ARCHIVED FORUM: Gurdwara Tapoban Sahib
A Silent Revolution
Posted by : Dass Sevadar
Date: 7/29/2004 8:29 am
Another inspirational poem and piece of writting by Professor Puran Singh
A SILENT REVOLUTION
Our Master, Guru Gobind Singh, called us to death and extinction, for he felt that it was no use living at all without the sense of liberty aglow in us. He gave such a vital and martial timbre even to our prayers that we, for the first time in the history of India, saw that the great love to which our Master was calling was not a prayer of the crushed people, but a prayer of the victorious. Guru Nanak, the first True King, had called us not to love the Beautiful God-Persons of Nature and Creation only, but to be so beautiful as to be loved by Him.
The Bhakti feelings of our devotion to God are not of the miserable man who in his utter smallness dares rise to evolve systems by which to perfect himself as a lover, as a saint, as a seer, but we wait in intense activity to be loved by Him. Few understand this silent revolution of ideals. To the terrified slaves of this country Guru Gobind Singh said, "Rise and fight and die fighting on horse-back."
This is an oceanic burst of the same glow of life and this too is of Him.
It is more glorious to die than to live as miserable wretches.
He poured into our veins that life which could not live without
song and freedom.
We rose as individuals and as masses
shouting for liberty and victory.
He gave us freedom of the soul
and we cried for the freedom of our life.
We died for it.
Touched by his inspiration we could no more remain slaves.
Here is almost a new race created by the Guru, imbibing a tradition of fire and iron, sacrifice and death. Every page of Sikh history burns with a hundred star-like names; one name is enough to thrill a whole life with the noblest of spiritual heroism.
The names of Guru Arjan Dev, Guru Teg Bahadur, Guru Gobind Singh, his Four Sons and the Five Beloved Disciples, and of the Sikh martyrs and devotees of the heroes of war and peace, provide the Sikh with an inexhaustible and intense past which no other race with centuries of history behind it can match in its life-giving, death-despising, self-sacrificing powers of inspiration.
Assuredly the Sikh's is not the Mughal Padshahi, but a state representing an uncrystallised constitution of some future society. And only the future perfection of the state will make clear the significance of the Guru's Khalsa. There is a distinct Utopian and prophetic strain in these prefigurations. The Khalsa is verily a great tree whose roots are deep in the bowels of the earth, but whose branches touch the skies above.
Re: A Silent Revolution
Posted by : Khalsa
Date: 8/02/2004 6:19 am
One of the powerful, soul-inspiring articles, read in a while. Don't stop writing!!
