Isn’t this world amazingly beautiful? Natural beauty, beauty of a woman, human emotions, aspirations, pleasures, achievements – what all is there to mesmerize us! And mesmerize we become so much so that we forget the source from where all this came from!
But whose fault is it that we forget? The Lord himself has created such a “Maya” that we get entangled in it, losing our innate freedom, just as an elephant loses his freedom when he pursues the female elephant made of straw. And once he falls in the pit on which the female elephant was erected, an halter is placed around its neck. Then, all his movements are governed not by his joy but by the stick of his new owner (Maya).
This world is lord’s play: he himself entraps us and then gives us Gurbani or other scriptures to help us get out of it. And even we aren’t separate from him? He is experiencing this duality through us, and then he himself gets free through us. There isn’t anything other than God! Such is the wonder!
In these lines, Gurbani warns us to avoid getting entangled in the pleasures of the world, otherwise we’ll become slaves of Maya. And the freedom of the soul has much more joy, peace, love, and beauty than anything in this world of Maya.