How can the wall of this falsehood break? How we can see through it, how? Hukam rajaayee chalnaa naanak likhiaa naal. The Siri Singh Sahib elaborates on this idea: “How we can become the living truth? Such a living truth, how can we become the living truth? Kiv sachiaaraa hoee-ai. So what should we do, asks Nanak? He tells us to abandon our ego, and obey the Hukam, the natural order of the universe, the Will of God. We can become very learned from our intellect, gain great depths from our meditative practice, and amass a great amount of worldly things, but Guru Nanak reminds us that not even one of these things will go with us with when we die. Sochai, soch na hova-ee, jay sochee lakh vaar” (January 16, 1990). Intelligence sits still and the world shall come to you. The idiot wastes his time because he is caught by the process of the intellect and not by the virtue of the intelligence. Some become feelings, some become emotions, some become desires and then you fulfill a desire and then there is another desire, then another desire, another fulfillment, another fulfillment. So when you think, what are you thinking for? What happens is those thoughts become feelings, some of those thoughts, but not all… pass away. So long as you are alive, you will breathe and intellect will release thoughts. This is called intellect, intellect releases thought whether you like it or not. In the words of Siri Singh Sahib, Yogi Bhajan, “Your brain releases one thousand thoughts per wink of the eye. Thinking is an intellectual mode, and the conception of the One is not achieved through the intellect it is experienced through the entire sensory being. Guru Nanak tells us that by thinking and thinking, we get nowhere.

The full potential of Japji Sahib lies in the reciting aloud of these sounds and the experience that creates within, not in the intellectual analysis of the meanings of the words.

In this opening pauree of Japji Sahib, Guru Nanak makes a very clear distinction between thinking, or the intellectual process of spiritual awareness, and the actual experience of it. Excerpted from the book Guru Nanak’s Call of the Soul: Japji Sahib:

Jap ji sahib full path lyrics