Interesting conversation.
I never thought about gratitude much until recently. Goetia, my main practice, is a bit more aggressive. There is a place for giving no fucks.
As a formal idea it was always a bit too New Agey for me. Then I read Neville Goddard and can see the point.
I'm also sure authoritarian systems can decontextualize and weaponize gratitude into a social control system. As a Latino, I know sometimes when marginalized groups raise systemic grievances we are met with responses like "Well, at least things are better than they used to be, for you." weaponizing a baseline of thankfulness to invalidate demands for equity. It's not wrong to be concerned about 'toxic positivity,' as they say these days.
But at the level of personal practice, free from socioeconomic system concerns, for Neville we were never powerless supplicants begging a distant divine power for favors. Our imagination is the ultimate reality. (See Kripal's Dual Aspect Monism here.)
Gratitude in Neville's system (my only one aside from more trad magic and mysticism) is a technique - an internal aesthetic and psychological discipline ( "stance" I'd say). You are thanking your own deeper consciousness (your "subconscious" or imaginal self, however you conceive of it) for the reality it has externalized (LOA is about the present moment) to anchor yourself firmly in the state of already having your desire. Key here.
Gratitude - and maybe we need a better word (?) - is an active technique for shifting your consciousness, not a moral obligation, submissive slavishness, or a passive emotional state. Gratitude here is a technique LOA uses for the elimination of "want" that Goddard taught is important to "manifest" (ugh, still not used to this language).
That feeling of lack ("I want X") pushes X further away because consciousness continually externalizes whatever state it occupies. True gratitude eliminates "want" by substituting it with the feeling of satisfaction. You cannot simultaneously feel grateful for having received something and anxious about not having it. Shit works too, without all the occulty bric-a-brac.
Can we also agree Beyond Everything has a point not to let mere techniques become an identity? If I am reading him clearly.