Chapter 28: Dangers on the Path
"God knows how to keep us in check. He knows very well." Ananta
Every map worth following also marks the places where travelers have lost their way.
The deeper you go into the territory of prayer, the more subtle the dangers become. The early pitfalls are obvious: boredom, distraction, forgetting to practice. Those obstacles have a kind of honest clumsiness about them. You know you have fallen off the horse. You pick yourself up. You climb back on. But the dangers that appear in the later movements are more refined, more camouflaged, more likely to disguise themselves as spiritual progress. They come dressed in the robes of the very thing you are seeking.
Ananta addresses this with the simple confidence of someone who knows the terrain: "God knows how to keep us in check. He knows very well."
He knows very well. There is something deeply reassuring in those four words. The One who placed the longing in your heart also placed the guardrails along the road. The dangers are real, but they are not unguarded. Grace does not abandon you at the moment when you most need its protection.
Still, a map should show the hazards. Let us look at them directly.
Spiritual Pride
The first and most pervasive danger is spiritual pride: the subtle conviction that you are further along than others, that your prayer is deeper, your understanding more refined, your relationship with God more intimate than the person sitting next to you.
This is a devastatingly easy trap to fall into, precisely because the experiences of the later movements are genuinely extraordinary. When the heart holds the Name without effort, when the prayer carries you instead of the other way around, when the fragrance fills your chest and tears come unbidden, there is a natural human tendency to feel that you have arrived somewhere special. And from "somewhere special" it is a very short step to "somewhere superior."
Every tradition warns against this with the urgency of someone who has seen the damage.
Ananta's warning is characteristically understated. He does not lecture about the sin of pride. He simply points out who is in charge: "God knows how to keep us in check." The implication is clear. If you start puffing up, expect a correction. And the correction will not come from outside. It will come from the very Source you thought you had mastered.
What does this correction look like? It looks like dryness. Like the morning after a night of deep prayer when the heart feels like stone. Like the sudden inability to find God anywhere, despite weeks or months of effortless communion. This is not punishment. It is medicine. God withdrawing the consolation to show you that the consolation is not yours to own. It belongs to Him. He gives it when it serves. He withdraws it when its withdrawal serves.
Ananta puts this in practical terms that leave no room for confusion: "It may completely happen that you are praying so deeply from within your heart one night, and next morning you wake up and it is all dry. So what? You just have to start again."
So what? Two words that demolish the entire edifice of spiritual pride. You were flying last night? Wonderful. You are crawling this morning? Also wonderful. The flying was not your accomplishment. The crawling is not your failure. Both are weather. Both pass through. You are not the weather. You are the sky.
The Dark Night
John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite, mapped this territory with a precision that has never been surpassed. What he calls the "dark night of the soul" is not depression. It is not clinical despair. It is not doubt about God's existence. It is something far more specific and, in a strange way, far more hopeful.
The dark night is the experience of God withdrawing the felt consolations of prayer. The warmth in the chest goes cold. The fragrance disappears. The Name that sang itself in the heart falls silent. The practitioner who was carried by grace now feels dropped, abandoned, left alone in an interior desert with no map and no water.
John identifies three signs that distinguish the authentic dark night from ordinary laziness, sin, or psychological disturbance.
The first sign: no consolation anywhere. "When a soul finds no pleasure or consolation in the things of God, it also fails to find it in anything created." This is the diagnostic key. If the dryness came from lukewarmness, you would find pleasure in worldly things even as spiritual things went flat. You would turn to food, entertainment, company, distraction, and find satisfaction there. In the true dark night, nothing satisfies. Not God, not the world, not anything at all. You are dry everywhere.
The second sign: persistent memory of God with painful care. "The memory is ordinarily centred upon God, with painful care and solicitude, thinking that it is not serving God." The soul is deeply concerned about its apparent failure. This is not the indifference of laziness. It is the ache of a lover who cannot find the Beloved but cannot stop searching. If you did not care, the dryness would not hurt. The fact that it hurts is itself a sign that love is still alive, burning underground where you cannot see it.
The third sign: inability to meditate as before. "The soul can no longer meditate or reflect in the imaginative sphere of sense as it was wont, however much it may of itself endeavour to do so." The familiar methods stop working. Not because the practitioner is doing them wrong, but because God is deliberately closing that door to open another one. The faculty of imaginative meditation has been exhausted by God for a purpose: to shift the soul from discursive meditation to contemplation.
When all three signs are present simultaneously, John says, the practitioner is in the authentic dark night. And here is the crucial teaching: this is not abandonment. It is preparation. God is weaning the soul from dependence on consolations, those sweet feelings, that warmth, that fragrance, so that the soul can receive something deeper. Something that does not depend on feeling at all.
Mistaking Experiences for the Goal
Ananta delivers this warning with the economy of someone who has seen many seekers stumble at this precise point: "Accept all the tastes as prasad, but till you know in your heart that you have come to atma darshan, you do not settle for anything as the final taste."
Accept all the tastes as prasad. Every spiritual experience, every vision, every moment of bliss, every inner light, every sense of expansion, take it as prasad. Receive it with gratitude. Enjoy it. Let it nourish you. But do not mistake it for the meal itself. Prasad is the grace-gift distributed after the worship. It is beautiful. But it is not the darshan. It is not the seeing of the Self.
This is one of the most universal warnings in the contemplative literature. Teresa of Avila was deeply concerned about practitioners who mistook their experiences for the goal. She warned that "the devil sometimes offers counterfeits of the graces mentioned, and this can easily be detected, the effects being exactly contrary to those of the genuine ones." False consolations produce pride, attachment to experiences, and constriction. True consolations produce humility, charity, and freedom.
Her diagnostic is practical and precise. After a genuine spiritual experience, "the soul is not so restrained as formerly in God's service, but possesses much more liberty of spirit." If an experience makes you feel freer, more humble, more loving, more open, it is likely genuine. If it makes you feel special, elevated above others, possessive of the experience, or anxious that it might not return, treat it with suspicion.
Ramana Maharshi offers what may be the sharpest version of this warning. He distinguishes between kevala nirvikalpa samadhi, temporary absorption in the Self, and sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi, the permanent, natural state. In kevala samadhi, "the vasanas, the latent tendencies, are not destroyed. The yogi is therefore bound to wake up from the samadhi, because release from bondage has not yet been accomplished." Even years spent in this sublime state, without addressing the underlying tendencies, yield no lasting liberation.
This matters enormously for the practitioner in Part V. The experiences of effortless heart-prayer can be genuinely extraordinary. The fragrance, the warmth, the tears, the sense of being carried, all of this is real. But it is not the end. It is a passage. To settle here, to build a house in the passage, is to mistake the doorway for the room.
The Danger of Mistaking States for Stations
The Sufi tradition provides the most elegant vocabulary for this danger. It distinguishes between hal, a temporary spiritual state, and maqam, a permanent spiritual station.
A hal is a gift from God: a sudden influx of ecstasy, peace, awe, love, or intoxication. It comes uninvited and departs without warning. "A hal is by nature transient and one should not attempt to prolong it." To cling to a hal is like trying to hold water in your fist. The tighter you grip, the faster it runs through your fingers.
A maqam, by contrast, is established through sustained practice and perseverance. It does not come and go. It becomes the ground you stand on. And, crucially, reaching a new maqam does not destroy the preceding one. The stations are cumulative. You do not lose patience when you gain trust. You do not lose trust when you gain contentment.
The danger is obvious: mistaking a hal for a maqam. Mistaking a temporary spiritual experience, however sublime, for a permanent transformation. A practitioner may experience profound peace during a single evening of prayer and conclude that they have "arrived." The next morning, the peace has vanished, and they are devastated. But they were never devastated by the loss of peace. They were devastated by the loss of the idea that they had achieved peace permanently.
Ananta cuts through this with the simplest possible instruction: "You just have to start again." The starting again is not a defeat. It is the path itself. The path is not a line that goes from point A to point B. The path is a circle that returns, again and again, to the same center, each time a little deeper, each time with a little less resistance, each time with a little more trust that the center holds.
Spiritual Bypassing
There is one more danger that deserves mention, though Ananta does not name it directly. It is what the Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist John Welwood called spiritual bypassing: "the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks."
This is the practitioner who uses the language of surrender to avoid the work of self-examination. Who uses the language of non-attachment to avoid the pain of grief. Who uses the language of divine will to avoid taking responsibility for harm done. Who uses prayer as a refuge from life rather than a ground on which to meet life.
The antidote is not less prayer. It is more honesty within prayer. The Name does not ask you to pretend. It asks you to bring everything, including the parts of yourself that you would rather not look at, the anger, the shame, the unprocessed pain, and offer them along with the devotion. The fire that does not ask whether you come with reverence or with ashes will burn through both. But it must be given the fuel.
Ananta's teaching on this is embedded in his larger framework: "The Ram starts clearing up the inner instrument. It just starts cleaning, emptying it." The Name cleans. But it can only clean what it is allowed to touch. If you wall off certain rooms of the heart and say "not here, not this," the cleaning is incomplete. The Name will wait patiently outside those doors. It will not force them open. But it will not pretend they do not exist.
God's Guardrails
Let us return to where we began. "God knows how to keep us in check. He knows very well."
The dangers are real. Spiritual pride is real. The dark night is real. The temptation to mistake experiences for the goal is real. The tendency to bypass the difficult human work is real. But none of these dangers operate outside the field of grace. The very dryness that humbles you is a gift. The very confusion that strips away your certainty is a gift. The very falling-back to the beginning that you interpreted as failure is, from God's side, the most tender form of guidance: bringing you home again, to the Name, to the starting point, to the place where you first opened your mouth and said Ram.
The path does not require perfection. It requires honesty. And the most honest prayer, as Ananta has taught from the very first pages of this book, is the one that brings whatever you have, however broken, however dry, however mechanical, and offers it anyway.
"Even if it feels like the best I can do at this moment is just to say Ram very mechanically and dead, it is still a million times better than not saying it."
With the dangers acknowledged and the guardrails visible, we turn now to what this whole movement looks like from the outside. What actually changes in the daily life of the one whose heart holds the Name? How does the world look different when God has become the background of everything?
From Ananta's Satsangs
"It is very important not to approach our spirituality with any sort of pride, because the spiritual ego is the most dangerous invention in this world. I feel that if we make our spirituality egoic and it becomes special and proud, it becomes an entitlement. So we are not saying that our prayer entitles us to samadhi. We are saying that it will come only if it is Your grace, if it is Your mercy."
"To keep our pride in check, God knows how much of the felt feeling of presence to give. As we deepen in our faith, we don't need to see any evidence of His presence to confirm His presence. The evidence of His presence is known in our heart. But to be in the heart requires us to be humble. So there is no danger of us getting into super-God mode."
-- It's a Privilege To Remember the Lord of the Universe - 31st December 2025
"Accept all the tastes as prasad, but till you know in your heart that you've come to Atma Darshan, you don't settle for anything as the final taste. If you see you're settling for an image or getting very enamored with some experience, repeat. Because many times spiritual experiences are just growing our pride without us knowing."
"The most dangerous form of pride that I have come across? Spiritual pride. Those with spiritual pride, it's the most difficult to get through anything to them. Why? Because the old Zen saying: the cup is already full. The constant effort and the constant work, lifelong vigilance, lifelong work for all of us is to smell for our own pride, to remain empty."