Every day should be a day of Thanksgiving for all the gifts of Life — sunshine, water, the luscious fruits and greens, which we receive as indirect gifts from the Great Giver.

He makes us work so that we may consciously and thankfully deserve to receive His Gifts.

The All-Sufficient One does not need the benefit of our thankful hearts, but when we are grateful to the Fountain of all gifts, our attention is concentrated for our own highest benefit upon the only Great Source of all supply.

He alone can unfailingly, un-deceivingly bestow upon us the lasting gifts of wisdom, abundance, and spiritual treasures without the confinement of any mundane measure.

There are millions of people today who are drunk with egotism, who think that they keep themselves alive because they feed themselves with their self-earned magic gold of delusion.

They never stop to think that man can neither make a grain of wheat, nor a leaf of green, nor the illusory, glittering, yellow gold, nor the paper and ink of which greenbacks are made.

Neither can he create first life independently of God — the life that gives power to the precious green papers.

For these people, Thanksgiving Day, although soiled with the blood of unthankful turkeys, is a great day of awakening. It is a day of thinking of the most important and the most forgotten Molder of our Destiny.

Millions of people who eat turkey forget to thank God at all, and think more of the turkey than of God. But many of you could thank God in meditation more consciously while munching on the meat of peace, than while dipping your lips in the gravy and the flavor-camouflaged flesh of a turkey, where once sensitiveness guarded the throne of Life.

If you eat turkey, be sure to stuff it with the best Bliss-spiced dressing of thankful remembrance of God and His highest gifts of wisdom, peace, and power to accomplish.

And thank God that you are not the turkey, to be used for the festivity of Thanksgiving!

Anyway, don’t mind my sympathy for the turkey, for I am more sympathetic toward you, who are superior to the turkey.

God is waiting to hear your unceasing knock of devotion so that He can open the Gates of Omnipresence to receive you. Whether you eat turkey or not does not matter if you will only knock hard with devotion on the doors of your heart.

Make every day a day of Thanksgiving, and continuous contentment will sparkle in your body, mind, and soul. Be sure to search for the all-freeing God from now on, until you find Him on the brink of unceasing seeking.

—Paramhansa Yogananda
November 1934