Church of the Churchless

Life makes more sense without any kind of god

Here's a guest blog post from someone I regularly communicate with via email. This recent message from the person resonated with me, because it echoes thoughts I frequently have about the absurdity of believing that life has a purpose imposed from outside of us. 

Like, from a god. Enjoy...

Hey Brian, how are you and yours doing?

My family and I are doing well. Lots of folks around us have COVID, but so far, we’ve managed to avoid it.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s interesting what hangs around in my head from religion. One thing that rears its ugly head on a fairly regular basis is the idea of purpose. The idea that my life has some specific purpose and I need to figure it out. Wow. Just typing that out feels like 200 lbs has been added to my shoulders. That’s a fucking heavy thing to carry around!

Of course, life purpose implies someone or something that gives purpose. Most feel it is “god” that does this. Well, now that I’m an atheist, that’s a problem!

You’ve written about this and I’m sure I’ve emailed you regarding this topic before. But it still amazes, and frustrates me, that I still struggle with this.

It seems to me that the idea of some specific purpose in life in more of a western culture idea and only if you have more than a little to a lot of money. You don’t have to go to India or Africa to find starving children, there are plenty here in the US. What is their purpose in life? I can’t imagine that they think about it much. Their main purpose is to get food!

Did early humans worry about some kind of ultimate purpose for their lives? I doubt it. They were just like any other mammal on the planet. Eat, sleep, reproduce. That was likely their main “purpose.”

I know all this, but it’s still hard to shake the idea of some kind of purpose that was so strongly instilled (brain washed) into me. “God has a specific plan for your life! You have to find out what it is and do it!”

I heard that message in one form or another for probably 20 years. I asked god about it on a regular basis. I prayed and prayed and cried and pleaded. You know what he said? Nothing! Ugh! It was so frustrating. Just thinking about all that makes me tense and irritable.

I think it’s funny that the memories of hearing about divine purpose come back to me when my job gets difficult, or life is unpleasant for whatever reason, etc. But it’s not surprising that this happens. After all, religion as a whole is kind of an escape from reality. Or at least the attempt at escaping reality.

You wrote a post right at 3 years ago that I found called No need to have a "calling." Just live your life. I read it before sending this email, and I’ll probably read it again. It pulls me back into reality and helps me relax.

I think it’s interesting that at one point, I would have said that without god, life doesn’t make sense. Now, the way I see it, is that without any kind of god, life seems to make more sense. It just is what it is.

Oh, and your last several posts have been very insightful and helpful to me. All your posts are good, but these last 5 or 6 have been very timely. Thanks again for sharing your ideas, insights, and things that you have been reading.

Talk to you again soon.

Open Thread 35 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. 

If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it's because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread.

As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Remember that I'm moderating comments, so it could take a while for your comment to be published. Almost every comment submitted to an Open Thread will be approved. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way.

So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.

Stephen Bachelor has a beautiful take on Buddhist emptiness

In my shelf of Buddhist books, there's one called something like The Emptiness of Emptiness. I bought it for the title. The description of emptiness in the book left me confused.

Not so with the chapter on Emptiness in Stephen Bachelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs. 

Below are some extensive quotes from the chapter. Hope you enjoy them as much as I do. 

After reading, or rather re-reading, the final passage, I was reminded of an experience I had in college while stoned on mescaline. I related it in a 2007 post, Loosening the bounds of "I am..."

Might as well copy it in, since it relates quite well to what Bachelor says about our fluid self. 

I was with a group of fellow "stoners" who'd headed off to a San Jose-area park to be high with nature. The path we were on led around a hill.

I felt energetic and forged on ahead by myself. My feet were flying through the northern California landscape. Until I rounded a corner and saw a different sort of group on the left side of the trail a short ways ahead of me.

Bikers. Drinking beer. Next to their choppers. With their equally tough-looking old ladies. At the time San Jose was a headquarters for the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang, which had a reputation rivaling the Hells Angels.

I didn't know anything about the bikers I was walking toward. But my first reaction was that I was an isolated peaceful hippie dude stoned on mescaline with long hair, glasses, and a corduroy coat, and they were cultural near-opposites in almost every way. Not good.

However, something snapped in me the very next moment. As I walked nearer to them I didn't feel like there was any difference between us. I could see them looking at me. I looked at them. More, I became them.

"What's happening, man?" someone called out. "Hell if I know," I said with a smile. They laughed. I laughed. I felt like I could sit down with them, have a beer, and fit right in.

My fear vanished as soon as I stopped thinking "I am…" and "They are…" Sure, it was partly (or mostly) the mescaline talking, but I suddenly felt that I was them and they were me, and we were all in this park getting high together.

Not exactly akin to the Buddha's enlightened experience of selflessness under the Bodhi Tree. But, hey, I'll take a speck of understanding any way I can get it.

Passing the biker group I realized that "I am…" can be flexible and boundless, not rigid and restricted.

Some things we always are; some things we always aren't; but there's a huge store of being-possibilities available to us moment to moment.

Here's the quotes from Bachelor about emptiness. 

In everyday experience, one thing leads to the next. I become irritated by something S said to me and end up wanting to hit him. I imagine I see a snake in the pottery shed and freeze in terror. Everything that happens emerges out of what preceded it. Everything we do now becomes a condition for what is possible later.

We may speak of conditions and consequences as though they were things, but if we look more closely they turn out to be processes with no independent reality. 

The harshness of a barbed remark that haunts us for days is no more than a brief instance isolated from a torrent of events. Yet it stands out in the mind's eye as something intrinsically real and apart. This habit of isolating things leads us to inhabit a world in which the gaps between them become absolute.

The snake in the shed is really there, as sharply differentiated from the frightened person who beholds it as from the shards of discarded pottery on which it is coiled.

Clutching at ourselves and the world in this way is a precondition for anguish. 

By regarding things as absolutely separate and as desirable or fearful in themselves, we set ourselves the task of possessing something we can never have or of eradicating something that was never there in the first place. Noticing how things emerge from and fade back into an unbroken flow of conditions begins to free us a little.

We recognize how things are relatively, not absolutely, desirable or fearful. They interconnect and interact, each contingent on the others, no one of them intrinsically separate from the rest.

Whatever emerges in this way is devoid of an intrinsic identity: in other words, things are empty. They are not as opaque and solid as they seem: they are transparent and fluid. They are not as singular and straightforward as they seem: they are complex and ambiguous.

...The same is true for each one of us. Just as a potter forms a pot on the wheel, so I configure my personality from the spinning clay of my existence. The pot does not exist in its own right: it emerges from the interactions of the potter, the wheel, the clay, its shape, its function (each of which in turn emerges from the interactions of its causes and components ad infinitum).

...As a human being I am more complex than a pot or a daffodil, but I have also emerged from causes and am composed of diverse, changing features and traits. There is no essential me that exists apart from this unique configuration of biological and cultural processes.

...To know emptiness is not just to understand the concept. It is more like stumbling into a clearing in the forest, where suddenly you can move freely and see clearly. To experience emptiness is to experience the shocking absence of what normally determines the sense of who you are and the kind of reality you inhabit.

It may last only for a moment before the habits of a lifetime reassert themselves and close in once more. But for that moment, we witness ourselves and the world as open and vulnerable. This calm, free, open, and sensitive space is the very center of dharma practice

..."Emptiness" is a confusing term. Although used as an abstract noun, it does not in any way denote an abstract thing or state. It is not something we "realize" in a moment of mystical insight that "breaks through" to a transcendent reality concealed behind yet mysteriously underpinning the empirical world.

Nor do things "arise" from emptiness and "dissolve" back into it as though it were some kind of formless, cosmic stuff. These are just some of the ways emptiness has been appropriated as a metaphor of metaphysical and religious consolation.

...Emptiness is as devoid of intrinsic being as a pot, a banana, or a daffodil. And if there were no pots, bananas, or daffodils, there would be no emptiness either.

Emptiness does not deny that such things exist; it merely describes how they are devoid of an intrinsic, separate being. Emptiness is not apart from the world of everyday experience; it only makes sense in the context of making pots, eating bananas, and growing daffodils. 

A life centered in awareness of emptiness is simply an appropriate way of being in this changing, shocking, painful, joyous, frustrating, awesome, stubborn, and ambiguous reality.

Emptiness is the central path that leads not beyond this reality but right into its heart. It is the track on which the centered person moves. 

And we too are impressions left by something that used to be here. We have been created, molded, formed by a bewildering matrix of contingencies that have preceded us. 

From the patterning of the DNA derived from our parents to the firing of the hundred billion neurons in our brains to the cultural and historical conditioning of the twentieth century to the education and upbringing given us to all the experiences we have ever had and choices we have ever made: these have conspired to configure the unique trajectory that culminates in this present moment.

What is here now is the unrepeatable impression left by all of this, which we call "me." Yet so vivid and startling is this image that we confuse what is a mere impression for something that exists independently of what formed it.

So what are we but the story we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads? 

The self is not like the hero of a B-movie, who remains unaffected by the storms of passion and intrigue that swirl around him from the opening credits to the end. The self is more akin to the complex and ambiguous characters who emerge, develop, and suffer across the pages of a novel.

There is nothing thinglike about me at all. I am more like an unfolding narrative.

As we become aware of this, we can begin to assume greater responsibility for the course of our lives. Instead of clinging to habitual behavior and routines as a means to secure this sense of self, we realize the freedom to create who we are. Instead of being bewitched by impressions, we start to create them.

Instead of taking ourselves so seriously, we discover the playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before.

Pre-scientific religious dogma shouldn't be trusted

As I said in my previous post (My #1 problem with Steve Hagen's 'The Grand Delusion"), the teachings of a ninth-century Zen master, Huang Po, shouldn't be given more credence than modern neuroscience.

After all, Huang Po, along with everybody else in those pre-scientific times, had no understanding of how the brain works. Naturally people knew how their mind seemed to work, but seeming is a long way from actuality. 

This is why Huang Po could claim that conception is totally different from perception. Now it is known that both conception and perception are founded on complex goings-on in the brain and are anything but simple. 

But those processes are hidden from view, so it seems that perception is akin to a mirror accurately reflecting what is before it. Actually, perception involves predictions by the brain based on past experiences and sometimes can't be trusted -- mirages and illusions being examples of this.

That said, I like how Buddhism is so non-religious, arguably it isn't even a religion. Sure, many Buddhists view it that way, as Stephen Bachelor writes in his appealing book, "Buddhism Without Beliefs."

If you go to Asia and visit a wat (Thailand) or gompa (Tibet), you will enter something that looks very much like an abbey, a church, or cathedral, being run by people who look like monks or priests, displaying objects that look like icons, which are enshrined in alcoves that look like chapels and revered by people who look like worshippers.

If you talk to one of the people who look like monks, you will learn that he has a view of the world that seems very much like a belief system, revealed a long time ago by someone else who is revered like a god, after whose death saintly individuals have interpreted the revelations in ways like theology. There have been schisms and reforms, and these have given rise to institutions that are just like churches.

Buddhism, it would seem, is a religion. 

Or, is it?

Well, it depends. Keep all that Bachelor describes above and you have a religion. Discard it, and you have a philosophy of life aimed at reducing anguish, which Bachelor prefers to the usual English word, suffering. 

I like how Buddhism is in line with modern neuroscience in how it denies the existence of an enduring self or soul. I also like how Buddhism reflects modern science in its notions of interdependency and ceaseless change, referred to by the potentially misleading term of emptiness. 

The way I see it, Buddhism, along with any other philosophy or approach to living, must continually evolve as fresh ideas and new facts about the world are known.

There's a parallel here between the view of the United States Constitution as a living document, or as a writing that should be interpreted through the views of those who wrote the Constitution in the late 1700s, otherwise known as originalism. An essay in the Atlantic on this subject concludes with a great line.

The Constitution should be the sturdy vessel of our ideals and aspirations, not a derelict sailing ship locked in the ice of a world far from our own.

This is how I feel about Buddhism revering outmoded views of pre-scientific Buddhists. It makes no sense to have the philosophy of Buddhism "locked in the ice of a world far from our own." Stephen Bachelor writes:

An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the dharma as a source of "answers" to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc. 

An agnostic Buddhist is not a "believer" with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena, and in this sense is not "religious."

...The extent to which dharma practice has been institutionalized as a religion can be gauged by the number of consolatory elements that have crept in: for example, assurances of a better afterlife if you perform virtuous deeds or recite mantras or chant the name of a Buddha.

My #1 problem with Steve Hagen's "The Grand Delusion"

I'm a big fan of Steve Hagen's books about non-religious Buddhism. "Buddhism Plain and Simple" and "Buddhism is Not What You Think" really resonated with me. 

But his new book, "The Grand Delusion: What We Know But Don't Believe" elicited a lot of question marks in the margins. 

One problem I had with the book is that while Hagen's other books were marked by humility, this one has a heavy dose of grandiosity. Hagen sets out to solve every issue perplexing humanity, or more accurately, scientists. 

Consciousness. Quantum theory. Free will. Existence of God. All these topics, and more, supposedly are subject to The Grand Delusion -- a belief in substantiality, that things actually exist. 

OK, emptiness is a core Buddhist notion that I'm fine with. Nothing has inherent existence. Interdependency rules the cosmic roost.

Anything we can point to, like a coffee cup, doesn't stand by itself but is the result of countless interactions involving countless entities extending all the way back to the big bang and the creation of our universe.

While Hagen respects the conceptual thinking of scientists, and everybody else, he views concepts as a poor guide to what is genuinely real. Which supposedly is known by perception, not conception. 

I part company with Hagen on this assertion. He often quotes Huang Po, a ninth-century Zen Buddhist. In John Blofeld's translation, Huang Po says "The ignorant eschew phenomena but not thought; the wise eschew thought but not phenomena."

So Hagen speaks over and over of simply seeing. That's what reality is, what is perceived with no effort in everyday life. Sure, this is a Zen notion in line with chop wood and carry water. Just live a normal natural life and you're in touch with big "R" Reality.

Problem is, Huang Po had no idea of how the human mind and brain really work (the mind is the brain in action, though as we'll see, Hagen disputes this). I don't think we should rely on the pre-scientific assertions of Huang Po over modern neuroscience. 

Hagen is familiar with a lot of modern science. However, he fails to speak about neuroscience in nearly as much detail as he does physics, probably because he can use physics as an example of how science is confused about reality, whereas the findings of neuroscience point to Hagen's confusion about how perception works.

There is no such thing as "simply seeing." Seeing isn't simple. It requires much learning. What is learned essentially are perceptual concepts: shapes, colors, shadows, perspective, etc. Huang Po may have thought that seeing, or perception in general, is like a mirror reflecting an image. 

But this is wrong. Hagen even has an example of this in his book. 

He relates a story told by Oliver Sacks about a man who had been blind for forty-five years, "having had little more than an infant's visual experience, and this long forgotten." The man had his sight surgically restored in middle age. While he could see, it was "all mixed up, all meaningless, a blur." The man never could see normally.

This shows how important experience is to seeing. Somehow Hagen misses the point of his own example, saying, bizarrely, "Simply put, conception, as useful as it might be, is no substitute for perception." 

Huh? Conception makes it possible to see usefully. It enables infants to move from perceptual confusion to normal seeing, where that shape of color and light is Mommy, not just a blob. Who would want to trade normal seeing for mixed up, meaningless seeing? Not even Hagen, I suspect.

I have an even bigger problem with how Hagen looks upon consciousness and the brain in "The Grand Delusion," because his take on this is decidedly at odds with his frequent admonition to just see. I suspect he falls prey to Buddhist orthodoxy here, which is disappointing. 

What I see, what I know from direct experience, is that when I've been given anesthesia in several colonoscopies that I've had, I lose consciousness almost instantly. I then wake up with no memory of what happened during the procedure. So it seems clear that a chemical administered by the anesthesiologist impacts my brain, which becomes unconscious.

Same thing happens when a football player, or whoever, has a strong impact to the head. Unconsciousness results. There are countless (almost) examples of how changing the brain changes consciousness. This isn't a matter of abstract conception. It is a matter of seeing what happens. 

Yet here's some quotes from Hagen's book about the brain and consciousness. My comments are in red. 

People have noticed since the middle of the nineteenth century that there appears to be a correlation between conscious experience and brain activity. Unfortunately, serious study of that correlation over many decades has brought us no closer to understanding mind or consciousness. In fact, the more we investigate this apparent correlation, the more elusive a genuine understanding has become.

Absolutely false. Hagen needs to do more reading in modern neuroscience. A lot of progress is being made in correlating brain activity with consciousness. For example, it is now possible to predict quite accurately whether a patient is in a vegetative state from that activity.

Physical processes in the brain have never been demonstrated to give rise to subjective experience. We only assume that they do -- because there seems to be a correlation. 

Well, I assume Hagen would be fine with having his brain removed, since he is skeptical that physical processes in his brain cause his subjective experience. More seriously, Hagen doesn't put forward any other explanation for subjective experience. Because there are mysteries waiting to be revealed about how consciousness functions, Hagen denies all that science does know about the brain and consciousness.

The fact is, we have no evidence that consciousness even has an origin, let alone that it originates in matter... Consciousness will always remain a mystery for those who continue in their attempts to construct it from matter.

These baseless assertions show how Hagen has gone all-in on religious dogmatism when it comes to consciousness and the brain. There is lots of evidence that consciousness arises from the brain. There is zero demonstrable evidence of consciousness existing apart from a brain. Again, this is obvious from simply seeing how consciousness is altered or lost by physical changes to the brain. Hagen should try LSD, or just a strong cup of coffee, if he doubts this. 

Consciousness is not a thing and nothing produces it. 

Again, this is anti-scientific dogmatism. It would be honest if Hagen would say that while consciousness appears to be produced by the brain, there is a lot to learn about how this happens. Instead, Hagen veers off into his version of Buddhist orthodoxy, which places Mind as separate and distance from Matter. (I'd say that this isn't at all what Buddhism teaches, just how Hagen views Buddhism.)

How the RSSB guru was involved with Ranbaxy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Which, I suppose, could be called mindfulness. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Here's another reason. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was easy for me to answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They might exist someday, though.

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

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

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

Adyashanti book confirms my commitment to secular spirituality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe. I doubt it, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Same with my mental exercise habits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There could be no better way to make the journey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read on...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's fine. Just notice it.

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

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

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

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

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

Recently I experienced something along these lines. 

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

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

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

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

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

I was doing a lot of trying, without success. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking in a different fashion made all the difference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presidential election polling bears this out.

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

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

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

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

Religions also have a shaky relationship with reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It feels good to be getting back into yoga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I started doing my yoga routine every day also.

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

That led me to buy the Yoga Bible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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