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A principle in life to remember is to travel light.
You are traveling all the time.
Travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light.
– Yogi Bhajan
THE BIG GREEN BOOKS
Memoirs by Kirpal Singh Khalsa
One evening, after a long day at Hanuman’s Conscious Cookery, we arrived home to the ashram to find a cardboard box on the back porch, stuck inside the screen door. UPS had left it while we were all at work. It had been sent from an unknown address in Los Angeles. We tore it open to find eight large green books. A quick perusal revealed they were obviously holy books and we rightly guessed that they were the complete works from which were derived The Sacred Writings of the Sikhs (our pre Peace Lagoon holy book). We were astonished at its length. Each volume contained over 500 pages for a total of over 4000 pages. So, not knowing what else to do with them, we placed them on a little shelf near the altar in the meditation room.
Siri Singh Sahib Ji visited the Denver Ashram for the first time shortly there after in 1971. After sadhana one morning he came downstairs and asked if we had a meditation room where he could sit quietly. Our meditation room was the nicest room in the house. It was clean with a fresh coat of white paint, had a nice rug, an altar with pictures, candles, incense, The Sacred Writings of the Sikhs and the newly arrived 8 volume set of large green books. We invited him in and he closed the door.
He had been in the room about ten minutes when he poked his head out and asked if we had a piece of cloth. Some of the women ran around and found a nice piece of cloth and gave it to him. He disappeared back into the meditation room. An hour later he went upstairs to get dressed.
I did my best to update him.
What did he do with the cloth? We immediately investigated. The cloth was neatly folded and placed over the 8 large green books.
He never said anything about the books. We had no idea what they were, but his simple gesture indicated they were something special.
We thanked our lucky stars that we at least had the sense to place them on the altar and not on some bookshelf somewhere.
Actually we knew nothing of the Siri Guru Granth Sahib. Siri Singh Sahib’s simple and tender gesture of placing the cloth touched all of us. These were not just books. They were something to be cared for with love, something to be honored with a special cloth. We knew from that moment that we had a lot to learn about these green books.
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