Hence, while maintaining the importance of grace, she always insisted on the value of regular and persistent spiritual practices. 'Don't relax practice,' she used to say, 'simply because you do not get His vision. Does an angler catch a big carp every day the moment he sits with the rod? He has to wait and wait, and many a time he is disappointed.'
She seemed to have attached special importance to spiritual experiences that came as a result of strenuous practice. 'God-realization,' she said, 'can be had at any time by the grace of God, but there is a difference between it and what comes in the fullness of time, as there is a difference between mangoes that ripen in the proper season and those that ripen in the month of Jyaishta (May-June). The latter are not very sweet.' She also insisted that the normal course of spiritual progress was gradual. Perhaps one had practised Japa and austerities in one life; in the next life one's spiritual mood deepened thereby; and in the life following, still more and so on.
Among spiritual disciplines, she stressed Japa as the most important. According to her, initiation with the Mantra purifies the body. God, she said, has given fingers in order that they might be blessed by counting Japa. An athlete was in the habit of carrying a calf in his arms from its very birth. He did it every day and as a consequence he gradually developed the strength necessary to carry it without effort even after it had become a full-grown animal. Exactly similar, she used to say, is the nature of the spiritual progress one makes, gradually and unobserved, through the practice of Japa. By