32nd Pauree
Sikh Art by Sewa Singh – SikhPhotos.com
Excerpted from the book Guru Nanak’s Call of the Soul: Japji Sahib:
Guru Nanak’s devotion to the One is absolute, and his experience of the total love of the Divine is clear. He tells us that if he had 2 million tongues, each would recite the Name hundreds of thousands of times. What a wonderful vision those words create! Seeing those millions of tongues in your mind’s eye expands your consciousness to Guru Nanak’s meaning. He teaches us that the Naam is the way to the heart of God. Naam experienced with a loving heart can be chanted aloud, whispered with the breath, reflected on in the mind, or held as a swelling of the heart. Reciting the Naam can be a name of God, a holy mantra, or a wordless expansion of human consciousness experiencing the divine bliss of union.
In Guru Nanak’s time, being a holy man had a lot of benefits. People gave you gold, jewelry, gifts, food, and a tremendous amount of status. These so-called holy men competed to outdo each other with acts of magic and verbose pontificating in an effort to demonstrate how knowledgeable they were and how much power they had. It was common practice to perform austerities and prayers in the open as a spectacle, so that people could appreciate how holy someone was. As they do today, in Guru Nanak’s time people mistook siddhis, yogic occult powers, for spirituality.
In the last line of this pauree, Guru tells us that union with God only occurs when He grants it; that it is an act of Gurkirpa, the Grace of the Guru. Guru Nanak teaches us that reciting the Naam with devotion and deep love, step by step and one day after the other, is how that Grace is obtained. The boasting of arrogant pretend-saints are false and a sham. Spirituality is the quiet and sincere devotion and longing that brings God to us, not the overt demonstrations of false power and false knowledge. When that Grace is bestowed, there is no need to talk about it or make a show of it.
32nd Pauree
Ik doo jeebhaao lakh ho-eh lakh hoveh lakh vees.
Lakh Lakh gayrraa aakhee-a-eh aykaa naam jagdeesh.
Ayt raa-eh pat paavarree-aa charree-ai ho-ei ikees.
Sunn galaa aakaash kee keettaa aa-ee rees.
Naanak nadaree paa-ee-ai koorree koorrai thees. II 32 II
If I had 100,000 tongues,
and these were then multiplied twenty times more,
with each tongue.
I would repeat,
hundreds of thousands of times,
the Name of the One,
the Lord of the Universe.
Along this path to our Husband Lord,
we climb the steps of the ladder,
and come to merge with Him.
Hearing of the etheric realms,
even worms long to come back home.
O Nanak, by His Grace He is obtained.
False are the boastings of the false.
Musical Recitation
Enjoy these beautiful musical recitations of the 32nd Pauree of Japji Sahib, courtesy of the SikhNet Gurbani Media Center:
Ik Doo Jeebhau – Wahe Guru Kaur (WHA!)
Ik Dooje Bhao – Bhai Gurpreet Singh (Shimla)
Need to practice your pronunciation of Japji Sahib?
One of the best ways to learn how to recite Japji is to listen to and read along with someone else reciting it.
To help with that, we have a FREE Japji for the Aquarian Age App for IOS and Android. Once you download it, you can use it to recite the complete Japji Sahib in your daily practice, or you can choose the “Repeat Paurees” feature and follow along with the recitation of each section of Japji Sahib.
A special 40 week practice of reciting Japji Sahib is to recite one section 11x a day for one week and then do the same for the next section and so on, until over 40 weeks, you’ve completed a practice of reciting each of the 40 sections of Japji Sahib 11x a day for a week.
Here are instructions for downloading the Japji for the Aquarian Age App
In Guru Nanak’s Call of the Soul: Japji Sahib, by Gurutej Singh Khalsa with Shanti Kaur Khalsa, Based on the teachings of Siri Singh Sahib Yogi Bhajan:
In Japji Sahib, Guru Nanak touches the deepest essence of individual consciousness, elevating one to the universal consciousness. Japji is made up of 40 remarkable segments where Guru Nanak not only explains the mysteries of the cosmos, but also gives us spiritual instruction that we can follow to achieve the same experience of higher consciousness that Guru Nanak embodied. In this book the Mul Mantra and each of the 38 paurees of Japji, plus the Slok, are explained from a spiritual as well as historical perspective, enhanced by the teachings of Siri Singh Sahib Yogi Bhajan. It is our sincere prayer that this book will open up to you the miraculous wonder of Japji Sahib.
194 pages including an in-depth exploration of the 40 sections of Japji Sahib, 48 full color illustrations, 15 meditations that enhance the effects of the paurees, pronunciation guide and glossary and a foreword by Bhai Sahiba, Bibiji Inderjit Kaur Khalsa, PhD. Includes beautiful full-color paintings by Sewa Singh and Sewa Kaur.
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