If you start expressing gratitude for what you do have ..... you might start to realize how 'wealthy ' you are .
Seriously, what you said is true. Taking an international mindset helps too. I am keenly aware that my part-time job in the US makes several months wages elsewhere in the world. I might be "in the lowest tax bracket", but on the global stage, I'm in the top 10% of wealth easily. Every day I live, I think several times about how great I have it. My life has been on a steady upward trend since I learned about the ajna chakra (and through this, meditation and manifestation) as a preteen. I give immense credit to my constantly improving mindset for that success.
The psychologist and sceptic, Richard Wiseman, wrote a book called 'The Luck Factor' where he tried to analyse what behaviours made people more lucky. One of the factors was whether people 'looked on the bright side' so that when bad things happened to them, they would, for example, comfort themselves that it could have been worse (because it can always be worse
)
I believe that this is part of keeping yourself open to new possibilities, which is a useful thing to have if you want to end up being successful in those possibilities. Gratitude, IMO, is one method for accessing this.
Incidentally, one of his factors was 'use your intuition', which he implied was about picking up subconscious cues that we get from our environment, including from other people. He then goes on to give a classic example of a guy who listened to his intuition and didn't get on a plane, which then crashed. What mundane environmental cues did that guy get?
Clearly, this was a magical experience, but Wiseman only says 'intuition' without saying 'hang on a minute'
Here's a great example of how that works in practice. There should be a word or name for that, the "comforting themselves when bad things happen" factor of luck. My wife and I's car was (and is, we still own it) in desperate need of repairs. The bill was stacking up, and then we learned that our mechanic that had given us a quote on some of the work retired at the start of the year, closing his shop. We asked family for money that they blessedly had to give us, and called a new mechanic to set up an appointment to get a quote on the work, knowing the bill would likely be more than the money our family had been able to provide. But I have good credit, and I was close to paying off my only outstanding loan. So on a whim, I looked at car dealership websites in the area with my wife. Within three days of this thought, we had an auto loan through my credit union with good terms to it and a new-to-us car in great condition. For a moment, it looked like the car insurance would hit our bottom line hard, our old carrier quoted us $180/mo higher than the old car. The next carrier my wife called offered us a rate for $10 more than our old car, despite the new car being a 2016 compared to a 2007 (and the old coverage was personal liability, now it's comprehensive). 8 days ago our car was falling apart and we were scared to let a mechanic quote us a repair job. Now we have a reliable vehicle and can actually go visit the family that paid for these "repair" bills, 1500 miles away. Our apartment complex allows us two vehicles, so we can keep the old car parked and fix it on our own time, have two reliable vehicles in the future. We're in this perfect situation now, and it feels like it's obvious even from the most materialist, deterministic mindset how our mindset enabled this outcome. If we'd been more focused on the "badness" of our broken car, we wouldn't have thought of the opportunity of a new one. If I hadn't spent two years appreciating the use I got out of my previous loan with the credit union, I wouldn't have thought to use them for an auto loan and gotten such favorable terms. I swear we manifested the junk mail we went through that night, as we were talking about the car I leafed across the promotion the credit union had just started on summer auto loans. It's the kind of mail that 99.99% of the time, you just throw out without looking at it. And maybe I've just circled my way around into figuring out the word or name for this. It's pranayama. Breath awareness. Because it's not just gratitude, it's mindfulness, and that's why pranayama is the core of my practice. When you are aware of your breath, you appreciate it. You really feel that life-giving energy in the inhale when you devote your mind to thinking of it. And the entire universe breathes when it vibrates. So the more aware of the universe you are, the more you appreciate it, the more you appreciate it, the more aware of it you are, the more good things happen to you. It feels like by now everyone knows the conscious mind is a filter, constantly discarding most information and hyperfocusing on the things that fit with how it already views the universe. Focusing on the things you like experiencing attracts your attention to things you like experiencing. Eventually, the only thing your filter can process is the good side of things, or how to get to the good side of things. And you can be non-dualist and morally relativist all you want, but at the end of the day, we all have some idea of what "good" is and the broad picture that is painted by what most people think of as "good" is coherent.
You are all pretending to have the Ultimate TruthTM. Maybe you should accept the fact that gratitude works for some, and for others it's irrelevant. Well, don't forget to bellow "WE KNOW BETTER!!!"
Is there anything more subjective than magic?
Magic is not subjective. It is poorly understood. It is, in fact, the catch-all term for things that are poorly understood, or else they would be described by a different technical term. If you brought a flashlight back in time 1000 years, it'd appear magical. But if you came with notes describing how to make it and diagrams, you'd just invent electricity ahead of schedule. Magic is only subjective in that the experiences are personal and non-transferable. Magic and peer review don't get along well. But I'd argue the goal for most magicians is to make the process more accessible, more intelligible, more transferable, more... Objective. People want magic that works, after all, and if it's subjective, it might not work for you, which is why this forum exists on some level, so we can discuss the principles at play like we are in this thread. The OP asked us how much of a role we think it plays, does your comment contribute to that discussion or just ask us to end it because it's impossible to resolve?
I don't believe Beyond Everything when he asserts that people who have material things expect them without being gracious for them. Rich people aren't stupid just because they're rich, they aren't the Buddha before he left the palace, unaware of the suffering in the world. I could believe a high schooler who is spoiled rotten has that mentality, if BE has high schoolers in his social circle, but people who have spent some time in the world, which is inevitable what with being alive and all, have seen suffering and have some level of thanks that it wasn't happening to them. You can't avoid suffering in this world, which means you can't avoid gratitude for the lack of suffering. That reaction ("there but for the grace of God go I", even if you don't put it that way) is part of the human condition and unavoidable. Even as Beyond Everything asserts we're delusional and Doing it Wrong
in every thread he goes in to preach his superior take on reality, he's practicing gratitude that he
has that superior take on reality. He's
gracious for his superior intellect and superior methodology, his gratitude is a part of him, and his gratitude is for that part of him which makes him who he is. It's patently obvious how his Attitude of Gratitude has created a feedback loop where he is always in a position to educate someone better.
And honestly? You're right, people shouldn't dog on him. I have a strong suspicion BE is hikikomori. This feedback loop of superiority he has is probably
all he has. He's averaging 1.4 posts a day. I check this forum daily, I can't imagine having an opinion on that many things. I'm too busy practicing to be preaching every day (and you should be too).
Sure, if OP's question had been "how important is gratitude to obtaining material objects", the idea that people get material objects without an attitude of gratitude might have bearing. But that begs the question, doesn't it? It assumes the OP (and the rest of us interested in this conversation) only practice magick to gain things material goods. But I practice majiq for many reasons, I eat, sleep, breathe and poop majiq, everything I do is thought of through a majiqal lens, because I've been practicing it for
two thirds of this life, I was practically born into it, so it is my mindset in everything I do. Yeah, I talked about my new car above in this post, because it happened this week. But I also lost my daughter two months before her second birthday three years ago, and of
course her life factors into my practice. I practice
gratitude for the time I had with her, for everything that went right in her life, and for her wisdom in leaving when she did, because her mother and I split up before the pregnancy and our daughter would have been stuck traveling between two states her whole life if she had stuck around for the long haul. She was born in Las Vegas, where I saw a shooting in the middle of the street. I never would have felt comfortable with her growing up there, and her mother and grandparents never would have moved. Baby spared us from that source of perpetual tension, her spirit knew better. She accomplished some things in that short amount of time that were nothing short of miraculous, and I mean that as in the sort of legal miracle someone would usually petition a goetic demon for help with (or a lawyer, or both). It'd be a real stretch of the imagination to call "the experience of early fatherhood" a material thing, but I achieved that with magic, I manifested my daughter, and she showed me I was already a father to my three grown stepchildren and freed me to pursue a relationship with them instead of focusing on "the baby". I hope it's obvious how gratitude is
interwoven with this experience, and it would have broken some other people, people who don't look at the silver lining in things.
OP's question was:
How much of a role do you think gratitude plays in magick and getting your magick to work?
And the answer to many of us is "central". And the voices of dissent I don't see posting about their results often, which is the metric by which I measure someone's practice. What has it
done for you? For me, it lets me remember my daughter with a smile and get to work without walking, two things that measurably improve my quality of life both psychologically and physically. I've seen BE post plenty of comments about how others' practice is poor, but very little detail of his own practice. Most of us can put into concrete terms on some level what we actually
do, beyond the metaphor of magickal language, using the metaphors only where we lack language. What does "energetically investigating gratitude" even
mean? It's just another way of saying "dwell on it". Or in a more lay language: "Think about it". Yeah, it carries the connotation of
feeling too, but the point is, it isn't actually a practice someone can perform. It's just a brush-off. Who or what am I "submitting" to when I appreciate the time I spent reading a story about a police dog to my daughter? I'm just high-fiving my higher self for creating a good moment. That's it. There is no external entity, it's all just the universe being awesome, as usual.
