Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Stay close to someone who is free, and you start becoming free yourself. The thing that does the freeing is the **shabad** — the divine Word — which wears away your ego and your grasping need to call things "mine." So keep your heart turned to the True One day and night, and through good fortune, the Guru comes into your life.
This verse says freedom is catching: stay near someone who is free, and you start to become free too.
It answers the dark picture of the verse before. The stuck worm could not free itself. But muktay sayvay muktaa hovai — stay near and serve someone who is free, and freedom rubs off on you. Freedom cannot be built alone. It passes from one freed person to the next, like a laugh spreading around a table. This is the sat sangat, the gathering of good company, in a small picture. We become like the company we keep, so keep company with the free.
What actually does the loosening is named: ha-umai mamtaa sabday khovai. The shabad, the Guru's Word, wipes away ha-umai (the feeling of a separate "me") and mamtaa (the clutching "mine, mine"). The action belongs to the Word, not to us. We do not grind the ego away by force. The Word does the work when we let it sound inside us. Guru Amar Das teaches this again and again: the ego cannot remove the ego. Only grace, only the Word, can.
The last line keeps even this from turning into pride. The Guru is found poorai bhaag — through perfect good fortune, through grace, not as a prize we earned. Everything here is received, not won. Freedom is caught from the free. The ego is loosened by the Word. The Guru is a gift.
Who in your life leaves you lighter and freer just by being around them — and are you spending enough time there?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI