Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Your voice, your Word, is everywhere — inside me and all around me, in every direction. You yourself are the one who speaks it; you yourself are the one who tells it. And the teacher made it clear to me, plain as anything: it is all One, only One. There never was, and never will be, anything else but the One.
This stanza reaches the central realization the whole shabad has been moving toward. First, the omnipresence of the sacred Word: antar baahar teree banee — "your banee (Word) is antar (inside) and baahar (outside)." The divine speech is not locked in a book or a building; it sounds within the heart and throughout creation. There is nowhere it is not. And the One is the one who utters it: tudh aap kathee tai aap vakhaanee — "you yourself uttered it, you yourself spoke it." Many readers hear in this that the One is not a person who issues the Word from outside, but is the speaking itself.
This sets up the climax, the Guru's plainest teaching: gur kahiaa sabh eko eko, avar na koee hoigaa — "the Guru said: it is all One, only One; there is no other, and there never will be any other." This is Ik Onkar stated as flatly and completely as it can be. Sabh eko — everything is the One. Avar na koee — there is no second thing. And the future tense, hoigaa — "there shall never be any other" — extends the oneness across all time: not only is there nothing else now, there will never come to be anything else. The oneness is total and eternal.
For the seeker, this is the resolution of all longing and all searching. If there is only the One — inside, outside, speaking, spoken, now, and forever — then there was never truly anyone to long for from a distance, never any real separation to cross. The whole drama of seeker-and-sought dissolves into the recognition that there was only ever the One, appearing as both. The Guru does not give the seeker a new truth; the Guru says it plainly (kahiaa) — names what was always so. This plain naming is itself the gift: the veil of two-ness lifted by a single clear sentence.
The Guru says it plainly: "it is all One, there is no other." If you really believed there was no separation between you and everything else, what would change about how you feel when you're lonely?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI