Facing your own death - Kaal, Kudrat, and the recognition of God

A discourse of Giani Sant Singh Ji Maskeen

An elderly Sikh man living in England, once a police inspector in Kenya, spends his last years walking from town to town so that he need never miss a satsang. He does something that startles even his closest companions: he asks that his funeral Langar and Akhand Path be arranged and paid for in advance, while he is still very much alive and in good health — and then, on the very journey that follows, dies exactly as he foresaw. Giani Sant Singh Ji Maskeen, recounting this two years after it happened, offers the story not as a curiosity but as a door into one of the deepest teachings of Sikh philosophy: that no one can truly recognise the Infinite, the Beant, until they have first looked honestly at their own end.

This discourse moves between two subjects that Giani Ji shows to be one and the same question. The first is death itself — how some souls sense its approach long before it arrives, and why so many people spend their final years refusing to look at it at all. The second is the age of religion — how recent every temple, every scripture, and every prophet actually is, set against Kudrat, the created universe, which has no beginning that history can date. Guru Nanak Dev Ji's own answer, as Giani Ji unfolds it, is that the Creator was never known through buildings or books alone, but through the wordless signs written into creation itself — and that the same honesty about death which every soul must eventually face is what finally opens the eye able to see this.

A devotee who prepared for his own end#

Giani Ji recalls a Sardar Kartar Singh, who had served as a police inspector somewhere in Kenya before settling into old age in England. Once Giani Ji began touring England for religious programmes, Kartar Singh travelled with him constantly, sometimes accompanied by one or two other jathas. He had, in effect, made satsang his family. His own children and his wider household had drifted far from him, since they had never entered the fold of faith, and he had told Giani Ji plainly: his true companions were only those walking the path of Dharam — the path of righteous living — because his own home had given him no taste of the Divine, and so he had gone looking for it outside.

One day this elderly, solitary man made an unusual request. He asked Giani Ji that when he passed away, all his satsangi companions be served a separate Langar in his memory. Giani Ji, taken aback, asked how a man of his age and modest means would ever arrange such a thing. Kartar Singh answered that he already had it settled: a Sikh who ran a hotel would prepare it for him, purely and properly, and he himself would personally oversee the seva. He then asked that an Akhand Path be read and its Bhog performed as well. When Giani Ji asked in connection with what occasion this Bhog should be held, Kartar Singh replied, without hesitation, that it was for his own death — because he could see it coming. His children, he said, were already estranged from him and had no part in this path he walked, so it fell to him to arrange his own final rites, and he asked that the Ardas at both the Langar and the Bhog be worded accordingly.

Giani Anoop Singh, who was present, remarked afterwards that the old man seemed to have lost his senses — how could anyone serve a memorial Langar and offer a Bhog's Ardas for someone who was standing right there, alive and well? Yet because Kartar Singh had walked with Giani Ji for so many years, the whole Sikh community in England had come to know him. Wherever a religious satsang was held, however far, he made certain to reach it — Glasgow, five hundred miles away, or a Kavi Darbar three hundred miles distant, it made no difference.

It was two years before this telling, Giani Ji recalls, that everything Kartar Singh had arranged came to pass exactly as he had described: the Path was read, its Bhog held at the gurdwara, the memorial Langar served separately to the sangat, and the Ardas offered in the words he himself had specified. From there, the group travelled on together to Wolverhampton, where Giani Ji was to deliver three days of katha at a Sant's dera, and Kartar Singh went along with them. The very next morning, rising early for Amrit Vela, the sangat prepared to walk over to the Darbar Sahib hall — but Kartar Singh told Giani Ji he would come along a little later, since he still had an Ardas of his own to complete, and preferred to stay behind at the place where they were lodging. Giani Ji offered to wait for him, but the old man insisted they go on ahead. When the group returned from that morning's programme, they found that he had already breathed his last, exactly where he had stayed behind. The police were called, as is required by English law, and it was they who eventually located his estranged sons and daughters, living in another corner of England with whom he had had no contact for years. When the news reached them, the wider sangat that had known and loved him gathered around his body — Giani Ji recalls his own astonishment at how precisely, and how peacefully, everything had unfolded exactly as he had foreseen it, all within that same journey, two years before this telling.

Twelve hours before the earthquake#

Reflecting on Kartar Singh's foresight, Giani Ji turns to a wider pattern he has observed in nature. It is said that some twelve hours before an earthquake strikes, sparrows already sense it and begin crying out in alarm. In Japan, one particular species of bird is known for this so reliably that when it calls in its distinctive way, people there understand at once that a tsunami or great upheaval is coming. In parts of India, it is said that wherever cobras are present underground, their movement can be sensed through subtle signs on the surface, much as skilled water-diviners can tell, simply by walking the land, where sweet water lies beneath and where the water will be bitter. Across the coal-mining regions of central India, miners have long spoken of sensing tremors and disturbances deep underground before any visible sign appears — scientists, Giani Ji notes, are still researching exactly how this sensitivity works.

If creatures and certain gifted people can sense a physical disaster twelve, or even ten or fifteen, days beforehand, Giani Ji suggests that a similarly sensitive human being can, in the same way, sense the approach of their own death. For some, this awareness comes as much as six months in advance; for others, only a month before. Even someone of duller or more troubled understanding, Giani Ji observes, is very often granted at least one day's warning — an unmistakable restlessness, an anguish unlike anything they have felt before, arising with no apparent cause. It seemed clear to Giani Ji, looking back, that this was exactly what had happened with the old man in Wolverhampton: something in him had known, and had quietly made its peace, months before the rest of the world caught up.

The old man who forgot he was dying#

Against this backdrop, Giani Ji turns his attention to how differently most people behave. He speaks of watching elderly men of eighty and eighty-five years celebrating their birthdays with real festivity, and admits that the sight leaves him, in his own words, hanging his head in something close to shame. A man who has already lived eighty or more years, he says, ought by now to have looked plainly at his own end; instead, he marks the day he was born as though youth itself were still ahead of him. Giani Ji does not soften the point — such a person, he says, must have a heart and mind of stone, entirely untouched by the plain fact standing before him.

This refusal to look at death, Giani Ji explains, runs directly against the counsel of the Gurus, who taught that the spiritual path opens only once a person is willing to accept their own mortality first.

ਪਹਿਲਾ ਮਰਣੁ ਕਬੂਲਿ ਜੀਵਣ ਕੀ ਛਡਿ ਆਸ ॥ ਹੋਹੁ ਸਭਨਾ ਕੀ ਰੇਣੁਕਾ ਤਉ ਆਉ ਹਮਾਰੈ ਪਾਸਿ ॥

Pahilā maraṇ kabūl jīvaṇ kī chhaḍ ās. Hohu sabhnā kī reṇukā tau āu hamārai pāsi.

First accept death, and give up your hope of life. Become the dust of everyone's feet — only then may you come near Me.

— Guru Arjan Dev Ji, Salok, Raag Maru, Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 1102

Giani Ji reads this not as an instruction toward physical death, but as a call to relinquish the demands of self before the Divine can draw near — yet he points out that most people cannot even manage this in the smallest, most literal sense: an old man of eighty cannot bring himself to acknowledge that his own end is near, still less surrender the deeper attachments of ego and self-importance that the verse actually asks him to release.

Where ego divides a household of faith#

This thought leads Giani Ji into a broader observation about why hankar — the ego that refuses to bow, refuses to walk behind another, refuses to accept even the smallest kind of death — proves so destructive in every community he has studied. He offers this candidly as his own reading, inviting correction if he has erred, but says that when he has looked closely, a clear pattern has emerged. Hindus, he observes, fight fiercely, but the great majority of their conflicts are rooted in the marketplace — in economic and commercial rivalry. Muslims fight with equal intensity, but theirs is more often a domestic struggle, playing out around divorce, marriage, and disputes over children. Sikhs, he says, fight with no less passion than either — but their battles unfold inside the gurdwara itself, and the root, in his estimation, is hankar: the refusal to accept that another may walk ahead. Where a thousand people all insist on being first, he asks, how can they possibly all advance together? Someone, inevitably, ends up sacrificed for another's precedence.

Giani Ji goes further, observing that the greater number of Sikhs who suffered violent deaths in Punjab did so at the hands of fellow Sikhs, not strangers — humiliated, harassed, and undone by their own community's pride rather than any external hand. He offers this as a painful and sobering illustration of how far hankar can travel once it is left unchecked — and, by implication, of how much more difficult the first, symbolic kind of death (the death of ego that the Gurbani above calls for) proves to be than the literal one that comes to everyone regardless.

When pain makes an hour feel like an age#

Returning to his central theme, Giani Ji turns to how differently time itself is experienced depending on what fills it. Separation, grief, and physical suffering — whether from illness, the loss of one's homeland, wealth, friends, children, or the Divine itself — stretch time almost unbearably. A single minute can feel like a day; a single day, like years.

ਚਾਰਿ ਪਹਰ ਚਹੁ ਜੁਗਹ ਸਮਾਨੇ ॥ ਰੈਣਿ ਭਈ ਤਬ ਅੰਤੁ ਨ ਜਾਨੇ ॥

The four watches of the day feel as long as the four ages of the world; when night falls, its end cannot be seen.

— as recalled by Giani Ji in the spirit of Guru Arjan Dev Ji's teaching on separation from the Beloved

Giani Ji explains that Guru Arjan Dev Ji describes this precise experience elsewhere in his own bani: a single moment without meeting the Beloved feels as heavy as an entire Kalyug; sleep will not come, and the night refuses to pass, without the sight of the Guru's court. Baba Farid Ji gives the same truth its most physical expression:

ਫਰੀਦਾ ਰਾਤੀ ਵਡੀਆਂ ਧੁਖਿ ਧੁਖਿ ਉਠਨਿ ਪਾਸ ॥ ਧਿਗੁ ਤਿਨ੍ਹਾ ਦਾ ਜੀਵਿਆ ਜਿਨਾ ਵਿਡਾਣੀ ਆਸ ॥

Farīdā rātī vaḍīāṅ dhukhi dhukhi uṭhani pās. Dhig tinhā dā jīviā jinā viḍāṇī ās.

Fareed, the nights grow long, and my sides ache with the burning within. Cursed is the life of those whose hope rests on another.

— Baba Sheikh Farid Ji, Salok, Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 1378

Grief and pain, Giani Ji says, stretch the hours; joy and ras — the deep, inner delight of the spiritually alive — do exactly the reverse, compressing them until an entire day seems to arrive and depart in a moment.

A song that stopped the clock#

Giani Ji illustrates this with a memory of a singer whose kirtan he once heard, whose absorption and concentration were so complete that the same quality settled over the whole gathering listening to him. Two hours of singing passed, Giani Ji recalls, as though only two minutes had gone by — people afterwards said, quite naturally, that the man had bound time itself and set it aside. This, Giani Ji says, is what happens whenever genuine ras fills a moment: suffering lengthens the clock, and joy dissolves it.

The world where there is no time at all#

Beyond even this compression of time in states of joy lies a further reality that Giani Ji is careful to distinguish: not merely a shortened experience of time, but a state in which time disappears altogether. This, he says, is what happens in true Samadhi, the state a realised soul enters when fully absorbed in the Divine — time is not felt as fast or slow, but simply ceases to register at all. Bhagat Kabir Ji describes this realm directly:

ਦਿਨਸੁ ਨ ਰੈਨਿ ਬੇਦੁ ਨਹੀ ਸਾਸਤ੍ਰ ਤਹਾ ਬਸੈ ਨਿਰੰਕਾਰਾ ॥ ਕਹਿ ਕਬੀਰ ਨਰ ਤਿਸਹਿ ਧਿਆਵਹੁ ਬਾਵਰਿਆ ਸੰਸਾਰਾ ॥

Dinasu na raini bedu nahī sāsatra tahā basai nirankārā. Kahi Kabīr nar tisahi dhiāvahu bāvariā sansārā.

Where there is neither day nor night, and neither Vedas nor scriptures reach, there dwells the Formless Lord. Says Kabir: meditate on Him, O deluded people of this world.

— Bhagat Kabir Ji, Raag Asa, Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 484

Giani Ji observes that the more genuinely joyful and inwardly settled a person becomes, the more this quality of timelessness begins to touch their own life, while the more restless and pained a person is, the heavier and slower every single minute grows upon them — often so heavy that they will seek out distraction, business, entertainment, or even intoxicants, purely to escape the unbearable weight of time itself. Yet this Formless Lord who exists beyond time, Giani Ji insists, must never be mistaken for a mere idea or abstraction. He is Akal Murat — formed, yet beyond destruction; He possesses a true existence, a true presence. And if He has form, the question naturally follows: who, then, shaped that form?

Guru Nanak Dev Ji's own answer, given at the opening of the Mool Mantar, closes this question entirely: the Divine is Ajuni — unborn, never fashioned by any hand — and Saibhang, self-existent, having brought Himself into being. Every one of His disciples is Nirbhau and Nirvair, free of both fear and enmity, Akal Murat, formed yet beyond time, and it is this same Being who is also Guru — the one who awakens truth, dispels the darkness of falsehood, and lifts ignorance from the soul. And here, Giani Ji notes, a fair question may be raised: if it is truly God who acts as Guru, how does the formless Divine remove human ignorance directly? To answer this, he turns to a different kind of evidence altogether — not scripture, but history itself.

How old is religion, really?#

Giani Ji sets out, with evident care, to establish just how young every religious institution actually is when measured against the age of the created world. By the account he traces, roughly five thousand years ago there was no Sri Ram; roughly three and a half thousand years ago, no Sri Krishna; roughly two and a half thousand years ago, neither Mahatma Buddha nor Swami Mahavir yet walked the earth; roughly two thousand years ago, there was no Jesus; roughly one thousand four hundred years ago, no Prophet Muhammad; and roughly five hundred years ago, Guru Nanak Dev Ji had not yet appeared in the form the world now knows. Sanatani temples, he notes, did not exist three thousand years ago; Buddhist monasteries began only around five hundred years after the Buddha's own life; churches are, by his reckoning, no older than about eighteen hundred years; mosques no older than roughly thirteen hundred; and gurdwaras themselves are barely five hundred years old.

The scriptures follow the same pattern. The Vedas, widely held by Hindu tradition to be the oldest of all scriptures, are commonly dated to around five thousand years ago. The Dhammapada was not composed by the Buddha himself but was set down roughly five hundred years after his life, when Buddhist monks gathered in Sri Lanka specifically to preserve his teaching in writing before it could be forgotten or distorted. The Bible, similarly, was compiled some five hundred years after the life of Jesus rather than written in his own hand. The Quran belongs to roughly the last thirteen hundred years, and Guru Granth Sahib Ji, in the form the sangat reveres today, to a period Giani Ji places at around four hundred and sixty years.

Judaism, he adds, is often described as the oldest of the Middle Eastern faiths, with a history its own tradition places at some three thousand years, while Islam is proudly described by its own followers as the newest and final revelation. In the Indian context, Sanatan Hindu tradition — whose very name means simply "ancient" — claims the Vedas as its foundation at roughly five thousand years, while Sikhi, by comparison, is often called the youngest of the major paths. Yet, Giani Ji points out, even granting the very earliest of these figures, five thousand years is a vanishingly small span beside the true age of creation, which the Gurus describe as having unfolded and dissolved pasrio pasara — spread out and drawn back — countless times across ages beyond ordinary counting, in a span the human mind cannot meaningfully hold.

Before there were temples, was there no Prahlad?#

If none of these scriptures, temples, or prophets existed further back than roughly five thousand years, Giani Ji asks, does that mean there was no God, and no true devotee, before that time — no faith at all? The suggestion collapses immediately once one single figure is set against it: Prahlad, revered in Hindu tradition as a devotee of unwavering faith, who lived in the Satyug, an age tradition places well before either Ram or Krishna, and therefore long before any of the scriptures or temples Giani Ji has just listed. If devotion genuinely existed before every one of these institutions, the question becomes unavoidable: from what scripture, in what temple, through which incarnate teacher did such a person draw their knowledge of the Divine, when none of these things yet existed?

Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Giani Ji says, answers this question directly and, in his words, magnificently:

ਨਾਨਕ ਸਚੁ ਦਾਤਾਰੁ ਸਿਨਾਖਤੁ ਕੁਦਰਤੀ ॥

Nānak sach dātār sinākhat kudratī.

O Nanak, the True Giver is recognised through His Kudrat — His creative power at work throughout Nature.

— Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Vaar Majh Ki, Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 141

Every particle of Kudrat, Giani Ji explains, carried the Kaadar's — the Creator's — own message; every atom of creation delivered His news; every fragment of the natural world drew the seeker toward Him, long before any book or building existed to do the same. This, he suggests, is precisely how Prahlad and every devotee before him came to know the Divine — not through absence of religion, but through a far older and more direct form of it.

Guru Nanak's answer: recognition through Kudrat#

Giani Ji anchors this teaching in a second, closely related verse from Guru Nanak Dev Ji's own bani:

ਬਲਿਹਾਰੀ ਕੁਦਰਤਿ ਵਸਿਆ ॥ ਤੇਰਾ ਅੰਤੁ ਨ ਜਾਈ ਲਖਿਆ ॥

Balihārī kudrati vasiā. Terā ant na jāī lakhiā.

I am a sacrifice to You, dwelling within Kudrat — Your limits can never be measured or known.

— Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Asa Ki Vaar, Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 469

The Pahalgam river#

To illustrate what it means to recognise the Kaadar through Kudrat rather than through institutions, Giani Ji recalls a poem by Bhai Vir Singh Ji, the great Punjabi poet and man of deep spiritual insight, written at Pahalgam in Kashmir, where two mountain rivers meet in a confluence so loud that two people standing beside one another cannot hear each other speak. Giani Ji himself used to travel there for a month or two most years, in the days when the valley was still peaceful, and recalls Bhai Vir Singh Ji often being there at the same season, watching the same waters.

Sitting beside that roaring confluence, Bhai Vir Singh Ji watched the river crash against the rocks, thrown back again and again by boulders in its path, until it seemed almost to lose its way home before gathering itself and pressing on. Out of that sight came a poem describing a single drop of water flung against stone after stone, driven back time and again, yet each time turning forward once more toward the distant sea it has never seen — accepting, in Bhai Vir Singh Ji's telling, that suffering and struggle are simply the price of ever reaching union, since no meeting comes without the ache of separation first, and no destination is reached without being tested along the way.

A single drop cannot reach the ocean alone#

Sitting with that image, Giani Ji wrote an essay of his own — some eighteen pages, he recalls — reflecting on what the single drop cannot do by itself. However determined it may be, one drop alone will never reach the sea: the sun will dry it before it travels far, or the earth will simply absorb it into itself. Only by joining with countless billions of other drops, lending each other momentum and shelter, can the river carry any single drop all the way to the ocean — and even then, Giani Ji notes, not every drop survives the journey. Some dry up along the way, undone by grief; others are absorbed into the ground, undone by worldly pleasure and possession, and never reach the sea at all.

In just the same way, Giani Ji says, no human being reaches the Divine alone. Every seeker needs the support of countless satsangis, the guidance of saints and prophets, the company of those further along the path — and just as some drops never reach the ocean, many souls who set out on this road will themselves fall short, some worn down by sorrow, others drawn away by material comfort. A heart consumed by grief, he adds, cannot even recite Japji Sahib without its pain intruding on every line, nor can it repeat Waheguru's Name without the mind wandering back to its own wound; suffering dries up the soul exactly as the sun dries the wandering drop, while the pull of wealth and possession absorbs it exactly as the thirsty earth absorbs the water that never reaches the river's mouth. Even the teachers and satsangis who guide others, Giani Ji observes, do not all reach the destination themselves — yet each nonetheless draws inspiration from those who walked before, and every generation continues to lean upon the ones who came before it, exactly as the countless drops of a single river lean upon one another all the way to the sea.

Kabir, the loom, and the temple door that stayed shut#

Giani Ji closes this line of thought with Bhagat Kabir Ji, whom he describes as a man who understood exactly this teaching, because his own life left him no other choice. Kabir Ji, born into a family of weavers, was for long periods refused entry into temples by Brahmin priests who regarded him as of low social standing, and denied access to formal centres of learning for the same reason. Left without institutional access to either the temple or the school, Giani Ji says, Kabir Ji nonetheless became a man of the sharpest spiritual insight — precisely because Kudrat itself, freely available to every soul regardless of birth, remained open to him when every human institution had shut its doors.

Giani Ji reads this as confirming, from a wholly different direction, exactly what Guru Nanak Dev Ji had already taught: that the deepest kind of understanding belongs to the one who reflects honestly on Kaal — mortality, the passage of time, one's own end — because it is only through that reflection on the finite that a person is ever drawn onward to a genuine contemplation of Akaal, the Eternal. Whoever has not yet truly seen their own end, Giani Ji says plainly, cannot yet see the Boundless; and this, he reminds the sangat, is exactly why Guru Nanak Dev Ji made it a condition rather than a suggestion — first accept your own death, and only then will the vision of the Timeless begin to open before you.

Conclusion: see your own end first#

Giani Ji brings the discourse back to where it began. Only once a person genuinely accepts their own death, he repeats, does surrender to the Beant, the Boundless, become possible.

ਪਹਿਲਾ ਮਰਣੁ ਕਬੂਲਿ ਜੀਵਣ ਕੀ ਛਡਿ ਆਸ ॥

Pahilā maraṇ kabūl jīvaṇ kī chhaḍ ās.

First accept death, and give up your hope of life.

— Guru Arjan Dev Ji, Salok, Raag Maru, Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 1102

He returns once more, with visible feeling, to the image of the eighty-year-old marking his own birthday rather than reckoning with how little time remains to him — an old man, in Giani Ji's words, still celebrating the day he was born rather than preparing for the day he will die, bound in the same cycle of birth and death he has spent a whole lifetime failing to examine. Kartar Singh, the devotee whose story opened this discourse, stands as this teaching's living opposite: a man who, in quietly and deliberately preparing for his own end, was granted the clarity that eludes those who spend their final years refusing to look at it at all.

Giani Ji closes with the Ardas: that Guru Nanak Dev Ji's blessings continue to be showered upon the sangat, that every difficulty draws to its end, and that all may in time be brought to Sach, the Ultimate Truth — offered, as always, with an acknowledgement of human error and a request for forgiveness, before the closing call of Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh.

References and further reading#

Primary source
Guru Granth Sahib Ji — Salok Mahalla 5 (Ang 1102); Vaar Majh Ki, Guru Nanak Dev Ji (Ang 141); Asa Ki Vaar, Guru Nanak Dev Ji (Ang 469); Salok Sheikh Farid Ji (Ang 1378); Bhagat Kabir Ji, Raag Asa (Ang 484).

For further study
Bhai Vir Singh Ji's nature poetry from his visits to Pahalgam, Kashmir, available in standard published collections of his work.