Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
You alone are, forever — and you are the one who set up this whole game of 'two-ness.' You made the ego, you made the pride, you tucked greed down inside us. So I can only say: keep me however you please; everyone moves the way you move them.
Some you forgive, and they melt back into you, joined through the teaching. Some simply stand and serve you, and nothing else even appeals to them — any other job would feel empty.
And here is a beautiful kind of person: right in the middle of children and family and a busy household, they stay free inside — and that delights you. Clean within and without, they are soaked through with the True Name.
This Pauree speaks to the Creator about the hardest mystery of all — that the very obstacles to the spiritual life seem to have been placed in us by the One. You set the play of duality in motion. You created egotism and arrogant pride, and You placed greed within our beings. The haumai (ego), the pride, the lobh (greed) that the whole tradition works to dissolve — the Pauree says, boldly, that the One put them there, as part of the Play. This is not an excuse for them; it is a refusal to imagine a second, rival power. There is only One, and even the difficulties of the human condition unfold within its single Play.
The soul's response to this mystery is not protest but surrender: Keep me as it pleases Your Will; everyone acts as You cause them to act. If the whole game is the One's, then the soul's freedom lies not in fighting for its own separate will but in aligning with the One's — keep me as You please. And within that surrender, the Pauree describes the different ways souls relate to the One: some are forgiven and merge; some stand and serve, finding every other task empty next to this.
But the Pauree saves its most important teaching for last, and it is the heart of the whole tradition's vision of the good life: In the midst of children, spouse and relations, some still remain detached; they are pleasing to Your Will. Inwardly and outwardly, they are pure, and they are absorbed in the True Name. Here is the householder ideal stated by Guru Nanak himself — you do not have to flee your family and home to reach the One. The highest soul is the one who lives right in the middle of ordinary life — kids, spouse, relatives, the whole busy household — and yet stays inwardly free, antar vairaag, detached within while fully engaged without. This is one of the most liberating teachings in the world's spiritual literature: the divine is not found by escaping your life but by bringing the right inner freedom into it. The kitchen and the family argument and the ordinary evening at home are exactly where the True Name is to be lived.
Could the very life you have — your family, your home, your daily busyness — be exactly where inner freedom is meant to be practiced, rather than somewhere you must escape?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI