Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
**M** — your real work is with your own mind. When you learn to steady it and gently guide it, everything else falls into place. That inner training is the true accomplishment.
Only the mind can work on the mind — no one else can do it for you. And in all my searching, I've found nothing else quite like the mind: nothing so powerful, nothing so worth understanding, nothing else that holds the key to everything.
The letter Mamma (a shorter shalok — a two-line couplet rather than the four-line pauris around it). man si-o kaaj hai — your business, your real task, is with the mind. man saadhay sidh ho-ay — one who saadhai (disciplines, refines, trains) the mind reaches sidh — perfection, the goal. man hee man si-o — only the mind can deal with the mind: no external ritual or authority substitutes for the inner work. kahai kabeeraa man saa mili-aa na ko-ay — says Kabir, I have met nothing equal to the mind. This is Kabir the great psychologist: the whole spiritual journey is, in the end, the mind coming to understand and steady itself. The mind is both the problem and the instrument of its own freedom.
What is one small way you already help your own mind calm down when it gets stirred up?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI