Chapter 23: The Heart Opens and Closes
"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."
This, perhaps, is the most important thing Ananta says about this movement. And the two words that matter most are: so what.
Not "so pray harder." Not "so examine what you did wrong." Not "so find a better technique." So what. As in: this is normal. As in: this is what happens. As in: the heart that opened last night will close this morning, and the opening was real and the closing is real and neither one is the final word.
You just have to start again.
The heart does not open once and stay open forever. Not yet. Not at this stage. The warmth that filled your chest last evening has gone cold by dawn. The tears that came so easily in the candlelight have dried by the time you brush your teeth. The Name that was alive, fragrant, pulsing with presence, is now a dead syllable lying on a dry tongue. And you sit there, in your usual corner, wondering whether any of it was real.
It was real. The dryness is also real. Both belong to this movement. The heart is learning to hold the Name, and learning takes time. A child learning to walk falls constantly. A hundred times, a thousand times. You do not conclude that walking is impossible. You do not conclude that the child is defective. You conclude that the legs are not yet strong enough, that the balance has not yet been found, that the falling is itself part of the learning.
So you start again. You pick up the Name. You place it gently in the chest. You sit with it, even when it feels like nothing is happening. Especially when it feels like nothing is happening.
Gregory Palamas, the great defender of hesychastic prayer, taught that prayer confined to the mind remains "superficial." The word is devastating in its precision. The mind, he acknowledged, is "a profound organ of the human person." But even the most profound mental prayer is superficial if it does not engage the heart. "Only when the mind is united with the heart can it function properly."
And when the mind is united with the heart, prayer engages the whole person. Body, will, emotions, intellect, spirit. All unified in one act of attention toward God. This engagement of the whole person is what makes heart-prayer so different from mental prayer, and so much more vulnerable. In the mind, you can maintain distance. You can think about God without being touched by God. But in the heart, there is no distance. What you feel there, you feel with everything you are.
And this is precisely why the heart opens and closes. Because vulnerability is exhausting. Because being touched by God with everything you are is not something a human being can sustain continuously, not at this stage. The heart opens, and for a moment you are flooded, and it is almost too much, and then the heart closes, not because it has failed but because it needs to rest. Because it needs time to integrate what it received. Because the fullness was so great that the vessel needs to expand before it can hold that much again.
Palamas taught: "It is not meditation, but a deepening in prayer, so that the mind would descend into the heart, which is the depth of man's being." The heart is the depth. And depth, by its nature, is not always accessible. The surface of the ocean is always visible. But the depths reveal themselves only to those willing to dive, and diving requires breath, and breath requires surfacing, and surfacing feels, every time, like loss.
It is not loss. It is the rhythm of the deep.
This is why tears come during prayer. Not because you are sad. Because the distance is closing. Because something in you recognizes that it has been holding itself apart from God, maintaining a careful separation, and now, for a moment, it cannot hold any longer. The walls come down. The defenses drop. And what rushes through the gap is so much larger than anything the mind can process that the body has no choice but to weep.
And then the walls go back up. Not because you chose to rebuild them, but because the habit of separation is deep and the learning is not yet complete. Tomorrow morning the distance will feel as vast as it ever was. The Name will feel like a stone in your mouth. And you will wonder what happened to the person who wept last night in the dark.
That person is still you. The tears are still real. The closing does not erase the opening. It is simply the heart catching its breath before it opens again.
John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic whose poems are among the most beautiful things ever written about God, described this closing with a precision that has comforted seekers for five hundred years. He called it the dark night. And he identified three signs by which you can know that the darkness you are experiencing is not spiritual failure but spiritual growth.
The first sign: you find no consolation in anything. Not in God, and not in the world. The dryness extends to everything. If you still found pleasure in worldly things but not in prayer, the problem would not be the dark night but lukewarmness. But when both the divine and the created are dry, when nothing satisfies, when the Name is ash and the world is ash and you sit between them feeling hollow, then something different is happening. God is weaning you from consolation, from the sweetness that accompanied the earlier stages, not because He is punishing you but because He is preparing you for something deeper than sweetness.
The second sign: despite the dryness, your memory dwells upon God with what John calls "painful care and solicitude." You are anxious about God. You fear you have failed. You wonder whether you did something wrong. You care desperately. This caring, this anxiety, is itself proof that love has not abandoned you. A person who has genuinely lost interest in God does not worry about losing God. The worry is the evidence.
The third sign: you cannot meditate. The old methods do not work. You try to chant, and the mind will not focus. You try to visualize, and the images will not come. You try to think about God, and the thoughts dissolve before they form. This is not laziness. This is God shifting the mode of communication. The discursive, image-based, concept-driven prayer of the earlier stages is being withdrawn, not because it was wrong but because it has done its work. God is now communicating through a more direct channel, one that does not require words or images or thoughts. But before that new channel is fully open, there is a gap. And the gap feels like nothing.
John's instruction for the dark night is the simplest and perhaps the hardest instruction in all of Christian mysticism: "Rest in peace and do nothing except remain attentive to the darkness."
Do nothing. Remain attentive. Let the darkness be. Do not fill it with frantic prayer. Do not chase the consolation that has withdrawn. Do not conclude that you have been abandoned. Simply be present to what is actually happening, which is: nothing that you can perceive. And trust that beneath the nothing, beneath the dryness, beneath the darkness, the deepest work of grace is being accomplished.
Ananta does not use John's language, but he arrives at the same place. "So what? You just have to start again." The "so what" is not indifference. It is the deepest kind of faith. It is the faith that says: the dryness does not define me. The closing does not erase the opening. The morning's emptiness does not undo last night's fullness. I am not measured by how I feel right now. I am measured by whether I show up.
And showing up, on a dry morning, with a dead Name on a dry tongue and a closed heart and no sign that God is anywhere near, is perhaps the most courageous act in the entire spiritual life.
Because anyone can pray when the heart is open. Anyone can chant when the Name is alive and fragrant and the chest is full of warmth. That is not courage. That is response to grace, and it is beautiful, but it is easy. What is hard, what costs everything, is praying when the heart has closed. Chanting when the Name is dead. Sitting in the dark and trusting that the dark is not the absence of God but the hidden presence of God, doing a work so deep that your conscious mind cannot perceive it.
Anandamayi Ma, the great Bengali saint who lived in a state of continuous God-consciousness, gave a teaching that speaks directly to this oscillation: "If through prolonged practice, the Name becomes inextricably linked with the breath, and the body is quite still, one will come to realize that the individual is part of the One Great Life that pervades the Universe."
The key phrase is "prolonged practice." Not a single session. Not a week of devoted chanting. Prolonged practice. Practice that spans months and years and includes countless mornings when the Name was alive and countless mornings when it was dead. Practice that continues through the openings and the closings, through the warmth and the cold, through the tears and the dryness. Practice that links the Name to the breath so deeply that even when the heart closes, the breath continues, and the Name continues with it, underneath consciousness, in the dark, where it cannot be felt but where it is still working.
Anandamayi Ma also said: "Even if you do not feel inclined to meditate, conquer your reluctance." This is not a harsh instruction. It is a loving one. The reluctance is real. The dryness is real. The closing is real. But the conquest is also real. And what you are conquering is not God's absence. You are conquering the mind's insistence that God's presence must always feel like something.
Sometimes God's presence feels like nothing. Sometimes the most profound encounter with the divine is indistinguishable from ordinary boredom. Sometimes the heart is being filled in a way so subtle that the senses cannot detect it, the way the earth is nourished by rain that falls so gently it makes no sound.
Ananta speaks of the fruit that awaits: "As you learn to live more and more in your heart, you will find that your heart loves to sing praises of God." And: "The highest form of prayer is a palpable presence of deep love, where the head is empty and the heart is full."
The head empty. The heart full. That is where this movement is leading. Not yet arrived, but leaning in that direction. The Name has fallen from the mind, and the heart has caught it, and now, with effort and love and God's quiet cooperation, the heart is learning to hold on. Learning through the opening and the closing. Learning through the warmth and the cold. Learning through the fragrance and the ash.
The oscillation is not a defect. It is the pedagogy. The opening teaches you what is possible. The closing teaches you what is durable. The opening shows you God's face. The closing shows you your own faith. And both are necessary. Both are grace. The warmth is grace, and the cold is grace. The tears are grace, and the dryness is grace. The night in which everything blooms is grace, and the morning in which everything withers is grace.
Stay with the warmth when it comes. Return to the Name when it fades. Do not judge the dry mornings. Do not cling to the fragrant nights. This is the season of stirring, and stirring is enough.
The fire is small. But it is real. And a small fire, tended faithfully, becomes a blaze that no wind can extinguish.
In Part V, we will explore what happens when the oscillation finally settles. When the heart that has been opening and closing learns to stay open. When the effort that has sustained the Name in the chest gives way to something else entirely, something that does not require effort because it has become your nature. The heart will hold. The Name will stay. But that is ahead.
For now, you are here. In the opening and the closing. In the warmth and the cold. In the season of stirring. And the stirring, faithful reader, is itself the proof that the fire has caught. A heart that is stirring is a heart that is alive. And a heart that is alive, however inconsistently, however falteringly, is a heart that is on its way home.
You just have to start again.
From Ananta's Satsangs
"It may completely happen that praying so deeply from within my heart one night, and next morning I 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.' So God knows how to keep us in check."
"Many times in the spiritual path we'll have ecstasy, and many times you'll have aridity, dryness. It'll feel like, 'I've lost the connection with God.' So these ups and downs will happen. We are not to get discouraged at that time. He knows exactly how much to give us. If in that moment you're true to yourself and you say you only want to be with His presence, then your wanting itself is to love Him."
-- Every Moment Spent in God's Light Transforms Lifetimes of Conditioning
"It's so beautiful that Hanuman Ji said if you've fallen, get up. And Brother Lawrence said the same thing, that 'I used to fall often but I used to quickly get up.' You may sit and want to pray and be in God's presence, but you may get distracted a hundred times in that one hour. But every one of those hundred times you got distracted and you returned, so that is very good."
"In a distracted prayer we do a hundred acts of love. So it's a great, great prayer as well. In fact, I cannot say which is the better prayer, but I'm leaning towards the second one, the distracted one. Every opportunity that we take to return back to Him is a beautiful act of love."