INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

K: So were the Sikh Gurus of divine nature or were they human?
G: They were humans like you and me, but they were always in meditation
(simran), doing worship to God. God saw that they were good
people and therefore sent them to earth to bring people on the righteous
path. God sent them. They came by a command (Hukam) of God.
These two foundational premises of being admitted divine knowledge and permitted
to speak are by no means restricted to the person of the Guru, but can be granted to
anyone who receives the divine grace and reaches the same stage of spiritual perfection.
That there will be sants, bhakts and other saintly persons who have mystical
experiences similar to that of Nanak is acknowledged, although generally alleged that
God alone knows their identity and only a few will be allowed to teach the world.
The “revelation” attainable for ordinary people is primarily to discover and disclose
the knowledge of God through the medium of gurbani. Through the Guru of gurbani
ordinary humans may attain a liberated state, or become a jivan mukt, while retaining
a bodily and worldly existence and continue living until the karma is exhausted at the
time of death.
Despite the belief that Nanak’s mission was divinely instigated and sanctioned,
these notions keenly stress the Guru’s human quality. A middle-aged woman
expressed this idea in the following way:
Guru Nanak Dev ji never called himself God. He said the Word (bani)
is the true Guru. He was an “informer” of God and came to tell us
about God. Guru Nanak Dev ji said the teaching I am giving is not
mine, the words I am giving you is not mine. It is the words of God. He
was the medium to give us that.
The real Guru was from the beginning gurbani, and consequently the personal guru
was not supposed to be object of worship like a deity, but highly respected as the
enlightened preceptor who rendered a revelation possible and thereby opened a door
to the path of liberation. To humanize Nanak, several of my interlocutors accentuated
the significance of his own efforts to reach the status of a Guru: Nanak obeyed the
commands of God and by relentless immersion in meditation and remembrance of
the divine name he was rewarded a high position in the celestial court. What differentiated
the spiritual endeavour of the Guru from ordinary people was his ceaseless
devotion to God. “When we are trying to reach God we will always face a lot of obstacles,
but Guru Nanak Dev ji was never affected by anything. He always continued
to praise God”, a woman in her fifties compared practices of the Sikhs with those of
the Guru. Frequently my respondents quoted a popular verse in Bachitra Natak attributed
to the tenth Guru to prove that all the Sikh Gurus ‒ from Nanak to Gobind Singh
‒ considered themselves merely as servants of God and condemned any instance of
deification:
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008