Chapter 9: The Russian Pilgrim and Other Beginners
There is a book called The Way of a Pilgrim, written by an anonymous Russian seeker in the nineteenth century. It is one of the most honest accounts ever written of what happens when a person takes the Name seriously. If you have never read it, the summary that follows may be all the encouragement you need.
The Question That Started Everything
The pilgrim was an ordinary man. He was not a monk. He was not a scholar. He was a wanderer, a mendicant walking the roads of nineteenth-century Russia with a knapsack and a piece of dried bread. But he carried a question that burned in him like a coal.
He had heard Paul's words in the epistle to the Thessalonians: "Pray without ceasing." And he could not let them go. What did it mean to pray without ceasing? Not to pray when you remembered. Not to pray at appointed hours. Without ceasing. At every moment. While walking, while eating, while sleeping. How was such a thing possible?
He wandered from church to church. He asked every priest, every teacher, every monk he could find. No one could explain it to him. They could tell him why it was important. They could not tell him how to do it.
Then his travels led him to a starets, a spiritual father, an elder who recognized something in the pilgrim's hunger. And the elder gave him the simplest possible instruction.
Repeat the Jesus Prayer. "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me."
Start with three thousand times a day. "Say it quietly and without hurry, but without fail exactly three thousand times a day without deliberately increasing or diminishing the number."
Three thousand times. Not as a punishment. Not as a test of endurance. As a medicine. The elder also gave the pilgrim a copy of the Philokalia, the great collection of Orthodox writings on the prayer of the heart, so that he could read alongside his practice.
The Count Rises
The pilgrim obeyed. He began with three thousand. After some time, the elder raised the count to six thousand. Then twelve thousand.
Twelve thousand repetitions of a single prayer in a single day. The arithmetic is worth pausing over. If each repetition takes five seconds, twelve thousand takes roughly seventeen hours. The pilgrim was chanting for almost every waking moment.
What happened?
First, difficulty. The expected difficulty of any beginner. The mind wandered. The body resisted. The repetition felt mechanical and dead.
Then, gradually, something shifted. "Soon the prayer became so easy and delightful that his tongue and lips seemed to do it of themselves." The pilgrim had not willed this to happen. He had not perfected his concentration or purified his heart through some act of spiritual athleticism. He had simply repeated, and the repetition had done something to him that he could not have done to himself.
This is the secret hidden inside mechanical chanting. You think you are the one doing the work. But the Name is doing its own work on you, quietly, the way water softens stone not through force but through persistence.
The Prayer Moves Inward
Then came the moment that changes the entire book. The pilgrim woke one morning and discovered that the prayer had, "so to speak, by its own action passed from my lips to my heart." He was no longer saying it. It was saying itself. His heart, in its ordinary beating, had begun to form the words of the prayer at each beat. "One, 'Lord,' two, 'Jesus,' three, 'Christ,' and so on."
He gave up saying the prayer with his lips. He simply listened to what his heart was saying. And in that listening, he felt "something like a slight pain in his heart, and in his thoughts so great a love for Jesus Christ that he pictured himself throwing himself at His feet and kissing them tenderly, and thanking Him with tears."
He had not tried to love. He had not practiced devotion. He had only repeated a prayer thousands upon thousands of times with the dogged persistence of a man who had no other method. And the love came on its own.
"Early one morning," he wrote, "the Prayer woke me up as it were."
Previously, he had been saying the prayer. Now the prayer said him.
The Name Does Its Own Work
Ananta describes exactly the same dynamic, from within the Hindu tradition, using different words but pointing to the same reality:
"The Ram starts clearing up the inner instrument. It just starts cleaning, emptying it."
You do not need to supervise the cleaning. You do not even need to know it is happening. The Russian pilgrim did not know his heart was being softened. He was just counting beads and moving his lips. But the Name was working beneath the surface of his awareness, in regions of the soul he did not know existed, clearing and emptying and preparing a space.
Anandamayi Ma, the great Bengali mystic of the twentieth century, used a medical analogy that captures this perfectly: "By taking medicine or having injections a patient may get well; even if you do not feel inclined to meditate, conquer your reluctance and make an attempt. The habit of countless lives is pulling you in the opposite direction and making it difficult for you; persevere in spite of it!"
The habit of countless lives. That is what you are up against when you sit down to chant. Every tendency toward distraction, every pattern of avoidance, every groove the mind has worn through years of looking outward rather than inward. And the remedy is not to fight these habits with willpower. The remedy is to chant. To persevere. To let the medicine do its work.
Other Beginners, Other Doors
The Russian pilgrim is the most detailed account we have, but he is not the only beginner whose story illuminates this path. The same dynamic appears in every tradition that practices the Name, and each account adds something that the others leave out.
In the Sufi tradition, the beginner enters the practice through dhikr al-jahr, the loud remembrance. The instructions from the Shadhiliyya order, founded by Abul Hasan ash-Shadhili in the thirteenth century, are disarmingly simple: "Start by saying the Name softly, yet loud enough so that you can hear it." Repeat the Name rhythmically. Feel for a pace and tone that is natural and gentle. And the key principle, which could be the subtitle of this entire chapter: "Remembrance is all about Receiving, not making. Your job is to receive and witness what is revealed."
You are not making anything happen. You are creating the conditions for something to be revealed. The Sufi beginner, like the Russian pilgrim, starts with the mouth and the ears. But the instruction is already pointing beyond effort. You are not manufacturing a spiritual experience. You are opening yourself to one.
The group practice of dhikr, the hadra, adds another dimension. The congregation stands together, moves and breathes in unison, while mystical poetry is sung. The individual voice is folded into the communal voice. The individual effort is carried by the effort of the group. This is something the solitary pilgrim did not have: the support of others who are doing the same work at the same time. If you have ever chanted in a group, you know how different it is from chanting alone. The collective sound picks you up and carries you.
In the Pure Land tradition of Japan, the beginner's experience is shaped by a theological insight that takes the pilgrim's discovery and makes it the starting point rather than the destination. Shinran, the thirteenth-century founder of Shin Buddhism, taught that "Namu Amida Butsu" is not said by the practitioner. It is "the call of Amida within every person and their response to that call."
Let that teaching settle in. You think you are calling to God. But God is calling through you. The nembutsu is not your effort but Amida's gift. The very impulse to open your mouth and say the Name was placed there by the one you are calling. You did not invent the prayer. The prayer invented itself in you.
This parallels Ananta's own teaching about the compass that turns us toward God: "That compass to turn towards Him was left by God only in our soul. We did not know how to design that compass." The longing to chant, the urge to pick up the mala, the strange pull toward the Name that you feel even when everything in your life argues against it, that pull was not something you manufactured. It was placed in you. It is God's own homing signal, embedded in the soul.
The Sikh beginner enters through Naam Jaap, the communal recitation that is one of the three pillars of the Sikh life. The Guru Granth Sahib teaches that through Naam, the devotee conquers the Five Thieves: ego, greed, attachment, anger, and lust. The daily practice, rooted in the discipline established by the Sikh Gurus and codified in the Sikh Rehat Maryada, weaves the Name into the ordinary texture of every day. The Sikh does not chant only in the temple. The Sikh chants at dawn, at dusk, before meals, before sleep. The Name becomes the thread that runs through the whole fabric of living.
What All Beginners Share
What do all these beginners have in common? Not their theology. Not their cultural context. Not the specific Name they chant. What they share is this:
They start from where they are.
The Russian pilgrim starts as a man who cannot even explain what prayer is. The Sufi novice starts with nothing but a rhythm and a willingness to receive. The Pure Land practitioner starts by saying the Name without understanding what Amida is or how the nembutsu works. The Sikh starts with a daily requirement that is more habit than ecstasy.
None of them starts from a place of mastery. None of them starts from a place of deep spiritual attainment. They start from the lips. They start from the sound. They start from the physical act of opening the mouth and letting a sacred syllable enter the air.
And in every case, the practice does something to them that they could not have done to themselves.
The pilgrim's heart begins to beat the Name. The Sufi receives what was already being given. The Pure Land practitioner discovers that Amida was chanting through them all along. The Sikh, going through the motions of a daily discipline, finds that the motions have become something more than motions.
This is the testimony of the beginners. Not the experts. The beginners. The ones who came with nothing and found that nothing was enough.
You are one of them. Wherever you are in this moment, whatever your tradition or lack of tradition, whatever your level of belief or doubt, you are a beginner. And that is not a limitation. It is, as the next chapter will argue, a kind of grace.
From Ananta's Satsangs
"The Ram starts clearing up the inner instrument. It just starts cleaning, emptying it. You may have to do Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram till the process -- like we've juiced the Ram so much that it provides us the momentum to sit in our heart."
"There are sages in India who have said that they take God's name 100,000 times a day, and that's all they did. They didn't care about anything. Just 'Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram.' And you listen to when they would talk; they're talking about the highest Brahman, the highest knowledge of the Ultimate Reality with only one simple practice: just repeat God's name 100,000 times a day."
-- Day Four - Contemplating the Ashtavakra Gita - 30th August 2024
"That compass to turn towards Him was left by God only in our soul. We did not know how to design that compass. We would not be able to design and say if I say Ram, if I say Krishna, if I say Hari, if I say Jesus, if I say Allah, it'll come to the same point. We could not have done it."
"You just have to notice and pull it back. Ask for God's assistance in everything. Every time you start the prayer, say, 'God, please bless this prayer today. May I be with You, and when I forget about You, may Your grace pull me back.' These simple, innocent things help a lot. Our prayer teaches us how to pray, because we don't know how to pray also."
-- The Method Is Secondary, Your Intention Is Primary - 26th July 2024