An address in honor of the birthday of the 10th Guru by Siri Singh Sahib Bhai Sahib Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogiji

The dream which Guru Gobind Singh had, to establish a brotherhood has many dimensions.

My personal feeling is that God had to prepare for a long time to saturate and soak into him the human values, to take a form such as Guru Gobind Singh. If it is true that a man is created in the image of God, then let us go deeply into the facet of the man. If it is true, then man represents God and this shall never be denied. The Theist believes in it and the Athiest denies it. But the fundamental reality remains, that whether he denies or accepts does not mean that it is not a reality. Reality is that man propagates, whether he propagates the existence of God or the denial of the existence of God. Still the pivot of the ideology of communication is man. And man has been created in the image of God – there is nothing wrong in admitting it.

But, when we talk of Guru Gobind Singh on this day, which is his birthday, we can think how much God might have prepared Himself to appear on earth in the form of such a man! If it is not true that it took a great preparation to create a man like Guru Gobind Singh, then all human beings should have had a minimum standard like Guru Gobind Singh. Our minimum standard of human behavior, attachment and sacrifice, should be that of Gobind Singh, the Guru. But it is not, which shows that God must have prepared His own image for a long time to manifest a leader for humanity.

Through this time of over 300 years, we can sit back and we have the absolute right to see who was this Gobind Rai who became Guru Gobind Singh. Your Guru was Gobind Rai. When Guru Gobind Singh was given the Guruship, he was known as Gobind Rai. Guru Gobind Rai is one of the ten masters who became a disciple of the Guru Gobind Singh to be. And it was thus that he became Guru Gobind Singh. He acted like a god through the self-creativity, which you will not find in the history of any other prophet. This nine-year old Gobind Rai, the Tenth Guru of the Sikhs, became the Guru Gobind Singh of the Khalsa on Baisakhi Day (in 1699), after himself being initiated by the Five Beloved Ones. 

It was the extreme super-creativity of the self into the Self and the sharing of the self with the entire congregation, which has never happened before. There is not a single example in the religious history of the world, where a man who is enthroned, loved, worshipped and revered as a Guru, comes down on his knees and asks to be baptized. Then he smartly takes up the same position as before and directs his men. If you research through the known and written entire human history, which has a record of over 20,000 years, you will be surprised to see that not a single incident can match this.

The finite consciousness of this man was beyond infinity. He was a poet and a philosopher. To call him a warrior is a simple expression of our ignorance. He was a defender, a defender of the innocent and the weak. His criteria of life can be observed through his action, for he never waged a war for territory, and in spite of the fact that he won wars, he never claimed the territory. This shows totally and completely the intention to defend. One can go to war as a defender, but if one wins and claims the land, then one is a “victor.”