Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Everyone knows life has endings — but few understand the good kind of 'letting go.'
Learn to let the grasping self quiet down once, and you never have to fear that again.
A Shalok of Bhagat Kabir — the weaver-poet whose voice appears across the Guru Granth Sahib — brought into this Vaar. It plays on the word "die": "the world is dying to death, but no one knows how to truly die. Whoever dies, let him die such a death that he does not have to die again." The "good death" is the now-familiar jeevat marnaa — letting the ego go quiet while fully alive. Kabir's paradox is bracing: everyone fears endings, but the one thing worth learning is the voluntary letting-go of the grasping self, which ends the fear of endings forever. That the verse of a low-caste weaver raised in a Muslim Julaha family — traditional accounts of his birth differ — sits inside a Sikh Guru's Vaar shows again the tradition's wide, shared table.
What's something you've had to let go of that turned out to be freeing?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI