Dear friends,
Some thoughts have been going through my mind on the subject of gratitude and I'd like to share these ruminations with you in this meditation.
Let's begin by bringing yourself to a place of rest.
You might be sitting casually on a chair just now or you might have organised a meditation cushion and you might even be trying out meditation for the first time.
Wherever you are and however you are seated,
I hope you'll settle into a comfortable position and allow yourself these few minutes of relaxation and reflection.
For the next 60 seconds,
Allow yourself to simply be,
Leaving aside all worries and concerns for now and giving yourself an opportunity to come to a place of peace and calm.
Sometimes when the idea of gratitude is mentioned,
People want to know to whom or to what are we to be thankful.
For those who believe in God,
In the everyday sense of that much used word,
Gratitude is an expression of thanks to a supreme being who has created or who is the underlying basis of the reality in which we exist.
But God is a very small word for a very big idea.
It's comical to think of us,
Finite beings,
No more than tiny ants really,
On a very small planet,
Circling a very ordinary star,
One of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy,
Itself only one of billions of galaxies in the known universe.
And yet,
Tiny as we are,
We are hugely significant,
Because we have the capacity to reflect and ponder on the biggest questions and even explore mind-boggling ideas such as eternity and infinity.
At the very least,
Our existence can be described as the universe becoming aware of itself.
Or as Alan Watts famously put it,
We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory,
Of its magnificence.
There are people who,
True to their conscience,
Cannot accept the idea of God in any sense of the word.
And so a reasonable question is,
Why should non-believers feel a sense of gratitude if there is no being or entity to whom the thankfulness is to be expressed?
Let's have another one minute pause now.
This time so that you can consider how you feel about gratitude,
And why we should have any intonation or any need to feel a sense of thankfulness for our being here.
Welcome back again.
I'll be looking forward to reading your comments after you've listened to this meditation.
And I'm sure what you have to say will provide food for thought for everyone who might follow this discussion.
While these ideas were circulating in my mind,
A thought which I hope you'll find interesting came to me,
And it is this.
If this extraordinary universe in which we find ourselves and our own existence is nothing more than the mindless coming together of the atoms and the subatomic particles that make up the world,
Isn't there even a greater reason for us to be grateful for the fact that we are here,
And able to debate and contemplate these things?
If an entity which we call by the name God is responsible,
It would only be common politeness to express our gratitude.
But if nothing whatsoever is responsible for us being here,
Then isn't our existence even more astounding?
And doesn't this give rise to an even greater call to us to fall to our knees,
If not in prayer,
Then at least in awe and wonder and gratitude?
Gratitude even though,
If we are of a non-theist frame of mind,
We have no one or no thing to whom the thankfulness can be expressed.
It seems therefore that irrespective of our beliefs,
Our doubts or even our non-beliefs,
It is impossible for us to weave a mindful way through this existence,
Without being filled with a sense of awe and wonder and heartfelt thanks.
The odds against any of us being here,
Or anything at all being here,
Are so immense,
So incalculable,
That all we can do when we take time to pause and reflect on these things as we should,
Is to say thank you.
And thank you again and again and again.
