Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Notice how the senses are never full. The mouth never tires of talking; the ears never get enough sound; the eyes never stop wanting to see more. Each one keeps chasing its own kind of pleasure, and not one of them is ever satisfied.
A hungry person isn't fed by talk of food. There is a deep hunger in us that no amount of seeing or hearing or tasting can ever fill — and it is satisfied by only one thing: singing the praises of the One. That is the food that finally fills you.
This shalok of Guru Angad names, with great economy, one of the most important truths about being human: the senses are insatiable. The mouth is not satisfied by speaking, and the ears are not satisfied by hearing. The eyes are not satisfied by seeing — each organ seeks out one sensory quality. Every sense has its appetite — the mouth for talk and taste, the ear for sound, the eye for sights — and no appetite is ever finally filled. You can talk all day and want to talk more; see endless wonders and crave new ones; the senses chase their pleasures in an endless loop, never arriving at enough. This is the engine of so much restlessness: we keep feeding senses that cannot be sated, and wonder why the hunger never stops.
The shalok then names the deeper hunger underneath all the sensory ones: the hunger of the hungry is not appeased; by mere words, hunger is not relieved. Just as you cannot feed a starving person with talk of food, you cannot fill the soul's deep hunger by feeding the senses or by mere talk of the One. There is a real emptiness in the human heart, and it has been mistaken, by almost everyone, for a hunger that more seeing, more hearing, more having might fill — which is why people consume and consume and stay starving.
And the cure is named in a single line: hunger is relieved only when one utters the Glorious Praises of the Praiseworthy Lord. The one food that actually fills the deep hunger is praise — the turning of the whole self toward the One in gratitude and song. This connects directly to the Pauree just before it, where the True Food is the Love of the Lord. The senses will never fill the soul, because the soul was never hungry for what the senses chase; it was hungry for the One. Stop trying to feed a spiritual hunger with sensory food, and feed it what it actually wants — praise of the One — and at last, for the first time, the deep hunger is relieved.
What sensory 'more' do you keep chasing that never quite satisfies — and what might your deeper hunger actually be for?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI