One of the shorter songs and one of the most tender. The Master is near your head, close enough to be felt, and yet you've slept for ages. This is the alarm-clock voice in every mystical tradition — the Gospels have "wake, O sleeper," the Upanishads have "arise, awake," the Buddha's name means "the one who has woken up." The pathos here is the centuries of unnecessary sleep. Kabir is saying: this morning. Not someday. This morning.Katha Upanishad 1.3.14; Ephesians 5:14.
The line about your Lord standing near to your head — nikat virajat — has a technical resonance in Kabir's tradition. The Sant mystics located the inner Beloved specifically behind the forehead, at what yogic literature calls the ajna chakra or tritiya-netra, the third eye. The sleeper's head is the seat of the Presence, and yet the sleeper is unconscious of it. Ephesians lands the same figure with different anatomy: awake, O sleeper, arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. In both cases the sleeper is lying against the very surface of what he is looking for.Ephesians 5:14; ajna chakra in Shat-chakra-nirupana.