Bring Gratitude In

Excerpts from Control of the Mind, a lecture by Yogi Bhajan on June 25, 1987

You have to learn to respect other creations bad and good. I’m not sitting in judgment and I am not asking to judge anybody.  You can see a prostitute and bow and thank God that you are not a prostitute; you can see a noble woman and bow and be in gratitude, and thank God that at least you have seen somebody who is noble, and you have acknowledged it. So each place give you only one chance and that is to thank. You do not have a chance not to thank. When you get up in the morning, and you open your eyes and you breathe consciously, if you have not thanked yet, you have lost the greatest opportunity of the right to live.

At night when you are dead tired and you do not know what to do and you have put your head on the pillow and you are gone, if you have not thanked for that day, you have lost the opportunity to enjoy the night. Each state of mind we enter, we enter with gratitude and that is God. That is experiencing God alive. That is knowing God now. God within you is in you and within your gratitude, and in that gratitude you grow as saintly as you could.

You are one group of people who are supposed to be walking towards your own soul, about your own spirit consciously. That’s why I am not reminding you of the body, I’m not giving you a lecture on how to be healthy. You can be as healthy as Samson; and you may have the mind of anybody you can name. But if you don’t have the light of soul shining around you, you shall be confused. You shall clash with each other, with your environments, with your neighborhood. You shall not follow discipline because you are handicapped and you have weakness, because the strength behind you is the spirit of you. If you do not let that spirit play, you will not have the power to go. The world today needs peace, it needs harmony, it needs tranquility. We can all work for it and give it only if we have peace within ourselves.

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