Chapter 39: Frequently Walked Dead Ends
"Trees which are continually transplanted do not grow roots." Gregory of Sinai
There are places on every path where the road appears to end. Not because the road has actually ended, but because you have wandered into a familiar cul-de-sac, mistaken it for the destination, and sat down.
This chapter names those dead ends. Not to scold you for wandering into them. Everyone does. The Desert Fathers did. The bhakti saints did. The Sufi masters catalogued them with the precision of cartographers. These are not failures of character. They are features of the territory. The human mind, confronted with the slow, humbling work of transformation, will find ingenious ways to avoid the very thing it claims to want.
Naming them is itself the remedy. Once you see the dead end for what it is, you are no longer in it. You are standing at its edge, looking at it, which means you have already turned around.
"I Am Not Progressing"
This is the most common dead end and the most seductive, because it disguises itself as honest self-assessment.
You have been chanting for months. Or years. The Name does not feel different. The heart does not feel warmer. The mind still wanders as restlessly as it did on the first day. You look at the descriptions in this book, the prayer falling into the heart, the Name becoming effortless, the witness appearing, and none of it matches your experience. Conclusion: you are stuck. You are doing something wrong. You are not the sort of person for whom this works.
Ananta's answer is so plain it could be printed on a card and carried in a wallet: "So what? You just have to start again."
The measuring impulse is itself the obstacle. Spiritual progress, as the Catholic tradition puts it, "is not measured like success with worldly goals; it is ultimately not measurable because it is spiritual and not material and is a process and not a task." The Bhagavad Gita does not list spectacular experiences as the sign of advancement. It lists equanimity. The person who remains steady in gain and loss, praise and blame, pleasure and pain, that person is progressing. Whether or not they feel like they are.
Sadhguru offers a practical marker: "If by the day you are becoming a more joyful human being, that means you are progressing." Not joyful as in giddy. Joyful as in rooted. Joyful as in less easily shaken. The kind of joy that has nothing to do with circumstances and everything to do with depth.
Here is the deeper truth: the desire to measure progress is itself a function of the ego, and the ego is precisely what the Name is dissolving. The part of you that wants to know "how far have I come" is the part that will eventually have to surrender its claim to being a separate someone who is going somewhere. You are not climbing a ladder. You are being unmade and remade, and the one who wants a progress report is the one being unmade.
Ananta teaches: "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." Do not measure. Do not settle. Just continue.
"I Used to Feel More and Now I Feel Less"
This one is particularly painful, because it carries the sting of loss.
There was a time, perhaps at the beginning, when the Name felt alive. The heart stirred. The eyes moistened. Something moved in the chest that you could not explain but did not need to. And then, at some point, the feeling dimmed. The Name became routine. The heart stopped stirring. You kept going, but the fragrance was gone.
This is not a dead end. It is a passage. Every major tradition names it.
The Desert Fathers called it acedia, from the Greek akedia, meaning "to lack care." Evagrius of Pontus, writing in the fourth century, called it the "demon of noonday," because it strikes hardest in the middle of the day, in the middle of the journey, when the initial enthusiasm has burned off and the destination is still invisible. The symptoms he catalogued read like a clinical checklist: gnawing boredom with one's practice, disdain for the routine, restlessness, exhaustion, yearning for something, anything, different.
John of the Cross named it the dark night. Not the dramatic dark night of advanced mystical purgation, but the "night of the senses," the earlier and more common experience of spiritual dryness in which the consolations of practice are withdrawn. The purpose of this withdrawal, John taught, is not punishment. It is weaning. God removes the sweetness of prayer so that the soul learns to seek God for Himself, not for the feelings He provides.
Ananta holds this teaching gently: "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." He does not explain why. He does not offer a theological reason. He simply says what comes next: "So what? You just have to start again."
The Desert Fathers' primary remedy for acedia was sheer endurance. Stay in the cell. Do not leave. Do the prayer. Do the work. The demon of noonday is defeated not by cleverness but by persistence. Ora et labora. Pray and work. That is all.
If you are in a season where the Name feels dead, you are in good company. You are in the company of monks who wanted to flee their cells, of saints who could not feel God's presence, of mystics who wrote their most luminous poetry in their driest years. Stay. The dryness is doing something you cannot see.
"I Need a Different Mantra"
The mind is endlessly creative in its strategies for avoidance. One of its favourites is the conviction that the problem is not your practice but your mantra. If only you had a different Name, a different syllable, a different tradition, things would open up. The current mantra has lost its power. You need something fresh.
Sivananda was unequivocal: "It is better to stick to one Mantra only." His disciple Swami Chidananda reinforced it: "You should stick to one mantra. You should not change from one mantra to another." Once the mantra has been taken up, it should be held with single-pointed dedication.
The reason is not dogmatic. It is practical. Spiritual energy needs to be renewed and reconnected through consistent, focused practice. Switching mantras is the spiritual equivalent of changing lanes in traffic: it feels like progress but actually slows you down. The restlessness that makes you want a new mantra is not a sign that the mantra has failed. It is a sign that the mantra is working. It is pressing against exactly the places in the mind that resist transformation, and the mind, in self-defence, whispers: try something else.
Gregory of Sinai used an image that has stayed in the contemplative tradition for seven centuries: "Trees which are continually transplanted do not grow roots." Roots require time, depth, and the willingness to stay in one place even when the soil seems dry.
Ananta uses the image of fire. "The name of God is like fire. Whether you burn fire with reverence or accidentally, it still burns." The fire does not depend on which match you use. It depends on whether you keep feeding it. A single log, tended patiently, will give more heat than a dozen logs lit and abandoned.
If you have received a mantra from a teacher, hold it. If you have chosen one yourself, hold it. The power is not in the syllable. The power is in the continuity. The Name you have been saying for years has worn a groove in your consciousness, and that groove is deeper than you think. Do not fill it in and start digging somewhere else.
"Nothing Is Happening"
This dead end is related to "I am not progressing," but it is subtler. The person who says "I am not progressing" at least believes that progress is possible and that they have somehow failed to achieve it. The person who says "nothing is happening" has begun to wonder whether there is anything to happen at all.
Two responses, from two different angles.
The first: something is happening. You sat down. You said the Name. You are reading this book. Something in you is drawn to this, or you would not still be here. That "something" is not your invention. Ananta teaches: "That compass to turn towards Him was left by God only in our soul. We did not know how to design that compass." The very pull you feel toward the Name is itself the Name at work. It was working before you noticed it. It will continue working whether you feel it or not.
The second: perhaps you are right that nothing is happening, and perhaps that is exactly what is supposed to happen. The ego wants fireworks. It wants visions, experiences, breakthroughs, states. Chogyam Trungpa called this "spiritual materialism," the tendency of the ego to co-opt spirituality for its own purposes. "The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality." When you sit in practice and nothing spectacular occurs, the ego has nothing to claim. No trophy to mount on the wall. No experience to compare with others. This is deeply uncomfortable for the part of you that wants to be somebody, but it is exactly the condition in which the Name does its quietest and most transformative work.
The saints do not report constant fireworks. They report constancy. They report showing up. Mother Teresa lived nearly fifty years in spiritual darkness, feeling nothing, sensing nothing, doubting everything. And she continued. She continued not because she felt the presence of God, but because she had given her word. That persistence, that plain, unglamorous persistence, was the practice. Not the feelings. Not the experiences. The showing up.
"I Need to Find the Right Teacher Before I Can Begin"
The teacher matters. Every tradition says so. Sivananda taught that the mantra should be received from a Guru. The Sufi path requires a Sheikh. The Hesychast tradition warns that practicing the Prayer of the Heart without the guidance of an experienced master is "to court spiritual disaster."
And yet. The Russian pilgrim lost his elder and continued. Tukaram had no Brahminical sanction. Kabir received the Ram Naam from Ramananda at the Varanasi ghat. Ramana Maharshi had no living guru at all.
The desire for a teacher can become another form of waiting. Waiting for the perfect conditions. Waiting until everything is in place. Waiting for permission. Meanwhile, the Name is available now, in this room, in this breath, without anyone's authorization.
Ananta says: "Nobody can ever say, 'I know how to pray,' because it is only that tiny bit in the method and 99% in Grace." The teacher can give you the method. But the method is only one percent. The rest is between you and God. And that ninety-nine percent does not require a teacher's presence. It requires your presence. Your willingness. Your tongue and the Name.
If a teacher comes, receive the teaching with gratitude. If a teacher does not come, begin. God has not withheld the Name from you. He placed it in the world like fire, available to anyone who will strike the match. Do not wait for someone to light it for you.
"I Am Doing It Wrong"
You are not. If your lips are moving, you are doing it. If the Name is in your mind, you are doing it. If you sat down with the intention of practice and then spent twenty minutes thinking about dinner, you are still doing it, because you sat down. The sitting down was the practice. The twenty minutes of wandering was the practice. The moment you noticed the wandering and returned, that was the practice.
There is no wrong way to say the Name. Ananta dismantles this fear with a single teaching: "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." Did you catch the arithmetic? Not slightly better. Not somewhat better. A million times better. The bar for "good enough" is lower than you think. It is any attempt at all.
The Pure Land tradition carries this to its logical conclusion. Shinran taught that the nembutsu "is not said by the practitioner but is the call of Amida within every person." You are not the author of the practice. You are its occasion. The practice is happening through you. Your job is to show up and let it happen, however clumsily, however imperfectly, however far from the descriptions in any book.
A Note on Darkness and Depression
One dead end requires special care. There is a difference between spiritual dryness and clinical depression, and the difference matters.
John of the Cross's dark night is localized to one's relationship with God. Daily life may continue to function. The person knows, on some level, that the darkness has a purpose. Clinical depression, by contrast, fills every area of life with heaviness. It involves changes in sleep, appetite, energy, and concentration. It may include feelings of worthlessness or thoughts of self-harm.
These two conditions can occur at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive. If you are experiencing persistent changes in sleep, appetite, or energy, if you have lost interest in everything, not just your practice, if you are having thoughts of harming yourself, please seek professional help. The Name is real. Grace is real. And so is the wisdom of a good doctor or counsellor. God works through many hands, including the hands of healers.
Ananta teaches that prayer is "a cooperative work of ourselves and God." Part of the "ourselves" side of that cooperation is taking care of the body and mind through which God works.
The Way Out of Every Dead End
Every dead end in this chapter has the same exit. It is the same exit the Desert Fathers prescribed, the same exit Ananta teaches, the same exit every tradition offers to the stuck and the discouraged.
Start again.
Not start over. Not go back to the beginning. Start again from wherever you are, with whatever you have, in whatever condition you find yourself. Dry? Start again. Distracted? Start again. Feeling nothing? Start again. Convinced you are doing it wrong? Start again.
"So what? You just have to start again."
That is Ananta's answer to every dead end. It is not a technique. It is not a strategy. It is the practice itself, reduced to its smallest and most indestructible form.
The next chapter is for those who have heard this instruction and still feel the pull to quit. It is a letter, written to you directly, because sometimes what the heart needs is not a teaching but a hand.
From Ananta's Satsangs
"That can seem tough, especially if you feel like there's nothing inside or you don't experience anything inside. But that means faith. For a while it may seem like you went to your temple, the heart temple, and there was nothing at the altar. Who can keep facing the altar even if they find nothing there? Shiva meditated for 72,000 years. Our point of frustration comes in 72 seconds."
"Many times you just find yourself disconnected. You don't know how you got there, you just got into some Maya loop. The instant you notice, then you have to put down your pride and what you want and your will and everything and just return like a silly, innocent child. We plead with God, we say, 'I've been foolish and I've fallen into this mind trick.'"
-- We Must Live a God Directed Life Instead of a God Assisted Life
"Many times we get into this: 'I can't do it. It's not happening. I just can't do it.' What can't you do? You can't say Ram once? You can always do it. So many times Maya blocks us in this way. What is being asked of you? Just to remember God. Remember His name."
"Whatever happened, by His grace, His presence, His light was found for this foolish one. So don't have to worry about all these ideas that very smart people have. You follow your heart. He will guide you. If you feel like praying to Ram Ji, pray to Ram Ji. As long as your true intention is to follow God and meet Him, don't have to worry."