Vahiguru ji ka Khalsa, Vahiguru ji ki Fatih!

We live in challenging times, with many stressed and trying to make sense of their lives. The natural yearning is wanting comfort. However, in this yearning for comfort, we often ignore Truth, for it is unsettling, and favor false comfort.

What is false comfort? Anything we reach for out of habit, familiarity, impulse, or craving that does not satisfy us.

Guru Teghbahadar Sahib, in the first composition of Rag Jaijavanti, guides us, remember the Beautiful, remember the Beautiful, only this is of use in your deeds. Renounce the company of material attachment, and attach yourself to the sanctuary of IkOankar. Consider the comforts of the world to be false. The entire creation is mithya, false, temporary.

We pause.
We reflect.

Remembrance of the Beautiful is what we ought to do. There are so many things that we call material attachment or Maya — our relationships with friends and family, power, and wealth, which are temporary. However, there is only one thing worth our efforts, worth being driven by, worth attaching ourselves to: the Remembrance of the Beautiful.

How do we rise above material attachment?

The Guru guides.

When we enter the sanctuary of the Beautiful One, the divine nature of the Beautiful One helps us rise above our all-entangling attachments.

The Guru urges us to consider the entire world to be temporary. It is not that the world is not real; it is just not absolutely Real. It is not that life on earth is false; therefore, we ought not to participate. Instead, when we root ourselves only in the temporary, when we fool ourselves into clinging to things we think are “ours,” what we are doing is straying further and further away from the Beautiful One, the Eternal. Binding ourselves with the temporary and distancing ourselves from the Eternal makes the world temporary. And in this temporary world, we seek false comfort.

The only thing that is Real, Eternal, and Beautiful is the Beautiful One, so why not remember That One, the source of true comfort?

May we yearn for that eternal source of true comfort.
May the Wisdom-Guru guide us!