Church of the Churchless

I'm feeling the fear and sharing my Tai Chi video anyway

As the title of a book says, Feel the fear and do it anyway. So I'm taking that advice and sharing a video I made today of me doing a Tai Chi form.

Watching the video was fear-inducing, or at least anxiety-inducing, because I do my best to avoid looking at myself in the lengthy mirror that's on one wall of the room where I've been taking Tai Chi classes.

But since we've been learning the Compact form -- which lives up to its name by not requiring much space to do it in -- I figured it would be a good opportunity to stick my iPhone on a tripod and make a "selfie video."

Maybe this will turn out to be a shortcut to ego-loss and consequent enlightenment, because I found it interesting (and somewhat disturbing) that how I've been visualizing myself doing the Compact form from the inside of my head is rather different from how my iPhone video shows me.

Which is typical, of course. Our self-image may not bear a lot of resemblance to how others see us. 

Anyway, I'm glad that I made the video. After watching my first video attempt, I changed some things in the next attempt. Slowed down some. Corrected a few moves that I got wrong the first time around.

Tai Chi, of course, is founded on Taoist principles such as yin and yang. This is one reason I enjoy Tai Chi so much. It's got a built-in philosophical foundation. But that makes it much more subtle than the hard style (karate, basically) martial arts training I did before Tai Chi.

Yin and yang, soft and hard, alternate throughout a Tai Chi form. This is easier to feel than to see. And it helps explain why, even after 15 years of taking classes three times a week, I still consider myself to be a semi-beginner in Tai Chi. Again, the moves in Tai Chi possess way more subtlety than, say, a karate punch or kick.

And they're performed at a slower pace, which magnifies missteps, stumbles, and such.

I should note that my instructor, Warren Allen, emphasizes the martial/self-defense aspect of Tai Chi to a much greater extent than most Tai Chi teachers, given his extensive background in hard style martial arts before he embraced Tai Chi.

if this video looks less flowing and soft than you'd expect Tai Chi to appear, that's one reason. Another reason is that I have a long ways to go before I'll feel that I've begun to master Tai Chi.

Heck, I'm only 71, a youngster in comparison to the 80 and 90 year-olds who are venerated in the Tai Chi world. (And they started learning Tai Chi at a much earlier age than I did.)

 

Indian Express story describes paradox of the RSSB guru

Today a commenter shared a link to a story by The Indian Express that profiles an Indian religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, and the guru who leads RSSB, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. (See below.)

The story doesn't break new ground, but it is interesting nonetheless.

What struck me is the contradiction between a quote from volunteers who guard the gates of the RSSB headquarters as they tried to explain why bags, mobile phones, and cameras have to be deposited before entering the headquarters, “you leave the material world outside as you journey to your inner self,” and the fact that Dhillon and his family are reported to have received hundreds of millions of dollars from various sources during the guru's stint as RSSB guru.

By all accounts, Dhillon is heavily involved in the material world, as is his family.

So it's a paradox that RSSB wants visitors to lay aside material possessions before entering the Dera headquarters, even though Gurinder Singh Dhillon is deeply involved in financial machinations that include accusations of fraud committed by Dhillon, his family, and close associates.

Here's the story.

Somewhere between Jalandhar and Amritsar on the Grand Trunk Road, a long, winding path breaks off and stops at an imposing gate, one of half-a-dozen entrances to the headquarters of Dera Baba Jaimal Singh, known more commonly as Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a sprawling commune on the banks of the Beas river.

Much like its 65-year-old head Gurinder Singh Dhillon, “Babaji” or “Master” to 20 million followers across 90 countries, the dera is fiercely private. Devotees guarding the gates tell you to deposit bags, mobiles, and cameras before venturing in. The rationale, the volunteers often say, is that “you leave the material world outside as you journey to your inner self”.

But, for some time now, the outside world has been threatening to intrude into this closed universe, with Babaji, the presiding deity of the town, and his family thrust into the ugly legal battle between Malvinder Mohan Singh and Shivinder Mohan Singh, former promoters of Ranbaxy. All the dramatis personae in the case are related to the dera — former dera head Charan Singh is the maternal grandfather of the Singh brothers, while Dhillon, whom he eventually chose as his heir, is Charan Singh’s sister’s son.

It all began with Japanese drug maker Daiichi Sankyo,which had bought the Singh brothers’ 34.82% stake in Ranbaxy in 2008 for $2.4 billion, filing a case in the Delhi High Court in 2018. It alleged that the Singhs had siphoned off over Rs 2,000 crore from their companies through loans to Shimal Healthcare and Prius Real Estate. Dhillon’s wife Shabnam was earlier listed as a director with Prius. But Prius told the judge that the firm was neither owned by the Singhs, nor was it a downstream company of theirs.

Nearly four months later, elder Singh brother Malvinder wrote to the Economic Offences Wing, accusing the dera spiritual head of working in “collusion and connivance” with Shivinder to cause “wrongful loss” to him and the shareholders of RHC Holding Pvt Ltd, a firm he once jointly owned with his younger brother.

Malvinder also alleged that the dera chief was “threatening” him to sign a settlement, freeing the Dhillons of any financial liability. His affidavit in the Supreme Court this year also claims that over Rs 6,000 crore in loans and advances are to be recovered from “various” individuals and companies, including Prius and the dera chief himself.

Dhillon had taken over as the fifth chief of the Beas dera in 1990, after the death of Charan Singh, a lawyer who had headed the dera since 1951. It’s said that Dhillon was home from Spain, where he worked, for the birth of his second son when Charan Singh passed away and he learnt of his anointment as dera chief.

The elderly gatekeepers on volunteer duty at the dera’s newest three-storey outpost still remember the day Dhillon became dera chief. “Babaji was a young man, all of 36, with a trimmed black beard,” recounts Mahender Singh, who owns a cloth shop in Kaithal and joined the dera in 1984.

A R Rajwade, a retired mathematics professor who lives next door to the Dhillon family mansion in Sector 8, Chandigarh, recounts seeing Dhillon as a young man on his bike. “His father Gurmukh Singh, an affluent landlord from Moga, built this house.”

Dhillon’s mother Mohinder Kaur continues to live in the house after his father passed away in the Nineties. Dhillon’s wife Shabnam, 58, who used to divide her time between the dera and the homes of her sons Gurpreet and Gurkeerat Singh, in Singapore and London, respectively, passed away on November 27 following complications after an abdominal surgery in London. She was cremated at the dera.

Dhillon’s friends, who call him “Moga”, also recall his love for bike drives, and Beatles and Paul Anka. “He studied at Sanawar while I was at Bishop Cotton School in Shimla. We became friends when he joined B.Com at Panjab University,’’ says retired Punjab and Haryana High Court Justice S S Saron.

Under Dhillon’s 29-year tenure, the dera has grown in strength and now has over 5,167 satsang centres across the country and over 500 abroad. The dera headquarters at Beas in Amritsar district is a self-contained ‘city’, with an air strip, a CBSE-affiliated school, apartments, an industrial area, a shopping mall, and a network of underpasses for the smooth flow of traffic.

The dera is run by the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) Trust, a non-profit society headed by a secretary with the dera chief as its patron.

On any given day, 15,000-20,000 come for daily satsang at the dera, with the number rising to several lakhs when the dera chief is addressing it. This summer, the dera hosted five lakh people for a satsang with Dhillon. Besides 15 sheds that can house 8,000 to 12,000 people each, there are dorms, serais or guest houses and apartments for visitors. The biggest of the satsang halls is spread over 80 acres and can accommodate five lakh people. The parking area within the campus can hold 50,000 vehicles.

The dera also boasts one of the world’s largest single rooftop solar facilities. Inside the township is an industrial area where the sewadars make everything, from paver blocks and tiles to furniture and grilles. “There is nothing we get from outside,” says J S Sethi, a retired chief engineer and secretary of the Trust since 2005.

Like with deras elsewhere in the state, the Radha Saomi sect depends heavily on volunteers or jathas to keep the giant dera machinery running. The volunteers are spread across the dera — men and women, who come in as per a pre-determined schedule every day.

The Beas railway station has been taken over this Tuesday evening by dera volunteers who have come to receive a jatha from Hoshiarpur. A batch of volunteers sweeps the station while waiting.

Soon, the jatha arrives and its members head to the two buses in the parking area. “We come here from Hoshiarpur on the 19th of every month. This month, we have been assigned the dera’s sanitation department,’’ says Satnam Singh, a farmer.

With the rapid expansion of the dera have come attendant controversies, the case of alleged fund diversion involving the Singh brothers only the latest.

In 2016, when the Akali-BJP government was in power in the state, former Patiala AAP MP Dharamvir Gandhi took a round of five adjoining villages and claimed that he had come across marginal framers who had been allegedly forced to sell their land to the dera at throwaway rates.

“I got to know that the dera administration is acquiring land through deceit and in connivance of local revenue officials,” says Gandhi, who raised the issue in Parliament.

Though a probe was initiated, nothing came of it. Dismissing Gandhi’s allegations, Sethi says the dera pays compensation at the rate of Rs 2.5 lakh a marla against the market rate in these parts of Rs 40,000 a marla.

Dhillon himself has rarely commented on any controversy, adding to his reluctant godman image.

“He hates being photographed,” says a former follower, who claims to have left the dera because he found it “too austere”.

This month though, Dhillon finally broke his silence on the Ranbaxy allegations, denying RHC’s claims of “huge receivables” from him and his family. Instead, he accused the Singh brothers of owing him over Rs 70 crore that he had loaned to them in 2011.

Mention the case to Sethi of the RSSB Trust and he bristles. “The RSSB has not taken a single paisa from the Singh brothers, you can check our records. Neither the dera nor Babaji like giving clarifications. We believe that ultimately the truth will come out.’’

Mindfulness is calculus made spiritual

OK, I'm wading into some deep philosophical waters here, given the title of this blog post, because I only took one semester of calculus in graduate school, and then only because I was forced to by the powers-that-be in control of the Portland State University Systems Science Ph.D program.

I found calculus to be difficult. By contrast, I've gotten back to reading an engaging book by Stephen Strogatz about calculus, Infinite Powers, which I blogged about back in August, noting that it had some spiritual aspects.

This morning, reading a chapter on "The Vocabulary of Change" before I meditated, I was struck by how mindfulness practice -- which basically involves focusing on what's going on here-and-now versus there-and-then -- resembles what Strogatz calls the Infinity Principle. 

Here's how Strogatz described this in the chapter I read today. 

Notice that we are using the Infinity Principle here -- we are trying to make a complicated curve simpler by chopping it into infinitesimal straight pieces. This is what we always do in calculus. Curved shapes are hard; straight shapes are easy, even if there are infinitely many of them and even if they are infinitesimally small. Calculating a derivative in this way is a quintessential calculus move and one of the most fundamental applications of the Infinity Principle.

In his book, Strogatz uses a graph of the length of days to talk about how an underlying mathematical function, in this case the complex motions of the Earth as it revolves around the sun, is used to produce a graph such as the one below that I found via some Googling.

What struck me is that while it's impossible to derive a mathematical function of life, we all have the feeling that our life consists of ups and downs. 

Our most significant "up," of course, is the moment of our birth. And our most significant "down" is the moment of our death. But in-between those moments we experience a wide variety of joys and sorrows, triumphs and disappointments, pleasures and pains.

It's natural to view the present moment in the context of both remembered previous ups and downs, and of imagined future ups and downs. However, this makes more sense when something is genuinely cyclical, as is the case with the amount of daylight (vertical axis in image above).

In our own life, it's often difficult to predict what is going to happen next. And our memory of what's happened in the past is prone to errors, since we tend to remember most clearly the Big Moments in life, not the Ordinary Moments -- even though the latter are much more common than the former.

So there's a lot to like about mindfulness, which I've noted is my current approach to meditation. 

Calculus can deal with curves such as those in the image above because it divides them into an infinity of straight lines. Similarly, mindfulness helps us to deal with the ever-changing circumstances of our life by guiding us to focus on the small things that are happening at this very moment, rather than the largeness of our actual past and potential future.

I'm not saying that mindfulness in any way takes away ups and downs, or pleasures and pains. But just as a portion of a curved line looks almost exactly straight if it is zoomed in enough, so are we able to look upon our life with more equanimity if we're able to be mindful of what is actually occurring to us -- versus what we hope will occur, or are worried will occur.

As a final observation, Strogatz uses Usain Bolt's record-breaking 100 meter dash performance in the 2009 World Championships as an example of how small ups and downs are largely meaningless when looking at a curve that is smooth at a larger scale. He shares a graph based on laser guns that tracked Bolt's speed hundreds of times a second.

The little wiggles on the overall trend represent the ups and downs in speed that inevitably occur during strides. Running, after all, is a series of leapings and landings. Bolt's speed changed a little whenever he landed a foot on the ground and momentarily braked, then propelled himself forward and launched himself airborne again.

...To me, these wiggles hold a larger lesson. i see them as a metaphor, a kind of instructional fable about the nature of modeling real phenomena with calculus. If we try to push the resolution of our measurements too far, if we look at any phenomenon in excruciatingly fine detail in time or space, we will start to see a breakdown of smoothness. 

...Yet if what we care about are the overall trends, smoothing out the jitters may be good enough. The enormous insight that calculus has given us into the nature of motion and change in this universe is a testament to the power of smoothness, approximate though it may be.

in the same way, mindfulness requires an appropriate level of resolution. Our life shouldn't be viewed in such excruciating detail as to miss the big picture, nor in such a broad scope as to miss the reality of what is actually happening at any given moment.

New Yorker story about Modi's India is disturbing reading

Having been an active member of an India-based spiritual organization for 35 years, I have a fondness for that country. (Including its food!) 

I've spent a lot of time with Indian people. I've visited India twice. Heck, I even volunteered to write a book about the karmic rationale for vegetarianism, Life is Fair, which is still being sold by the group I used to belong to, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

But I've paid much more attention to Indian spiritual philosophies than to Indian politics.

Sure, I'm aware that Narenda Modi became the Prime Minister of India, and that he's a Hindu nationalist. That's worrisome to me, since Modi seems to bear some resemblance to our President Trump -- which isn't a compliment.

Since I'm a subscriber to The New Yorker, a terrific publication, a few days ago I got an email about stories in the upcoming issue. This one caught my eye. I've shared some excerpts from the lengthy story below.

It's disturbing reading for a variety of reasons: such as, how Muslims are being treated in Kashmir and elsewhere; how Modi and his political party are intimidating journalists; Modi's involvement in the killing of Muslims.

Of course, there are two sides to every story. But The New Yorker is known for quality writing and accurate journalism, so I'm confident that this story is quite truthful.

Download Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India | The New Yorker

UPDATE: Here's a comment I left after other people have commented on this story.
---------------------------------
So I've seen several mentions of "fake news" from commenters on this post, but no one has pointed out what, specifically, is fake or untruthful in this New Yorker story. I have zero patience for people who cry "fake news" but can't back up that claim with facts.

Show your facts, if you have them. If you don't, then stop calling this well-researched and well-written story fake news. If you like that Modi is a Hindu nationalist, that he's been involved in mass killings of Muslims, that he attacks Indian journalists, that he's doing bad things in Kashmir, that he's requiring Muslims in India to prove that they are citizens -- that's fine.

I disagree with your view, but at least you're recognizing facts. What I find most distasteful is claims of "fake news" that aren't backed up with "true news." Share links to reputable sources that rebut what the New Yorker says. Or stop with the fake news claim.

...The change in Kashmir upended more than half a century of careful politics, but the Indian press reacted with nearly uniform approval. Ever since Modi was first elected Prime Minister, in 2014, he has been recasting the story of India, from that of a secular democracy accommodating a uniquely diverse population to that of a Hindu nation that dominates its minorities, especially the country’s two hundred million Muslims. Modi and his allies have squeezed, bullied, and smothered the press into endorsing what they call the “New India.”

...Muslim-Hindu harmony was central to the vision of India’s founders, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who laid the foundation for a secular state. India is home to all the world’s major religions; Muslims constitute about fourteen per cent of the population. As the British Empire prepared to withdraw, in 1947, Muslims were so fearful of Hindu domination that they clamored for a separate state, which became Pakistan.

The division of the subcontinent, known as Partition, inspired the largest migration in history, with tens of millions of Hindus and Muslims crossing the new borders. In the accompanying violence, as many as two million people died. Afterward, both Pakistanis and Indians harbored enduring grievances over the killings and the loss of ancestral land. Kashmir, on the border, became the site of a long-running proxy war.

...After the riots, Modi’s government did almost nothing to provide for the tens of thousands of Muslims forced from their homes; aid was supplied almost entirely by volunteers. Asked about this, Modi said, “Relief camps are actually child-making factories. Those who keep on multiplying the population should be taught a lesson.”

Although some Hindu rioters were arrested, just a few dozen were ultimately convicted. Mayaben Kodnani, a B.J.P. minister, was the only official to be punished significantly; she was convicted of murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy. When Modi’s government later came to power in Delhi, she was cleared of all charges.

In the following months, there were indications of substantial government complicity. According to independent investigations, the Hindu mobs had moved decisively, following leaders who appeared to have received explicit instructions. “These instructions were blatantly disseminated by the government, and in most cases, barring a few sterling exceptions, methodically carried out by the police and Indian Administrative Service,” concluded a citizen-led inquiry that included former Supreme Court justices and a former senior police official.

...India’s female journalists are often subjected to an especially ugly form of abuse. The threats that Ayyub received were nearly identical to those sent to Gauri Lankesh, a journalist and book publisher from the southern state of Karnataka. Like Ayyub, Lankesh had reported aggressively on Hindu nationalism and on violence against women and lower-caste people.

She had also published Ayyub’s book in Kannada, the predominant language in the state. “We were like sisters,” Ayyub told me. In September, 2017, after Lankesh endured a prolonged campaign of online attacks, two men shot her dead outside her home and fled on a motorbike.

Neha Dixit, who has done groundbreaking reporting on the B.J.P., told me that she receives death threats and sexual insults constantly: “Every day, I get three hundred notifications, with dick pics, and with conversations about how they should rape me with a steel rod or a rose thornbush or something like that.” For Dixit and other targets of these campaigns, it is especially galling that the abuse is apparently endorsed by prominent Modi allies.

Ayyub showed me a tweet about the porn video from Vaibhav Aggarwal, a media personality who often speaks on behalf of the B.J.P. It read, “U want to dance in the Rain, get all wet & not want to then have pneumonia”—a suggestion that she deserved whatever abuse she got. In June, the fake Ayyub quote about child rape was retweeted by a prominent B.J.P. member named Ashoke Pandit. The quote, which originated in English, was translated into Hindi on a Facebook page for the so-called Army of Yogi Adityanath—admirers of the B.J.P.’s Chief Minister in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

...As Modi consolidated his hold on the government, he used its power to silence mainstream outlets. In 2016, his administration began moving to crush the television news network NDTV. Since it went on the air, in 1988, the station has been one of the liveliest and most credible news channels; this spring, as votes were tallied in the general election, its Web site received 16.5 billion hits in a single day.

According to two people familiar with the situation, Modi’s administration has pulled nearly all government advertising from the network—one of its primary sources of revenue—and members of his Cabinet have pressured private companies to stop buying ads. NDTV recently laid off some four hundred employees, a quarter of its staff. The journalists who remain say that they don’t know how long they can persist. “These are dark times,” one told me.

...Modi’s government has targeted enterprising editors as well. Last year, Bobby Ghosh, the editor of the Hindustan Times, one of the country’s most respected newspapers, ran a series tracking violence against Muslims. Modi met privately with the Times’ owner, and the next day Ghosh was asked to leave. In 2016, Outlook ran a disturbing investigation by Neha Dixit, revealing that the R.S.S. had offered schooling to dozens of disadvantaged children in the state of Assam, and then sent them to be indoctrinated in Hindu-nationalist camps on the other side of the country.

According to a person with knowledge of the situation, Outlook’s owners—one of India’s wealthiest families, whose businesses depended on government approvals—came under pressure from Modi’s administration. “They were going to ruin their empire,” the person said. Not long after, Krishna Prasad, Outlook’s longtime editor, resigned.

...A feeling of despair has settled in among many Indians who remain committed to the secular, inclusive vision of the country’s founders. “Gandhi and Nehru were great, historic figures, but I think they were an aberration,” Prasad, the former Outlook editor, told me.

“It’s very different now. The institutions have crumbled—universities, investigative agencies, the courts, the media, the administrative agencies, public services. And I think there is no rational answer for what has happened, except that we pretended to be what we were for fifty, sixty years. But we are now reverting to what we always wanted to be, which is to pummel minorities, to push them into a corner, to show them their places, to conquer Kashmir, to ruin the media, and to make corporations servants of the state. And all of this under a heavy resurgence of Hinduism. India is becoming the country it has always wanted to be.”

Why the RSSB guru has broken an initiate's heart

Here's a comment on a recent blog post from Alexander Black that I found to be moving. People put a lot of faith in the morality of gurus and other spiritual leaders. When a leader acts badly, it causes pain among those who trusted them. (I corrected a few typos in the comment.)

As an initiate of Gurinder Singh it breaks my heart how he has lost the moral high ground by getting so deeply involved with the Singh brothers’ illegal and criminal financial dealings.

As Satsangis we seek to find the spiritual truth by practicing meditation every day. Isn’t it equally important to seek the truth of our guru’s character and moral conducts? If the guru is not aligned with the truth how can he be true?

A spiritual guru should be the epitome of truth and the unshakable example how to conduct ourselves in life and on the spiritual path.

Before their initiation seekers must spend a year in probation. They test themselves to make sure that they can follow the dietary requirements as well as the high moral standards that the teachings prescribe. This is meant to be serious business and a lifetime commitment.

Baba Ji is not only the RSSB master but he is also a disciple of his master, Charan Singh. As a disciple he made the same commitment to stay true to the teachings as we did.

There is sufficient proof of Baba Ji's shady financial dealings for those who bother to investigate. The Indian public records speak for themselves.

Why presume that Baba Ji was given the 61,83,013 shares of Religare Enterprises as a gift by the Singh brothers. Don't the teachings of RSSB recommend not to accept favours or gifts? According to the teachings favours and gifts create further karmic debts that bind us to this creation and make us spiritually bankrupt.

In Baba Ji’s and his family’s case we are talking about millions of dollars worth of “gifts” or perhaps "loans" - we don't know which, because there was only a verbal agreement between the parties involved. The high moral standards of the RSSB teachings clearly do not apply to Baba Ji, the “true” guru.

At a question and answer session a woman sitting in a wheel chair came to the microphone. She was hoping to get some sympathy from master regarding her condition. She explained to Baba Ji how hard life was for her in a wheel chair and if it wasn't for her friends who bought her ticket to India, she would not be here.

Baba Ji told her that in India people with total paralysis paint with their mouth to make a living and he suggested to the questioner that once she returned home she should get a job and repay her friends for the ticket to India.

So a ticket to India must be repaid, says Baba Ji, but USD1.25 million borrowed by him from filmmaker Sheetal Talwar must be forgotten.

We soon lose faith and respect for those leaders who do not walk the talk. By keeping our guru on the pedestal no matter what, we give up our power of discrimination.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon

"Don't know" is a great thing to keep in mind

All of us are prone to making mistakes with our minds. That comes with being human. Nobody sees reality as it is, because there's no way to tell what as it is means, since every conscious being views the world through their own set of perception filters.

But there's ways to come closer to the truth about reality.

Basically, we need to accept true things as being true. Like global warming, gravity, and the honking of geese.

And we need to to accept false things as being false. Like Donald Trump's claim that he didn't want the Ukraine president to announce an investigation into a political rival in exchange for getting military aid and a White House visit.

In between the poles of true and false there's something else: don't know. 

I love those two words. I wish everybody on Earth adored them also. If they did, the world would be filled with much less dogmatism, holier-than-thou self-righteousness, and rigidity.

Don't know is ubiquitous, because few things (maybe zero things) can be known with 100% certainty. This is the way of science, and of wise everyday life. 

We can be highly confident that something is true or false, but there's always at least a tiny bit of don't know lurking in the shadows. Facts might pop up that would change our point of view, where "our" encompasses both an individual's ideas and an entire culture's way of looking at the world.

Today I listened to a guided meditation by Jeff Warren on my Calm iPhone app that focused on the benefits of embracing don't know.

It's a great thing to keep in mind during a meditation session, because those words lead us toward a sense of openness, or beginner's mind. 

Of course, most religious people hate don't know, because they wrongly believe that they know. About God. About heaven. About life after death. About divine messengers.

They do their best to cover up their truthful lack of knowing with false certainty in a holy book or holy person. Not surprisingly, this leaves them less likely to actually know, since a feeling of don't know is what impels us to learn, explore, try new things.

Don't know also is an aid to peace of mind.

After all, most of us find ourselves worrying about unwelcome possibilities that often don't come to pass, or if they do, aren't as bad as we thought they'd be. So telling ourselves, don't know, can be comforting. Rather than being sure a dental appointment, for example, will be dreadful, we can truthfully say, don't know. 

Which doesn't mean that things will turn out fine. Often, they don't. But it's better to be disturbed by a nasty present-moment reality, than by worries that precede that reality by hours, days, weeks, months, or even years. 

And usually we don't know how long a bad situation will last, even though our anxious mind may be thinking, it will never end. 

If you want to know more about how Jeff Warren looks upon don't know, there's a 41-minute talk on this subject on his web site. I just came across it, so haven't listened to the talk yet. I'm confident that the talk contains a lot of wisdom.

But I don't know for sure.

 

 

Great comment about RSSB truth-telling

Here's a comment by "j" on a recent blog post about Gurinder Singh Dhillon's involvement in a financial fraud investigation that I heartily agree with. 

Truth needs to be spoken. Journalists, in India and elsewhere, do a good job of revealing truth, by and large. Yes, sometimes they make mistakes, as do we all.

But the stories in the Indian financial press about the RSSB guru's alleged role in financial fraud have been almost entirely accurate, and I've been pleased to share them on this blog. I'll continue to do so. 

Sure, I know that some devotees of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the religious organization headed up by Dhillon, dislike news that puts the guru in a bad light. The truth shines equally in all directions, though. We shouldn't ignore a truth just because it makes us feel uncomfortable.

In that ignoring way lies dogma, blind belief, and intolerance. Let's be open to truth wherever it may lead. This is "j's" comment, which starts with a quote from another commenter.

"Brother with respect one simple question to all of you. Why all of you are passing your judgements without having a strong evidence or proof , if u have so then why u are wasting ur time here, if have go to the concerned authorities and if not then dont shout and keep ur mouth shut and watch all that happening like a respected spectator. This i request to both who are in favour of dera and to those who are not.Thnx"

Another appeal from the RSSB sangat (my brothers?) to cease and desist from making any online comments about RSSB.

How many people outside RSSB know that 20 or so years ago, this organization's current guru banned any discussion of RSSB on the web? The ban has never been lifted, and the prejudice against any criticism of RSSB has been deeply ingrained in the sangat's culture.

I'm guessing that the same people who are "horrified" at critical comments about RSSB have no problem reading other news sites about events in India and across the world. I'm also guessing they're not writing to these media sites and imploring their brothers there to keep mum and just observe events dispassionately.

Let's be frank. No one here is accusing the RSSB gurus of anything that isn't based on evidence. I don't see any of the wild and lurid accusations against Gurinder here that you tend to find on some Sikh sites.

What we're commenting on is public record: 2 separate parties have accused Baba Gurinder Singh Dhillon of taking huge sums of money and refusing to pay it back. I believe the diversion of the Beas river is also a matter of public record.

If you believe as your Guru does that commenting on those matters of public record is indecent and unseemly, that's your right. But you apparently forget that not all of us here are followers of your guru, and we don't agree with you or him that silence is the best policy.

RSSB guru is being shielded by Indian agencies, says Malvinder's attorney

This accusation has been made before by attorneys for Malvinder Singh, and it was made again last Tuesday, November 26. Here's a LiveMint story about the latest turn of events in the ongoing saga of how a guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, appears to be deeply involved in financial fraud.

I'll comment on this development following the story.

NEW DELHI : Delhi High court on Tuesday heard arguments on Enforcement Directorate’s plea for custodial interrogation of former promoter of Fortis Healthcare Malvinder Singh and former Managing Director of Religare Enterprises Sunil Godhwani in a money-laundering case related to alleged misappropriation of funds of Religare Finvest Limited (RFL).

Advocate Ramesh Gupta appearing for the respondents said the agency is not honest with their investigation.

“They have searched and seized the documents. I have joined the investigation whenever they asked of me. They are not touching the baba with whom 2000 crore is already there. They just want my confession. They want to know where the money is parked. I have nothing to do with those companies." He argued.

“They have arrested me only. They did not arrest the other accused. They want to shield Gurinder Singh Dhillon." He further added.

On the other hand, it was argued by standing counsel Amit Mahajan that there are 22 companies where 2300 crore has been transferred and there is an enormous material which needs to be confronted with the accused.

“I am trying to unearth the crime and trace the proceeds." He said.

The court will now hear further arguments on Wednesday.

The ED had arrested Singh and Godhwani on 14 November, following which their custody with the ED was extended twice. On 23 November, a Saket court rejected the ED's plea for extension of custody and remanded the two to judicial custody till 7 December.

ED had moved the Delhi high court against the trial court’s order.

Singh and Godhwani are accused of laundering money, punishable under sections 3 and 4 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

In December, Religare Enterprises and its subsidiary filed a complaint with the corporate affairs ministry alleging misappropriation of funds worth ₹2,230 crore of the company and its units.

The complaint also alleged that illegal issuances and redemption of preference shares led to undue gains of approximately ₹290 crore to promoter groups.

OK, it's good that the counsel for the Enforcement Directorate, which I've been told is sort of a cross between the FBI and CIA agencies in the United States, is trying to "unearth the crime and trace the proceeds." 

What's puzzling is why it is taking so long.

After all, follow the money is a given in financial fraud crimes. It's extremely difficult to believe that Malvinder Singh and Sunil Godhwani broke laws and engaged in a complicated scheme of round-trip loans going to shell companies without the cooperation, if not the connivance, of those who ultimately ended up with the money and controlled the shell companies at one time.

This isn't akin to someone robbing a bank and then giving the money away to a relative without that person knowing where the money came from. It's akin to someone robbing a bank with the assistance of someone who worked at the bank, with that employee than ending up with the money.

Malvinder and his attorney are asking a good question: why aren't the authorities focusing more on the people who were the ultimate beneficiaries of the money that was siphoned from Fortis and Religare?

This appears to be Gurinder Singh Dhillon, his family, and close associates.

Numerous stories in the Indian financial press have traced the flow of money into their pockets. And the High Court of Delhi has ordered the Dhillon family to repay money owed to Malvinder and companies once controlled by the Singh brothers so a $500 million settlement can be paid to Daiichi Sankyo.

Maybe the wheels of Indian justice are turning slowly, but in the right direction.

However, there's reason for concern that because the Dhillon family has friends in high places, and the millions of followers of the RSSB guru include some fanatical people who would do anything for the guru, possibly including committing violence in his name, there's been pressure on the Enforcement Directorate to go easy on Gurinder Singh Dhillon. 

Hopefully that isn't happening. Or if it is happening, it won't succeed.

This is a high profile case that has gotten worldwide attention. It would make India look bad if a guru was allowed to make off with hundreds of millions of dollars without legal consequences. This would send a bad message to companies thinking of investing in India. And it would leave the boards of Fortis, Religare, and Daiichi Sankyo justifiably enraged.

I'll end by citing a June 2019 post, "RSSB guru identified as beneficiary of fraudulent funds," where I quoted from a Business Today story that described filmmaker Sheetal Talwar's accusations that closely mirrored those just made by Malvinder's attorney. Here's some excerpts.

NRI film producer Sheetal Vinod Talwar has submitted to Sebi that Radha Soami Satsang chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family allegedly benefited the most from Religare's Rs 2,300 crore fund diversion. Sebi's forensic audit via probe agency MSA Probe Consulting had identified diversion worth Rs 2,315.09 crore.

...Talwar has told Sebi that even though its Religare investigation via forensic audit firm MSA concluded fund diversion and large scale irregularities and illegalities, the probe did not lift the corporate veil to disclose the ultimate beneficiaries of the diversion.

Advocates & Solicitors Kartikeya & Associates-representing Talwar-have submitted to Sebi on 29 May, 2019 that, "...the persons who have benefitted the most and/or on whose instance the said illegalities and irregularities were and/or have been committed have yet not been identified. Please note that the persons and/or the shadow promoters of REL, RFL and their other group companies is one Gurinder Singh Dhillon (GSD/Babaji) and his family".

...Talwar's complaint to Sebi has also levelled a grave charge of a serious conflict of interest among Religare's then board  members. "...the fact that the companies shared common directors to the GSD family as well as were all run by GSD followers eg.

Just a quick review would point to the fact that during the diversion of funds, Vitoba, Platinum and Devera entities to which fund were diverted would reveal that Yuvraj Narain Gorwaney alias Mithu is on the board of these companies-not only is Yuvraj...the secretary of RSSB, he also sits on the board of Logos Holding along with GSD and Shabnam Dhillon. Many such associations exist between the entities named and GSD family."

Lessons about thankfulness from our dog

Our oldest dog, ZuZu, died last month. I'm still grieving. So when I looked through my previous Thanksgiving Day blog posts (a holiday here in the United States), it seemed fitting to share a 2013 post, "Our 14 year old dog teaches me about thankfulness."

That dog was Serena, shown above in her younger days on a bank of the Metolius River in central Oregon. Here's most of what I said in the blog post I wrote about her when Serena's health was fading.

She doesn't look like she did in her younger days. But heck, who does? Surely not me. Being almost fourteen, Serena is something like 100 years old in dog time.

Serena is a Shepherd/Lab mix (her sisters looked like black labs; we were thrilled to get a kind-of German Shepherd-looking dog with a laid back Lab personality -- great combination). Her back legs are weak, a common trait in aging Shepherd canines.

Yet she still can go on a mile walk every evening with me and ZuZu, her four year old sister-dog. Not literally; they just look somewhat alike.

Serena chugs along, uphill and downhill, across two creek bridges, around a neighborhood lake, through grassy fields. I fired up an iPhone GPS app a few days ago. We meander along at an average of 1.8 mph. Hey, not bad for a 100 year old. 

Her pooper, which may not the precise veterinary term for what controls her bowel movements, isn't working very well.

Most mornings we get up to find roundish firm dark "presents" in the room where Serena and ZuZu sleep. A tiled room, thankfully, because some days the poop is mushier. Which, in case you're worrying, is all I'm going to say on this subject.

Because its my Thanksgiving Day thankfulness thoughts about Serena that are important. I'm grateful that she's helped me realize the importance of, so to speak, sniffing the heck out of life every single freaking day. 

No exceptions. 

I used to look upon our evening dog walk much differently. That was when both Serena and I were younger, when it seemed like an endless stream of dog walks lay before us. 

If Serena paused too long to smell something, inhaling the scent of what, to a dog, at that moment, is the most fascinating thing in the world, I'd get impatient.

Hey, Serena, I'd think, get a move on; I've got other things to do than watch my dog obsess over a clump of grass that, to my impoverished human senses, looks utterly meaningless.

Now, though, our walks have taken on some of the quality of the Zen "Enjoy the Strawberry" parable.  

The meaning of living fully in the present moment, neither retreating to the past nor anticipating the future, is wonderfully illustrated by a Zen parable about a monk being pursued by a ferocious tiger.

The monk raced to the edge of a cliff, glanced back, and saw the growling tiger about to spring. The monk spotted a vine dangling over the edge of the cliff. He grabbed it and began shinnying down the side of the cliff out of the clutches of the tiger.

Whew! Narrow escape.

The monk then looked down and saw a quarry of jagged rocks five hundred feet below. He looked up and saw the tiger poised atop the cliff with bared claws. Just then, two mice began to nibble at the vine.

What to do?

The monk saw a strawberry within arm’s reach, growing out of the face of the cliff.

He plucked it, ate it, and exclaimed, “Yum! That’s the best strawberry I’ve ever tasted in my entire life.”

If he had been preoccupied with the rock below (the future) or the tiger above (the past), he would have missed the strawberry in the present moment.

I'm thankful when Serena stops to taste her canine equivalent of a strawberry. My dog-expert wife tells me that dogs experience dementia just like people do.

But I prefer to think that when Serena suddenly stands still, staring off into the distance for no discernible reason, she is drinking in the present moment. Just as I should always be doing. As we all should be.

Because even though I'm appeciative that Serena's advancing age and deteriorating health have helped remind me that I'm in the same sinking mortality boat she is, it shouldn't take a 14 year old dog to remind me that we'll never know when the last time will come. 

Probably it won't be very long before Serena and I take our last evening dog walk.

There's a good chance I won't know which one it is. So I want to look upon every walk as our last walk. I want Serena and I to enjoy it like the best strawberry (or chew stick) either of us has tasted in our entire life.

The older I get (I'm 65 now), the more I realize there is only one way to cheat death: making the most of every moment. Not in a frantic skydiving, tango in Buenos Aires, howl at the moon fashion (though there's nothing wrong with this).

In the sense of being present, in the present. 

Serena is. Dogs always are. Serena doesn't know she's old and getting ever closer to dying. She just knows that when her nose senses an enticing odor, it needs to be attended to.

Shabnam Dhillon, wife of RSSB guru, has died

I just received this message from someone. Babaji refers to Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. It's a sad day for the Dhillon family and the millions of RSSB devotees. I'm no longer one of them, but I share in the sadness of Shabnam Dhillon's death. 

UPDATE: Below is a message from Radha Soami Satsang Beas about Shabnam Dhillon's death. And there's a hindustan times story about her passing.

Second update: There's a Business Today story about Shabnam Dhillon's death.

Shabnam Dhillon, wife of Radha Soami Satsang Beas head Gurinder Singh Dhillion, has passed away in London. She was 57 years old.

According to a statement before Delhi High Court, Shabnam went to London on November 12 for treatment of gastric troubles. She and other members of the Dhillon family had been summoned to appear before the court in person in relation to the Daiichi Sankyo case.

As per the filing, Shabnam had undergone abdominal surgery in United Kingdom on November 20. She later developed some complications post surgery. She breathed her last at an England hospital at 3:00 am IST.

Shabnam is survived by her husband Gurinder Singh Dhillon and two sons, Gurpreet Singh Dhillon and Gurkirat Singh Dhillon. Both of them run businesses in Singapore and England, respectively.

Reports suggest that Gurinder Singh Dhillon will carry on with his three-day programme from Friday to Sunday in Delhi. He will also visit Dubai for a two-day event scheduled for December 2 and 3. Shabnam's mortal remains will reportedly be brought back to Radha Soami Dera at Beas after December 3 for the last rites.