The beginning of gratitude is acceptance of what is. Fortunately, this is the easy part of manifestation – you already accept what is in your world – and act accordingly. That is why you have what you currently have in your world and why it is that things are the way they are. You accept it that way and act accordingly.

For example, you accept that trees are green and rain is wet. You do not question nature as it is – you simply accept it. EVERYTHING in your life is as it is because you accept it that way – and act accordingly. When was the last time you questioned something in your life that you take for granted – like air. Over time, you have come to simply accept things as they are – for the most part, you take your life for granted.

Your education level is what it is; your spousal situation is what it is; your income is what it is; your personal health is what it is; the world situation is what it is; etc. You accept it by observation. That is, you observe the way things are and that’s that – you trust your senses to give you an accurate picture. And you accept your picture and act upon the picture accordingly. That is gratitude – it’s what you are already doing every second of every day – accepting life as it is and acting upon it accordingly.

Acceptance is the cornerstone of gratitude. Gratitude is the cornerstone of action. Action is the cornerstone of manifestation. Things are the way they are because you accept them that way and act accordingly. In effect, you are “happy” with the way things are and tend to keep things as they are with your acceptance of them – with appropriate action.

So, what happens during life-change? What about those times when you were so fed up that you suddenly took action to make a change and the change occurred? What about those times? Was I then no longer in gratitude? When I took action about a goal and achieved it, was I no longer accepting and acting accordingly? What about the times of change?

Even in times of what seems like massive change in one’s life – like divorce, for example – MOST of your life is as it has always been. Your attitudes are pretty much the same, trees are still green in the summer; telephone service still works like it did; you still sweat when you exercise; you still breathe air; blood flows through your body as it did before. Very little is actually changing. In numbers, perhaps as little as .0000000000000000000000000001% of life changes when you make a HUGE life change. The rest remains as it has always been – the way you accept it.

Where life is different, is where you notice it as being different. The rest remains the same – just as you accept it and act accordingly. That means that even the largest changes you want in your life are actually minuscule so far as that change is compared with everything else in your life.

And here is the secret to life change – IT’S EASY. Very little actual energy must be diverted to make any change. The reason change seems hard is because we have ACCEPTED hardness and act accordingly. We are, in effect, grateful that life is hard to change. In reality, life change is so simple WE CAN’T ACCEPT IT. Here’s how easy it is – accept anything and act accordingly – and that is the new way things are. To prepare for a life change, one can use a well-known technique called pretending. Until you actually accept a new way in life, you can pretend first – it’s like a half-way method. However, once you ACCEPT that things are a certain way AND act accordingly, things will tend to remain as they were – because that is what you actually accept and act upon accordingly.

Want to know what you really want in life? It’s easy – just look around you. YOU NOW HAVE WHAT YOU MOST WANT – you accept it and act accordingly.

Life looks at it like this – “You must like what you have because you accept it and act upon it accordingly.” To make a real change in life, all you must do is no longer accept things as they were – in other words, accept the new to the exclusion of the old. You are so used to doing this, you probably no longer notice it when you do it. When you choose to take the bus instead of the car, for example, you are accepting one way to the exclusion of another. When you choose to take a shower instead of a bath, you are accepting one way and no longer accepting the other. This happens so often in the course of a day that you may not notice how often you do it – how often you change that .0000000000000000000000000001%.

The very first step in manifesting what you want is to notice that YOU ALREADY HAVE WHAT YOU MOST WANT. You accept it and act accordingly – manifesting what you most want in every second of every day. If you don’t like some aspect of your life today, it’s not anyone’s fault – it is merely a consequence of your acceptance of what you believe your life to be – and you’ve acted accordingly – making it manifest in that manner.