Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Wake up, friend — you keep gripping the glitter as if it's everything, and it really isn't a small thing to get this wrong.
What you're so sure is 'yours' was never actually yours. You barely pause to remember the One, and meanwhile you treat borrowed things like they belong to you forever.
The shabad opens with a startled cry — "Oh! Oh!" — the sound of someone realizing a mistake mid-motion. The word rendered "fool" (moorakh) is not an insult hurled down from above; read in the tradition's spirit it's a gentle, urgent shake of the shoulder — don't sleepwalk through this. The core diagnosis is about ownership: nearly everything we clutch as "mine" is really on loan — our things, our roles, even our bodies. The suffering comes from forgetting that, and gripping the borrowed as if it were permanent.
What's something you think of as totally 'yours'? In what sense is it actually on loan?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI