Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The One Himself is **maya** — the glittering surface — and the One Himself is the shadow it casts. The One Himself made the attachment that runs through the whole world. And the One Himself is the giver of every good quality, the One Himself sings His own praises, and the One Himself speaks them aloud to be heard.
This is perhaps the boldest stanza in the whole song, because it folds even maya and moh — the very things the rest of this Mehl warns us against — into the One. Aape maya aape chhaaia — the One Himself is maya (the glittering, deceiving surface-world) and its chhaaia (its shadow, its illusory shade). And aape moh sabh jagat upaaia — the One Himself created the moh (attachment) that runs through the entire universe. This can be startling. If maya and attachment are what trip us up, how can they be the One?
The resolution is the deepest insight that all is one: if there is only the One (the relentless point of this whole song), then there's nothing outside the One to be the "enemy." Maya isn't a rival power fighting against God; it's part of the One's own play — the curtain the One draws across His own face. The illusion of separateness (the farak of Pauri0), the pull of attachment — these aren't evidence that something escaped the One's control. They're the One playing hide-and-seek with Himself, setting up the very game of seeking and finding that the whole spiritual life consists of. Maya is the hiding; the Guru's revealing is the finding; and both are the One.
This is enormously freeing, and it dissolves a subtle fear. We can come to hate maya, to be at war with the world and with our own attachments, treating them as a dark enemy force. This stanza gently disarms that war: there's no enemy, only the One, even in the things that trip us. You don't have to fight maya as a hostile power; you only have to see through it to the One who is playing behind it. And the last line completes the circle in the most intimate way: aape gundaata, gun gaavai aape — the One gives all good qualities, and the One sings His own praises, and the One speaks them to be heard. So even your devotion, even your praise of the One, is the One praising Himself through you. There's no corner of the whole drama — not maya, not attachment, not your own worship — where anything but the One is at work. The seeker, the sought, the obstacle, and the path: all one. And once you truly see that, the war ends, and what's left is only wonder at the single Player playing every part.
How might it change things to stop treating temptations and distractions as an "enemy" to battle, and instead gently see through them to what's real?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI