The name can be taken anywhere. Nobody's permission is needed.

नाम कहीं भी लिया जा सकता है, किसी अनुमति की ज़रूरत नहीं।

Why his instruction carries no posture, no breath count and no stages. Anything requiring a quiet room would be useless to a person on a crowded train, and most of his listeners are on one.

Premanand Ji Maharaj during satsang at Shri Hit Radha Keli Kunj, Vrindavan
What it means

No permission is required, including his

Devotees ask him for permission constantly. May I start, do I need initiation from you, is there a mantra you will give me, can I take the name without a guru. He refuses the premise of the question every time, and the refusal is not humility. It is the position of the tradition he belongs to, stated plainly.

Nothing stands between a person and the name. There is no ceremony that unlocks it, no fee that qualifies you, no clean room you must find first, no hour of the morning it works better in, no direction to face and no posture to hold. He is explicit that this includes him. You do not need his consent, and asking for it is a way of postponing the thing you already have.

The reason he presses this so hard is that entry conditions do a particular kind of harm. A practice with requirements quietly sorts people, and the people it sorts out are the ones with the least room in their day: the woman with three children and a household, the man working nights, someone sitting in a hospital corridor with no idea when they will next be alone. A name that can be taken silently on a full train sorts nobody out.

In practice

Living with this saying

It also removes the most common excuse in satsang, which is the reason he keeps returning to it. Devotees explain that they will begin properly once things settle, once the house is quieter, once they have found a teacher, once the children are older. He treats all of these as the same sentence, and points out that the conditions being waited for do not arrive, and were never needed.

There is a second thing he is protecting against. A tradition in which access runs through a particular man becomes a business very quickly, and he refuses to be a gate. This is consistent with everything else at the ashram: nothing is sold, no initiation is arranged for money, and anybody offering to secure you a mantra or a private audience for a price is selling something that does not exist.

What it asks of you is to start today rather than on a date. Not to prepare, not to ask anybody, not to wait for a better week. Take the name once during whatever you are doing next, and then again later, and let a practice assemble itself out of that instead of out of a plan. He is fairly clear that this is the entire entry procedure.

A saying, not a certified transcription: a short statement of a position he has taken consistently in public satsang.

About this saying

Questions about this saying

What does Premanand Ji Maharaj mean by “The name can be taken anywhere. Nobody's permission is needed”?

Why his instruction carries no posture, no breath count and no stages. Anything requiring a quiet room would be useless to a person on a crowded train, and most of his listeners are on one.

What is this saying in Hindi?

नाम कहीं भी लिया जा सकता है, किसी अनुमति की ज़रूरत नहीं।

Is this an exact quotation?

No. It is a short statement of a position he has taken consistently in public satsang, not a certified transcription of one recording.

Where can I hear him speak about this?

His satsang is recorded and published on the official channels. This site is an independent devotee site and is not connected to the ashram.

Keep reading

All 30 sayings

The Radha naam is itself the greatest mantra. God is not a judge waiting to punish you. The mind is not your enemy, it is only untrained. Do not give anger a second thought. Do the work fully, then hand the result over. Suffering is the distance between what happened and what you demanded. Service done to be seen is a transaction. You do not need to leave home. Do your sadhana inside it. Keep taking the name even when you feel nothing. Difficulty does not mean you have taken a wrong turn. The name can be taken anywhere. Nobody's permission is needed. Take only as much of the name as you can keep up daily. When you are ill, go to the doctor. Take the name alongside. What changes first is your conduct, not your feelings. Do not hand the mind the problem. Hand it the name. Do not weigh your life against one you only see from outside. The one who wronged you moved on. You are the one still paying rent. Children copy what is done and ignore what is said. Devotion that creates conflict at home has misunderstood itself. If it can be bought, it has nothing to do with me. Begin with the name. Study will follow the practice. Keep the practice running through the doubt. Certainty arrives behind it. With the name in your mouth you are never in an empty room. Put the mala where the phone used to be. Earn honestly, spend without cruelty, give quietly. The relationship does not end when the body does. Fix the routine before you try to fix the mind. Do your own part fully and stop keeping accounts of the other person's. The gap between what happens and how you react is the first real result. One instruction heard two hundred times gets acted on. Two hundred heard once do not.