count or its lack of nutrition, I consider how wonderful and tasty it is and how hard various forces worked to bring it to me. I could be yet another diet-obsessed drudge; those types are common enough. It’s easy to obsess about what I eat. I don’t. People love being obsessed with food because it spares them the hard work of confronting their real fears and drives in contemplation and discursive meditation. In a world teeming with toxic negativity and misery, gratitude serves to counterbalance certain forces that have gotten out of control. I cannot singlehandedly cure the collective astral plane of the nastiness it suffers right now; nobody can. There’s no way gratitude for a nuked Dollar Tree egg roll will save the world. I can, however, be grateful for small things and small acts of kindness and by that virtue ameliorate some of the black sludge of the modern collective consciousness. I can watch and observe as that gratitude bounces back at me through the planes by the power of seven or more.

Imagine being grateful to every object, person, or place that fills your life. Imagine being grateful to those you don’t like for teaching how not to be and what not to do. Imagine being grateful for your mistakes because they are a constant opportunity to learn, despite it often feeling like trial by fire. Gratitude is like a rose in the garden. If you tend to it and give it lots of care it will grow and flourish. If you are grateful to your bed every morning, you will sleep better at night. If you are grateful for the place you live, you won’t be consumed by the desire to fix every aspect of it or to run away. The consequence of gratitude is often more gratitude. If you are grateful to others, they stand a much better chance of changing into the kind of people who would earn that gratitude than if you took them for granted and got angry at them for their behavior. Gratitude builds the positive and to a degree ignores the negative.

Gratitude and the Spirit of Place

The first connection to the spirits of place happens via gratitude, not by “getting into the occult”, pulling out the Ouija board, or hosting a sleepover seance. Humans make a grave mistake when they presume that bad energy that flies in their direction is coming either from other human beings who happen to know magic or other human beings who happen to be dead. At any given moment, the subtle ecosystem around you is populated by a complex menagerie of unseen beings. Some of these beings are the spirits of the dead. Some are elementals, beings that make fire hot and whose energy is the reason snow becomes crystals. Some are the spirits of place, from huge land spirits that encompass entire provinces and give them their particular idiosyncrasies to a tiny spirit who occupies the stove in a rented apartment. Some are thought egregores you created yourself that develop lives of their own. Some are egregores created by groups of people, such as the spirit Carl Jung described and warned about in his prophetic essay Wotan. Some are larvae, the unseen equivalent of maggots. Larvae are found wherever there is sickness or death. Clairvoyants can actually see them; most of us can only sense them as an icky feeling. Some are angels and some are demons. There are some who are so beyond humans in their intelligence that they could destroy you and everything you know in a single thought, yet for some odd reason they don’t. Most of the subtle ecosystem cannot be explained at all, and it also doesn’t help that we humans cannot physically see it and that our scientists have forgotten what it is to try to understand it. Just know it is there and as humans, we are uniquely handicapped when it comes to perceiving it.

Ancient Mayans feared the age we are currently living through. It’s as if they knew how far the human race would fall from being in touch with its own spirituality. Though people of our era love to claim that humankind is at the most advanced state it has ever achieved and that the past was full of ignorant, god-bothering rubes, it is our time that is the true Dark Age. Like a person who gradually becomes blind over the span of several years, our entire race has gradually lost its connection to clear perception of the subtle worlds over many generations. The unseen world is in attack mode all the time now. I don't think it was always this way, but it is this way now. That is why it is unwise to counterhex people who you think or know are hexing you. In absence of a banishing ritual such as the Sphere of Protection or the etheric and astral shielding formed by sacred homemaking and a great prayer relationship with one or more gods, to counterhex is to paint a target on your own back. You end up calling out for the exact type of energy you are trying to repel, much like the dumb kid who took a couple of martial arts classes and makes the mistake of taking on the biggest bully in school.

The answer to the blindness of our age is to slowly re-sensitize ourselves via the appreciation of the good, and that means cultivating many gardens of gratitude.