Caitanya Mahāprabhu teaches actually that The Holy Name is very merciful and descends for our benefit, but we mustn't take it for granted. Not taking it for granted means giving full attention to the chanting. If we do that, we'll find for ourselves what is called nāma-bala, or strength that we get from the name. We'll understand that even chanting in nāmābhāsa, although we haven't realized the direct manifestation of Kṛṣṇa in His name, we'll start to feel the effects of chanting, and will get faith.

In nāma-aparādha or chanting without attention would be like calling somebody to speak to them, and they come over to you, and then you turn your back on them and get on your cell phone. How would they feel? Similarly, when we're chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, we're calling Kṛṣṇa, "Please come. Please help me." And when He comes, if I turn around and do something else with my mind, with my intelligence, or even physically, if I turn the other way and start fixing a curtain rod, then this is a kind of an offense.Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura says this kind of chanting can actually lead to atheism. Why? Because if I do that repeatedly, then I'll start to think that there is no actual manifestation of The Holy Name because I'm not experiencing it. I'm not getting nāma-bala or strength, I'm not having any sphūrti or direct realization of The Holy Name. And then I'll start to commit the fifth offense and think that The Holy Name is imagination, that somebody just made it up.

There's some made-up philosophy, and then there's a series of other events he describes, in which I try to justify the situation. And then people can even stop the process altogether and become lost again in the material whirlpool, drowned. So it's incumbent upon the sādhaka to take the process of chanting seriously, and seriously means to give your full attention when chanting. So that takes practice, because the mind is accustomed to taking shelter of distraction and finding pleasure in it. It actually feels some kind of perverse satisfaction in moving from one thing to the next. It's a kind of conditioning. Or, it takes shelter in dullness or laya, where my mind feels satisfaction in sleep—in a kind of thick darkness, in which I zone out from the variety of the world. And then when I wake up, I get back into the distracted state.

In order to come to the state of actually full focus on The Holy Name, ekāgra—where I'm one-pointed—it takes a lot of practice, and also a kind of again and again practicing simplicity of the mind: that I'm okay without being distracted, without going to other things, and I can simply focus on the chanting without going anywhere else.

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