Mukaam Ohi Ek Hai — The Restless Mind, the Origin of Creation, and the One True Home
A discourse of Giani Sant Singh Ji Maskeen
Everything in this world is moving. The sun rises and sets, the moon waxes and wanes, the stars themselves are said to be passing away, and the earth beneath our feet never stands still for a moment. Giani Sant Singh Ji Maskeen begins this discourse with a simple but searching observation: if everything is travelling, then everything must be travelling somewhere. A journey without a destination is not a journey at all.
From this single observation, Giani Ji builds an entire teaching about the human mind — why it can never settle, why every pleasure grows stale the moment it is tasted, and why the restlessness so many people feel is not a flaw to be cured but a signal to be understood. Drawing on Gurbani from Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Guru Arjan Dev Ji, Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji, Bhagat Kabir Ji and Baba Farid Ji, and moving through everything from a planetarium in Chicago to the ancient shrine of Omkareshwar on the Narmada, Giani Ji shows that the human being's long climb from stone to soul is really a single, unfinished journey back to one true home: God.
Everything that moves must have a destination#
The discourse opens with a shabad from Guru Nanak Dev Ji in Siree Raag:
ਦਿਨ ਰਵਿ ਚਲੈ ਨਿਸਿ ਸਸਿ ਚਲੈ ਤਾਰਿਕਾ ਲਖ ਪਲੋਇ ॥
ਮੁਕਾਮੁ ਓਹੀ ਏਕੁ ਹੈ ਨਾਨਕਾ ਸਚੁ ਬੁਗੋਇ ॥Din rav chalai, nis sas chalai, taarikaa lakh paloi. Mukaamu ohee eku hai, Naanakaa sach bugoi.
By day the sun moves on, by night the moon moves on, and countless stars pass away. Only the One is permanent — Nanak speaks this as the plain truth. (Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 64)
Giani Ji explains that bugoi is a Persian word meaning "I speak," so the line is Guru Nanak Dev Ji's own declaration: this is not poetry, it is testimony. The sun, the moon, the uncountable stars, the planets, the earth and sky — everything is chal rahaa hai, in motion. And whatever moves, Giani Ji reasons, must eventually arrive. A traveller has a destination; someone who is walking has a home waiting at the end of the road. If the whole universe is walking, the whole universe must have a home. Guru Nanak Dev Ji answers the question directly in the very next line: Mukaam ohi ek hai — there is only one such home, one such resting place, and it belongs to everyone alike.
The soul that forgot the way home#
Having established that everyone is travelling toward the same home, Giani Ji turns to a harder question: where did the journey begin? Gurbani's answer, he says, will surprise the listener — the soul did not simply arrive in this world; it left somewhere first. It set out from a door, a dar, and from a home, a ghar, and it has been wandering outside that home for countless lifetimes, unable to find its way back.
Giani Ji compares this to something ordinary and human: a person who has lived abroad, in pardes, for a very long time. Psychologists observe, he notes, that long years away from one's homeland can make a person forget that homeland altogether — its customs are set aside, the customs of the foreign land are adopted instead, and eventually the foreign land itself starts to feel like home. When that happens, calling such a person back becomes very difficult, because they no longer recognise the place they are being called to. Gurbani, Giani Ji says, exists precisely to jog this forgotten memory. It calls out gently and insistently:
Mere man pardesi ve piaare, aao ghare — O my exiled and beloved mind, come home.
The moment this memory of home stirs in a person, Giani Ji explains, it becomes prayer. It becomes the simple plea captured in the line Jitu duaarai ubhre, tithai laihu ubaar — O God, send me back through the very door by which I first came out; I have lost the way, I have forgotten the door. This is the emotional centre of the whole discourse: an exile who has forgotten not only the road home but the very existence of home, until Gurbani reminds him.
Which door, which home? Guru Nanak's question#
Giani Ji then poses the natural next question — if the mind left through a door and a home, which door and which home are these? He turns to a shabad of Guru Nanak Dev Ji in Raag Raamkalee that asks exactly this:
ਜਿਤੁ ਦਰਿ ਵਸਹਿ ਕਵਨੁ ਦਰੁ ਕਹੀਐ ਦਰਾ ਭੀਤਰਿ ਦਰੁ ਕਵਨੁ ਲਹੈ ॥
ਜਿਸੁ ਦਰ ਕਾਰਣਿ ਫਿਰਾ ਉਦਾਸੀ ਸੋ ਦਰੁ ਕੋਈ ਆਇ ਕਹੈ ॥Jitu dar vasahi, kavan dar kaheeai, daraa bheetari dar kavan lahai. Jisu dar kaaran firaa udaasee, so dar koee aai kahai.
O God, at which door do You dwell? Among all the countless doors, which one is truly Yours? I wander in sorrow searching for that door — will someone come and tell me where it is? (Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 877)
Giani Ji reads this as Guru Nanak Dev Ji speaking, remarkably, in the voice of an ordinary searching soul rather than as one who already possesses the answer — teaching, through his own posture of longing, how the sincere seeker ought to ask. The answer, Giani Ji says, is given elsewhere in the Guru's own words: So dar kehaa, so ghar kehaa, jit bahi sarab samaale — what is that door, what is that home, seated in which the One cares for all creation? Human beings possess great knowledge of many things, Giani Ji observes, yet remarkably little knowledge of their own door and their own home — simply because they have lived in exile for so long that both have slipped from memory.
Why the mind can never stay still#
At this point Giani Ji turns from the abstract question of home to something every listener can verify from their own experience: the mind never stays still anywhere. It does not settle in family life, it does not settle in possessions, it does not settle in entertainment, fashion, music or poetry. Something in it is always restless. Giani Ji explains the mechanism behind this restlessness with striking precision: on the plane of the mind, everything becomes old the instant it is experienced. Whatever is unseen is new; the moment it is seen, it has already become old. Whatever is unheard is new; the moment it is heard, it has already become old.
He illustrates this with a small story about a great poet. The first time the poet recites his finest poem, the audience is delighted, moved, full of admiration for his genius. If he offers to recite the very same poem a second time, the audience's delight is already halved. A third time, and perhaps two or three per cent of the original pleasure remains — the rest has evaporated. A fourth time, and the audience begins to wonder whether the poet has lost his senses; what seemed brilliant on first hearing now seems close to foolish. And if the poet insists on a fifth recitation, the listeners will simply get up and leave. Nothing in the poem itself has changed — only its newness has gone, and with it, the pleasure.
From this Giani Ji draws the wider principle: gatherings grow old, friendships grow old, homes grow old, fashions grow old, and the mind refuses to settle in anything that has grown old. People spend their whole lives changing things in response — a new house, a new occupation, new fashions, new music, new company — chasing the same fleeting freshness the poet's audience felt the first time. But the pattern always repeats: what is unseen is new, and the moment it is seen it is already old. This, Giani Ji says, is simply how the mind functions, and no amount of novelty can outrun it, because novelty by its very nature cannot last.
The one thirst that only grows#
Having shown that every worldly pleasure diminishes with repetition, Giani Ji now presents Gurbani's striking counter-example: remembrance of God, or Simran — sustained, loving remembrance of the Divine — behaves in exactly the opposite way. Rather than fading with repetition, its joy, or rasa, keeps increasing the more it is practised. He compares this to the experience of eating: the first mouthful of a meal is the most satisfying, because hunger is at its peak; each mouthful after that satisfies a little less, until the stomach is full and all pleasure in eating has gone. Worldly enjoyments — wealth, romance, friendship, comfort — behave the same way: as the underlying hunger is satisfied, the pleasure recedes with it.
Naam does not follow this pattern. Giani Ji quotes Bhagat Kabir Ji, who compares this thirst to a fire that water itself cannot put out:
Madho, jal jal ki pyaas na jaaye; jal mahi agan uthee adhikaaye.
O Lord, this thirst for Your Name is not quenched by drinking of it; rather, the more I drink, the more the flame within me grows.
Giani Ji reads Guru Arjan Dev Ji's own words in the same spirit — a shabad in which the Guru says that God has given him only one tongue, yet if he had millions of tongues he would still wish to drink the nectar of the Name with every one of them; that God has given him only two ears, yet he pleads for millions more, simply to keep hearing the Lord's praise. It is not that two ears and one tongue are insufficient in themselves — it is that the thirst itself has no ceiling. Giani Ji sums up the point plainly: hunger and thirst for the world diminish as they are satisfied, but hunger and thirst for the Name only increase, right up to the final breath. This, he says, is the one and only resting place the mind can find, because it is the one experience that never grows old — it renews itself endlessly rather than fading into repetition.
Before time began#
Giani Ji now moves the discourse to the very beginning — to the question of what existed before existence itself. He recites the opening lines of a Solha by Guru Nanak Dev Ji in Raag Maru:
ਅਰਬਦ ਨਰਬਦ ਧੁੰਧੂਕਾਰਾ ॥ ਧਰਣਿ ਨ ਗਗਨਾ ਹੁਕਮੁ ਅਪਾਰਾ ॥
ਨਾ ਦਿਨੁ ਰੈਨਿ ਨ ਚੰਦੁ ਨ ਸੂਰਜੁ ਸੁੰਨ ਸਮਾਧਿ ਲਗਾਇਦਾ ॥Arbad narbad dhundhookaaraa. Dharan na gagnaa Hukam apaaraa. Naa din rain na chand na sooraj, sunn samaadh lagaaidaa.
For endless ages there was only darkness upon darkness. There was no earth, no sky — only the boundless Hukam. There was no day, no night, no moon, no sun; the Lord alone remained absorbed in a primal, unbroken meditation. (Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 1035)
Hukam — the Divine Order, or governing will through which all existence unfolds — is a term Giani Ji uses here to describe the one reality that was already present even before the created world existed. Before time, before the elements, before even the concepts of day or night, there was only formless mist, or dhundh, and the Divine held within it, absorbed in its own stillness.
A planetarium in Chicago#
To illustrate this teaching, Giani Ji recounts an experience from one of his visits to the West. He had been speaking on this very passage — that the sun, moon and stars are all in motion, and that Gurbani calls the world chanchal, restless, because it never stops moving — when, after the discourse, a group of leading scientists in the audience invited him to see something at Chicago's planetarium.
The next day, he was taken into a great domed hall, the lights lowered, and shown a visual presentation of the universe's history — its formation from swirling matter, the appearance of early life in the water, and its gradual unfolding into diverse forms. Giani Ji recalls the scientists remarking that what he had described in his discourse, using centuries-old Gurbani, matched what the display was showing: an ancient account of formless beginnings that modern science was independently arriving at through its own methods. Whatever weight one gives to any single conversation of this kind, Giani Ji's point in retelling it is not to claim scientific endorsement for Gurbani, but to show that Guru Nanak Dev Ji's description of a primal, undifferentiated darkness before creation — stated centuries before modern cosmology existed — continues to resonate with how the physical universe is now understood to have unfolded. Chicago is home to the Adler Planetarium, the first planetarium built in the Western Hemisphere, long known for exhibits and dome shows tracing the universe's evolution from its earliest beginnings to the present day — a fitting setting for the exchange Giani Ji describes.
The first sound: Oankar#
If darkness and stillness preceded creation, Giani Ji asks, then what set creation in motion? His answer is sound. Within that primal dhundh, he says, there occurred a great sound — not the roar of an explosion as some scientists have pictured it, but a sound of an entirely different order, one that continues to resonate through creation even now. Giani Ji introduces this sound through Guru Gobind Singh Ji's own words in Jaap Sahib: Oankaar aad, kathnee anaad — Oankar is the first, and speech of it is without beginning. He distinguishes between aahat sound, which arises from the collision of two things, and anaahat sound — the unstruck sound that comes directly from God and, because it comes from what is imperishable, cannot itself perish. This unstruck sound, Giani Ji says, still resounds through the universe; the human mind, ordinarily too full of its own chatter to hear it, can perceive it only once it falls silent — and Guru Nanak Dev Ji observes in Japji Sahib that mere silence of speech does not bring this inner silence:
ਚੁਪੈ ਚੁਪ ਨ ਹੋਵਈ ਜੇ ਲਾਇ ਰਹਾ ਲਿਵ ਤਾਰ ॥
Chupai chup na hovaee, je laai rahaa liv taar.
Silence is not achieved by silence alone, even if one sits in unbroken, silent absorption for a lifetime. (Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Japji Sahib)
True inner quiet, Giani Ji explains, comes not from forcing the mind to stop speaking, but from turning it toward listening — since speaking and listening cannot happen at once, a mind that has learned to listen naturally falls silent.
Giani Ji then places this teaching alongside other traditions that have arrived at comparable ideas in their own vocabulary — the sages of the Upanishads describing creation as arising from the sound of Om; the Jain tradition, through Swami Mahavir, similarly tracing existence to this primal sound; Bhagat Kabir Ji's own testimony to Oankar as the eternal utterance in his composition on the alphabet; and, in Giani Ji's account, Islam and Christianity each locating creation's origin in a divine utterance of their own — Kun in Islamic tradition and the Logos, the Word, in Christian tradition. Giani Ji's point in setting these side by side is not to claim these traditions are equivalent, but to note that the idea of an original creative utterance appears across very different times and cultures. Guru Nanak Dev Ji, in the Dakhni Oankar composition of Raag Raamkalee, unites this Divine sound with the Divine Itself: Ik Oankar — the One whose very name is this primal sound.
Omkareshwar, the place of the Name#
Giani Ji adds a note of personal geography to this teaching. He describes a pilgrimage site in central India, roughly fifty miles from Indore on the road toward Hazur Sahib, where a river town, a railway station and an ancient temple all share the single name Omkareshwar, with a Sikh Gurdwara standing only a short distance from the temple itself. This is, in fact, one of the twelve Jyotirlinga shrines of Shiva, situated on a small island in the river Narmada whose shape is traditionally said to resemble the symbol Om; the standing temple on the site is generally dated by historians to the medieval Paramara period, around the eleventh century, though the site itself has been regarded as sacred in far older textual tradition. For Giani Ji, the significance of the place lies less in its precise age than in what its name itself preserves: a landscape, a river crossing and a place of worship all still bearing witness, in their very names, to the primal sound at the root of creation.
From stone to man: the long ascent of awakening#
Giani Ji now traces the long physical and spiritual ascent that follows from this first sound — the journey from a single primal explosion of light to the human being reading these words today. In his account, the first sound scattered into innumerable suns; the primal mist condensed into water, and the earth itself lay for ages as a molten mass within it, until whatever portion cooled first took the form of stone. Stone, he says, is therefore the very first shape the visible world took, which is also why humanity's earliest acts of worship — long before anyone learned to carve an image — were directed at plain, unshaped stones; even today, he notes, this instinct survives in various forms across different cultures.
Stone, in Giani Ji's account, is a state of complete unconsciousness. It feels no hunger, no thirst, no pleasure, no pain; praise or abuse leave it equally unmoved, because it is, in his words, entirely asleep. And the whole of this long journey, he says, is nothing but the process of an entirely sleeping existence gradually waking up — jaag lai re man jaaganhaare, awaken, O sleeping mind, for you are capable of waking.
After ages beyond counting, Giani Ji continues, stone became soil, and soil gave rise to vegetation — the first form of life to carry even a trace of awareness. Vegetation, unlike stone, feels thirst; deprived of water it wilts and dies, as Gurbani itself observes: jal bin saakh kumlaavatee — without water the plant withers. Because its awakening is only slight, its needs remain few: thirst alone, with no accompanying hunger and no voice.
After a further age, this awakening deepened further into animal life — birds, insects and beasts. Animals, Giani Ji notes, feel both hunger and thirst, and nature binds each species to its own particular diet: a cow will starve rather than eat meat, a lion will starve rather than graze on grass, because their hunger itself is shaped by their nature. He illustrates the danger of overriding this natural constitution with the example of the British "mad cow" crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, in which dairy cattle — naturally herbivorous animals — were fed protein supplements made from processed animal remains. The practice produced a fatal neurological disease in the cattle, contributed to human deaths, and ultimately led to the slaughter of millions of animals and billions of pounds in losses across the United Kingdom. For Giani Ji, the episode illustrates a principle that runs through the whole of this teaching: every level of creation has its own nature, and violating that nature — however profitable it may seem in the short term — carries severe consequences.
Animals, Giani Ji continues, also possess voice, so that each species can be recognised by its distinct call — the cow, the cuckoo, the donkey, the jackal, the lion, each given its own sound by the Creator. Some animals, he says, show a still greater degree of awakening than others — the elephant, the horse, the swan and the peacock among them — capable of a rudimentary awareness of family bonds and, on occasion, even of the Divine itself. He cites Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji's own repeated reference, across his bani, to the story of the elephant who cried out to God when seized by a crocodile in the river:
ਜਬ ਹੀ ਸਰਨਿ ਗਹੀ ਕਿਰਪਾ ਨਿਧਿ ਗਜ ਗਰਾਹ ਤੇ ਛੂਟਾ ॥
Jab hee saran gahee kirpaa nidh, gaj garaah te chhootaa.
The moment the elephant took refuge in the Treasure of Grace, he was freed from the crocodile's grip. (Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 632)
Giani Ji is careful to add that not every elephant remembers God, just as not every human being does — but the capacity for such awakening exists in certain animals in a way it does not in stone or plant. He offers a second illustration from Sikh history: an account of Guru Gobind Singh Ji riding through the Malwa region, in which his horse suddenly refused to move forward, no matter how firmly the Guru urged it on. Dismounting to check whether something had lodged in the horse's hoof and finding nothing, the Guru remounted, turned the horse aside onto a longer route, and explained to the Sikhs travelling with him that the field ahead had been sown with tobacco two years earlier — and that although the crop was long since gone, its scent still lingered faintly in the soil, detected by the horse's far keener sense of smell, which it refused to cross. Giani Ji uses the story pointedly: even a horse, he says, will not go near tobacco, while human beings alone, among all creatures, choose to breathe in smoke deliberately — a foolishness, he notes, that no other animal displays.
At last, after this same long ascent, awareness developed further still into the human being — manukh. Like the animal, the human being feels hunger, thirst and voice, but is given something no animal possesses: language, or akhar, the power of letters and words. Giani Ji observes that this single gift is the foundation of all human civilisation and progress, quoting Guru Nanak Dev Ji's own praise of the alphabet in Japji Sahib — that through letters comes the Name, through letters comes praise, through letters comes knowledge, song and virtue, through letters comes writing and speech itself, and through letters the destinies of all three worlds are recorded. An animal can express its feelings only as raw sound, largely unintelligible to others; a human being can shape that same feeling into words, and so can communicate sorrow, joy, union, separation and every shade of inner experience with a precision no animal can reach.
Awake, yet never still#
Even this greater awakening, Giani Ji cautions, is not complete. He cites an estimate that only around fifteen per cent of human beings are, in his sense of the term, truly "awake" — meaning the great majority of the human mind remains, in practice, asleep even while the body is active. And even this partial awakening, he observes, is directed mostly toward wealth and possessions rather than toward God, toward family rather than toward the Divine that sustains all families; an animal has no concept of gold, silver or jewels, while a human being not only recognises their value but is often consumed by the pursuit of them.
Paradoxically, Giani Ji notes, it is often the most awake among human beings — the philosophers, thinkers and great poets — who suffer the greatest restlessness and unease, precisely because a more awakened mind feels its own homelessness more acutely than a less awakened one. No amount of wealth, beauty, family, worldly success or entertainment brings this restless mind to rest, because — exactly as with the poet's poem recited a second and third time — everything of this world eventually grows old to the mind, and the mind refuses to remain anywhere that has grown old.
Only one home#
Giani Ji now draws the different threads of the discourse back together. The mind cannot rest anywhere in creation, he says, because its true resting place was never meant to be found there. It will rest only when it reaches its actual home — and Gurbani has already named that home in the shabad with which the discourse began: Mukaam ohi ek hai — that one home belongs equally to everyone, because it is God. Everything else — family, wealth, achievement, pleasure — is only a stopping point along the road, offering brief and temporary relief, never permanent rest; only the true home itself can offer that.
Becoming Jivan Mukt#
Giani Ji closes with the practical heart of the teaching: what it actually means to complete this journey while still alive. He offers two paired images, one drawn from Hindu tradition and one from Islamic tradition, to make the same single point: that the body's journey toward the cremation ground or the grave is not, by itself, the completion of a life. What completes a life is whether the mind reaches God before the body reaches its resting place — tan shamshaan tak pahunche, us se pahle man Bhagwan tak pahunch jaaye — for it is this, and this alone, that Giani Ji calls a successful journey, a jivan mukt life — one that has attained liberation while still living, rather than waiting for release through death.
He supports this with Bhagat Kabir Ji's own teaching that one who is not liberated in life is not liberated by death either; whoever dies still bound by worldly attachment is simply born again in another body, carrying the same unfulfilled longing forward into a fresh lifetime. And he closes this section with a well-known salok of Baba Farid Ji, in which the grave itself is imagined calling out to the wandering, homeless soul:
ਫਰੀਦਾ ਗੋਰ ਨਿਮਾਣੀ ਸਡੁ ਕਰੇ ਨਿਘਰਿਆ ਘਰਿ ਆਉ ॥
ਸਰਪਰ ਮੈਥੈ ਆਵਣਾ ਮਰਣਹੁ ਨ ਡਰੀਆਹੁ ॥Fareedaa, gor nimaanee sadd kare, nighariaa ghar aao. Sarpar maithai aavnaa, marnahu na dareeaahu.
Farid, the humble grave calls out: O homeless one, come home. You must come to me in the end — so do not fear death. (Salok Farid Ji)
Giani Ji's point in placing this beside the earlier teaching on liberation is not that the grave is the soul's true home — it plainly is the resting place only of the body — but that fear of death loses its grip entirely once the mind has already found its real home in God while still living; only for a mind still homeless does death remain something to dread.
The Guru is the door, God is the home#
Giani Ji ends this sitting of the discourse by drawing together the two words with which it began — dar, the door, and ghar, the home. Just as a door and the house it opens onto are never truly separate, the Guru, in Giani Ji's teaching, is the Shabad, the Divine Word, which serves as the door; and the light of God that stands beyond it is the home itself. He cites Guru Nanak Dev Ji's teaching that the Guru and God are, in their essence, without difference — the same light appearing in two aspects. To reach the home, one must pass through the door, and it is the practice of the Shabad, Giani Ji says, that opens it.
He leaves the question of exactly how a person crosses that door for the following day's sitting, closing this portion of the discourse with a simple prayer that echoes its opening line: that the mind reach God before the body reaches the graveyard — and with that, the day's teaching came to its close, to be continued the next evening.
References & Further Reading#
Primary source: Guru Granth Sahib Ji — Siree Raag Mehla 1 (Ang 64); Raamkalee Mehla 1 (Ang 877); Maru Solhe, Mehla 1 (Ang 1035); Japji Sahib (Pauri 1 and Pauri 27); Sorath, Mehla 9 (Ang 632); Salok Farid Ji.
Further reading: Dasam Granth — Jaap Sahib, attributed to Guru Gobind Singh Ji, for the invocation of Oankar as the primal, unstruck word.
Note on Omkareshwar: general historical and geographical details regarding the Omkareshwar shrine on the Narmada river are drawn from published temple and regional tourism sources; readers interested in the site's architectural history may consult standard reference works on the Jyotirlinga shrines of central India.
Note on the 1980s–90s UK cattle disease outbreak (bovine spongiform encephalopathy): general facts are drawn from standard public-health and historical accounts of the episode.