(October 15, 2019 at 2:56 pm)mordant Wrote:(October 14, 2019 at 9:55 am)Acrobat Wrote: Sure, to live my life, with a prevailing sense of gratitude, wonder and amazement, with a sense of something profound deep, and rich about it all.
Now perhaps you might acknowledge this about yourself as well, but assign its to the universe here, but it’s rather synonymous, where reality of universe is just replaced with a reality of God, as if they are one and the same.
It would be sort of like assigning it all to the singularity.
An "attitude of gratitude" is a bit of a misnomer. Gratitude definitionally has to be directed to some sort of benefactor, even if that benefactor has to be made up.
What we are really after is an appreciation of the positive aspects of our existence, which requires one's awareness to be raised (indeed, given our inherent negative bias -- it has to be cultivated). But it doesn't require a benevolent external actor, simply a recognition of certain events and contextualizing them in a positive way. If it just so happens that some REAL benefactor conveyed that benefit -- a parent, a sibling, a spouse, a child, a dear friend, a random stranger, a doctor, whatever -- then we can of course express gratitude toward that actual, real benefactor.
I think this is an instance where the habitual indiscriminate use of loaded words like "gratitude" drives the discourse a bit off course.
Someone quoted someone on twitter the other day to the effect that his grandfather used to say, in the midst of some pleasant family experience or other, "if this isn't nice, I don't know what is" and this stuck with him throughout his life -- the need to recognize and give voice to positive experiences, otherwise, they tend to pass through us unnoticed, whereas unpleasant experiences are definitely noticed, if not catastrophized.
That's the real issue -- no gods or supernatural impetus required to make it work. Sometimes nice things just happen; sometimes they are instigated or catalyzed by some real actor, sometimes they are at the end of a far vaguer causal chain. The need is for us to even NOTICE these things, not to ascribe magical properties to them.
Gratitude can be a temporary appreciation, it can also be a state of mind/being. It’s one thing to be grateful in the moment of something being given, but there’s what we can say is to be continually grateful.
If we can imagine a person resentful, bitter, in which this and who they are, is inseparable, that we can imagine what might be the opposite, filled with gratitude.
I look at my mother as such a person, even in suffering and grief or sorrow, she never really caves into resentment and bitterness, but a sort of beautiful resilience, as what I can be best be described as the experience of gratitude, a gratefulness, which is as much a reality for her, as an object in which it’s directed. It’s both a state of being, and the God she loves. It’s nothing magical, or out there, it purely what is.
