Daily Inspiration Quote by Guru Nanak

The line lands like a paradox meant to short-circuit the mind’s lazy habit of turning God into a picture. “A thousand eyes” conjures omniscience in the most human way possible: we reach for anatomy to explain the unexplainable. Then Nanak pulls the rug out. “Yet not one eye.” The point isn’t that the divine is blind; it’s that any literalizing metaphor is already a mistake. God is not a superhuman with upgraded parts. God is the condition that makes seeing possible, not a creature who sees.

That rhythm - offer an image, revoke it - is classic Guru Nanak: devotional language used as a ladder, then kicked away once you’ve climbed. The subtext is an argument with both idol-worship and narrow theology. If you insist God has one fixed “form,” you can start policing which form counts: this statue, that prophet, this tribe’s name for the sacred. “A thousand forms” acknowledges the dizzying variety of religious experience and the many ways the divine is encountered. “Yet not one form” refuses to let that variety harden into any final container.

Context matters: Nanak is speaking in a South Asian world thick with competing claims - Hindu devotional traditions, Islamic monotheism, caste hierarchy, ritual authority. His move is to protect transcendence without evacuating intimacy. The paradox keeps God close enough to be sung to, but too vast to be owned. It’s theology as anti-weapon: a line designed to disarm certainty, not decorate it.