Mr.J.S.Neki opened his speech with the lines: “What most traditions call “Spirit” is the deepest center of the person which is open to the transcendent dimension and through which the individual may experience ultimate reality.” Elaborating on the role of Sikhism in achieving the “ultimate reality” he explained “Sikh spirituality, while sharing this major concern with almost all the religions, has a distinctive approach of its own.” “The modicum of the divine that is within us is our real self, it is not the same as our empirical self with which we are ordinarily familiar.” “It (empirical self) mentally segregates us from the undifferentiated reality and creates for us the illusion of a distinctive circumscribed entity of our own which we begin to defend. It makes us intensely aware of our thus differentiated identity and readily responds to a given name that comes to represent it. From its very inception it engages itself in self-assertion and self-defenses which are twin processes of the worldly retrace called dhaturbazi or that in the Sikh Parlance, The real self, on the contrary, is not dependent on our sense organs, it is self resplendent.” Mr.Neki punctuated his speech with appropriate quotes from the Adi Granth,”O my mind thou art of the nature of resplendence, Pray, recognize thyself.”
He concluded by saying “The real self can be realized by making a journey inwards contrasted to the journey outwards or the chase of that. The journey inwards is called liv. Thus we have at our disposal these two orientations the out ward orientation or that conductive to our physical survival and the inward orientation or liv conductive to getting in time with the medium of the infinite within ourselves,”
“The Gurus instructed us how to adjust to the worldly orientation while developing the inward orientation which alone can lead us to our real destination namely experiencing the ultimate reality whom we call *Waheguru’ or the wonderful lord of the universe.”
Article extracted from this publication >> October 1, 1993
