There is a difference between being present and being available. Presence is a state. Availability is a posture, an open hand held out before anything has been asked for. And it is this distinction, almost invisible in daily life, that quietly determines whether Grace moves through a person or simply moves past them.Most people think of Grace as a gift that descends, random, unconditional, untouched by anything they do. In one sense the mystics agree: Grace cannot be earned. But unearned is not the same as unconditional. The sun does not have to be earned either  and yet a shuttered room stays dark. Grace, in nearly every tradition that speaks of it seriously, behaves less like a reward and more like a current. It needs a channel. The channel is availability.

What the Texts Actually Say About Grace

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna does not tell Arjuna to perform extraordinary rituals to receive divine attention. He says, in essence, remember me at all times, in eating, in sleeping, in walking, in breathing (Gita 8.7). Not in crisis. Not in the temple alone. In the ordinary motion of an ordinary day. That single instruction is perhaps the oldest written description of availability: not grand gestures, but continuous, low-grade remembrance that asks for nothing.

The parable of the sower in the Gospels makes a related claim from another direction. The seed, Grace, the word, the teaching  is the same seed regardless of where it lands. What changes its fate is the soil. Rocky, thorny, packed-down, or open. The sower never withholds the seed. The ground withholds itself.

Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic, went further and said the soul must become empty.  What he called Gelassenheit, a letting-be because the Divine cannot fill what is already crowded with the self’s own agenda. And in the Sufi tradition, Rumi’s reed flute cries precisely because it has been cut hollow; it is the hollowness, the availability of empty space, that lets the breath of the Beloved become music. A reed that refuses to be hollowed cannot sing, no matter how much breath is offered to it.

Mohanji speaks to this directly with a teaching that is deceptively simple: I am available. Not “I am worthy,” not “I have done enough sadhana to deserve this.” Simply available, a door left unlocked, regardless of who is expected to walk through it that day.

And this is the part of his teaching people most conveniently misread. He has said, in different ways and on different occasions, that he is available to everyone and yet very few stay close enough, for long enough, to actually receive that availability. Watched honestly, the pattern is almost never the Master withdrawing from the disciple. It is the disciple drifting, distracted by the very things the connection was meant to help them hold until one day they simply stop showing up. Not in protest. Not in rebellion. In forgetting. And this kind of leaving rarely feels like leaving from the inside. It feels like being busy.

Mohanji also gives the exact mechanics of the right distance, in a teaching as practical as it is profound: sit too close to the fire and you will get burnt; sit too far and you will freeze. Closeness without humility curdles into ego, demand, or a familiarity that forgets reverence. Distance without contact curdles into indifference — until the cold itself starts to feel normal, even comfortable. The discipline is not proximity for its own sake. It is the right proximity, sustained, which is exactly what availability has been describing all along: warm enough to be touched, humble enough not to consume.

Most people, without ever deciding to, drift toward the far end of that spectrum. The call comes, a quiet pull to sit, to remember, to simply connect and it gets postponed for something louder. Once. Then again. Then as a habit. And one day a person notices they are standing outside a warmth they used to take for granted, looking in, no longer sure exactly when they stepped outside it. The cold does not announce itself the way fire does. It is gradual, almost gentle, until it isn’t. And getting back in is rarely as simple as walking back through the door. The fire is still there, it was never the one that moved. But the body has adjusted to the cold, the habits and excuses have rebuilt themselves around the absence, and the way back, more often than not, becomes a longer and harder pilgrimage than the original distance ever was to begin with.

Across every one of these traditions, the same architecture repeats: Grace is constant. Availability is the variable. And most people, without realizing it, are quietly adjusting that variable downward every single day.

Showing Up When It Doesn’t Matter

Here is where the real teaching and the real consequence begins.

Almost everyone turns up when something is at stake. The exam is tomorrow, so the prayer is fervent tonight. The diagnosis is frightening, so the temple is full. The relationship is breaking, so suddenly there is time for connection. This is not wrong, desperation has its own honesty but it is not availability. It is negotiation. And Grace, by its nature, does not negotiate. It flows toward an open channel, not toward a closed one that occasionally cracks open under pressure.

The deeper teaching found in the discipline of Zen as much as in the daily Aarti, in the quiet repetition of japa as much as in the Sufi’s zikr. The relationship with Grace is built almost entirely in the moments that don’t matter. Chopping wood. Carrying water. Lighting a lamp on an evening when nothing is wrong. Sitting for ten minutes of Sadhana when no one is watching and nothing is being asked for in return. These are the moments Grace actually notices, not because Grace is keeping score, but because these are the only moments in which the channel is genuinely open rather than opened-on-demand.

This is, strangely, also exactly what modern attachment psychology describes. A child does not develop a secure attachment to a caregiver because the caregiver shows up dramatically during emergencies. Security is built in the small, unremarkable, repeated moments of availability, being picked up when nothing is wrong, being looked at with warmth when nothing is being requested. Psychologists call this the difference between a relationship built on intermittent reinforcement and one built on consistent responsiveness. Intermittent reinforcement, connection only during crisis or need produces anxious attachment: a nervous, transactional bond that strengthens desperation but never trust. Consistent, unconditional small contact produces secure attachment: a bond strong enough to hold weight precisely because it was built when no weight was on it.

The nervous system does not distinguish between a human relationship and a relationship with the unseen. The same law of “use it or lose it,” what neuroscience calls Hebbian learning, the principle that connections strengthen through repeated use and weaken through neglect, governs the inner channel through which Grace moves. A pathway visited only during emergencies stays narrow, brittle, slow to open. A pathway visited daily, in ordinary devotion, widens until it can carry almost anything.

The Forgetting — And What It Actually Costs

This is the part people rarely want to sit with, because it implicates exactly the moment they feel most triumphant.

Look closely at scripture and folklore and the pattern repeats with uncomfortable precision: it is not poverty or suffering that breaks the bond with Grace, it is arrival. The Israelites, fed daily by manna in the wilderness, did not abandon their faith while hungry. They abandoned it almost the moment security arrived, building a golden calf out of the very gold that prosperity had given them. Karna, gifted extraordinary power by his guru Parashurama, lied to receive that boon and was cursed to forget it at the one moment he would need it most — the moment of his greatest battle. The folk tale of the wishing tree tells of villagers who visit it constantly while in need, and the moment their wishes are granted, stop visiting altogether, until, one day, the tree simply stops answering, not out of spite, but because the relationship was never anything but a queue.

This is the mechanism people consistently fail to notice in their own lives: Grace is rarely lost in suffering. It is lost in success. The job arrives, and the gratitude that built it quietly stops. The relationship stabilizes, and the daily tenderness that earned that stability gets replaced by routine. The healing happens, and the practice that made room for healing is abandoned the week health returns. Each of these looks, from the inside, like simply “moving on.” From the outside, from the vantage point of the traditions that have watched this pattern for millennia. It looks exactly what it is: the slow re-narrowing of a channel the moment it stops feeling necessary.

And here is the consequence, stated as plainly as it deserves to be stated: the channel does not stay open out of memory of past use. It only stays open through present use. Grace does not punish forgetting with some dramatic withdrawal. It simply behaves like any current behaves when a channel narrows, it finds less and less room to move through. The synchronicities that once seemed to follow a person everywhere grow rarer. Doors that used to open quietly now require force. Life, which once seemed to be cooperating, starts to feel like it has to be wrestled. Most people misread this as bad luck, a “rough patch,” the universe turning on them. It is rarely that dramatic, and rarely that personal. It is closer to a plant that stopped getting watered the moment it flowered, mistaking the flowering for the end of the work rather than the proof that the watering mattered.

This is not retribution. Grace does not abandon out of anger. It is closer to a law than a feeling, closer to Rta, the cosmic order the Vedas describe, than to a wounded parent withdrawing love. But the absence of malice does not soften the consequence. A river does not hate the field it no longer reaches. It simply no longer reaches it.

The Discipline of Staying Available

What protects a person from this is almost laughably modest, which is perhaps why it is so often skipped: continue showing up after the prayer is answered. Continue the small evening practice after the crisis passes. Say the gratitude before the next request, not only after the last one was granted. Sit in the unremarkable moment, the one with nothing to gain and treat it as sacred precisely because nothing can be gained from it.

This is, in the end, what availability really means. Not constant performance. Not spiritual urgency. Just a door, left open, on the days nobody is expected to walk through it. Grace was never a rare event. The rare event is a person who stayed available long enough to notice it had been there all along.