LukeJTM wrote: ↑Mon Oct 02, 2023 4:48 pm Thanks for the responses back, Ashvin and Federica.
It seems that it would potentially be a very good idea to incorporate some form of expression of gratitude into meditation. Specifically, gratitude towards the higher heirarchies who help make our incarnations possible. Do any of you know any meditations or prayers that achieve this?
Luke,
Zajonc explicitly incorporates gratitude into his meditations, such as the one here. Every meditation for him enters through the gate of humility and reverence and exits through the gate of gratitude, and I think that is a great practice to emulate. As Federica noted, the Psalms are generally great prayers for expressing gratitude to the Divine All.
However, we should not imagine that the meditations/prayers achieve gratitude out of of themselves. Our innermost disposition is always the critical factor. If we don't truly feel the sense of gratitude, there is no way to 'fake it' into our prayers, like we might do when putting on certain masks for other people in outer life. So it is something we need to work on cultivating and we can certainly pray for this soul quality-faculty to enlarge within us so that we become of better and better service to humanity and the Earth.
An area where I try to work especially hard on cultivating the feeling of gratitude is when eating, because my default tendency is to gobble down the food while watching TV and thinking a million different things, with little attention to the taste and nutrition that the hierarchies have worked into this food that sustains me and also allows me to exercise my spiritual activity (Steiner lectures on how food substance is converted into etheric forces for our head). We can at least start by saying a simple mantra while contemplating the food before us, like "God's love is full of abundant life" (3x). We can also try to work on chewing slowly and intentionally and sensing all the harmonious natural and cultural processes that went into bringing that food to us.
Another way of cultivating the quality that we all probably have some familiarity with is by contemplating the wondrous scenes of Nature. Zajonc writes about that as well:
In our meditative practice we can cultivate the above change in consciousness. For example, consider a still mountain pond surrounded by stone and trees. Birds wing across the pond, and an occasional fish breaks its surface. The blue sky and white clouds are reflected in its depths. Sitting with such an image, we can recognize at least four stages on the path of reverence.41 We first meet the pond with wonder. Before the sublime we are astonished by what we experience, we are awed and quietly amazed, joy spreads through us, and we are simultaneously energized and settled inwardly. Wonder can change to reverence when we ponder the force or agency that lies behind the phenomenon beheld. As in a work of art, we recognize the wisdom and beauty that are reflected in the form, colors, sounds, and movements of the mountain pond. How did these come into existence? What wise and generous agency created them? No longer an “It,” that which is before us has become a “Thou,” in Martin Buber's language.42 In the third stage we find ourselves drawn more and more deeply into the scene of pond and mountain. We resound with the interior tones and currents of that which is before us. Its own harmonious nature sounds also in us. We participate in the pond, sensing its watery nature; we live partly into the hard stone that rises up on all sides, we open into the infinite reaches of the sky. Our own sense of autonomy and identity blurs and we identify increasingly with the other. The Thou before us moves gradually into us. The final stage is self-surrender. The universal, protean aspect of our own nature is capable of becoming all things, and in the final fourth stage we do exactly this. Subject-object consciousness disappears and a non-dual form of awareness takes its place. We know from within because we are the object itself.
Albert Schweitzer recounts his discovery of reverence as a guide while making his way by boat along the narrow creeks of Africa. He tells us that he was seeking a universal ground for ethics, writing his reflection in his journal as he traveled. Suddenly, “Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, ‘Reverence for Life.’ The iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible.” Reverence opened a path for Schweitzer as it can for us.
The closing lines of Mary Oliver's poem “Wild Geese” reminds us, “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, /calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—/over and over announcing your place/in the family of things.”43 Schweitzer heard the call. The world's offer is one we should take up repeatedly. When we are open enough it will surely awaken us to a true ethic based on a reverence for life.
Whether experienced by Thoreau on Walden Pond, or John Muir writing on the Western wilderness, or Mary Oliver musing on wild geese, nature continuously invites us to move beyond our physical and psychological struggles and to enter into a vaster universal rhythm and current that embraces us always but mostly remains unnoted. It offers itself to our imagination, calls to us, announcing our place within the family of things. We have evolved in relationship with these currents of nature, and we can use them as a trusted foundation for our meditative life every day of our lives.
Zajonc, Arthur. Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love (pp. 63-64). SteinerBooks. Kindle Edition.