(This is Part 13 of a continuing series. Go back to Pt 12.)
7. The Principle of Praising
There is a kind of secret key in life, a key which can be summed up approximately like this: Praise everything. Give thanks for everything.
Let gratitude overflow in your heart, and then, as the day must follow the night, light will replace the darkness in your life and you will feel as if you have gone to heaven —as indeed you have, though it is happening right here, right now, right on planet earth.
This praise is very specific and moment-to-moment. If you're out driving a car, praise God for the car and the scenery going by, whatever it might be. Praise God for your magnificent body, which is keeping you alive at this very moment.
Praise God for the shoes on your feet, for the eyes with which you see, praise God for your family, your friends, your associates, for the majesty of the mountains and the sweep of the plains and the simple directness of animals. Praise God for the intricacy of a bug and the humility of a grain of sand.
Praise God for your life, for the privilege of being here. Praise God that you're capable of feeling love. Praise God for the existence of this world. In other words, praise God for everything.
An alternate phrasing is to use the words "Praise You" or "Thank You." Thank You for my friends. Thank You for my job. Thank You for the roof over my head. Praise You for my children. Praise You for this meal. Praise You for the opportunity to make a difference. It's the same thing in different wording.
And as mentioned before, also Praise God for everything in your life that you don't like, for everything that is a problem to you, for everything that seems negative, everything that you've been arguing with, everything that you've been praying God to change. This is the real breakthrough.
If you don't have shoes on your feet, praise God for that. If you don't have a job, praise God for that. If you don't have a roof over your head, praise God for that. If you don't have any friends, praise God for that. If you're dying, praise God for the life that you did have. Praise God for everything.
This latter part makes no sense to the mind, but leaving nothing out will open the gates of heaven for you like nothing else.
Jesus expressed this very well. Paraphrasing, he said that if we only love those who love us, how is that different from what we ordinarily do? Rather, he said, it's when we begin to love those who don't seem lovable that our heart really begins to open.
And Jesus said that God sends His healing rain on the just and the unjust alike. This is the quality of divine love, which doesn't address its love to this person and not that one, or to this situation and not that one. On the contrary, nothing is left out.
This is the quality of divine compassion, which opens like a flower in our hearts and allows the divine to express through us. This is the destiny of all of us. And the happiness and joy we feel is a by-product of the divine love flowing through us.
After awhile you may find that the specific praising will die down and you'll be left with a kind of mantra, like "Praise You," just running by itself in your heart—though with forays now and then back into specificity.
Eventually there's just a kind of surrender, love and openness as the background of consciousness. Does this mean we're incapable of feeling irritation or sadness or whatever? No; anything is possible. It just means that those things are much less likely.
And if states like those do happen, if we're completely willing for them to be there, if we're not busy trying to get rid of them, we can appreciate them for what they are, just another face of the divine, and feel our love returning.
A variation in working with problem areas is to bless them. If your finances are a challenge, bless them. If some part of your body is a challenge, bless it. If a situation is a challenge, bless it. By letting go of our resistance to that part of reality being the way it is, possibilities open up that are not possible otherwise.
But we can't bless things and people so that they will change. That isn't the real transformation. When our love of reality as-it-is is sincere, it means that we're no longer hoping and wishing and praying for reality to change its nature. We're in love with it as it is.
And, though our insistance is gone, reality does indeed begin to transform, not only because we're perceiving it differently but because reality is a faithful mirror; it's a responder to our consciousness.
Does this mean that we don't plan, don't make "choices" and so on? Not at all. Everything goes on as before, but we've released the outcome to existence itself, which is where the outcome always resided in the first place. We trust reality to go where it's supposed to go. Even if we die this afternoon, we trust it.
Where all this ends up is gratitude. Gratitude fills our hearts just for being here, just to experience this miracle we call reality, just to see the divine's face everywhere and to praise It everywhere.
(This is the end of Part 13. Go to Part 14.)
—jim sloman, 12.29.03 for Jul 18
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