According to Osho, blissfulness is primary; gratitude flows from it. First, through meditation your consciousness flowers into a living silence, peace, and ecstatic dance—this direct encounter with existence (not a personal God) births spontaneous, unaddressed thankfulness. True prayer is prayerfulness: a natural overflow of bliss, free of desire or bargaining, revering the godliness shimmering in life itself.
Find inner joy through meditation, and then real thankfulness naturally appears without asking for anything or addressing a god.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved master, is blissfulness an expression of gratitude towards existence?
Finally he decided to go and see for himself what was going on. He took a motorboat, reached the small island. It was so small that there was only one tree on the island, but with beautiful foliage, and all those three saints were sitting underneath it. Just by looking at them the archbishop knew: These are absolutely uneducated villagers -- who has created this rumor? And how gullible are people that they are worshipping these people? And as he descended from his boat all the three villagers touched his feet. He was immensely happy. He said, "Are you the three priests the whole country is talking about?" They said, "We don't know. People come to us, we cannot prevent them coming. All that we know is that we are absolutely contented. All that we know is that there is no more desire, no more ambition. Life is just a…
In that state of utter emptiness and purity bliss arises in your being. It does not come from the outside, it simply grows in you. Ripples of it start arising, and those ripples are like opening flowers. Great fragrance is released in your being and for the first time you feel that life is significant, meaningful, that life has poetry in it, that it is a beautiful gift. Feeling that, one bows down -- not to somebody in particular but to existence itself. That bowing down is prayer, that gratitude iS prayer. For my sannyasin the only way to approach God is by being more and more blissful. [Anand Irmela -- Bliss isn't something you can buy or sell] It is not transferable: one who has it cannot give it to the other who has not got it.
God is, truth is, tao is -- there is no need to believe at all. Just open the doors and the windows and let the wind and the rain and the sun come in, and they will give you a glimpse of the outside world, of the tremendously beautiful existence. They will become invitations from the ultimate. Then go and explore with joy, with thrill. My sannyasins have to be adventurers, explorers. One day they are bound to find. And when you yourself find, it has a totally different significance, it has a totally different quality to it. It is not impotent belief, it is living truth, it is your truth -- you can risk your life for it. Jesus could die so easily for the simple reason that the knew. If he had been just a believer he would have wavered, he would have escaped.
Gratitude is the essence of prayer
Doubt is a perfectly adequate method for extrovert enquiries, it is the right method. I am not against doubt. It has tremendous importance. The whole edifice of science stands on it: doubt and doubt, unless you stumble upon something that you cannot doubt. But still that is only a hypothesis. That means you are still not going to trust it absolutely. Who knows? -- tomorrow some new facts may turn up, so keep the doors open for doubts. For the time being, use it hypothetically; for the time being this is true, but only for the time being. Science never comes to truth, only to approximations, hypotheses. Religion is a totally different endeavour: it begins in trust. It needs faith, such faith that no doubt ever arises. Not that one has to repress doubt; if you repress it, it will be there. One has to watch, one has not to…
[God is everywhere, except in the temple, Osho explains.] Bliss is the only experience that gives you a taste of God. For a moment it transports you into another world where you are worldly no more; for a moment you are human no more, you are divine. The moment of bliss is the moment of God penetrating you and of you penetrating God; it is an orgasmic experience with God. Hence those who have not known it will think the blissful person mad. He looks utterly out of his mind; in a way he is, because he is beyond mind. In a way he is mad because he is so drunk with the divine. But his madness is far more valuable than the so-called worldly sanity. The ordinary human being who thinks that he is normal is utterly wrong; he is not normal, he is only average.