TL;DR
The single most common obstacle to the spiritual path is not doubt about God or weakness of will. It is lok-laaj — the fear of what other people will say. The young Sikh worried about being mocked for keeping kesh. The diaspora professional embarrassed to be seen at gurdwara. The party-going son who thinks his friends will laugh if he starts doing simran. The Gurus name this fear directly across Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji and identify it as a quiet trap that keeps most people from ever truly turning. The remedy is not to argue with the mockers. It is to recognize that the mockers will not be there in the end, and the One who will be there does not require their approval.
ਨਾਨਕ ਮਨਮੁਖਿ ਜਨਮੁ ਖੋਇਆ ਕਿਛੁ ਆਖਣ ਨਾਹੀ ਥਾਉ ॥ Says Nanak: the self-willed one wastes their life, and at the end has nothing to say in their defense.
— Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji
The fear, named plainly
You have felt it. Almost everyone has.
A young diaspora Sikh thinks about starting Nitnem. The first thing the mind produces is not "this is hard" or "I doubt this works." The first thing the mind produces is: what will my friends think?
A diaspora professional considers keeping their kesh after years of cutting it. The fear is not theological. It is: what will I look like at work? What will the relatives say? What will my own family say?
A person who has been partying their whole life feels a quiet pull toward something deeper. They notice it. They want to follow it. And then the mind says: if I become "religious" now, after everything, my friends will mock me. They will say I am pretending. They will roll their eyes. They will treat me differently.
This is lok-laaj. Lok — the world, the people. Laaj — shame, fear of judgment. Together: the fear of what the world will think.
Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji names this fear directly. Not as a small weakness. As one of the primary obstacles between a person and the Divine.
Why this fear is so powerful
The fear is powerful because it is not abstract. It has faces.
The friend who you know will laugh. The cousin who will text-share the news with the whole family group chat. The auntie who will comment at the next wedding. The colleague who will whisper. These are not imagined people. The mind can name them, one by one, and play out the exact mockery in advance. That is what makes lok-laaj so effective at stopping people. The cost is concrete; the reward is invisible.
Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji understood this. His own life made the cost real: he was mocked. As a young man, his decision to give away his father's investment money to feed sadhus (Sacha Sauda) was treated as foolishness by his own father. His decision to leave conventional careers was met with confusion. His teaching that there is no Hindu, no Muslim, only one Creator — that itself produced hostility from both communities. The Guru did not avoid mockery. He moved past it.
And the Bani he gave us names lok-laaj plainly as the obstacle most people never get past.
The teaching across the Gurus
This is not one Guru's observation. It runs through Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji.
Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji's compositions repeatedly distinguish between the manmukh — the one oriented toward the world's opinion — and the gurmukh — the one oriented toward the Guru's teaching. The manmukh is not a bad person. The manmukh is a person whose decisions are governed by what others will think. This is most people. This is, at various moments in our lives, all of us.
Bhagat Kabir, whose Bani is enshrined in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji at the same eternal level as the Gurus' own compositions, writes from his own experience of social rejection:
ਲੋਕਾ ਮਤ ਕੋ ਫਕੜਿ ਪਾਇ ॥ People may say whatever they wish; do not let their mockery hold you back.
Bhagat Kabir was a low-caste weaver in 15th-century Banaras who refused both Hindu Brahminism and conventional Islam. He was mocked, threatened, exiled, and harassed his entire life — by family, by religious authorities, by political powers. He kept turning toward the Divine anyway. His Bani is, among other things, a manual for how to do this when the world disapproves.
What the fear actually is, underneath
If you look carefully at lok-laaj, it has a strange structure.
The people whose opinion we fear most are often:
- People who do not actually love us deeply
- People who will not be present when we are dying
- People who will, within a few weeks of our death, forget us
- People whose own lives we secretly do not admire
- People who are themselves living in lok-laaj, mocking us to manage their own fear
The friend who will mock you for keeping kesh is afraid himself — afraid that his identity is shakier than yours, afraid of what his own choices add up to. The cousin who will roll her eyes is doing so partly because your turn toward the Divine makes her own avoidance more visible. The mockery is rarely the confident statement it pretends to be. It is usually the noise of someone managing their own discomfort.
Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji's Bani repeatedly observes how worldly relationships dissolve at the end:
ਜਿਨ ਕਉ ਜਨਮੁ ਮਨੁਖ ਮਿਲਿਆ ਹਰਿ ਨ ਪਛਾਣਨਿ ਫਿਰਿ ਦੁਖ ਪਾਵਹਿ ॥ Those who received the human birth but did not recognize the Divine, suffer endlessly.
The people whose mockery you fear today will not be there when you are dying. The friends will move on. The cousins will be living their own lives. The aunties will gossip about the next person. Your funeral will be conducted, and within a few weeks the conversations of the people you feared will have moved on entirely.
This is not bitter. It is observed reality, given by the Guru, to help us calibrate.
What the Guru asks
Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji is not asking us to become defiant. The teaching is not "ignore everyone, do what you want." That is its own kind of ego.
The teaching is more careful: make your decisions for the One who will be present at the end, not for the people who will not.
If you turn toward the Divine, He will be with you. Through the mockery. Through the family group chats. Through the awkward family weddings. Through the quiet years when your changed life is no longer interesting to anyone. He will be there in a way the mockers were never going to be.
ਜਿਨ ਕਉ ਸਾਸਿ ਗਿਰਾਸਿ ਨ ਵਿਸਰੈ ਸੇ ਪੂਰੇ ਪੁਰਖ ਪਰਧਾਨ ॥ Those who do not forget Him with each breath and morsel — they are the truly fulfilled.
This is the trade the Guru is offering. The approval of people who will not remember your name in a year, for the relationship with the One who is in you, has always been in you, and will be with you when everyone else is gone.
The small practice
How do you actually move past lok-laaj?
Not by arguing with it. Not by becoming aggressive about your spirituality. Not by lecturing your friends. The Guru does not ask for this.
You move past lok-laaj by quietly going ahead anyway. Reading Bani in the early morning when no one is watching. Keeping the small practice you have decided on, regardless of who notices. Letting your changed life be visible without explaining or defending it. The mockers will mock for a season, and then they will lose interest. Most people are not actually paying as much attention to your spiritual life as your mind tells you they are. The mockery you fear is, in most cases, much smaller and shorter than the imagined version.
And by the time the mockery has run its course, you will have built something the mockers cannot touch — a relationship with the Divine that does not depend on their approval, and never required it.
This is what the Guru calls gurmukh. Not a person who has become aggressive about religion. A person whose decisions are oriented toward the Guru rather than toward the watching world. The shift is interior. Most outsiders cannot tell when it happens. The person living it knows.
A gentle word to anyone reading this who is hesitating
If you are reading this because you have been thinking about turning toward Bani — keeping kesh, starting Nitnem, doing simran, returning to gurdwara, just sitting with Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji in the morning — and what is stopping you is not doubt but what people will say:
The people will not say anything for very long. Their attention is shorter than your mind is telling you. The mockery you fear will arrive briefly, hurt briefly, and pass. What you build in those weeks of being mocked will last the rest of your life and into whatever comes after.
The Guru is not asking you to be brave. The Guru is asking you to recognize that the people you fear are not who you think they are, and the One you are turning toward is more present than you have allowed yourself to feel.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ ਜੀ ਕਾ ਖਾਲਸਾ ॥ ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ ਜੀ ਕੀ ਫਤਿਹ ॥