Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Picture a person who hears and understands everything — and just stays silent, doing nothing about it.
Under Maya's spell, he never quite wakes up.
After the bright banner of the refrain, this short stanza turns to its shadow: the soul that knows better and does nothing. He hears and knows everything, but he keeps silent. This is not the silence of wisdom but the silence of inaction — a person who has heard the truth, who understands perfectly well what matters, and who simply... does nothing with it. The knowing never becomes living; the understanding never moves the feet.
Why? Bewitched by Maya, he never regains awareness. The word bewitched is exact — Maya casts a kind of spell, a trance, in which a person can possess all the right information and remain fast asleep to it. He is not ignorant; he is entranced. And the spell's deepest effect is that he never regains awareness — never quite wakes from it, because the trance disguises itself as ordinary waking life. This is a sobering portrait, and a recognizable one: the person (and we have all been this person) who knows what would heal them, knows what they should turn toward, and stays spellbound in inaction, hearing everything and waking to nothing. The banner-carrying soul of the refrain and this entranced sleeper differ not in what they have heard but in whether the hearing woke them.
Where do you already 'know everything' you need to and yet stay strangely asleep, doing nothing about it?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI