Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
He sleeps, dazed by wrongdoing and illusion. He never comes to see or understand.
Seizing him by the hair, the Messenger of Death pulls him up. Only then does he come to his senses.
This one says that if you won't wake up on your own, death becomes the alarm clock.
The picture is meant to jolt us. A man is asleep, maa-i-aa maad, dazed by Maya, the pull of shiny things and wrongdoing. Soojh boojh na aavai — he understands nothing.
Then the messenger of death grabs him by the hair and pulls him up. Only then does he come to his senses. But by then it is too late to live differently.
Think of snoozing your alarm again and again on a school day. You finally jump up when your parent flips on the light, and the bus is already leaving. The verse asks us to wake up now, while there is still time. Shabad 201 uses the same picture.
What would it take to wake up now, rather than only at the very end?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI