University of Bridgeport; Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA

14 April 1969

How to please God? I can please God by offering 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 rather a constant experience
of His. If I want to please Him most, not only in one 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 exaggerate your selfimposed
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 affirmation, 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 God exists. True, they
have not seen God, but that does not mean they are qualified to deny His
Existence. What about those who have seen Him, felt Him and 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 the 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. The
eager desire of Christ’s disciple Thomas to have proof is found 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 when a man lives and swims in the sea of his soul’s light,
he is all gratitude. He is the constant expression and spontaneous revelation of
God the Receiver and God the Achiever.
According to Paul Valéry, “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 Upanishads have taught
us that the body is the chariot and the soul is the master of the chariot. Valéry 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’ we should 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 aspirant’s meditation transforms the desirepleasure
of the body into aspiration-delight, the soul and the body not only will
eat the same food, but will eat it at the same time. And their food is Truth. Truth
at once awakens the body and pilots the soul.
The other day someone said to me that God is pleased with him all the time,
for one secret reason. He then volunteered to tell me his precious secret:
“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 well 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 is entirely different from mine. You
feel that imperfection is something discouraging, disheartening, dirty and finally
damaging. I take imperfection as something growing, something that has still to
complete its journey. I take imperfection as an unavoidable rung in the ladder of
gradual and ultimate perfection. I take imperfection as a significant experience
God Himself is having in and through man’s life. And this same 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
do not 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 expect
anything of you. God is not an autocrat. He does not demand anything from you.
What God is, is Love. What God is, is Joy. If you can love yourself soulfully, if
you can discover your true inner Joy, then you will see that God has already been
pleased with you. Do not try to please God by deceiving Him. We cannot deceive
God. Never. We cannot even deceive any human being on earth. At most what we
can do and what we in fact do, is 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.