The Soul of Thanksgiving
In the autumn Canada and the United States celebrate Thanksgiving.
Canadians celebrate in October without much fanfare. Many don’t celebrate it. It’s a wonderful choice celebration in Canada.
In the United States, Thanksgiving is a huge holiday! Of all America’s holidays, it is my favorite! The festivities are joyful and unencumbered with religious overtones or the need for gifts. The point is to remember life’s blessings and give thanks with family and friends for the year’s blessings.
Thanksgiving is far more than it seems. “Gratitude is the hallmark of the enlightened soul,” according to D.K. who has a habit of writing in threes.
Following this pattern, He relates gratitude to service and karma.
Gratitude
Karma service
The karmic part of gratitude expresses as a light-filled soul that’s grateful for problems and challenges as well as opportunities and victories. Karma helps us appreciate life experience of every kind. It is to learn from, to gain serenity and non-attachment from and to make friends with. In this way of looking at gratitude, it is a 24/7 state of mind. It never leaves.
Remembering that our innate divinity enables us to be present to betterment, experience and progress, we strive to reach the distant heights that we have dreamed of.
Achieved through the dint of our own labor, we work out our own destiny finding that “As we sow, so shall we reap.” We make discovery after discovery and find that something always occurs to the human soul that brings us closer to the Source where the Good, the True and the Beautiful exist. That is the reason that in gratitude we look at the contents of our lives. Gratitude enables us to realize the Source.
Service is the third aspect of gratitude which is an expression of love to another person, to family, community, nation or the world that is in some way beneficial to the group. Motives that emerge from the karmic aspects of life experience can be soul driven. The presence of the soul steadily expresses through its personality which becomes increasingly aware of the Plan, of the ideal, and of the purposes underlying the universe itself. ”2
Thanksgiving beckons us to be open to all ranges of our experience and to glean everything we can from it, making an effort to sow well, to serve the group and to express the love of the heart and above all to be grateful.
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1. Discipleship in the New Age, Vol. II, Bailey, Alice A., Lucis Publishing Company, New York, p. 676.
2. A Treatise on White Magic, Bailey, Alice A., Lucis Publishing Company, New York, p. 204.
© 2013, Rebecca Field, All rights reserved.