Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
O man, when you were curled up in the womb, upside-down, you were lost in meditation.
You had no pride in your body, which does not last. Night and day were the same to you. You lived without knowing, in deep silence.
Remember the great pain of those days, now that you have spread the net of your mind far and wide.
You left the womb and came into this world, and you forgot the Lord.
This one says that before you were born, you were very close to the One.
Bhagat Baynee's song is sung to the tune called Pehray, the "watches" of the night. Other songs use the four watches of the night. Baynee turns them into the stages of a life. This first stage is the womb, before birth. And surprisingly, it is the time when we are closest to the One.
Ray nar garabh kundal jab aachhat uraDh Dhi-aan liv laagaa: "O man, when you were curled up in the womb, upside-down, you were lost in meditation." The baby has not yet grown ahankaar, the proud "me" feeling that pulls us away from the One. Being upside-down in the womb is an old picture in Indian spiritual life. Before birth, the soul faces the right way. At birth it turns over and loses that direction.
Agi-aan so naagaa speaks of living without knowing, in stillness. This is not emptiness. It is a deep, quiet calm, a kind of pure being-there that the Gurus also describe.
Then you are born, and slowly, over the years, you forget. By the time you are old enough to understand words and ideas, the One may be the thing you have left behind. Think of a song you knew by heart as a toddler and forgot as you grew. Baynee is asking us to remember that tune.
Does it change how you think about 'growing up' to hear that you might have been closest to God before you had grown at all?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI