How to please God¹

How to please God? I can please God by offering to Him what I have and what I am. What I have is gratitude. What I am is aspiration. If I want to please Him more, then I must never consider my life a sad failure, but a constant experience of God. If I want to please Him most, not only in one aspect of life, but in every aspect of life, then I must feel that, unlike me, He sees my life, inner and outer, as the Song of His own Life-Breath — the Song of His perfection, growing into His own perfect perfection Absolute.

Do you know when you hurt God? You hurt God the moment you underestimate your inner capacity. You hurt God the moment you overexaggerate your self-imposed outer responsibility. You hurt Him deeply when you cherish the futile idea that God-Realisation is not for you. To be sure, your God-Realisation is the mightiest “yes”, the greatest certainty at God’s choice hour.

Unfortunately there are people in whose lives the very question of pleasing or hurting God does not arise at all. They do not believe in the existence of God. True, they have not seen God. That does not mean that they are qualified to deny the existence of God. What about those who have seen Him, felt Him, realised Him and are fulfilling Him in this world and other worlds. I tell the unbelievers and disbelievers that they are not only mercilessly deceiving themselves in their inner life of divinity, but also unendingly carrying themselves away, far away from the outer life of reality. There are people who deny the existence of God outright. Again the eager desire of Christ’s disciple Thomas to have proof is spread all the world over. “Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.” Let the message of the Son of God reverberate in the inmost recesses of each human heart, aspiring or unaspiring, inspired or uninspired. Today faith is the harbinger of reality. Tomorrow, faith and reality will move together. The day after tomorrow, faith and reality will fulfil each other. Faith fulfils reality in its embodiment of reality. Reality fulfils faith by revealing itself through faith.

The feeling of gratitude makes a man truly happy and God is pleased when a man is truly happy. Dostoevsky declares, “I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.” This may be true when a man swims in the sea of his body’s ignorance. But a man, when he lives and swims in the sea of his soul’s light, is all-gratitude. He is the constant expression and spontaneous revelation of God the Receiver and God the Achiever.

According to Paul Valery, “The soul is the wife of the body. They do not have the same kind of pleasure or, at least, they seldom enjoy it at the same time.” First of all, the spiritual world has already discovered for certain that the soul is neither masculine nor feminine. It is above and beyond these two dividing zones. Hence the soul can never be the wife of the body. The Upanishad has taught us that the soul is the master of the chariot and the body is the chariot. Valery is absolutely right when he says that the body and the soul do not have the same kind of pleasure. We know that the body gets pleasure in ignorance and from ignorance. Slowly, gradually and unerringly we come to realise that the body’s pleasure is ignorance itself. In the case of the soul, instead of using the word “pleasure” let us better use the word “delight”. The soul feels delight in and from Infinity and Eternity. The soul’s delight is the flowing Infinity; the soul’s delight is the glowing Eternity. When the desire-pleasure of the body is transformed into aspiration-delight by the aspirant’s meditation, the soul and the body not only will eat the same food, but eat at the same time. And their food is Truth. Truth at once awakens the body and pilots the soul.

The other day somebody said to me that God is all the time pleased with him because of one secret reason. He then volunteered to tell me his precious secret. He said, “Although I have many things to say against God’s creation, even against God Himself, I just cleverly ignore His world of countless imperfections and mightily flatter Him in silence and in public. That is why God is so pleased with me all the time and He ought to be.” I said to him, “My dear friend, there is a slight difference between you and me. Your sense of imperfection in God’s world entirely differs from mine. You feel that imperfection is something discouraging, disheartening, dirty and finally damaging. Am I right?” “You are right,” said he. I continued, “I take imperfection as something growing, something that has to complete its role, its journey. I take imperfection as something as an unavoidable rung in the ladder of gradual and ultimate perfection. I take imperfection as an experience. God Himself is having this significant experience in and through man’s life. Again this very God will enjoy perfection, perfect perfection in and through each individual in the bosom of Eternity. Now, as regards your flattery of God, God needs no human flattery. You don’t have to flatter Him to gain His Love, Concern and Blessing. God neither expects nor demands flattery from you. God is not a beggar. He does not have to expect anything of you. God is not an autocrat. He has not to demand anything from you. What God is is Love. What God is is Joy. If you can love yourself soulfully, and and if you can discover your true inner Joy, then you will see that God has already been pleased with you. Don’t try to please God by deceiving Him. We can’t deceive God, never. We can’t even deceive any human being on earth. What we, at most, can and do is to deceive ourselves. Emerson is perfectly right when he affirms. “It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.”

To come back to our original question, how to please God? The easiest and most effective way to please God is by constant and unconditional self-offering. Let us try. We shall, without fail, succeed. Lo. God is standing right in front of us. He is pleased. God is really and truly pleased with us.