Church of the Churchless

I'm a human being having a human experience. How about you?

During my religious believing days -- well, 35 years actually -- I'd frequently hear people talk about "We are spiritual beings having a human experience, not human beings having a spiritual experience."

That quote came from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and Jesuit priest. So it isn't surprising that he'd have such a dualistic attitude, with our bodily existence as humans just being a step on the way toward a supernatural experience as a spiritual being.

But early on in my churchless evolution, I realized that it makes no sense to view myself in that way. So if I had to describe my current approach to life, it would be that I'm a human being having a human experience.

Which isn't exactly an astounding observation. It's obvious, clear for both me and everyone else to see in their own lives. However, religions specialize in making what's simple and obvious, complex and indistinct.

In 2010 I wrote "Religions are wrong about self-realization."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience."

Well, that's highly doubtful.

Yet even if it were true, every human being who has any sort of experience is accomplishing this via a physical brain that, as noted in a quote above, processes most of what we come to be aware of outside of conscious awareness.

And what's much more likely is that we indeed are "only animals" who have evolved an ability to think of ourselves as having passed beyond our animal nature. This is belied, however, by the neuroscientific understanding of the brain's primitive parts.

Admittedly, the triune brain theory (reptilian, ancient mammalian, modern human) has been superseded by more accurate and sophisticated models. But the fact remains that whatever our "self" may be, it isn't something simple, obvious, supernatural, or transparently evident to awareness.

So this makes traditional religious/spiritual notions of self-realization laughably out of touch with reality. Whatever we are, it isn't what we intuitively consider ourselves to be -- often with ridiculously excessive confidence.

If somebody claims to be self-realized, or says he knows how this can be achieved, ask him to show you a "self." He won't be able to do it, just as no supposedly God-realized person ever has been able to demonstrate the existence of a "God."

And in 2013 I wrote "Be a real actual body, not an imagined abstract soul."

What are we? Ah, there's an ageless question. Matter? Energy? Mind? Spirit? Soul? A combination?

As noted in a post from a few years back, "Feeling the spirit... via body or soul?," I used to believe that our true nature was non-material soul-consciousness. After I died, or maybe before if my meditation bore fruit, I'd soar into a spiritual realm of existence and enjoy a soulful (literally) existence.

Yet where is the evidence for this? Nowhere. Except in the minds of people who believe this sort of stuff -- which seemingly includes the majority of the world's population, given how popular supernatural religiosity is.

(Though traditional Christianity taught that resurrection of the faithful was a bodily affair, I've seen surveys that indicate most Christians today think their soul will go to heaven after death and spend quality time with God, Jesus, departed relatives, and other souls who won the Salvation Lottery.)

One reason I've switched to embracing my bodily nature a lot more enthusiastically than I did in my churched days is this:

For me, living in my head, surrounded by abstract conceptions, isn't anywhere near as satisfying as dwelling in the physical world -- immersed in real live sensations and perceptions. This was the theme of a recent post, "To be 'spiritual,' get physical."

In other words, all our notions about divinity, spirituality, the supernatural, soul, spirit, angels, and such derive from our experience as physical beings in a physical world. 

If someone has a vision of God, that vision was processed through a physical brain and body. If someone writes a holy book, that writing was produced by a physical brain and body. If someone speaks about what lies beyond the material world, their speaking came from a physical brain and body.

Religious people are physical beings pretending to have a spiritual experience. Wisdom lies in seeing through this pretension. Genuine "spirituality" is achieved by being honestly physical.

Amen (secular version) to what I said back then, and believe even more strongly now. I feel a great sense of relief being what I so obviously am: a human having a human experience. Just like everybody else in the world, no matter if they wrongly believe otherwise.

Beneath all our differences; beneath all our political, religious, and other divisions; beneath all our widely varying views about what makes life meaningful -- there's the common denominator of our shared humanity. 

In one sense, none of us is anything special. Yet in another sense, we're all marvelously special. Each of us is a physical being in a physical world, sharing that being'ness with all of the other living creatures on our planet, which, given our current knowledge of the cosmos, is the only place life exists that we're aware of.

Beautiful. Inspiring. Unifying. It's what I see John Lennon talking about in the secular/atheist songs he wrote.

Why this blog is still screwed up

Typepad, my blogging service, is having major problems following a failed data migration to new servers. It takes forever (more or less) for my three blogs to load, including this one. I wrote about this mess and published the post both on HinesSight and also on my rarely used Blogger blog to make it more accessible. So you can read about what's going on with Typepad there.

John Lennon's atheism in three of his songs

I love John Lennon's Imagine. But whenever I hear it played at some large event, like New Year's Eve in Times Square, I wonder why it's so popular in a highly religious country like the United States.

After all, the lyrics are not only secular, they're anti-religion. 

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today... Aha-ah...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace... You...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world... You...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

This is a great You Tube video of Lennon singing the song in the company of Yoko Ono.

I enjoyed reading an article about the song, "Imagine at 50: Why John Lennon's Ode to Humanism Still Resonates." This is how it starts off. 

Fifty years ago, John Lennon released one of the most beautiful, inspirational and catchy pop anthems of the 20th century: “Imagine.”

Gentle and yet increasingly stirring as the song progresses, “Imagine” is unabashedly utopian and deeply moral, calling on people to live, as one humanity, in peace. It is also purposely and powerfully irreligious. From its opening lyric, “Imagine there’s no heaven,” to the refrain, “And no religion too,” Lennon sets out what is, to many, a clear atheistic message.

While most pop songs are secular by default – in that they are about the things of this world, making no mention of the divine or spiritual – “Imagine” is explicitly secularist. In Lennon’s telling, religion is an impediment to human flourishing – something to be overcome, transcended.

As a scholar of secularism and a devout fan of the Beatles, I have always been fascinated by how “Imagine,” perhaps the first and only atheist anthem to be so enormously successful, has come to be so widely embraced in America. After all, the U.S. is a country that has – at least until recently – had a much more religious population than other Western industrialized democracies.

The article clued me in to two other anti-religious songs Lennon wrote after the Beatles broke up and went their separate ways, God and I Found Out. Somehow I've either forgotten about them, or never was familiar with them. 

Here's the lyrics of God. 

God is a Concept by which we measure our pain
I'll say it again
God is a Concept by which we measure our pain

I don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in Tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha
I don't believe in Mantra
I don't believe in Gita
I don't believe in Yoga
I don't believe in Kings
I don't believe in Elvis
I don't believe in Zimmerman
I don't believe in Beatles

I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that's reality

The dream is over
What can I say?
The dream is over
Yesterday
I was the dreamweaver
But now I'm reborn
I was the walrus
But now I'm John
And so, dear friends,
You'll just have to carry on
The dream is over

Lennon sings the song in this You Tube video. 

Beautiful. And inspiring to atheists like me. Or to anyone who wants to stop believing in abstractions and far-off potential objects of devotion, preferring instead to embrace the reality that's near at hand.

Lennon's I Found Out is another paean to his discovery that religions are worthless, being obsessed with pie-in-the-sky fantasies. Nice to see him taking a jab at gurus.

I told you before, stay away from my door
Don't give me that brother, brother, brother, brother
The freaks on the phone, won't leave me alone
So don't give me that brother, brother, brother, brother No!
I, I found out!
I, I found out!

Now that I showed you what I been through
Don't take nobody's word what you can do
There ain't no Jesus gonna come from the sky
Now that I found out I know I can cry

I, I found out!
I, I found out!

Some of you sitting there with your cock in your hand
Don't get you nowhere don't make you a man
I heard something 'bout my Ma and my Pa
They didn't want me so they made me a star

I, I found out!
I, I found out!

Old Hare Krishna got nothing on you
Just keep you crazy with nothing to do
Keep you occupied with pie in the sky
There ain't no guru who can see through your eyes

I, I found out!
I, I found out!

I seen through junkies, I been through it all
I seen religion from Jesus to Paul
Don't let them fool you with dope and cocaine
No one can harm you, feel your own pain

I, I found out!
I, I found this out!
I, I found out!

Here's a You Tube video of Lennon singing this song, which isn't one of his best. I like the lyrics a lot more than the song.

Hindu nationalism is affecting Bollywood filmmaking

Nationalism is bad enough, since most people love their country, and it makes little or no sense to claim "our nation is the best." But when it is paired with religious dogmatism, the result is doubly dangerous.

The October 17, 2022 issue of The New Yorker has a really interesting story, "When the Hindu Right Came for Bollywood." Here's a PDF file if you have trouble with that link. (I'm a subscriber.)
Download When the Hindu Right Came for Bollywood | The New Yorker

It's unfortunate that India has become so polarized -- the fate of many nations, including the United States. But in this country, at least Christian nationalists don't get to tell Hollywood how to make movies. The story describes how in India, Hindu nationalists are trying to do just that.

Here's some excerpts from the story.

In the summer of 2019, the actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub won a role on “Tandav,” an Indian political drama being produced by Amazon Prime. The title was clever. In Hindu lore, the tandav is the dance of life and death performed by Shiva, the god whose terrible powers can end the universe—a neat metaphor for the dark, intricate maneuvers of national politics.

When Ayyub read the show’s script, he spied a handful of allusions to the India around him. In one episode, policemen barge onto a university campus to arrest a Muslim student leader. The scene recalled the government’s persecution of popular student politicians and, more broadly, the hostility toward Muslims that marks the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.).

...Drawing inspiration from bleak headlines—the religious lynchings, the cronyism, the autocratic acts of the state—had become a fraught enterprise. The B.J.P. and its supporters were growing intolerant of contrary views and criticism, and they were liable to react badly—through social-media attacks, targeted harassment by government agencies, or endless litigation. Outright violence was rarer, although its threat was never distant. “In the year or so before ‘Tandav,’ ” the lawyer said, “people were objecting to anything.”

...When “Tandav” premièred, in January, 2021, Ayyub was on location, shooting a film. On Twitter, he noticed that he was being tagged frequently—sometimes by people praising him, but mostly amid heaps of abuse. In cities and towns far from Mumbai, people filed police complaints, claiming that the portrayal of a foulmouthed Shiva was an insult to Hinduism. (A B.J.P. official told me that, in the large family of Hindu-nationalist organizations, “an enthusiastic worker can always be found who will file these complaints to keep his bosses happy.”)

Such cases usually go nowhere, but in the B.J.P.’s India, where the police and the courts are pliant, it’s hard to be sanguine. Recently, a Muslim journalist was imprisoned for three weeks because someone complained that a four-year-old tweet derided Hinduism. The account that reported him was anonymous, had one tweet and one follower on the day of the arrest, and went offline thereafter.

...Filmmaking thrives in plenty of other cities in India, but “Bollywood” has become shorthand for Indian cinema as a whole, and for the thousand or so movies that the country releases annually. For nearly a century, Bollywood has also worn the warm, self-satisfied gloss of being a passion that unifies a country of divisions. Not only are its audiences as mixed as India itself, filmmakers will say, but Bollywood is a place where caste and religion don’t matter. The most piously presented proof of this is the fact that, in a Hindu-majority country, a Muslim man named Shah Rukh Khan has been the supreme box-office star for decades.

Even if Bollywood possesses this liberal fibre, the rightward swing in Indian politics has gnawed away at it. In Mumbai, people divide recent history into pre-“Tandav” and post-“Tandav” periods, reading the show’s fate—its bitter legal battles, its suspended second season—as a lesson in what can and cannot be said in Modi’s India.

...The B.J.P. often ascribes these events to fringe elements or faceless Hindu “patriots.” But the number of such incidents makes filmmakers assume that they’re seeing a bigger transformation, in which the average member of their audience now truly likes everything the B.J.P. likes, and abhors everything it abhors. For anyone with hundreds of millions of rupees riding on a movie, a director of lavish blockbusters said, these are tectonic confusions. “When someone thinks of a movie idea—not just me but other people who think of themselves as liberals—they think, Is it O.K. if my hero is a Muslim?” he told me. “But the darker question is: Is there even an audience out there for this kind of movie?”

...One morning, a man with a polite mustache joined me at my hotel for breakfast. Once a consummate outsider, he is now trying to become a new kind of insider. I’ll call him Ramesh, because although he belongs to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the mother ship of the B.J.P. and other Hindu-nationalist groups, he was keen to stress that he was meeting me in a personal capacity. The R.S.S., a volunteer organization that’s nearly a hundred years old, isn’t a political party. It’s the custodian of a belief that India is, first and foremost, a land for Hindus; it aspires so much to a literally muscular Hinduism that its members often receive paramilitary training. 

...Happy endings are relative, though. If a film conforms to the R.S.S.’s vision of India, Ramesh excuses any manipulations of fact; if it departs from that vision, Ramesh believes that its creators seek to “tarnish” India’s image. He cited “The Empire,” a show on Disney’s Indian platform, about Babur, the Muslim warrior who founded the Mughal dynasty in India, in 1526. Why make a show that humanizes Babur, Ramesh wondered. He doesn’t consider Muslim rulers to be Indian, even if they were born in the country. “They were invaders,” he said.

...“It’s only in the late nineteen-eighties, and really with greater and greater frequency in the nineteen-nineties, that mainstream films start showing Muslims as gangsters, smugglers, and then terrorists,” Bhaskar said. Not by coincidence, she pointed out, these were also the decades when the B.J.P. grew as an electoral force. In 1992, after calling for the destruction of a mosque in the temple town of Ayodhya, B.J.P. and R.S.S. leaders watched as their followers tore the building down in a matter of hours.

The demolition ignited riots, ushering India toward its present condition of chronic, quivering polarization. In 2010, Bhaskar met the director Yash Chopra, who had made many staunchly secular movies between the sixties and the eighties. “We couldn’t make those kinds of films today,” he told her. The plural ideal had withered too much. “Back then, we had faith in it.”

...Earlier this year, Banerjee sent me a Vimeo link to his finished film, which confronts the bigotry infecting India. Banerjee approaches his theme slowly and sideways, through the story of one Muslim family. The family’s first generation, living in Kashmir during the unrest in 1990, finds itself sundered from its Hindu friends. In the second generation, a young woman wants to buy an apartment in present-day Mumbai, but no one will sell to her. (Muslims in Indian cities commonly struggle to find places to live, a form of discrimination practiced by Hindu homeowners and residents’ societies.)

...Banerjee’s film joins a growing trove of content that studios and filmmakers are reluctant to air. One director told me that he’d shot a love story about a couple who run away from home to be together. No one wants to release the film, he said, because “it just so happens that the boy is Muslim and the girl is Hindu.”

Sam Harris and Loch Kelly on nondual mindfulness

Today I set aside my doubts about Loch Kelly's approach in his "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness: A Revolutionary Guide For Living an Awakened Life," and continued on with my re-reading of his book. 

I liked what I read, by and large. Then I listened to the daily guided meditation by Sam Harris on his Waking Up app. It struck me as highly compatible with what I'd just read in Kelly's book. Which isn't surprising, since both Harris and Kelly embrace a similar Buddhist approach, that of Dzogchen.

Here's my transcription of what Harris said.

Just sit comfortably. And close your eyes. And become aware of the weight of your body, the feeling of gravity holding you in place. See if you can let the shape of your body dissolve. And notice whatever sensations spontaneously appear.

As you pay attention to sensations, let your mind expand and become an open space in which everything is appearing. Notice if your mind feels contracted at all. Are you stressed, or tired, restless? Notice if there is any pattern of energy here that's coloring your awareness.

Recognize that too as a mere appearance in this prior condition of consciousness. 

However your mind feels in this moment, recognize that this moment is the only moment in your life that is your life. This is the only moment that stands a chance of being real. Everything else is just something you're thinking about.

Resolve to fully connect here.

The moment you realize your mind has been captured by thought, drop back and recognize thought itself as an appearance. Where does it come from? And where does it go? There is a single space of consciousness. 

See if you can feel your identity with that. Not meditating on it. Not wandering from it. Everything that's happening is happening in, and as, consciousness. And if it feels like you are the observer, the center of experience, see if you can observe how that feeling arises.

It must be something, yet another appearance. Otherwise you couldn't feel it. It too is arising in a condition that is totally undefined. Just be that condition. 

In the last minutes of the session, pay careful attention to each breath. Simply cover each inhalation and exhalation with your awareness. 

OK. Well, as you go about your day today, you might try an exercise. You'll confront many things that annoy you, that cause you anxiety. You'll see many things online about which you have a strong feeling of judgement.

As a frame for the rest of the day, see if you can just decide in advance to dial down your reaction to all of that. Dial it down to 50 percent. Be 50 percent less reactive, less perturbed, less judgmental. Just see if you can decide to do that, and see if it has an effect.

And I'll see you here tomorrow for the next session of the Waking Up course.

Before speaking more abut Kelly's approach to mindfulness, I'll share a recent Pearls Before Swine comic that illustrates what I find lacking in my own approach to mindfulness. 

OK, usually I'm not quite as bad off as Rat, but some days I'm right there with him. And I have to say that I think Rat is correct about what mindfulness is all about. Kelly includes a quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn, a leading teacher of mindfulness.

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. 

Here's how Kelly distinguishes traditional mindfulness from effortless mindfulness. I'm sure I'll have more to say about this in another blog post. For now I'll just share this passage, which appeals to me even though I'm not completely confident that what he describes is attainable.

One simple way to distinguish the two types of mindfulness is to say that they are both being mindful but from different levels of mind. This is important because what you can be mindful of depends on what level of mind you're mindful from.

In effortless mindfulness, it is not as important to focus on what thoughts and emotions are arising but rather to ask, "Who or what level of mind are they arising to?" In effortless mindfulness, we shift from focusing on what we are aware of into focusing on awareness itself -- moving from a detached observer and into a view from interconnected awake awareness.

In deliberate mindfulness, we are aware, from our mindful witness, of things arising and passing. Effortless mindfulness invites us to be more intimately connected with our experience and all that is happening. This begins when we shift out of both our conceptual mind and our mindful witness and into awake awareness.

Deliberate mindfulness focuses on the contents of consciousness, while effortless mindfulness turns back to be aware of the context -- awareness itself. With deliberate mindfulness, we discover who we are not. With effortless mindfulness, we discover who we essentially are.

Effortless mindfulness does not lead to being detached from emotions but rather to both feeling more vulnerable and to having more capacity to be tender and welcoming of all feelings. The radical reports from my students are that our essential nature is loving, joyous, and free of worry, and we just need to untie the knots of conditioning to reveal these natural qualities. 

I'm giving "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness" another read

This morning I felt like brushing up on mindfulness, one of my favorite subjects, since mindfulness has become my meditation. 

Looking through my books about mindfulness, I decided to pick up Loch Kelly's The Way of Effortless Mindfulness. As I noted in a 2019 post, "Effortless mindfulness versus deliberate mindfulness," I liked the idea of putting in no effort.

A book by Loch Kelly, "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness," came to my attention via an interview Sam Harris conducted with Kelly and shared on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app that I'm a fan of. 

Any book about meditation that has effortless in the title is going to get my attention.

For thirty-five years I practiced a mystical meditative practice that involved considerable effort via repeating a mantra, sitting in a particular posture, and adhering to various other rules (such as ideally meditating for 2 1/2 hours a day, which I did for many years).

By comparison, mindfulness involves much less effort, since the focus is on attending to what is right before us, notably the breath.

In his interview with Harris, Loch Kelly talked about how his mindfulness approach derives from Tibetan Buddhism, which differs in some regards from other forms of Buddhism. Basically Kelly (along with Harris) considers that awareness itself is key to mindfulness, with the contents of awareness, though important, being secondary. 

OK, in a way this is obvious, especially if awareness is viewed as closely akin to consciousness, if not exactly the same thing. For we can't be mindful of anything unless we're able to be aware or conscious of that thing.

But even given this obviousness, re-reading the first few chapters of Kelly's book this morning was pleasurable, in part because so far I haven't come across anything that goes against the principles I listed in my first blog post about the book as being essential for me to resonate with a book of this sort.

Though I'm not 100% sure about anything -- the way of science -- I consider it highly probable that these premises are true.

(1) The mind is the brain in action
(2) There is no enduring, unchanging self or soul
(3) Free will is an illusion
(4) We humans see reality through a species-specific lens
(5) Consciousness is created by the brain
(6) All living beings exist in a web of interconnections

So my favorite books about mindfulness and meditation recognize that those six statements most likely are how us Homo sapiens relate to reality. The six truths are grounded in modern science and neuroscience, though naturally there's room for quibbling about the exact nature of what I've summarized above in a half dozen pithy sentences. 

I'm not saying that every author who writes about mindfulness/meditation needs to explicitly agree with each of the principles above to get my stamp of approval. However, at least what they say shouldn't conflict with those principles, or my highlighter is quick to insert question marks in the margin of their book's pages.

Often the sort of mindfulness Kelly espouses is described as being akin to the familiar sky/clouds metaphor. 

Mostly our attention is captured by clouds. Rarely do we view a clear blue sky as being worthy of special notice, though after a long rainy spell, it might be. Likewise, not surprisingly the contents of consciousness are what we're mostly mindful of -- thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and such.

Consciousness itself is like clear air. We need it to exist, but generally we aren't aware of air unless there's a breeze blowing. Inside as I am at the moment, air is an invisible entity that fills our house, yet isn't the sort of thing that draws anybody's attention.

(We've never had a visitor to our home say, "You have such beautiful air.")

Of course, a big difference between the sky/clouds analogy and consciousness/contents analogy is that we look at the sky as an object, while consciousness is the subjectivity that we are. Kelly uses "awake awareness" as a term for what effortless mindfulness is all about. He writes:

"So close that you can't see it" means that awake awareness is hidden in plain sight. It is closer than our own breath. We can't find aware awareness because awake awareness is not an "it." Awake awareness is neither an object nor thing that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted.

It isn't a thought, emotion, image, belief, feeling, or even energy. Awake awareness is invisibly inherent within us and is where we're looking from.

We need to learn how to have awake awareness look within, turn around, or rest back, so that awake awareness can discover itself. Then, awake awareness is the source of mind from which we are able to perceive. 

Well, if awake awareness is the same as consciousness, just under a different name, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. After all, consciousness discovering itself sounds more than a little crazy, since consciousness is how we know everything. 

Our ability to know isn't an object. Kelly has told us that. So how can awake awareness discover itself? Guess I need to re-read more of his book to find out.

Or maybe I should switch to a different mindfulness book.

A philosopher's take on fate, Buddhism, religions

Before the book I've been writing about recently -- Kieran Setiya's Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way -- is put away on a bookshelf where I'll have trouble finding it (my books aren't organized very well), I wanted to share some final observations from Setiya that I found interesting.

No such thing as fate. I agree with Setiya that fate doesn't exist, at least not in the sense of events in our life being preordained. I'd say, though, that they're ordained, in that chains of causes and effects control everything in the cosmos outside of the rarified realm of quantum mechanics where probabilities rule. But that realm has no bearing on everyday life.

In this passage Setiya is talking about an episode in baseball.

No one''s life can be reduced to one event, one enterprise, or one ambition. Each is made of facts and facts and facts. Nor is there any fate to be discerned in what transpires. As we relive the season, the at bat, we see how differently things could go, the sheer contingency of failure and success.

More than that, we see how tempting and how dangerous it is to tell the stories of our lives as if they had some hidden teleology, driving onward to predestined ends.

...We can be at fault for failure, but the chaos of contingency in life -- the pitch that dips or doesn't, the catch that bounces from the heel of a glove -- reminds us that control is never absolute and often limited. Whatever your mistakes, moreover, there is more to you than the failures they explain, more than any project you pursue.

Buddhism is mistaken. I can sort of see why Setiya makes the following critique of Buddhism, but he's speaking of the religious side of Buddhism, the supernatural side. There's also a secular side to Buddhism that does proclaim that living in the present moment is the wisest thing to do. (Atelic means being unfinished, incomplete.)

An alternative reading of the film treats life in Groundhog Day as an allegory for samsara, the cycle of suffering conjectured by Buddhist philosophy, in which we live life after woeful life according to the law of karma. The goal is to be free of this cycle, no longer reborn, in the nothingness of nirvana. Thus Phil escapes from repetition to mortality.

Whatever its merits, the Buddhist interpretation of Groundhog Day, and of human life, is not the same as mine. For Buddhists, the power of now is about the transience and emptiness of reality, overcoming attachment to persons and things, the liberation of disengaging from what is fragile, perishable, shifting. For me, it's the opposite. 

To value the atelic is to attach oneself to the present. It's not about emptiness but fullness, not about detachment or liberation but engagement with, and attention to, what is happening now.

...In Midlife, I wrote about meditation as a way to reorient oneself to the atelic. To focus mindfully on breathing, sitting, listening to sounds, detached from future goals to learn to appreciate the present; it nurtures an ability to find atelic value that transmits into everyday life.

Not all religions appeal to God. Setiya is absolutely correct about this. It's a good thing to remember when religious believers make a sharp distinction between atheism and religiosity. Actually, some religions, like Buddhism, are atheistic.

The first thing to say is that not all religions appeal to God. Beside the monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- there are polytheistic religions like Hinduism, and religions that arte nontheistic, like Buddhism.

It's not easy to say what these religions have in common, what makes them religions, binding together a "total reaction upon life" with creeds and doctrines, rituals and practices. But one element of any religion is belief, or faith, in something that transcends the ordinary world -- if not God or gods then a metaphysics of some kind, as in the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness and the puzzling proposition that there is no self.

Religion is, I believe, essentially metaphysical. It provides a picture of the world as a whole that guides our total reaction: how we are meant to feel about life, the universe, and everything. This might involve our relation to God or it might not; but it always involves a metaphysics of transcendence. 

Take Buddhism, for instance. What distinguishes Buddhist meditation from mindfulness as a method of stress control is the aim of ending suffering through discovering the truth -- in particular, the truth that you don't exist. If neither you nor those you love are real in anything like the way you once believed, mortality and loss are less traumatic.

(That is the idea, anyway; it's never been clear to me why discovering this "truth" is not at least as traumatic, like being told that everyone you know, including you, is already dead.)

To come to terms with life through meditation for serenity, or through talk therapy, is not to be religious, or to know the meaning of life, since it is not to discover any such truth.

Hope is the secular equivalent of religious faith

I've finished Kieran Setiya's book, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.

As might be expected, Setiya doesn't conclude that's there some magical bit of philosophy that can be sprinkled over his first six chapter titles -- Infirmity, Loneliness, Grief, Failure, Injustice, Absurdiy -- and renders those manifestations of life's hardness harmless, or at least bearable.

The best Setiya can come up with is Hope, the title of his concluding chapter. He warms up to that topic in the Absurdity chapter.

Thus the existentialists were wrong: reason may dictate a total reaction to the world, and that reaction may be, if not exactly affirmation, then acceptance of the universe and the place of human life within it. 

This need not rest on anything transcendent or divine, the nonexistence of the self or the immortality of the soul. The afterlife it calls for is collective. The meaning of life -- the truth that tells us how to feel about the whole residual cosmos -- would lie in our halting, perhaps perpetual, progress toward justice in this world.

This vision is less distant from religion than it seems. It is often said that religious belief originates in fear of death, that it's meant to console us in our mortality. But that view is simplistic.

As the pioneering theologian John Bowker argued, the ubiquitous injustice of our world -- where the innocent suffer and the guilty go free -- cries out for metaphysical solution. That is why religions look for justice in a world beyond, or dismiss the world we know as an illusion. The truth would otherwise be intolerable.

The point of being immortal is not simply to cheat death but to make room for the justice our mortality frustrates. The virtuous must be rewarded and the vicious damned; and if that does not happen in this world, it must happen in another. Justice comes first -- as it does in my account of the meaning of life.

I don't believe in another world, not one that compensates for ours. If there is meaning to be found, we must find it in the shape of history, the arc of the moral universe that bends, or does not bend, toward justice.

...I am not by nature optimistic. When I look at whee we are heading, I am terrified, by climate change most of all... If climate change leads to widespread food and water insecurity, mass migration, conflict, and war, we can forget about equality and human rights.

That climate change threatens the meaning of life is not mere rhetoric; it is plain fact. Human life could have meaning. It's meaning could be to limp slowly, painfully, contingently, toward a justice that repairs, so far as it can, the atrocities of the past.

If human history had that shape, we should accept it and play our part. In our small corner of the vast, indifferent universe, we would have made a home. If climate change leads instead to social collapse, that meaning will be lost, not in absurdity but in shame. 

...Our task now is to pull the emergency brake on climate change -- along with the injustice, domestic and global, gendered and racial, with which it is entwined. Our efforts will shape the facts that tell us how to feel. We'll rise to the challenge or we won't. Things may look bad, but remember how they looked before, when we faced the vacuum of absurdity. The question of life's meaning is intelligible and the answer is up to us.

Today, the future is uncertain. We can't be sure, can hardly guess, how history's arc will bend. And so we cannot say what human life means, if it means anything at all. The question that remains is what to feel when so much is unknown. What total reaction makes sense when the meaning of life is unsettled and at risk. Should we be lifted by hope or flattened by despair?

Great question. Me, I answer it either way depending on my mood. My mother, who raised me after my parents divorced, was highly political. So am I.

I love to follow the ins and outs of politics, even as American and world politics both elates and depresses me, depending on how the arc of justice Setiya speaks of appears to be bending. In three weeks the United States will hold midterm elections that will determine which party controls Congress and state legislatures.

Since I care so much about politics, and the related subjects of climate change, American support for Ukraine in its fight against the war crimes of Russia, and other pressing issues, I'm unable to simply live my everyday life, as appealing as that seems at times.

So how do I, or anybody, who cares about making the world a better place, find the energy and determination to pursue justice in all of its varied forms? I think Setiya has it right when he gives a qualified nod to Hope in his final chapter.

Until recently, I didn't think much about hope, and when I did, I was suspicious. My chronic pain is here to stay. To hope otherwise is to be dishonest. And when there's something to be done, what matters is to do it, not whether one does it with hope or resignation. 

Hope isn't important to me. My therapist disagrees. She believes that its significance in my life shows up in my resistance to it. The problem is that I'm afraid to hope; and what I need is courage. It's not just me. For many, hope blurs into wishful thinking. And the more we hope, the more we risk despair.

Why put ourselves through it? At the same time, we cling to hope, a seeming source of light when times are dark. I have come to think that none of us are wrong. Hope is and ought to be an object of ambivalence. Imprisoned in Pandora's jar, hope is both useless and essential.

What is hope, anyway? Philosophers have spilled some ink on this in recent years and, amid dissent, a broad consensus has emerged. 

Hope has elements of both desire and belief. To hope for something is, in part, to wish for it, in part to see it as possible, though not inevitable. You don't hope for what you don't want. Nor do you hope for what is out of the question or what you're sure is bound to happen.

What's more, to hope for something is to think it isn't wholly up to you. It doesn't make sense to hope for what you can simply bring about. Hope is a concession to what you cannot control.

...It is much easier to say why despair is bad than why hope is good. We despair when things are hopeless, but we remain attached to them. "The relationship is over; she is gone forever," cries the jilted lover. The terminal patient weeps: "There is no cure." What they feel is grief or something like it. The pain of passion for a possibility that has died.

But that doesn't mean there's merit in hope. Sometimes impossibility is a fact. My mother's Alzheimer's is not going to get better, only worse, and it would be foolish to hope otherwise, however much I wish it weren't.

Even where hope is rational, what is the good of it? I think of the U.S. elections in 2016 and 2020, when I watched the returns with agonized hope. There was nothing to do but manage my anxiety and vehemently plead for the better result.

Where is the value in that? Hope coexists with quiescence. If there's courage in hoping, it's the courage to face the disappointment that hope creates. When things turn out badly, hope is more harrowing than despair. 

...This is where the myth of hope's value starts. Hope is a precondition of what matters: the pursuit of meaningful change. But that doesn't make hope worthy in itself.

...Hope is like the forging point of iron: the temperature at which it can be wrought. Hope is the point at which we can be moved to act. But it is not the source of heat that brings us to that point or the force that moves us forward, the hammer blow with which we bend the world. Like hot iron, hope is dangerous: it can hurt us. 

And by itself, hope does nothing at all.

Hope doesn't inspire us to act: it makes room for grief and rage to do that. Fear, too, can be a motivating force, as it is for those who work on climate change. "I don't want you to be hopeful," the activist Greta Thunberg told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "I want you to panic."

Hope is consistent with inaction. It's a precondition of something good -- of striving, uncertainly, for what matters -- but it's not good in itself. 

If you are trying to find a therapy for your illness, to adapt to disability, to cope with loneliness or escape from it, to succeed against the odds or to learn from failure, you are living in hope. Depending on your temperament, you may feel good about this or, like me, beset with fear.

If hoping makes you anxious, you'll need courage. My therapist was right: I have to fight the fear of hope that inhibits me from taking risks. But hope itself is idle -- a prerequisite, not a goal. 

I said hope is and ought to be an object of ambivalence, but I've been mostly negative so far. Hope doesn't do much for us: at best it correlates with something good; and the correlation is imperfect. When we give up hope, we give up trying; but we can hope while doing nothing. 

And it's action, not hope, that matters.

...The virtue of hoping well is a matter of belief, of standing with or searching for the truth, attending to what's possible. And it's a matter of will, the courage to conceive alternatives, even when it's not clear what to do. 

This is how we should approach life's hardships, finding possibility where we can: the possibility of flourishing with disability or disease, of finding one's way through loneliness, failure, grief. The question, then, is not whether to hope but what we should hope for.

In the spirit of this book, the answer's not an ideal life. What we need is acknowledgement and close reading of the lives we have. I can hope to ignore my pain or to make something of it, even if I don't hope for a cure.

I can hope to see my mother again, to hold her hand and walk with her along the foreshore where the estuary gathers the tides and the great bridge sweeps across the river mouth, curving with the Earth. But I know she won't recover.

...Other concepts we should leave behind: the concept of the best life as a guideline or a goal, of being happy as the human good, of self-interest divorced from the good of others. Disability need not make life worse and pain is not lost for words. Love need not be earned; grief is no mistake, and the tempering of grief is not betrayal.

Life is not a narrative "that swells and tautens until climax"; it's not all about getting things done. Responsibility for justice need not rest on blame; and while we cannot know we've done enough, that's not a reason to do nothing. Human life is not inevitably absurd; there is room for hope.

Unconditional friendship explains a lot in politics and religion

I'm continuing to enjoy Kieran Setiya's book, "Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way." Every chapter offers up fresh insights into issues that only a skilled philosopher who is dedicated to making philosophy a practical guide for everyday life could come up with.

In the Loneliness chapter, Setiya speaks about friendship. As he did in other chapters, Setiya starts with Aristotle, then picks apart Aristotle's perspective, showing where it is lacking.

As you can read below, Setiya disagrees with Aristotle's contention that when a friend loses the qualities that make him or her lovable, the friend should be dropped. Rather, friendship means being loved for oneself, not for the qualities that you possess.

This rings true to me. Sure, it is easier to be friends with someone who has qualities that you like. But a deep friendship can remain intact even when your friend changes for the worse.

When I read the passage below, it struck me that this helps explain why, say, those who are devoted to Donald Trump stick with him through scandals that seemingly should turn them off to America's most notorious politician. 

Trump's base of support remains amazingly constant even through two impeachments, a failed re-election attempt, countless blatant lies, serious legal troubles, and his attempt to prevent Biden from being installed as president.

I've always thought that Trump's supporters simply were incapable of recognizing the truth about him. But after reading Setiya, I think a more likely explanation is that Trump's charisma and ability to stir up a crowd lead his supporters to view him as a friend.

And friends can disregard a lot of failings in the other person, because as Setiya says, they value their friend for who they are, not the qualities they possess. Same holds true for religious leaders.

So in both politics and religion, if followers consider a leader as a friend (even if they've never met the leader in person), they will be inclined to look past their flaws and mistakes, just as they would for a personal friend.

Here's some of what Setiya had to say about friendship.

Seeing where Aristotle went astray shows something deep about love for friends and family. His mistake was to think of friendship as meritocratic: for him, it's conditional on virtue.

"But if one accepts another man as good, and he turns out badly and is seen to do so," Aristotle asks, "must one still love him? Surely it is impossible, since not everything can be loved, but only what is good."

For Aristotle, friends ought to be flaky, in a way. They should drop you, and stop loving you, the moment you lose the qualities that make you friends. That's pretty much the opposite of the truth. I'm not saying that friendship must be unconditional -- but it can be.

I've had friendships in which a friend changed utterly, to the point that I no longer liked them. I still cared about them. When my friend becomes an asshole, their redemption matters to me vastly more than that of any random schmuck. I suspect that you're the same.

Aristotle's oversight goes back to his initial argument, that loving someone for himself is loving him for his character. That just isn't so.

You are not your character, an assemblage of quirks and traits, virtues and vices, all of which you can outlive. You are a particular, concrete human being, not defined by the attributes you have. Being loved for yourself, therefore, is not being loved for qualities that make you, you, and being valued as a friend is not the same as being admired.

In fact, it's the other way round. Being loved for yourself is being loved precisely not for any special qualities by which love must be earned. And to be valued as a friend is to be valued irrespective of your faults.

Philosophers sometimes claim that to love someone is to see the best in them, even to the point of exaggeration; this is known as "epistemic partiality." 

I hesitate to generalize, but that is not my experience. Parents can be unsparingly critical, and whether or not that's for the best, it doesn't conflict with their claim to love. What is more, their children may be happy to reciprocate. 

Nor is this confined to parental and filial love. No one knows my faults better than my wife, and I know plenty of hers. This doesn't prevent us from loving each other. 

All of which helps us locate the value in friendship, and so, by negation, the harm in being lonely. The rewards of friendship are manifold; friendship offers meaning and pleasure of many kinds. But its value flows ultimately, I believe, from the unconditional value of the people who are friends. 

Pick a friendship that matters in your life: it matters, in the end, because your friend matters and so do you. True friends cherish each other, not just the friendship that connects them. 

Shabnam Dhillon's death leaves questions unanswered

Today I was reminded of the death of Shabnam Dhillon, the wife of the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, after someone posted this comment on one of my blog posts.

Have tried to post a picture of Shabnam and Gurinder Singh Dhillon - the same picture is with the article below:

https://www.bhaskar.com/punjab/jalandhar/news/shabnam-wife-of-former-ranbaxy-promoters-mamie-and-dera-beas-chief-gurinder-singh-dhillons-london-126151220.html

A picture speaks a thousand words ... The Happy Couple NOT. The questionable timing of Shabnam's death. Her body was cremated. Will the truth ever come out?

Here's the photograph.

The timing and circumstances of her death are indeed curious, leading to questions. 

Shabnam died on November 27, 2019. A Business Today story that I quoted in a blog post about her death said:

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.

I'm pretty sure that there never has been any description of what the post-surgery complications were. So that's one question.

It's also perplexing why her husband, the RSSB guru, reportedly carried on with his previously scheduled program in New Delhi just two days after his wife died. That's a really brief mourning period. 

The timing of her death raises other questions, since Shabnam was part of the financial scandal involving her husband. I wrote several 2019 blog posts that mentioned Shabnam Dhillon.

June 10, 2019. Delhi High Court orders recovery of money from RSSB guru

RSSB chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon, wife Shabnam Dhillon, sons Gurkirat and Gurpreet and daughter-in-law Nayan Tara Dhillon are among the 56 entities from whom Delhi HC has ordered recovery of monies Singh brothers-Malvinder & Shivinder-owe to Daiichi. Money will also be recovered from former Religare chief Sunil Godhwani and brother Sanjay Godhwani, according to the Delhi HC order. [part of a Business Today story]

November 8, 2019. RSSB guru and his family make up reasons to avoid court appearance

After being ordered by the High Court of Delhi to appear before it on November 14, along with other parties involved in what appears to be fraudulent transfers of funds that now prevent the Singh brothers from having enough money to pay an award related to their sale of a pharmaceutical firm, the family of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, has made up some marvelously unbelievable excuses for not being able to make the court hearing.

This is more evidence that Dhillon and his family have done something wrong.

Innocent people welcome the opportunity to tell their side of a story in court. Guilty people don't. Hopefully the court will look at the Dhillon family excuses with a highly skeptical eye, because those excuses make very little sense.

...These are my takes on the excuses.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon. RSSB satsang schedule shows no meetings on the 14th. And somehow the senior citizen guru can travel all over the world giving talks to RSSB devotees, but is unable to go to a court appearance in Delhi. Highly unbelievable. 

Shabnam Dhillon. The guru's wife just realizes she has surgery scheduled for November 20 in the UK that she has to leave eight days early for. Must take days to check into the clinic or hospital. Highly unbelievable. 

November 17, 2019. Here's an example of Dhillon family connections to shell companies

The RHC Holding as well as the RSSB did not respond to the queries sent by The Indian Express. Another source — involved with RSSB’s corporate dealings — added that Dhillons have been in business with Singh brothers for a very long time. “Take the example of Luminous Holdings, which was set up in 2002, and has Babaji himself as a director. Moreover, his wife Shabnam Dhillon is the other director of this company,” he said. [excerpt from The Indian Express story]

November 18, 2019. RSSB guru's wife deeply involved in real estate deal

This is a follow-up to yesterday's blog post, "Here's an example of Dhillon family connections to shell companies." Someone just sent me a PDF file of an analyst's 2014 report on a company owned by Shabnam Dhillon, the wife of the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Download SGGD-Projects-Development-PPMLD_335Cr-Rationale-9May2014

The company, SGGD Projects Development Pvt Ltd, is one of the 56 entities, many or most controlled by the Dhillon family, that the High Court of Delhi has ordered money to be recovered from.

A screenshot of part of the report shows how deeply Shabnam Dhillon, and the Dhillon family in general, were involved in high stakes financial dealings -- at the same time Gurinder Singh Dhillon was preaching about the need to live a pure and simple life in which spiritual advancement should take precedence over acquiring great wealth.

On November 27, 2019, Shabnam Dhillon died in a hospital following surgery on November 20. Now, naturally it could be a coincidence that her death occurred 13 days after she was supposed to appear at a hearing before the High Court of Delhi regarding fraudulent transfers of large amounts of money.

But the timing of her death definitely raises questions.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that an autopsy was performed, and her body was cremated in early December of 2019. It'd be interesting to see Shabnam Dhillon's death certificate (if that's what they're called in Great Britain) to learn exactly what the complications were that caused her death.

If any reader of this blog lives in Great Britain and is willing to obtain a copy of the death certificate, please do so and email me a scan of it.

UPDATE: Someone searched for Shabnam's death certificate in the UK and couldn't find one. The comment they left on this post is below. I Googled the question of whether India requires a death certificate for a citizen who dies abroad. Answer is possibly, since it isn't clear on this web page whether both a medical report and death certificate issued by a hospital are needed, or just one of these. 

Shabnam Dhillon died in National Health Service Hospital Bedford that is generally open to UK tax payers only free of charge. Believe she was originally operated in a private paying institution somewhere else and upon complications transferred to larger national health service hospital Bedford where she died. It is normal for visiting overseas persons to be treated in small private paying hospital for specific illness and in case of complications private individuals transfer to larger general hospital as emergency (which appears to be the case here). I have applied all relevant searches on Her Majesty,s Register office but there appears to be no ideath certificate record of Shabnam Dhillon recorded in United Kingdom. Link attached.https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FZovwK0ZEAUoLbm-3bx1IBsxy35IAqWE/view?usp=sharing

Don't protest that something should not be, or it is for the best

I've read a lot of books in my seven decades or so of avid reading.

What I've learned is that sometimes a book is worth reading for a single memorable thought that sticks in the mind long after the rest of the book has been forgotten.

I feel this happening with a sentence that keeps popping up in my psyche several days after I came across it in "Life is Hard," by Kieran Setiya, a philosopher who teaches at MIT. I've boldfaced the sentence below, placing it in the context of where it appears in Setiya's book.

Here it is by itself in all its thought-provoking glory.

Religious or not, we conjure the problem of evil whenever we protest that something should not be; and we engage in something like theodicy when we say it's for the best.

Here's an experience you may have had. You tell a friend about a problem you are coping with, maybe a blowup at work or in a close relationship, a health scare that has you rattled. They are quick to reassure you -- "Don't worry; it will all be fine!" -- or to offer you advice.

But their response is not consoling. Instead, it feels like disavowal: a refusal to acknowledge what you're going through. What we learn in moments like these is that assurance and advice can operate as denial.

Worse than denial, even, is the urge to justify human suffering. "Everything happens for a reason" -- except, of course, it doesn't. Philosophers have a word, "theodicy," for an argument that vindicates the ways of God to man.

Theodicies address the problem of evil: if God is omnipotent and benevolent, what accounts for the manifold evils of the world? 

But theodicy has a life of its own, outside of narrowly theistic or doctrinal contexts. Religious or not, we conjure the problem of evil whenever we protest that something should not be; and we engage in something like theodicy when we say it's for the best.

The problem with theodicy is not just intellectual -- none of the arguments work -- but ethical, too. It's wrong to justify your own or others' suffering, to mute pity or protest in that way. 

I find this sentence amazingly brilliant and well-said. It shows the value of having a philosopher take on the problem of living as well as possible in a world filled with suffering of many varieties.

Every day, many times a day in fact, I protest that something should not be.

When the sciatica in my right leg is more painful than usual. When our dog won't come when I call her. When Putin fires missiles at Ukraine apartment buildings, killing innocent civilians. When I'm late for my Tai Chi class and can't find a nearby parking space.

I'd never thought that I was conjuring the problem of evil when I do this. But it makes sense. After all, evil is viewed as the presence of something horrible that shouldn't be. In the paragraph above, that would be Putin wantonly killing Ukrainians who have no connection to the military.

Yet I think Setiya is correct that the conjuring of evil occurs when we protest that anything should not be.

After all, what exists is a fact. We may not like that it exists. We may want to work to stop it from existing. However, Setiya correctly says in his book that "We have to live in the world as it is, not the world as we wish it would be."

Evil is a creation of the human mind. I use the word occasionally. From now on I'm going to try to use it less often, because it serves no real purpose. What Putin is doing to the Ukrainian people isn't evil; it is terribly wrong. 

Evil demands an explanation for its existence. But we conjure it into existence by viewing evil as something substantively real, often supernaturally real. Dealing with serious problems can happen just as easily without bringing evil into it. 

Politicians like to use the term "evildoers" to justify harsh reactions, as was the case after 9/11. Why not just call them terrorists or extremists? 

More broadly and personally, why do I need to tell myself that such-and-such shouldn't be in my life, when it so obviously is? I can dislike what is happening to me without feeling that its very existence is a mistake.

What is real never is a mistake. It is simply reality. If I don't like the pain in my leg, I can try to lessen the pain. But I gain nothing by complaining to myself that the pain shouldn't be, since it clearly is.

Regarding theodicy, which Setiya defines as vindicating the ways of God to man, I also agree with him that we engage in a secular version of theodicy when we say something is for the best. No, it is just a thing. It is just what is.

The sciatica in my right leg isn't for the best. There's no outside message being communicated to me when I feel that pain. Sure, I've learned some things from the pain, like having the fortitude to ignore it as much as possible for the 75 minutes or so of a Tai Chi class. 

However, this is different than viewing something disagreeable as being for the best, as if there's a Cosmic Teacher who gives us suffering to convey a life lesson. That's absurd, and as Setiya says, "It's wrong to justify your own or others' suffering, to mute pity or protest in that way."

Suffering is simply suffering.

If we find meaning in our suffering, that's our business, and our creation. But to tell someone that they should look upon their suffering as being justified either by God's will or some human rationalization, that's cruel and wrong.

I'm quoted in a story about RSSB center in New Zealand

I just got a link to a Newsroom story by Cass Mason about a new Radha Soami Satsang Beas center in New Zealand. Here's a screenshot of how the story starts out, along with a PDF file of the story. Below I'll share critical mentions of RSSB in the story, along with mentions of an interview Mason did with me. 
Download Sect sets up home at Ihumātao stonefields

This is the concluding part of the story. I found the final paragraph amusing, though not surprising. Baruch ter Wal won’t comment on allegations of the RSSB guru's involvement in financial fraud, but he’s fine with ascribing motivations to me that don’t fit with reality.

That’s to be expected, since RSSB faithful can’t conceive that someone could find the guru and the RSSB teachings lacking after 35 years of serious devotion to meditation and the other RSSB vows. Instead, my leaving the group must be my own failing.

However, the group is not without its controversies. 

While RSSB’s previous gurus have maintained a low profile, Singh Dhillon has made the news in India for allegations about his involvement in financial scandal.

Singh Dhillon is alleged to have siphoned funds relating to the sale of multinational pharmaceutical company Ranbaxy Laboratories - owned by Singh Dhillon’s cousins, brothers Malvinder and Shivinder Singh - to Japanese global healthcare company Daiichi Sankyo in 2008. 

An affidavit signed by Malvinder Singh in 2019 accused Shivinder of transferring Singh Dhillon more than NZD$100 million in fraudulent loans through shell companies controlled by Singh Dhillon, his family and close associates, money which was then used to buy real estate. 

“Shivinder initiated these actions and permitted siphoning and malfeasance of funds with the ulterior motive of gaining control of the seat of the spiritual head of RSSB, which was promised to him by Dhillon in lieu of the financial gains,” the complaint says. 

He alleged any attempts at recovering the money were met with death threats. 

“Gurinder Singh Dhillon has threatened the complainant through his lawyer Ferida Chopra that if he did not agree to the demands of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, he would be eliminated by persons from the Radha Soami Satsang,” the complaint said.

The Economic Offenses Wing of the Delhi Police summoned Singh Dhillon to court seeking explanation around funds transferred to his and his late wife's bank accounts following the accusations from Malvinder.  

Singh Dhillon and his family members were among 55 people eventually ordered by the Delhi High Court in 2019 to repay 6,000 crore rupees - or nearly NZD$1.3 billion - to the Singh brothers’ flagship holding company RHC Holding as part of a directive to third parties to compensate Daiichi, which alleged non-disclosure of crucial information during the 2008 sale. 

Asked how RSSB might reconcile these allegations, which have not resulted in any charges against Singh Dhillon, with its principles, Baruch ter Wal says the group doesn’t feel it needs to respond. 

US-based author Brian Hines was a member of RSSB for 35 years. Since leaving in 2002 he has become an outspoken critic, particularly about what he sees as hypocrisy within the leadership. 

He describes RSSB as “stranger than your usual religion”, drawing on a study by American psychiatrist and former Harvard Medical School teacher Robert Jay Lifton to make his point. Namely, that the outfit fits the bill for the three criteria Lifton defines as making a cult: a charismatic leader followers must not question; ‘thought reform’ or indoctrination; and exploitation of members. 

“Followers of RSSB believe their leader is a living god. He’s considered an infallible being and his commands are to be carried out without question.”

Doubts about teachings are heavily discouraged and followers are told the human mind is considered to be “the agent of a negative power”, he says.

Hines also says devotees are expected to commit vast amounts of time, energy and money - though this is not enforced - to the organisation, which operates strictly as a top-down hierarchy. 

Ter Wal says members are not encouraged to donate, and while they are made aware of opportunities to volunteer, that too is optional. He also says the nature of RSSB’s way of life can lead to retrospective negativity.

“The lifestyle is quite rigorous, so if you become disillusioned, you could look back at 10 years and go ‘Oh shit, I wasted 10 years of my life, I could have been out there earning money and watching Andrew Tate videos’. And so you could get resentful about that, and feel like ‘I was brainwashed’ so the teachings are the teachings and if you fall out of love with them then you could say it was groupthink ... which comes with the territory.” 

My new favorite book: "Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way"

I've read countless (more or less) religious, spiritual, mystical, philosophical, and self-help books that basically take an optimistic approach to life.

Yes, life is difficult, as the Buddha said. But those books say that it's possible to turn suffering into well- being through a myriad of suggested ways, many of them contradictory.

Believe in God. Meditate. Find your true self. Flow with whatever happens. Have a positive attitude.

Nothing wrong with all that. Except when it is. Yesterday Amazon delivered into my eagerly awaiting hands a book that Sam Harris recommended on Twitter: "Life is Hard," by Kieran Setiya, a philosopher who teaches at MIT.

It's a breath of fresh air for me. And I've only read the introduction. Here's some excerpts from the introduction. I really like both Setiya's writing style and his clear thinking.  

Life, friends, is hard -- and we must say so. It's harder for some than it is for others. Into each life some rain must fall, but while the lucky dry themselves beside the fire, others are drenched by storms and floods, both literal and figurative.

We live in the wake of a global pandemic and mass unemployment, amid the surging catastrophe of climate change and the revival of fascism. These calamities will disproportionately harm the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed.

...Since the age of twenty-seven, I have experienced chronic pain: persistent, fluctuating, strange, a constant drone of sensory distraction. It can be difficult to concentrate and, at times, impossible to sleep. Because it is invisible, my condition is isolating: almost no one knows. 

...There is no cure for the human condition. But after twenty years teaching and studying moral philosophy, I believe that it can help. This book explains how. 

...We should not turn away from hardship; and the best is often out of reach. Striving for it only brings dismay. This attitude may strike you as perverse or pessimistic. But we need not live our "best lives" in order to be more resilient; and we have to face the facts.

Here's an experience you may have had. You tell a friend about a problem you are coping with, maybe a blowup at work or in a close relationship, a health scare that has you rattled. They are quick to reassure you -- "Don't worry; it will all be fine!" -- or to offer you advice.

But their response is not consoling. Instead, it feels like disavowal: a refusal to acknowledge what you're going through. What we learn in moments like these is that assurance and advice can operate as denial.

Worse than denial, even, is the urge to justify human suffering. "Everything happens for a reason" -- except, of course, it doesn't. Philosophers have a word, "theodicy," for an argument that vindicates the ways of God to man.

Theodicies address the problem of evil: if God is omnipotent and benevolent, what accounts for the manifold evils of the world? 

But theodicy has a life of its own, outside of narrowly theistic or doctrinal contexts. Religious or not, we conjure the problem of evil whenever we protest that something should not be; and we engage in something like theodicy when we say it's for the best.

The problem with theodicy is not just intellectual -- none of the arguments work -- but ethical, too. It's wrong to justify your own or others' suffering, to mute pity or protest in that way. 

...So this is where we are: heirs to a tradition that urges us to focus on the best in life but painfully aware of the ways in which life is hard. To open our eyes is to come face-to-face with suffering -- with infirmity, loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, absurdity. 

We should not blink; instead, we should look closer. What we need in our affliction is acknowledgement. 

...Two insights light the way. The first is that being happy is not the same as living well. If you wish to be happy, dwelling on adversity may or may not be of use. But mere happiness should not be your goal. Happiness is a mood or feeling, a subjective state; you could be happy while living a lie.

...The truth is that we should not aim to be happy but to live as well as we can.

...I don't mean we should strive to be unhappy, or be indifferent to happiness, but there is more to life than how it feels. Our task is to face adversity as we should -- and here truth is the only means. We have to live in the world as it is, not the world as we wish it would be.

The second guiding light is that, in living well, we cannot extricate justice from self-interest or divide ourselves from others. It will emerge as the book goes on that even the most insular concerns -- with one's own suffering, one's loneliness, one's frustrations -- are implicitly moral.

They are entangled with compassion, with the value of human life, with ideologies of failure and success that obfuscate justice. Reflecting honestly on affliction in our own lives leads toward concern for others, not into narcissistic self-regard. 

Tools for reducing undesirable mental chatter

Having finished Ethan Kross' book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, I want to share some tools listed at the end of the book for dealing with the voice in our head when it gets too annoying.

These are the tools that Kross says can be implemented on your own. They're in order of how easily each can be implemented when chatter strikes. A basic theme is that they're aimed at stepping back from the echo chamber of our own mind.

The last two involve embracing a superstition or performing a ritual. All perfectly fine for even us atheists, since there's no need to believe in the supernatural to do these things.

(1) Use distanced self-talk. One way to create distance when you're experiencing chatter involves language. When you're trying to work through a difficult experience, use your name and the second-person "you" to refer to yourself. Doing so is linked with less activation in brain networks associated with rumination and leads to improved performance under stress, wiser thinking, and less negative emotion.

(2) Imagine advising a friend. Another way to think about your experience from a distanced perspective is to imagine what you would say to a friend experiencing the same problem as you. Think about the advice you'd give that person, and then apply it to yourself.

(3) Broaden your perspective. Chatter involves narrowly focusing on the problems we're experiencing. A natural antidote to this involves broadening our perspective. To do this, think about how the experience you're worrying about compares with other adverse events you (or others) have endured, how it fits into the broader scheme of your life and the world, and/or how other people you admire would respond to the same situation.

(4) Reframe your experience as a challenge. A theme of this book is that you possess the ability to change the way you think about your experiences. Chatter is often triggered when we interpret a situation as a threat -- something we can't manage. To aid your inner voice, reinterpret the situation as a challenge that you can handle, for example, by reminding yourself of how you've succeeded in similar situations in the past, or by using distanced self-talk.

(5) Reinterpret your body's chatter response. The bodily symptoms of stress (for example, an upset stomach before, say, a date or presentation) are often themselves stressful (for instance, chatter causes your stomach to grumble, which perpetuates your chatter, which leads your stomach to continue to grumble). When this happens, remind yourself that your bodily response to stress is an adaptive evolutionary reaction that improves performance under high-stress situations. In other words, tell yourself that your sudden rapid breathing, pounding heartbeat, and sweaty palms are there not to sabotage you but to help you respond to a challenge.

(6) Normalize your experience. Knowing that you are not alone in your experience can be a potent way of quelling chatter. There's a linguistic tool for helping people do this: Use the word "you" to refer to people in general when you think and talk about negative experiences. Doing so helps people reflect on their experiences from a healthy distance and makes it clear that what happened is not unique to them but characteristic of human experience in general. 

(7) Engage in mental time travel. Another way to gain distance and broaden your perspective is to think about how you'll feel a month, a year, or even longer from now. Remind yourself that you'll look back on whatever is upsetting you in the future and it'll seem much less upsetting. Doing so highlights the impermanence of your current emotional state.

(8) Change the view. As you think about a negative experience, visualize the event in your mind from the perspective of a fly on the wall peering down on the scene. Try to understand why your "distant self" is feeling the way it is. Adopting this perspective leads people to focus less on the emotional features of their experience and more on reinterpreting the event in ways that promote insight and closure. You can also gain distance through visual imagery by imagining moving away from the upsetting scene in your mind's eye, like a camera panning out until the scene shrinks to the size of a postage stamp.

(9) Write expressively. Write about your deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding your negative experience for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for one to three consecutive days. Really let yourself go as you jot down your stream of thoughts; don't worry about grammar or spelling. Focusing on your experience from the perspective of a narrative provides you with distance from the experience, which helps you make sense of what you felt in ways that improve how you feel over time.

(10) Adopt the perspective of a neutral third party. If you find yourself experiencing chatter over a negative interaction you've had with another person or group of people, assume the perspective of a neutral, third-party observer who is motivated to find the best outcome for all parties involved. Doing so reduces negative emotions, quiets an agitated inner voice, and enhances the quality of the relationships we share with the people we've had negative interactions with, including our romantic partners.

(11) Clutch a lucky charm or embrace a superstition. Simply believing that an object or superstitious behavior will help relieve your chatter has precisely that effect by harnessing the brain's power of expectation. Importantly, we don't have to believe in supernatural forces to benefit from these actions. Simply understanding how they harness the power of the brain to heal is sufficient. 

(12) Perform a ritual. Performing a ritual -- a fixed sequence of behaviors that is suffused with meaning -- provides people with a sense of order and control that can be helpful when they're experiencing chatter. Although many of the rituals we engage in (for example, silent prayer, meditation) are passed down to us from our families and cultures, performing rituals that you create can likewise be effective for quieting chatter. 

"Open Mind, Open Heart" is an intriguing book about Christian meditation

It's probably surprising to others, and definitely surprising to me, that as churchless as I am, one of my favorite meditation books is Open Mind, Open Heart by Thomas Keating, a Catholic priest, monk, and abbot. 

(There's a new edition of the book, but I'm familiar with the old one, and the new one is more difficult to read typographically, from Amazon reviews I've read.)

I've written some blog posts about the book, which I bought in 2005.

Support for the churchless

Seeing clearly now

Let go. Then let go of letting go.

Let it go. So simple. 

 

The basic technique described in Open Mind, Open Heart is what Keating calls centering prayer. Except it isn't at all like the usual Christian notion of prayer. You aren't asking for something from God, but opening yourself up to God via outer and inner silence.

Of course, right there an atheist like me has a problem with the book, since I don't believe in God. But Keating says:

Every response to God, whatever it is, must begin with the full acceptance of reality as it actually is at the moment.

So I mentally substitute "reality" for "God" in the book.

This leaves centering prayer as closely akin to other forms of meditation in which one's attention is focused on the breath, a mantra, or some other object of attention while thoughts and other perceptions are allowed to come and go.

The next problem I have with the book is that Keating believes in pure awareness. Or at least, almost pure awareness. But so does Sam Harris and other Buddhist types, so I just look upon pure awareness as a possibility that doesn't make much sense to me, yet isn't all that crazy.

Especially since I've argued for it in the past, including in the first book I wrote, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder.

What I find refreshing about Open Mind, Open Heart is how Keating presents the via negativa approach to God in a modern fashion. That Wikipedia article includes a quote from Plotinus, an ancient Neoplatonist philosopher who I wrote a book about, that echoes what centering prayer is all about.

Our thought cannot grasp the One as long as any other image remains active in the soul [...] To this end, you must set free your soul from all outward things and turn wholly within yourself, with no more leaning to what lies outside, and lay your mind bare of ideal forms, as before of the objects of sense, and forget even yourself, and so come within sight of that One.

Keating describes how he views consciousness and God.

Our consciousness, as we have said, is like a great river on the surface of which our superficial thoughts and experiences are moving by like boats, debris, water skiers or other things. The river itself is the participation God has given us in His own being.

It is that part of us on which all the other faculties rest, but we are ordinarily unaware of it because we are absorbed with what is passing by on the surface of the river.

In centering prayer we begin to shift our attention from the boats and objects on the surface to the river itself, to that which sustains all our faculties and is their source. The river in this analogy has no qualities or characteristics. It is spiritual and limitless because it is a participation in God's being.

Suppose you get interested in some boat and find yourself looking in the hold to see what is on board. You are slipping away from your original intention. You must keep turning your attention from what is on the surface of the river to the river itself, from the particular to the general, from forms to the formless, from images to the imageless. 

...A thought in the context of this method is any perception that appears on the inner screen of consciousness. 

This could be an emotion, an image, a memory, a plan, a noise from outside, a feeling of peace, or even a spiritual communication. In other words, anything whatsoever that registers in the inner screen of consciousness is a "thought". The method consists of letting go of every thought during the time of prayer, even the most devout thoughts.

Thus Keating views human consciousness as a gateway to God when consciousness is reduced to inner silence. OK, interesting theory, one which I used to embrace -- which probably explains why I'm attracted to Open Mind, Open Heart, though I doubt that some basic tenets of the book are true.

Keating speaks positively about Eastern forms of spirituality. Not surprising, since he's basically espousing an Atman (consciousness/soul) -- Brahman (God) form of Christianity.

Probably false, but at least Keating presents a specific method of reaching out to God that makes more sense than the whole "Just have faith in Jesus" thing.

RSSB guru mentioned in Business Standard story of Singh Brothers financial misdeeds

Recently India's Business Standard published a good overview of Malvinder and Shivinder Singh's financial problems -- a story I've been following here at the Church of the Churchless because the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) is implicated in the fraudulent behavior.

And there's nothing I enjoy more than pointing out the pitfall of religious belief and having blind faith in the people who lead them. Well, of course there are other things I enjoy more. Carrot cake, for one.

But spiritual hypocrisy deeply irks me, as when Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, preaches that returning to God should be the primary aim of human life, then spends his own life raking in hundreds of millions of dollars for himself and his family in a questionable fashion.

Below is the Business Standard story. I've boldfaced the mention of Dhillon. Here's some blog posts I wrote that pertain to what's said in the story about the RSSB guru. I'm also sharing a related PDF file.

https://hinessight.blogs.com/files/fortis-fraud-may-exceed-2-000-crore-says-sfio.pdf
https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2019/02/another-story-about-gurinder-singh-dhillons-financial-wrongdoing.html
https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2018/09/investigations-of-financial-illegality-circle-closer-to-rssb.html
https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2019/03/why-gurinder-singh-dhillon-is-a-lot-like-donald-trump.html
https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2019/06/whats-next-for-the-rssb-gurusingh-brothers-scandal.html

Before we get into the details of the current case, let's learn some history. In the 1980s, Parvinder Singh inherited Ranbaxy from his father, Bhai Mohan Singh, a wealthy contractor who hailed from Rawalpindi. What had started out as a small pharma business in Amritsar had by then grown into an empire. At a time when most Indian drug-makers were looking inwards, Parvinder decided to take Ranbaxy into international markets. By the time he passed away in 1999, he left behind a global pharma major.

And, the way in which Parvinder’s sons, Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, squandered away the empire in subsequent years has become the stuff of corporate folklore. According to reports, Malvinder and Shivinder squandered away Rs 22,500 crore over the span of just one decade.

So, what are the particulars of the case in which the latest orders have come? Former Ranbaxy promoters Malvinder and Shivinder Singh have been accused of concealing information about wrongdoings at Ranbaxy when they sold a majority stake in it to Daiichi Sankyo, a Japanese firm, in 2008. In 2016, the Singapore tribunal awarded Daiichi Rs 3,500 crore in damages. In 2018, Daiichi Sankyo approached the Indian Supreme Court with the allegation that the Singh brothers were diverting funds using a number of shell companies to avoid the payments. Daiichi had also approached the apex court to stop a deal between Fortis and Malaysia-based IHH Group. As part of the deal, the IHH Group was set to acquire a 30 per cent stake in the Fortis group for 1.1 billion dollars with an open offer of 26 per cent stake. While the deal was signed in August 2018, the SC stayed the IHH open offer in December that same year.

But, this too is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg since there are several other cases against the Singh brothers. In October of 2019, Malvinder and Shivinder were arrested by the Economic Offenses Wing of the Delhi Police for allegedly diverting money and causing losses to the tune of Rs 2,397 crore. The allegations were related to Religare Enterprises Limited, or REL, a company that was once led by the brothers. They were accused of diverting money from Religare Finvest Limited, or RFL, an REL subsidiary. According to the allegations, the brothers and other REL officials took loans in RFL's name and then diverted the money to other firms.

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

Long before the recent wranglings, there was also the episode with Dinesh Thakur, the whistle-blower who put Ranbaxy in the dock. Thakur joined Ranbaxy in 2003. But, in 2005, Thakur quit and waved a red flag about alleged violations and irregularities at the pharma company. Thakur ended up working with US authorities to expose the fraud and even filed a lawsuit to hold Ranbaxy accountable. Eventually, Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to making fraudulent statements to US regulatory authorities about how it tested drugs at its Indian plants. The firm had to pay $500 million to resolve the civil and criminal violations.

It remains to be seen if the recent developments will be the final chapter of their downfall, or whether more skeletons might tumble out of their cupboard. What we know for sure is that Malvinder and Shivinder Singh have all but destroyed the legacy of their grandfather Bhai Mohan Singh and father Parvinder.