Church of the Churchless

Harris-Trump debate shows how political lies are like religious lies

In both politics and religion, lies are commonplace. I'm defining "lie" as a person saying something that isn't true, because there isn't any persuasive evidence supporting the statement.

God loves you is a lie, since there's no persuasive evidence that God exists, so there's no entity to love or do anything else. You'll go to heaven after you die is another lie given the lack of evidence for life after death.

People believe in religious lies for a variety of reasons. For example, it feels good to embrace warm supernatural fantasies that are more appealing than the cold truth of reality. Accepting lies also is a requirement for belonging to most religions, where people enjoy fellowship with other lie-believers.

But there's also great satisfaction in embracing truth, of being part of a reality-based community.

That's how I felt watching the 90 minute debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump last night, the first (and maybe also the last) debate they'll have after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race following his horrible debate performance against Trump last June. 

Along with a couple of instant reputable polls, I felt that Harris won the debate. Not by a little, by a lot. I wrote about this in a post for one of my other blogs, "Harris beat Trump so badly in the debate, I almost feel sorry for him." 

CNN fact-checked both candidates, finding that in the debate Trump had more than 30 false claims, lies, while Harris had just one. In my post I wrote about one of the strangest lies Trump spewed. 

A memorable moment in the debate, which I'm pretty sure made the heads of Trump's advisors explode, because it was exactly what they'd advised Trump not to do, was when he brought up the absurd MAGA lie about immigrants from Haiti eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Obviously that's completely false. 

When Trump blathered on about this lie, I stopped our recording of the debate to take a photo of the split screen reaction from Harris. Her look, along with Trump's angry expression, summed up the entire debate. Harris relaxed and pleasant, Trump tense and angry. 

Here's a video of Trump lying about the pet killings by Haitian migrants. He also lies about Harris paying people to attend her rallies.

The scary thing is that about 46% of American voters, roughly, continue to support Trump even though it is obvious that he's a habitual liar. I'm confident that most of them espouse truthfulness in their personal lives.

So how is it that Trump can command such loyalty even though he shamelessly spouts all kinds of lies every time he opens his mouth? Well, for the same reason that religious leaders are supported and worshipped even though they shamelessly spout all kinds of lies every time they open their mouths. 

Cult leaders attract followers because many people enjoy belonging to a community of like-minded believers even though those beliefs lack evidence to support them, being lies. Standing up for truth is much more difficult than lying down and letting lies wash over you.

However, the truth is more satisfying than lies. Yes, it takes more work to separate fact from fiction, truth from lies, reality from fantasy. But that's why I'm a Democrat rather than a Republican, and an atheist rather than a religious believer.

I don't want to follow a cult leader, whether that individual is a politician like Trump or a religious personage like gurus who behave badly. Since 2004 I've preached the gospel of spiritual independence on this blog. 

Truth means more to me than belonging to a group that demands the acceptance of lies as the price of admission. The Democratic Party isn't perfect, nor are the atheists that I know. By and large, though, I enjoy the company of people who value truth and abhor lies much more than those who make falsehoods their daily companion.

That's why I enjoyed last night's debate so much.

Kamala Harris has her flaws, but she will be a hugely better president than Trump in part because truth comes easily to her, a testimony to her upbringing by an Indian mother and to a considerably lesser extent, by her Jamaican father who didn't have much contact with her after her parents divorced.

Rationality has a lot to do with spirituality

For the thirty-five years I was an active member of an Eastern religion, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), one of my favorite Indian words was sat, truth. 

For example, there was the satguru, the true guru, and satsang, association with truth. Eventually I came to feel that truth was the most important thing. When I concluded that for me, truth was best pursued outside the bounds of RSSB, there was only one thing I could do: leave RSSB.

When I came to the epilogue of Thomas Metzinger's book, The Elephant and the Blind, an examination of pure awareness, his thoughts on intellectual honesty resonated with me. That's something I aspire to, though I certainly don't claim that I'm always capable of intellectual honesty. Far from it.

I can be wrong about lots of things within and without my own mind. As Metzinger notes in excerpts I've shared below from the epilogue of his book, our beliefs directly influence how we experience the world. I have great difficulty looking upon Donald Trump with an open mind, because I believe he is a great danger to the United States and the world.

But at least I'm aware of that bias. Being aware of it, I can at least try to be receptive to Trump's words and actions that might contain a glimmer of truth. Maybe even more than a glimmer (though I'm doubtful about that).

In short, I aspire to rationality, intellectual honesty. I've never considered that rationality and spirituality are opposed. As Metzinger says below, actually they're closely linked, because rationality and spirituality both aspire to know the truth about reality, a goal they share with science.

Enjoy...

Yes, there has been a successful rebellion against organized religion and a fresh global counterculture has emerged. Millions have taken things into their own hands, and this can be seen as one of the major cultural innovations of the twentieth century.

But if one looks at the reality of all the different movements, traditions, and groups that have formed -- especially their irrational belief systems and the resulting social dynamics, which are often pathological and cultlike -- one may conclude that the original innovative impulse has long been outweighed by more mortality denial and self-deception, just in slightly subtler forms than they used to take.

Many of the spiritual movements that have developed in recent decades in Europe and the US have long lost their progressive impulse, and most sectors of spiritual counterculture seem already to have morphed into experience-based forms of privately organized religious delusion.

...We therefore have grounds to wonder whether the people labeling themselves as "SBNR" [spiritual but not religious] or "SBNA" [spiritual but not affiliated] are religious after all, just in a slightly new way. In most of these contemporary forms of "nonreligious spirituality," something is sorely missing: a particular kind of honesty. After all, the opposite of religion is not science, but spirituality.

The ethical principle of intellectual honesty can be analyzed as a special case of the spiritual stance and, in their purest form, the scientific and the spiritual stances emerge from the same basic normative idea. But what exactly is "intellectual honesty"?

"Intellectual honesty" means simply not being willing to lie to yourself. It is closely related to old-fashioned values such as propriety, integrity, and sincerity, as well as to a certain kind of "inner decency." 

Perhaps one could say that striving for intellectual honesty is a very conservative way of being truly subversive. Intellectual honesty might be exactly what the many "teachers" and representatives of cults, organized religions, and theologians of almost any type simply cannot have -- even if they often like to make claims to the contrary.

Intellectual honesty means not pretending to know or even pretending to be able to know the unknowable, while still having an unconditional will to truth and a commitment to the growth of knowledge, which includes being genuinely open to new scientific results.

...A flood of empirical data, as well as the mathematical models of modern computational neuroscience, show how the beliefs we hold directly influence the way that we consciously experience the world -- a simple empirical fact whose importance is hard to overstate when it comes to meditation practice.

Whoever wants to become whole -- a person of integrity -- by gradually resolving all conflict between their actions and values must pursue this harmony with their inner actions as well. This requirement is especially true for their "epistemic actions" -- actions for the sake of knowledge.

We act epistemically whenever we strive for insight, knowledge, true belief, sincerity, and also authentic self-knowledge. To the extent that meditation is an epistemic practice, it cannot work without radical honesty toward oneself, without a self-critical ethics of belief.

There is a bridge between spiritual practice and the ideal of reasonable, rational thought: Both involve an ethics of inner action for the sake of knowledge. Moreover, in both cases, the goal is a systematic enhancement of mental autonomy, of inner freedom.

...The sincere intention of being honest toward oneself is what connects critical rationality and the nonconceptual insight of contemplative practice.

.... But you cannot choicelessly observe your own thoughts as they arise and disappear again if you are not prepared to honestly face what you will now begin to see: the painful restlessness of your very own mind, your violent fantasies, your desire for retaliation, your boredom, your loneliness, your existential despair, or your envy.

...I hope that you are beginning to sense that a strict and altogether old-fashioned form of rationalism could have a lot to do with spirituality -- and with what is still missing in large parts of the spiritual counterculture. 

...Here, my point is that rationality is actually a special form of mindfulness. In order not only to think clearly but also to listen properly -- in order to understand one's opponent -- critical rationality first needs the sincere and nonreactive quality of mindful attention. And then it also needs careful, rational thinking, a way of handling concepts that is as precise as possible.

...Real meditation practice cultivates the conditions of possibility for rational discourse by cultivating the sincere intention of being honest toward oneself. If it doesn't, there is something wrong. 

The sad state of RSSB gurus, and advice on seeking spirituality without them

Today M K Sharma left this comment on my previous post, "Jasdeep Singh Gill, successor to RSSB guru, has disturbing tie to Ranbaxy." Sharma made some points that I'd thought of, yet wasn't able to grasp as clearly. GSD refers to Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) who appointed Gill as his guru-in-waiting.

What a saga unfolding before our eyes! The new Baba, now revealed as the cousin of the old Baba, GSD, is knee-deep in the same deceitful schemes, and it seems the corruption runs through the entire family.

It’s almost like GSD found the perfect accomplice in his own blood, ensuring that all the ill-gotten gains stay neatly within the family circle. For years, countless devotees have poured their hearts into what they believed was true seva—selfless service—only to realize that their dedication and sacrifices meant nothing when it came to choosing a successor.

No one among these devoted followers was ever considered worthy; the role was reserved for a family member who, it seems, has spent time abroad and conveniently stepped in to take over.

This situation stands in stark contrast to the traditions of genuine saints and Gurus of the past, who selected their successors based on merit, spiritual dedication, and selfless service—a painstaking and rigorous process. The transition of leadership was never treated lightly; it was a testament to the chosen one’s spiritual journey and commitment.

But here, we witness a spiritual empire handed over like a royal throne, with no regard for the values that once defined the path.

It’s disheartening to see a lineage that now operates like a dynastic rule, where leadership passes down through blood rather than virtue. If God is truly watching over Sant Mat, one hopes that He will hold this family accountable for their actions. But in moments like this, it’s hard not to question: is God still present, and how can He allow this to happen?

Great question, assuming one believes in God, which I don't -- since the probability of God existing seems vastly less than the probability of God not existing, given the lack of evidence for God's presence (leaving aside the question of what that presence might consist of and how it could be realized).

However, I remain interested in spirituality, which I define loosely as the search for deeper meaning in a person's life, in this case, mine. For about thirty-five years I accepted the RSSB adage that a guru was needed to be a guide to God-realization. Now I embrace the notion that what many or most of us are looking for is so close at hand, we hardly need any help at all in embracing it.

Just a few pointers, basically. Here's how Joan Tollifson puts it in the "Is India More Nondual than Chicago?" chapter in her book, Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues About Non-Duality. The back cover describes Tollifson as having "an affinity with Buddhism, Advaita, and other forms of nonduality, but she belongs to no tradition."

Since so-called Eastern spirituality has come to the West, many westerners have rushed to Japan or India or someplace in the Far East to get the real goods. There is nothing wrong with traveling, but what these teachings point to is right here in front of you.

You don't need to go somewhere else. In fact, you never do go anywhere else. Places appear to you, in awareness. They come and go, dream-like.

It has been said that the truth is inside, not outside you. That doesn't mean it's in your intestines or in your emotions, but not in the chair across the room. It means it's in the undivided awareness that beholds intestines, emotions, chairs, birds, and everything else. It points to the realization that there is no boundary, that inside and outside are one whole.

In the same way, past and future are inseparable from Here/Now. When I talk about the jewel of Here/Now, I'm not in any way intending to disparage the study of history or the creative envisioning of the future. I'm simply pointing to the fact that it all shows up Here/Now as one indivisible whole that is boundless, seamless, timeless and spaceless.

How to realize that? Well, first of all, notice that the question itself is rooted in the assumption that it is not realized right now. Is that true? What are you imagining that such realization would look like?

Perhaps the acquisition of the sighting of an enormous object like a giant dinner plate? Or maybe an experience like being permanently high on drugs? Or maybe some mental understanding like an algebraic equation or a verbal formulation that would be the final answer to every question?Does it make sense that totality would be an object, an experience, or a formulation? Does it make sense that "you" would need to find it?

The truth itself is so simple that the mind habitually keeps overlooking it by looking elsewhere.

Endlessly fascinated by glittering distractions (India, Japan, robes, bells, gurus, teachers, retreats, satsangs), we overlook the jewel of here and now. Of course, India, Japan, robes, bells, gurus, teachers, retreats, satsangs -- it's all the jewel. There's no escape.

But when we think the jewel is in India but not in Chicago, or that we need to go to a retreat or a satsang to find it, then we are like a wave looking for the ocean. The imaginary problem can only be resolved Here/Now.

After wandering all over the world seeking the truth "out there" somewhere, after having amazing spiritual experiences and breakthroughs, we inevitably end up back in our ordinary everyday life. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, we wake up back in Kansas. The whole journey is inside us, and what we are seeking is inside us, too.

And when I say inside us, again, I don't mean inside the body mind -- I mean Here/Now.

And that's really what all spiritual teachings are pointing to -- that the heart of the matter, the jewel that is being sought is not "out there" somewhere apart from you or in the future. No one can give it to you. You must discover it yourself. And the only thing that makes this discovery seem difficult is how easy it is. It is already perfectly realized.

This moment is the Buddha.

The thought of "somewhere better" keeps us from seeing that what we are seeking, we already are. The postponements, the ways we move away, get subtler and subtler. Wanting to never run off on another journey to Oz ever again is itself running off on such a journey! But luckily, the journey and the one taking it are both imaginary. You never really leave Here/Now.

Sometimes people say, "Everything is great when I'm at these meetings," or "It's all totally clear when I'm off on a meditation retreat, but then I get home and I lose it all." I come back to Kansas and it seems like I'm this screwed up character again.

But of course being on a meditation retreat is going to be different from being in the office. Sitting in silence listening to the rain is different from listening to other human beings. And yet both the office and the meditation retreat appear Here/Now in this ever-present awareness. 

What is, is so simple, so unavoidable. Everything is as it is, even if what is appearing is confusion or upset. 

I like what Tollifson says. I also like what Rumi said in a bit of Sufi poetry, as shared in my blog post, "This is my favorite Rumi quotation." Both are speaking about the here and now.

Fear the existence in which you are now!
Your imagination is nothing, and you are nothing,
A nothing has fallen in love with a nothing,
a nothing-at-all has waylaid a nothing-at-all.
When these images have departed,
your misunderstanding will be clear to you.

Jasdeep Singh Gill, successor to RSSB guru, has disturbing tie to Ranbaxy

The gurus of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) are supposed to demonstrate exceptionally high spiritual virtues, including honesty. After all, the RSSB teachings proclaim that their gurus are God in Human Form.

So a few days ago, when I saw on the RSSB web site that Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the organization's current guru, had appointed a successor, Jasdeep Singh Gill, I was surprised to see that Gill had worked at Ranbaxy from 2006 to 2010.

Ranbaxy (2006 – 2010): Multiple roles
Worked across Project management and Strategy functions

Surprised, because Ranbaxy was accused of pharmaceutical fraud following sale of the company to Daiichi Sankyo in 2008, following which the fraud allegations came to light.

In 2013 the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Ranbaxy had agreed to plead guilty to several felonies. 

In the largest drug safety settlement to date with a generic drug manufacturer, Ranbaxy USA Inc., a subsidiary of Indian generic pharmaceutical manufacturer Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited, pleaded guilty today to felony charges relating to the manufacture and distribution of certain adulterated drugs made at two of Ranbaxy’s manufacturing facilities in India, the Justice Department announced today. Ranbaxy also agreed to pay a criminal fine and forfeiture totaling $150 million and to settle civil claims under the False Claims Act and related State laws for $350 million.

And when did the illegal manufacture and distribution of adulterated drugs take place at the two Ranbaxy manufacturing facilities in India? At the same time (2006-10) Jasdeep Gill was serving as Executive Assistant to the CEO of Ranbaxy, Malvinder Singh. That's an important position. We have to assume that Malvinder was the one who hired Jasdeep.

The Department of Justice announcement says:

Ranbaxy USA admitted to introducing into interstate commerce certain batches of adulterated drugs that were produced at Paonta Sahib in 2005 and 2006, including Sotret, gabapentin, and ciprofloxacin... Ranbaxy also acknowledged that the FDA’s 2006 and 2008 inspections of the Dewas facility found the same issues with incomplete testing records and an inadequate stability program, as well as significant cGMP deviations in the manufacture of certain active pharmaceutical ingredients and finished products.  

There's more, so bear with me on what admittedly is fairly complex corporate malfeasance. I've shared additional detail in previous blog posts for those who really want to learn about the Ranbaxy-related scandals.

First, Gurinder Singh, the current RSSB guru, reportedly was highly involved in Ranbaxy dealings. In 2016 a Singapore tribunal awarded Daiichi Sankyo about $500 million in damages because Ranbaxy hadn't divulged its pharmaceutical quality problems in the course of the sale to Daiichi Sankyo.

Then, according to the preceding link, "In 2018, Daiichi Sankyo approached the Indian Supreme Court with the allegation that the Singh brothers were diverting funds using a number of shell companies to avoid the payments."

Now Gurinder Singh enters the picture again. Because Malvinder Singh accused the RSSB guru in a criminal lawsuit of being a recipient of that massive money diversion via shell companies. Religare and Fortis were companies once owned by Malvinder and Shivinder Singh into which they pumped much of the $2 billion received from the sale of Ranbaxy.

In 2019, the Serious Fraud Investigation Office, or SFIO, was also probing their [Singh brothers] role in an alleged fund diversion at Fortis Healthcare. After its initial probe, the SFIO had said that it believed that the fraud could be to the tune of Rs 2,000 crore. The Securities and Exchange Board of India and the SFIO suspected that the Singh brothers had diverted public money from Fortis Healthcare to Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the head of Radha Soami Satsang Beas and other religious bodies.

In 2019 Gurinder Singh, his family, and close associates were ordered by the High Court of Delhi to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to RHC Holding so the money that was siphoned off into their pockets could be used to pay what Malvinder and Shivinder Singh owed Daiichi Sankyo. 

NEW DELHI: Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the spiritual head of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), his family members and associates are among 55 individuals and entities ordered by a court to pay over Rs 6,000 crore owed to RHC Holding in connection with the settlement of a dispute related to Daiichi Sankyo’s acquisition of Ranbaxy Laboratories.

The Delhi high court ordered Dhillonʼs wife Shabnam, sons Gurkirat and Gurpreet and daughter-in-law Nayan Tara, among others, to pay up the amount due to RHC Holding, the flagship holding company of the Singh brothers who formerly owned Ranbaxy. Money will also be recovered from former Religare Enterprises chief Sunil Godhwani and his brother Sanjay Godhwani. The non-banking financial services conglomerate was formerly promoted by Malvinder and Shivinder Singh.

So Jasdeep Singh was part of the financial scandals that started with the illegal actions by Ranbaxy regarding dangerously adulterated pharmaceuticals at a time when Gurinder Singh's nephew, Malvinder Singh, was CEO of Ranbaxy and Jasdeep Singh was an executive assistant to Malvinder.

In my post, "'Dirty money' tied to RSSB guru's Ranbaxy wealth," I quoted from a Wikipedia article about Malvinder Singh and Ranbaxy.

Malvinder Singh's tenure as CEO of Ranbaxy starting in 2006 is controversial. Corporate culture of fraud continued unchecked under his tenure.

Jasdeep Singh, the guru-in-waiting of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the hand-chosen successor to Gurinder Singh, became the executive assistant to Malvinder Singh in 2006. It's difficult to imagine that someone so close to the Ranbaxy CEO, who almost certainly was hired by Malvinder, wasn't aware of that "corporate culture of fraud" during the four years he worked at Ranbaxy.

Jasdeep Singh Gill should be questioned about this by the Indian financial press. He's a distant cousin of Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Malvinder Singh also is related to Gurinder Singh, a nephew I believe, though genealogy isn't my strong suit. Here's a Family Tree that someone sent to me today. The Gill and Dhillon families are linked.

Given how closely Gurinder Singh was involved with Ranbaxy and the Singh brothers at the time, it seems entirely possible that the RSSB guru had a say in the hiring of Jasdeep by Malvinder. You know, keep everything in the family. 

Now Gurinder has chosen Jasdeep as his successor, also keeping the RSSB guru'dom in the family. It's unsure why this happened now. RSSB says that the guru's health is fine. If that's true, then it's possible that the guru's legal problems played a role in his decision to step aside from managing the large RSSB financial and real estate holdings, handing that over to Jasdeep as of a few days ago.

I give credit for stimulating this post to a Church of the Churchless reader who emailed me with thoughts about Jasdeep Singh Gill's connection with Ranbaxy. This person had read Bottle of Lies, a book about the fraud in the generic drug industry. An excerpt from the book about Ranbaxy was shared with me:

At the behest of managers, the scientists substituted lower-purity ingredients for higher ones to reduce costs. They altered test parameters so that formulations with higher impurities could be approved. They faked dissolution studies. 

 

For some markets, the company fraudulently mixed and matched data streams, taking the best data from manufacturing in one market and presenting it to regulators elsewhere as data unique to the drugs in their markets. For other markets, the company simply invented data. Document forgery was pervasive.

 

The company even forged its own standard operating procedures, which FDA investigators rely on to assess whether a company is following its own policies.

 

In one instance, employees backdated documents and then artificially aged them in a steamy room overnight in an attempt to fool regulators during inspections.

 

There was little effort to conceal this method of doing business. It was common knowledge,  from senior managers and heads of research and development  to people responsible for formulation and the clinical people. Essentially, Ranbaxy's manufacturing standards boiled down to whatever the company could get away with.'

This person commented:

What am trying to get at is that if it was common knowledge all this was taking place, plus the using of brand name drugs crushed up and made into capsules to be tested plus superimposing brand-name test results onto their own applications, unless everyone was briefed to change tactics, there is no way Gill couldn't have known.

Here's more of what this person wrote to me. The quote at the beginning is from an unnamed source. It seems accurate.

Malvinder and Shivinder Singh were running Ranbaxy until 2008 when they sold their stake.

 

"11 June 2008, Malvinder Singh stunned the Indian business world by announcing that he and his brother were selling their 33.5% stake in Ranbaxy to the Japanese drugmaker Daiichi Sankyo for $2 billion."

 

'Stunned' the business world because Ranbaxy was at its peak. Malvinder and Shivinder were arrested in October 2019.

 

So Gill was there during the rampant fraud going on and Ranbaxy had Malvinder as CEO. Gill must have been aware something was wrong?

 

Thakur, the main whistleblower knew there was something seriously wrong in 2003. Thakur encountered chaos. Disputes at executive meetings sometimes escalated into fistfights. He said, "There was no structure. It was the complete antithesis of everything I had learned for ten or twelve years."

 

Everyone tried to block every single attempt he introduced to sort the mess out. His boss who had employed him resigned because of the rampant corruption. He told Thakur he knew enough to bring the company down.

 

I have to condense this. Brian.

 

His next boss had the same problem. He discovered there was astonishing fraud going on. Astonishing is the right word! Ranbaxy was lying about everything. The drugs destined for terribly sick AIDS patients had not even been tested.

 

When Thakur's boss 2 told the corporate office the drugs must be immediately withdrawn, they refused. Thakur's boss responded by telling them he was a physician and no way was he going to sign off something he knew full well was going to cause harm to patients. Either they pull the stuff off the market or he was resigning. 

 

Anyway, Ranbaxy was faking its dossiers to the FDA, Europe and India. At behest of the managers of Ranbaxy, (Malvinder and Shivinder) scientists substituted lower purity ingredients for higher ones to reduce cost. They faked everything. To generate normal results, they crushed up brand name drugs into capsules so that they could be tested instead of Ranbaxy's own drugs. They then used the brand-name results as their own.

 

It goes on an on. In markets including Brazil, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Egypt, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Peru, and Dominican Republic, Ranbaxy simply invented all the data. Thakur's boss 2 resigned when they refused to withdraw the crap drugs and stop selling them to all these countries.

 

Then they got rid of Thakur because they knew he knew too much. After they combed his computer for incriminating evidence against Ranbaxy they hacked his servers and planted his IP address on porn sites.

 

Thakur was furious and handed in his resignation providing the evidence of computer tampering. Thakur then decided to contact the FDA and present his evidence....long story.....

 

Will leave it there, Brian because it's a long, convoluted saga but just to give you a preliminary background sketch.

 

I can't believe Gill was not aware of what was going on. He was there when Malvinder and Shivinder were at the helm for four whole years until they sold their stake to the Japanese company when they were being asked to present legal data to UNICEF which they couldn't do. Neither could they supply data to the FDA.....am being vèry brief. 

 

And who got Gill the job? More nepotism? Gill is Babaji's [Gurinder Singh's] mother's sister's grandson. They are related. Yikes!

Let's make sense of the strange RSSB guru succession episode

I'm used to strange things happening in the realm of religion.

After all, this is where we humans believe in the strangest things: a virgin birth, commandments issuing from God, and in the case of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religion, a guru who is God in Human Form.

At least, that's how the RSSB teachings describe the guru, a fact that I'm well aware of, since I was an active member of RSSB for thirty-five years. 

So when the RSSB guru announces a successor, this is a big deal in the eyes of RSSB devotees. It's also newsworthy otherwise, since RSSB has enough followers to be a significant political force in India, especially in the Punjab, where the organization's headquarters is located.

As noted in my first post about the recent strange RSSB guru succession episode, "RSSB guru appoints Jasdeep Singh Gill as successor," traditionally this has happened much differently than what transpired this time.

Always, to my knowledge, the RSSB process has worked this way. If anyone can point out why I'm wrong, do so in a comment; I don't claim to be an expert in the history of RSSB.

A guru of advancing years makes known who their successor will be in a document that isn't made public until after the guru's death. Then it is opened and the RSSB membership learns who the new guru is. The guru is inaugurated, so to speak, through a turban-tying ceremony (Dastar-bandi) that's part of the Sikh tradition.

But the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, did things differently.

His chosen successor, Jasdeep Singh Gill (a distant relative), was announced while Dhillon was very much alive. Because this meant that two RSSB gurus were alive at the same time, considerable confusion resulted from the succession announcement.

This official succession announcement must have been approved by Dhillon. It seems inconceivable that something so important would have been approved by someone else without Dhillon's knowledge of the wording.

The first paragraph of this announcement says that Dhillon is both the Satguru (true guru) and Patron of RSSB. Satguru refers to the spiritual side of the guru's duties. I take it that Patron refers to the organizational/management side of the guru's duties. Gill has been nominated as Patron, effective immediately from September 2, 2024.

The second paragraph of the announcement goes further, saying that Gill also shall succeed Dhillon as the Satguru of RSSB and will have the authority of giving initiation. Not surprisingly, this caused most people, journalists included who wrote stories about the RSSB succession, to conclude that Gill not only has become the Patron of RSSB, he also is the Satguru. 

That conclusion is reinforced by the third paragraph, which says that Dhillon (Baba Ji) wishes and requests that the same love and affection he has received from RSSB members (Sangat) be given to Gill in carrying out his service (Sewa) "as Patron as well as Sant Satguru." Again, both: Patron and Satguru.

Note that the announcement says "For Information of Entire Sangat." That's every member of RSSB, who number in the millions worldwide, I believe. So this announcement was widely shared. I'm no longer a member of RSSB, but I got copies of it from several people who knew I'd be interested in it.

Also note that the subject of the announcement is "Nomination of Patron and Sant Satguru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas." Nothing in the announcement says that Gill has to wait to carry out these roles. The whole tone of the announcement is that this is happening now, not in the future.

However, the RSSB web site had a different tone. I'm not sure when the web site message was published. As mentioned below, I suspect it was considerably after the just-discussed announcement. 

The web site says that Gill will become the Patron of RSSB right away,  but will succeed Dhillon as the Satguru and have the authority to initiate people in the future. So Gill is an instant RSSB manager and a RSSB guru-in-waiting.

A story in The Tribune, "Day after flip-flop over Beas dera head, Dhillon and Gill share stage," indicates that the RSSB web site language is the result of Dhillon changing his mind about having Gill become the full-blown RSSB guru -- both Patron and Satguru, as the three paragraph announcement said was happening. 
Download Day after flip-flop over Beas dera head Dhillon and Gill share stage - The Tribune

Here's excerpts from the story.

A day after a ‘clarification’ over the occupant of ‘Sant Satguru’ (spiritual head) seat of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), ‘Babaji’ Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his successor, the newly appointed patron ‘Huzur’ Jasdeep Singh Gill, shared the stage in the presence of a large number of dera followers, who converged at its main centre located 45 km from here.

Gill (45), a distant relative of Dhillon, has been appointed the patron of all RSSB Societies with effect from September 2 as part of the succession plan. On the official website of RSSB, the title ‘Huzur’ has been prefixed with his name and a photograph showing Dhillon with Gill has also been uploaded.

It is learnt that confusion ensued among the followers about the sudden development and they started pouring in last evening when the announcement of Gill as successor was made.

...An earlier communiqué issued yesterday on behalf of Dhillon read: “He has received full support and love of Sangat. He has wished and requested same love and affection be given to Jasdeep Singh Gill as patron as well as Sant Satguru”.

Following this, the followers gathered at the dera, apparently upset at the impending exit of Dhillon. They seemed to be pacified only after the RSSB issued a ‘clarification’ late last evening, stating that Dhillon would continue to lead as ‘Sant Satguru’.

Devender Kumar Sikri, secretary of the RSSB, said Gill would eventually be the the Sant Satguru and will then have the authority of bestowing ‘Naam Daan’. “Till then, he will remain in attendance with Babaji (Dhillon) for the scheduled satsangs,” he said.

So it appears that Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the current RSSB guru, changed his mind about handing over to Gill both the spiritual and management duties of the guru. Nothing wrong with that. To me, it just shows that even a supposed "God in Human Form" makes mistakes and learns from experience. That's how it is with all people. Even gurus.

RSSB guru appoints Jasdeep Singh Gill as successor

NOTE: I just saw in a comment on this post a link to a story about RSSB now saying that Gill actually won't have initiation authority as a previous RSSB message shared in this post said. Reportedly this occurred after RSSB members got upset about the news. Here's how The Tribune story starts out: "In a dramatic turn of events, the spiritual head of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon (69), nominated his distant relative Jasdeep Singh Gill (45) as his successor with 'immediate effect', but later decided to continue to hold his position."

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Big news in the world of Indian gurus! The guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon, has appointed Jasdeep Singh Gill as his successor. 

This is the first time that's happened in RSSB history. Previously, a guru would appoint a successor who took over after the guru's death. Now Dhillon has done this while still alive. 

RSSB has a notice on its web site.

It sort of sounds from this like there will be two RSSB gurus. Dhillon will remain as the "real" guru for a while and Gill will become the full-blown guru in the future after becoming Patron now, basically manager of RSSB's operations. Apparently only Dhillon will be initiating new disciples until Gill gets the go-ahead to initiate once he becomes the full-blown guru at some point, though this is contradicted by news stories below. 

This will be confusing theologically. But, hey, Dhillon hasn't been a traditional guru so it fits with his style.

UPDATE #1: Just checked my email and saw that several people sent me a RSSB notice saying that Gill has initiation power. So it looks like RSSB now has two full-blown gurus at the same time.

The Economic Times has a story about Gill. It starts this way, contradicting what the RSSB web site says about when Gill will become the "sant satguru" with initiation power.
Download Who is Jasdeep Singh Gill Radha Soami Satsang Beas' new head and former Cipla CSO

A Hindustani Times story also says that Gill will be initiating new disciples. Guess we'll just have to wait and see whether RSSB now has two satgurus: one complete satguru and one incomplete satguru. Or maybe there are two complete gurus, which will confuse disciples who won't know which they should bow most deeply to. [Note UPDATE above: this seems to be the case, since Gill apparently will be initiating people.]

Gurinder Singh Dhillon has nominated his successor, 45-year-old Jasdeep Singh Gill, as patron and ‘sant satguru’ of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas Society with immediate effect.

In a significant development, the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a spiritual organisation headquartered on the banks of the Beas river near Amritsar, on Monday announced that its head Gurinder Singh Dhillon has nominated Jasdeep Singh Gill, 45, a doctorate in chemical engineering from Cambridge and an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, alumnus, as its patron and ‘sant satguru’. 

A statement by RSSB secretary Devender Kumar Sikri said: “Baba Gurinder Singh Dhillon has nominated Jasdeep Singh Gill, son of Sukhdev Singh Gill, as patron of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas Society with immediate effect from September 2, 2024.

“Jasdeep Singh Gill shall also succeed Baba Gurinder Singh Dhillon as the Sant Satguru of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas Society and will have the authority of giving initiation (naam),” Sikri said, adding “Baba Ji has expressed that like he has received full support and love of the ‘sangat’ after Huzur Maharaj ji, he has wished and requested that the same love and affection be given to Jasdeep Singh Gill in carrying out his ‘sewa (service)’ as patron and sang satguru.”

UPDATE #2: I received this thoughtful message from "DSK" just now. Wanted to pass it along with this person's permission.

Dear Mr. Hines,

I have, for many years, followed with great interest the RSSB part of your blog because I come from a Radhasoami family.

I write to draw your attention to this morning's rather surprising announcement that Baba Gurinder Singh Dhillon has nominated his successor, an academic and businessman called Jasdeep Singh Gill. As per the expected RSSB style, the announcement on its official website is low-key, inconspicuous and provides only the most basic information on the newly appointed Guru: https://rssb.org/JSG.html.

The speed and suddenness with which the decision was made is enough to pique the curiosity of even an aloof observer such as myself. It is of course entirely likely that the search for a candidate has been going on for any number of months or years before settling on this one, but for most satsangis including my parents, news of this sort was only ever going to be received negatively.

There are accounts, for example, of a spate of suicides during a previous succession described in the RSSB literature, and other drastic emotionally-charged reactions. The stakes are high, and RSSB has made its way into almost every country on earth; a coordinated emotional outburst on a worldwide scale that is anything like those of the past would be catastrophic in its proportions, and, more importantly for GSD, would be terrible publicity for the sect.

On the less emotional side of the spectrum, it is a known phenomenon for even longstanding satsangis to reject the new Guru and go their own way: accounts of this too can be found in the RSSB literature — they simply cannot "feel" connected to the new Guru, they simply cannot bring themselves to attend satsang, and so on. I partly suspect that GSD simply wishes to cushion the ill but inevitable effects of the transition on such a neurotic, dependent and obsessive population that is the sangat by nominating and "training" the new Guru whilst still living, breathing, and giving satsang, almost like — an apprentice!

A separate but related observation. More important than the satsangis are those high-ranking disciples of GSD who have amassed enough material support, enough popularity, and enough prestige, either to attempt to claim the Guruship for themselves from within, or break away and form their own splinter groups under the same or a similar banner.

Those who are familiar with RSSB history and literature will already be aware of the various Guruship claims, iterations, and spin-offs that have accompanied every succession so far. With the organisation having grown as large as it is today, a succession dispute would be akin to a schism in the Catholic Church, and a spin-off would represent the loss of hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions, of disciples as they are siphoned off into the worship of yet another pop-up dera.

And this would be shown in all its terrible ugliness by the Indian media. Best to have a successor in line that everyone can agree on whilst still alive, and avoid the dramas. GSD has learned from the dark days of RSSB's previous successions, and is trying a strategy which he hopes will obviate these risks.

The new satguru has, you will observe, already been assigned his spiritual title of "Huzur," which, while I suppose does have the practical effect of distinguishing one Guru from another in speaking and writing, it more importantly allows for a modicum of pretence at a grandeur that comes with, say, regnal and papal titles.

Every Guru in the lineage has some sort of title or "nickname" by which he is exclusively addressed by all disciples, and which appears to me to be specifically contrived to demarcate the newly anointed divine Master's identity from his previous merely human identity:

1. Soamiji Maharaj (from Shiv Dayal Singh)
2. Babaji Maharaj (from Jaimal Singh)
3. Bade Maharaj/Huzur Maharaj, et al. (from Sawan Singh)
4. Sardar Bahadur Maharaj Ji (from Jagat Singh)
5. Hazur Maharaj (from Charan Singh)
6. Babaji (from Gurinder Singh Dhillon)

Though the titles tend not to be too over-the-top in comparison with other Indian-style sects of similar type, we can still see that RSSB, with its dour rejection of the majestic, the ritual and the ceremonial, appears at least subconsciously to have preserved this nominal element of traditional succession.

It remains to be seen what will become of the old Dastarbandi, the traditional turban-tying ceremony, considered by many satsangis to be almost akin to a coronation. The communique (attached) makes it clear that the succession is "with immediate effect" from today. This may not seem significant to many, but to the masses of satsangis who have grown attached to the current Guru, whether Indian or diaspora, a ceremony represents a visible transfer of authority which fits in nicely with the simple "God-In-Human-Form" style of theology.

A transitional apprenticeship period now blurs these lines. "How can there be two Gods, two Babajis?" I hear my mother ask. I suppose we shall find out soon enough under the new diarchy.

A final point to be made is that it is clear for anyone with eyes to see that successors are not selected for their piety or religious merit, but for their business, management and administration skills. A quick perusal of the Successor's profile will make this plain enough to even the most casual observer. RSSB is no longer a religious organisation; it is an organisation with some religious activities, and must be run accordingly. The present Master is part-Guru, part-CEO. The new Master will be more CEO than Guru.

Nondual awareness could be closest to the scientific worldview

In my previous post, We're all having an "out of brain experience," I said there was more to say about a lengthy chapter in Thomas Metzinger's book about pure awareness, The Elephant and the Blind. 

Here's that saying. More accurately, here's what Metzinger says, because his ideas are so subtle and often expressed in philosophical language, I figure that it's best if I use his own words here, rather than trying to restate them in my own language.

Don't be surprised if some, or much, of what Metzinger says in these excerpts isn't crystal clear. It isn't always clear to me, either, and I've finished his entire 500 page page book.

Our inner model of the space of pure awareness is a medium, like a window. You can look at a window, or through a window. And as we all know, sometimes you can somehow do both at the same time.

...Just like a window, our inner model of the space of pure awareness, and epistemic openness (which may be what MPE [minimal phenomenal experience] is) can be more or less transparent. If it is fully transparent, we typically do not notice it.

We see through it, but it reappears as the experiential realness of what we take to be the external world. It reappears as the all-pervading subjective confidence that things are there and we know about them. It reappears as the certainty that something has been known, the nonconceptual knowledge that knowledge exists. It reappears as the background experience of openness to the world. 

Only through meditation practice do we sometimes become aware of the window itself, quite often while still looking through it at the same time. Then we begin to notice something that has been there all along. 

...Let me first explain what "phenomenal transparency" means. This philosophical concept has a lot to do with what, in meditation research, is often called "reification." Phenomenology is described as transparent when certain contents of experience (e.g. perceptual objects, the body, and sometimes even the content of thought) are experienced as thinglike, mind-independent, ultimately real, and immediately given.

We don't see that they are processes anymore because, phenomenologically, they have become frozen or "solidified" into something objective and real. You experience the tree in front of you not as a holographic construct, but simply as a tree, out in front of you, irrevocably real and as if immediately given.

This is because normally your introspective attention does not penetrate the earlier processing stages in your brain that construct the visual scene, bind different visual features into a gestalt, resolve ambiguities, and separate the tree from the background.

...In my book Being No One, I said that transparency is a special form of darkness. There is something that you cannot see -- namely, the fact that most of the content of your experience are constructs, the brain's best guesses, representations not experienced as representations. They are probability distributions, predictions, mere possibilities -- but represented as realities.

...Some aspects of experience "seem to vanish" as a result of exercising attentional agency, actively trying to "fix our attention" onto them. Nondual awareness is highly evasive because any sense of exerting mental effort to attend to it or any attempt to meditate on it immediately destroys it by creating an epistemic agent model and contracting the phenomenal signature of knowing into this model.

...One of my main claims in this book has been that pure awareness is not literally contentless, but that it actually represents something. It is of something, but in a way that makes it completely natural to describe it as devoid of content, as entirely empty, as not like anything, or even as a kind of nothingness.

...In some sense it is an embodied image occurring in a biological organism. You can see an image in two different ways: You can recognize it as an image, or you can look right through it, as it were, and mistake it for a direct experience of reality itself. Drawing on Moore, we can now say that in the first case the image would be called "opaque," and in the second case, it would be "transparent." 

This is merely a visual metaphor. But if it's pointing in the right direction, then pure awareness itself also could be sometimes opaque and sometimes transparent. Sometimes we might be able to look at it, and sometimes we might be looking through it. And sometimes we are it. 

...The transparent VR [virtual reality] in our heads has been highly parsimonious and computationally efficient in helping us survive and copy our genes to every next generation. However, meditation practice can make the medium "opaque," so we sometimes become aware of the medium while still perceiving the world. 

And in a full-absorption episode, we have nothing but the autonomous recurrent activity of the medium itself, creating an internal model of mere epistemic capacity, of the abstract space of awareness as such. Epistemic openness is all there is. 

...I think that conscious beings are precisely those who have a model of their own space of knowledge -- they are systems that (in an entirely nonlinguistic and nonconceptual way) know that they currently have the capacity to know something. 

...The space itself can be almost empty, containing only a clear, abstract image of the mere capacity for knowledge and experience. Or it can contain images of actually ongoing actions, perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. In this account, MPE [minimal phenomenal experience] itself is a model of the entirely unobstructed empty space in which all these different processes of knowing something can occur. 

...Nondual awareness, on the other hand, is a state in which the model is there and has become salient, and in which something actually is known -- but the structural feature of subject/object duality (by means of which the embodied brain normally explains what is happening to itself) has been attenuated. Now the experience of knowing is no longer contracted into an ego, into an epistemic agent model -- now "everything knows," but selflessly. 

...Astonishingly, very few people seem to have realized that we have continual access to the richest, most robust, and closest-to-perfect VR [virtual reality] experience currently imaginable: our very own ordinary biologically evolved form of waking consciousness. 

...Have you ever imagined that you were a visionary who could see into the future? Well, your ordinary conscious experience is an (often reasonably successful) attempt to do just that, because what you see is the most likely future state of the world. 

Scientifically, phenomenal content (the brain-based content of conscious experience) is the content of an ongoing simulation; it is a prediction trying to model the probable causes of a sensory signal. It is not a veridical representation of the actual environment, and it is useful for precisely this reason, because it helps the organism reduce the uncertainty about what will happen next.

This is what conscious experience and VR [virtual reality] have in common: They provide us with a counterfactual image of the world. Waking consciousness is a complex hallucination constrained by the senses, and -- as sketched out earlier in our discussion -- it makes something possible become real.

As opposed to today's VR, biological consciousness is about successfully anticipating the future. This is the reason why we could even say that ordinary consciousness is an action-oriented kind of visionary experience. 

...This raises the interesting question of whether some global modes of conscious experience are closer to the emerging scientific image than others -- whether their underlying ontology maps more closely onto the scientific worldview than does ordinary waking consciousness, which is strongly shaped by biological imperatives. 

I think that nondual awareness could be a high-convergence mode in exactly this sense: a form of conscious experience that is suboptimal from a biological perspective but is closer to our best scientific understanding of what the conscious brain really does and what the deeper causal structure of the world actually is.

We're all having an "out of brain experience"

At long last, I'm reaching the home stretch of reading Thomas Metzinger's meaty/tofuy book, all 500 pages of it, The Elephant and the Blind, about the experience of pure consciousness that's based on more than five hundred experiential reports from meditators.

There are 35 chapters. I've just got two left to read. I thought about skipping some, but after finishing the "Transparency, Translucency, and Virtuality" chapter this morning, I'm glad that my rather obsessive reading style -- usually I read every page in a book, unless I'm really not enjoying it -- paid off in this instance. 

Because Metzinger makes some fascinating points in this chapter. I'm sure I've been exposed to similar thoughts in other books by Metzinger that I've read, along with other neuroscience books, but his basic thesis seemed fresh to me.

He starts off the chapter, #28, with this overview:

This is a special chapter. I want to draw your attention to three particularly interesting phenomenological aspects, and therefore I offer more extensive commentary than usual, in addition to our selection of experiential reports.

In chapter 27, on nondual awareness, I said that ordinary consciousness is a nonconceptual mode of knowing one's inner model of reality. However, any time that this way of knowing is contracted into an ego and falsely experienced as direct and immediate, a large part of the model appears as an outer reality to us. 

We then have what the Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo has called a built-in "out of brain experience"; we experience ourselves as an embodied agent situated in some external environment.

This makes good evolutionary sense: Our biological ancestors successfully learned to use different parts of their inner model as a proxy for parts of their environment. According to our ancestors' subjective experience, models of trees turned into trees and models of wolves into real wolves.

Their brains also learned to use the model of the body that carried them, including sensations like hunger, thirst, breath, and heartbeat, as a proxy for the body itself, improving the organism's capacity for self-control. 

This is what it means to have a "transparent self-model" -- that is, a conscious model of yourself as a whole that has become so reliable that you are unable to experience it as a model -- and we will learn more about all this in the second half of this chapter.

To stay alive, there was a boundary that had to be protected, or re-created from moment to moment. Conscious experience often includes an explicit representation of inside and outside (e.g., of the interior parts of my body, of inner feelings and emotions arising from them, and also of what appears as my "own" mind) -- plus an outside world of mind-independent objects. 

What meditation practice shows is that awareness can also occur with no explicit representation of inside and outside. This can lead to a conscious model of reality in which, according to verbal description, everything is inside and outside at the same time -- or in which it has neither quality.

There's a lot to unpack here, which is why the chapter is unusually long, 27 pages. I'll have more to share about it in other blog posts. For now, I'll be content with some basic observations about the "out of brain experience" thing, a term I like a lot, which is a play on the much more familiar "out of body experience."

With an out of body experience, someone has the illusion (almost certainly that's what it is) that their consciousness has left a body and entered the world. That's pretty damn dramatic, so it gets a lot of attention. 

An out of brain experience, by contrast, is what almost everybody has at each waking moment. It's so commonplace, few people even know that's what they're experiencing, neuroscientists being an exception, along with Buddhists and others in the know about how the human mind works.

For we have an intuitive sense that there is (1) our internal consciousness and (2) an external world that consciousness is aware of. In other words, consciousness perceives a world that is independent of our perceptions of it.

But this isn't true. It can't be true. It just seems to be true. 

The brain has no direct connection with external reality, the world outside of the brain. The brain is locked inside our skull. All it knows about the world comes through the five senses -- sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste. 

Those sensations undergo a great deal of processing within the brain before they appear in consciousness. That's part of what Metzinger means by a conscious model of reality.

So in truth we never have an "out of brain" experience of an outside world. We have what our conscious model of reality presents to us, which ordinarily is constrained by mostly accurate sense perceptions that allow us humans to generally agree on what the world is like. 

"Beautiful sunset," we may say to a stranger. "Sure is," they may reply. 

This is a manifestation of the transparent nature of our conscious model of reality. Usually we aren't aware of the model that, somewhat akin to the programming of an AI (artificial intelligence), leads us to wrongly believe in dualism: that there is a physical world out there that's separate and distinct from the mental world in here. 

Metzinger says that understanding the nonduality of reality is what both modern neuroscience has been able to achieve, along with ancient wisdom traditions such as Buddhism.

We are now beginning to expand our understanding of what the phenomenological concept of "nonduality" means. One of the most fascinating aspects is that some experiences of nondual awareness given by our participants quite directly match our best current models of what consciousness might really be from a neuroscientific, computational, or mathematical perspective, while at the same time cleanly mapping onto phenomenological descriptions given by scholar-practitioners more than 1,000 years ago.

This may well be one of the most philosophically important results of our first interdisciplinary study. It is interesting to see how one can apply the idea of nonduality not only to the distinctions between subject and object and between inside and outside, but even to the distinction between what is "real" and what "does not exist."

 

Sea level and evolution show that reality is shades of gray, not black and white

One of the reasons why I've come to dislike religions so much is that they're so prone to making absolutist statements. 

God is.... blah, blah, blah. The commandments to follow are... blah, blah, blah. You can tell good from evil by...blah, blah, blah. That's all bullshit, regardless of what the blah, blah, blah consists of. 

I say this for a couple of reasons.

One obvious reason is that religions don't deal in truth, they deal in fantasy. They make stuff up, then expect people to believe in it. If they don't, bad things are supposed to happen: hell, damnation, God's wrath.

Another more subtle reason is that reality isn't marked by sharp distinctions akin to the difference between black and white. While reality may seem that way at first glance, a closer look reveals shades of gray. 

Examples abound. 

A vacuum in deep space isn't really empty, but is filled with ephemeral quantum particles popping in and out of existence. Sexual desire isn't homosexual and heterosexual, but includes other varieties such as bisexual. The big bang wasn't a single moment of creation, but is ongoing as space continues to expand some 14 billion years later.

Here's a few more examples drawn from articles I read recently in The New Yorker and New Scientist. 

The New Yorker article by Brooke Jarvis is called "Sea Change: What the search for sea level tells us about living on our changeable planet." The Compass app on my iPhone tells me that I'm at 360 feet elevation. But what am I elevated above?

Well, sea level. Just about everybody knows that elevation refers to the distance above sea level. Few people, though, wonder about how sea level is measured, me certainly included. The article describes how difficult this is.

The oceans rise and fall with the tides, which are caused by the moon. Some places in the ocean are higher than others. Because of how our planet bulges as it spins, "the water levels of equatorial seas are some twenty-one kilometers higher than the sea ice at the North Pole." The oceans expand when warmer and shrink when cooler. Melting ice sheets raise the ocean level while growing ice sheets lower it.

It was only in 1929 that the U.S. adopted a shared reference for setting mean sea levels around the country; it was derived from calculations based on twenty-six tidal stations and 106,724 kilometres' worth of coastline surveying.

The article is based in part on a book about the quest to determine sea level.

"There is no progress to be found in the story this book tells, no constant improvement of knowledge, no approach to a more 'real' system of reference," von Hardenberg writes in his introduction. Instead, there's a story of people abandoning a belief in some perfect natural reference point as it slowly becomes  evident how complicated and changeable the planet on which they live truly is.

The line between the land and the ocean, after all, has never been fixed; it is a binary abstraction we impose on a place that, as Rachel Carson wrote, is forever "changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea." For animals and plants that make their homes in the intertidal zone, survival depends on flexibility, on adapting to a world in which the only constant is inconstancy.

The New Scientist article by Colin Barres is called "Becoming Human." Subtitle: "What is a human and when did such a being emerge? These fundamental questions about ourselves are surprisingly difficult to answer."

Our species is called Homo sapiens. But there have been other species in the genus Homo. DNA testing, such as via the firm Ancestry, shows this. Five years ago I got my DNA tested. I was mainly interested in where my recent relatives came from, but the test also showed a much more distant heritage: like most people, I have some Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. 

So I'm mostly Homo sapiens, but not entirely. This indicates how it is difficult to draw a hard and fast distinction between who is "human" and who isn't. The article goes into this problem at some length, ending with:

A century after the discovery of the Taung Child, and 50 years after Lucy, we seem no closer to understanding when or why humans emerged. That is frustrating, but also, paradoxically, a reflection of how much progress has been made.

When researchers had just a handful of hominin fossils to work with, it was easy to spot the significant differences between them and to assume that there was a dramatic moment when our ancestors became human. It is because we have better evidence that we now know things are more complicated.

What is clear is that we didn't suddenly "become human" 2.9 million years ago when A. afarensis died out. That should come as no surprise. Evolution is a continuous process, and the propensity to divide life up into conspicuously distinct species and genera is less a reflection of fact than another human idiosyncrasy. 

Ultimately, where we draw the line between "us" and "them" isn't simply a biological question -- it is a philosophical one too.

"Empty Force" is a Tai Chi and martial arts myth, but people fall for it

Today someone in my Tai Chi class spoke about a Tai Chi master being able to repel people, or knock them down, without using any physical force. You know, just with their mind, their supposedly highly evolved chi power. 

(Note: in Chinese the same word can denote different things. The "Chi" in Tai Chi means boundary. Chi can also refer to vital life force, also known as qi. That's how I used it in the sentence above.)

When I heard this, I thought, that's a Tai Chi myth, because it isn't possible to project a physical force just with the mind. However, I didn't say that out loud. People believe all kinds of things that aren't true. That's the basis of every religion: fantasies that people believe in. 

They do this out of a search for meaning. It can feel good to believe in the supernatural, in God, in "empty force" chi power.

I'm not shy about making fun of those myths on this blog, and in conversations with people who agree with me about the absurdity of supernaturalism, but I don't go out of my way to dump a heaping load of reality on someone else's fantasy if the fantasy works for them.

Fortunately, when it comes to empty force in Tai Chi and other martial arts there's plenty of evidence that has debunked this myth. 

It seems clear that one foundation of this myth is the same foundation that causes followers of a guru to ascribe supernatural powers to them. I know whereof I speak, because for 35 years I was an active member of an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru who was considered to be God in Human Form.

That there wasn't any objective evidence of this didn't bother the most fervent of the guru's devotees (I was a bit more on the skeptical side) who believed the guru could know what his disciples were doing and thinking half a world away, and could intervene in their lives if he so chose.

Those devotees, like devotees of a Tai Chi master who claims to have the power of empty force, want so badly for their fantasy to be true, they participate in the manufacturing of supernatural powers which then are taken as truth by other gullible devotees.

Here's a You Tube video that, in 5 1/2 minutes, demonstrates how "Chi Power Woo Woo Fails." (Title of the video.) It's rather sad how the students of a Tai Chi or marital arts master will either consciously or unconsciously go along with his empty force B.S., which is shown to be a fantasy when someone not under the spell of devotion participates in a demonstration that invariably fails. 

If you want more amusement, check out this longer 13 1/2 minute video that shows some additional empty force staged ridiculousness. Again, I'm unsure whether those who participate in the demonstrations know that the supposed master is a fake, or have convinced themselves that he's really got empty force power, so they fall down when he gestures at them. I like the description of the video:

Qi Power, Lin Kong Jin / Empty Force Compilation of Martial Artists desperately in need of psychiatric treatment. Harness the Chi Power of confused minds! ... This kind of belief is common in Chinese and Japanese martial arts as Tai Chi and Aikido. But there are also "sects" out there as Yellow Bamboo and EFO. It seems like many of the "masters" believe themselves in what they do. Apparently some people have a very deep need of believing in magic and mysteries. - "Hey! Look at me! I am special!"

Lastly, "Myth busting in Chinese marital arts" is a good post on The Tai Chi Notebook site. Excerpt:

These more marketing-orientated myths about the prowess of practitioners – how deadly they were, how unbeatable their martial arts was, how the power of Qi was greater than physical strength all fed directly into all that nonsense about no touch knockouts and “empty force” that has marred the image of Chinese martial arts in the modern age.

And politics also gets involved. When obvious myths about the origins of martial arts are dispelled they often get replaced by more politically motivated stories about the arts origins that are equally as unprovable and unreliable yet fit a nationalist agenda. It seems like the Chinese martial arts are forever being used to support some sort of Chinese government propaganda.

In short, the Chinese martial arts world was in need of, and remains in need of, a lot of myth busting, because much of what we are being told and sold is basically not true. But Bowman’s fears, that we are in danger of spoiling the fun for everybody with this relentless search for the truth, holds true, I think. I was certainly attracted to Chinese martial arts by a steady diet of orientalist propaganda from the likes of David Carradine’s Kung Fu TV series and Marvel comics with heroes like Iron Fist. This is often what draws us to the martial arts in the first place and there has to be some way of searching for truth in the martial arts, but keeping the magic that drew us there in the first place. 

UPDATE: Here's a few links to descriptions of empty force by people who believe this myth. They sound a lot like miraculous faith healing stories in evangelical Christianity. My best attempt to be sympathetic about such unfounded beliefs is that it shows the power of the human mind: when someone really wants to believe in something that isn't true, they reshape reality to fit their belief. I just have an old-fashioned attitude that we should reshape our beliefs to fit reality, to the best of our ability.

Empty Force
Empty Force in the Buqi System
Chinese Empty Force

And here's a post that, on a quick read (it's pretty long) puts Tai Chi training in a realistic perspective. I'll share some excerpts that debunk the notion of empty force as something supernatural. By the way, if anyone is wondering, I've practiced Tai Chi for nineteen years. Before that I was into hard style martial arts for about twelve years, earning a black belt in a form of karate. 

What is Empty Force?

Possibly a year after my lifelong friend and martial arts partner, Martin Inn and I had immigrated Chu, Ch’u-fang into the United States, he announced a new and important mission for us. There was someone else, someone of great importance, that we must now turn our efforts toward immigrating. This was a special and secretive individual only known to a few advanced adepts, such as Mr. Chu, and we should be honored to have the job of bringing him to America.

He was so special because he had mastered the technique of “empty force,” the highest achievement of Taijiquan. When one’s circulation of qi becomes high enough, he reaches the point at which he can project it at others, knocking them down at a distance, or even killing them. We all have some idea of what this looks like, having seen it in countless gung-fu movies.

Marty and I were properly stunned, not expecting to be “living the dream” of becoming gung-fu supermen quite so quickly, and Mr. Chu must have noticed, asking next if we believed him, to which, after quickly glancing at one another, we both assured him that of course, teacher, you can bet on it. After nodding solemnly for a moment, he told us, sounding rather disgusted, that we were fools. No one, he emphasized in a slightly louder tone of voice, can do this, and don’t believe anyone that tells you that they can. 

I am sure that no one could righteously fault me for ending the current discussion right here, because Mr. Chu’s warning is definitely the short answer to the whole subject of empty force, given what people take the phrase to mean.

It is a worthwhile warning, because purveyors of this “power” seem to surface every few years with the persistence of some sort of biblical pestilence. It is amazing to see the number and relatively high caliber of people who can be taken in by this “emperor’s new clothes” con, in which an inability to be affected by this “qi attack” identifies an insufficiency in you, rather than in the one mounting the attack. 

...As far as any fantasies concerning what appears to be happening in supposed demonstrations of “empty force,” these should be relegated to the same mental dust bin as similar martial fantasies about making oneself heavier or lighter at will, or fighting multiple assailants while blindfolded. All of these kinds of stories have their origins in some sort of reality, but never the reality that is presumed.

The presumed reality here is that someone is emitting a force that operates at a distance and can affect completely untrained and even unaware opponents. In the words of Chu, Ch’u-fang: no one can do this, and don’t believe anyone who tells you that they can.