Siri Guru Granth Sahib Ji: Ang 644

MP3 File

Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh!

The hukamnama today is by Guru Amardasji, in Raag Ramkali, on Ang 644 of the Siri Guru Granth Sahibji.

sloku m Ú 3 ] (644-14)
salok mehlaa 3. (644-14)
Salok, Third Mehla: (644-14)

siqgur kI syvw sPlu hY jy ko kry icqu lwie ]
satgur kee sayvaa safal hai jay ko karay chit laa-ay.
Service to the True Guru is fruitful and rewarding, if one performs it with his mind focused on it.

min icMidAw Plu pwvxw haumY ivchu jwie ]
man chindi-aa fal paavnaa ha-umai vichahu jaa-ay.
The fruits of the mind’s desires are obtained, and egotism departs from within.

bMDn qoVY mukiq hoie scy rhY smwie ]
banDhan torhai mukat ho-ay sachay rahai samaa-ay.
His bonds are broken, and he is liberated; he remains absorbed in the True Lord.

iesu jg mih nwmu AlBu hY gurmuiK vsY min Awie ]
is jag meh naam alabh hai Gurmukh vasai man aa-ay.
It is so difficult to obtain the Naam in this world; it comes to dwell in the mind of the Guru-oriented.

nwnk jo guru syvih Awpxw hau iqn bilhwrY jwau ]1]
naanak jo gur sayveh aapnaa ha-o tin balihaarai jaa-o. ||1||
O Nanak, I am a sacrifice to one who serves his True Guru. ||1||

m Ú 3 ]
mehlaa 3.
Third Mehla:

mnmuK mMnu Aijqu hY dUjY lgY jwie ]
manmukh man ajit hai doojai lagai jaa-ay.
The mind of the ego-oriented is so very stubborn; it is stuck in the love of materialism.

iqs no suKu supnY nhI duKy duiK ivhwie ]
tis no sukh supnai nahee dukhay dukh vihaa-ay.
He does not find peace, even in dreams; he passes his life in misery and suffering.

Gir Gir piV piV pMifq Qky isD smwiD lgwie ]
ghar ghar parh parh pandit thakay siDh samaaDh lagaa-ay.
The Pandits have grown weary of going door to door, reading and reciting their scriptures; the Siddhas have gone into their trances of Samaadhi.

iehu mnu vis n AwveI Qky krm kmwie ]
ih man vas na aavee thakay karam kamaa-ay.
This mind cannot be controlled; they are tired of performing religious rituals.

ByKDwrI ByK kir Qky AiTsiT qIrQ nwie ]
bhaykh-Dhaaree bhaykh kar thakay athisath tirath naa-ay.
The impersonators have grown weary of wearing false costumes, and bathing at the sixty-eight sacred shrines.

mn kI swr n jwxnI haumY Brim Bulwie ]
man kee saar na jaannee ha-umai bharam bhulaa-ay.
They do not know the state of their own minds; they are deluded by doubt and egotism.

gur prswdI Bau pieAw vfBwig visAw min Awie ]
gur parsaadee bha-o pa-i-aa vadbhaag vasi-aa man aa-ay.
By Guru’s Grace, the Fear of God is obtained; by great good fortune, the Lord comes to abide in the mind.

BY pieAY mnu vis hoAw haumY sbid jlwie ]
bhai pa-i-ai man vas ho-aa ha-umai sabad jalaa-ay.
When the Fear of God comes, the mind is restrained, and through the Shabad, the Guru’s Word, the ego is burnt away.

sic rqy sy inrmly joqI joiq imlwie ]
sach ratay say nirmalay jotee jot milaa-ay.
Those who are imbued with Truth are immaculate; their light merges in the Light.

siqguir imilAY nwau pwieAw nwnk suiK smwie ]2]
satgur mili-ai naa-o paa-i-aa naanak sukh samaa-ay. ||2||
Meeting the True Guru, one obtains the Name; O Nanak, he is absorbed in peace. ||2||

pauVI ]
pa-orhee.
Pauree:

eyh BUpiq rwxy rMg idn cwir suhwvxw ]
ayh bhoopat raanay rang din chaar suhaavanaa.
The pleasures of kings and emperors are pleasing, but they last for only a few days.

eyhu mwieAw rMgu ksuMB iKn mih lih jwvxw ]
ayhu maa-i-aa rang kasumbh khin meh leh jaavnaa.
These pleasures of Maya are like the color of the safflower, which wears off in a moment.

clidAw nwil n clY isir pwp lY jwvxw ]
chaldi-aa naal na chalai sir paap lai jaavnaa.
They do not go with him when he departs; instead, he carries the load of sins upon his head.

jW pkiV clwieAw kwil qW Krw frwvxw ]
jaaN pakarh chalaa-i-aa kaal taaN kharaa daraavanaa.
When death seizes him, and marches him away, then he looks absolutely hideous.

Eh vylw hiQ n AwvY iPir pCuqwvxw ]6]
oh vaylaa hath na aavai fir pachhutaavnaa. ||6||
That lost opportunity will not come into his hands again, and in the end, he regrets and repents. ||6||

Today’s hukamnama is a pretty complex description of how to deal with the ego, mind, maya and life and death. There is a lot in the detail of this hukamnama, so we will start from the beginning and do what we can to cover it.

There is a word in Gurbani, Chit and another word Man. Man relates to our psyche, the play of the mind, the play of the thoughts, the play of the personality. Chit is awareness, the ability to attend to something, to focus on something. In the first line of the hukamnama, Guru Amardas is telling us that when we do service for the Guru it does bare fruit as long as we put our attention to it, as long as we really paying attention to what we are doing. Gurbani talks about the mind and the problems that come when mind leads us one way or another. If we follow our thoughts, if we follow our desires it creates a lot of trouble. One of the antidotes to that is that we really use the chance of the human body, the human breath and the human birth to serve the Guru. Rather than serving what our mind wants us to do we find that we can clear our Karmas through service to the Guru. We find that we can raise our consciousness by serving the Guru.

Guru Amardas is telling us in the first line, “Service only has a reward to it if we are actually really putting our attention in what we are doing.” It’s not serving the guru thoughtlessly, its not serving the Guru as an empty ritual. It’s about really putting our attention into that service. In that attention there is a fruit that comes. He says, “By doing that what the mind longs for comes to fruition and the ego; the sense of self from within us disappears.” Haume; ego is a false identity that we build. It’s based on our memories, our tastes, our likes and dislikes, our thoughts and desires. What we are doing with human incarnation is that we have this chance to actually experience the deathless reality, the jot; the divine light that lives inside of us. Ego serves that journey at some point and then there is a point where ego actually blocks us from experiencing the divine light. It’s when we are paying attention to the service of the Guru the longs of the mind can bare fruit and ego dissolves from within. That state is really beautiful, the guru is saying, “It’s the state of being freed.” It’s a state where all of the bonds are broken. It’s a state where we become completely absorbed in the true reality, in the deathless awareness of the light, that play and we are part of that light and the play. We can remain absorbed into that experience.

Guru Amardas then goes on to say, “In this age we are living in, the experience of the Naam is really difficult to obtain, the experience of this divine identity that we truly are is difficult to obtain but by being Gurmukh that experience can come to live within our own mind.” The Siri Singh Sahib once defined Gurmukh as one who flows with the integrity of the Guru’s words. So when you live with both the spirit and the meaning of the Guru’s word and let that guide your mind, guide your mind, guide your breath that’s what a Gurmukh is. Though it is difficult in this age to realize the divine identity within us but through the Guru’s word and flowing with them in spirit and integrity we can consciously realize that identity.

Then the next line is that those who do this service and serve with attention and do everything that the first few lines of the hukam described then as a result of that service Nanak says, “I am a sacrifice to those people, I’ll do anything I can to help and serve those people.”

Then Guru Amardas goes on to talk about the Manmukh. Manmukh is the one who flows with their own thoughts, who really believes that thoughts of the mind are their identity and purpose. Gurbani always talks about what a painful and difficult life it is when one is ruled by their own mind. So he is saying, “Manmuks are very stubborn and they are very lagee; meaning attached to the experience of reality that isn’t an awareness of the divine.” We get caught in duality when we forget that everything is the divine light or when we stop experiencing that everything is the divine light. The mind likes to judge, the mind likes to create superiority and inferiority. This is a tremendous pain that we create by allowing our mind to do this. The mind has a stubborn attachment and those who follow their own mind have a stubborn attachment to seeing things as higher and lower, lesser and greater. They are in the duality because they don’t see the one light behind everything.

The hukam goes on to say, “There is no way to experience peace, even in your dreams as long as the mind is ruling you with it’s judgments and it’s assessments and life is just pain and misery.”

Then Guru Amardas goes on to describe all the ways that all the different religious rituals have been created to try and control the mind and how completely useless they are. He says, “People have grown tired of going from door to door, of reading and reciting scriptures, have become tired of going into trances, have become tired of bathing at the shrines, they are tired of putting on spiritual costumes that don’t mean anything.” So many religions all over the world have created so many rituals and people do these rituals thinking that this ritual is going to get them to experience peace, to experience contentment. Really the rituals do not have the power to create peace and contentment! Only the experience of our own divine identity can give us that contentment. Guru Amardas ji is saying, “All these people are doing all these different rituals but in this way the mind isn’t conquered. The ego, the doubts, the illusions that we suffer from stay with us.” Ritual does not get rid of ego. Ritual doesn’t get rid of doubt or illusion. We can waste a lot of time and energy in rituals that actually don’t serve us. He says, “There is another way, Gurparsaad, that there is this energy of the divine teacher in the universe and when we can receive the gift of that teacher it gives us a divine fear.” Fear is something that really helps contain the mind. The Guru and other passers will talk about remembering death. Remembering death reminds you that you are not going to live forever. It gives you a healthy kind of fear that allows you to treat something with respect. When you fear something or you fear someone you are much more likely to treat it with respect. Through the Guru’s gift this divine fear can come in and we start to treat our breath and our life and human rebirth as something very precious. We treat it with a lot of respect because it is a very temporary and a short opportunity to experience the divinity, which is what the human body was given to do. So through this sweet gift of the Guru when the fear comes in then it’s very fortunate because the divine can come to abide in the mind. When that divine fear is with the mind then through the shabad we are meditating on, through the sound current of the Gurbani, the ego is burned away. There are a lot of analogies in Gurbani about fire and the purification of it. The fear, and the motivation to practice that, comes from that divine fear; it is a fire that starts to purify the illusory identity.

The next line is that when we start to burn away and purify that temporary, illusory identity the mind creates then we get in touch with the true reality. It’s a very pure experience. We find that divine light that lives within us and within everything and the mind can surrender and merge into that experience of light. This is a tremendous blessing that can come to us with the human body. That’s my own comment about the hukam (comment of Ek Oang Kaar Kaur Khalsa; the translator) that the chance to merge into the divine light comes with the opportunity of the human birth.

The next line says when we meet with the divine teacher who can take us to truth then we can obtain this experience of the divine identity, the Naam, it (the experience) comes to us. Peace is something that is ever-present; we just need to merge into that experience of peace within ourselves through that meeting with the Guru and through that obtaining of the experience of the Naam.

In the ending Paure of the hukam Guru Amardas takes it back to the place of reminding us how temporary the pleasures of life are. Even if you were a king or an emperor and you could have all the pleasure of the wealth and the status of kings the court could give, still that experience lasts for only four days. They are very temporary, they are like the color of the safflower, in a moment they are gone. No matter how intense the pleasures are they are gone very quickly.

Then he talks about the experience of death. When we go through the experience of death none of these things we accumulate in our life will go with us when we leave the body. There is this word in Gurbani, which is Paap, it gets translated as sin but sin is not a very good translation. Paap is whenever you harm someone and whenever you feel you have been harmed, both, it creates a memory in the subconscious. You store all theses memories of harm you have done to others and you have done to yourself. Through your Sadhana, through your daily practice you can clean out those memories in you day-to-day life. You can work with your breath, you can pray, you can allow the Guru’s grace to come in and heal, balance and correct all the harm that you do or all the harm that is done to you. But if you don’t take the time to practice (your Sadhana) then Guru Amardas is saying, “At that moment of death you don’t take your wealth with you, you don’t take the pleasures of world with you, you take the memories of all that pain with you.” That’s the thing that goes with you when you die. It’s a terrible experience to not face those memories of all that pain until your last breath. In that moment what the soul experiences is that they had an opportunity when they were human to clear their accounts and they have lost that chance. It creates a tremendously deep regret for the soul when it leaves the earth plane and it hasn’t used the human life in a good way.

The end of the hukamnama is a reminder that this moment of death is real, if we get caught up with the pleasures of the earth plane to the point where we forget about the service, the Guru; the divine identity inside of us then what we take with us is not the memory of pleasure but all of our unresolved pain and conflict. When we loose the human body we loose the chance to work that karma out. We have to come back again to work that karma out. So Guru Amardas is reminding us, “Those who loose that chance really regret it in the last moment.” It’s an example to us that we should really take this chance with the human birth to what we can do here like: clean our karma, serve and experience liberation, find the divine light within us and to take that chance very seriously.

Waheguru Ji Ka Khlasa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh!