“Each time I offer my gratitude-heart
To my Lord Supreme,
I am blessed with a deeper and richer
State of existence.”
– Sri Chinmoy
For our happiness and continual progress, we need many divine qualities: purity, cheerfulness, sincerity, eagerness, determination, patience. Sri Chinmoy was once asked, if there is one quality which a seeker needs the most?
“The quality that you need most and that everybody needs most is gratitude. Every seeker, without exception, needs one particular thing, and that is gratitude. Now, how do you develop this quality? Not by looking into the far past and seeing your stone life, plant life and animal life. Even in the human life, which is reasonably good, what were you in the past? A bundle of desire, a bundle of jealousy, a bundle of insecurity and a bundle of falsehood. But now, what have you become? Are you the same Himalayan falsehood? No, far from it. Now you are in the truth, of the truth and for the truth. What has made you feel that you are in the truth, of the truth and for the truth, or for the highest life? The answer is your inner cry. And who has given you this inner cry? God.
“What will you give God, since He has given you so much inner cry? You can give the thing that you feel is best. What God feels best to give you is His Compassion. Because of His Compassion, you have accepted the spiritual life. What you should feel best to give Him in return is your gratitude. Your gratitude is by far your best quality, so give Him your gratitude. The more you give gratitude to Him, the more you will be able to receive from Him.”
– Sri Chinmoy
“My God-gratitude-heart
Is the most precious treasure
I have.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Question: How can we be most receptive?
Sri Chinmoy: “You can be most receptive on the strength of your own simplicity, sincerity, purity and humility. When you bring to the fore your own divine qualities — simplicity, sincerity, purity and humility — then you can receive the utmost. And inside simplicity, inside sincerity, inside purity, inside humility, please try to feel a sense of gratitude to the Inner Pilot, to your own Inner Pilot. Your gratitude-heart will be able to receive the utmost; it will bring down from Above Peace, Light and Bliss in boundless measure. It is a gratitude-heart that receives these divine qualities and also manifests them here on earth.”
Question: What is the easiest way to evoke our divine qualities?
Sri Chinmoy: “Through constant soulful gratitude you can easily invoke your divine qualities.”
Question: Does a seeker’s gratitude-heart truly carry more significance than his own personal transformation?
Sri Chinmoy: “Definitely. A seeker’s gratitude is infinitely more important than his longing for transformation. His gratitude will automatically give him the easiest, safest and quickest way to transform his personal life. Gratitude has more to offer us than our personal transformation.”
Question: Is there any short cut in the spiritual life? “If there is any short cut in the spiritual life to arrive at the Golden Shore, then gratitude is the short cut. If there is a secret and sacred way to love, please and fulfil God, then it is the way of gratitude. Gratitude embodies and reveals all our divine virtues. It is by virtue of gratitude that we can bring down God’s infinite Power, infinite Light, infinite Love. Gratitude is the master key to open up all the doors of Divinity’s Palace.”
– Sri Chinmoy
This passage is a continuation of Sri Chinmoy’s remarks on the importance of offering gratitude to the Source:
“We know that if we can offer gratitude to anything good that comes to us early in the morning, then many good things will happen in our life. We will do good things for others and they will do good things for us. Everything that comes to us in the form of goodness comes from God.
“So at every moment we have to offer our sincere gratitude to the Source, because we will not be able to offer gratitude to each individual, each thought, each action.
“Of course, if we do have the opportunity to offer gratitude to a particular individual, wonderful! But even then what we are really doing is offering gratitude to the Source. Let us say that you do me a favour and I offer you my gratitude. At that time I am actually offering my gratitude to the Inner Pilot, the Source, in you – who is in you, in me, in the entire creation. The One who deserves my gratitude is not you, but God. He is the very Person who came to you in the form of a good action, and He is the One who is inspiring me to offer you my gratitude. In everything He is the Doer; we are only His instruments.
“If we cannot offer gratitude to someone individually, no harm. But we have to offer gratitude to the One who has inspired the creation in the form of this human being. To Him we have to offer gratitude. We may not have time to offer our gratitude to the entire creation, but we do have time to offer gratitude to God inside us.”
– Sri Chinmoy
In this passage, Sri Chinmoy speaks of the importance of offering gratitude to the Source:
“In addition to our bad qualities, each human being has many, many good qualities. The most important and most significant good quality in our human life is gratitude. Unfortunately, that good quality we somehow manage not to express either in our thoughts or in our actions. Right from the beginning of our life we have somehow learned not to express it. So we have the least amount of the very thing that we need most in order to become a better person.
“The things that most deserve our gratitude we just take for granted. Without air we cannot live for more than a minute or two. Every day we are breathing in and breathing out, but do we ever feel grateful to the air? If we do not drink water, we cannot survive. Even our body is composed to a large extent of water. But do we give any value to water? Every morning we see the sun blessingfully offering us light and life-energy. But are we grateful to the sun? On the contrary, when the sun is too bright we complain that it is bothering us.
“A tree has many branches and countless leaves, flowers and fruits. If we try to offer our gratitude to the millions of leaves, people will say, ‘You are a fool!’ We will get tired just counting the branches, not to speak of the leaves, flowers and fruits. But the tree came from a tiny seed, and the Source of that seed is God. He is the Source of everything in the creation. So if we offer our gratitude to the Source, we are doing the right thing.”
– Sri Chinmoy
God’s Compassion fulfils all our wants and needs. How then, can we attain oneness with God’s Compassion? Sri Chinmoy explains:
“In oneness you get everything. A child has established oneness with his parents, so he knows he will get everything. If the parents have material power or any power, any capacity, then it is all his: the parents are going to give it to him. If you are one with someone, that means all his qualities are your very own, and vice versa. Your eyes are one with your legs and arms. Your arms want to perform something at a particular place. Your eyes show you how to get there and your legs take you. Just because oneness has been established in all your limbs, one complements and fulfils the other. So if you establish your oneness with God’s Compassion on the strength of your gratitude for God’s Compassion, then inside God’s Compassion you will get everything.
“But again, if you find it extremely difficult to think of God’s Compassion all the time or your own gratitude, then try to bring to the fore individual aspects of God’s Capacity. If God’s Power is what you want, then concentrate on God’s Power. If you want inner cry, which you need, then try to bring this to the fore. Or if you need sincerity, try to get this. Anything you need, you bring forward individually.
“But if gratitude is there, then inside gratitude you will find power, sincerity, simplicity and all divine qualities, because gratitude means oneness. God has played His role by giving; you have played your role by expressing your gratitude. By giving, God has shown his oneness with you; and by offering your gratitude, you have become one with Him.”
– Sri Chinmoy
We all want to know the purpose of our life; what is our soul’s mission; what we should be doing outwardly, to be fulfilled inwardly. Most people who meditate, already have a sense that our life has a higher purpose, and that through meditation, we may come closer to finding and fulfilling that purpose.
Many expect that our purpose will be revealed through a glimpse into our future. Yet to know our purpose, to know God’s Will for our lives, Sri Chinmoy suggests we do not think of the future at all.
When asked, “How can I know God’s Will in my daily life?”, Sri Chinmoy answered:
“You can know God’s Will in your daily life if early in the morning you offer your utmost gratitude to God for what He has already done for you. When you offer your gratitude-heart, then it expands; and when it expands it becomes one with God’s Universal Reality. Gratitude-heart blossoms like a flower. When the flower is fully blossomed, then you appreciate and admire it. In your case also, when your heart of gratitude blossoms, immediately God is pleased. So if you offer gratitude to God for what He has already done for you, then naturally God’s sweet Will will operate in and through you. Early in the morning, before you meditate or do anything, offer as much gratitude as possible; offer your soulful tears just because you have become what you are now. If you do this, eventually you will become infinitely more than what you are now. So gratitude will be able to make you feel what God’s Will is. God’s Will will act in and through you and God will do everything in and through you, and for you, if you offer gratitude.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Sri Chinmoy has many times said that gratitude is the most essential of all divine qualities in our spiritual life, and gratitude itself embodies and brings forward all the divine qualities we need such as simplicity, sincerity, purity, humility, wisdom, love, eagerness, devotion and joy.
But to attain any of these divine qualities, we first need to develop our receptivity, otherwise we are like a jug made of wire mesh – all the water that is poured in, just flows right through; nothing is retained.
Sri Chinmoy was once asked: how can we increase our receptivity in our inner life? He answered:
“You can increase your receptivity to your inner life just by becoming more grateful to the Inner Pilot. The Inner Pilot will give you the inspiration and aspiration to become spiritual and He will be able to give you more receptivity if He sees that every day you are increasing your gratitude-capacity. The more you can offer your gratitude to the Supreme Pilot within you, the more and the sooner you will increase your receptivity. Gratitude means self-offering to one’s highest self. This gratitude is not going to somebody else; it is going to your own highest self. Gratitude helps us identify and feel our oneness with our own highest reality.
“Many of your near and dear ones are not following the spiritual life, but you have accepted the spiritual life. How is it possible? It is possible because the Supreme inside you has given you the aspiration, whereas there are many, many people who are still not aspiring. You should feel that He has selected you, accepted you to be spiritual; therefore, you should always be grateful to the Inner Pilot, the Supreme. And when you are grateful, your receptivity automatically increases.”
– Sri Chinmoy
In the spiritual life, we know gratitude is of utmost importance in developing our receptivity and quickening our progress. And yet, it is a quality sorely lacking in our world and our own consciousness. How then, can we feel the necessity of gratitude?
Sri Chinmoy answered this question:
“You can feel the necessity for gratitude if you feel that gratitude is your living breath. Feel that if your gratitude-breath is extinguished, then you are dead. Each time you offer gratitude for a fleeting second, feel it is a living breath.
“On earth there is nothing so important or significant as gratitude. In God’s case, the most significant thing He has is Compassion. God is Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent, but His Compassion-Power makes us close to Him. If He did not have Compassion-Power, we would not care for Him. If we can show God an iota of gratitude, God feels that within us He can exist. Our gratitude is God’s Existence, God’s House, God’s Abode. God has to live in the street unless He can live inside our gratitude-heart.”
– Sri Chinmoy
How can we show gratitude for all the Compassion we receive?
Sri Chinmoy again:
“We do not actually show gratitude; we become gratitude. Gratitude is not a matter of showing. Here I have a finger and I can show it. No, it is not like that. The moment we want to show gratitude, we take away the sweetness, the real wealth, the real secret or real power, the very raison d’être of gratitude. So gratitude we don’t show; we don’t even express it. Gratitude is something that we grow into, we become. It is not a matter of offering gratitude when God shows us infinite Compassion. We have to just become gratitude itself.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Sri Chinmoy speaks and writes so highly of the importance and power of gratitude in our spiritual lives, it is not surprising that he was once asked: “Does gratitude cure everything?” He responded:
“Yes, gratitude cures everything if inside gratitude there are prayerful tears. If you just say, ‘I am grateful to you,’ that gratitude is not deep. It is just like saying, ‘Thank you very much.’ But if gratitude comes from the very depth of our being, from the inmost recesses of our heart, because God has done so much for us unconditionally, then there are streaming tears inside that gratitude.
“Sometimes if we go one step towards God, He will come ninety-nine steps towards us. Sometimes if we do not take even one step, God comes one hundred steps to awaken us and lift us. At that time we should develop prayerful tears, saying that we shall become a better person, we shall become a good person and we shall try to please God in His own Way. If we have that kind of gratitude, it will definitely cure all our shortcomings and weaknesses in our spiritual life. That kind of gratitude embodies inspiration, aspiration, readiness, willingness, self-giving — everything.”
– Sri Chinmoy
This answer begs a follow-up question. If the heart’s tears are so essential, how then can we maintain the intensity of our inner cry? Sri Chinmoy’s answer completes the circle, from inner cry to gratitude, to inner cry:
“The most important thing is to offer your gratitude every second to the Supreme. Your inner cry comes from God’s Concern and Compassion. When you offer your gratitude, immediately your cry increases; it becomes continuous and constant. When you offer gratitude, your inner cry mounts to the highest.”
– Sri Chinmoy
“If anything on earth is really beautiful, really meaningful and really fruitful, if anything on earth can sustain our golden connecting link with God, our Source, then that very thing is gratitude. If you have an iota of sincere gratitude and if you preserve that gratitude as the most precious thing in your life, then the breath of that gratitude will keep you alive in the Heart of God, your Lord Supreme.
“If you feel that gratitude is your inner name and also your outer name, if you feel that your only name is gratitude, then immediately your gratitude will jump to the fore and establish its inseparable oneness with your God-oneness-reality.
“Gratitude is a most powerful weapon in your life. There is nothing undivine that you cannot get rid of and there is nothing divine in your life that you cannot increase in boundless measure on the strength of your gratitude. There is only one thing that you need in order to increase your divinity, and that thing is gratitude.
“Gratitude is not a mere word; it is not a mere concept. It is the living breath of your real existence on earth. There is nothing that God will not do for you if you really treasure the gratitude-breath inside your aspiring heart.
“Gratitude, gratitude and gratitude. The soul you do not know; the Supreme you do not know. And at this stage in your spiritual development you do not have to know them. But gratitude you do have to know if you want to connect yourself with your own Highest, with the Supreme. If you want to connect yourself with the Real in you, then your gratitude-breath you have to claim as your own, very own.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Gratitude is of supreme importance, embodying all the divine qualities we need for our happiness and progress – purity, humility, love, sincerity, joy, devotion and satisfaction. This abstract quality is difficult for our minds to grasp since it exists beyond the mind’s realm of comprehension – so how are we to cultivate a quality we do not or cannot understand?
When asked simply, “What is gratitude?” Sri Chinmoy responded:
“To feel gratitude means to become a flower in every part of your being — body, vital, mind and heart. Everything in your being will exist as a single, fully blossomed flower with all its petals completely open. There are thousands of nerves in your physical body and 86,000 subtle nerves inside your subtle body. But these will all disappear and you will feel that you exist only as a most beautiful flower ready to be placed at the Feet of the Supreme. This is gratitude.
“Recently, somebody was having difficulty understanding one of my aphorisms about gratitude. The aphorism says, ‘One second of gratitude to God is worth three hours of intense meditation on God.’ He thought it meant that just saying ‘thank you’ for one second was worth several hours of meditation. But gratitude is not like shaking hands or saying, ‘Thank you!’ It may take hours, days, months, years or many incarnations to achieve one second of true gratitude. The preparation it takes to come to that stage may take quite a long time.
“So when I say that gratitude is something most difficult and important, I am referring to this kind of gratitude. When everything of yours has melted and you exist only as a flower ready for worship, when you have placed yourself totally at the Feet of your Beloved Supreme — this is gratitude.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Sri Chinmoy spoke and wrote much about the precious nature of gratitude. Here is one such passage:
“Gratitude is the most precious thing that a human being can have. If someone has a million dollars and if someone else has only an iota of gratitude, in the Eyes of the Supreme he who has an iota of gratitude to God is far superior. Gratitude is the purest thing that we can have. It is immortal in us. If we can offer to God whatever is immortal, soulful and significant, then that is most meaningful.
“Someone can have outer wealth, but if he has spiritual wealth — simplicity, purity, humility — that is far better. Again, somebody can be pure, devoted and sincere, but if he does not have any gratitude to God, then his purity is not perfect.
“Every morning you should offer gratitude to God for your existence. You should offer gratitude because God has kept you on earth to manifest Him. So gratitude is the most important thing in our life. Nothing is more important in God’s Eyes than gratitude.”
– Sri Chinmoy
On another occasion, Sri Chinmoy made these additional observations on the significance of gratitude in our lives:
“Gratitude is a living reality. A seeker has to know that his most powerful capacity is gratitude. What God has is infinite Compassion and what we have is gratitude. God’s gift to man is infinite Compassion and our gift to God is an iota of gratitude to be placed at His Feet. Gratitude-power can never be surpassed. It is the only satisfaction we can offer God. This is not because God needs our gratitude but because He needs ample opportunity to enter into us in a more effective way, and gratitude increases our heart’s receptivity.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Attempting to assert its dominion through its ‘knowledge’ of the world, while operating under the illusion of its separation from the world, the mind has blindfolded itself and tied its own hands behind its back. Even then, the mind offers its perceptions and judgement as infallible.
Having divorced reality due to its craving for authority, our mind constructs models of what it imagines reality to be, based on its observations, previous experience, education and conditioning, and relies on these models to conduct its life and interactions with the world. No matter how smart, vast, brilliant or intelligent our mind, whatever model it sets up and relates to as ‘the world’ can never be the full picture, never the actual world.
We observed the world to be flat, believed it so, and lived in accordance with that model. Now most believe the world to be spherical, and we live and operate in accordance with this model. There might come a time when we postulate the world to be neither flat nor spherical, but an amalgam of multiple dimensions. We will then need to adapt to that new paradigm.
Newton’s laws of physics were superseded by Einstein, then by quantum physics and now by ever-new theories. All that we once assumed to be fixed and solid – time, space, matter, light – are no longer so. Time is relative, the past and future are one. Light bends, speeds up, slows down. A solid wall is mostly empty space. It is solid only as long as we think, and believe so. Knowing the wall is not solid, a yogi walks straight through it.
Only in our heart’s oneness with reality, can we know reality.
Meanwhile, relying on our minds’ knowledge, everything we think we know, we actually don’t.
