We all have experienced the joy and peace of gratitude. Life flows smoother and your outlook is brighter when you feel grateful. Gratitude comes when you feel full. When you don’t feel any sense of lack, then you feel gratitude. You cannot be grateful and feel lack—the two cannot co-exist at the same time. Certainly, you’ve experienced both, but only at different times. When you feel grateful, you also feel full. When you feel any lack, grumbling begins in some corner. With knowledge, you experience gratitude and become grateful. And when you are grateful, the law of nature ensures that the gratefulness increases and that you are given more. If you are grateful, more positive things will flow to you. If you are grumbling, the grumbling and negativity will increase. For those who do not have the knowledge, there is no way out of their grumblings, because grumbling becomes their nature. And once they start grumbling, demand arises, and when the demand arises, everything is taken away from them. Even what little joy, peace, or love they have in this world will be lost. This is all in accordance with the law of nature. Whatever seed(s) you sow, such fruit you will personally bear. If you sow the seed of lack, only lack will grow. Conversely, if you sow the seed of plenty and the seed of gratitude in your life, these elements will blossom in your world. Open your eyes and see what surrounds you. When you recognise through this knowledge what you have been given, then you become grateful. And in that gratefulness, everything grows. This is the reason why grandmothers in India have a habit of saying, “Everything is full.” If something is less than full, or empty, they never say, “This is empty, we don’t have this.” Instead, they say, “We have a lot of this.” It is an attitude of “plentitude” in the mind. When you feel that you have plenty in the consciousness, the ‘plenty-ness’ grows.
Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is a humanitarian leader, spiritual teacher and an ambassador of peace.