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.
What we think we know is a constantly shifting assortment of opinions, assumptions, inferences, prejudices, educated guesses and stabs in the dark.
The knowledge we think we know, is inside the box of our mind. Reality is infinite and indivisible.
The mind, being itself a finite instrument, can never grasp or comprehend the infinite. The finite can only ever hope to grasp and define the finite. To be a finite speck in an infinite universe is a lonely, insecure, even frightening existence. To overcome its inherent insecurity, our mind desperately wants to assert its dominion over the world around it. To assert itself, it must first separate itself from the world, separate the knower from the known. Like a turkey burying its head in the sand, in order to ‘know’ reality, our mind pretends reality to be finite, which is an absurd denial of the indivisible infinite. Most of what the mind thinks it knows, is derived from this essential denial of truth.
Our mind is a tiny sealed box, floating in the ocean of the infinite, oblivious to the ocean in which it floats. It is the frog who, having lived all its life in the well, asserts that there is no universe outside of its little well.
There can be no superiority and inferiority without division. To prove oneself superior, one must establish one’s differences from the inferior. Our mind can never know reality, for it sets itself (the knower) apart from reality (the known) – or from what it supposes to be the known. Relying on the falsehood of division, the mind can never own the known, let alone the unknown and the unknowable.
We convey much about ourselves, by our attitude to a rainy day.
To complain about the rain is a pervasive pastime: and yet, we cannot live without rain. Rain is the source of life, bringer of nourishment, richness, fulfilment, diversity, abundance. Rain sustains, soothes, cleanses, refreshes, replenishes, energises and inspires us. In the spiritual life, rain symbolises divine blessings. Rain embodies and evokes the spiritual qualities of forgiveness, grace, compassion, love, concern, kindness, gratitude. Rain is conducive to meditation, awakening and illumining our consciousness, if we accept it gratefully.
So why would we complain about rain? Why bite the hand that feeds us so lavishly, generously and unconditionally?
A happy heart never complains, for happiness is its own reward, its own fulfilment. A happy heart shines upon the world around it, seeing blessings and opportunities everywhere. An unhappy mind seeks ever to complain, for in finding fault with the world and outer circumstances, the mind has a scapegoat to blame for its perpetual unhappiness, a punching bag onto which to project its own frustrating inadequacy.
The unhappy mind is a magnet for the negative, seemingly generating obstacles and problems out of thin air. Thus, the mind sees only the negative in a rainy day: the cancelled outdoor activities, traffic delays, slippery surfaces and soaked socks.
Rain threatens our dry mind; and is embraced by our flowing heart.
Our mind is certain in its fixity, while our heart thrives in spontaneity. Rain is beyond our mind’s control: rain interrupts our fixed plans, unbalances our mind’s certainty and frustrates its supremacy. Once our mind’s plans have been dashed, our heart’s spontaneity has an opening, an opportunity to blossom.
Now we know: every rainy day is a barometer of our healthy mind and happy heart.
You have lived in the same house all your life. You own the house and the land it sits on.
One day, a geologist comes to your door, with some interesting news. He says: “We have been conducting geological tests and surveys, using advanced technologies, mapping the geological composition of all the land in this region, including identifying the prevalence of minerals in the area. It is my pleasure to inform you, that the land under your feet, precisely the plot that you own, contains the richest deposit of gold ever located in the history of the world. It is impossible to calculate its worth: its value would run into trillions of dollars.”
He gives further technical details of other minerals in the area, shows you a few maps and spreadsheets, and offers some explanation as to how such a rich concentration of gold might have formed in precisely this locale.
With that the geologist shakes your hand by way of congratulation, leaves his card in case you might need his services in future, bids his farewell and goes on his way.
You are alone again. You go back inside, to resume whatever it is you had been doing prior to the geologist’s arrival.
But you cannot. Whatever it is you were doing, no longer has any appeal. Something has changed. Everything has changed. The view outside your window has changed. Your life, which had been so well established in its routines and habits, is suddenly empty, insufficient, incomplete.
You are sitting on untold treasure of inestimable value. It has been under your feet this whole time, your entire life.
There is no going back. You gaze at the charts the geologist left with you. Their story is clear. The question is staring at you:
Soon you will have breathed out all the restlessness, all the stress and tension that you had been harbouring within you. Offloading these stolen goods, creates more space throughout your being so you can breathe in even more peace. Breathing in peace creates room for ever more peace.
Now you are breathing in peace and breathing out peace, your breath is a cycle, a continuum of flowing, growing, glowing peace. There is peace within you, above, below and all around. You are saturated with peace. Every cell of your being, every thought, every feeling is peace. You are swimming in the sea of peace, beginningless and endless.
You are the ocean of peace. On the surface of the sea sometimes there will be waves, sometimes there may even be a storm. No matter what is happening on the surface, in the depths of the ocean is always profound peace.
Your thoughts are the waves, your emotions the storm surges on the surface of the sea, but you are the very depths of the ocean, you are the vast silent profundity of the ocean’s infinite, eternal peace.
In the very depths of your ocean there is a cave where you keep all of your spiritual wealth. Now all the peace that you have breathed in, pour it carefully into that cave. Then, tomorrow or the next day when you need some peace in your outer life, you know precisely where to find it.
Now, take three final breaths to consolidate the peace that you have breathed in, taking care it is all safe inside your secret cave. Then when you’re ready, open your eyes.
Continue to sit quietly for a few minutes. Now you are ready to face, embrace and fully live your day.
Sit somewhere you can be alone, silent and undisturbed. Wear loose, comfortable clothing, so you can be physically relaxed, while sitting straight and still: calm, alert, in control.
Close your eyes and dive into your life-breath. If we practise breathing regularly, then whenever we dive into our breath, we have the feeling of returning home, to where we belong. Nothing else exists, nothing else matters.
Now please imagine that what you are breathing in from the atmosphere around you is not air, but solid peace. And you are breathing in this peace not only through your nostrils, but through your eyes, your ears, through the very pores of your skin. It is as though inside, you are a dry sponge and you are just soaking up this peace directly into your very core. And slowly but surely this peace is circulating right throughout your being from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet to the very tips of your fingers.
And as you breathe out you will release anything within you which is not peace. If there is tension in your muscles, anywhere in your body, let that tension go, release it and breathe it out. Any restlessness in your nerves or emotions, soothe it and breathe it out. Any stress that is tying your mind in knots, unravel it, let it go and breathe it out.
Stress and tension are not our possessions. They are stolen goods. We have no right to hold onto anything which is not our possession. So all these stolen goods, this foreign stress and tension, let it go, let it flow out the window, up and out into the sky, where it dissipates and evaporates without a trace, never to return.
These days, everyone is an expert on meditation. Everyone has views, thoughts and opinions. Everyone, it seems, has read books on meditation; attended lectures, seminars and retreats; listened to podcasts; watched YouTube videos; listened to meditation music playlists; talked with their friends and thought a lot about meditation.
But how many actually meditate? How many yearn with intense longing to utterly silence the mind? How many shed streaming inner tears to fly into the bliss-flooded sunlit vastness of the heart?
Meditation will absolutely answer all our life’s questions; unfailingly solve all our life’s problems; and reliably help us fulfil all our life’s dreams and highest goals… on one condition: that we do it, we actually practise meditation, regularly, sincerely, ardently and devotedly. If we want meditation to give us everything – to answer all our questions, solve our problems and fulfil our dreams, then we must in turn be prepared to give all our heart to our meditation. We must take it seriously and soulfully. We must love it and live it.
Meditation is self-discovery. Discovering yourself can never be theoretical. You are not a theory. You are real.
Someone else’s advice can inspire you or guide you – but only you can walk the path within, to your own heart and soul. Only you can live your inner life; only you can survey your own unique inner landscape; only you can breathe the exquisite fragrance of your own heart-garden; only you can unveil the brilliance and clarity of your own soul’s light; only you can fulfill your life’s destiny; only you can come face to face with God in the form God has adopted just for you.
Knowledge and theories are useless, without practise. Only practise yields experience; only experience yields realisation; and only realisation is real.
A sheep could not eat meat even if it tried, while a lion would perish on a diet of grass. Each to their own.
Each of us is a unique soul, each with our own sacred mission, our own life’s purpose and divine destiny.
The pressure on us to conform, to adapt ourselves to fit in with the behaviour and expectations of others, comes both from around and within us.
Our family, friends and colleagues usually have their own ideas about what we should aspire for and how we should behave, according to their own worldview. It is inevitable that we feel influenced by the desires and opinions of others, especially when these come from people we admire, depend on or fear.
Yet until we know who we are, we can never be happy and fulfilled. What if we are not sure if we are lion or sheep? How should we behave?
Because we are not happy or fulfilled, we choose to conform with others’ expectations out of uncertainty, fear or insecurity, or we imitate others, especially those we perceive as being successful or popular, or we seek to define ourselves in rebellion against the family or society which has not gifted us happiness. Most often, rebellion brings us to the same destination as conformity: disappointment and frustration.
Because our soul is the source of happiness, only in fulfilling our soul’s purpose can we be happy.
Only in meditation can we discover the purpose of our soul and the path to fulfill our soul, the path to happiness.
In meditation, the brightness and clarity of our soul disperses the fog of our uncertainty and guides us out of the labyrinth of society’s expectations.
Only once we know ourselves, can we be true to ourselves. So – meditate.
