INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

with the divine words through continuous meditation on God. It is a progressively
unfolding realization of one’s own embodiment of the divine words, which is dependent
on the grace of God and a spiritual discipline involving meditative and ritual
techniques to devotionally engage in the Guru and the Guru’s teaching. From this
understanding, the spiritual path of a gurmukh concerns embodied practices which
manifest and make the human inner self permeated with words of ontologically divine
origin.
Many of my interlocutors also reported stories of how the bones of spiritually
gifted people were imprinted with the Ik omkar sign, the opening syllable of Guru
Granth Sahib, after their death. A middle-aged Sikh woman recalled the following
story:
My great grandfather’s brother was a very religious man. He was doing
puja-path [worship-reading] all the time. When he died and they were
picking up his bones they found Ik Omkar written on his forehead in
three places. When they were cleaning them [the bones] they were getting
darker. It looked like someone had carved it on his forehead.
To have the first character of the Sikh scripture inscribed on the forehead is the ultimate
evidence of a gurmukh who has attained spiritual liberation. Other informants
told similar stories of how people longed to get an auspicious sight (darshan) of the
engraved bones of the liberated. These people are believed to have perfected and
purified their inner self with gurbani to such an extent that even the remains they
leave behind will be marked with Guru Nanak’s formula of the one and formless
God. They had textualized themselves to become unwritten records and their bones
indicated the mergence with God.
DEVOTION CONTINUED
Surmounting life and death for a final liberation, however, is not necessarily visualized
as an attainable goal by local people, nor is it considered to be the ultimate strive
of their devotion. When my interlocutors at Varanasi where asked to explain their
personal ideas and desires behind religious activities, only a few imagined an end to
the cycle of rebirths when the human soul unites with God. On the contrary, most
found this interpretation of mukti remote and unattainable in the present dark and
degenerating age of kaliyug. Only those who are exceptionally spiritually gifted and
had given up all desires and attachments to the world can be judged righteous in the
divine court and merge with God. A few saw transmigration as an everlasting process
without end. A Sikh man in his twenties said: “If God wants you he can call you.
But people never get mukti. There is a cycle of 84 lakhs of life-forms. We are just running
in that. We never get rid of it.”
If Sikhs do not perceive their religious actions as strives to dissolve worldly
bondages and merge with a divine power, then which are the ultimate goals they
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008