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For me this is a unique honour to address this August gathering here this evening to celebrate and rejoice the birthday of Guru Nanak who was born 542 years ago. Ladies and Gentlemen, one of the most divisive elements in our lives for centuries has been religion. As we know, religion can be a force for peace or war, it can heal or hurt. It can create or destroy on an unimaginable scale. In this background of human frailty and weakness was born this great man with a noble soul in a village 40 miles from Lahore in North West India, now Pakistan, and lived for 70 years of a spiritual and humble life giving the world the great religion of Sikhism. He travelled extensively and interfaced and interacted with different faiths and beliefs in India and abroad. India has traditionally welcomed and absorbed all the faiths that came there over the centuries, and the Sikh religion was equally welcomed. Throughout history humans have demonstrated their genius for creativity. However, in spite of our glorious achievements, we have lost none of our ability to destroy and kill fellow humans with impunity and whenever these weak threads in human character become large and obnoxious God sends a great soul to lead the people from darkness to light and Guru Nanak was one such person who illuminated the horizon with his spiritual enlightenment and gave the people the divine message of harmony, humility, equality, meditation and worship. Whenever a community becomes seriously conflicted from the activities and utterances of some of the extremists in that community the confused majority asks the question as to how to respond to such serious threat and how as responsible citizens to put one's own house in order and to live a life of peaceful and harmonious living with ones neighbours. As human beings we are all more alike than different irrespective of our physical makeup and self-created labels that might suggest otherwise. The challenge before us is to respect, value and understand others without compromising the bedrock of our own faith. This is a great message to us from Guru Nanak. He guided people from different faiths whilst observing and respecting their cultural differences because he proclaimed that it was fool hardy to hate a fellow human for worshiping God in a different way from us and it was also highly unlikely to please the great Almighty. Guru Nanak, who's religious philosophy and teachings have remained unsurpassed in Indian mysticism, was himself an absolute example of humility and spoke of himself as a servant of the beloved One. In the holy scriptures of the Guru Granth Sahib he has repeatedly emphasized the importance of humility. Humility with devotion and truthful living was the way of life for Guru Nanak.
To serve the people is to serve God; this was Guru Nanak's doctrine. He taught that one needs to purge oneself of ego and pride to create divine love for God. Guru Nanak was born of Hindu parentage of high kshatriya caste and was strongly opposed to the caste distinction which was so deeply entrenched in Indian culture. It is difficult to believe that God, who is both loving and powerful, would make any discrimination amongst his people. Such discriminations are made by man to serve his own selfish purpose said Guru Nanak. He restored women to their rightful equal place in Indian society and regarded them as man's companion on the spiritual plane. According to him the grace of God may come to the scholar or the illiterate, the high or the low, the rich or the poor. It does not depend on caste, knowledge, wisdom or penance. Instead, those who seek it through love, service and humility, retain the true goal of life. He strove for religious tolerance and universal brotherhood which comes through in the following hymn:
"No one is my enemy, No one is a foreigner, For me, there is no Hindu, no Muslim, With all I am at peace. God within us renders us, Incapable of hate and prejudice". The persistent number of competing religions all claiming the privilege of being the sole recipients of God's incarnation or His final revelation are a challenge to one another. It's therefore extremely difficult to imagine that God would bestow his grace only on a certain tribe at a certain time on a particular part of our tiny earth in the solar system. On the other hand, contrary to the above dogmas, and claims of exclusivity, Guru Nanak rejected the idea of exclusiveness and uniqueness and defined God as the ultimate spiritual reality for all mankind. According to him, although the world is not eternal like God, yet it is never the less real, created with a purpose. Because of the importance of practical living that Guru Nanak attached to the world, he was opposed to the prevailing Indian belief in renunciation as a means to achieving God. According to Guru Nanak, the first step towards God is self-realisation and to achieve that one should understand the nature of the mind. The mind is controlled by senses and the senses by material objects and pleasures. He said that one may have every worldly comfort but one will not have peace of mind until one has control over the senses and identify oneself with the immortal soul. He wrote in a hymn: "Dirtv hands, feet and body, can be washed clean with water; Soiled clothes washed clean with soap; But when the mind becomes dark with sin, Divine love alone can restore it to purity". In one of his hymns the Guru has described man as a crown of creation; the final stage in the evolutionary process. Human life is a grand opportunity and a great challenge for realising the goal of self-realisation. In Guru Nanak's Sikh religion, a self-realised soul is identified as having already conquered lust, anger, greed, attachment, and pride.
Such a blessed soul becomes an example of tolerance, contentment, forgiveness, humility and service. From one of the hymns from the Adi Granth it says: "Undisturbed is he when afflicted with grief, Freed from greed, attachment, conceit, No more affected by passion or anger, Pleasure and pain, honour and dishonour, Becoming one with the infinite, as water with water". There are numerous other examples in the Guru's hymns which identify an individual blessed soul with the ultimate reality, as for example a drop of water merging with the ocean and becoming one with it. According to Sikhism a fully enlightened and self-realised blessed soul is rewarded with the same spiritual reunion with the Supreme Being as were Nanak, Buddha, Rama, Krishna, Jesus and Mohamed. Just as sooner or later all waters must flow down to the sea whence they came, so all life must ultimately return to God who originated it. The purpose of human life is to gain bliss by transcending ones self. Once the self is transcended by love and devotion, suffering fails to disturb the mind. Mankind is not destined for suffering if only it knew how to overcome it by converting the sorrows of this life into the vision of self-realisation. To Guru Nanak, the true purpose of religion was to spread the spiritual principles, humility and truth, among as many souls as it can reach to enable them to fulfil the true goal of pleasing God. On his travels Guru Nanak carried his message of truth, love, peace, humility and service. He said that submission to the divine will lead to contentment or santosh. It is a sign of trust in God and grace. A true devotee accepts all that comes to him with gratitude and joy, true happiness comes to a person with contentment within oneself and compassion for others.
His view on the prevailing two major religions of India, the Hindus and the Muslims was; To the Hindus: "Not the yogi's garb and ashes, not the shaven head, Not long prayers and rituals, nor the aesthetic way, But life of truth and love, amid the world's temptations, is the secret of spiritual life".
To the Muslims he said:
"Speaking the truth is the real fast, And remaining contented is true pilgrimage,
Meditations is the true ablution
Compassion is the true worship,
Humility is the real rosary". Guru Nanak's religion of one universal God was devoid of all dogmas, doctrines and claims. Guru Nanak's spiritual message was carried forward by nine subsequent Gurus'. The sayings and hymns of the Sikh gurus and fifteen other Hindu and Muslim saints (bakhtas) from various regions of India were incorporated into a holy book of 1430 pages called guru Granth or Adi Granth which forms the scripture of the Sikh religion and is considered the eleventh and the eternal Guru.
The fact that the contributions belong to the various regions and religions, caste and communities, of the entire country, bestows on the holy Granth a rare catholicity of spirit and makes it a treasure house of the religious cultural heritage of India. It signifies the first unparalleled unique experiment to put together and unify the warring religious sects, faiths and castes on a common spiritual and emotional plane. Guru Nanak has described music as a means of obtaining spiritual joy and transcendental spiritual bliss. He adopted music as a means for moulding the spiritual, mystical and temporal life of the devotees. His poetry is valuable both for its sublime content and literary excellence. The dominant themes of which are truth, harmony and wisdom.
He preached a religion for which men could live, a religion which would illuminate human life, a religion of love, service and sacrifice. His vision of life embraced all nations, all races and all times. He is the light bearer to mankind and his message is timeless. He built a nation of self-respecting men and women devoted to God, filled with a sense of equality and brotherhood for all. God is universal.
He is not the God of this race or that nation. He is the God of all Human beings. They are all "India was once again blessed by God with Guru Nanak, possessed of all attributes of a prophet. A complete and perfect human being. Guru Nanak's appearance in the world was no less than that of Prophet Abraham five thousand years ago". Finally, let me quote from the holy book the holy Granth Sahib, what would be the message for all of us, it says: "Let universal brotherhood be the highest aspiration of your religious order. He who grasps this truth realises that there is the one religion of all mankind." This would be a bridge between faiths of goodwill and respect. The stronger this bridge, the greater the ability to weather any storms. We are grateful to God for our fortune in having given us Guru Nanak who's message of universal love with no difference from caste, creed or colour, and the great aspiration of the brotherhood of man, are lessons for all humanity to be inspired by. Lord Khalid Hameed House of Lords London SW1A OPW | 
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