in the beginning man had an ego – God said "I have given you everything but don’t eat from two lousy trees" – imagine getting everything, yet you cant resist two trees!! – but its that human nature, if I said to you, "in this room there is a million lamps but two in the center you may not have!" – the very fact that I have given you a million lamps fills your ego – and now your ego will rage against me that you cannot have those two lamps!! – so within us is this balloon, that the more your blow into it, the more it wishes to consume and will in fact be angered that something as big as I should not be entitled to more (we see this clearly in the behavior of kings who instead of being grateful they weren’t the serfs, only sought more and more expansion) but then there is another way, it is the soul, the soul also attracts but it, unlike the balloon that seeks more expansion, filling its belly and growing ever more conceited / obese etc. it creates a vacuum – it creates an empty space and in its humility, in its very nothing, it becomes a force of attraction – so the simple equation of truth is this, the more I sense my entitlement (which comes by not acknowledging that all is a gift, hence everything I get contributes to my delusion) the more obsessed I am with becoming ever more! but conversely, the less sense of entitlement, the more gratitude I feel, the more I feel undeserving of anything (hence everything I do get, fills me only with joy that someone as insignificant as I has been blessed so abundantly) the more my positive joy increases and like a vacuum begins to attract