Gratitude

If you go more deeply and if you understand the philosophy of the meaning of life, you start becoming thankful for all of the troubles, pains, sufferings, failures, problems, and obstacles that you have had. Not everyone is in that stage. If one day you open the book of your life and analyze it, you will see in those difficult pages that you made the greatest progress on those days that you were passing through suffering, pain, and failures. I don’t know how many of us can very sincerely say, “Thank you, Lord, for this accident, for this sickness, for these obstacles, for these headaches and problems.” Our first reaction is to hate them because they disturb our previous level — the crystallization of consciousness in which we say, “We are thankful because we have a turkey on the table.” This is fine, but can you look deeper and see how you can be thankful for a life that was nothing but a chain of troubles? If you examine your life more deeply, you will understand that all of the troubles, tribulations, pain, and suffering are nothing else but bills that come so that you can pay your karma and get rid of it. If you do not get rid of your karma, you don’t have a chance to expand your consciousness and contact your own Soul. Let us learn to bless our troubles, pain, and suffering and be thankful for them. Your consciousness must be shifted to that level in order to bless obstacles, pain, and suffering. But if you cannot do it totally,occasionally sit and ask yourself, “What did I learn from this problem?” You will never learn anything unless you have problems.
-Torkom Saraydarian, Wisdom of the Zodiac Volume 3