Increasing Gratitude

Sri Chinmoy: How can you increase your gratitude and your devotion towards me? I always say that imagination is a reality in its own world. The imagination-world is as real as the reality-world. Think of sincere devotion, not insincere. Sometimes people show devotion with folded hands. They are just folding their palms or hands, with no sincere inner devotion. But when you are feeling true devotion, it is something sweet, sweeter, sweetest you are tasting. You can never imagine how such a sweet thing can exist here on earth. That sweetness is your devotion. Nothing can be as sweet as devotion in the spiritual life.

So you can try to remember how many times you have experienced that sweetness inside your heart. Not only inside your heart — after some time it permeates the whole being. Remember the sweetness. It is not like the taste of sugar or honey. It is a sweet feeling of devotion experienced by all your subtle nerves – you have thou-sands of spiritual nerves – and by your muscles, tendons and everything that you have and you are. Just think of how on that particular day you had that experience, the sweet feeling of devotion. While thinking of it soulfully, I assure you, your devotion will increase. It is bound to increase, of course, with purity in the mind, purity in the vital. Purity is of tremendous importance, paramount importance. If purity is not there in anything, then the results will be next to nothing. If purity is there while you are having this experience in your mind, in your vital, then you are bound to increase your devotion.

To increase your gratitude, take gratitude as a flower. First take gratitude as if you have sown the seed. You have sown the seed of so many flowers, all the flowers. You have sown the seed of gratitude. Then it is blooming and blossoming. After a few days, a few weeks or a few months, the gratitude-flower will be fully blossomed. You can enjoy the beauty and fragrance of that gratitude-flower.

This gratitude-flower is not a flower produced by nature, from some plants, which you can see with your human eyes. This gratitude-flower you will see only inside your heart. Every day it is blooming and blossoming. You have to feel every day that the gratitude-flower is blooming in the morning, and then in the evening it has blossomed.

Each and every flower you see blooms and blossoms, then it fades away, it becomes dry, and it dies. The beauty and the fragrance are all gone. But inside your heart you have to feel there is a gratitude-flower, and this flower does not die. Unlike the flowers that you see in front of your eyes, this gratitude-flower of the heart only blossoms and blossoms. It has already bloomed, and it is blossoming and blossoming and radiating its beauty. When you look at it, you can feel something is expanding in your inner life and outer life. It is expanding and expanding, spreading and covering the length and the breadth of the world.

This is one way you can increase your gratitude, by seeing a gratitude-flower inside your heart. Every day the petals of that flower are becoming larger and larger, and radiating more and more beauty, trying to cover the length and the breadth of the world. And when that flower covers the whole world or the universe, you become at that time part and parcel of the universe. Your gratitude and the blessings and joy of the universe go together – the blessings that you have got from Above so that you can increase your gratitude. It is an expansion. If a muscle can be stronger, then the gratitude-flower which the heart has can be more beautiful, brighter, brightest.

Always feel that the gratitude-flower inside the heart does not die, unlike the flowers that you see. You get this flower from the gratitude-plant, from your aspiration, from your heart’s cry. The gratitude-flower that takes birth from your aspiration, from your heart’s cry, never fades away, never dies. It only increases. The more you can see the gratitude-flower inside your heart, the more its beauty and its divinity will expand. And you become one, part and parcel of its expansion, which covers the length and the breadth of the world.