Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Your mind is like a mirror, but only a rare person, facing the Guru, actually looks into it and sees themselves clearly. When you dry up your ego, no rust can grow on that mirror. Then a wonderful thing happens — a soundless music begins to play inside, the pure word starts ringing, and you melt into the True One.
The mirror — aarsi — is one of the most beautiful images in this whole shabad. Your mind is a mirror that could reflect the One perfectly. But mirrors get covered in morcha, rust, and a rusted mirror shows nothing. The rust here is haumai, ego. When ego coats the mind, you can't see what's really there — not your true self, not the One.
How does the rust come off? Not by polishing harder, but by letting ego "dry up" (sokhai). And notice the rare gift: "koee gurmukh vekhai" — only a rare one actually faces forward and looks into the mirror at all. Most of us are too busy facing our own ego to ever turn around and look honestly at ourselves. The gurmukh is simply someone who turned around and looked.
And what they hear once the mirror clears is anhad — the "unstruck melody." This is one of the most mysterious ideas in the tradition, and it is left open: a sound that no one plays, traditionally described as a music that is always quietly going on underneath everything, the background hum of reality itself. You can't hear it while ego is roaring. But when the mirror is clean and quiet, you notice it was playing all along. That noticing is being "absorbed into the True One."
When everything around you goes quiet, what do you notice that you usually can't hear?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI