When we try to cultivate gratitude, we may encounter various obstacles, with greed seeming to be the most evident candidate. The focus of gratitude and greed are opposite: gratitude centers on appreciating what we have, while greed centers on craving for what we don’t have.
Counterintuitively however, the greatest obstacle to gratitude is not greed; it is pride. When we are proud, we feel entitled to far more than what we currently have. Pride goes beyond just making us crave for things we don’t have; it makes us believe that the world is wrong for not giving us those things which we believe we have a right to. Much more than greed, pride erodes our ability to appreciate what we have or to even dwell on what is good in our life. Hence, when cultivating gratitude, we need to challenge the entitlement mentality created by pride, along with the craving mentality created by greed.
The Bhagavad-gita’s sixteenth chapter describes that the godly are characterized by humility and gratitude, while the ungodly are characterized by craving, arrogance, and perpetual discontent.
Gita wisdom also provides us a holistic vision of life, wherein we understand that we are spiritual beings, and that the most important things in life are not things. Such a vision makes it much easier to cultivate the mental discipline of contentment, as recommended by Bhagavad-gita (17.16). Thus, we can free ourselves from both greed and pride, thereby opening our hearts to be enriched by gratitude.
Summary:
Gratitude is obstructed not just by greed, but also more so by pride. Greed makes us focus on the many things we don’t have, while pride makes us feel entitled to them.
Think it over.
- How does greed undermine gratitude?
- How does pride undermine gratitude even more?
- How can we curb greed and pride and cultivate gratitude?
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17.16: And satisfaction, simplicity, gravity, self-control and purification of one’s existence are the austerities of the mind.
Audio explanation of the article is here:
https://gitadaily.substack.com/p/two-obstacles-to-gratitude
To know more about this verse, please click on the image
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