Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Inside there's a nagging doubt, and lost in busy affairs, people quietly wear themselves down.
Asleep in the sense of being separate, they never wake; they never turn the Name over, never sit with the teaching. That is the whole shape of a self-centered life — and it runs out empty.
The paired Shalok sharpens the picture of the manmukh — the mind curved back on itself. Its condition is "the pain of doubt," a life "asleep in the love of duality." The tragedy is not villainy but sleep: never waking to the Name, never contemplating the Word, and so wasting the days. Read gently, it is a portrait of drift, offered so the reader might notice and wake.
Where might you be 'asleep' — going through motions without ever waking to what they're for?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI