January 15, 2022
It is better to light one small candle of gratitude than to curse the darkness.
– Confucius
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.
– Cicero
Wise men appreciate and are grateful.
– The Buddha
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.
– Paul
A grateful mind is a great mind which eventually attracts to itself great things.
– Plato
If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.
– Meister Eckhart
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
– Nietzsche
Your depression is connected to your insolence
And refusal to praise
Whoever feels himself walking on the path
And refuses to praise
that man or woman steals from others everyday
Is a shoplifter.
– Rumi
I can no other answer make
But thanks,
And thanks,
and ever thanks.
– Shakespeare
A lot of attention has been given in the last few years to the value of gratitude in aiding one’s life — to improve mood, attitude, and even health — and those effects are real and valuable. There has also been increased recognition of the importance of being grateful and thankful toward those you care about — which improves and deepens relationships — and this is extremely valuable.
But I want to focus on another value of gratitude and thankfulness in this essay — how they can help us grow emotionally and spiritually. If you want to become more psychologically and emotionally mature, and especially if you want to grow spiritually, one of the most important traits to develop is gratitude — thankfulness for the good there is, for “what is.”
The default position for most of us most of the time, however, seems to be to focus on the things that are wrong with the world, with other people, with ourselves, and with our lives. This is sometimes necessary, and even beneficial. There is even recent scientific research suggesting this is the natural first response to all situations – why that happens and why it is useful. But if we do not give sufficient attention to all that is right with others and with ourselves, this becomes emotionally and spiritually stunting.
The wisest among us have understood this for a very long time. In Aesop’s Fables we hear: “Gratitude is the sign of a noble soul.” And for thousands of years, most religions have had songs and poems of gratitude and praise as a central part of their services — from Shamanic rituals to the poems and chants that make up the central part of the ancient Vedas of India. The Psalms in the Hebrew Bible are filled with songs and prayers of praise and thanksgiving, and Paul’s letters in the Christian Bible speak often of the importance of thanksgiving, saying, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances,” and “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God.”
This emphasis on gratitude and being thankful continued into the Middle Ages, with one of the greatest mystics and preachers of the time, Meister Eckhart, saying, “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” A bit later, the great poet John Milton insisted that gratitude is a primary doorway to opening to the highest moments of fulfillment:
“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.”
In the 20th century, the best-selling Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast wrote extensively about gratitude, saying at one point:
“Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy — because we will always want to have something else or something more.”
The importance of gratitude is also prominent in Buddhism. The Buddha emphasized it, saying:
“Wise men appreciate and are grateful. Wise men try to express their appreciation and gratitude by some return of kindness, not only to their benefactor, but to everyone else.”
It is, of course, fairly easy to be grateful to those who are kind to us, but the radical spiritual practice he advocates here is to also be grateful to everyone else. The Buddha also said, “A noble person is mindful and thankful for the favors he receives from others,” and “You have no cause for anything but gratitude and joy.”
One of my favorite quotes by the Buddha makes gratitude and thankfulness essential qualities on the path:
“One who possesses four qualities is deposited in heaven as if brought there. What four? Bodily good conduct, verbal good conduct, mental good conduct, and gratitude or thankfulness.”
This emphasis on gratitude is also exemplified in Buddhism by the many, many statements recorded by students through the centuries who expressed in moving language their deep gratitude to the teachers who helped them along on their journeys to liberation.
Confucius also focused on gratitude, and one of my favorite quotes is often attributed to him: “It is better to light one small candle of gratitude than to curse the darkness.”
(It is not clear if Confucius said these exact words, so to give credit where it is due, one researcher traced the first written use of this exact phrase to the writings of William L. Watkinson.)
Moving on to ancient Greece and Rome, the incomparable Plato said, “A grateful mind is a great mind which eventually attracts to itself great things,” and the greatest of Roman writers, Cicero, made a startling statement: “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”
The Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius insisted on the importance of gratitude, even for small things, such as a sunny day, a tasty piece of fruit, or a summer evening warm enough to sit outside without extra layers of clothing.
Even that highly influential 19th century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who most would not immediately think of in relation to gratitude, placed it at the pinnacle of what he loved most, art: “The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”
And, needless to say, the importance of gratitude and giving thanks is fully alive in the modern world, from the Thanksgiving holiday to the many songs and chants in the worship services of every spiritual tradition. Think about the African American services you have seen, if not in person, on television or YouTube. In fact, all over the world, worship services in every spiritual tradition are filled with songs of praise. Or think about the continuing use of Gregorian chant in thousands of monasteries all over the world for at least 1500 years, with millions of monks and nuns singing these chants of praise and thanksgiving, sometimes several hours each day.
Gratitude can, of course, arise in many different ways, and we can do many different things to develop it. For the poet and writer John Ciardi, and many other people, the best inspiration for and place to practice gratitude is in nature, as captured beautifully in his poem, “White Heron.”
What lifts the heron on its two soft kissing kites
I praise without a name
A crouch, a flair, a shape thought at the sky
A long stroke through the cumulus of trees
Then gone
Oh rare!
St. Francis, happiest on his knees,
would have cried “Father”
Cry anything you please
But Praise
Praise the white original
that lights the blue expanse of sky
While saints report their doves and rays
I sit by pond scums,
till the air recites its heron back.
And doubt all else
But Praise
Why Is Gratitude Given So Much Importance?
Many reasons have been given through the ages for the importance of gratitude. One very short statement that captures much was made by Melody Beattie, a best-selling author who writes about addiction, co-dependency, and recovery: “Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
In essence, she is saying that choosing a worldview that focuses on gratitude helps to establish a place to stand in relation to our lives and create a positive way to move into the future. That is not so different from the Buddha’s insight that, as a practitioner of the path gains a higher perspective, that person becomes “grateful that things are not worse than they are.” With this, he says, comes “freedom and joy: his thoughts are peace, his words are peace, and his work is peace.”
Besides the wisdom figures quoted so far, many of the wisest writers, philosophers, and scientists through the centuries have focused on the reasons to feel gratitude, and one common answer boils down to a question: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Those who have pondered this question and been unable to give an answer include Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, William James, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. All concluded that the very existence of a universe, and their own existence in it, is a great mystery. In response to this mystery, many wisdom figures, as well as intellectual giants, have concluded that gratitude for existence itself is the most reasonable and meaningful conclusion. For instant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said:
“Bewilderment about the fact that there is anything at all, and curiosity about meeting that fact as a wonder, is the best part of man.”
Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, wrestled extensively with the question of why we exist, and went so far as to call it “the fundamental question of metaphysics.” The reason it seemed so important to him, and to so many others, is that there is no known reason for a universe to exist. Science cannot explain it. Reason cannot. And there is certainly no known necessity for you, or I, or anyone else to exist. Yet here we are, with a universe all around us.
If you start with a void — nothing at all — it is easy to imagine that this void would continue forever. But it didn’t. Yet the fact that something appeared out of nothing is hard to wrap the thinking mind around. It is hard to imagine that out of a complete void came this universe, with its trees and flowers and cows and puppies and kittens — and you and me. How did this amazing thing happen? No one knows. But here we are. As Terence McKenna quipped, materialists say: “Give me one big miracle (the big bang) and I can take it from there.”
Now consider that without this universe you would not exist, would never have existed. Then try to take in that how it came to be is a complete mystery to us, even though the wisest among us have pondered this question for thousands of years. Because no answer has come, many have concluded that the only reasonable response is awe, wonder, gratitude, thankfulness, and praise.
Returning to Martin Heidegger, he explored the question of existence as deeply as he could for many years, and in the process helped found the philosophy of Existentialism. As his exploration developed, he realized there is a sharp difference between two ways of thinking. The first he called Calculative Thinking, which we use in our daily lives to reason, organize, plan, do math, make practical and financial decisions, and generally take care of the business of our everyday lives. With this type of thinking we build buildings, rockets, all sorts of technological devices and systems, and countless other material things.
But Heidegger also insisted we have a totally different way of thinking, which he called Contemplative Thinking. For him, this constituted the foundational level of all thinking, and of the mind itself. Further, by learning to pay attention to and by developing our capacity for contemplative thinking, we can gain access to the deepest ground of our being, and perhaps even gain access to the mysteries of existence itself.
Heidegger certainly knew that most of us spend most of our time engaged in calculative thinking, but he came to believe that, even when this calculative thinking is going on, there is always, in the background, a harmonizing and unifying flow of contemplation thinking happening beneath the surface. Most of us, however, are not conscious of this deep ground of contemplative thinking most of the time. But we can become more conscious of it by intention and practice. In fact, any one of us can access this contemplative level at any moment — if we will learn to turn our attention to it and open to its currents.
Coming at this from a more curmudgeonly direction, W. H. Auden wrote a long poem entitled Precious Five. In it, his consciousness talks to his five senses as if they are each separate entities. In the poem, he tells them why they should be happy, no matter what is going on around them. Here are the final stanzas:
Be happy, precious five,
So long as I’m alive
Nor try to ask me what
You should be happy for;
Think, if it helps, of love
Or alcohol or gold,
But do as you are told.
I could (which you cannot)
Find reasons fast enough
To face the sky and roar
In anger and despair
At what is going on,
Demanding that it name
Whoever is to blame:
The sky would only wait
Till all my breath was gone
And then reiterate
As if I wasn’t there
That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?
How Do We Access the Deepest Ground of Our Being?
Heidegger came to believe that having access to this fundamental level of our being is the most precious human gift. And he discovered, through many difficult years in his own life, and much inner work, that gratitude and thankfulness are the doorways to this deep ground of “Being.” Contemplative thinking is the doorway, and thankfulness is the doorway. Ultimately, the two cannot be separated, for “denken ist danken.”
Translated, this means “thinking is thanking.” Heidegger came to believe that when we reach the deepest level of our own being through contemplative thinking, we find ourselves being thankful. Thinking and thanking merge into one thing. Both are the doorway, and both are the destination reached. The result is serenity and inner peace.
Another way to say this is that, when we reach our own inner depths through contemplative thinking (or meditation, or prayer, or a momentary experience of awe and wonder), a spontaneous thankfulness arises. In these moments we feel gratitude for being alive, for Beingness itself. And when this gratitude spontaneously comes, we feel, to use Heidegger’s words, that we are being “lifted up” by something larger than ourselves. We feel a sense of being part of Beingness itself.
Can we make this happen? We cannot. To explain the process, Heidegger coined the term “releasement.” We cannot make the experience of Beingness happen. We can only release into it. But when we do, it feels like we have received a loving gift, and we find ourselves resting in a place that is free of personal striving — with no thought of earning, deserving, or trying to attain.
Although we cannot force releasement to happen, Heidegger definitely believed that there are ways to practice contemplative thinking that make it more likely that we will experience this release into “Being.” This is, of course, very similar to the idea that we cannot force our own salvation, or the freedom that Buddhism describes, or the final possibility other spiritual traditions describe. In all cases, as the Hindu sage Ramakrishna said, we cannot force the wind to blow, but we can raise the sails of the ship of our life to be prepared to catch the wind when it does blow.
Another and perhaps simpler way to access gratitude is to notice that things don’t always go badly. Sometimes they go well — especially if we start paying attention to that possibility; perhaps looking for good things to happen will even increase the chances. A poem by Sheenagh Pugh captures this well:
Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel faces down frost;
green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care enough,
that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born to be.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss;
sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen:
may it happen for you.
A simple saying I once heard captures much of this wisdom: “An attitude of gratitude creates a space for grace.”
In a similar vein, what John of the Cross says about love is equally true of gratitude: “Where there is no love, put love, and there you will find love.”
If we put either love or gratitude into any situation, it will be there for us to experience, no matter what anyone else is doing or feeling.
Gratitude Is Not Just for When Things Are Going Well
It is easy to be thankful when our lives are going well. It is easy to be grateful to people who have done nice things for us. But it is crucial not to stop there, for gratitude and thankfulness are two of the most powerful practices we can undertake to open us into fulfillment, peace, and joy.
There is no contradiction between the idea of Heidegger’s releasement and Samuel Johnson’s aphorism: “Gratitude is a fruit requiring great cultivation.” If we wish to experience gratitude, or freedom, or salvation, we have to develop practices that move us toward the inner space that is fertile ground for their growth. And of course, all the wisdom traditions offer just such practices — meditation, prayer, inner quiet, and more. To that list we can add Heidegger’s contemplative thinking, which is not so different from the others — just a slightly different way to access this place.
There are many examples in the wisdom traditions of those who used a radical practice of gratitude to reach the highest spiritual fulfillment. For instance, Martin de Porres was born a mulatto in Peru in 1579. He was the illegitimate son of a father who was a Spanish soldier and mother who was a former slave of African descent, and his father did not take responsibility for him. This placed Martin at the very bottom of the social order in that time and place. Yet he rose to become an advisor to the highest civil and religious authorities in Peru, and was eventually canonized as a saint in the Catholic Church. At his funeral, countless thousands from every social level streamed by to pay their respects.
How did this dramatic transformation happen? Martin practiced thankfulness for everything — even for all the wrongs that were done to him (and there were many). He would say thank you to everyone, no matter what they did, and through this practice he gradually transcended all thoughts of personal concerns or ego ambitions. He practiced just being grateful for the opportunity to be of service to all, no matter how they treated him.
In a similar vein, a French girl, born in 1873, entered a cloister at the age of 15, and was given the name Thérèse of Lisieux. She was often treated badly by some of the sisters and by an abbess. But she began a radical practice of being thankful for everything that befell her, even the very difficult, painful, and even mean things. Through this practice, she gradually became one of the most beloved saints in the history of the Church. Her example, as described in her book, The Story of a Soul, has inspired many others to attempt to practice gratitude for life, for everyone and everything, as a means of letting go of ego attachments and opening into fulfillment.
(There is, of course, a fine line between this kind of radical practice and accepting abuse, or becoming co-dependent with an abuser. Without trying to explore the differences here, the key seems to be that both Martin and Thérèse had a profound sense of confidence in themselves and the path they had chosen, and did not follow it out of weakness or fear of others. For them, it was a consciously chosen path to freedom. Because most of us do not have such a clear idea about the path to take, nor such a deep sense of our own strength in following it, it is probably not the best path for most of us. This, however, does not mean we cannot use gratitude and thankfulness as an important part of our own journeys.)
In the Buddhist tradition, there is a story with a similar message to that of Martin and Thérèse that has also been valuable to me, the story of a Zen teacher in Japan, a woman named Sono.
Her devotion and purity of heart had become known far and wide.
A monk in a distant monastery heard of her, and because he was so troubled, he decided to make the long, difficult journey to see her and ask for her help.
When he arrived, and sat in her presence, he asked:
“What can I do to put my heart at rest?”
Sono said:
“Every morning and every evening, and whenever anything happens to you, always say: Thank you very much, I have no complaints whatsoever.”
The troubled monk went home and did what she had instructed. After a year, however, his heart still was not at peace. So he made the long journey back to see Sono.
“I’ve repeated the phrase over and over, just as you instructed, but nothing has changed. I am still as miserable as I was before. What can I do?
Without a pause, Sono said:
“Thank you for everything, I have no complaints whatsoever”
On hearing those words this time, after a year of frustrating practice, the monk had a great insight, and returned home filled with joy.
As this story suggests, gratitude doesn’t necessarily just happen by itself. When it does, that is wonderful, but most of the time we have to choose it, cultivate it, until it becomes so much a part of us that it is an opening into a different way of being.
Rumi says in one of his poems:
We should ask God to help us toward thankfulness
If a man or woman flails about, he not only smashes his house,
He burns the world down.
Your depression is connected to your insolence
And refusal to praise
Whoever feels himself walking on the path
And refuses to praise
that man or woman steals from others everyday
Is a shoplifter
The sun goes out –
whenever the cloud of not-praising comes near.
If we focus on and recognize the incredible mystery of our existence, of having a life to live, we will sometimes spontaneously feel we have been given a great gift. When we open ourselves to the amazing gift of existence itself, this by itself will often trigger in us a feeling of deep gratitude. Then, as Heidegger suggests, we might find ourselves released into the state of “Being” he describes.
If we can release into this place, we can say with Shakespeare in Twelfth Night:
I can no other answer make
But thanks,
And thanks,
and ever thanks.
The best poetic summation of why we might do this is in the “Salutation,” by Thomas Traherne:
These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I find,
These rosy cheeks wherewith life begins,
Where have ye been?
Behind what curtain were ye hid from me so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?
When silent, I
So many thousand, thousand years
Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie,
How could I expect smiles or tears,
Or lips or hands or eyes?
Welcome ye treasures which I now receive.
I – that so long
Was nothing from eternity,
Did little think such joys as ear or tongue
To celebrate or see:
Such sounds to hear, such hands to feel, such feet,
Beneath the skies, on such a ground to meet.
From dust I rise,
And out of nothing now awake;
These brighter regions which salute mine eyes,
A gift from God I take.
The earth, the light, the day, the skies,
The sun and stars are mine – if these I prize.
A stranger here
Strange things doth meet, strange glories see;
Strange all, and new to me;
But that they mine should be, who nothing was,
That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.
If we can feel this wonder of our existence, we might begin to open into our own deep experience of gratitude.
Thought Experiment
There are many good ways for me to encourage the feelings of gratitude and thankfulness: Bringing to mind the people I love and special moments with them; thinking about the beauty of the natural world and especially going into nature and experiencing it afresh; remembering the magic of seeing a great city, great art, a powerful play, or the experience of great writing.
Before any of these things are even possible, however, there are three things that bring me awe and wonder when I reflect on them. And if I truly immerse myself in meditative or contemplative thinking about these things, it brings deep feelings of gratitude and thankfulness. I invite you to spend a few moments with each one of these three amazing things.
When you have a few moments, just sit and reflect on one of them at a time.
1. The fact that this vast universe exists:
Light travels 5.88 trillion miles in one year. The estimated distance of the universe we can detect with sophisticated instruments today is 94 billion light years. Thus, the size of the universe we can get hints of today is 5.88 trillion miles multiplied by 94 billion miles. Try creating that number on a calculator. Even more, a lot of scientists today seem to be concluding that the universe is infinite in size (whatever that means). Try to imagine an infinite universe.
Just sitting with the marvel of the universe for a few moments causes me great wonder, and a feeling of gratitude that such a universe came into being. Then I realize it had to do this for me to exist at all. And for you to exist. If the universe were different in any way, we might not be here. And if the universe did not exist, not one of us would be here at all. If it were even a little different, we might well not be here.
So, why is it here? How did it come to be? No one knows. There is no logical or rational explanation that has gained any consensus through the ages. Perhaps it is not too great a stretch, then, to imagine for a moment that this vast universe is here so that you and I – and everyone else — can be here?
2. The marvel of your body:
The average adult human body has around 7 octillion atoms — that’s about 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, more or less. Somehow, all these atoms in me (and an equal number in you, and in each human being) work together in each one of us in thousands of exquisitely coordinated ways to make our lives possible.
How does such a miracle happen, day after day, year after year, for me, for you — for each of the 8 billion people on this Earth? No one can begin to imagine the complexity, or how each of these 8 billion systems are internally coordinated, microsecond by microsecond. Think of the digestive system, the breathing system, the heart and circulatory system, vision, hearing, smell, touch, taste, our ability to sense our location in space, to maintain balance, the complex removal of waste products, the replacement of billions of cells every day, the incredibly nuanced systems of the skin and its sensitivity to and constant adjustments to temperature, texture, light, air, and more. Just the healing and repair systems we each have, which is constantly monitoring every part of the body and making adjustments millisecond by millisecond, is mind-boggling.
And all this does not even take into account the most complex things of all: our ability to think, to reason, to plan, to make decisions about what we will read, which shows to watch, where we will live, where we will travel, and the friends and lovers we will choose or people we will turn away from.
The brain, which is involved in all these processes, has about 1,000 trillion synapses (connections) between neurons that are firing in different ways, while themselves changing constantly. To write a computer program to manage this complex whole is unimaginable, even if we had any idea how to begin. Even if there were sufficient computing power, no one has a clue about how we do many of these things. We don’t even know whether the the brain is the sole location of these complex systems, only that it is involved.
Again, sit for a few moments trying to imagine the unimaginable complexity of this intricately coordinated set of hundreds of systems. For me, it gives rise to awe and wonder, and great gratitude for having this human form.
3. The great mystery of consciousness:
Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is your own consciousness, the creation of a personal sense of identity, the formation and coordination of countless emotions, your access to a lifetime of memories stored and catalogued in ways that no one has begun to understand. And the ability to change your emotions, your choices, and even your identity to some degree.
We now are told by science that time and space do not exist as real entities — but are actually creations of consciousness. And many brilliant minds have been telling us for a long time, all the way back to the ancient Hindu sages, that consciousness and the physical world are not separate. In modern times, listen to these highly respected scientists, including three Nobel Laureates:
Arthur Eddington: “The stuff of the world is mind stuff.”
Sir James Jeans: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”
Eugene Wigner: “Consciousness must be introduced into the laws of physics!”
Roger Penrose: “I am arguing for some kind of active role [in physics] for consciousness, and indeed a powerful one.”
Wolfgang Pauli: “It would be most satisfactory of all if physics and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality.”
The Hindu sages and some of the above scientists even came to the conclusion that consciousness came first, that it created the world. Whether this is so, no one knows, but you can be pretty certain that everything you know and experience is in your own consciousness first. Everything you experience, including all images you have about what is outside you, are first — and perhaps only — in your consciousness.
You can make a leap of faith that what you think of as the universe is also in another person’s consciousness, or in that of many others — but the only way you can do this is to assume that other people have the same kind of consciousness you do.
You cannot know this, however; can only assume it. And you can only do that by using your consciousness and then imagining that there are other consciousnesses just like yours. It all starts with you and your consciousness. You are the center of your known universe.
This realization aligns with the Buddhist thought of interdependent origination. It can also be explained by the thought of a Deity that created it all. But these ideas, and everything else, are located squarely in your own consciousness. All and everything you can experience directly is within your own consciousness.
Where is your perception of another person?
Where is your perception of the sun or moon?
Where is you perception and understanding of anything you have read or heard?
All these and everything else exist in your consciousness alone. You can assume that some of your experiences match what is out there in the world, but how do you know for sure that any of them are not a misperception, or an illusion, or a dream?
If you have any doubt about the fact that your consciousness creates the reality you see, rather than being a direct perception of something that is outside you, just browse all the current scientific literature that shows pretty clearly that, no matter the model for how consciousness takes in information, your reality is created in your consciousness. (Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently by Beau Lotto; Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman; The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald Hoffman; The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt; The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life by Lisa Miller; and How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
All this to say that everything you know starts with your own consciousness, and proceeds as waves out from there. Your consciousness is the center of your known world.
Without this universe as it is, you quite probably would not exist. And as far as you can know, everything that has gone before was necessary for you to exist.
Even harder to wrap the mind around, this universe might not be able to exist without you.
Both of those possibilities are worth a little thought — and gratitude.
Bonus Reflection
Our connectedness:
Perhaps, as the mystics have said through the eons, it is possible to leave your own mind and experience the larger realty directly while in a mystical state. We are now told that the brain is made up of trillions of sub-atomic particles — but at the same time, they do not exist in any way we understand matter existing with our thinking minds. Until they are measured, they do not exist in space or time, and are only probabilities that might exist sometime and somewhere — if and when they are measured.
We can do measurements in a controlled experiment on a tiny fraction of things, but what about all the rest of the time? What material thing exists as me when I am going about my daily life? Where is it? Who or what is doing the measuring during my normal day? If I am not being “measured” in some way, science says I do not exist in the material world as it is now understood. And if my physical brain does not exist as a physical thing in space or time, there is no reason to assume it functions in a material way, or that it is limited to any known physical dimensions. Thus the mind could be much more than the brain.
And this opens the door to what the mystics have been saying for thousands of years: that consciousness is not dependent on matter; some say that consciousness came before the physical world; and many say that you and the universe are inextricable entwinned, that the two are completely dependent on each other. Perhaps they are not even two things.
Further, many mystics and now some scientists are saying that there is a deep connection between your consciousness, the consciousnesses of others, and consciousness itself. Perhaps there is only one consciousness we all share.
A number of very bright people are exploring just this possibility in various ways today, from meditation to the scientific lab. (See: More than Allegory by Bernardo Kastrup; Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality by Robert Lanza; The Physics of God: Unifying Quantum Physics, Consciousness, M-Theory, Heaven, Neuroscience and Transcendence by Joseph Selbie; Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind by Marjorie Hines Woollacott.)
After reflecting on all these things, take a few moments to be grateful for the opportunity to live this life you have been given, and the consciousness that allows you to experience it. As Max Ehrmann says in his poem, Desiderata:
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
… whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.