Church of the Churchless

How the RSSB guru was involved with Ranbaxy

If you want to know the truth about Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an Indian religious organization), a great place to look is my compendium of comments left on this blog by "Tara" between 2010 and 2014. 

In 2018 I compiled the 27,000 words worth of comments into a post, "Devastating criticism of Gurinder Singh Dhillon by a RSSB insider."

The comments, though not entirely negative in regard to Dhillon, paint a different picture of the guru than devotees see when he sits on a stage and talks about spiritual subjects.

In a recent comment on this blog, someone raised the question of who orchestrated the sale of Ranbaxy, a pharmaceutical company controlled at the time by Malvinder Singh, a relative of the RSSB guru. 

I shared one of the comments by "Tara" that said it was Dhillon who advised on the sale. That got me to thinking it would be interesting to see what other mentions of Ranbaxy were in other comments by Tara.

I've shared all of those mentions below. They make for interesting reading, especially if the reader is concerned about how a guru supposedly focused on God-realization became so enmeshed in gigantic business deals and making he and his family hugely rich to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Enjoy... the comments are in reverse chronological order, so the most recent ones by "Tara" appear first.

Catherine, a few corrections : Parminder Singh died in Delhi in 1999 following a prolonged battle with cancer. His sons, Shivinder Mohan Singh and Malvinder Mohan Singh ( now known as the Singh Brothers ) succeeded him. Ranbaxy was always a professionally managed company in the days of Dr. Singh, but following his passing, many differences between the board and the promoters crept in.

 

Gurinder is said to have played his part. Malvinder Singh sought to muscle in after an eruption of disagreements with the professional CEO — D.S Brar, one of the oldest employees of Ranbaxy who was instrumental along with Dr. Singh in shaping the vision for Ranbaxy. Brar resigned in 2004 and it was all downhill for Ranbaxy from there. Malvinder Singh re-shuffled the board and took control. By the end of it — price wars, reduced profitability, debt and expiring patents got the better of Ranbaxy.

 

In mid 2008, the Singh Brothers decided to sell the family's 64% stake to Daiichi Sankyo in a deal that was too overwhelmingly overvalued to decline. In just months after their takeover, the Japanese realized that they were stung in the backside, and Malvinder Singh was politely told to leave. Read : http://business.rediff.com/column/2009/jun/05/malvinder-singhs-ranbaxy-report-card.htm

 

Please note that there was always some confusion about Dr. Singh's name : Parminder or Parvinder, you'll find half the articles on one name and the other half on the other. A short biography of Dr. Singh can be found here... Read : http://www.sikh-history.com/sikhhist/personalities/parvinder.html Gurinder affair with the Singh Brother's had already begun in 2006 with the inception of Religare, the financial services company that he mentored.

 

The sale of Ranbaxy gave Religare the shot of capital that it needed. Whatever transpired between them, it is quite clear that Gurinder's wealth was created by the opportunity that he found or was given to him — by the Singh Brothers. But, it is also important to note that Gurinder may have made a number of important and correct decisions for the Singh Brothers after Dr. Singh's demise.

 

Of course, selling the golden goose for ten thousand golden eggs is debatable, but with the valuation that Ranbaxy got, it would have taken an extremely conservative and competent man to say no and walk the company back to a second term of success. But then again, Gurinder's role as the family's Guru and business advisor, coupled with his own personal business agenda, was a bit too entwined to do any differently.

 

IMO, I think RSSB should seriously consider updating Gurinder's wikipedia information to include Religare. Unless of course, like everything else, he wants to keep 'em guessing !

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Okay... Charan was a different man. He was not interested in Ranbaxy and the politics, and often told Parminder to manage his professional journey outside Beas. He was clear about his role as the head of RSSB and did not mix that with a side-business. His own son is working for Fortis today. Had Charan taken advantage of his proximity to Parminder, his sons would have been shareholders, three decades ago !

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Nietzsche. Great ! You've made the effort to backtrack into Gurinder's current financial status and what you've stated sums up the facts very well. I'm relieved that what I've been harping about on the COTC ( that makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist in the process ) has some validation from an independent fellow blogger... :)

 

My additional thoughts are : Gurinder ordered the Ranbaxy sell-out, and as a faith policy, Shivinder and Malvinder do not over-rule anything HE decides. The final " go ahead boys " was given by Gurinder. I know this because the celebratory cheers resounded with a boisterous " Baba-ji does not make any mistakes ! " that came from none other than Sunil Godhwani, Baba-ji's right-hand man.

 

Before the news hit the press, everyone knew that a chunk of that booty would be pumped into Religare. Of course, Ranbaxy's health was generously inflated, but the sell-out was the best possible move from a financial standpoint — considering that the Singh Brothers made quite a mess of the succession when they inherited the company, which subsequently reflected in the company's performance over the years.

 

There was a joke in the corporates circles here that Parminder Singh was in a big shock in heaven when he learnt that Gurinder had advised his sons to sell Ranbaxy. His reaction was : " What ? Who the f*** is he ? " ( LOL ) This entire Religare affair that Gurinder's having with the Singh Brothers is in direct conflict with his role as a Guru, whether he's teaching 1.0 or 3.0. His insatiable appetite for wealth is sick, specially when there is no charitable initiative for the poorer sections of the Sangat that make up for ninety-five percent of his following.

 

IMO, Gurinder wants them to remain hungry and foolish otherwise they will not be interested in the salvation promise, which is why I think that Sant Mat 3.0 will never be introduced to the langar. You are absolutely right about the Mc-Donald's style of operations at Fortis. Also, the services they provide are the Micky-D's equivalent of fries and nuggets. It is all about the money, with little regard for ethical practice and human life.

 

But, it is interesting to note that post Ranbaxy, none of the Singh Brothers' businesses have been particularly profitable. It is too early to call, but Fortis is struggling. And, going forward, the competition will intensify. Religare is hemorrhaging under the acumen-devoid leadership of Sunil Godhwani and is showing no signs of recovering. Religare continually gets mini bail-outs from the huge cash reserves that the Singh Brothers are currently sitting on, but the well could dry-up in less than a decade if their current run continues.

 

It is also possible that Gurinder could make some bad ( not-so-GIHF ) decisions. Our comments here are forming a valuable archive for those who will seek to find out more, specially after the radical shift in the Sant Mat teachings. I like the Japanese quote, it applies to all of us.

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Nietzsche. No ! No ! Lets get this straight. Analjit Singh has not become rich on the backs of his nephews — the Singh Brothers. He was Bhai Mohan Singh's youngest son and Parminder Singh's youngest brother. Following a family division in 1989, the pharma business ( Ranbaxy ) went to his older brother ( Parminder ) and he got the smaller Max India. Has since built it into $1 billion ( sales ) Max Group with interests in healthcare, insurance, clinical research and packaging.

 

Currently, his healthcare business ( Max Hospitals ) is the biggest competitor of Fortis Healthcare, which is the healthcare business of the Singh Brothers. They are business rivals and the two families have never had any commercial alliance with each other after they parted ways in the Charan Singh days. Of course, they have often dragged each other to court over petty disputes ( a small property or some section of Bhai Mohan Singh's will ) but it was Analjit who got the raw deal when his father preferentially gave Ranbaxy to his oldest son.

 

For more on Analjit, this article sums it up well : http://business.in.com/article/boardroom/analjit-singhs-futureproof-strategy/24072/1 Gurinder's two sons, Gurpreet Singh Dhillon and Gurkirat Singh Dhillon can be found on the Indian Billionaires Club on the website here : http://www.indiastudychannel.com/resources/87721-Billionaire-Club-Ranking.aspx

 

Okay friend, stop looking for Gurinder on that list ! He's way smarter than that. The legitimate money is in his sons' names who live in London. It is highly likely that the larger ill-legit amounts are off-shored safely in the private banks of Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

 

His sons lead a rather discreet life in London. Most of their friends do not even know who their father is ! I can't find the latest rankings where they are at 355 / 356, but this rating ranks them at 360 / 361 respectively. ( I'll tell someone to search it out and I'll post it later ! )

 

Another correction — Ranbaxy was not sold last year, it was in the June of 2008. Immediately after that ( in July ) the Singh Brothers formally changed the name of Fortis Financial Ltd. to Religare Enterprises Ltd. The name " Religare " was chosen / approved by Gurinder. ( The etymology of the word « religion » in latin : Religare, means to bind. )

 

What else ? Hmmm... Yeah, there is a ton of stuff on Ranbaxy's dubious business practices. They were quite infamous for their animal testing methods, that is fine, but the promoters followed a rigid spiritual path that did not permit mayo. Oops ! Gurinder is the only " relative " who is a business partner and has made big money with the Singh Brothers. The rest of them are high paid employees, like Charan's son Cuckoo who works for Fortis Hospitals.
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Familial Ties / Religare: Gurinder is Charan's nephew (his sister's son) and back in the day, Charan had nothing to do with Dr. Parminder Singh's (his son-in-law) fortunes. Nimmie (Charan's daughter) had a rather turbulent relationship with her husband (Dr. Parminder Singh) and Charan was often involved in resolving their marital issues. Towards the end Nimmie and Parminder were living separately.

In Charan's guru-days, Gurinder was just another member of the extended family. The Grewal's (Charan's family) and the Dhillon's (Gurinder's family) were not very close, nor were Gurinder and Nimmie (cousins). But, Charan was always very fond of Gurinder, who was (at that time) a simple man from a modest financial background, dedicated to his Guru Uncle.

Gurinder was working at the Hyatt Regency, New Delhi (as an Assistant Food & Beverage Manager there) and his career wasn't exactly going places. It was Charan who lined up a job for him with the Bilani's in Spain and Gurinder would scour China / HK and other Asian countries for watch parts. From a job in a hotel to a billionaire businessman? Like they say, you've come a long way baby... :)

Dr. Parminder Singh was an industry captain and a visionary exemplar. A lot changed after his demise in 1999. His sons (Malvinder and Shivinder) were very young and inexperienced at the time, and Ranbaxy was being run by a group of professionals headed by D.S Brar (then MD & CEO, a non-family member) who was instrumental (along with Dr. Singh) in transforming Ranbaxy from a small Indian pharmaceutical company into a research-based global pharmaceutical major.

The disagreements over Ranbaxy's international expansion strategy between Brar and the family surfaced in 2002 and Brar exited before the end of his term, leaving what happened behind the boardroom doors a mystery. An analyst, commenting on the Ranbaxy succession planning issue, said - "The question, however, uppermost in most people's mind is: (that) does the decision reflect a tussle between the promoter and professional management in which the promoter eventually had his way." Initially,

Gurinder was just playing an advisory role to the Singh Brothers. Soon, that "advisory role" turned into a full-time consultancy of sorts and it was soon heard that Malvinder & Shivinder "don't make a move" without HIS advise.

That "HIS" was Gurinder - a backstage operator in Ranbaxy's succession that led to Malvinder quickly taking up the post of MD & CEO in what was once a professionally run company. In the months that followed, Gurinder and the Singh Brothers became inseparable when it came to taking business decisions. Then in December 2005, Gurinder announced to his family and close friends that he will not be giving business advise to any one after the turn of the year!

 

Who knows, maybe the Singh brother's thought of "including" him in some way and it was around that time Fortis was launched as a financial services company, which was then re-named Religare... (I can bet this name was Gurinder's pick, the definition of Religare is mentioned somewhere on the RSSB website in an essay with reference to religion and spirituality.)

 

Gurinder is very shrewd, it would take a very smart person to do what he is doing. Keeping everyone's faith while making a great deal of money is not something that all of us can pull off. Of course, he has an added advantage of playing "God" so he gets away unquestioned and unscrutinized. I doubt if Dr. Parminder Singh would have approved of any of this.

 

Charan Singh (Parminder's father-in-law) was not his business advisor! It is common knowledge that Ranbaxy and RSSB were separate entities during Charan's tenure - one was into the pharma business while the other was into the God business... In fact, Charan had his hands full with the politics within the Dera and wholly discouraged any kind of business association with himself or RSSB trust.

If you take a look into the Ranbaxy archives, there is no trace of Gurinder or any of his immediate family members being associated to Ranbaxy or to Dr. Parminder Singh and Nimmie Singh in any way - through employment, through shareholding, through inheritance.

The fact that one of Charan's two sons is working in Fortis today (you can confirm this on the Fortis website, his name is Jasbir Grewal aka Cuckoo) and has no shareholding in either Religare or Fortis clearly shows that Charan did not take advantage of his familial relationships, else shouldn't his son be richer than his nephew ( Gurinder ) today? I would also like to add here that Gurinder and his sons are the only family members who are shareholders in the Singh brothers' businesses. It is not like there is a consortium of familial relations managing these companies.

Relatives are employed, but share-holding has been reserved only for the Guru and his sons. I can tell you for certain that no uncle or aunt of Gurinder had gifted him the initial capital (millions of dollars) to invest in Religare. Gurinder comes from a humble past, and for those who think that he has hectares "farmland" it may be good to know a fact - Gurinder and his immediate family are not agricultural industrialists of Punjab. A few acres of wheat and mustard produce cannot buy pre-issued shares in a global financial services company!

If you read the Religare prospectus, the shares were transferred to his sons at a pre-issue price of INR 10 before the IPO was launched. Like I said in my earlier comment, I see no reason for the Singh Brothers to part with the shareholding if there wasn't something in it for them.

 

That is why, IMO, the RSSB trust-funds cross-holdings with Religare is not such a smokin' conspiracy theory after all. I do not think that Gurinder and his family are directly siphoning out money from the RSSB trust. However, there is an institution in place (Religare) which manages the RSSB trust-funds, and in turn helps the Guru and his family profiteer from it. It is a legal v/s moral issue and if you look at this from a pure " Sant Mat " perspective, all of it looks terribly wrong!

This is not your average Wall Street banker we're discussing, this is GIHF - the Perfect Living Master, the Param Sant Sat Guru of Kalyug. The plethora of RS teachings now looks like a bigger pile of BS ! What ever happened to " Honest Living " I wonder... Gurinder's younger son - Gurkirat Singh Dhillon is the youngest billionaire on the Indian Billionaires List. The children of other billionaires are the inheritors of business legacies or are first-generation entrepreneurs - their success stories are a Google search away.

 

Gurinder's older son lives in a posh apartment in Mayfair, London. Has he earned it, or is it a by-product of having a Guru-dad ? My concern is for the poor villager who takes out his INR 10 to put into the RSSB money-box. That INR 10 could also buy him another meal. Something to think about - specially when salvation does not seem to be happening.

 

Well, I don't think we'll find Gurinder absconding one day, my guess is that he may head out in an autonomous direction (the signs are already there) and may even renunciate his leadership and Guru-status in the years to come. This may be a long shot, but like all things RSSB - it will be well orchestrated and the Sangat will be satisfied.
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SKat, Please read http://business.in.com/printcontent/932 and that should put the real facts in line. If Ranbaxy was all that cash rich, why did they sell out ? So, they sold the golden goose for ten thousand golden eggs ? Really ? Was it the current trend of intensifying generic competition and increased government regulation that got to them ?

It is common knowledge that Ranbaxy became debt-free after the deal and got $1 billion in cash to pursue inorganic growth opportunities more aggressively. It is also common knowledge that Parminder Singh would have wholly disapproved of Malvinder's business approach. Back in the day, Ranbaxy had one of the renowned R&D departments in the pharmaceutical sector. Many patents on drugs were about to expire industry wide, which would have allowed other pharma companies to innovate and produce products at lower costs.

The Daiichi-Ranbaxy deal was valued at 4.3 times sales and 21 times EBITDA on historical earnings. Malvinder wouldn't have got a better catch than Daiichi. He got the Japanese - hook, line and sinker ! And, the Parkway Hospital in-and-out deal was the only option as a bidding war with Khazanah would have bled them. Nothing wrong with a " good deal " though Corporate India did expect the Singh brothers to resist ! Instead, Malvinder came back with all bags packed and a neat pile of money.

From your comment it seems likely that you probably know that RSSB trust funds were ( and continue to be diverted ) to Religare. Do you see another reason for the Guru's two sons being shareholders ? What was Gurinder's financial status prior to becoming the Guru ? Of course, you don't have to answer this, but I'm sure that if you know the Head of Treasury and Head of Finance at Religare, you know the truth.

 

And, in this case, they more than hint about the Guru's involvement. It is all very risky, and you probably also know that that if this is publicly proved, it may spell disaster for the RSSB cult. By the way ( as tAo well noted ) we at the Church of the Churchless had nothing to do with the near-collapse of the global banking system ! Gurinder is a bigger fraud than all those bankers combined and he hails from our land. Besides, how different are the business practices of Mukesh Ambani, Malvinder Singh and co. in this country for you to be pulling out a fair-play card ?
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( The Singh brothers cannot be considered " family " in this regard as they " got into business " with Gurinder only in 2006, prior to which Gurinder had nothing to do with Ranbaxy and had no business of his own. ) B. There is no road-map to indicate how the Guru and his sons became ( now the largest ) shareholders of a two billion dollar company... ( ?? ) C. Why were shares transferred at a pre-issue price to Gurpreet and Gurkirat only ? Why is Gurpreet nowhere to be seen on the Religare India website ? Why is he tucked away in London ? Why has he never been interviewed ?

Here's what meditation is and isn't, from a Buddhist perspective

People have a lot of different views about what meditation is and isn't. I've changed my mind on this subject considerably. 

For thirty-five years I viewed meditation as a way to access a supernatural realm of reality, have mystical experiences, and realize God. But that's a narrow perspective, something I realize now.

Currently I embrace a form of meditation that is vaguely Buddhist, even though I don't consider myself a devotee of Buddhism. I enjoy being as fully aware as possible of what is happening both inside and outside me, within my mind and without in the world. 

Which, I suppose, could be called mindfulness. 

This morning I started reading a book by Steve Hagen, "Meditation Now or Never." I thought I'd read all of Hagen's books, but somehow I'd missed this one until recently.

It's good. Short, simple, direct. In all of his writings Hagen takes religion out of Buddhism, which leaves the Buddha's original teachings, insofar as it is possible to discern what they were.

Below are excerpts from a right-on chapter, Things Mistaken for Meditation. It turns out that almost everything I thought was meditation for those thirty-five years actually isn't. At least, not from a Buddhist viewpoint. 

Let's start, though, with what Hagen says meditation is. 

Meditation is, finally, just to be here. Not over there, in some other place called peace or freedom or enlightenment. Not longing for something else. Not trying to be, or to acquire, something new or different. Not seeking benefit. 

We need to understand that the wanting mind is the antithesis of the mind of meditation. The mind of meditation is a mind not driven by desires and fears and longings.

Indeed, a mind that seeks to rid itself of these painful mental qualities is already the dissatisfied and confused mind from which we seek to free ourselves. 

When we desire the desirelessness, we remain trapped in desire. When we want the wantlessness, we bind ourselves with yet another chain.

And here's the excerpts regarding what Hagen says meditation isn't. 

Relaxation. If your goal is to temporarily calm down, a simple relaxation technique is helpful. If, however, you want to experience a mind that is present and collected, this is the mind of meditation. Meditation, in other words, is not a quick fix. It's long-term -- that is, it's a lifelong approach to peace of mind, tranquility, and stability.

Visualization. With visualization, you actively conjure up images in your mind. In meditation, however, there's no deliberate effort to conjure up anything, or to create any mental phenomena. Plenty of them will bubble up anyway, and in meditation, we don't try to hold on to them or drive them out. Contrary to visualization, in meditation we allow our mental images to freely come and go.

Trance. In most trance meditations, you turn inward and tune out awareness of your surroundings, your body, and your mind. Your attention becomes filed down to a very narrow, still point, which can feel temporarily blissful. But every trance is itself temporary. When you come out of it, you're back to all of the problems and confusion that were there when you went into it. There's no transformation.

Supernatural powers. But meditation is not about acquiring anything. In fact, it's about getting rid of the clutter of our mental lives. It's an act of mental housecleaning... Meditation is not about acquiring supernatural powers. It's about being present and living life completely... If you think about what you're getting from this moment, you're not in this moment. 

Going beyond. Another misunderstanding about meditation is that it's a bodily form of philosophical inquiry, a method for breaking through some cosmic mystery to a transcendent reality beyond our everyday world. Meditation is not about any "beyond." Truth and Reality are right here, in plain view. They are not vague or far away... In meditation, we see that there is no cosmic mystery to break through.

Enlightenment. You can't become enlightened. It's not possible. You can't become enlightened for the same reason that you can't come into contact with Truth: you're already here, immersed in it. It's like trying to become human, or searching high and low for air. When we search for enlightenment, we're like a fish searching for water or a bird seeking the sky.

Escaping from reality. Sometimes people get the idea that meditation is about escaping from our lives, or our painful feelings, or even Reality itself. In fact, meditation is just the opposite It's about settling down and facing Reality. In meditation we investigate our own mind openly and honestly, without denying anything. We see how we tell ourselves stories about ourselves, about others, and about the world.

Bliss. Many people come to meditation hoping to experience bliss, euphoria, ecstasy, or some superconscious state of mind. Many spiritual practices and exercises aim at inducing such states. But so can any number of things, both good and not so good -- a gorgeous sunrise, rapturous music, sex, street drugs, or even a double expresso. Meditation is not about creating any particular feeling. Meditation is about awareness, about waking up to Reality.

Spiritual thoughts. Occasionally, people use meditation to try to experience lofty or highly spiritual thoughts. These thoughts are just more distractions, more forms of delusion. In meditation, whether our thoughts are lofty or low, mundane or spiritual, we view them in the same way. We allow them, and whatever else comes up, to appear and to pass away.

Quick cure. Lastly, meditation is not a quick cure for anything. It won't magically heal your illness or fix your depression or get rid of your loneliness. It won't provide comfort or solace or nurturing, at least not the kind we typically look for to try to temporarily ease our pain. Instead, the practice of meditation involves transformation. 

...Through our effort of coming back again and again to this moment, where all of us live, we learn how to live in this world with sanity, intelligence, and true compassion.

 

What is versus what might be -- a rationale for atheism

There are several reasons why I'm a proud atheist. For example, atheism is firmly grounded in reality, since there is no demonstrable evidence that a god exists. Hence the "a" before theism. 

Atheism also is humble. I'm not saying that all atheists are humble, just that not believing in a god is inherently humble, since there is no way to feel that you're part of a god's chosen people if you don't believe in a god.

Here's another reason. 

Atheism is focused on what is, not what might be. In contrast, religions have the opposite focus, on what might be rather than what is. Now, obviously this is closely tied to the first reason above, the grounding of atheism in reality.

Mostly I hang out with other atheists. This isn't a conscious choice. It is just a natural outcome of the sort of friends and family I have. They're mostly people who embrace science and facts, in addition to the many other possible things people embrace, like art and politics. 

In our conversations, obviously there is zero talk of what happens after death or an afterlife. Religious believers, though, love to talk about heaven, reincarnation, spending eternity with God, and so on. 

The fact that there's no good reason to believe in this stuff doesn't bother them. Hey, it might be true, and that's good enough for people who value fantasy and wishful thinking over what is -- indisputable reality.

Of course, us atheists, along with everybody else, have to strike a balance between attending to what is versus what might be. Planning for the future is as much a part of being human as living in the now is. They're both essential for a fulfilling life.

To offer up an example from my life, a few days ago I wrote a post on one of my other blogs, "My geeky search for the perfect winter tire." As I said in the post, the first question I faced was whether I should get winter tires for the 2020 Subaru Crosstrek that I bought last February. 

That was easy for me to answer.

My wife and I live in a part of Oregon where it can be snowy or icy in late fall, winter, and maybe even early spring. We don't get a lot of snow and ice, none at all the last two years, but when it happens, it's tough to drive around. We live in the south Salem hills, so some roads, along with our driveway, are steep.

And often the temperature is close to freezing when snow or ice hits. That makes roads more slippery than the dry snow common in the mid-West, which also is quite flat. 

So based on my experience of what has been, a close cousin of what is, I decided to order a set of winter tires yesterday -- a new Michelin model, the X-Ice Snow. I recalled how we haven't been able to get up our driveway in the snow with an all-wheel-drive car that had all-season tires, whereas a front-wheel drive car with winter tires did just fine. So an all-wheel drive car with winter tires will be super-fine.

But it would be crazy for someone to buy winter tires if they lived on a place near the equator where it never has snowed or been icy. In this case the odds of needing winter tires to drive around is close to zero. Possible, but extremely unlikely.

That's comparable to religious people planning for an afterlife when it is extremely unlikely that they'll have one.

There's a cost to religiosity, to acting on the basis of a very low probability of might be. Whereas the cost of winter tires is monetary, the cost of religious belief is using one's limited lifetime for activities that aren't based on clear and present reality.

I'm going to feel good when the winter tires are put on my Crosstrek, because I have a solid factual basis for believing there might be snow or ice in our area in the next four or five months. However, no one has a solid factual basis for believing there might be an afterlife, because those facts don't exist.

They might exist someday, though.

Just as if global warming continues to increase, there could come a time when winter tires are needed in Western Oregon just as much as they're needed now at the equator -- never. Keeping an open mind to new facts enables us to preserve a healthy relationship between what is and what might be.

Here's a passage from a recent issue of New Scientist that bears on this.

One of the special things about science is its inbuilt system of self-correction. There is no such thing as scientific truth, just a set of provisional truths that are subject to revision or rejection when new information comes in. That process isn't always quick or peaceful, but it usually gets an answer in the end. The result is scientific progress.

Adyashanti book confirms my commitment to secular spirituality

Recently someone who asked if I'd like to be a guest on her podcast (I would!) responded to an email I sent her which said, in part, "I’m sort of in the spiritual-but-not-religious camp. However, I’m not sure if 'spiritual' has any meaning for an atheist."

She replied, saying, "The intersection I think we may intersect is this kind of secular spirituality pursuit. Would you say that's a phrase you kind of resonate with? That's the sense I get from your writings."

Sure. Typically secular means not-religious, not-spiritual, not-sacred. But I like the idea of mixing two seemingly contradictory ideas into the notion of secular spirituality. 

That preserves the useful notion of spirituality as a quest to lay bare the deeper meaning of life, to dig deeper into what it means to be human. And it makes clear that this quest has nothing to do with supernatural B.S. or mystical mumbo-jumbo.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why I quickly decided to stop reading a book by Adyashanti, "Emptiness Dancing." 

I ordered it from Amazon after listening to ten minutes of an interview Sam Harris did with Adyashanti on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app. It had been a while since I'd gotten a new book about Zen Buddhism, and I found Adyashanti making quite a bit of sense in the interview.

In retrospect, I should have paid more attention to the fact that the guy didn't have his original name of Stephen Gray.

By and large, I find that books written by people with assumed "spiritual" names don't appeal to me, because this shows that the author has bought into some sort of dogma where giving up your birth name is seen as desirable for some mysterious reason.

Still, I enjoy Zen Buddhism when it is stripped of religious crap. It didn't take more than a few pages of reading Emptiness Dancing before I realized that this book wasn't for me, since alarm bells began ringing in my mind when I came to these passages. The italicized part is my thought when I read them.

p.2  "Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren't even generated by you." Oh, yeah? That's news to me. Where else would stuff in my mind come from if not from me -- both the unconscious and conscious mind of me?

p.3 "What arose was an image of what seemed like an infinite number of past incarnations, as if heads were lined up one behind another as far back as I could see." Ugh. A Zen Buddhist who believes in reincarnation, a thoroughly religious concept. 

p. 7 "We realize our own pure awareness and see that what we are is pure spirit with no form. We recognize that formless spirit is the essence, the animating presence of everything." One pure in a sentence is bad enough, two is insufferable. Any resemblance to genuine Zen is purely coincidental in Adyashanti.

Adding to my irritation with Adyashanti's book was how he spun his supposed enlightenment experience. One moment he was his ordinary self. The next moment he'd achieved... something or other. He says that suddenly "Everything was a reflection of that One thing. Everything was divine."

OK, that's cool. But everybody has amazing experiences. Few people, though, set themselves up as teachers where they try to get other people to have the same experience they had. Tellingly, Adyashanti says he had the thought, "Oops. I just woke up out of Zen!"

No kidding. I've never read a Zen book that speaks of heaven, but Adyashanti does. Apparently he's calling his own personal philosophy "Zen" even though it bears little resemblance to Zen Buddhism. 

After I put "Emptiness Dancing" aside with a feeling of relief, I picked up a book of Sam Harris's interviews with fascinating scientists, mostly. I read about the promise and pitfall of artificial intelligence, machines that soon will surpass human intelligence. It was refreshing to focus on something real rather than Adyashanti's forays into whatever his Oneness consists of.

Understand: I'll all for meditation. That's why I've meditated every day for over fifty years. I believe in mental exercises, just as I believe in physical exercises.

I also agree with Adyashanti and Sam Harris that it is possible, and beneficial, to come to a realization that our feeling of being an enduring"self" is an illusion. I just don't believe that an organized spiritual practice is needed to get in touch with what each of us already is -- a being without a lasting self.

I snapped this photo in early September of the view through the window of the room where I do my morning reading and meditating. I was struck by how my view of the curving metal dragon sculpture stuck in the ground next to a large fern was so nicely situated between two bonsai "trees" in a planter in front of the window.

Today I was struck by something different -- the absence of the sculpture.

At first I thought it had gotten hidden behind some fern fronds. But as I looked more closely, I saw that the dragon was still there. High winds yesterday had turned it sideways, so all that was visible was the thin edge of the dragon sculpture. You can see that edge in the "V" above the bottom of a bridge that's part of the bonsai planter.

This seemed like an apt metaphor. When we face the world head on, making a big deal of ourselves, considering that how we view things is the way everybody should, our sense of self is magnified.

But when we make a subtle change, turning sideways to the world, feeling how small we are compared to the vast cosmos, accepting that everyone has their own view of how things should be, our sense of self is diminished.

I bounce back and forth between these perspectives, as most of us do. And that's fine.

Some days I feel like facing the world head on. Other days I feel like turning aside and letting the world slide by me. I don't think it is possible to do anything else, though Adyashanti apparently believes he has become One With Everything.

Maybe. I doubt it, though.

"A good traveller has no fixed plans," says Lao Tzu

The Eastern religion that I was an active member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), liked to talk of being on "the path." (One of the RSSB books is called "The Path of the Masters.")

Well, my attitude toward religious or spiritual paths has changed a lot. And it keeps changing. 

More and more, I'm convinced that not only is there no evidence that any path leads to God or some supernatural reality, it isn't even wise for someone to consider that they're on a life path in this physical world. 

At least, that's how I see it. Naturally others are free to disagree. 

Below you'll find some passages I liked in the final chapter of "The Antidote" by Oliver Burkeman. They talk about the desirability of not craving certainty, of not feeling you are on a path that must lead to a certain destination. 

This isn't the way life works for most of us. Heck, maybe all of us. I got to thinking about this as I was exercising this afternoon in my covid crisis fashion.

Since my wife and I don't feel comfortable with going to our athletic club, I've been exercising at home. I've bought several pieces of home exercise equipment, including the Nucleus Central Core Pro, a simple device that I'm enjoying. 

After exercising a certain way for quite a few years, now I'm doing things differently. And that's been the case my whole life.

From high school into my 30s, I played a lot of competitive tennis. I also jogged. Then I took up karate in my early 40s. For the past sixteen years I've been a student of Tai Chi. So my physical exercise habits keep on changing. 

Same with my mental exercise habits.

I've meditated every day for over fifty years, starting in 1969. But I've experimented with different meditation approaches over the years. Mindfulness and following the breath appeal to me now, whereas for a long time I enjoyed mantra meditation, silently repeating a word or words.

Being frozen in place isn't really living. Life is fluid, always changing. That's one of the messages of Burkeman's book, as reflected in these passages.

Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.

...More loosely defined, 'negative capability' is really just another term for living in accordance with the 'backwards law' -- and it might be a good label to describe the chief talent I kept discovering among the people I encountered in the course of researching this book. 

What they all shared was this same turn of mind, which I came to visualise as a sort of graceful mental dance step: a willingness to adopt an oblique stance toward one's own inner life; to pause and take a step back; to turn to face what others might flee from; and to realise that the shortest apparent route to a positive mood is rarely a sure path to a more profound kind of happiness.

The phrase 'negative capability' also helps to clarify a subtle double meaning in the word 'negative'. It refers both to a set of skills that involve 'not-doing', as opposed to doing -- a negative kind of capability -- as well as to the fact that this skill involves confronting negative (as in 'unpleasant') thoughts, emotions, and situations.

The point here is not that negative capability is always superior to the positive kind. Optimism is wonderful; goals can sometimes be useful; even positive thinking and positive visualisation have their benefits.

The problem is that we have developed the habit of chronically overvaluing positivity and the skills of 'doing' in how we think about happiness, and we chronically undervalue negativity and the 'not-doing' skills, such as resting in uncertainty or getting friendly towards failure.

To use an old cliche of therapy, we spend too much of our lives seeking 'closure'.

...For the Stoics, the realisation that we can often choose not to be distressed by events, even if we can't choose events themselves, is the foundation of tranquility. For the Buddhists, a willingness to observe the 'inner weather' of your thoughts and emotions is the key to understanding that they need not dictate your actions.

Each of these is a different way of resisting the 'irritable reaching' after better circumstances or better thoughts and feelings. But negative capability need not involve embracing an ancient philosophy or religious tradition.

It is also the skill you're exhibiting when you move forward with a project -- or with life -- in the absence of sharply defined goals; when you dare to inspect your failures; when you stop trying to eliminate feelings of insecurity; or when you put aside 'motivational' techniques in favour of actually getting something done.

...And the end result of all this? The chief benefit of 'openture', Paul Pearsall claimed, is not certitude or even calm or comfort as we normally think of them, but rather the 'strange, excited comfort [of] being presented with, and grappling with, the tremendous mysteries life offers'.

Ultimately, what defines the 'cult of optimism' and the culture of positive thinking -- even in its most mystically tinged, New Age forms -- is that it abhors a mystery. It seems to make things certain, to make happiness permanent and final. And yet this kind of happiness -- even if you do manage to achieve it -- is shallow and unsatisfying.

The greatest benefit of negative capability -- the true power of negative thinking -- is that it lets the mystery back in.

...The aforementioned Paul Pearsall, inventor of 'openture', spent a large part of his life waging a lonely battle of which John Keats would surely have approved: to get the concept of 'awe' accepted by the psychological establishment as one of the primary human emotions, alongside such standards as love, joy, anger, fear, and sadness.

'Unlike all the other emotions,' he argued, awe 'is all of our feelings rolled up into one intense one. You can't peg it as just happy, sad, afraid, angry, or hopeful Instead, it's a matter of experiencing all these feelings and yet, paradoxically, experiencing no clearly identifiable, or at least any easily describable emotion.'

Awe, he writes, 'is like trying to assemble a complex jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. There's never any closure in an awe-inspired life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life. We've never allowed to know when this dramatic voyage might end... but that's part of the life-disorienting chaos that makes this choice so thrillingly difficult.'

...The negative path to happiness, then, is a different kind of path. But it is also a path to a different kind of destination. Or maybe it makes more sense to say that the path is the destination?

These things are excruciatingly hard to put into words, and the spirt of negative capability surely dictates that we do not struggle too hard to do so. 'A good traveller has no fixed plans,' says the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, 'and is not intent upon arriving.'

There could be no better way to make the journey.

"Right view" of Buddhism is of the whole dynamic world

Here's another passage from Steve Hagen's book, "Buddhism Plain and Simple," that I liked a lot. It helps explain what Hagen means by seeing, the key notion in his book. 

The way I interpret what Hagen says below isn't that we can't have views, opinions, biases. I'm a progressive who wants Kamala Harris to beat Mike Pence's butt in tonight's vice-presidential debate. 

Supporters of Pence have a different view. That's fine. 

What isn't fine is believing that our view is 100% correct, faultless, impossible to be argued with. As I often say on this blog, nothing is completely certain. Even science recognizes that the most proven scientific theories are open to falsification, even though the chance of this is low.

So Hagen says we shouldn't be caught by our views. We shouldn't hold on to them so tightly we can't make room in our mind for considering alternative views.

I also like what Hagen says about a view of the Whole.

I'm not sure how practical or easy it is to have a view of the Whole, though. I suspect that what Hagen means by this is that our overall view of reality should be based on the core Buddhist tenet that everything changes, nothing is fixed in place forever.

Read on...

The first aspect of the eightfold path is right view. According to the Buddha, to hold onto any particular view is to freeze Reality, to try to encapsulate the world into thought. To take a view is like taking a snapshot -- you've frozen the scene right there.

Once we hold a view, it's not long before our view will buck up against other views. After that, the people holding the various views will file off into separate camps. And then we start to go after each other.

What the Buddha meant by right view isn't like this at all. The view of a Buddha isn't an ordinary, frozen view.

There are those who argue that the Buddha didn't have any view whatsoever, but this is not correct. What the Buddha meant by right view is not being caught by a particular view. It's not being caught by ideas, concepts, beliefs, or opinions.

The view of a buddha is of how things actually are -- which in light of the constant flux and flow of the world, is no one way in particular. 

After all, how can things be a particular way if they are in constant motion? How can a hard-and-fast view of a world that is never hard or fast possibly be accurate?

It's not the particulars of the world that provide us with right view, but the world itself, as an ever-dynamic Whole. Right view is Wholesome -- that is, it's of the Whole. It's all inclusive. It leaves nothing out.

Such a view, by definition, does not go to war with any other view. In fact, it cannot. Since it's already of the dynamic world as a Whole, we can't conceive of anything that opposes it.

Seeing that there is no see'er inside our head is clear sight

I've been re-reading one of my favorite spiritual books, Steve Hagen's "Buddhism Plain and Simple."

I love how Hagen strips out Buddhism's religious and supernatural aspects, leaving the genuine teachings of the Buddha.

Hagen's key idea in the book is seeing. Here's a passage I read today that illustrates what he means by this.

Breaking the grip of ignorance and craving comes with just seeing, not with doing something particular about it. Once you see, your course of action will naturally follow. 

The problem in dealing with craving is that when we try to squelch it, we only step it up somewhere else. It comes bursting out more intensely than ever. For example, suppose you notice, "I'm craving a pizza now."

That's fine. Just notice it.

But we usually don't stop there. Rather than just seeing, we act upon what we notice instead. "I shouldn't be wanting pizza. I must stop this desire for pizza."

This very reaction is already more craving. We're desiring an end to desire. We're doing the usual thing again -- reaching for, insisting, grabbing. This is bondage, not freedom.

This is a subtle but crucial point. There's no bandage to use on this problem that will not itself be the same problem all over again.

The only way to eradicate this problem is to see it and thereby no longer feed it.

This is not a call to complacency or inaction. To act or not to act is never the question. You can't help but act. The question is whether or not you see. The entire issue rests on this.

Recently I experienced something along these lines. 

Laurel, my wife, is a vacuum fancier. She has several vacuums, a large corded one, a smaller battery powered one, an even smaller hand-held one.

A few days ago Laurel came up to me while I was in the kitchen. "I've been working on this for half an hour," she said. "I can't figure out how to get the vacuum filter back in the plastic case." 

She'd only removed the round filter once before, since the vacuum had a clever way of cleaning the filter that didn't require removing it. She showed me the instructions. They just said to replace the filter after cleaning it.

But the plastic cover wouldn't snap into place after the filter was inserted.

I tried myself for about 15 minutes, rotating the filter assembly every possible way, observing that, as Laurel had said, it seemed there was only one way to put in the filter.

I was doing a lot of trying, without success. 

Then I decided to stop what Laurel and I had been trying, because it clearly wasn't working. I focused instead on what simple thing I was missing, because it seemed that no vacuum designer would make replacing the filter so difficult. 

Ah... instead of inserting the filter into the top of the plastic case, I inserted it into the bottom of the case. Two seconds later the lid clicked shut without a problem.

Laurel hadn't noticed which way the filter had come out, so we both were fixated on an assumption that turned out to be false -- that the filter went in the top of the case.

So this is one way to look upon the seeing that Hagen speaks of. Seeing reality clearly, rather than through the fog of erroneous thoughts and assumptions about reality. 

Another way, a more profound way, is repeated by Sam Harris in just about every guided meditation in his smart phone Waking Up app. 

Harris will ask the listener to either look at the outside world with eyes open, or at the space behind the eyes with eyes shut. In either case, Harris asks, "Are you aware of someone who is seeing within your head, a see'er, or is there simply seeing?"

In my experience, the latter. Simply seeing. I've never come across a see'er who is separate and distinct from the act of seeing.

Which, of course, is a core Buddhist notion. There is no self, no soul, no enduring entity anywhere within us. Things simply arise and pass away. 

Thoughts. Emotions. Perceptions. Cravings. And so on.

Thus when Hagen urges us to simply see, arguably the most important sight to see is that there is no see'er doing the seeing.

Looking for our true self, eventually we grasp that there is no self to be seen -- in somewhat the same way as I came to realize that there is no way the filter could fit in the manner I was trying to insert it.

Looking in a different fashion made all the difference.

Reality -- a horrible thing to waste (but Trump does)

Yesterday I wrote about Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis over on my Salem Political Snark blog in "Reality is the big winner in Trump's COVID-19 infection." Here's the most philosophical part of the post.

Being as deeply philosophical as I am deeply political, I now want to broaden my take on the meaning of Trump coming down with COVID-19. It's a big win for reality!

Not that reality needs any help. Reality always comes out on top in the end, because, well, reality is the only thing that is truly real. 

A short blog post isn't the place to discuss what I mean by "truly" and "real." So here's my brief take on those words. Everything that exists is real, or it wouldn't exist. Thus dreams are real, as are hallucinations. Fantasies are real, as are lies. Those things exist, but not truly.

To exist truly, something has to posses a certain substance and objective nature. As I said in "The best one-sentence metaphysics ever written," I love Phillip K. Dick's definition of reality.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Donald Trump didn't believe in the seriousness of the coronavirus. He thought it would go away when the United States had just 15 cases. He thought it would go away in warmer weather. He thought this country had turned the corner on the pandemic. Those beliefs, and many more, were spectacularly wrong. 

No matter. Whatever Trump or anyone else believes about COVID-19 has no bearing on the coronavirus. It just keeps on doing what viruses are so good at: spreading. We humans have learned a lot about how to slow or stop that spread. Those measures work whether or not anyone believes in them.

Trump and others in his administration have a strong bias against reality. They believe that if a lie is repeated often enough and strongly enough, many people will believe it. Sadly, this is true. But I'm optimistic that most people won't.

Presidential election polling bears this out.

More Americans favor Biden than Trump. Biden has a vastly stronger truthfulness rating on PolitiFact than Trump does. Biden accepts the science of global warming; Trump doesn't. And Biden has been following public health guidelines in his campaigning, including wearing a mask, while Trump hasn't. 

Now Trump has COVID-19. He's been admitted to the Walter Reed Medical Center. He faces a potentially lengthy recovery period, though there is a chance that even at the age of 74 and with underlying conditions such as obesity, Trump will get well fairly quickly. Time will tell. 

What won't change with time is the primacy of reality. It always wins out in the end. Always. 

So it's fitting that in the month before the election where, hopefully, Trump is tossed out of office by voters, the Liar-in-Chief is suffering from the disease that he has been downplaying for many months. To adapt a familiar phrase, the wheels of reality turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine. 

Religions also have a shaky relationship with reality.

They love to talk about things for which there is no demonstrable proof of their existence. God. Heaven. Soul. Spirit. Devil. Afterlife. Angels. Etc. Etc. And they are reluctant to talk about things that clearly exist, such as evolution and the Big Bang.

In my morning reading today I came across some mentions of reality. I'll share those also. Here's passages from Steve Hagen's, "Buddhism Plain and Simple," one of my favorite books. 

The buddha-dharma is grounded in Reality. It is not pie in the sky, or wishful thinking, or a denial of what human life is. There's no attempt to cover up, to gloss over, to reinterpret the facts.

...You are already in reality, whether you see it or not. Reality is what's here, now. Thus you're here now, too. You know all this already, from direct experience. You're not separated from Reality. It's not "out there" somewhere, but right here.

And here's a passage from Sam Harris' fascinating book, "Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity." Harris says:

One difference between religious dogmatism and scientific curiosity is the boundedness of the worldview that results and one's consequent tolerance of ambiguity and complexity. 

For a dogmatist, the final answers are already given. Reality can't be more complex than what's spelled out in his favorite book. 

But for a scientist, or for any truly curious person, the investigation of reality is open-ended. Who knows what we will learn in the future, and who knows how it may supersede our current understanding?

It feels good to be getting back into yoga

When I was about 20 or 21, I was a yoga dude. My college girlfriend and I had been studying yoga and meditation with (in retrospect) a crazed Greek teacher who managed to cobble together a blend of Eastern religion, yoga, and Christianity.

We used to drive around with him in a VW van with Christananda Ashram on the side. Yeah, it was weird, but this was 1969 and 1970, when weirdness permeated the San Francisco Bay Area, where we attended San Jose State College. 

Here's a photo of me from my yoga days. I got pretty damn good at Hatha Yoga postures. Meditation, maybe not so much. But I became one of Yogiraj's lead students, until the weirdness went over the top in a dramatic health food store confrontation.

At any rate, I never forgot some of the many yoga postures that I learned back then. For many years I practiced a short yoga routine that I did at our athletic club after doing aerobic stuff, lifting weights, and some Tai Chi.

But in February of 2020 I developed a pretty serious sciatica problem in my right leg. An X-ray showed that my lower back just showed normal wear and tear for a 71-year-old. So the cause of the leg pain remains a mystery. 

l'm much better now, thankfully. I've been doing physical therapy exercises every day, walking two miles up and down hills every day, and using home exercise equipment for strength building every day. Still...

When I realized a few weeks ago that I hadn't done my yoga routine for a long time, I got out my mat and gave it a try. Wow. I wasn't nearly as flexible as I was six months ago. Not a huge surprise, but it still shocked me -- since I'd been exercising so much and doing other kinds of stretches.

So I started doing my yoga routine every day also.

I'm already seeing some improvement, flexibility-wise. And it feels good to be doing the yoga moves. Wanting to broaden my repertoire, I downloaded several yoga apps for the iPhone. They were OK. I can see how many people would benefit from them. However, I concluded that I'd rather get back into yoga on my own, choosing my own postures, and doing them at my own speed.

That led me to buy the Yoga Bible.

It's got over 1,200 mostly positive reviews on Amazon. I took the advice of many reviews and had the book spiral bound at the FedEx copy center in Salem. That allows the pages to fold flat, making it much easier to follow directions while laying on my mat or standing up (the book stands up nicely also, after being spiral bound).

There's a nice overview of what yoga is all about in an introductory section. Here's some excerpts. I hadn't thought before that the body always is in the present moment, but this does make sense. 

Yoga is actually a state of mind. Achieving the goal of stilling the mind is a tall order, so practices have been developed that allow you to move toward this state. Quieting the mind is a rather intangible goal.

In contrast, the progress made on accomplishing a yoga posture can be evaluated by alignment, length of stretch, and the length of time it can be held. It's much easier for you to relate to something tangible -- the body -- and then move on to something intangible -- the stillness of the mind.

During yoga practice, you begin somewhere known and, using your body and breath, you move toward an unknown. As you open your body and mind with yoga postures and breathing, you become receptive to the delightful and profound experience of inner stillness.

While the human mind tends to drift off into thoughts of the past or future, the human body exists only in the present moment. Hatha yoga, a type of yoga that emphasizes strenuous and persistent effort, encourages awareness of the body.

Coming back to your body draws your mind back to the present. Then, worries drop away and there are no more "shoulds" or "musts." One of the reasons yoga is so refreshing is that, even if only for an instant, there is only the reality of the present moment. Each time you come to the present moment, you drop a certain amount of baggage.

You may pick it up again shortly thereafter, but the point is that you have practiced letting it go. Eventually you will be able to reduce the stress more often and for longer periods of time. 

In this respect, yoga is like life training. Its practice is a fabulous tool for transformation. 

...However, yoga may be anything that gives you a sense of unity, helps you better connect with yourself, and helps you remember who you are. It might be a walk along the beach, a luxurious yawn, or simply taking a single conscious breath.

Any practice that helps you center yourself is important. When you operate from a space that is close to your center, it is easier to be calmer and more focused. Being off balance is a huge source of stress.

When things go wrong when you are already off balance, it is like swimming against a strong tide. The farther out you are, the harder it is to swim to shore. 

Yet, distractions and sensory stimulation often cause you to look outward rather than gazing inward. The real challenge in life is to manage to stay "with" yourself while at the same time interacting with others; to respond appropriately to people and events while maintaining a sense of connection to yourself.

What is the problem religions are trying to solve?

One of the reasons I'm now an atheist after having embraced an Eastern form of religion for 35 years is that it eventually dawned on me that religions are trying to solve problems that don't really exist. 

This isn't the case with other cultural institutions. 

For example, health care agencies try to solve the problem of people getting sick. Environmental groups try to solve the problem of pollution. Educational advocates try to solve the problem of helping children learn.

It's possible to disagree with how these problems are being addressed, but not with the fact that these are real problems. By contrast, Christianity, along with other religions, sees a big problem with sin. Which raises the question, what are they talking about?

"Sin" is a concept. It isn't something real in the same way sickness, pollution, and a lack of learning are. It's an idea that sprang from the minds of humans. "God" is another concept that doesn't refer to anything real. It's another idea that sprang from the minds of humans.

Put those two concepts together, "sin" and "God," and you've got the makings of a religion -- Christianity. 

Most religious people, though, fail to realize how thoroughly they've bought into the concepts of their faith. So thoroughly, they never question the reality of those concepts. 

Notions like God, heaven, sin, karma, soul, spirit, and such are discussed as if they possessed the same reality as trees, air, sunlight, water, dogs, and other entities that clearly exist.

So my advice to religious believers is this.

Think clearly about what problem, or problems, your chosen faith is trying to solve. If all you can come with is a self-referential statement like "The Bible says humans have original sin that only Jesus can forgive," then you've embraced a bunch of concepts that have no grounding in reality.

An exception is Buddhism, which is why Buddhism often isn't considered a religion, but a way of living. 

Buddhism says that life is suffering. That's appealingly concrete. We know that life exists. We also know that suffering exists. Finding a way to deal with the problem of suffering is the foundation of Buddhism.

Somewhat similarly, my take on Taoism is that the problem it addresses is how to live in a flowing fashion, not being bound by rigid rules or attitudes.

"Flow" is a bit more conceptual than "suffering," but having been an avid student of Tai Chi for sixteen years -- Tai Chi being a physical expression of Taoist principles -- I can confidently say that flow is something that can be observed by others and felt by oneself.

Contrast that with the central concept of the Eastern religion that I belonged to for three and half decades: God-realization under the guidance of a Perfect Living Master. There's no evidence that God exists, so no evidence that God-realization exists.

Likewise, there's no evidence that a Perfect Living Master (or guru) exists. As I've observed before, if you stuck a supposed Perfect Living Master in with a bunch of other people and asked someone to pick out the perfect master/guru, there would be no way they could do this, because there is no concrete reality underlying the abstract concept of "perfect living master."

A recent issue of New Scientist has a column by Graham Lawton called "The war against reality." It deals with the thoroughly absurd notions promulgated by those who embrace QAnon. As Lawton writes:

To cut a long story short, QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that contends the world is run by satan-worshipping paedophiles who traffic children for sex and for a life-extending compound that is extracted from their adrenal glands. 

It is named after a shady character called Q, who posts "inside information" on internet message boards. While it is all total and utter nonsense, two US presidents loom large in the QAnon narrative: Obama as one of the controlling elites and Trump as Q himself or the leader of the fight against the elites and the "deep state", a shadowy organisation that really runs the US.

Totally crazy, right? There's no evidence of what QAnon believes in. Yet a disturbingly large number of people think QAnon speaks the truth. Likewise, there's no evidence of what religions believe in, yet billions of people are religious.

Here'a another quote from Lawton's column that is a great summary of what turns me off about religion.

On a good day, I think of QAnon as a fascinating case study of human psychology and behaviour, laying bare how far from reality our minds can stray, how social forces can drag people into parallel universes and how we can sustain beliefs in the face of what is irrefutable evidence to the contrary.