God is sitting in His name, or you can say that His name is another form of Him. There’s no difference between Him and His name.
So, “Oh Krishna, You have provided us such a powerful tool. Even though we can’t see You right now because we’re not qualified, we have Your name, and we can chant Your name. And You haven’t put any restriction on when to chant Your name or where to chant Your name. We can be anywhere, anytime.”
So, it’s such an easy thing to make use of and it’s so powerful.
“You’re in Your name, and I can chant Your name anytime, anywhere. It means I can connect to You anytime, anywhere I want. I have the perfect connection. And yet, I am so unlucky, I’m so unfortunate that even though You’ve provided this name, but when I chant it, I don’t feel any love for You. I don’t feel excitement! My heart doesn’t melt! I don’t feel a thrill in my body. I have such bad luck!”
What is that bad luck? When God Himself is in His name, why can we not experience the blissfulness of that name?
Tulsidas Ji says,
जासु नाम सुमिरत एक बारा। उतरहिं नर भवसिंधु अपारा॥
Jāsu nām sumirat ek bārā, utarahiṇ nar bhavasindhu apārā.- Ramayan: Ayodhya Kand
“If someone correctly remembers the name even once, they’ll cross the ocean of maya (material energy, illusion) and reach God.”
But when we take the name, never mind crossing maya and reaching God, many times we don’t feel anything. It’s like just repeating any word. Why is it so? Because we all have the same bad luck. And you know where luck comes from. We create our own luck with our past lives’ actions. It’s called prarabdh (destiny resulting from past actions).
But this is a very particular brand of bad luck. This particular brand of bad luck has been created by doing nām aparādh (offense against the Divine name). Aparādh means a transgression or a crime, and nām means the name.
We have offended against God, God’s name, God’s virtues, God’s leelas (Divine pastimes), God’s abodes, and God’s associates, His Saints - all these six things are one with the name - नाम, रूप, लीला, गुण, धाम, जन - nāma (name), Roop (form), leelā (pastimes), guṇ (qualities), dhām (abode), and Jan (Saints).
So if we have offended against any of these six by thinking negatively against them, we’ve all done it.
Even thinking something like, “Why did Ram send Sita back to the forest?” That is a transgression. It means we’re doubting Ram’s goodness. How dare we? So that type of transgression blackens our heart. It pollutes our heart and blocks our ability to make that connection with God.
It causes Him pain when we do that because He knows we’re His children. He wants us to be able to experience Him. And yet we’re—it’s this self-created blockage by having this negativity in our mind towards God, God’s forms, God’s names, etc.
So in our past lives, we have done all kinds of Naam Aparadh. It’s called spiritual transgressions.
It’s the worst kind of sin because it instantly pollutes the heart and blocks our devotional receptivity. So even though there is unlimited potential in that name Radhe, we say Radhe and we feel very little to nothing because we’ve created that blockage in our heart. The connection isn’t clean.
