The total knowledge of God and ecstasy is contained in this pauree. It is an antidote to depression. It will lift you from the deepest depression, insecurity, nightmares, and loss, and bring contentment.

~ excerpted from the Psyche of the Golden Shield as compiled by BibiJi Inderjit Kaur Khalsa

The following is excerpted from the book Guru Nanak’s Call of the Soul: Japji Sahib:

In this opening pauree of Japji Sahib, Guru Nanak makes a very clear distinction between thinking, or the intellectual process of spiritual awareness, and the actual experience of it. The full potential of Japji Sahib lies in the reciting aloud of these sounds and the experience that creates within, not in the intellectual analysis of the meanings of the words. Guru Nanak tells us that by thinking and thinking, we get nowhere. It is not going to do us any good.

Thinking is an intellectual mode, and the conception of the One is not achieved through the intellect; it is experienced through the entire sensory being.

In the words of Siri Singh Sahib, Yogi Bhajan, “Your brain releases one thousand thoughts per wink of the eye. This is called intellect, intellect releases thought whether you like it or not. So long as you are alive, you will breathe and intellect will release thoughts. These two faculties are human faculties. So when you think, what are you thinking for? What happens is those thoughts become feelings, some of those thoughts, but not all… pass away. Some become feelings, some become emotions, some become desires and then you fulfill a desire and then there is another desire, then another desire, another fulfillment, another fulfillment. The idiot wastes his time because he is caught by the process of the intellect and not by the virtue of the intelligence. Intelligence sits still and the world shall come to you. Sochai, soch na hova-ee, jay sochee lakh vaar” (January 16, 1990).

We can become very learned from our intellect, gain great depths from our meditative practice, and amass a great amount of worldly things, but Guru Nanak reminds us that not even one of these things will go with us with when we die. So what should we do, asks Nanak? He tells us to abandon our ego, and obey the Hukam, the natural order of the universe, the Will of God.

The Siri Singh Sahib elaborates on this idea: “How we can become the living truth? Such a living truth, how can we become the living truth? Kiv sachiaaraa hoee-ai. Kiv koorai tuttai paal. How can the wall of this falsehood break? How we can see through it, how? Hukam rajaayee chalnaa naanak likhiaa naal . . . ‘I am happy and pleased God in Thy Will, it is either this way or that way.’ If you want me to be a great yogi I am a great yogi. If you want me to be a nobody, I am a nobody. But I belong to thee… Bad and good I belong to you Lord, I belong to You” (October 6, 2000).

In the last line of the first pauree Guru Nanak tells us a cosmic Truth for the first of many times in the Japji Sahib; that the path to achieve the experience of consciousness is to understand that your destiny is the Will of the Divine.