Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
If you never let yourself fall in love with good company — people who lift you toward the light — and instead spend all your time with people who only pull you toward selfishness, you slowly waste the one precious life you were given. It's like a tree that yanks out its own roots. Nobody did it to you. You did it to yourself, by choosing where to belong.
Guru Arjan keeps using the garden image, and now he points to roots. The company you keep is where you draw your life from — your roots. "Santaa setee rang na laa-ay" — to never form a loving bond (rang, the dye of love) with the sat sangat, the company that raises you, and instead live among "saakat" (people cut off from the One, circling their own ego) is to drink from poisoned ground.
The most piercing word here is "aap" — yourself. "Jarh apunee aap upaarhee" — you tore up your own roots. This is not a punishment handed down by some angry God. In the qMonk vision there is no separate God handing out fates. There is only hukam — the way things actually work. And the way things actually work is: you become the company you soak in. Choose company that forgets, and you forget; choose company that remembers, and remembering becomes natural — sahaj.
This is why sat sangat is not optional decoration in Sikh thought. It is structural. We are not self-made; we are made by what we let near us. The human birth is called "dulabh" — rare, hard to come by — precisely because it is the chance to plant your roots in living soil.
Who are the people who, just by being around them, make you want to be kinder and more awake?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI