Chapter 38: Seven Contemplations
"A rosary is a whip to goad the mind towards God." Swami Sivananda
If at any point this feels overwhelming, stop. Return to the breath, to the body, to ordinary life. The heart temple is patient. It will wait.
What follows are seven small practices, one for each day of the week if you like, or all in a single sitting if the pull is there. Each one echoes a movement from the journey you have just read. None requires special posture, special clothing, or special belief. A chair will do. A park bench will do. The edge of your bed at night will do.
These are not techniques to be mastered. They are invitations to be accepted. Accept whichever ones feel right and leave the rest. You can return to what you left behind at any time. As Ananta teaches: "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."
Starting again is the entire practice.
I. The Tongue Learns
Say the Name aloud, slowly, three times.
Do not listen for anything special. Simply notice the feeling in your mouth, the vibration in your chest, the way the air carries the sound outward. Let the tongue do its honest, physical work. This is the first movement: the body meeting the sacred through simple repetition.
If a mala is nearby, hold it. If not, your fingers against your thumb will serve. The mala is not essential. What is essential is the sound leaving your lips. Even three repetitions are enough to begin. You are not trying to achieve a spiritual state. You are placing a word on your tongue. That is all.
The Sivananda tradition offers practical guidance for those who wish to extend this practice. Sit facing East, Northeast, or North. Begin with chanting Om once, with awareness at the heart centre. Then take up whatever Name or mantra you have been given, or the one that calls to you. Repeat from 108 to 1,080 times daily, one to ten rounds on the mala. "It is better to stick to one Mantra only," Sivananda taught. One well is better than ten shallow holes.
Ananta makes the threshold even lower: "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." You do not need feeling. You do not need devotion. You do not need readiness. You need a tongue, a word, and the willingness to begin.
The Sufi tradition adds a beautiful detail. When chanting the Name of God aloud, some teachers instruct the student: "Say the Name softly, yet loud enough so that you can hear it." Not a shout. Not a whisper. Loud enough that the ears receive what the tongue offers. The sound travels outward and then returns, and in that small circuit between mouth and ear, the practice takes root.
II. The Mind Receives
Now close your lips and let the Name continue silently in the mind. Hold it there with gentle attention, the way you might cup water in your palms. When the mind wanders, and it will, do not scold yourself. Simply begin again. This beginning-again is not a failure. It is itself the practice. Every return is a small act of devotion.
Gregory of Sinai gave precise instruction for this transition: "Both methods of prayer should be used, with the lips and with the mind. One should appeal to the Lord quietly and without agitation, so that the voice does not disturb the attention of the mind." Start with the voice. Let the voice grow quiet. When the inner repetition falters, return to the voice. When it steadies, return to silence. The movement between audible and inaudible is not a sign of inconsistency. It is the natural rhythm of learning.
Al-Ghazali described this stage with stark honesty. The heart engages, he said, but it requires significant effort, "as it naturally drifts toward worldly preoccupation." If you find your mind drifting, you are not doing it wrong. You are doing it exactly as every practitioner in every century has done it. The remedy is ancient and universal: return. Begin again. Place the Name back in the mind, gently, without drama, the way you would pick up a dropped thread.
Sit with this for five minutes. Or three. Or one. The duration matters less than the quality of return. One genuine return, one moment of noticing that the mind has wandered and choosing to come back, is worth more than twenty minutes of distracted repetition.
III. The Breath Joins
For a few minutes, let the Name synchronize with your breathing. One syllable as you breathe in, one as you breathe out. Do not force the rhythm. Let the Name and the breath find each other naturally, the way two rivers merge without anyone directing them.
Every tradition that practices sacred repetition has discovered this marriage of word and breath independently.
The Hesychast monks coordinate the Jesus Prayer with the breath: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God" on the inhale, "have mercy on me a sinner" on the exhale. The breathing is made slower, and the two halves of the prayer settle into the body's natural rhythm.
The Sufi tradition teaches: "As you inhale, mentally repeat Allah, and feel that God's lights are being sucked into your heart. As you exhale, mentally repeat Hu, and feel that the light of Hu is powerfully striking your heart." The instruction is not merely physical. It carries an image, a felt sense of light entering and settling.
The Sikh practice of Naam Simran coordinates "Wahe" with the inhale and "Guru" with the exhale, with specific attention to where the sounds resonate in the body: "Gu" from the palate, "ru" from the forehead.
In the Hindu tradition, the most ancient form of breath-synchronized chanting is ajapa japa, the unchanted chant. The breath goes out with the sound "Ham" and comes in with the sound "Sa," forming the mantra "Hamsa" or "So-Ham," meaning "I am That." The Yoga Chudamani Upanishad teaches that this is already happening in every living being, 21,600 times in every 24-hour period. You are not starting something new. You are becoming aware of something that is already going on.
If the Name shifts to a single pulse, one repetition per breath, let it. You are not controlling the practice now. You are letting it settle into the body. Let the breath be slow, natural, unhurried. Let the Name ride it. After a few minutes, you may notice that you cannot tell whether you are breathing the Name or the Name is breathing you.
IV. The Heart Listens
Place one hand on your chest. Say the Name once more, silently.
Notice if anything stirs beneath your palm. Warmth, a settling, a softening, a faint pulse of something you cannot quite describe. If nothing stirs, that is also fine. The hand on the chest is enough. You are telling your own heart: I am here. I am listening. This gesture, palm to chest, is older than any scripture. Trust it.
Ananta describes what this feels like when it opens: "Then the prayer drops into your heart. It is full of fragrance, full of life." But he is equally honest about the days when nothing seems to drop, when the heart feels closed and the Name feels distant: "So what? You just have to start again."
The Hesychast tradition offers a specific instruction for this movement. The practitioner "concentrates his thought in the cardiac centre" and, while inhaling through the nose, makes his intellect "descend" with the breath. This is not visualization in the ordinary sense. It is an intention carried on the breath, a gentle turning of attention from the head to the chest, from thought to feeling.
But the Philokalia also issues a warning that deserves respect: "Exact instructions concerning this exercise are not committed to writing for fear they should be misunderstood; the details of the process are so delicate that the personal guidance of an experienced master is indispensable." The heart is real territory. Approach it with reverence, not ambition. If something opens, let it open at its own pace. If it does not open, do not force the door. Simply keep your hand on your chest, keep saying the Name, and let time and grace do what effort cannot.
The Sufi heart practices carry a similar gentleness. One instruction from the Shadhiliyya tradition: simply hold the Name in the awareness while keeping attention at the level of the heart. Do not chase a feeling. Do not manufacture warmth. Just be present to whatever is there, even if what is there is an ordinary heartbeat and nothing more.
What you are learning here is not a technique. You are learning how to listen to your own chest. Most of us have never done this. The heart has been beating our entire lives, and we have never stopped to ask it what it knows.
V. The Witness Appears
Without stopping the Name, step back inwardly and notice who is chanting. Not the content of the chant, but the one who hears it. You may find that the Name continues on its own while "you" simply watch. If this happens, let it. If it does not happen, do not chase it. Simply notice the noticing. This is the threshold where effort begins to thin.
In the Hindu tradition, this is called sakshi bhava, the stance of the witness. Sakshi is "pure awareness" that observes all thoughts, words, and deeds without affecting them or being affected by them. In Advaita Vedanta, there is no independent, separately existing witness. There is only awareness, which lights up all experience the way sunlight lights up a room without becoming the objects it illuminates.
The practical application is simpler than the philosophy. You are sitting. The Name is going on. Now, instead of attending to the Name, attend to the one who is aware of the Name. Who is hearing this? Who is noticing the silence between repetitions? Who is present when the mind wanders, and who notices the wandering?
You will not find an answer to these questions. That is the point. The looking is the practice, not the finding. Ramana Maharshi taught: "If you search and try to find out who it is that is doing japa, that japa itself becomes the Self." The inquiry does not yield an object. It dissolves the inquirer into what was always here.
If this feels abstract, try a simpler version. Close your eyes. Let the Name play silently. Now notice that there is an awareness in which the Name appears. The Name comes and goes. The awareness does not. It was there before you started chanting. It will be there when you stop. It was there in the gap between two repetitions. It has no edges. It has no preferences. It simply is.
Sit with this for as long as it holds you. When it releases you, let it go without grasping. The witness does not need to be maintained. It maintains itself. It is what you are when you stop being busy.
VI. The Emptying
For a minute or so, do nothing at all. No Name, no inquiry, no effort. Simply sit and let whatever is here be here.
This is what Ananta calls eating. "You have cooked through all the chapters of practice. Now taste. Let the silence hold you." All the effort of repetition, attention, breathing, listening, all of it was the preparation. This is the meal. You do not produce anything here. You do not need to feel anything. Just sit.
Sivananda's instruction for this moment is striking in its simplicity: finish your japa and then "abide in the fruit of your practice." Sit quietly after completing the rounds. Notice what condition has arisen. Enjoy it. "Abiding is very important," the tradition teaches. Most practitioners skip this step. They chant, they finish, they stand up, they move on. But the fruit of the practice is in the silence that follows it, not in the repetitions that precede it.
The Cloud of Unknowing, that anonymous fourteenth-century English manual, teaches the same thing in different language: "By love may He be gotten and holden, but never through thought." The emptying is not the absence of God. It is the presence of God without the interference of the mind trying to grasp Him.
Let the silence hold you. You do not need to understand it. You do not need to name what you feel. If you feel nothing, that is also the silence doing its work. The silence is not empty. It is full of what you have been looking for. It has been here the entire time, underneath the chanting, underneath the breathing, underneath the effort. Now you are simply sitting in it, the way you sit in a room you have just noticed you have always been in.
VII. The Return
Open your eyes. Look at the room around you. Notice the light, the textures, the ordinary sounds of the world. Say the Name one final time, gently, as a greeting to the day or the night ahead.
The practice does not end when you stand up. It simply changes form. The Name you placed on the tongue now lives somewhere deeper. Let it accompany you into the kitchen, the car, the conversation. It knows the way.
Brother Lawrence spent thirty years in a monastery kitchen and reported that "the time of business does not differ with me from the time of prayer." The Pure Land tradition teaches that nembutsu can be practiced while walking, working, or resting, woven into the fabric of daily life without requiring any special setting. The Sikh tradition of Naam Simran extends beyond formal sitting into every waking moment.
Ananta teaches this with characteristic directness. The older forms of practice do not have to be abandoned when the newer ones emerge. "The Ajapa Japa started happening, so we should not feel that, 'Oh, now it is Ajapa Japa, now I do not need to chant, I do not need to use the Mala.' No, all that can also happen." You can still pick up the mala while washing dishes. You can still chant aloud while walking. These are not regressions. They are homecomings.
The return is the practice that never ends. It is the point where the seven contemplations loop back to the first. Tomorrow, or tonight, or in the middle of some ordinary afternoon, you will sit down again. You will say the Name. You will close your lips. You will let the breath join. You will place your hand on your chest. You will notice the noticing. You will sit in the silence. And you will open your eyes again.
Each time you do this, something settles a little deeper. You may not feel it settling. That does not mean it is not happening. Ananta reminds us: "The name of God is like fire. Whether you burn fire with reverence or accidentally, it still burns."
Strike the match. The fire knows what to do.
But the path from here to the fire's full blaze is not always straight. There are places where the road seems to circle back, where you feel you are losing ground, where the Name feels dead on the tongue and the heart feels sealed shut. The next chapter names those places. Naming them is the first step out.
From Ananta's Satsangs
"The point of using the name of God and to continue to use it in our prayer is that it gets more and more spiritually charged. And by spiritually charged, it means that it allows us to return to our hearts. If in our honesty we notice that one Ram is not enough, then we say it seven times. If you find that is also not working, then say it along with your breaths. In-breath is Ram and out-breath is Ram."
"Don't poison your spirituality by seeking to do what you want. Is my spirituality just lip service, a tick in the box, or every moment am I giving my highest to Him? Chant inwardly, deeply. Do the full breath prayer because nothing is so important. You'll see that life becomes quite a breeze. It's not so full of attacks and defenses all the time."
"If there's anyone who feels like that, they can always come to me and say this: 'I feel like my mind is so noisy. I feel like the space is so empty and I don't feel like any devotion to anything.' So to you, I might be saying something. It might be meditation, it might be chanting, whatever you might need. Something, anything which has no 'me' at the center of it."
"If you're attracted to a particular aspect of consciousness -- Ram, Krishna, Jesus, Allah -- latch on to the scent of that. When you say Ram, when you say Krishna, when you say Jesus, when you say Allah, a certain fragrance is bound to take birth in your heart. Accept with devotion and love, follow that fragrance. Where does it come from? That pure love for divinity can guide you to the divinity itself."
-- Set Your Compass Straight, Keep It Aligned to God's Light