“How to melt God’s Heart?
Just launder your life
With gratitude-soap.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Sri Chinmoy was once asked, “Once we achieve purity, how may we maintain it?” He responded:
“Once you achieve purity, you can maintain it only through constant remembrance of God’s Compassion and through constant offering of gratitude to the Supreme. Only then will your purity stay with you permanently.”
– Sri Chinmoy
It is clear, that gratitude is the key to maintaining purity in our inner life. Yet to someone lacking in purity, understanding or identifying with the very concept of purity can be frustratingly baffling, and to obtain any meaningful degree of purity in our thoughts and lives, is a monumental and sometimes seemingly impossible task.
In the following passage, Sri Chinmoy clarifies the essence of purity and elucidates the means to attaining this elusive quality:
“Purity. In a broad sense, physical purity is cleanliness, vital purity is an open heart and mental purity is the absence of undivine and unhealthy thoughts. Inner purity is our gratitude-heart. If we really want to know what purity is, our gratitude-heart can tell us what it is. In the inner world, gratitude is the only purity. It is through gratitude, constant gratitude to the Supreme in us, that we expand our consciousness and come to know our higher vision and reality. If we can sow a seed of gratitude which will germinate and grow into a tiny plant and then into a banyan tree, then under this huge banyan tree in our gratitude-hearts thousands of seekers will be able to take shelter and grow into divinity.
“Our gratitude-heart is the pioneer-seeker. It is the path-finder and the God-server. Let us feel that what we are and eternally will become is nothing but a gratitude-heart.”
– Sri Chinmoy