A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all other virtues.—Cicero
We are often told that gratitude is a necessary adjunct to spiritual living, for to be grateful is to recognize that we do not live alone but are linked with other living beings. At its root lies also the recognition of the fact that unless we make a return in some way for benefits received we miss the value of the gift.
Do we pause to think to whom or what we owe our character, our opportunities, our environment? We often feel a sense of injustice when we lack opportunities or capacities, or find ourselves in a bad environment, and we blame "past Karma." And as we in our present personality did not create that Karma we feel the effects to be unjust. H.P.B. says that it is because of this feeling in the personality that Devachan is necessary.
But have we paused to ask where our good character, our good opportunities and our capacities come from? To whom do we owe them? Did they come to us by chance? Are they, too, unmerited? Ought we not to feel a sense of gratitude for these things, not only to the Law, but to the personalities our Ego had clothed itself in, in prior lives, and whose sufferings and struggles are bearing fruit in the form of the good character that we have today, the opportunities and good environment that we now enjoy? Our body is weak—we blame past Karma! Our body is strong and healthy—we take them for granted! Good opportunities come our way—we take them for granted! But when faced with lack of opportunities we feel life is hard! A good environment in the present has been earned, not by our present personality, but through the efforts of other personalities the real "I" in us has lived in, in the past. Let us pause and send a thought of gratitude to those dead and gone personalities, whose efforts and endeavours are not dead and gone and are responsible for placing us where we find ourselves today.
Will the new personalities our Ego will have in the future feel grateful to the "us" of today for what we are suffering and struggling to achieve in this life? It is good to think that perhaps our new personalities will spare a thought of gratitude for what we are giving them as a gift, won by "blood and sweat," struggle and strife!
In the future enjancement of agriculture and medicine is not thought enough to merit conservation, then consider survival. The biosphere gives us renewed soils, energy, clean water and the very air we breathe, all free of charge. The more species that compose wild communities, the more stable and resilient becomes the planet as a whole.Then consider ethics. More and more leaders of science and religion now pose this question: Who are we to destroy or even diminish biodiversity and nature, they say; every species is a masterpiece, exquisitely adapted to the particular environment in which it has survived for thousands to millions of years. It is part of the world—part of Eden if you prefer—in which our own species arose.
The profligacy of the 20th century has led humanity into a bottleneck of sources. Through this bottleneck humanity and the rest of life must now pass. By the end of the new century, if we are both lucky and wise, we will exit in better shape than we entered, with the population peaked around eight billion or less and a gradual decline begun. People everywhere will have acquired a decent quality of life, with the expectation of more improvement to come. One of the defining goals of the century must also be to settle humanity down before we wreck the planet. To that end it is important to accept the challenge and responsibility of global conservation—and to do so right now, before it is too late. We will be judged by the amount of biodiversity we carry through the bottleneck with us.
—Edward O. Wilson