Chapter 10: The Humility of Beginning
There is a particular grace in being a beginner.
You have no reputation to protect. You have no spiritual attainment to defend. You are simply a person sitting with a name on your lips, not sure whether anything is happening, not sure whether you are doing it right, not sure whether God is listening or whether there is a God to listen.
That uncertainty is honest. It is more honest than the person who has chanted for thirty years and believes they have mastered the technique. The Name is not a technique to be mastered. It is a door to be walked through, again and again, every single day.
The Expert's Trap
The Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki opened his most famous book with a sentence that deserves to be carved in stone: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."
He called this quality shoshin, beginner's mind. It is an attitude of openness, eagerness, and absence of preconception, maintained even at the most advanced levels of practice. The beginner sees many doors because the beginner has not decided which doors are real. The expert, full of knowledge and accumulated technique, has narrowed the field. The very fullness of the expert's mind has become the obstacle.
This is not an abstract principle. You have felt it, if you have practiced anything long enough. The first time you sat down to chant, something was alive in the act. There was freshness, curiosity, perhaps a faint thrill of possibility. A month in, the freshness has faded. A year in, the practice feels like routine. Five years in, you may wonder whether you are simply going through motions. Ten years in, you may have constructed an entire identity around your practice, an identity that prevents you from actually encountering what the practice was meant to reveal.
The beginner has none of this baggage. The beginner comes with empty hands. And empty hands can receive what full hands cannot.
The Morning After the Mountain
Ananta addresses this with a teaching that is both comforting and ruthless:
"It may completely happen that you are praying so deeply from within your heart one night, and next morning you wake up and it's all dry. So what? You just have to start again."
So what. Two of the most liberating words in the spiritual vocabulary.
You had a profound experience last night. The Name was alive. The heart was soft. Tears may have come. You felt held. You felt heard. You went to sleep thinking: something has shifted. Something permanent has opened.
And then you wake up, and it is all dry. The Name sits in your mouth like cardboard. The heart feels locked. The mind races from one irrelevant thought to the next. Everything that opened last night has closed.
So what? You just have to start again.
This is not a failure. This is the weather. Spiritual life, like the sky, is not one thing. It moves. It changes. The same landscape that was bathed in golden light at sunset is gray and cold at dawn. The landscape has not changed. The light has.
The temptation in that dry morning is one of two things. Either you try to recapture last night's experience, grasping at the feeling of depth, performing sincerity rather than living it. Or you conclude that last night was an illusion, that the dryness is the truth and the depth was self-deception. Both responses are wrong. Both come from the same place: the conviction that spiritual life should move in one direction only, upward.
It does not move in one direction. It moves the way the seasons move. The way the tides move. The way the breath moves, in and out, filling and emptying. The dryness and the depth are both real. And the practice is the same in both: you say the Name. You begin again.
Returning to the Lips
There is a shame that can accompany the return to the beginning. A person who has experienced the Name in the heart, who has known the interior prayer, the effortless repetition, may feel that returning to the lips is a regression. A step backward. A loss of ground.
Ananta's teaching dissolves this shame completely. Because in his understanding, the earlier stages of practice never become invalid. They do not get left behind like rungs on a ladder you will never climb again. They remain available. They remain appropriate. They remain, in fact, necessary.
When the interior chanting goes dry, you return to the voice. When the voice goes dry, you pick up the mala. When the mala feels mechanical, you chant a little louder. You do not ascend past the lips and never return. You return to them the way you return to breathing: naturally, without apology, because they are the foundation on which everything else rests.
Sivananda confirmed this from a different angle. Addressing the student who feels nothing, who chants and chants and wonders whether anything is happening, he taught: "Even mechanical repetition of Japa without any Bhava has a great purifying effect on the heart or the mind. The feeling will come later on when the process of mental purification goes on."
The feeling will come later. You do not need to produce it now. You need only to begin. And if the feeling has come and gone, if you tasted it last Tuesday and have not felt it since, you still need only to begin. The purification is happening beneath the surface, in regions you cannot see. The dryness is not a sign that the process has stopped. It may be a sign that the process has gone deeper than your conscious mind can follow.
Sivananda added, with characteristic simplicity: "Do not bother yourself if the mind wanders. Be regular in your Japa. The mind will gradually come under your control."
Be regular. Show up. Whether the practice feels alive or dead, whether the heart is soft or stone, whether tears come or nothing comes at all. Be regular. The regularity is the practice. The feeling is the fruit. You do not need to produce the fruit. You need only to tend the tree.
The Cloud and the Single Syllable
In the fourteenth century, an anonymous English mystic wrote a book called The Cloud of Unknowing. It is one of the most extraordinary texts in the Christian contemplative tradition, and it has something to say to every beginner who has ever felt overwhelmed by the apparent complexity of spiritual practice.
The author's instruction is almost aggressively simple: "Take but a little word of one syllable, as it is better than a longer word. Such a word is 'God' or 'Love.' Choose whichever you prefer, as long as it is of one syllable."
One syllable. Not a theology. Not a philosophy. Not a system of meditation with twenty-seven preliminary steps. One syllable. "God." "Love." That is all.
And what do you do with this syllable? "This word shall be fastened to your heart so that it never departs from there. This word shall be your shield and your spear, and with this word, you shall beat on the cloud and darkness above you and smite down all manner of thought under the cloud of forgetting."
The language is martial, almost violent. You beat on the cloud. You smite down thoughts. But the weapon is absurdly simple: a single syllable, held in the heart, repeated. That is the whole method. And the anonymous author adds, with the confidence of someone who has practiced exactly this for years: a "little short prayer of one little syllable" will "pierce heaven" when prayed with a full spirit.
The key principle the Cloud offers is this: God cannot be grasped through thought. "By love may He be gotten and holden, but never through thought." The mind, however brilliant, cannot think its way to God. But the heart, even a stumbling, uncertain, beginner's heart, can love its way there. And the vehicle of that love is a single word, repeated, fastened to the heart like an anchor.
This is the same teaching Ananta offers, in different clothing. You do not need to understand. You do not need to be clever. You do not need to have mastered the theology of the Name or memorized the scriptures that describe its power. You need only a syllable and the willingness to say it.
The Grace of Not Knowing
The beginner does not know whether the practice is working. The beginner does not know whether God is listening. The beginner does not know whether the Name has any power at all or whether it is just a sound vibrating in the air.
This not-knowing is not a deficiency. It is the ground from which genuine encounter grows.
Consider: the expert who is certain that chanting works has already closed a door. The expert has made the practice into a known quantity, something that can be measured and evaluated and checked off. The expert sits down to chant already knowing what will happen. And that knowing, however accurate, stands between the expert and the raw, unmediated encounter with the Name.
The beginner sits down not knowing. Not knowing whether something will happen. Not knowing what it will feel like if it does. Not knowing whether this whole enterprise is wise or foolish. And because the beginner does not know, the beginner is open. The beginner can be surprised.
This is what Suzuki meant when he said the beginner's mind has many possibilities. Not because the beginner is more talented. Not because ignorance is a virtue. But because the absence of conclusions leaves room for revelation.
And so the return to the lips, far from being a regression, may be the most advanced practice there is. The person who has chanted for twenty years and can sit down on a dry morning, pick up the mala, say "Ram" with a mouth that feels like dust, and bring nothing to the practice except the willingness to be there, that person has arrived at something deeper than any ecstatic experience could have given them. They have arrived at faithfulness without conditions. They have arrived at practice without reward.
This is humility. Not the humility of self-abasement. Not the humility of believing yourself worthless. The humility of being willing to begin, again and again, from the very first syllable, without demanding that the first syllable deliver anything in return.
Just Start Again
Ananta's teaching, stripped of everything but its essence, is three words.
Just start again.
The depth came and went. Start again. The dryness came and stayed. Start again. You missed a day. Start again. You missed a year. Start again. You forgot the Name entirely and remembered it in the middle of a supermarket, standing between the cereal and the canned goods, with no mala and no meditation room and no special posture. Start again. Right there. Under the fluorescent lights.
The Name does not need ideal conditions. It does not need your best self. It needs only your willingness to say it one more time.
Begin.
And when you are ready to begin, not in theory but in practice, not as an idea but as an act, the next chapter will sit beside you and tell you exactly how. No philosophy. No theology. Just a friend showing you where to put your hands.
From Ananta's Satsangs
"It may completely happen that you are praying so deeply from within your heart one night, and next morning you wake up and it's all dry. So what? You just have to start again. So you start praying, you go to God in full humility and full devotion. Because otherwise what would happen? We become proud. 'Oh, look at these people using Mala, look at these people saying the prayer. Why? It has to happen from the heart.' So God knows how to keep us in check."
-- Carry the Intention to Make Every Moment About God - 18th March 2024
"If our humility is growing then our relationship with God is growing. This is if you need just one benchmark. If you just need one, how can I tell if I'm going more towards God or getting stuck in Maya? Am I becoming more humble? Is my humility growing or do I now have a lot of pride of my spiritual knowledge or any knowledge that I have?"
-- The Highest Possibility for Us Is To Live in God's Love and Light - 28th January 2026
"The more strong the obstacle feels, the more gross our beginning point of prayer can be. If the obstacle is seeming very strong and I don't even want to take God's name, then our mode of returning can also be very gross. We can just talk to God. We bring ourselves in whatever way we are to Him. From almost a semi-tantrum with God to just an inward glance, all of these can be methods that are used to return to that same place."
"To remain empty of attachment to the changing and to stay empty like that, waiting for God's grace to shine upon us, that is spirituality. To identify what is changing is the simplest thing; a child can do it. But that patience, that humility to wait at the heart temple, empty of attachment to all of these layers of our existence -- that is the point of the practice."
-- A Gentle Calling From Within Our Soul - 9th February 2026