Nicholas Eliopoulos is an Emmy Award-winning producer, director, film editor, and sound editor, and the founder of the motion picture companies Earthlight and White Rock Entertainment. Nicholas directed VISIONS OF A NEW WORLD, which features Louise L. Hay, Ted Danson, and Dennis Weaver; and he spent over a year in Russia directing the TV special “Russia Today, A People’s Journey.” He has also worked on numerous feature films, including FOUL PLAY, NINE TO FIVE, and OUT OF AFRICA. A resident of Los Angeles, Nicholas is a member of both the Motion Picture and Television Academies.
I have been, for the most part, a very grateful person all my life, but it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve come to know the concept of gratitude in a larger, fuller meaning. I have lived what many people would call a “charmed life.” I had a happy upbringing, a wonderful education, and I have found success in my chosen career. I have not achieved all that I have coveted as yet, and, like most people, I experience the pain and heartaches, the joys and exhilaration of this wonderment called “life,” but I am fortunate that I possess many good and loving friends. I have much to be grateful for, yet one day I realized that there was something I didn’t know: true gratitude.
The meaning of gratitude changed for me when I began to look at the “great force of all life”—beyond my taught perception of God. A dear friend of mine referred to that force as God/Goddess/All That Is. Up to that time, the concept of a Mrs. God was only familiar in the Goddess stories I was taught as a child about ancient Greece. My friend was talking about a “feminine force” that together with God gave “birth” to all material matter—our physical Universe. It wasn’t until I took this concept (which is all “one” force) called God/Goddess/All That Is and examined it for myself, that my concept of true gratitude expanded immensely. I realized through this study that the feminine principle of the Goddess was first—that it was the Goddess who created, or brought forth, God, and together they created ALL THAT IS.
I know that this does not fit in with the chauvinistic, traditional religious view of God. Most of the world’s religions don’t even acknowledge a Goddess energy at all. And if they do, in whatever form, She definitely came after God Himself. The idea of the Goddess giving “life itself to God, I had never heard at all, anywhere. Whether this idea is wrong or right, the product of just considering it suddenly gave me a whole new realization of what true gratitude must really be like. For the first time, I saw what I believed to be God’s gratitude—His gratitude to the Goddess for His own creation.
I thought to myself, and I felt for myself, the immense scope of love and gratitude that God must feel. It was then that I truly realized that “life itself is a gift. My life was, and is, a gift. The immense gratitude that poured out from this realization was colossal. I thought, If I could somehow feel the same gratitude for my life that God Himself had for His own gift of life, then everything I was, everything I did, everything I touched, would have a new and more special meaning.
Some people whom I knew back in my college days were cynical. They would say, “God is dead,” or “God does not exist.” I always felt that they were talking about themselves. That is, something within them didn’t exist, and they knew it.
My favorite author, Ayn Rand, who wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, was often accused of being an atheist. But I saw her on TV once, and she said, “No, I am not an atheist. I shall never die. When I pass away, it is the world that will end…a beautiful world at that.” She went on to explain, “On the contrary, I love the word God because it means ’the highest of the high.’ God bless you is a wonderful phrase.”
My dear friend Lazaris has said, “Life is a gift, and our job is to learn to receive it.” For me, life is a gift, and gratitude is its magnet. With my friend’s permission, I would love to end my thoughts with what Lazaris has expressed: “Gratitude is a tangible force. The more you feel it, the more reasons you will find to feel it. Gratitude is a miraculous force, like a magical magnet, generating and then attracting so much more than you have already received. It is like a living energy, clearing the way for you to become so much more than you have already experienced.”
