Become gratitude and enjoy!🔗

You have to just become gratitude! The best way to become gratitude is to learn to enjoy without a reason. Enjoy everything

Things are running smoothly not because of us, but in spite of us! that you see, everything that you hear, and everything that you do, with the supreme confidence that Existence is taking care. Life will then simply transform in front of your eyes and you will be overflowing all the time because you are always enjoying it.

A small story:

There was a man who was walking past a mango grove, which was overflowing with mangoes of different varieties.

He entered the grove, looked around, studied it, took down some statistics and left half an hour later, with facts and figures.

After a while, another man walked past the same grove.

He entered it, plucked a few mangoes, ate them joyfully and left!

Now, please don't stop by at any mango grove and eat up the mangoes. You might get stoned for

The best way to become gratitude is to learn to enjoy without a reason. it! Try to understand what I am trying to say. Just learn to enjoy life without questioning, although I don't mean that you should drop all your work and only enjoy all the time.

You need to work, no doubt. No one is going to give you everything if you only enjoy. I am only saying, don't look for reasons to enjoy, that's all. Simply enjoy everything without questioning. Let enjoying become your very nature, then gratitude will become your very being.

Your profession may be anything, your social status may be anything, your economic status may be anything, but enjoying is something that every man can do irrespective of all this.

The problem is that you always feel that there should be a causative factor for everything including enjoyment. You have trained your mind with these kinds of thought patterns. This is also the reason why, you often feel, that others have been blessed with things that they don't deserve, while you have not been given enough for your efforts.

You always think that you need to work hard in order to enjoy. No! Working hard is alright, but it has nothing to do with the capacity to enjoy. Drop this idea. This is the only way you can stop complaining or feeling dissatisfied.

Existence showers. If you choose to enjoy it, you will. It is purely your choice. You choose wrongly and then complain or blame someone else. Remember, no one is responsible for anything that happens to you. Everything is a conscious choice that you make unconsciously. Because of lack of awareness in you, you make unconscious and monotonous decisions and land up complaining about life.

Always remember that heaven and hell are not geographical locations in the outside world. You create them within yourself. The moment you lose trust over Existence, you alienate yourself from it and carry hell with you wherever you go.

A teacher once asked her students, 'Can anyone tell me where you think hell is?'

Everything is a conscious choice that you make unconsciously. Because of lack of awareness in you, you make unconscious and monotonous decisions and land up complaining about life.

After a long silence, a girl stood up and replied, 'In my dad's study.'

The teacher was surprised and asked her why she had said that.

The child replied, 'Every time I go to my dad's study, he says, get the hell out of here!'

Be with gratitude, it is enough

Children are trained from a young age, to think of hell and heaven as entities outside of them. They are trained to think that God is sitting above, on a big throne, and watching every movement of ours, and noting down our sins and good deeds.

By thinking in this way, we start the cause and effect cycle of all our actions. We associate good deeds with heaven and bad deeds with hell. We start thinking of God and the whole of Existence as a transaction center. Each one of us becomes a businessman in our own way, whatever may be our real profession!

What do you do when you go to the temple? You purchase flowers, coconuts and fruit, and go to the deity inside and make an offering in your family's name to the deity. You tell the name, birthstar etc. of each and every member of your family and do the ritual.

The poor priest will hold one bowl in his hand and you will be telling him a long list of names with all the details of each of your family members. You are so afraid that God will send the blessings to the wrong person, to the wrong household! You give him the exact geographical location etc. and emphasize to him that it is you and no one else who has come with the offering. Only after doing this, you leave the temple. Am I right?

As if God does not know you if you don't tell him all this! As if you need to remind God of your existence so that he will shower on you.

All you need to do is feel continued gratitude towards Him, that's all. He is always showering on you.

It is not that he sees you in trouble and then decides to bail you out, or sees that you are alright and therefore ignores you. All this is our own conditioning that we project on God. All this is what society has taught us from a young age.

Simply enter into the temple with a feeling of gratitude; stand before every deity for a few minutes with deep thankfulness, and leave the temple in that same mood. That is enough. The rest will be taken care of. This is the ultimate prayer. Gratitude is the ultimate offering.

Open up and allow yourself to flower. This is a rare opportunity for you. This is a chance for you to transform. Don't miss it. Create that new inner space in you, which will go with you when you leave this place.

Gratitude happens from the heart

The problem is, we are always trying to reach God through our heads. You can never reach God through your head. If you simply drop your head, you will automatically function through your heart and discover that you need not even reach out to Him; He is already there in you!

With your head, you will always seek outside and you can never find God outside. Also, you will be looking for reasons to feel grateful. When you move from your head to your heart, a whole new space will open out for you, and you will realize that you always knew, and that it was your mind which was causing all the havoc and not letting you realize it.

When you operate from your heart, you are always in gratitude. Do we ever say 'mind-felt

If you simply drop your head, you will automatically function through your heart and discover that you need not even reach out to Him; He is already there in you! gratitude'? No! We always say 'heart-felt gratitude', do we not?

Next, you will ask, 'How do we move from our head to our heart Swamiji!' Just be aware of your head, that is enough! Only because you are unaware of your head, you allow it to function in an undisturbed fashion, in a mechanical fashion. Once you become aware of your head, you will be able to drop it.

Gratitude is not any virtue. It has to be your very attitude. When you feel only gratitude, you can tune yourself beautifully to Existence, and then Existence will reveal to you its magical splendour. All you need to do then is sit back and enjoy!

Let me explain what I mean by tuning. We all know how the radio works. The same radio, without any change in its physical form, can be connected to many radio stations airing different programs, can

apply this same concept to tuning to Existence.

There are thousands of programs happening around us. Whatever we tune ourselves to, that we will experience. Now, tuning to any one program is purely our own choice. You have the freedom to choose the program you wish to listen to, right? In the same way, if you choose to tune yourself to discontentment and similar negative things, you will be caught in the never-ending whirlpool of worry, discontentment, dilemma and what not. Whereas, if you choose to tune yourself with the central chord that is running this whole show, you will catch the right thread in all the chaos that is around you and will be free from all these emotions. You will become a beautiful flower that blossoms with a fragrance.

The more you fine-tune yourself with Existence, the more ecstatic life will be.

Discontentment will pull you down, make you heavy and miserable. On the other hand, gratitude will make you light and blissful.

Feel causelessly grateful

A small story:

In a Christian household, a girl was sitting at the dinner table with her mother.

Food was served at the table and she started eating her food without saying grace.

The mother was shocked and asked her how she could do such a thing.

The girl promptly replied, 'There is nothing on this plate that I have not said thanks for at least once before.'

We know to feel grateful only with a strong reason.

One more small story:

A young girl asked her mother, 'Mom, how many more days remaining before Christmas?'

The mother asked, 'Why do you want to know?'

The girl replied, 'I was just wondering

The more you fine-tune yourself with Existence, the more ecstatic life will be. whether it was time for me to start being a good girl.' This is how we train children to think and behave. We teach them how to do transactions. We teach them that everything is nothing but a transaction. We don't teach them to be spontaneous and flowing. We don't teach them to live without a purpose. We make everything goal-oriented for them.

Because of all these things that have been done to children, you have to work hard in undoing them first. Be very clear that all that I am doing with you is only undoing. I am continuously undoing. Imagine the amount of doing that has been done to you! Over generations, people have been passing on their ideas to you. I have to first undo all that and then create a space in you for you to flower.

When I tell people to feel a continued sense of gratitude in them, they come back later and tell me, 'Swamiji, these days I say thank you to the cab drivers and to the servants at home.' Be very clear: when gratitude becomes your being, you will not even report these kinds of things.

When you are grieving the loss of a dear one, do you verbalize your grief? Will you be able to verbalize your grief? No! It becomes such a deep-rooted emotion that it becomes the state of your being. You can only feel it; you can never report it.

In the same way, gratitude when it becomes your very being, will simply become your state; you will not be reporting it. You can never report it also. Of course, saying 'thank you' is alright for social reasons because unless you express it, it doesn't reach the ears of the other person.

But what I am trying to tell you here is, we need to move from gratitude of the mind to gratitude of the being. The gratitude that we are talking about, you will never be able to express, because it runs so deep.

Real gratitude runs very deep

People often say to me, 'Swamiji, we are so grateful to you for so many things that have happened in our lives after association with you.'

For reasons of social etiquette, you may thank a person for something, but gratitude is not something that you direct towards a person. When you feel gratitude towards a person for something you have received, it is simply gratitude of the mind. This is the kindergarten stage of gratitude.

Real gratitude is a deep overwhelming feeling inside yourself, not as a result of any gain but just at the thought of existing, at the thought of the compassionate life force that is Existence, that's all. This gratitude does not need any relationship; it is not dependent on anyone or anything; it is not under the sway of any emotions like lust, anger, hatred or love. It simply IS, that's all.

You express your gratitude with words because you are egoistic and you don't want people to think you lack courtesy. But the moment you express it, you belittle or falsify it.

Actually, your very body language can convey the state of gratitude in you. Your eyes can convey it; your smile can convey it; your warmth can convey it much better than words. Tears of gratitude express it better than anything else. When you are overwhelmed, when you are brimming, tears overflow.

I am not asking you to cry! I am only telling you that when you overflow, your body will show it, you cannot hide it, and that is the real indication of the state of your gratitude.

And remember, these tears don't belong to any caste or creed or religion.

Real gratitude is a deep overwhelming feeling inside yourself, not as a result of any gain but just at the thought of existing, at the thought of the compassionate life force that is Existence,

They cannot be classified as Hindu tears or Muslim tears; these tears don't belong to any religion. They belong to the being and the being is beyond all this. Gratitude is one thing that can dissolve all manmade barriers and conditioning; that is why it is the ultimate prayer.

Anything deep can never be expressed wholly. Poets may write poems to express it, painters may paint to express it, writers may write to express it, but there will remain a portion that can never be expressed through any of this. Existence can never be expressed by ordinary things. That is why it is so mystical and luring. That is why it is so exciting beyond what words can describe! That is why you can only feel it and not express it. That is why you come here again and again!

When you come here, you don't have to express any gratitude, because even without you expressing, I will know. When real gratitude is overwhelming in you, I will know it even before you do! I know the beat of your heart! I know it from the look in your eyes! In fact, when you express to me, you might be deceiving yourself because most of the time, you think and talk in contradicting ways. You might be thinking something inside, but you express something else outside.