Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The whole world is on fire. It burns in the flames of endless wanting,
of greed, of puffed-up pride and ego.
Caught in that fire, people die and are born again and again. They lose their dignity along the way, and a precious life burns up for nothing.
This verse says the world burns in a fire of wanting, and the fire is the wanting itself.
The verse before spoke of a cool, gentle Light. This one turns to a different kind of fire. Tisnaa agan jalai sansaaraa — the world burns in the fire of tisnaa, thirst that never ends. So there are two burnings in this shabad. One is the Light, jot, that the One is. The other is the fire, agan, that the ego suffers in. One lights the way. The other eats everything up. A big question of any life is which fire we live in.
What feeds the eating fire? The verse names the fuel: lobh (greed), abhimaan (showing off) and ahankaar (big ego). These are some of the five inner thieves that bend how we see. Under them all is tisnaa, the thirst. They are all the ego in different flames. Greed is the ego grabbing. Pride is the ego puffing up. Thirst is the ego always hungry. The separate "me," ha-umai, is always on fire in this way: never enough, always reaching. Think of scrolling for "just one more" video. The wanting never ends. That restlessness is the burning.
That is why the verse is sad: birthaa janam gavaavni-aa — a precious life used up in vain. Pat gavaa-ay — people lose their dignity in the grabbing. Yet the one Light is shining in that very person, right now, for free. They could rest in it at any moment. The fire is not a punishment sent from outside. Greed simply is burning. And there is hope hidden here. We do not have to fight the fire by force. We only have to turn toward the cool Light that was shining all along, as the next verses show.
What's a "craving fire" — wanting more and more of something — that's left you more restless, not less? What would it feel like to set it down?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI