He had been travelling for years — through the villages of Punjab, through the forests and mountains, through Hindu temples and Muslim mosques and Jain temples, accompanied by his Muslim musician Mardana, and everywhere he went he was saying the same thing in different ways: there is no Hindu, there is no Muslim. There is only the one who made both.
He came to Mecca. This was itself extraordinary — a Hindu going to Mecca, the holiest city in Islam. He was received with some suspicion and much curiosity. He attended the prayers, he behaved with respect, and at night he slept.
He slept with his feet pointing toward the Kaaba — the sacred cube at the heart of the mosque, the direction toward which all Muslims pray. In Islamic practice, directing your feet toward the Kaaba is an act of disrespect. The qazi who was present woke him and rebuked him sharply.
Nanak said: I am sorry. Please turn my feet to where God is not, and I will gladly point them there.
The qazi reached for his feet — to turn them away from the Kaaba in the direction of disrespect. But as he turned the feet, the Kaaba seemed to move. He turned them further. The Kaaba moved again.
Every direction he turned the feet, the Kaaba was there.
The story is told across Sikh, Sufi, and the broader North Indian devotional tradition with the same essential point: the divine does not occupy a direction. The divine is not diminished by feet pointing in any direction because the divine is in every direction simultaneously. The qazi's theology had located God in the Kaaba — a precise, specific location that required precise, specific orientation. Nanak's theology located God everywhere, which meant nowhere was disrespectful and every direction was the right direction. Ik Onkar — one universal Consciousness — is not a theology. It is a description of the structure of reality. And reality, when tested with the feet of a sleeping traveller, confirms it in every direction the qazi turned.
Nanak left Mecca and continued his journeys — south to Sri Lanka, east to Assam, north to Tibet. He is said to have travelled more than twenty-eight thousand kilometres over twenty years. Everywhere he went he sang. Mardana played the rabab. The singing was not performance — it was the technology of transmission. The words entered through the ear and did something to the listener that could not be done through argument.
The Guru Granth Sahib — the Sikh scripture — is entirely in musical form. Every word to be sung. This was deliberate. Nanak understood that the mind defended against argument but opened to music. The Kaaba could not be turned away from. The music could not be turned away from either.
In every direction you turn, the divine is there. This is not consolation. It is geography. The feet point somewhere. The somewhere is sacred. So is every other somewhere.