Question: How can you develop perfect gratitude?

Sri Chinmoy: First of all, please try to feel that gratitude abides inside your heart. Then ask yourself whether you are the heart. The immediate answer will be, "One minute a day." The rest of the time, you are the mind or you are the body or you are the vital. But if you can feel that you are the heart, not just for a fleeting second or a fleeting minute, but twenty-four hours a day, if you can feel the presence of your heart as your own existence, then easily you will have gratitude, since gratitude lives inside the heart.

Now, how can you increase your gratitude? If you have that capacity to feel that you are the heart, try to feel that your heart is constantly becoming large, larger, largest. It is like the father whose salary is constantly increasing. He used to get fifty dollars a week, now he is getting one hundred dollars, and soon he will be getting two hundred dollars. In the same way, the capacity of your heart is constantly increasing. Now, the child of the heart is gratitude. When the father becomes richer, the child also automatically becomes richer because he knows that his father's property belongs to him as well. If his father becomes a multimillionaire, then in time his father's wealth goes to him. So when the heart is all the time expanding, when its capacity is all the time increasing, gratitude is also increasing and growing in capacity.