Meditation: Call of the Divine
Gajindar Singh*
* 2983, Sector 61, Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar. 160 062. (Punjab).
Guru Granth Sahib is replete with exhortation to Godliness, Truthful conduct and life-long practice of moral conduct. The stress is on good clean life, detached from erring acts but not essentially from the worldly pursuits. The difference between Guru Nanak’s path and other established religions is that others do not stress so much on giving priority to extrusion of faults. They rather hasten to initiate the individual presuming that, in due time, the behaviour of the man would automatically cleanse itself of moral weaknesses. This has been exploited by certain religious orders to form a mass base of the half-inclined and semi-initiated followers who have created havoc with the pristine value-based systems without their seriously accepting the concerned disciplines.
Even though the matter has been dealt with in great detail in the
Guru Granth Sahib, there is an on-going serious debate in the
Sikh community about the methodology of meditation.
It is held by some scholars that in spite of stress on the practice of
naam simran, they do not find clarity on the rules and methods of meditation in the
Guru Granth (or in other standard works of
Sikh savants) specifying the science and procedure of
Naam simran in practice. They hold that the people, who are immersed into long hours of recitation of
guru-bani feel the vacuum, andgo in search of a methodology of meditation since the mere reading of the
Gur-Vak is not the desired purpose. It has led many Sikhs to approach the ill-informed
bhais,
granthis and the self-acclaimed
Babas to become their keen followers, who complement the seekers’ travails with the Yogic and
Nath theories, firmly discarded by the
Sikh Gurus.
Kou sast ibcrt muiK igAana . pUja itlku tIrT iesnana . invlI krm Aasn cxurasIh ien mih sa:it n Aav{ jIxu .
[SGGS: 98] They utter the six philosophic schools orally, Worship, applying marks, visit holy spots to bathe, The eighty four asanas and the yogic practices,