This question nagged at me for years, until I learned in college to ask myself a different order of question: Where does this focus on afterlife come from? And why do I care so much? It was through taking this new question seriously that I was able to uncover my bias. I wasn’t asking this question out of curiosity or because I saw an inconsistency within Sikh philosophy. I was asking because it was a central question in other people’s worldviews. They expected my worldview to mirror theirs because it’s what they knew—and I had unknowingly come to internalize their expectations, too.
