Today, we're going to be talking about gratitude. You hear it all over the place, 'You should be grateful for this' or 'list ten things you're Grateful for', 'the more grateful we are, the better person we are'… and so on.
It doesn't work that way. You shouldn't be grateful for anything.
Why is being grateful or having gratitude so horrendous?
Why is gratitude a top-level sin?
Are you ready for the answer?
Let's start with the definition of gratitude – with the pure definition and why gratitude needs to be defined. It has to be defined because in this reality, if anything is not defined, you won't be able to experience it. Laughter, happiness, anger: if they're not defined in this reality, you won't be able to experience them.
But before we define gratitude, let's understand something first: emotions are just programs – they're simply programming.
Emotions are indicators or guides for how you are fulfilling the underlying program you're running. For example, you could have a program for being abused or a program for being lucky: your emotions guide you; they are compasses to guide you to fulfill the underlying program you're running.
(Calibrating Emotions Podcast)
You shouldn't trust your emotions until you recalibrate them to get you where you want to go. Look at the last time you followed your heart: you feel that gushy feeling, you jump into that relationship and then, three/four months later, that person is abusing you. It's not so great. You need to recalibrate your emotions by looking at the underlying programming that your emotions are guiding you towards.
Coming back to gratitude, the top-level definition (which then gets watered down through the filters that we have) is that gratitude, at a pure level, is a shackle around you. Now, that sounds weird. Why would a god (however you define god), a programming, global setting, or presence, create a shackle around you called gratitude?
At the limitless (or timeless) level of who you are, you wouldn't be grateful for anything because you are everything and anything that you could be. You could not be grateful because there is no separation or reference points at that level.
So, the top-level definition of gratitude is a shackle. It's a beautiful shackle; it's an adornment; it's a beautiful necklace around your neck; it embraces you to help you understand the beauty of who you are. It creates a reflection; it gives you a reference point to look at yourself and what you've rendered.
Imagine yourself as a spirit or your timeless self. How can you feel the immensity you are, the infinite wisdom, the infinite beauty, and the brilliance you are? If you are all that you are, you can't – you would need a reflection of yourself. That's why time and space have been created. You are here in this reality: to understand how grand you are.
So, we created time and space. How do you connect yourself to time and space? Again, time and space are created so we can see and reflect the limitless possibilities that we are, and we're not running them all at once.
(Space-time podcast episode)
When we have gratitude, that's the mechanism, or the beautiful shackle, that binds us into time and space. It's quite beautiful; it's an adornment of who you are. In that scenario, as you see yourself, you're grateful for your brilliance, and you don't have to pay anything back. What do you do? You give back the gift of time and space. You render yourself from it, you go back to yourself, and you go to a higher level. In its purest form, that's what being grateful is about. It's an experience that allows you to expand into yourself; that's the type of gratefulness you want.
People use gratefulness to destroy, control, and abuse at the lower levels. When you take something that is pure and redefine it at this level, just like love, it becomes destructive. Nobody uses it properly. Just like nobody uses forgiveness properly…
Coming back to gratitude, think of why it's a shackle: it's to reference you, in this reality.
At this level, gratefulness is used to shackle and bind you, not adorn you. The classic example is parents or a lover saying: "You should be grateful for what I've done for you, I gave up this, I put you through college so you could live a better life," or "Your father sacrificed through war, your forefathers sacrificed for you to be free," "You should sacrifice yourself and get vaccinated so you can save other people."
Do you see how that becomes a shackle? It becomes a shackle of guilt, of burden, of shame. And you wear it around your neck, and it's rusty, heavy – it's a shackle that destroys you.
"My kids are so ungrateful", "My spouse is ungrateful", and "They're so ungrateful for what I'm doing for the country ."It's not what you did for them. It's you – wanting them to feel guilty and shameful to pay you back for what you lost. Crazy, isn't it?
Here are the logistics of how that works:
You redefined what gratefulness is by using sacrifice; you gave your essence. You might think you gave your time, money, your… whatever it is – it's not about that. You gave of yourself, your presence, essence, and limitless self. The point is that you gave your essence away for something of material manifestation. Simple as that. And now what you're doing is you're blaming others.
It's like, "Hey, I gave myself away, and I did all this for you. I want myself back", "I did all this for you, I want part of your essence because now I feel like I'm drowning and you should be grateful". In this equation, you gave your essence away and want somebody else's essence or presence back; you literally want their spirit.
So, don't be grateful to anybody because being grateful means that you have to pay back according to the pure definition. It doesn't work in this realm because it's not a physical thing that you're paying back. You're exchanging your essence, and when you're grateful to someone or something, they own you. They control you.
If somebody does something for you and it transforms your life, you're grateful to them. They ask you for something, and you feel guilty and shameful. Again, that burden you feel, you can never remove, no matter how much you've done for them. It's like a noose. That's what happens when you're grateful. You always have to pay it back. Even if they don't want anything back, you always feel like you have to pay it back; it's a burden.
What do you do instead? Use thankfulness. Thankfulness is clean; it's efficient. Be thankful for what you have; think of the free flow. Doesn't it sound better? Being thankful, it's a contract that's just clean-cut.
Thankful – It severs the ties between you and others. If you're solid and confident and want to be sufficient on your own, start using thankfulness. It's a clean-cut relationship. And when you're thankful for something, it never gets old because you have to reinitiate that agreement. For example, in timeless relationships, you sever that contract, and it disconnects you; then, when you want to reunite, you renew the agreement or reestablish that connection you have with each other, and it's always new. It's always thriving.
But when you're grateful, it's actually "Hey, you should be grateful for that one thing that I did ten years ago" that they're still holding over your head. How does that relationship work out? We've all been there, right? And you can never get out of that.
Use being thankful for everything you do, and don't get into being grateful for anything, no matter who says it. They don't know the deeper science of gratefulness; they don't understand the deeper implications.
Use thankfulness. It's simple, it's quick, it's revitalizing, and it's timeless.
