Ego Is an Illness With Its Cure Hidden Inside
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The 'me-first' feeling is like a long-running illness — it keeps us stuck in the same old patterns.
But here's the hopeful part: the cure is hidden right inside the sickness itself. With a little grace and good guidance, it heals.
The Second Guru's companion shalok gives us one of the most quoted and most hopeful lines in all of Sikh scripture: ha-umai deeragh rog hai, daaroo bhee is maahi — ego is a chronic disease — but the cure is within it too. Think about how encouraging that is. The very thing that troubles us — the me-first feeling — isn't a hopeless curse; it carries its own medicine. How? The disease, fully understood (as the last shalok said), becomes the doorway out — and with grace and the Guru's teaching, it heals. You don't have to be someone else, or destroy a part of yourself. The healing is built right into the problem, waiting to be found. Your struggle already contains its own way through.
How might a struggle you have actually contain the seed of its own solution?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI