Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
When the spotless Name comes to live in your mind, your whole mind and body become clean too, and the sticky pull of **maya** falls away. Then you keep singing the pure praises of the True One — and a pure sound begins to ring inside you, like quiet music playing on its own.
You do not have to fight the darkness. Let the Light move in, and the darkness leaves by itself.
This verse shows what happens once the pure Name moves in. It is like a row of dominoes.
Nirmal naam vasi-aa man aa-ay — the spotless Name comes to live in the mind. Then right away: man tan nirmal — mind and body become clean. Notice the whole person is cleaned, not just the soul. This is the Sikh way of grihast, living fully in the world, with a family and a body and a job, not apart from them. A guest this pure cannot help but clean the house where it stays.
And what leaves when the Name arrives? Maa-i-aa moh gavaa-ay — moh for maa-i-aa goes away. Maa-i-aa is the shiny world of things that come and go. Moh is clinging to it. Here is something important. We do not first rip ourselves free of clinging and then earn the Name. It is the other way around. The Name comes in, and the clinging simply goes.
Think of walking into a dark room and switching on the light. You do not have to fight the darkness first. The light comes on, and the darkness is just gone. In the same way, our grip on things loosens. Not because we pried our fingers open by force, but because something better came in and our hand let go on its own.
The verse ends with a mysterious and lovely picture. Nirmal gun gaavai nit saachay kay — keep singing the pure praises of the True One. Nirmal naad vajaavani-aa — and a pure naad, an inner sound, begins to play. Teachers in the Sikh tradition link this naad to the "unstruck music," a music the soul hears once the noise of the ego goes quiet.
Here is one way to think of it. Soft music is always playing under everything. But a grabbing, wanting mind is so noisy it drowns the music out. As the Name moves in and the clinging leaves, the inner noise drops. And suddenly you can hear the music that was there all along. Singing and hearing become one. You start by singing to the One, and you end up hearing the One singing in you. Cleaning the mind is also tuning an instrument. And a clean, quiet heart finally rings.
What's a quiet, beautiful "sound" — a feeling, a sense of rightness — that you can only notice when your mind finally stops its noise?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI