Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The dust from the saints' feet finally touched my face — the very thing I had begged for. And the moment it did, my twisted thinking and my unlucky, foolish ways simply dissolved. Now I sit, settled, in the true home of myself, singing the wonders of the One. Nanak says: everything false in me has fallen away and disappeared.
The shabad comes full circle: the one thing begged for in the Rahao is received. Ren santan kee merai mukh laagee — "the ren (dust) of the saints touched my mukh (face/mouth)." The humble request is granted, and immediately the transformation comes: durmat binsee kubudh abhaagee — "durmat (wrong-mindedness, corrupted thinking) was destroyed, along with kubudh (bad understanding) and abhaagee (the unlucky, the misfortune)." The dust of humility does what no effort could: it dissolves the crooked patterns of the ego-mind. To be touched by the humility of the saints is to have one's own twistedness undone.
Then the home-coming: sach ghar bais rahe gun gaae — "I came to sit (bais rahe) in the sach ghar (the true home) and sing the qualities [of the One]." Recall the recurring teaching of this section: the One is found within the home of the self (Shabad 7, Shabad 8). Here the seeker finally sits down in that true home — no more wandering, no more running in every direction (the dhaavai of earlier shabads). She is settled. Sach — the real, the permanent — is now where she lives, and from that settledness, she simply sings.
The final word is the dissolving of its opposite: binse kooraa — "the kooraa (the false, the jhooth, the impermanent) vanished." This is the project's core distinction between sach (the real and lasting) and the false constructions of ego and status. As the seeker settles into the sach ghar, everything kooraa — the fake self, the pretenses, the chasing after impermanent things — simply binse, disappears. It is not destroyed by force; it evaporates because, in the presence of the real, the false cannot hold. The arc is complete: pride set down (Rahao), the chance asked to be fulfilled (P1), the ego-fortress fallen to the One's sight (P2), and now the dust received, the false dissolved, the seeker home and singing. Signed with the lineage's name, Nanak. The whole movement was downward into humility, and it landed her in the truest home there is.
The seeker's "false" self vanished not by being fought, but by her settling into what was real. Have you noticed that some bad habits or pretenses just fall away on their own when you're in a genuinely good place?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI