Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
O my mind, you are like a camel that keeps wandering, always looking for something better over the next hill. Slow down. Look carefully at what is really here.
People have searched the whole forest, wearing themselves out looking everywhere outside. But the One you love has been inside your own heart all along. When I follow the teaching, I finally see that.
This opens Guru Ram Das's Karhalay -- a set of shabads that address the mind as a karhalaa, a camel. The camel is the perfect image for the restless mind: it can travel enormous distances across the desert, always moving, never quite arriving. The forest-dwellers (ban vaasee) are those who searched for the divine by leaving the world and roaming the wilderness -- and they grew weary (thakay), because the thing they sought was never in the forest. The turn of the whole set is pir ... ridai -- the Beloved is within the heart. Gurmat (the Guru's teaching) is not one more place to travel to; it is what lets the wandering finally stop.
Where do you go looking for happiness that might actually be waiting quietly inside you?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI