Life filled with gratitude

Gratitude is a very important trait that we need to definitely pursue in our life. It starts from the time of our birth to our mother who is responsible for bringing us to this wonderful planet. Sometimes, we might get confused between love and gratitude. Love is spontaneous where as gratitude is one of the characteristics that we need to inculcate in our life. Then why do we need to show gratitude to our mother? We have to remember that we have come into existence in this world by our past action to pursue our unfulfilled desires and it is one more opportunity for us to realize our inner self. The ultimate goal of every life is to become one with the being, become aware that we are Atma (part of divine) and achieve bliss. Sat means truth or being (what is called Atma or true being inside of us), chit means awareness and ananda means bliss. Therefore Satchitananda means being, awareness and bliss. Without mother bringing us to this world, we do not even have a body and mind to pursue our goal. Therefore, it is absolutely critical that we show our gratitude to our parents for giving that wonderful opportunity.


The next we need to be very grateful to our father. Our father is supposed to guide us towards the right Guru who could provide the true knowledge for us to pursue our goal. Without us knowing where this knowledge is available and without finding the right person to impart that knowledge to us, we could not assimilate the true knowledge. Therefore our next gratitude is to our father.


Third, we need to be grateful to our guru who imparts the knowledge to us. For that we need to know who a true Guru is. Guru in Sanskrit means the one who has the knowledge of the truth, self-realized and is ready to impart that knowledge to his students. No one else could be called Guru. Guru is someone who would provide that knowledge with intend to serve and not for a consideration. He would not only provide that knowledge but also prevent his students from going in the wrong direction. However, the students will have to gain that knowledge, make an effort to understand it and put that into practice exactly as per the directions of the Guru. We need to be very grateful to someone who provides that rich knowledge that guides us towards immortality.


Forth, we need to be also grateful to the Universal Absolute for consistently showering His Grace. Depending on our past actions and unfulfilled desires and considering our ultimate goal, He makes us to be born to our parents where we could find an opportunity to pursue our unfulfilled desires. He provides us a free will to either pursue the path for self-realization by looking inwards to transform ourselves or delve in the cycle of birth and death with our desires and attachments for several lives looking outwards towards the world. We only have the ability to control our tools consisting of our body, mind and intellect and we have no ability to control the rest of the world. We need to be grateful to Him for giving us a body, mind and intellect to realize our true self without which we could not pursue our goal.


If we develop this attitude to be grateful to those who are responsible for our spiritual growth, we automatically would become grateful to everyone who helps us in our life. How do we fulfill our gratitude? Those who help us with a good act, we need to be ever grateful to them and reciprocate when we get an opportunity to serve them again. Even showing compassion to the people in need is one way of showing gratitude to the world and paying back for what we are receiving from the world. When we grow up, our showing respect and taking very good care of our parents is showing our gratitude to them. When we practice everything our Guru taught us, thinking good about what we had learned from a Guru and showing respect to him when we meet him is the best way we could demonstrate gratitude to our Guru. We could show our gratitude to Universal Absolute by becoming an instrument in His hands. After all, He provides us the body, mind and intellect to pursue our goal and if we use all of them for His mission, it is the best gratitude we could ever show to Him.