Sikhism: The Way of the Word

Painting of Guru Nanak in the Himalayas by Ravi Bhangu, email address RaviBhangu@hotmail.com, website ReikiHealing.

The Sikh religion was founded over 500 years ago by Guru Nanak, an independent free spirit and poet. The Sikhs have a unique way of relating with God: They use the Word as their connection with Higher Power.

There are currently about 25 million Sikhs worldwide, the majority of them residing in India, but also a large number in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

The following is an interview conducted on Ek On Kaar Kaur, the communications director for Sikhnet, an online web community for Sikhs under the auspices of Yogi Bhajan, the great guru who brought Sikhism to the West.

Wynn: Could you begin please by talking about the beginnings of the Sikh religion?

Ek: It began with Guru Nanak, in Northern India of the 1400s.

Guru Nanak was actually a modern kind of guy. He was born in a Hindu family but was not really at peace with the way that different people from different religious traditions would fight and argue, so he traveled all over and studied with different people. He wanted to learn who God really was from his direct experience and from the varied experiences of others who had discovered God.

He talked to yogis and the other learned people of his time, and came to the realization that there is an aspect of God that guides us that isn't really a person at all, but is just the power of the Word to awaken the higher consciousness.

So Guru Nanak took as his teacher "the Word" — the words of learned people and the words of people of spiritual understanding. He didn't limit himself to any one path, or any one school, or any one person. He was a man who went through very human experiences to take his lessons, and came to awakening and a state of union with God through a natural process. In this state of divine union, he wrote a 40-verse poem called Japji, and this poem became his first teaching.

And so, for perhaps the first time in history, we have the words of a person who achieved divine union, relating what he himself experienced at that exact moment.

Guru Nanak began to travel, and he taught a very simple message of universality and of brotherhood and sisterhood of all people.

He was against the caste system. He was against inequality of the sexes, and he was in favor of the human spirit as the most important connection between people. He wanted to break down the walls between the Hindus and the Muslims. He said we're all sons and daughters of the one Divine Spirit, and if we would just sit and meditate together, we would get the experience of that.

The spiritual practice was centered on living a clean lifestyle and singing divine songs to awaken oneself to higher consciousness. He used in his songs the words of people who had been in union with the Divine as the teacher and guide. These words awaken our own higher selves when we sing them.

Guru Nanak started this tradition, traveling by foot to local villages with his Hindu and Muslim companions and singing to people. People started following his example, and they became known as Sikhs, or "seekers of truth."

One of his students — Angad — had achieved the experience of union through the study of the Word, and at that point Guru Nanak handed the Guru-ship over to Guru Angad. This tradition continued for a couple of hundred years, where one adept would meditate on the Word and achieve union with the Divine and then become the next Guru.

The fifth Guru was one of the most prolific writers for the Sikhs. Guru Argend put together what the Sikhs call the Adi Granth, which is a compilation of the writings of the first five Gurus, plus the incorporated writings from other saints and mystics who were in India at this time, from every spiritual school. The idea was that no matter what religion someone identified themselves with, when they were in a state of union with the Divine, everyone spoke the same truth.

The Adi Granth is a tribute to that universal spirit of truth. The important thing is :"Are you speaking the vibration of truth?"

Guru Arjun determined which poetry was in that state of vibration. The 400th anniversary of the Adi Granth is coming up next year, 2004.

Wynn: When you talk about union with the Divine, what does that mean exactly?

Ek: It means that when our human awareness becomes completely aware of the God within us and surrenders to that, and we no longer live in a state of separateness from the creation or the Creator, we understand ourselves perfectly in relation to the creation and the creator. So it's not that we are God. It's the extent to which a human being can live in the will of God and the love of God and the awareness of God.

There are lots of analogies we can use to describe this. It's like the drop of water merging into the great ocean. In that merging, we lose our feeling of separateness from the vast ocean.

By the time of Guru Arjun, the Sikhs had become a strong enough community that they started to threaten some of the political kingdoms in Northern India. Guru Arjun was taken by one of the kings in the area and was tortured to death on a hotplate for about five days. The beauty of the story is that Guru Arjun smiled the entire time. And even though he was a Guru and he had this experience of union with the Divine, he didn't use any kind of occult powers to get out of it.

A Muslim Saint came up to him and said, With one move of your hand you could end this whole thing. Why are you sitting here, letting yourself be tortured?

He said, You know I have to do this so my Sikhs understand how to go through it, it's the will of God that I do it. And since I'm surrendered to the will of God, therefore I'm happy in this moment.

And then he showed the Saint a vision of Guru Argen on the hotplate. But it was also Guru Argen stoking the fire of the hotplate, and it was also Guru Argen pouring the sand on himself. This vision demonstrated that as Guru Argen sat on that hotplate he simultaneously had the understanding of the divine play, that God is in everyone and God moves through everything. And in that understanding, there was no suffering for the torture that he went through.

His son, Guru Hargobind, became the next Guru, and as a result of the persecution of his father, he began the tradition that, as Sikhs, we have sovereignty over ourselves spiritually, but we also have a right to be sovereign on the Earth and not have anyone question our identity or attack us.

The Sikhs had to develop a warrior spirit in order to survive the attacks that were going to be coming at them for the next couple of hundred years. And to some extent that is still going on even today.

Wynn: Is that why Sikhs carry swords?

Ek: Yes. But that didn't start with Guru Hargobind. I'll get to that.

But, yes, that warrior spirit developed. And the whole idea was never to fight out of anger or to fight out of hatred, but always to be willing to defend yourself. And always be willing to stand up for those who are weak, and defend them from people who are attacking them. So the Sikhs are unique in that they have gone to war not only in their own behalf, but in order to defend the right of other religions to practice freely. For example, the Sikhs have historically defended the Hindus.

It's interesting, in that, in some ways, the political system in the United States was founded on equality and freedom of religion and equality. If it had been a spiritual movement instead of a political movement, it would have been very much akin to Sikhism. The origins of America, with its discovery by Columbus, and the beginnings of the Sikh religion happened during the same period.

So Guru Hargobind began the warrior spirit for the Sikhs. But it was the tenth Guru, and Guru Gobind Singh, who completed it.

There were two very important things that Guru Gobin Singh did when he was Guru. The first was that he created the order of the Khalsa. One day, a harvest festival in India where all the Sikhs were gathered to listen to him talk, he called for a head. He said "I want someone to give me a head." And people said, What's the Guru up to? This is sort of crazy. But one person, Bhai Daya Singh, stood up and said, "My head belongs to you."

I won't go through the whole story, but at the end of it there were five people who basically stood up and said, "I'm willing to die for you because I love you so much."

And he said, OK, you guys with that love and that devotion are the pure ones, you are the ones who hold the spirit of truth within your own hearts. And he gave these five what we may call a Baptism ceremony. Again, I won't go into the whole story here, but anyone can go to Sikhnet.com to find out about the Amrit Ceremony and the Khalsa and all that. The bottom line was that after Guru Golbin Singh baptized these five people as Khalsa, people who had a true pure spirit within them, he then bowed to them and said, OK, now you baptize me.

He told these Sikhs that wherever five of them were working together in group consciousness, the power of truth also would be present, "and even I am subject to that." So the first thing he did was to give the Sikhs a system of wisdom which is five Sikhs — five-Khalsa group consciousness — whereby the Divine can lead people through the collective consciousness.

The second thing he did was to declare himself the last human teacher for the Sikhs. He took the Adi Granth that was compiled by Guru Argen, and he added the writing of his father, Guru Teg Bahadur, and he said, This is now the Guru for the Sikhs. Whenever you want to learn, achieve higher consciousness, whenever you want to see me, you come to this living Guru. It is just words on a piece of paper to other people, but to the Sikhs it is the absolute living Guru, because all of the words of wisdom are embodied there, and in meditating on those sounds, they becomes the teacher that guides us to our awakening.

When Guru Golbin Singh died, what was left behind was this legacy to guide people to their own spritual awakening.

Wynn: Is it true that all Sikhs have adopted the last name "Khalsa"?

Ek: Only the western Sikhs adopted Khalsa as a last name. When Guru Golbind Singh gave the Amrit ceremony where he created the Khalsa, he told men to take the last name Singh, which means lion, and he told women to take the last name Kaar, which means princess.

When we became a Western movement under the guidance of Yogi Bhajan, we decided to add the name Khalsa to our last name, which was indicative of where we wanted to end up: Khalsa consciousness. Also, it was kind of a tribal move, because we had come from many different backgrounds. All of us having the name Khalsa gave us a feeling of family.

Wynn: Is there a specific initiation for someone to become a Sikh, or is this something people just have to decide for themselves?

Ek: The beautiful thing about becoming a Sikh is that there is no specific procedure. In fact, all good Waras, where Sikhs study and meditate, have four doors, one facing each of the directions. It's a sign that coming and listening to these teachings is available to all people, no matter what their religion, caste, race, or culture. These are teachings for the entire world.

Wynn: So in other words, someone could be a Christian and still be a Sikh?

Ek: Somebody could be a Christian and still meditate on the words of the Guru and have benefit from them. Becoming a Sikh is taking a custodian role. They dedicate themselves to the Guru and vow that these teachings will make it to the next generation. We're custodians of this Guru, but we don't own it.

Wynn: So, again, the Guru is the Word? Not like the traditional idea of the guru, where you have an exalted teacher?

Ek: It's actually the same, but the Word is the teacher, not the human.

Wynn: Are these words kept sacred and secret?

Ek: They are sacred, but they are not secret. They are available to anyone.

Wynn: So how does one find out what words to meditate on?

Ek: The collected writings from Guru Argend and Guru Golbind Singh became the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, also called the Adi Granth. There are 1430 pages in the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, and you can open to any page and begin to meditate. That is the Guru for the Sikhs. We've actually got an online version of this on Sikhnet.com that anyone can refer to.

Wynn: Does the Guru contain stories as well as words.

Ek: It is primarily songs written by people who were in states of union with the Divine when they wrote them. It is an amazing teacher because it really talks about so many different things. There's so much wisdom, how to address evil, and so on.

Wynn: How do Sikhs relate to the ideas of good and evil?

Ek: Nothing is good or bad unto itself. It's our thoughts that make it so. It's our own judgments that, in the play of God, are all part of His plan and purpose. So as Sikhs we grow into the consciousness of accepting everything as His will and feeling His hand behind everything. In that way, we transcend the polarity of good and evil.

Wynn: What is right action for a human being? Or does it matter?

Ek: It does matter. God lives within every human being, and we have the opportunity to experience that within ourselves. When we act from that experience, we access the maximum joy of being human. The idea is that God commands us, and we surrender and obey that command. It's a genuine internal experience, not an external one that's inflicted on us.

Wynn: Where did we begin and where are we going?

Ek: We don't know where we began, and God's play is limitless. Guru Nanak teaches not to try to mentally understand the Divine. Rather, as humans we can have an experience of God in our hearts that fills us up and leaves us experiencing ourselves as a drop in that vast ocean.

Wynn: Can other religions embody truth as well as Sikhism.

Ek: Guru Nanak teaches that the truth of God is in every single path. He wrote, "All temples, all shrines are yours. God can be found through devotion, and anyone who's genuinely devoted in their heart to their path by the will of God will understand God."

Wynn: Is there some idea that corresponds to the principle of "doing unto others as you would wish others to do unto you?"

Ek: Yes. It says that if you want to see God, do not break anyone's heart, because within the heart of another person is the jewel of God which lives there.

Wynn: Yogi Bhajan is the most important person to introduce Sikhism to this county, and I understand that most new Sikhs have become so through these teachings. Did Yogi Bhajan come to the West on his own steam, or did his teacher tell him to come here, or...?

Ek: When Yogi Bhajan was a young man, his grandfather wanted him to study Kundalini Yoga, and so he became a Kundalini Yoga master at the age of fourteen.

When he was eighteen and the partition happened between India and Pakistan, the Punjab was affected, and Yogi Bhajan had to lead his people out of Pakistan into India.

He worked and lived in India until he was in his 30s, then went into the military and was stationed at Amrit Sar. There, he performed the sacred service of washing the floors of the Golden Temple every morning, and he would meditate as he was doing this.

One day when he was washing the floors he had a vision of all the young people in the West who were longing to open themselves up to the experience of higher consciousness. And he saw that although they had this longing to know God, they had no tools with which to do it. In the vision, the Guru told him to go teach them Kundalini Yoga.

So the idea of starting a Sikh western organization wasn't even in the picture at that time. Originally, all Yogi Bhajan knew was that he was going to teach yoga to these Western kids and help them.

When he came to the West and started teaching yoga for a couple of years, his students became fascinated with the turban and the beard and the Sikh tradition, and started to question him. Then one of his long-haired students got taken into police custody, and the police were going to cut his hair. So the student said, "You can't cut my hair because I'm a Sikh."

The judge called up Yogi Bhajan and asked if it were true that this guy was a Sikh. Yogi Bhajan said yes, and the judge said he needed him to come to the court right now with a signed document confirming this.

So a bunch of students put turbans on their heads and created some stationary that said "Sikh Dharma of the Western Hemisphere," and they went down to the courthouse and said, This guy's a Sikh, so you can't cut his hair.

And that's how Sikh movement of Yogi Bhajan got started in the West.