What Is Home?

There is a level of peace that we are all starving for. We wander through our lives trying strategies to seek out something we absolutely must have, what we absolutely need to survive, and not knowing how to get it. The smallest taste of it reminds us that we actually do know this feeling intimately well. It isn’t distant, it is known to us, like returning to your mom’s arms. It fulfills a need that we waited lifetimes to get, and nothing else can fulfill so we remain hungry. Gurbani tells us “Bin Nave Jag Kamla Fire” because we do wander, as if we have lost our minds without Naam. Guru Ji teaches us that our whole life purpose is in reaching that state permanently, to merge into it, return to it, realize it. The mind may not realize it right now, but this is what it so desperately is searching for, a feeling of home that no other home can fulfill. I sometimes find myself saying “I wish I was home” even when I am home...there is another home that I seek. 

My thirst for home has grown exponentially stronger over time. Just like we have a burning desire in our hearts for someone we love, thus is the intensity of the yearning to be fully at peace. Our mool is our home, Waheguru, and we are created out of this universal energy. In this life, in our mother’s uterus, we were fully connected. We were immersed in God and learned how to play this game of life. We were tested, and taught how to return again to our mool. We were taught that it would be there, just hard for us to recognize because of the game of maya, because of our doubt. We learned how to return home again in this lifetime. Yet when we aren’t successful, we return again to play this game, and again and again: “The Gurmukhs worship the Lord, and find His celestial home. Without meeting the Guru, they die, and come and go in reincarnation (Rahao).” We all wander homesick daily, only some of us don’t know it yet. 

My homesickness is not for a physical place. Things of comfort are not my home, blankets and beautiful palaces could not replace this emptiness and desperation for home. There is a heartfelt shabad on this topic that says, “If I had a palace made of pearls, inlaid with jewels, scented with musk, saffron and sandalwood, a sheer delight to behold- seeing this I might go astray and forget You, and Your Name would not enter into my mind” and in the Rahao line of this shabad we are reminded that without our Guru there is no place at all. I used to think homesickness was for people, that maybe my home would be a person. I thought maybe calling someone mine will give me a home- wherever he was, I would be home. This is a continuation of thinking that maybe sangat is home… but how can people be our homes if they leave? If we place ourselves in our home and they have disappeared, it will never exist again. That familiar feeling would be snatched forever, how is it so that it could be so temporary? The home we find within other people and the reason why Sangat is a form of our Guru, is because Waheguru is encompassing in all. In order to find that home that is the “one light in two bodies” it is necessary for us to not just replace people into a role of home as a physical or mental home, a temporary comfort, but to remove all doubt and barriers of maya to really realize God. Furthermore, some people in the sangat are already home and help us find our home, and others walk with us while we find our home. I guess home can be seen and found in other people because this is the sargun form of God, but we must be careful not to attach ourselves to the painting instead of the Creator.  

Marble

Although I am having a difficult time finding an appropriate word in English I think rest will suffice. Going home offers some sort of deep state of rest. This is the state in which Guru Arjan Dev Ji and many other Sikhs have been able to endure physical torture but still found God’s will to be sweet. For most of us living go-go-go lives, we don’t really know rest. We vacation and rest our bodies and stop working, but still we do not actually rest. We feel unrefreshed and unrejuvenated. We do it out of necessity sometimes, a short-term sacrifice for long term dream of being able to give back to society and do some amazing sewa for the Sikh kaum. I’ve done it all- skipped meals, gotten short sleeps, and cut out talking to anyone because I had to get through. I know what it feels like to do what you gotta do. I was overwhelmed and didn’t know another way. While we run constantly, it's like running on a hamster wheel. We aren’t moving our actual life journey that was written for us. In the background, our minds are starving for home. Being immersed in Naam is an actual deep sleep-like state, where your body relaxes- jaw loosens, shoulders drop, lungs expand, and the nervous system tunes into rest and digest (parasympathetics). While people do simran and enter into Sunn, they learn to disconnect from the body and enter a peaceful state of mind that is impossible to describe. Through small periods of this state, the mind learns how to go home permanently.

 

“O Sheikh, you wander in the four directions, blown by the four winds; bring your mind back to the home of the One Lord.”