Lost and Found Within the One Way

Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa

This stanza is built on a single repeated word: bhaanai — "by [your] bhaana," the divine Will, the way things are ordered. It opens at the head of every clause. Bhaanai ujharh, bhaanai raahaa — "by your way, the wilderness (getting lost); by your way, the path (being found)." Both the losing and the finding unfold within the one reality. Bhaanai... gurmukh gaavaahaa — by the same Will, one becomes gurmukh and sings. Bhaanai bharam bhavai bahu joonee — by the same Will, another wanders in bharam (confusion, doubt) through many lives.

This is Hukam / bhaana stated at its most uncompromising: sabh kichh tisai rajaaee — "everything is by that One's rajaa (will, ordering)." The lost and the found, the awakened and the wandering — none of it falls outside. At first this can feel troubling: if even getting lost is "by the Will," where is our freedom? But read through the project's lens, this is liberating, not fatalistic. It dissolves the proud, anxious haumai that imagines itself the sole author of its fate. If even my turning toward the light is, at the deepest level, the One's own movement through me, then I can stop the exhausting pretense of being a separate self who must engineer everything alone.

The teaching is not "so nothing matters." It is "so stop carrying the whole weight as if you were separate." The river does not strain to flow downhill; it simply is the flowing. To recognize that everything happens within the one ordering is to relax into being part of it — to align with the Hukam rather than fight an imagined battle against the universe. The losing and the finding are both held; even the wandering is not outside the One's care.