Chapter 22: The Cooking and the Eating
Ananta uses a metaphor that stays with you once you hear it, the way certain flavors stay on the tongue long after the meal is finished.
Practice, he says, is like cooking. The inquiry, the chanting, the reading of scripture, the discipline of sitting. All of this is the cooking. It is necessary. Without it, there is nothing on the table.
But you must also eat. You must actually sit, be empty, and let God nourish you. "If you never eat the food, God must be tasted fresh."
That last phrase. God must be tasted fresh. Not thought about. Not understood. Not analyzed or debated or placed in a theological category. Tasted. Fresh. The way you taste a mango, not by reading about mangoes, not by studying the chemistry of sweetness, but by putting the fruit in your mouth and letting it dissolve.
How many seekers cook endlessly and never sit down to the meal? They read another book. They try another technique. They attend another retreat. They learn another mantra, another meditation method, another framework for understanding the divine. The kitchen is spotless. The pantry is full. The recipes are memorized. And they are starving.
Because they have never been still enough, empty enough, to receive what was being prepared for them all along.
This is one of the subtlest traps on the spiritual path, and it deserves a chapter of its own because it catches so many sincere seekers. The trap is activity disguised as devotion. The trap is preparation that never yields to reception. The trap is the belief that more effort, more practice, more knowledge will eventually produce the result, when in fact the result can only be received in the stillness that all that effort was supposed to create.
The cooking is not the problem. The cooking is essential. You need to practice. You need to chant. You need to sit and say the Name and wrestle with your wandering mind and pick up the mala when it falls from your fingers. All of this is holy work, and it is the subject of everything this book has said so far.
But there comes a point, and Ananta is describing that point now, where the cooking must stop and the eating must begin. Where the doing must yield to the receiving. Where the seeker must set down the spatula and pick up the spoon.
What does "eating" look like in the life of prayer?
It looks like silence. Not the silence of someone who has run out of words, but the silence of someone who has arrived at the place where words are no longer necessary. You have been saying the Name. You have been saying it on the lips, in the mind, in the heart. And now, at some point in the sitting, the Name itself grows quiet. Not because you have failed to maintain it, but because something deeper than the Name is presenting itself. A presence. A warmth. A fullness that does not need syllables to sustain it.
In that moment, the instruction is: do not restart the chanting. Let the Name rest. Let the silence hold you. Let God, who has been summoned by a thousand repetitions of His Name, sit with you now, wordlessly, the way two people who love each other deeply can sit together without speaking and feel more connected than they ever feel in conversation.
This is the eating. This is the receiving. This is what the cooking was for.
Teresa of Avila described this transition with her characteristic blend of practicality and mystical depth. She called it the shift from active to passive recollection, and she gave this instruction: "Let it try, without forcing itself or causing any turmoil, to put a stop to all discursive reasoning."
Without forcing. Without turmoil. The instruction is not to wrestle the mind into silence. The instruction is to notice when the mind, having been faithful in its chanting, is ready to rest. And then to let it rest. To trust the silence. To believe that the God you have been calling is now here, and that your job is no longer to call but to listen.
Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century French Carmelite, understood this better than almost anyone who has ever lived. He was a lay brother, not a theologian. He did not have a university education or a reputation for brilliance. He was a cook. For thirty years, he worked in the monastery kitchen, among pots and pans and the endless clatter of a community that needed to be fed three times a day.
And in that kitchen, he found God.
Not because the kitchen was a sacred space. Because he brought the eating, the receiving, the tasting of God's presence, into every moment of his ordinary work.
He wrote: "The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament."
Read that slowly. In the noise and clatter of the kitchen, he possessed God in as great tranquillity as if he were at prayer. The cooking and the eating had become one thing. The practice and the reception had merged. There was no longer a time for God and a time for everything else. God was the everything else. God was the pot. God was the fire. God was the clamor. God was the quiet. God was the work and the rest from work and the meal that followed.
This is what Ananta means when he says God must be tasted fresh. Not tasted once, in some peak experience that you then spend the rest of your life trying to reproduce. Tasted now. Tasted here. Tasted in this moment, this breath, this syllable, this ordinary Wednesday afternoon when nothing extraordinary is happening and the only sacred thing in the room is the fact that you showed up.
Meister Eckhart, the German mystic who saw further into the nature of God than most theologians dare to look, said it in five words: "God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk."
The walk is the cooking. The endless preparation. The reading, the practicing, the striving, the searching. All of it, as necessary as it is, is a form of going out. Going out in search of what is already here. Going out to find what never left. Going out to bring back what was already in the kitchen, waiting to be tasted.
The eating is the coming home. The sitting down. The putting aside of every tool, every method, every ambition. The being still enough to taste what has been simmering on the stove since before you were born.
Eckhart's theology of Durchbruch, breakthrough, is built on this insight. The soul does not need to travel to God. The soul needs to break through the layers of its own distraction to discover that God was always at the ground of the soul, at home, in the deepest interior, cooking a meal the soul has been too busy to sit down and eat.
But Ananta is not telling you to abandon practice. He is not saying that the cooking is unimportant or that you should skip it and go straight to the eating. The cooking is indispensable. Without the chanting, the mind is wild. Without the inquiry, the ego is untouched. Without the discipline of sitting, the heart never learns to be still enough to receive.
What he is saying is that the cooking is not the end. It is the means to the end. And the end is the tasting.
How many seekers have you met, how many have you been, who have turned the practice itself into an idol? Who chant with such grim determination that the chanting becomes another form of work, another item on the spiritual to-do list, another brick in the wall of self-improvement? Who sit for meditation with the jaw clenched and the fists tight, trying so hard to be spiritual that they have squeezed out the very space where God could enter?
The cooking is beautiful. Ananta honors it. But the cook who never sits down to eat is missing the entire point of the meal.
There is a subtle shift that happens when the chanting moves from something you do to something you offer. The syllables are the same. The breath is the same. But the intention has changed. You are no longer saying the Name in order to achieve something. You are saying the Name as a gift, an offering, a placing of flowers at the feet of the Beloved. And in the moment of offering, you become empty. And in the emptiness, you are filled.
This is the shift from task to opening. From performance to prayer. From cooking to eating.
Ananta points to the fruit: "As you learn to live more and more in your heart, you will find that your heart loves to sing praises of God." The heart loves to sing. Not the mind loves to analyze. Not the ego loves to achieve. The heart loves to sing. And its singing is not effort. Its singing is joy. Its singing is the sound of something finally being received, finally being tasted, finally being allowed to nourish what it was always meant to nourish.
The practical instruction, then, is this: continue to cook. Continue to chant. Continue to sit and say the Name and discipline the wandering mind. All of that is your one percent, and it is sacred.
But also: learn to eat. Learn to receive. Learn to recognize the moment when the cooking is done and the meal is ready and the only thing left to do is to sit down and taste.
That moment may come as silence in the middle of chanting. It may come as a warmth that does not need the Name to sustain it. It may come as a fullness in the chest that says: stop reaching. I am here. You do not need to call me anymore. I have come.
When that moment arrives, trust it. Set down the mala. Close the mouth. Let the mind rest from its labor. And taste.
God must be tasted fresh. Not remembered. Not imagined. Not reconstructed from a previous experience. Fresh. Now. Here. In the silence that remains when the last syllable of the Name has dissolved and what is left is not absence but presence.
There is a beautiful paradox hidden in this teaching. The cooking is for the sake of the eating. But the eating cannot happen without the cooking. You cannot skip straight to the meal. You cannot sit down to an empty table and demand to be fed. The preparation is real. The effort is real. The discipline is real. And the grace that arrives when you finally stop striving is also real.
What you are learning, in this movement of the heart, is the dance between activity and receptivity. The dance between effort and surrender. The dance between doing everything you can and then releasing the outcome into hands that are larger than yours.
This is what Ananta means by cooperative work. You cook. God provides the ingredients. You sit down to eat. God serves the meal. You taste. God is the taste.
And when the meal is over, when the silence ends and the mind begins to stir and the world comes flooding back with its demands and distractions, you do not despair. You stand up. You return to the kitchen. You begin to cook again. Because the next meal is already being prepared, and the table will be set again, and the One who feeds you has never run out of food.
The next chapter holds the most important and, for many, the most painful truth about this stage: the heart does not open once and stay open forever. Not yet. It opens and closes. And that closing, that dryness, that morning when the Name is ash in your mouth, is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that the heart is learning. And learning takes time.
From Ananta's Satsangs
"Most of us in the world, when we are thinking about spirituality, we are thinking about the active doing part: to take God's name, to do the inquiry, to do our reading. But that is the cooking part. It's very important to cook because if you don't cook, then what will you eat? But this food must be eaten fresh. God must be tasted fresh. You kept doing prayer, but you never actually meet Spirit. Then we are tending towards spirituality, but we are not actually becoming spiritual."
"How to do the eating? By being empty of ourselves. The whole cooking is so that we can become empty of 'me' and to remain, to abide empty of 'me' with the eating. And where He takes us is His will. But can we be empty for Him? Can we trust Him without being demanding?"
"The cooking is the first three, and the eating is the final contemplation. The final part is the eating, so don't rush through that. To go deep into that holy place of your heart temple where you can truly be still and know your reality, meet that 'I am' who God is, that is the important thing. So don't rush through the eating part."
-- Contemplating the Writings of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
"A godless spirituality doesn't work. If you just have this idea that I can just be in the now by myself, without loving God, without the grace of God, without the surrender to his will, it is just a fantasy. Spirituality is about the spirit of God."