Gratitude and Work understanding 3

Before you clothe the Work teaching with the Biblical material gratitude would be seen in this way: when a negative event comes your way be grateful because it gives you the opportunity to practice not being identified and to practice the Work in general. Be grateful for the opportunity to develop being, in other words.

That reason for gratitude is real and can carry you in your Work development. How far it can carry you is the question. Certainaly it can carry you far because if you have real valuation for the Work and the doing of it then being grateful for events that challenge you is a real hardcore thing.

But it keeps you at the level of you and the event and the other human(s) involved. I.e. it keeps you at the level where your motivation is for personal self-development and it keeps you - or leaves you - at the level of the event itself and the other human or human beings involved, so you never transcend that level, really. You are always in danger of revisiting it all and indulging negativity sooner or later regarding it because you have stayed at that level. The motivation of personal self-development doesn't pull you above it all.

But when you begin to see the motivation for gratitude being the glorification of God and having a connection with God (to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever, as the Shorter Catechism puts it) it takes you up above the human level and the level of merely being motivated to personally self-develop. So you are free from the miasma of the human, all to human level. (Of course this requires active memory and new thinking and all the rest, but the change in object of motivation will make a change in the whole process in and of itself.

The language of God in the Bible has to be seen in a biblically sophisticated way too for this to be real. The Trinity itself is a sophisticated construct. God is one in essence and three in persons. The connection to God requires a Mediator (Jesus who appears in bodily form), yet to be connected with Jesus it requires the Holy Spirit (which is a Spirit), and then God Himself is a Spirit (not in bodily form). And Jesus hands the Kingdom back to the Father after all is consumated, so God is Spirit ultimately. The God you are connected with is Spirit. Connected to Spirit by Spirit. Internally the Work language explains the connection with terms such as Real I and higher centers and so on. Real Will.