Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Here is a strange and powerful instruction: while you are still alive, conquer death — and then you will have no regrets at the end.
The world is passing, though only a few really see it; most people pour their love into worldly busy-ness instead of into what is true. Meanwhile, the time of dying hangs over everyone, and when the measure of a life is full, not even a moment's delay is allowed.
But the One pours its love into some hearts and settles it there; and by grace, a soul comes to know the True One and melts into it. That is how you 'conquer death' — by becoming one with what death can never touch.
This Pauree opens with one of the tradition's most paradoxical instructions: while you are alive, conquer death, and you shall have no regrets in the end. How does a living person conquer death? Not by avoiding it — everyone dies. You conquer death by dying the other death first: the death of the ego, jeevat marnaa, dissolving the grasping separate self while the body still lives. The soul that has already let go of the clinging self has nothing left for biological death to take; it has, in advance, conquered the thing everyone fears. And so it reaches the end with no regrets — the regret of a life clung-to and lost is simply not available to a soul that already let go.
The Pauree is clear-eyed about why most people never do this: this world is false, but only a few understand. People do not enshrine love for the Truth; they chase after worldly affairs instead. The forgetting is not exotic; it is the ordinary preference for busy-ness over truth. And meanwhile, with quiet inevitability, the terrible time of death hovers over the heads of the world, and when one's measure of life is full, there is not a moment's delay — the appointed end comes exactly on time, unhurried and unhalted.
But the Pauree, like the whole Vaar, turns from the warning to grace. The Lord Himself gives His Love, and enshrines it within their minds. The conquering of death is not finally a feat of willpower; the One pours its love into the heart and settles it there, and by Guru's Grace, one comes to know the True One, and is absorbed into Him. This is the real victory over death: absorption into the deathless One. What death can touch — the body, the ego, the possessions — is exactly what the awakened soul has already released; what remains, merged into the True One, was never within death's reach at all. To conquer death while alive is simply to become, now, one with what does not die.
What would you have to release now, while alive, to meet your own ending with no regret?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI