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.
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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)