Chapter 5: The Tongue's Only Two Jobs
There is something Ananta says that stops people mid-sentence. He says it gently, the way you might point out that someone's coat is on fire. No alarm, just fact:
"Have you ever found yourself gossiping in God's presence? Sitting in God's light and you just... you found this doesn't happen. Be careful of well-intentioned sounding gossip."
That pause in the middle. That trailing "you just..." It is the sound of someone catching themselves. And that is exactly what the teaching is about. Catching yourself. Noticing what the tongue is doing when it is not doing its real work.
Because in the tradition Ananta teaches from, the tongue has only two legitimate jobs. It is meant to taste God's prasad, the food that has been offered and blessed and returned to us as grace. And it is meant to speak God's name. Everything else, every complaint, every piece of gossip, every grinding rehearsal of grievance, is a misuse of the instrument.
The Gossip You Did Not Notice
Most people, when they hear the word "gossip," think of malicious talk. Deliberate cruelty. The kind of conversation where someone is torn apart behind their back.
But Ananta is not talking about that. Or not only about that. He is talking about the subtler kind. The kind that sounds like concern. "I'm just worried about him." The kind that sounds like analysis. "She's always been like that." The kind that sounds like sharing. "Did you hear what happened?"
Well-intentioned sounding gossip. That is his phrase. And the word "sounding" does all the work. It sounds well-intentioned. It wears the mask of care. But underneath, the same mechanism is at play: the tongue is spending its time on a person who is not present, building a narrative about them, and in doing so, leaving the presence of the One who is always here.
"When is it worth it to leave God's presence and just spend the time talking about some brother or sister?" Ananta asks. "Let's spend the next two hours of our life talking about someone who's not here... So spending time on both fruitless thinking and fruitless conversations, isn't that such a low-hanging fruit? If we can cut that out of our life, we have so much more time for God."
Low-hanging fruit. He does not ask you to renounce the world. He does not ask you to sit in silence for twelve hours. He asks you to notice the two hours you just spent discussing someone else's life, and to wonder: could those hours have been spent differently?
What You Carried In
You picked up this book because something stirred. Perhaps a phrase caught you, or a stillness opened briefly in the middle of an ordinary day. Whatever it was, you responded. You stepped toward the Name. You entered the castle.
Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century Carmelite mystic, wrote of this moment with unsparing honesty. In her Interior Castle, she describes the soul that has just entered the spiritual life as arriving at the First Mansion, the outermost rooms of a great dwelling. The soul has crossed the threshold. That is real. That is not nothing. But look at what it brought with it.
The rooms, she writes, swarm with "numerous reptiles which disturb their peace." These are not exotic spiritual afflictions. They are ordinary: vanity, idle talk, petty resentments, worldly ambitions. "So many reptiles get in with them that they are unable to appreciate the beauty of the castle." The souls in these first rooms "think about their souls every now and then; although very busy, they pray a few times a month, with minds generally filled with a thousand other matters." They have not been corrupted by the castle. They arrived this way.
This is the condition Ananta is describing. Not the advanced practitioner wrestling with subtle obstacles, but the beginner who comes to the Name carrying a lifetime of conversational habit. The gossip, the grievances, the resentment that has been rehearsed so many times it feels like truth. These are your reptiles. You did not pick them up on the path. They walked in with you.
The Sufi tradition names this starting condition nafs al-ammara, the commanding self, the soul still governed by its own appetites and distractions. The Desert Fathers counted the disciplining of the tongue as one of three essential practices for any beginner, alongside fasting and solitude. Across traditions, the diagnosis is the same: you begin where you are, and where you are is noisy.
But here is what Teresa also understood. You do not clear the reptiles by fighting them room by room. You move deeper into the castle. You walk toward the center. And the Name is how you walk.
The Bucket
Ananta has a way of putting things that makes the abstract concrete. He talks about what we fill ourselves with. The image is simple: you are a container. Every day, you are filling that container with something. The question is what.
"Don't fill yourself up with garbage. It's all garbage."
He means it. The gossip, the grievance, the mental replay of how someone wronged you last Tuesday. All of it takes up space that could hold something else.
"So if I'm not empty of garbage, then how will nectar be filled?"
This is displacement. There is only so much room. If the bucket is full of dirty water, you cannot pour clean water into it. You have to empty it first. And you empty it not by some heroic act of purification, but by the simple act of stopping the flow of what is dirty and letting something clean take its place.
The Name is the clean water. Every repetition of God's name displaces a small amount of what was occupying that space before. You do not fight the gossip. You do not suppress the irritation. You replace it. You give the tongue something better to do.
Ramana Maharshi acknowledged this with characteristic directness. The old habits, the vasanas, "will not let you do it," he warned. They resist. But they "can be obliterated" by concentration on that which is free from them. The Name is precisely that: something free from the reptiles, offered to a tongue still covered in them.
The Small Things
Here is where the teaching gets uncomfortable. Because most of us do not think of gossip as a spiritual obstacle. We think of lust, anger, greed. The big ones. The ones the scriptures warn about in thundering language.
But Ananta keeps pointing to the small things.
"So irritation, gossip, small small things."
Small small things. Said twice, because once is not enough to get your attention. These are the termites, not the earthquake. The earthquake you notice. The termites eat the house while you sleep.
Al-Ghazali, the great Sufi scholar, saw this with uncommon clarity. In his Ihya Ulum al-Din, he devoted an entire book to the diseases of the tongue and made an observation so devastating that it has echoed across nine centuries: "People count with self-satisfaction the number of times they have recited the name of God on their prayer beads, but they keep no beads for reckoning the number of idle words they speak."
No beads for the idle words. We count our prayers and ignore our gossip. What if you kept score on both sides of the ledger?
The Displacement
Here is the good news. You do not overcome gossip by gritting your teeth and swearing never to gossip again. That approach fails, as anyone who has tried it knows. You overcome gossip the same way you overcome darkness: by turning on the light.
The light, in this case, is the Name.
Anandamayi Ma, the Bengali saint, gave this instruction: "Either chant God's Name in silence or read a good book, or discuss a good topic. But do not waste your valuable time in idle gossip."
Notice the structure. She does not say: stop gossiping. She says: do this instead. Chant. Read. Discuss something worthwhile. Fill the space with something better. The tongue, given a better occupation, will take it.
"So coming back to what we have to endeavor to do with our lives moment to moment: make it for God," Ananta says. "Remain inward-facing. Remain in His presence, in His love. So notice the small things that take you away from God."
Notice. That is the first step. Not suppress. Not condemn. Notice. You were in God's presence, and then you left. When did you leave? What pulled you out?
The Promise
There is a teaching from Ananta that sounds like a vow:
"So I promise not to leave God's presence even in these cases where it seems so justified."
Even where it seems so justified. Because gossip always feels justified. The grievance always feels reasonable. Someone did something wrong. Someone was unkind. The case for leaving God's presence and spending an hour discussing it is always compelling.
And the promise is: I will not leave, even then.
This is not the same as ignoring injustice. It is a recognition that the tongue, once it begins the work of complaint and judgment and narrative-making, does not easily stop. One grievance leads to another. One judgment opens the door to ten. And before you know it, the entire afternoon has been consumed, and the only thing you have to show for it is a head full of someone else's failings and a heart that has moved further from God.
Kabir, the weaver-poet who belonged to no tradition and was claimed by all of them, offered a teaching so counterintuitive that it can only come from direct experience: "Keep the slanderer near you, build him a hut in your courtyard; for, without soap or water, he will scrub your character clean."
The slanderer as purifier. The gossip that would have consumed your own tongue, had you engaged, becomes instead a mirror. And the tongue, freed from the need to respond, is available for its real work.
"If our bhav is true, it is 'me for God' and not 'God for me,'" Ananta teaches. "Then the narrative-making will stop and we'll find ourselves getting empty of this 'me.'"
Me for God. Not God for me. When the orientation is right, when the tongue and the heart and the whole being are turned toward the divine rather than toward the endless project of maintaining and defending the self, then the narratives that gossip feeds simply lose their fuel. You stop needing to talk about others because you have stopped needing to build the story of yourself. The tongue, emptied of its usual preoccupations, finds itself free. And a free tongue gravitates naturally toward the Name, the way water gravitates toward the lowest ground.
When You Notice, Return
Ananta does not ask for perfection. He does not expect you to never gossip again. What he asks for is something simpler. Something more honest.
He asks you to notice.
"When you notice, return. When you notice, return."
That is the whole practice, compressed into six words. You will leave God's presence. You will find yourself, ten minutes into a conversation, deep in the details of someone else's life, rehearsing their failures, enjoying the small, dark pleasure of being right about someone who is not there to defend themselves. You will do this. You are human, and this is what humans do with their tongues when they are not paying attention.
But when you notice, return.
Return to the Name. Return to the breath. Return to the quiet interior space where God is waiting with infinite patience for you to stop talking and come home. Teresa's reptiles do not vanish at the threshold. They thin out, room by room, as you move deeper. The Name is both the step and the direction.
The tongue has only two jobs. And the one that matters most is available to you right now, in this very breath.
Say the Name.
From Ananta's Satsangs
"Have you ever found yourself gossiping in God's presence? Sitting in God's light and you just... you found this doesn't happen. Be careful of well-intentioned sounding gossip."
"When is it worth it to leave God's presence and just spend the time talking about some brother or sister? So spending time on both fruitless thinking and fruitless conversations, isn't that such a low-hanging fruit? If we can cut that out of our life, we have so much more time for God."
"When one or more gather, then God can really amplify His presence. When we gather in God's name, the feeling of His presence can be so much more alive. Why was that opportunity lost in all this fruitless talk?"
"Every time you take God's name, you're adding to your spiritual wealth, which is the only true wealth you can ever have."
"Will you pick gossip? Will we pick complete garbage to consume in our minds, or will we pick things which are inspirational? Will we pray?"
-- Humility
"When you notice, return. When you notice, return."