Church of the Churchless

Inference to the best explanation is a wise approach

In the course of reading books about modern science, I frequently come across an appealing phrase: inference to the best explanation.

I like the sound of it. It makes sense to me. It's a foundation of both the scientific method and how we deal with issues in everyday life.

Defining this approach in any detail can lead into some tricky philosophical territory that I'm not much interested in. This article summary from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is good enough for blog post purposes.

Inference to the best explanation is the procedure of choosing the hypothesis or theory that best explains the available data. The factors that make one explanation better than another may include depth, comprehensiveness, simplicity and unifying power. According to Harman (1965), explanatory inference plays a central role in both everyday and scientific thinking.

In ordinary life, a person might make the inference that a fuse has blown to explain why several kitchen appliances stopped working all at once. Scientists also seem to engage in inference to the best explanation; for example, astronomers concluded that another planet must exist in order to account for aberrations in the orbit of Uranus. However, despite the suggestiveness of cases like these, the extent to which we do and should rely on inference to the best explanation is highly controversial.

Highly controversial? Well, maybe to professional philosophers. Choosing a hypothesis that best fits the available data seems not very controversial to me.

Here's two slides from an academic presentation on this subject that I came across via some Googling.

"Comic relief" is a good way of describing how I've come to look upon supernatural religious claims. They're akin to the notion of tracks in the snow being made by a trained monkey wearing snowshoes. Possible, but highly improbable. 

Likewise, it's possible that God exists. It's possible that life after death is a reality. It's possible that consciousness is immaterial rather than being produced by goings-on in the brain. But each of these possibilities is highly improbable, given the evidence.

Thus they don't pass the Inference to the Best Explanation test. Other hypotheses do: God is a fantasy. When we die we're dead and gone forever. Consciousness is produced by the brain.

But here's the beautiful thing about taking a scientific approach to reality.

An open mind is able to adjust to fresh facts with ease. If somehow solid evidence appeared for the existence of God, life after death, or the immaterial nature of consciousness, I'd have no problem changing my mind on these subjects. 

Even more, I'd joyfully change my mind, since I think it'd be great if any or all of those things were true.

How many religious believers, though, can honestly say the same thing? I suspect, not many. Meaning, what if undeniable evidence surfaced that the foundation of their religious faith was false? Could they give up their religious belief as easily as I could surrender my atheism?

I doubt it.

This is the difference between open-minded atheism and closed-minded religiosity. Every atheist I know -- and I know a lot of them -- is open to the possibility of a supernatural side to reality. However, my experience is that most religious people are so attached to their chosen faith, they have great difficulty imagining giving it up.

I'll end by saying that engaging in inference to the best explanation isn't necessary, or desirable, in many areas of life. For example, our personal likes and dislikes. We don't need reasons for liking or disliking broccoli; or rap music; or New York City; or watching baseball; or countless other things.

That said, I feel that we still need to keep an open mind to our own predilections, what appeals to us, because we can surprise ourselves.

For example, I've been pondering a replacement for my much-beloved 2017 VW GTI for quite a few months. I enjoy automobile "window shopping." Reading car reviews and watching You Tube reviews is a pleasure for me. Because I'd driven a Mini Cooper S for five years prior to the three years I've driven the GTI, I'd been focused on other small, fast, fun cars.

Yet I'd paid attention to other subcompact cars such as the Subaru Crosstrek. My "inference," so to speak, was that even though I'd never driven a Crosstrek, I wouldn't like it, given its underwhelming engine. 

However, the more I pondered my driving wants and needs, the more I realized that a Crosstrek could make sense as a GTI replacement. After a test drive, I wrote a post on one of my other blogs, "Here's my pitch to be in a Subaru commercial." Excerpt:

Today, though, I drove the GTI to Capitol Subaru to test drive a 2019 Crosstrek Limited. I adore small cars. I'd studied the Crosstrek because I liked its subcompact size and all-wheel-drive (it's just eight inches longer than the decidedly small GTI). 

However, I couldn't get past the reviews that talked about the underpowered Crosstrek engine and lack of driving excitement. A few days ago something changed in my psyche, though.

I began thinking to myself, Maybe at the age of 71 I've had enough of fast cars that handle great. Perhaps it's time for a new phase in my car life. 

A few days ago I put in an order for a 2020 Crosstrek. I waited a while after the test drive to make sure that my change of automotive heart wasn't an impulsive fling. It wasn't. I'd changed. I'd altered my personal inference to the best explanation of what car I wanted.

Such is life. When we're open to change, to fresh facts, to surprising ourselves about what we value and believe.

RSSB guru and his family make up reasons to avoid court appearance

Wow. Big news regarding the Singh brothers/Dhillon family financial scandal drama.

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.

Here's two stories from the Indian financial press about this development. This is a Business Today story.
Download Daiichi case: 6 days to deadline RSSB chief Dhillon & family back off from court appearance

Six days before their scheduled hearing in the Delhi High Court in the Daiichi Sankyo case, the Gurinder Singh Dhillon family has backed off from personal appearance in court citing reasons ranging from "surgeries" abroad to "satsang commitments".

The court had asked RSSB chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family members, former Religare promoters Shivinder Singh and Malvinder Singh, former Religare chief Sunil Godhwani and his brother Sanjay Godhwani to be present at the court hearing on November 14. They were also asked to come up with all the required documents relating to the dealings.

While Gurinder Singh Dhillon said he had "satsang commitments" outside Delhi on the hearing day, his wife Shabnam Dhillon cited a scheduled gastric surgery at a UK hospital on November 20, saying she needed to travel to the country on November 12.

Indicating his inability to be present in court, Gurinder Singh also said he's "senior citizen, diabetic and cancer patient". Dhillon's son Gurkeerat said he had to accompany his mother to the UK for the treatment. His elder son Gurpreet said he's in Singapore. Dhillon's daughter-in-law Nayan Tara Dhillon cited her four-year-old son's hip implant treatment for her inability to be present in the court.

Interestingly, RSSB's Satsang schedule on its website shows no Satsang has been planned on November 14. The Rudrapur Satsang, which begins on November 12, ends on November 13. The question now is whether there are already any lookout notices against the Dhillon family and other 55 garnishees. And whether the court would prevent any of them from travelling abroad -- fearing escape.

Also read: SC take note! Singh brothers can pay off $500 million to Daiichi, provided the money is recovered

Daiichi had earlier enforced an arbitration order in Singapore that ordered the brothers to pay Daiichi $500 million towards alleged non-disclosure of crucial information during the sale of Ranbaxy Laboratories to Daiichi in 2008. Expanding the scope of people from whom the money could be recovered, the court in June had named 56 entities, including Dhillon, his wife Shabnam Dhillon and other family members, and Godhwanis, and ordered them to pay up Rs 6,373 crore worth of dues to Singh brothers so that they could honour the $500 million order to pay Daiichi.

On March 12, BusinessToday.In reported that Singh brothers could only pay the $500 million order against them to compensate Daiichi, provided the money owed to them by RSSB chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family was recovered. In his submission, Malvinder had maintained that he could pay Daiichi provided he recovered the money owed to him.

Also read: Recover money from RSSB chief Dhillon & family to pay Singh brothers' dues to Daiichi: Delhi HC

Besides the Dhillon family, the Delhi HC had also issued 'garnishee orders' -- an order that's issued against a third party to recover money to settle a debt or dues -- against 55 entities, including  Dhillon and RSSB associates' companies, including Prius Real Estate, Addon Realty, Payne Realtors SGGD Projects, Luminous Holding.

BusinessToday.In had also reported the flow of money that went from Singh brothers to entities owned and controlled by Gurinder Singh Dhillon, his family and RSSB associates. RoC filings and terms sheets had revealed that between 2011 and 2014, Rs 1,107.5 crore from the Rs 9,576 crore sale proceeds of Ranbaxy to Daiichi Sankyo was paid through various RHC group firms. Thereafter, this money was transferred to Prius Real Estate Private Limited controlled by Dhillon family associates and RSSB functionaries through optionally convertible debentures (OCD).

And here's an Economic Times story.

Radha Soami Satsang chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon along with his family members have cited various reasons seeking exemption from appearing before the Delhi High court on November 14.

The Dhillons in their Interim applications (IAs) filed before the court expressed their inability to appear before the court on the next date of hearing. While RSSB chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon has said that he has satsang commitments outside Delhi on that date and also he is a senior citizen, diabetic and cancer patient, hence he will be unable to appear before the court.

His wife, Shabnam Dhillon has said that she cannot appear due to a scheduled surgery in a hospital in UK on November 20 for which she needs to travel on November 12. Their son Gurkirat has said that he has to accompany his mother for the treatment.

While their second son Gurpreet Dhillon has expressed that he is in Singapore and has “critical work commitments” and is required to be personally present. His wife Nayan Tara on the other hand said that she cannot appear due to her four year old son’s medical condition, which needs "continuous care and attention”.

The court had in October ordered Dhillon along with his wife Shabnam, sons Gurkirat and Gurpreet and daughter in law Nayan Tara to personally present in the court on November 14, after Dhillon and his family members had said that they did not owe any money to RHC Holding Pvt Ltd, promoted by Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, following the court’s direction to deposit the amount owed to RHC holdings pvt Ltd in connection with the execution of Rs 3500 crore arbitration award won by Japanese form Daiichi Sankyo against former RanbaxyNSE 5.63 % promoters.

In his plea Dhillon had told the court that RHC Holding has made false claims and they did not owe any money to RHC Holdings Pvt Ltd. The court in its order then asked the Dhillons to “remain present in the court with relevant documents related to their dealings and transactions with the garnishees and their related companies.

The Dhillons are among 55 individuals and entities ordered by the court to pay over Rs 6000 crore owed to RHC holding in connection with the settlement of a dispute to Daiichi Sankyo’s acquisition of Ranbaxy laboratories.

The court while hearing the applications on Friday asked the garnishees to furnish their documents before the court. The requirement to appear before the court still looms as the court will take up the matter on November 14.

Justice JR Midha in his earlier order had also stated that these entities cannot “dispose of, alienate, encumber directly or indirectly, part with the possession of any assets, except in the ordinary course of business like payment of salary and statutory dues, till the next date of hearing.”

According to an affidavit filed by RHC Holding in April, entities including those controlled by the RSSB chief, his family and close associates, owed over Rs 6,000 crore to the company and other group entities of the Singh brothers. Malvinder Singh, one of the directors of RHC, had maintained that payment of an arbitration award related to Daiichi Sankyo’s acquisition of Ranbaxy could be made only if the money owed was recovered.

Leave a comment on this post if you want to share your opinion about the Dhillon family excuses for not being able to come to the November 14 court hearing. 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. 

Gurpreet Dhillon. The guru's son has "critical work commitments." However, the November 14 court appearance has been scheduled for quite a while, over a month I recall. Somehow Gurpreet can't do his critical work either before or after the 14th? Highly unbelievable.

Naya Tara Dhillon. I accept that her child has a medical condition. But I can't believe that a wealthy Indian family can't find anyone to care for the child during the short time needed to attend a court hearing. Highly unbelievable.

UPDATE: A commenter sent a link to a Times of India story that appeared in a newsreader. I wasn't able to find the story on the Times of India web site, but here's screenshots of the link. Looks like Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family don't have to attend the November 14 hearing, though they have to provide documents and be available by phone.

Stephen Batchelor on enlightenment and listening

Following up on my previous post about a charming little book by Stephen Batchelor and his wife Martine, which consists of talks they gave at a 2016 retreat in England based on the Korean Buddhist tradition (Son), here's some passages from What is this? that I resonated with in my pre-meditation reading this morning. 

I liked this take on enlightenment, which is very much in line with Zen teachings. Son, which means "meditation," is the Korean equivalent of the Japanese "Chan" and Japanese "Zen."

So once we let go of the idea that to be enlightened means to understand the nature of reality as it really is, or to gain some privileged mystical insight into truth with a capital "T" -- the way of thinking Deshan and other Son masters are trying to shake us free from -- then we shift into a practice that that is inextricably tied up with how we respond to life in each moment, which is the foundation for engaging with the world in an ethical way.

And I also liked this description of how listening can be a better way of describing what meditation, and life, is all about, than seeing is.

When you are asked to watch something carefully, what do you do?

You tend to narrow the focus of your attention onto the object, thereby letting it stand out in the wider field of vision, in order that you can look at it more precisely. What you're looking at is invariably something outside of yourself, 'over there' somewhere.

What often happens in meditation is that we fail to acknowledge the metaphoric nature of the visual language being used. Quite unconsciously, we adopt an inner stance or posture that mimics the act of seeing.

You might feel, for example, that when you're meditating there's a bit of you, in the back of your head somewhere, that's peering in on your body and breath and mental states. You've created a distance between an observer looking in and an object being observed.

But if you think about listening or hearing it's often completely the other way round. Rather than narrowing your attention on a particular sound 'out there', you open yourself up to allow the sound to enter you. 

When you listen to a piece of music in your living room, for example, what do you tend to do? Very often you dim the lights or close your eyes, then raise the sound so that it envelopes you. Then you relax and let yourself be completely receptive to the sounds that enter you from all around.

So the internal posture you assume is not that of a detached observer looking out onto something, but rather a completely vulnerable and open attention that allows sounds to stream into you from every direction.

Now that's a very different inner stance. Your physical posture might be the same, but your mental posture is the opposite to that of looking at something. 

...To think of listening in this way can help us better understand how to attend to what arises in response to the question 'What is this?'. In posing that question, allow yourself to be completely open to whatever you 'hear' in the pregnant silence that follows, without any hopes or expectations.

Metaphorically, you're waiting to hear a response rather than expecting to find an answer. The point of Son practice is not to look for an answer, or to see the nature of reality. Again, pay attention to the metaphors we use unthinkingly. 

You might find it helpful on our last full day together just to explore what it feels like in your body to be open to this question in the same way that you would open yourself to a piece of music or listen with total attention to the polyphony of the birds and wind outside, the occasional plane that flies overhead, the patter of rain on the windows.

Listen more carefully, and at the same time notice how that listening is not just an opening of the mind but an opening of the heart, a vital concern or care for the world, the source of what we call compassion or love, which brings us back into the world of relationships that we will be returning to tomorrow.

Life is a matter of material chance, not divine dispensation

The truth can be disturbing. Yet truth is immensely valuable. These two truths about truth present a dilemma to religious believers. They don't want to be disturbed, so they choose to accept falsehoods about reality.

By contrast, people like me who don't believe in religious fantasies are able to accept both truths about truth. We embrace disturbing facts such as the non-existence of God, no life after death, and the contingency of life on Earth.

That last fact is discussed by Buddhist skeptic Stephen Batchelor in an appealing little book that consists of talks he and his wife, Martine, gave at a 2016 retreat in England based on the Korean Buddhist tradition. 

I'm enjoying "What is this? Ancient questions for modern minds." Here's some excerpts from a talk Stephen Batchelor gave. His theme is how amazing existence is, even though no God designed the cosmos or is overseeing how it operates.

Yet today when I read popular books, listen to a radio programme or watch documentaries about the discoveries of the natural sciences, it often evokes in me feelings that might best be described as religious. I find the sheer scale and vastness of space and time overwhelming.

And I become acutely aware of the poignancy, the utter contingency of existence. 

Contingency means that, on the one hand, something arises contingent on other conditions, which, in turn, are contingent on yet other conditions, ad infinitum.

And, on the other hand, we make 'contingency plans' because we realize that what we prepare ourselves for might suddenly get thrown off course by circumstances we hadn't foreseen coming into play.

Such notions of contingency are very close, I feel, to what the Buddha meant by paticcasamuppada, usually translated as 'dependent origination' or 'conditioned arising'. Remember, in the early sutras the Buddha says that the person who sees such conditioned arising sees the dharma, and the person who sees the dharma sees conditioned arising.

So there's something very much at the core of the Buddha's teaching which has to do with waking up to what I would call the utterly contingent nature of experience.

...In terms of the cosmic timeframe, we are latecomers on the scene. The first human beings anatomically identical to us -- who, when naked, would have been indistinguishable from us -- first appeared somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand years ago. 

Which is really just the blink of an eye. And how long we will manage to remain here is anyone's guess.

The fact that all of this has happened seems entirely accidental and arbitrary. This is difficult for human beings to accept. We like to tell ourselves stories that explain how special we are. We invent concepts like 'God' to show how the story of life on earth was designed in such a way that would culminate in humankind, made 'in the image' of God.

The idea that humans could actually be a purely contingent and haphazard event we find deeply uncomfortable. We have an instinctive sense that we're so much more than just a pure accident, that there must be some reason for our being here.

Buddhists may not speak of God, but they nonetheless have developed theories of karma, which attempts to explain how over countless lifetimes we have been reaping the results of our previous actions that lead us to getting born in one place rather than another, and as one kind of creature rather than another.

This too explains why we exist; it provides reasons that we can get our heads around. It makes us feel that we are meant to be here.

According to classical Buddhist theory, this has been going on forever -- since 'beginningless time'. But the natural sciences simply don't back that up. We have emerged, it appears, out of purely physical conditions by random mutations and chance.

In principle, I see no reason why Buddhists should have an issue with this explanation of how life evolved; it accords well with the principle of conditioned arising. But I suspect many of them, like their theistic brothers and sisters, find this account rather chilling. It makes them uncomfortable.

If everything is the product of chance, rather than the moral consequences of our karma, it cannot account for the dignity and special opportunities of being human. 

But given what we now know from evolutionary biology, we have little choice, I feel, but to swallow the fact that these pre-modern explanations might simply be wrong. The fact is that we're here and, as far as we know, these material conditions alone are what gave rise to us being here.

Religious delusion is alive and well in India, as elsewhere

Here's a great example of how closed-minded religious believers are able to deny reality, an Economic Times story about how a spiritual leader is still trusted by his followers even after being convicted of rape and murder. 

This is how the story starts out.

SIRSA: Nothing has changed over the last two years for Baljeet Insaan. Her devotion to “pita ji” remains intact. She says prison bars cannot contain his healing effect. After all, she says, he cured her of cancer 20 years ago.

There are many like Baljeet who swear by Dera Sacha Sauda sect chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh’s “powers”, more so at the Dera headquarters on the outskirts of Sirsa in Haryana, even after his arrest and conviction for the rape of two followers and murder of a local journalist who exposed the scandal in 2017. Though followers at the Dera compound deny it, the Dera following has come down considerably.

But this has not deterred the present followers from looking towards the Dera for solutions to all their problems, including who to vote for.

An Economic Times story discusses the failed family settlement with the RSSB guru

Yesterday India's The Economic Times ran a story that restated facts that were already known about the attempt to reach a family settlement agreement between the Singh brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder) and their relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.
Download Shivinder singh : Singh bros' settlement sought to absolve Dera Chief of liabilities

It's a good summary of what went on. 

I suppose the story was published to provide some background prior to November 14, when reportedly the Singh brothers, Dhillon, and others involved in this complicated financial fraud saga will appear before the High Court of Delhi following an investigation by Indian authorities.

You'll read in the story that the proposed family settlement, which Malvinder refused to sign, would have absolved the guru of any liability raised by an government authority. So that must have been a concern back in the spring of 2018.

Singh bros' settlement sought to absolve Dera Chief of liabilities

Singh brothers undertook that they will "indemnify" the Dhillon family in the event of a liability.

Raghav Ohri

New Delhi: The Singh brothers of Ranbaxy had locked horns over a 'family settlement' that sought to absolve their 'Master' - Gurinder Singh Dhillon, head of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), and his family members of all of all the amount they allegedly owed to RHC.

Malvinder has placed before the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) emails to establish that while he had protested against the settlement, Shivinder had not only agreed to relieve the Dhillons of all their liabilities, but also pressurised Malvinder to sign the deal.

A 'memorandum of family settlement' drawn on May 25 last year read that it was “not based on actual valuation of the assets and loans but had been arrived to preserve and maintain mutual respect, goodwill and harmony, and to avoid any future disputes between the parties”.

It read that Shivinder and Malvinder had assured the Dhillon family that they have “irrevocably and unconditionally released and forever discharged them from all past, present or future claims, obligations and liabilities in connection with payment of 10 loans”. It added that the Singh brothers undertook that they will “indemnify” the Dhillon family in “event of any liability raised by any government authority”.

Malvinder claimed that the objective of the settlement was to relieve the Dhillons from the RHC dues. He submitted Shivinder’s emails dated June 2, 2018 and June 19, 2018 to prove that Shivinder had promptly agreed to the settlement to appease Dhillon so that he could succeed him as the Dera chief.

Malvinder has produced an email dated July 12, 2018 written to Dhillon to show that he had objected to the settlement, and sought details of assets of Dhillon and his family to repay the creditors. In his email, he had sought Dhillon’s intervention to “come out of the critical life-threatening issues” being faced by them.

Referring to several criminal actions and liabilities of over Rs 10,000 crore towards RHC, Malvinder wrote, “Given the current situation where we have lost almost all our businesses/assets and are at risk of losing everything that we own due to various personal guarantees, etc, we are not in a position to repay all our existing liabilities. Today our survival is completely dependent upon support from you, and if there is any chance of our being able to come out of this mess, it will be only with your blessings and support.

Malvinder had stressed on the need for the details of assets to satisfactorily “resolve the outstanding financial matters between us (which is very important and critical from regulatory as well as legal perspectives)”. “In order to satisfy the regulatory scheinvestigations and our lenders and creditors, we need full details of utilisation of funds borrowed from private companies and assets acquired therefrom,” he wrote.

“This will be needed to satisfy the authorities and creditors that no funds have been siphoned off and all such funds have been legitimately deployed at your end. We will need details of all assets held by you, family members, entities under your control or influence to kill any allegations of siphoning off. We utilise the following assets which can be made immediately available to resolve some of the issues, including surplus from the sale of LRD assets, Westend and Chandigarh properties, Parklane property, Singapore property, Chhatarpur farmhouses, add-on recoverable, SRL shares held by Logos, and any other asset that could be made available in India or abroad,” the email read.

Malvinder added that the mode of the “utilisation and priority thereof be agreed jointly by all of us keeping in view the spirit of working jointly and resolving the most critical issues on priority”. He sought to settle and close all inter-group outstanding loans by acquiring the assets as part of a settlement document.

“The said document needs to capture that apart from above assets, there are no other assets held by you and your family directly and indirectly, and in case any other assets which may have been acquired from the funds borrowed from private companies are made available, the same shall be acquired by private companies in settlement of the dues. All of these are necessary in order to close the existing loans in the books from accounting and regulatory perspectives,” Malvinder wrote.

Earlier this month, the RSSB chief had told the Delhi HC that he and his family owe RHC Holdings no money at all. In the July l2 email, Malvinder sought repayment of LVB Bank dues worth Rs 750 crore to avoid criminal cases, Fortis ICDs (Rs 450 crore), dues to Indiabulls to avoid cheque bouncing cases — worth around Rs 200 crore (negotiated down from Rs 400 crore), repayments to Zee and SSG to keep LRD assets and group reputation intact (Rs 300 crore), dignity and add-on dues to Fortis of around Rs 50 crore. Put together, it came to Rs 1,750 crore.

Singh brothers turn on each other. RSSB guru in middle of the mess.

Today someone emailed me a link to a MSN story about the Singh brothers, Malvinder and Shivinder, and their tangled relationship with their relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in India.
Download Shivinder Singh likens Malvinder Singh to 'Bhasmasur'

Read on for the latest developments in this fascinating drama. It'll be interesting to see what conclusions Indian authorities draw after investigating the complex web of fraudulent financial transactions involving a bunch of individuals, public companies, and shell companies.

I've boldfaced the mentions of Dhillon and RSSB.

Shivinder Singh likens Malvinder Singh to 'Bhasmasur'; Malvinder says his brother's 'sanyas' was fake: NCLT filings


© Amal KS/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Former Religare promoter Shivinder Singh, in his NCLT filing in July, called his brother Malvinder Singh 'Bhasmasur', a mythological demon, while saying that he was suffering from a personality disorders. He had also sought a "forensic probe" of RHC Holding.

Threatening to sue the younger brother, Malvinder, in his NCLT filing in August, said he deserved the right to sue his brother for making "scurrilous insinuations". He also alleged that Shivinder was trying to take favour from Radha Saomi Satsang Beas (RSSB) because he owed its money.

The hearings in the NCLT case will be held in December.

"MMS (Malvinder Man Singh) has turned out to be the mythological 'Bhasmasur' for the RHC group. Wherever he became head of a business — Ranxbaxy, Fortis, Religare, SRL Labs Ltd — he decimated the value to zero for the RHC group," Shivinder told the NCLT filing.

Notably, both of them are currently in jail as Delhi's Saket court had sent the Singh brothers and 3 others to judicial custody till October 31 in a fund misappropriation case related to Religare Finvest Ltd. The other three accused, former Religare CMD Sunil Godhwani, and former senior executives Kavi Arora and Anil Saxena are also in jail.

In their NCLT filings, both the brothers accused each other of large-scale fraud and corruption. Shivinder sought that Malvinder be removed as the holding company's director while urging NCLT to take over its board. He also asked the court to issue a restraining order against Malvinder from entering the RHC office and even communicating with any of its employees.

Malvinder told in his reply that Shivinder was hurling accusations to seek favours from RSSB as he wished to become its chief. He also alleged that Shivinder filed the suit against him only to stop RHC from demanding its money from Gurinder Singh Dhillon-led RSSB. He said Shivinder had done "large scale diversion of funds from FHL, RHC, REL etc to Dhillon (chief of RSSB) and the entities under his (Dhillon) control".

As per Shivinder's filing, he's a 50 per cent owner of RHC and had an established track record of value creation by building Fortis from scratch into India's second-largest healthcare chain and turning it into one of RHC's most valuable businesses before his retirement in 2015.

"The petitioner no. 2 (Shivinder) is of the firm belief that the continuous destruction of RHC's asset base can be arrested provided the 'Bhasmasur' is dislodged from the helm of affairs of RHC," said Shivinder's petition.

While denying that Shivinder was solely involved in building and running of FHL, Malvinder said: "...the Petitioner number 2 (Shivinder) had been actively involved in all businesses of the group including the Respondent no. 1 (Malvinder)." He said Shivinder was falsely claiming before all the investigating agencies, regulators and courts that he was under 'Sanyas' (asceticism) from the corporate world from January 2016 till late 2017.

Urging the court to punish him for perjury, Malvinder said Shivinder "continued as a director of all companies, listed/unlisted, in the group", and that he continued to draw Rs 43.5 lakh monthly salary from two key subsidiaries of Malvinder's company. He also said during his 'sanyas', Shivinder attended numerous board meets and used to draw all the perquisites from listed and unlisted companies, including all his foreign travels, his cars and household expenses.

He accused Shivinder of protecting Dhillon from debts and "possible investigations and liability towards Daiichi (Sankyo)." The younger brother said Malvinder had sought Rs 1,000 crore from him to cede control of RHC. Demanding status quo on its assets and shareholdings, Shivinder asked the NCLT to appoint two independent directors and change account signatories.

The Singh brothers sold Ranbaxy to Japanese drugmaker Daiichi Sankyo in 2008 for Rs 10,000 crore. In 2013, Daiichi paid $500 as felony charges in the US for selling adulterated medicines, following which it filed an arbitration case against the Singh brothers.

I disagree with Stephen Batchelor about Buddhist truth claims

A couple of days ago I wrote, "I like Stephen Batchelor's take on Buddhism."

In that blog post I said that after I listened to the end of Batchelor's lengthy discussion with Sam Harris that Harris shared on his Waking Up iPhone app, I'd share anything interesting that I heard.

Well, what I heard Batchelor say in the last five minutes does strike me as both interesting and highly debatable.

Harris asked a good question of Batchelor: currently, what are your most important disagreements with Buddhist doctrine?

To his credit, Batchelor started off by saying that he can't stand dogmatic assertions by Buddhist practitioners. Since Harris had mentioned rebirth/reincarnation as a tenet that Batchelor probably disagreed with, I figured that Batchelor would agree with Harris.

Instead, Batchelor said he wasn't at all interested in the truth claims of Buddhism. Rather, what concerned him was: "How does your belief in reincarnation help you live better?" That was the central question for him.

OK. I can sort of understand where Batchelor was coming from. His focus is on practicality, not theology. If a religious belief has a practical benefit, then it gets a thumbs-up from Batchelor.

Not from me, though, not automatically.

If a religious belief isn't true -- and almost certainly rebirth/reincarnation is a fantasy -- that strikes me as a big argument against accepting it, no matter how it makes someone feel. Harris also sounded surprised at Batchelor's casual attitude toward the truth claims of Buddhism.

Sure, an argument can be made that if a religious person finds satisfaction in an untrue belief, and the belief helps them to live better, there's no harm in this.

I'd agree, so long as the belief remains private and personal. But this isn't how religious beliefs operate. They become dogmatic assertions that have real effects in the real world.

For example, reincarnation has been used as an argument for India's caste system, vestiges of which still exist in that country. (Maybe more than "vestiges.")

Likewise, a related belief in karma that extends over multiple lives can lead to an uncompassionate they deserve what they're getting attitude toward the less fortunate members of a society. So I hope Batchelor rethinks his view that it doesn't matter if a religious belief is true or not, so long as it appeals to the believer.

On a lighter note...

I like Stephen Batchelor's take on Buddhism

Over the years I believe I've read all of Stephen Batchelor's books about his somewhat heretical attitude toward Buddhism. Some blog posts about his books can be perused here, here, here, and here. 

Batchelor correctly argues that for Buddhism to make sense and be useful, its religious/supernatural aspects need to be set aside. 

Stephen Batchelor

So no karma extending over multiple lives, no reincarnation, no mythical entities inhabiting non-material realms of existence.

In this regard Batchelor agrees with Sam Harris. Both Batchelor and Harris have many years of experience with Buddhist meditation and teachings. So I've been enjoying listening to a lengthy discussion between Batchelor and Harris that is on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app that I subscribe to.

Today I heard an interesting dialogue about how they view enlightenment and the familiar Buddhist adage that life is suffering.

Because Batchelor and Harris largely agree on most things Buddhist'y, their exchange wasn't so much a debate, but an exchange of views, with each man trying to understand where the other was coming from, as the saying goes.

Harris is more into enlightenment as an end in itself, where that word basically means seeing through the illusion of a separate self or soul, and recognizing that everything we experience is an alteration of consciousness.

In his view, it is always possible to step back (a favorite Harris saying) and view an emotion, thought, or whatever as something that arises in consciousness, rather than a substantial entity -- thereby defusing the power of a disturbing or unproductive state of mind.

Batchelor agrees with the value of doing this, but prefers to speak about non-reactivity, as I noted in a blog post. 

In his book "After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age," Bachelor has some interesting observations about nirvana. Prior to saying that nirvana can be understood in one of two ways, as either the ceasing of reactivity or as freedom and independence from reactivity, he gave this view of reactivity:

We tend to regard the appearance of such a fearful world as a projection of our mental state.

But this reading of the situation is based on the cultural habit of interpreting experience psychologically. No matter how much we tell ourselves that the fearfulness of the world is just a projection, such reassurance does not significantly alter either how the world appears to us or how we feel about it.

From the perspective of a dharma practitioner, the task of "letting go of what arises" entails releasing one's grip on the whole picture: angry-me-facing-hostile-situation. 

Letting go is not simply a question of breathing deeply to calm my rattled mind; I need to cleanse the doors of my perception. This requires suspending the default habit of seeing the world as being hostile, desirable, or boring. One of the most effective ways of suspending that habit is to train yourself to comprehend the world as an infinitely suffering world.

Now, I don't claim to fully understand what Bachelor means.

However, I have at least an indistinct grasp of what he's getting at, and that's good enough for me. The way I see it, Bachelor doesn't view life as ever being free of suffering. But it is possible to lessen the impact of suffering.

Now, the differences between Harris and Batchelor in this regard are subtle. In large part they matter only to people like themselves -- so knowledgeable about Buddhist history, teachings, and writings, they can intelligently discuss the finer points of Buddhism.

That said, there was one area where I believe I understood Batchelor quite well, and agree with him to a greater extent than I agree with Harris.

Today I heard Batchelor say that individual enlightenment or ending suffering shouldn't be the final goal of a Buddhist practitioner. Instead, being a good ethical person should be. Thus our inner work should be viewed as a foundation for wise compassionate actions and relationships in our everyday life.

I see this as akin to a combination shot in pool, or billiards. You're striking a certain ball with the intention that it will hit another ball that's your primary interest.

Which isn't totally different from how Harris views things. He said that the more he can tone down or eliminate his worries, anxieties, fears, negative emotions, and such, the better his relationships with other people will be. Which makes perfect sense. It's much easier to be around someone loving and happy than someone angry and sad.

Thus what makes meditation important isn't only how it impacts how we experience the world. Equally important, if not more so, is how an inner realization affects our outer relationships.

If a spiritual practice isn't making us a better human being, it isn't serving a purpose.

This is clear when we consider how often supposedly enlightened or awakened people engage in bad behaviors. There's simply no excuse for devotees of these people to say things like, "It isn't possible to judge the behavior of an enlightened soul."

Sure it is. Are they honest, compassionate, loving, truthful, caring, generous, and so on? Are they acting like a normal good human being? If not, their so-called enlightenment or awakening is a fraud, bullshit. 

I've got a bit more of the Harris-Batchelor discussion to listen to. If I hear anything worth sharing in another blog post, I'll be sure to do that.

How the brain fools us into believing consciousness is immaterial

I love it! Because I loved The Matrix movie. There's something wildly appealing about our consciousness being deceived about the nature of reality in such a fashion that it is very difficult to escape the bounds of that deception.

The "it" that I'm loving is a book by Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience is one of the best books I've read about the nature of consciousness, and I've read a lot of them.

Here's a 13-minute video where Graziano describes the key aspects of his Attention Schema Theory. 

And here's some excerpts from his book that provide a pretty good overview of the theory, especially if you watch the video first.

Graziano's approach explains why almost all people believe that they possess, or are, an immaterial consciousness. That just feels so real, so right, so immediately obvious. 

Which is exactly what the Attention Schema Theory predicts. A schema isn't the real thing. It is a simplified version of the thing. Evolution hasn't given us the ability to be aware of what the hundred billion or so neurons in the brain are doing.

Instead, the brain presents us with a view of the world, and of ourselves, that is functional, because it leaves out unnecessary details. Like, how the physical brain produces a metaphysical sense of consciousness and attention.

This passage describes why the Attention Schema Theory is believable. Covert attention refers to "a roving mental focus that can take in information apart from where the senses are pointed, like hearing sirens at a distance or recalling a memory." (from the book jacket)

In my view, the attention schema theory of consciousness has some inevitability to its logic. First, we know that the cortex uses covert attention. Second, we know that it needs to control that attention. Third, we know that the brain must have an internal model of attention in order to control that attention.

Fourth, we know that a detailed, fully accurate internal model is at best wasteful and at worst harmful to the process, and so, this internal model of attention would necessarily leave out the mechanistic details.

Therefore, and fifth, an attention schema would depict the self as containing an amorphous, nonphysical, internal power, an ability to know, to experience, and to respond, a roving mental focus -- the essence of covert attention without the underpinning details.

From first principles, if you had to build a well-functioning brain that had a powerful, cortical style of covert attention, you would build a machine that, drawing on the information constructed within it, would assert that it has a non-physical consciousness.

That cortical machine, of course, would not know that its subjective conscious experience is a construct or a simplification. It would take the nonphysical nature of conscious experience as a reality, because -- somewhat tautologically -- the brain only knows what it knows. It is captive to its own information. 

This passage describes why the attention schema in humans differs from that in computers, at least as they exist currently,

The human attention schema, having been shaped over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, has weird, biologically bumpy content.

It depicts attention as an invisible property, a mind that can experience or take possession of items, a force that empowers me to act and to remember, something that in itself has no physical substance but still lurks privately inside me.

The attention schema is more than a pointer to an object or a couple of lines of code. It builds a rich picture of attention and its predictable consequences. Build a machine with that kind of an attention schema, containing the weird, biologically messy lumps of the real one and you'll have a machine that can claim to be conscious in the same ways that humans do

No major technological hurdle stands in the way of an artificial attention schema. It is, arguably, the easiest and certainly the most circumscribed of all the components to build into the machine. 

And this passage gets at the objective nature of the Attention Schema Theory, in principle.

From the perspective of the attention schema theory, we can know, with objective certainty, whether a machine has the same kind of consciousness that people have. And direct personal experience is not the only way -- it's not even a very good way -- to know about one's own consciousness.

"Of course I'm conscious. I know I am, because I have a direct experience of it."

If that isn't the definition of a circular logic loop, I don't know what is. Consciousness is a direct experience. Therefore, the statement is tantamount to, "I know I'm conscious, because I'm conscious."

As I've said before, the machine is captive to the information it contains.

A particular internal model informs the machine that it has consciousness, and therefore it "knows" that it is conscious. The internal model informs the machine that its consciousness is without physical substance and forever private, and therefore it "knows" that its consciousness is unconfirmable by anyone else.

But an internal model is information, and information can be objectively measured. We don't need to rely on personal affirmation.

In the attention schema theory, to go about determining whether a machine is conscious, we should probe its innards to find out whether it contains an attention schema, and we should read the information within the attention schema.

We will then learn, with objective certainty, whether this is a machine that thinks it has a subjective conscious experience in the same way that we think we do. If it has the requisite information in that internal model, then, yes. If not, then no. All of this is, in principle, measurable and confirmable. 

A blog post from the past: Sant Mat cartoons

In the course of browsing through some old blog posts (I'm gathering material for another book based on my Church of the Churchless posts), I came across a fond memory:

"RSSB cartoons show lighter side of Sant Mat." Which started out this way.

While perusing a Christian web site that pokes fun at evangelical fundamentalism, today I suddenly thought Cartoons!

Back in 1999 I'd worked with a talented artist, Bart Goldman, on cartoons aimed at deflating the balloon of Radha Soami Satsang Beas seriousness (RSSB is a branch of Sant Mat).

Bart and I both were RSSB initiates. We met at a RSSB bhandara (large get-together), introduced by a mutual friend: Victoria, also an artist.

Several times Victoria leaned over to me and whispered, in a decided stage whisper, so Bart could hear, "He's very talented."

Since spiritual cartooning ideas had been running through my head, and my own artistic talent is limited to stick figures, I was eager to chat with Bart.

After some post-bhandara back and forth emailing, here's what Bart produced. I sent them off to RSSB headquarters in India but so far as I know, they haven't been published. At least, not all of them.

I give Bart most of the credit for the cartoons – unless you really like one of them, in which case it must have been my idea.

Here's one of the cartoons.

Head over to my original blog post to see the rest. (Click on a small image to enlarge it.)

Love hurts. But the pain of love also is pleasure.

Last Tuesday our older dog, ZuZu, had to be put to sleep. Which is another way of saying, euthanized. Tearfully, I was able to write about her last days on my HinesSight blog in It was a good day for our dog to die.

Of course, it wasn't a good day. Not really. I wanted ZuZu to live much longer. What I meant was explained in the first part of the blog post.

Don't get me wrong. I didn't want our beloved older dog, ZuZu, to die. But she did last night, put out of her misery by a dose of morphine at Salem's emergency vet clinic.

What made it a good day -- and now the tears are coming, as I figured they would when I set out to compose this blog post -- was how ZuZu and I got to have a pleasant day together yesterday, since she went downhill really fast, as I'll describe later on.

Monday ZuZu and I had come back from central Oregon a day before my wife and other dog, Mooka. So on Tuesday I didn't want to leave her alone when I went to exercise at the River Road Courthouse athletic club.

In the morning we'd had our usual walk through our rural property, across a creek, and along a community trail here in Spring Lake Estates. ZuZu seemed pretty normal at that point.

She was walking a bit less energetically than usual, which likely was a sign of what was to come. But when she spotted a squirrel, the old ZuZu came to life. Zoom! She raced ahead and excitedly stared into the branches of a tree the squirrel had escaped to.

I'm so happy that ZuZu was able to chase a squirrel on her last day alive. It was one of her favorite things to do. We also ran into some neighbors walking their dogs, so she got to greet them a final time. Nice.

What I'm most glad about is deciding to take ZuZu to the Minto Brown Dog Park after exercising. It was starting to drizzle. I thought about going straight home. But I thought, "ZuZu enjoys the dog park. I've got time. Let's do it."

Yeah, it's a cliche. Live every day as if it were your last. And usually it isn't practical, since we need to plan for future days. 

However, it's also true that we never know. When we will die. When a loved one will die. When a pet will die. I had no idea when I drove the short distance from our athletic club to the dog park that ZuZu would be dead in less than eight hours.

It's been tough. Really tough. I miss ZuZu a lot. That's the price of love: pain, when a loved one departs, or suffers, or otherwise tears at our heart. But it's a price well worth paying.

The day after ZuZu died, I opened the rear hatch of my VW GTI. What I saw brought more tears to my eyes, along with a bit of an inner smile.

The dog park I'd taken ZuZu to on the afternoon of her last day alive has an unpaved parking lot. When I picked ZuZu up to put her in the back of the car, her paws were dusty. This was the last time she rode in my car, since she was taken to the emergency vet clinic that night in my wife's car.

My first thought was, "I never want to wash off the paw prints." Yes, I know that will be necessary. Eventually. For now, I enjoy looking at the paw prints, because they remind me of ZuZu and of the good times we shared.

This is the reason I took her dog bowl and put it on a shelf in my office, along with a photo of ZuZu with our older dog at the time, Serena. A vase that was on the shelf graces the inside of the dog bowl. I did this after realizing that I had a couple of choices about how to deal with ZuZu's death.

Try to forget about it, or embrace it -- feeling the pain of love as acutely as possible.

I decided to go the embrace route. The first few days after ZuZu died I could barely bring myself to look at the dog bowl and the photo. I wondered if maybe it would be better to do the forget thing. But I can't forget ZuZu. I don't want to forget ZuZu.

Yes, love hurts. But a life without love isn't worth living. The death of a loved one hurts tremendously. Yet I'm glad that it does. The pain of love is also its pleasure.

RSSB guru and his family played large role in Singh brothers' downfall

Indian journalists continue to do an excellent job of reporting on the complex, Bollywood'ish drama of how Malvinder and Shivinder Singh's business empire disintegrated, in part because of their ties to a guru relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, who heads up the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) spiritual organization.

Here's some excerpts from a well-researched Outlook story. I've focused on the passages that mention Dhillon and his family, which are boldfaced. Keep in mind that Sunil Godhwani was the guru's right hand man, personal treasurer, and reportedly once managed the finances of RSSB.
Download Riches To Rags: How Billionaire Ranbaxy Brothers Malvinder And Shivinder Singh Landed In Jail

Of course, it is about money. But in the case of Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, the two Ranbaxy brothers and billionaire scions who ended up in jail, the narrative goes beyond a simplistic explanation. The sub-plots, which emerge larger than the main one, include personal tussles between family members—father-­son and sibling rivalries—besides ­intense friendships that led to ­greater animosities. Add to this the mysterious veil of spiritual power—both the quest for it, and efforts to retain it.

The story spans three decades, starting when the two brothers were quite young, and their father, Parvinder Singh, and grandfather, Bhai Mohan Singh, were alive. It takes numerous twists and turns, curls and loops, and one can lose track of the critical markers along the journey. It comprises hundreds of dubious deals—money transfers from listed companies to sha­dowy private firms. Each tran­saction includes dozens of sub-deals so there is minimal connection between the points at which it originates and where it ends.

Even the mastermind, if there is only one, is difficult to pinpoint. Sometimes, the needle of suspicion points at Malvinder, the elder Singh, who took the key decisions. At other times, Shivinder appears to be the perpetrator, given his aggression and ambition. In some cases, Sunil ‘Sunny’ Godhwani, who handled the personal wealth of the two Singh brothers, looks guilty. The cast of characters also includes several faceless bankers, senior corporate managers, company auditors and fin­ancial experts.

However, there is a big shadow lurking sometimes in the forefront, and sometimes in the background. This is the towering personality of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the spiritual head of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), which boasts of more than four million followers across the world. Gurinder Singh’s family members are allegedly active participants in the various firms inv­olved in the fraudulent deals—wife Shabnam, and two sons, Gurpreet and Gurkeerat. RSSB forms a common link between the various actors.

The cases against the Ranbaxy brothers are simple to understand. They all­egedly sip­honed off huge sums—one estimate puts it at Rs 10,000 crore—from the listed groups such as Ranbaxy, Fortis and Religare. They funnelled the money to their closely-held private firms. They retained a part of it, and shifted the bulk of the funds to other firms that were owned by Sunil Godhwani, Gurinder Singh and Shab­nam Dhillon, and Gurpreet and Gur­keerat Singh. Most of the money was used to buy real estate.

The loot was systemic, deliberate, in connivance with the bankers, financiers, and auditors, and against the interests of the investors in the listed companies. It was done over 12-13 years. The money was squandered as the values of the properties fell sharply during the ongoing crisis in real estate. When the scandals became public, each actor blamed the others. Malvinder found faults with Shivinder, Godhwani and the Dhillons; Shivinder with Malvinder and Godh­wani; the Dhillons with Godhwani; and Godhwani with the others.

“The notorious saga of Malvinder and Shivinder Singh seems to be at a conclusive stage and investigating agencies are tightening their grip on the pending cases,” says Sandeep Grover, partner, Ortis Law Offices. “At the same time, in a case filed by Japan’s Daiichi-Sankyo, which bought Ranbaxy in 2008, the Delhi High Court has asked the Singh brothers to reveal details of the assets transferred by them (from Ranbaxy, as alleged by the Japanese buyer).” The court has sought information from the other pla­yers like Gurinder Singh of RSSB.

...The two brothers sought ways to sell the company to a global player. In 2008, during the height of the global recession, Daiichi purchased the Singh family’s stake for $2 billion. It was a corporate coup. The brothers had found the perfect way to tide over a global financial crisis. They had emerged as the Kings of Cash. Finally, to bolster their personal wealth, the Ranbaxy brothers, according to a complaint by the Japanese buyer, illegally transferred Rs 2,900 crore from Ranbaxy to their private concerns.

By this time, the Singh siblings were close to RSSB, Gurinder Singh Dhillon and Godh­wani. The RSSB-Singh family proximity was decades-­old. Accor­ding to members of the sect, when Babaji, as Gurinder Singh is popularly known, shifted to Beas from Spain in 1990 to take over as the new head, the situation was complex. He was inexperienced, and there were int­ernal power struggles. Parvin­der, father of Mal­vinder and Shivinder, ­became Dhillon’s “biggest source of support”.

After Parvinder’s death, his two sons, who were deprived of their legitimate corporate power because of Brar, sought refuge and solace at Babaji’s feet. Sources contend it was the RSSB head, who caj­oled them to sell Ranbaxy. Godh­wani, a key member of the sect, became friends with the Singhs, or at least Shivinder, and emerged as their ­personal financial advisor. He helped them in moving the money out of Ranbaxy to personally owned ­companies, and take important ­inv­estment decisions.

The extent of proximity among these three families was evident in 2006. Malvinder and Shivinder transferred 13.5 million shares of a group firm, Religare Enterprises, to the two sons of Gurinder Singh, Gurpreet (6.25 million) and Gurkeerat (6.25 million), and Godhwani (1 million) at the face value of Rs 10 each. During the company’s IPO in 2007, these shares were allotted to public shareholders at Rs 185. The combined paper profits of the trio: a whopping Rs 227.5 crore. Godhwani was the head of Religare.

After the 2008 sale of Ranbaxy, three strands grew simultaneously. Publicly, the Singh siblings seemed like smart ent­repreneurs, who judiciously used the $2 billion from the Daiichi deal to grow their operations in hospitals (Fortis), and fin­ance (Religare). They had huge ambitions—they wished to build the largest hospital chain in the country, and open a bank. They became the darlings of the media and shareholders. Corporate obs­ervers felt they could do no wrong.

In private, away from prying eyes, the shenanigans continued. Massive amo­unts, raised as loans, were allegedly funnelled out of Religare and Fortis groups, and found their way to the private firms owned by the Ranbaxy brothers, Godhwani, and Gurinder Singh and his family members. One estimate is that Rs 2,300-2,700 crore was looted to buy commercial properties in various cities, including in Saket, New Delhi. Shabnam Dhillon, wife of the RSSB guru, was a dir­ector in some of the largest recipients.

...Malvinder, who claimed he got a death threat, said Shivinder, who wished to be RSSB’s next spiritual head, “bribed” the Dhillons. This was done by the transfer of loans raised by the three listed groups, Ranbaxy, Religare and Fortis, to the private firms owned by the Dhillons. Shiv­inder maintained that Godhwani had ­misused his powers as the manager of the Singhs’ personal wealth. The Dhillon family told the Delhi High Court that it had not ­received any money from the Singhs.

“These are meaningless allegations,” says a RSSB member. “There is no case of money laundering of the sect’s funds. RSSB’s money and assets are handled by a trust, and there can be no manipulation. Babaji’s name is being dragged into corporate scandals masterminded by others such as Godhwani, who bec­ame quite close to the Singhs in 2011.” Godhwani has largely been silent.

The courts will decide the destinies of these characters. The fall of the Ranbaxy brothers is a classic case of how hubris, conceit, hunger for money and over-­confidence can lead to a house of frauds. As quickly as it was built, it can fall ­instantly like a house of cards.

Read Malvinder's messages to the RSSB guru about repaying money

Given recent developments in the financial fraud scandal involving the Singh brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder), Gurinder Singh Dhillon, their relative, who is the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, and some other people, I thought it'd be good to point out my June 2019 post, "Malvinder Singh's message to the RSSB guru is moving."

(See here, here, here, and here for those developments. Malvinder, Shivinder, and the guru's right hand man, Sunil Godhwani, have been arrested. Dhillon, his family, the Singh brothers, Godhwani, and others have been ordered to appear before the High Court of Delhi on November 14.)

Actually I should have said "messages" in the blog post title, because I shared several messages from Malvinder to Dhillon that were attachments to the criminal complaint filed against the RSSB guru by Malvinder. (Scroll to nearly the end of the PDF file to find them.)

I'm re-sharing the previous blog post because some commenters on this blog have said that they doubt the RSSB guru actually owes money to Malvinder Singh and the companies that Malvinder and his brother once controlled. Malvinder's criminal complaint contains ledger entries showing what Dhillon and his family owe, and the messages in the complaint are further evidence that the Dhillons owe a lot a money.

Here's my commentary in that June blog post about the messages. 

At the end of the attachments to the criminal complaint filed by Malvinder Singh against his cousin, Gurinder Singh Dhillon (the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas), there's some messages that are both moving and enlightening -- as they cast light on the complicated financial scandal involving the Singh brothers, the Dhillon family, and others.

I'd looked at these quickly when I wrote a blog post about the criminal complaint. Today I read them more thoroughly. I've made screenshots of several messages from Malvinder to make it easier for other people to read them.

To begin with, in May 2018 Dhillon agreed to settle his debts if Malvinder and Shivinder (Malvinder's brother) would submit an accounting of what is owned to them by the guru and his family.

...Then, below is a letter addressed to the RSSB guru, whom Malvinder ("Malav") refers to with the honorofic, Babaji. This alone is interesting, since Malvinder is both a relative of Dhillon and also an initiate of his. 

You can read how Malvinder addresses Gurinder Singh Dhillon with the utmost respect, even capitalizing You and Your, seemingly in the same way "God" is capitalized by religious believers.

Malvinder is desperate to resolve the financial difficulties that are causing him so much distress. In response to Dhillon's request for the liabilities owed, Malvinder describes what Dhillon and his family need to pay.

(Two other messages I've shared that follow describe the problems involving Dhillon and his family in more detail, as does the criminal complaint itself, of course.)

Presciently, Malvinder recognizes that various investigations into financial wrongdoing have the potential to be very dangerous to the Singh brothers, the Dhillon family, and others involved with shady loans. 

He presents a way forward that, in his view, would resolve the problems. Perhaps not completely, but largely. Here's the message to Dhillon.

...Later, Malvinder turns his attention to the three companies named in a SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) report detailing fraudulent transactions, after apparently failing to get a response from Dhillon to his July 12 message. 

What's significant here is that Malvinder draws a connection between (1) the fraudulent money diverted from RHC (Religare) and Fortis to the three companies named in the SEBI report (Best, Fern, Modland), and (2) who ended up with the fraudulent money -- Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family.

Several commenters on this blog have been trying to make a big deal out of the fact that the first SEBI report didn't mention Dhillon, his family, and close associates as being involved in the fraud.

However, Malvinder's criminal complaint names Dhillon, et.al., as does his messages below, where he makes it clear that the Dhillon family owes money to the three companies, and those companies owe money to Religare and Fortis. Thus this establishes a clear link between the fraud described in the SEBI report and the ultimate beneficiaries of that fraud.

...A second message was sent on November 28. Malvinder is even more desperate now to be paid the money owed him by the guru and his family, which totals $158 million just for funds diverted from the Best Group of companies.

...What's disturbing in all this is how Malvinder's relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, who he also considered to be his father figure and spiritual advisor, was so uncaring and unresponsive to Malvinder's entreaties.

Not exactly how one would expect a guru who is considered by devotees to be God in human form should act. In fact, it isn't even anywhere close to how a decent human being should act.

It must have been difficult for Malvinder to decide to file a criminal complaint against Dhillon, given how close they once were and how much trust Malvinder once had in the RSSB guru. But Gurinder Singh Dhillon ignored Malvinder's repeated requests for the guru to pay back the money that was owed to him and the companies he once controlled.

So whatever befalls Dhillon, he deserves it. At the moment the Dhillon family has gotten their assets frozen by the High Court of Delhi, which then will be sold by the Court. Whether they also will face criminal punishment remains to be seen.

Open Thread 25 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

I appreciate that off-topic comments have been going in a previous 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. 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.

RSSB guru ordered to appear before Delhi High Court on Nov. 14

UPDATE: A commenter shared a link to another story by Business Today on this subject that contains more information. There's a Delhi High Court order for all those involved in the financial fraud investigation to appear on November 14.

Daiichi case: Delhi HC orders RSSB chief Dhillon & family, Singh brothers, Ghodhwanis to be present in court on November 14

BusinessToday.In on March 12 reported Singh brothers could only pay the $500 million order against them to compensate Daiichi, provided the money owed to them by RSSB chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family is recovered

BusinessToday.In

Delhi High Court has asked RSSB chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family members, former Religare promoters Shivinder Singh and Malvinder Singh, former Religare chief Sunil Godhwani and his brother Sanjay Godhwani to be present at the court hearing in the Daiichi Sankyo case on November 14. The court has asked all accused to remain present in the court, along with all the documents relating to the dealings. "The garnishees shall also remain present in the Court on the next date of hearing along with all the documents relating to the dealings/transactions with the judgment debtors as well as their related companies on the next date of hearing," says the court order dated October 11.

Daiichi had earlier enforced an arbitration order in Singapore that ordered the brothers to pay Daiichi $500 million towards alleged non-disclosure of crucial information during the sale of Ranbaxy Laboratories to Daiichi in 2008.

Also read: Recover money from RSSB chief Dhillon & family to pay Singh brothers' dues to Daiichi: Delhi HC

Expanding the scope of people from whom the money could be recovered, the court in June had named 56 entities, including Dhillon, his wife Shabnam Dhillon and other family members, and Godhwanis.

BusinessToday.In had reported on March 12 that Singh brothers can only pay the $500 million order against them to compensate Daiichi, provided the money owed to them by RSSB chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family is recovered. In his submission, Malvinder has maintained that he can pay Daiichi provided he recovered the money owed to him.

Also read: SC take note! Singh brothers can pay off $500 million to Daiichi, provided the money is recovered

Besides the Dhillon family, the Delhi HC had also issued 'garnishee orders' -- an order that's issued against a third party to recover money to settle a debt or dues -- against several Dhillon and RSSB associates' companies, including Prius Real Estate, Addon Realty, Payne Realtors SGGD Projects, Luminous Holding.

BusinessToday.In had earlier reported the flow of money from Singh brothers to entities owned and controlled by Gurinder Singh Dhillon, his family and RSSB associates. RoC filings and terms sheets say between 2011 and 2014, Rs 1,107.5 crore from the Rs 9,576 crore sale proceeds of Ranbaxy to Daiichi Sankyo was paid through various RHC group firms. Thereafter, this money was transferred to Prius Real Estate Private Limited controlled by Dhillon family associates and RSSB functionaries through optionally convertible debentures (OCD).

Today The Economic Times of India ran this story concerning the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.
Download Daiichi Sankyo-Ranbaxy case: HC asks Radha Soami head 54 others to deposit Rs 6 000 crore

It doesn't appear to be good news for Dhillon and his family, who reportedly were the beneficiaries of hundreds of millions of dollars fraudulently siphoned from RHC Holding, a public company.

Delhi HC orders RSSB chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon to appear in court on Nov 14

The RSSB chief is among 55 individuals and entities ordered by the court to pay over Rs 6000 crore owed to RHC Holding Pvt Ltd in connection with the settlement of a dispute to Daiichi Sankyo’s acquisition of Ranbaxy laboratories.

Teena Thacker

The Delhi High Court has ordered Gurinder Singh Dhillon, chief of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) to be personally present in the court on November 14.

The order comes after he and his family members told the court that they do not owe any money to RHC Holding Pvt Ltd, promoted by Malvinder and Shivinder Singh.

The Dhillon had filed an application following the court’s direction to deposit the amount owed to RHC holdings pvt Ltd in connection with the execution of Rs 3500 crore arbitration award won by Japanese form Daiichi Sankyoagainst former Ranbaxy promoters. In his plea Dhillon had told the court that RHC Holding has made false claims.

Thereafter, in an order dated October 11 the court ordered Dhillon along with his wife Shabnam, sons Gurkirat and Gurpreet and daughter in law Nayan Tara to “remain present in the court with relevant documents related to their dealings and transactions with the garnishees and their related companies,” the order said. ET has accessed a copy of the order.

The Dhillon are among 55 individuals and entities ordered by the court to pay over Rs 6000 crore owed to RHC holding in connection with the settlement of a dispute to Daiichi Sankyo’s acquisition of Ranbaxy laboratoriesNSE 5.63 %.

Justice JR Midha in his earlier order had also stated that these entities cannot “dispose of, alienate, encumber directly or indirectly, part with the possession of any assets, except in the ordinary course of business like payment of salary and statutory dues, till the next date of hearing.”

According to an affidavit filed by RHC Holding in April, entities including those controlled by the RSSB chief, his family and close associates, owed over Rs 6,000 crore to the company and other group entities of the Singh brothers. Malvinder Singh, one of the directors of RHC, had maintained that payment of an arbitration award related to Daiichi Sankyo’s acquisition of Ranbaxy could be made only if the money owed was recovered.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon

Delhi police following money trail that could lead to RSSB guru and his family

Here's some fresh news on the Singh brothrers/RSSB guru (Gurinder Singh Dhillon) financial scandal saga.

A commenter on this blog just left a link to an Economic Times story that shows authorities are having success in tracing where the money ultimately went that was siphoned out of companies once controlled by the Singh brothers, and into companies that were partly or mostly controlled by the Dhillon family and their close associates.

Here's what the story says. I've boldfaced the mention of the RSSB guru.

A district court in Delhi extended the police custody of businessmen Malvinder and Shivinder Singh by two days in connection with fund diversion and misappropriation of funds pegged at about Rs 2,400 crore. The court will hear the case on October 17.

Claiming that they have found the “money trail” to some extent and wanted the custody be extended, the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Delhi police filed a remand application in which it claimed that “during the police investigation the accused persons disclosed that the amount to the tune of Rs 1000 crore approximately was transferred from entities linked to corporate loan book”. ET has seen the copy. These entities are Modland Wears Pvt Ltd, Devara Developers Pvt Ltd, Fern Healthcare Pvt Ltd, Best Healthcare Pvt Ltd, Adept Lifespaces Pvt Ltd, Rosestar Marketing Pvt Ltd,” the application said.

“The amount has been transferred to various persons which has been transferred from the complainant company to these shell entities and finally the said amount was misappropriated/siphoned,” it further goes on to say.

The EOW said that they wanted the custody to be extended to “identify the persons to whom the amount was disbursed and to ascertain the purpose of giving the said amount”.

While the police custody has been extended for Singhs along with former REL chairman and managing director Sunil Godhwani, ex-Religare Finvest Ltd (RFL). Former CEO Kavi Arora and former REL CFO Anil Saxena were sent to judicial custody.

All five were arrested last week following a complaint by Religare Finvest Ltd. They were produced in a court in Saket on Tuesday afternoon.

The EOW has alleged that the accused “wilfully defaulted in repayments and caused wrongful loss to RFL to the tune of Rs 2,397 crore,” in its application filed in the court on 11 October. It also said that the funds were diverted to promoter related companies.

The police investigative agency sought extension of judicial remand for “sustained interrogation,” to find the trail of “cheated money” to ascertain the purpose of cheating, to confront the directors of shell entities and to ascertain the role of co-conspirators.

Malvinder Singh’s lawyer Manu Sharma said he was happy to note that the investigative agencies are heading in a right direction. He has been saying that the investigative agency should recover the money from the head Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

According to the FIR filed by the EOW, internal inquiries showed that the poor condition of the complainant company was to a large extent on account of wilful defaults on significant unsecured loans, defined for internal purposes as CLBs by borrower entities either related, controlled or associated with the promoters.

Malvinder's criminal complaint casts light on RSSB guru's alleged role in financial fraud

Given that the High Court of Delhi has ordered Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family to pay back money they owe to Religare, a company once controlled by the Singh brothers and Sunil Godhwani, I thought it would be interesting to go back and look at Malvinder Singh's criminal complaint against the Dhillon family, Godhwani, and others.

That complaint was filed in February of this year, I believe. I wrote about it in a February 20, 2019 blog post, "Legal filing against Gurinder Singh Dhillon is fascinating reading." 

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that anyone who doubts that Dhillon and his family received lots of money from shell companies should scroll to the attachments in Malvinder's criminal complaint. There you'll find a detailed accounting of the funds that went into the pockets of the Dhillon family, along with a signed message from the RSSB guru acknowledging his liabilities and the need to "work to settle the accounts." 

Recent stories in the Indian financial press have said that authorities are investigating possible co-conspirators in the massive financial fraud that has led to the arrest of Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, plus Godhwani and a few others.

Naturally it is impossible to say how that investigation will play out.

But here's how I summarized parts of Malvinder Singh's criminal complaint, since it presents a persuasive argument for the culpability of the Gurinder Singh Dhillon in this financial mess. Read my original blog post for more details. 

Someone sent me a copy of the legal brief filed by Malvinder Singh against his cousin, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas; the guru's wife and children; Malvinder's brother, Shivinder; and several cronies of the guru.

...This complaint has formed the basis for a number of stories in the Indian financial press (see here, here, and here). Now, obviously Gurinder Singh and the other people named in the complaint will have an opportunity to respond to the allegations of illegality. 

But the complaint is very much in line with comments left on this blog from 2010 to 2014 by someone in the know. I shared their 27,000 words in "Devastating criticism of Gurinder Singh Dhillon by a RSSB insider." So this is independent confirmation that the general tenor of what Malvinder Singh alleges in his complaint is true.

I strongly recommend reading the criminal complaint in full. Though the stories in the Indian financial press accurately reflect what is in the complaint, there's additional details in the complaint. And it is well-written in what I assume is the style of Indian legal documents of this sort.

...Sunil Godhwani was the guru's right-hand-man/close advisor for many years. Control of companies owned by the Singh brothers passed to Godhwani at the request of Gurinder Singh. This is the first mention of how Malvinder Singh viewed the guru as a spiritual guide, father figure, and mentor. Malvinder and Shivinder are initiates of Gurinder Singh, I'm pretty sure.

...This excerpt talks about how Godhwani wasn't running the companies on his own, but was in "consultation and conspiracy" with Gurinder Singh to cheat Malvinder.

...To understand this excerpt, we need to remember that the RSSB guru is considered by devotees to be God in human form. Hence, his advice and guidance can be trusted as divine. Malvinder says that he trusted Gurinder as his spiritual guru and believed "he can do no wrong." Almost certainly he can, though, as we'll see in the next sections of the complaint. 

...Shivinder is alleged to have spent a lot of time at the Dera (RSSB headquarters) working on a conspiracy to take money from RHC (a holding company formed by the Singh brothers with many subsidiaries) and shift the money to the guru, his relatives, and others -- leaving RHC with no assets but only liabilities, which obviously hurts Malvinder and other RHC shareholders.

...Via an audit, Malvinder learns that RHC is debt-ridden and wasn't a "going concern." This leads him to investigate what happened. He learns that his brother, Shivinder, hasn't engaged in any sort of normal business practices, which the complaint argues shows the fraudulent intent of acquiring various companies held by RHC.

...The complaint says that Malvinder learned that the RHC companies had loaned 1006 crores, which seems to be about $142 million US dollars, to Gurinder Singh, the guru's family, and other close associates of the guru.

...After listing the exact amounts of RHC loans that total to the $142 million, the complaint alleges that Godhwani, in collusion with Shivinder and Gurinder Singh, "intrinsically intertwined" the finances of the Dhillon family with the finances of the companies -- which, as noted above, had shareholders whose interests weren't served by taking money from RHC to give to the Dhillon's.

...Here's one of the motives (maybe the main motive) of Shivinder going to such lengths to funnel money into the pockets of Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family. The guru had promised to make Shivinder the head of RSSB, taking Gurinder Singh's place, in exchange for forgiveness of the debts owed to RHC by the guru.

...This part of the complaint says that Shivinder, in connivance with Gurinder Singh, his family, and close associates fraudulently acquired six companies in order to hide from RHC shareholders what was going on, and to shield the people who had gotten loans from RHC from having to repay the money.

...Shivinder agrees to sign a "family settlement" that absolves Gurinder Singh Dhillon of wrongdoing or criminality. But Malvinder has objections to this, as detailed in some emails included in an appendix to the complaint. Again, Malvinder alleges that his brother, Shivinder, agreed to this "in his greed to become the next spiritual head of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas."

...When Malvinder refuses to sign the settlement agreement, things get really nasty. Malvinder says that Gurinder Singh threatened that he would be eliminated by people from the Radha Soami Satsang, and warned him that the guru is a powerful person who has friends in high places.

...Malvinder states that he has recordings of the death threats made by Gurinder Singh and can make them available as and when desired. He also has received "veiled innuendos and threats" from other members of RSSB. Not surprisingly, this has put Malvinder "under immense mental pressure and trauma."

He's fearful for his life, saying that if anything happens to him this will be at the "behest of Sh. Gurinder Singh Dhillon and the other accused and those working under his influence."

...Here the complaint says that Shivinder Singh has refused to try to recover the loan money as part of "his evil design to effectively  try and write off the debt of the Dhillon Family."

...This isn't a victimless crime, because Fortis Healthcare will be affected, diluting the value of shares owned by investors, defrauding the public, and adversely impacting public confidence.

Commenting is good. Insulting is not.

I've added a "Commenting" link in the navigation bar at the top of this blog to remind people of my comment policies. They're pretty loose, but if you're wondering why a comment of yours wasn't approved, do some introspecting after you read the comment policy. 

Each guideline is important, but failure to follow the one about insults probably irritates me the most, because there is nothing more boring than simple-minded personal insults. They belong in middle school, maybe, but not elsewhere. Like I say...

It's boring to insult people in a comment. Don't do it. Stand up for issues, ideas, concepts, and such that you feel need discussing. But don't insult other commenters, or anyone else. Criticize what someone says or does, not the person themselves. 

Try to imagine you're in a person-to-person conversation. It is fine to say, "Hey, I disagree with what you're saying about ______. The way I see it is ______." It wouldn't be fine to say, "Hey, you're an idiot for saying _____. You should keep your mouth shut from now on." 

Malvinder's lawyer calls for arrest of RSSB guru

Following the arrest of Malvinder and Shivinder Singh by Delhi police for questioning about the diversion of funds from companies they once controlled,(see here and here), and the High Court of Delhi giving the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, along with others, 30 days to pay back $842 million to the Religare corporation, there's more fascinating news.

Likely reflecting what his client is telling authorities, Malvinder Singh's attorney had some harsh words for Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru. At one time the Singh brothers treated Dhillon, their relative, as both a father figure and trusted spiritual adviser on matters both financial and religious.

But now, according to a story in the Indian Express, things are very different. I've boldfaced the mentions of the RSSB guru and co-conspirators.

A day after they were arrested for alleged diversion of funds and causing a loss of Rs 2,397 crore to Religare Finvest Ltd (RFL), brothers Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh, former promoters of Religare Enterprises Ltd, were remanded in four-day police custody Friday.

Before they were led away with three others arrested with them, Malvinder’s counsel Manu Sharma told a Delhi court that his client did not have a “single penny” and that investigators were not arresting a “a person to whose doorstep the money leads as he is heading a great religious organisation”.

“This gentleman runs an entity called Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) trust. He’s a very powerful man and has high political relevance,” Sharma told the court of Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Deepak Sherawat at the Saket courts complex in south Delhi.

At one stage, the Singh brothers were followers of the RSSB.

He said the FIR against Malvinder is an offshoot of a September 27 order of the Delhi High Court which ordered 55 entities and individuals, including RSSB chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon, his family members and various companies owned by them or by RSSB associates, to pay dues of over Rs 3,000 to the Singh brothers.

“\After this (High Court) order was reported two days back, my client was detained on the intervening night of Thursday and Friday and arrested before his wife and daughter, who is undergoing treatment at a hospital in Ludhiana,” Sharma told the court.

Besides Malvinder and Shivinder, the Economic Offences Wing of Delhi Police Thursday arrested Sunil Godhwani, former chairman and managing director of Religare Enterprises Ltd (REL), Kavi Arora and Anil Saxena who held “important managerial positions in REL and RFL” for alleged diversion of public money “in clandestine manner for their own benefit.

Noting that “the offence is of very serious nature involving huge amount of siphoning of money”, CMM Sherawat ordered their police custody since it is “necessary to trace the trail of the cheated amount and find out the role of other persons who might have participated in conspiracy, and confrontation with other officials of RFL and REL”. He directed that the accused be produced in court again on October 15.

The court granted four-day police custody though the EOW had sought six days, saying they also needed to ascertain the role of co-conspirators.

Godhwani and Saxena did not oppose the police remand while Shivinder told the court that he himself was a victim of the fraud and would cooperate with the investigation in every possible manner.

Malvinder’s lawyer Sharma told the court that he had given an affidavit in the High Court saying the money was not with him. Maintaining that his client had been cooperating, he said: “I am a defenceless and a penniless man. The agency should arrest the RSSB chief who has not even been touched.”

Meanwhile, the RSSB chief and his family members moved the High Court Friday, saying they do not owe any money to RHC Holdings Pvt Ltd, promoted by Malvinder and Shivinder.

Malvinder Singh arrested by Delhi police. RSSB guru appeals High Court order.

The drama surrounding the financial fraud saga involving the Singh brothers, Sunil Godhwani, and a guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, has taken another turn with the arrest of Malvinder Singh (his brother, Shivinder, and Godhwani were arrested previously).

A LiveMint story describes the arrest.

New Delhi: In late night drama on Thursday, the economic offences wing (EOW) of the Delhi police arrested former co-promoter of Religare Enterprises, Malvinder Mohan Singh, in Ludhiana (Punjab) for allegedly causing wrongful loss worth ₹2,397 crore to Religare Finvest Ltd, a senior Delhi police official said.

“He was nabbed in Punjab, and we are getting him to Delhi," a senior Delhi police official said about Malvinder Singh

An official statement from the Delhi Police will be available on Friday morning.

Malvinder Singh’s arrest comes hours after his younger brother Shivinder Singh, former Religare Enterprises chairman and managing director Sunil Godhwani, as well as two other officials from the companies were also arrested in the same case.

“The alleged persons, having absolute control of Religare Enterprises Ltd and its subsidiaries, put Religare Finvest Ltd in poor financial condition by way of disbursing loans to the companies having no financial standing and controlled by the alleged persons," the Delhi Police had said in the statement earlier on Thursday.

The accused, the Delhi police said, were arrested under section 409 (criminal breach of trust by a public servant, banker, merchant or agent) and section 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code.

The financial irregularities were flagged during independent audits by the Reserve Bank of India and Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), the Delhi Police said.

The arrests were made based on a complaint filed by Religare Enterprises arm Religare Finvest in December, when they alleged that the three had misappropriated funds of Religare Finvest to the tune of around ₹740 crore through loans to entities that were related to them or their associates.

Religare Finvest had also named N.K. Ghoshal, a long-time associate of promoters, along with directors of the promoter companies.

What strikes me about this sordid mess is what it reveals about the Singh brothers connection with their cousin, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Following the death of Malvinder and Shivinder's father, Dhillon is reported to have become a father figure to them, acting of both a trusted financial advisor and spiritual guide. Shivinder even had hopes of becoming the next RSSB guru and became a sevadar (volunteer) for the organization.

Well, that didn't work out very well for them.

Stories in the Indian financial press show that Dhillon and his family were the prime beneficiaries of the money that was fraudulently taken from companies controlled by the Singh brothers.

So the big question now is whether Indian authorities will continue their investigation into how the financial manipulations were orchestrated and who benefitted from the illegally gotten funds.

The RSSB guru and his family have been ordered to repay within 30 days up to $842 million that doesn't belong to them.  

It's hard to believe, almost impossible, in fact, that Gurinder Singh Dhillon, his wife, and sons simply looked at hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into their bank accounts and didn't ask, "Gosh, how is this happening?" Almost certainly, they were willing participants in the financial fraud.

After all, Dhillon is supposed to be God in Human Form, a Perfect Living Master, who I've heard is fond of saying "my way or the highway." Yet in this case defenders of the guru are claiming that he was a passive recipient of vast amounts of money and had nothing to do with how it was obtained.

Yeah, right. I don't believe this. I suspect that Indian authorities don't believe it either. 

UPDATE: The RSSB guru is claiming that he and his family don't owe any money to Religare. Well, as noted above, good luck with that argument. It'll be interesting to see if the High Court of Delhi buys it. The attorneys for RHC Holding, Singh brothers, and Daichi likely are already busy doing their best to refute that contention.

Probably Gurinder Singh Dhlllon had to take this step because he isn't able to repay what he and his family owe.

But the downside is that it puts a spotlight on the ultimate beneficiaries of the fraudulently-obtained money, and that could end up turning out badly for the Dhillons. Of course, it's impossible to predict how this Bollywood'ish drama will play out. Here's the Economic Times story.

NEW DELHI: Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) head Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family members Friday approached the Delhi High Court saying they do not owe any money to RHC Holdings Pvt Ltd, promoted by Malvinder and Shivinder Singh.

The Dhillons filed the application following the court's direction to deposit the amount due to RHC Holdings Pvt Ltd in connection with the execution of Rs 3,500-crore arbitral award won by Japanese pharma major Daiichi Sankyo against former promoters of Ranbaxy LaboratoriesNSE 5.63 %Malvinder and Shivinder Singh.

Dhillons told the court that RHC Holding has made false claims that they owe money to the company.

Justice J R Midha sought response of RHC Holding, Singh brothers and Daiichi on the plea of Dhillons.

The court, in its September order, said the amount which 55 garnishees, including Dhillon family, owe to RHC Holdings should be deposited with the Registrar General of the Delhi High Court within 30 days. A garnishee order is an order against a third party for the recovery of debt or dues.

 

ANOTHER UPDATE: Looks like there could be even worse news for the Dhillon family, or at least for so-far unindicted co-conspirators. I've boldfaced some pertinent passages in this The Tribune story.

Former Fortis promoters Malvinder, Shivinder sent to police custody

New Delhi, October 11

A Delhi court on Friday granted the police four-day custody of former Fortis Healthcare promoters Malvinder Singh, his brother Shivinder and three others, arrested for allegedly misappropriating funds of Religare Finvest Ltd (RFL), causing it losses of Rs 2,397 crore.

Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Deepak Sherawat allowed custodial interrogation of the five people who were arrested by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Delhi Police.

Malvinder (46) was arrested on Friday morning, while Shivinder (44), Sunil Godhwani (58), the former chairman and managing director of Religare Enterprises Ltd (REL), Kavi Arora (48) and Anil Saxena, who occupied important positions in REL and RFL, were arrested on Thursday by the EOW for allegedly diverting the money and investing in other companies.

The police sought the custodial interrogation of the accused saying it was necessary as they were allegedly involved in diversion of public money which needs to be tracked.

It further said that a lot of people are involved in the alleged cheating and misappropriation of the fund.

The police sought their custodial interrogation saying the accused have to be confronted with other officials to ascertain the role of co-conspirators and said that the money trail was to be found in the case which was at an initial stage of probe.

The counsel representing the accused opposed the Delhi police plea and said their custody was not required as the evidence is documentary.

The counsel for Malvinder said in the court that he has joined the probe and answered all the questions for which his custody was not required.

Malvinder told the court that he has given an affidavit before the high court saying the money was not with him.

Malvinder opposed the police plea claiming that he was being made a soft target, however, his brother Shivinder, representing himself, did not oppose the plea.

Shivinder told the court that he was himself a victim and was ready to help and cooperate in the investigation.

RFL is a subsidiary of the REL. Malvinder and Shivinder were earlier the promoters of REL.

The police had said that a look out circular (LOC) had been issued against Malvinder as he was absconding.

He was detained on the intervening night of Thursday and Friday in Ludhiana and was formally arrested on Friday morning after he was brought here by the EOW team, Additional Commissioner of Police (EOW) O P Mishra earlier told reporters.

The EOW had registered an FIR in March after it received a complaint from Manpreet Singh Suri of the RFL against Shivinder, Godhwani and others alleging that loans were taken by them while managing the firm but the money was invested in other companies.

According to the police, the complainant stated that the four had absolute control on REL and its subsidiaries.

“They put RFL in poor financial condition by disbursing loans to companies having no financial standing and being controlled by them. The companies to which loans were disbursed willfully defaulted in repayments and caused a loss to RFL to the tune of Rs 2,397 crore,” Mishra alleged. PTI 

Here's a Bar & Bench story that contains the High Court order. It appears to be an enforcement of a May order against the same 55 garnishee parties, with the difference being that now they have to pay up within 30 days and provide a detailed description of all of their assets and income.

 

 

Singh Brothers and RSSB insider arrested. Bad news for RSSB guru.

Indian authorities are starting to arrest people involved with the financial scandal that has embroiled Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, Sunil Godhwani, and Gurinder Singh Dhillon, plus the Dhillon family, in a tangled web of fraud.

Here's how the Economic Times story starts out.
Download Shivinder Mohan Singh | Ranbaxy ex-promoter Shivinder Singh Sunil Godhwani arrested in fraud case

Shivinder Mohan Singh, the erstwhile promoter of Religare Enterprises Limited (REL) was on Thursday arrested by the Economic Offences Wing (EoW) of the Delhi police, along with Sunil Godhwani, former chief of REL, among others following a complaint of misappropriation of funds of Religare Finvest Ltd, the lending arm of REL.

Malvinder Mohan Singh, the elder brother was not in Delhi and could not be arrested. It is learnt that a lookout notice has been issued against him. Both Malvinder and Shivinder were raided by the Enforcement Directorate in August this year. The brothers have been accused by Religare Finvest of fraud and misappropriation of funds to the tune of Rs. 740 crore.

In December, a criminal complaint was filed by RFL with EoW against the Singh brothers, following which a case was filed against the brothers in May this year.

The Singh brothers are relatives of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Malvinder has alleged that Dhillon and Godhwani conspired to siphon funds out of companies the Singh brothers controlled at the time along with Godhwani -- who reportedly was the guru's right hand man and managed the finances of RSSB. (The "Dera" is RSSB headquarters in the Punjab.)

Here's a description of his role from a Bloomberg story posted on the RSSB web site:

• Sunil Godhwani: The money man. Said to have been friends with the Dhillon family since childhood and to have grown up in the dera itself, Godhwani was managing the finances of the dera.

Further, the fraudulent funds apparently ended up in the pockets of Dhillon, his family, and close associates. In a separate legal matter, the Dhillon family and others have been ordered to pay back $842 million that, obviously, they aren't entitled to.

What happens next is unclear, but it's interesting to speculate. It's well known that authorities typically work their way up a fraudulent/criminal "food chain" by arresting and interrogating lower level people first, the goal being to get these people to implicate higher-ups.

There's no way to know if that is what is happening in this case. It sure seems possible, though. So in my opinion, Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family should be more worried today than they were yesterday about their legal culpability. 

RSSB guru and his family ordered to repay up to $842 million

Thanks to a comment left on a post today by a blog visitor, I learned that a financial noose is tightening around the necks of Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family, who, along with others, have been ordered to pay 6,000 crore rupees to RHC Holding -- which equals $842 million.

UPDATE: Someone just sent me a photo of the print version of the story. 

Here's how an Economic Times story, "Daiichi Sankyo-Ranbaxy case: HC asks Radha Soami head, 54 others to deposit Rs 6,000 crore," starts out (HC refers to the High Court of Delhi in India).

Download Daiichi Sankyo-Ranbaxy case: HC asks Radha Soami head 54 others to deposit Rs 6 000 crore

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

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

The amount should be deposited with the courtʼs registrar general within 30 days, according to the order dated September 27. Any party disputing the claim should file an affidavit to place their contention on record, Justice JR Midha said in the order, which ET reviewed. The entities cannot “dispose of, alienate, encumber directly or indirectly, part with the possession of any assets, except in the ordinary course of business like payment of salary and statutory dues, till the next date of hearing.”

Back in March I wrote a blog post based on reporting in the Indian financial press, "RSSB guru now faced with repaying $909 million in allegedly fraudulent loans." Excerpt:

I keep writing about this Indian financial saga, which could provide the plot for a great Bollywood movie, because it shows up so clearly the hypocrisy of many religious leaders.

The guru who leads a sect that teaches the goal of life is to purify the soul and mind so they can rise to higher spiritual regions has devoted himself to amassing worldly riches in a highly dubious manner, using his position as the head of RSSB to make himself rich. 

It'll be interesting to see if Malvinder succeeds in getting the money back from the RSSB guru and others. Hopefully he will. Gurus can't hold themselves above the law, even though their devotees often try to excuse their actions with a variety of unconvincing excuses: "It's God's will...this is a test of our faith...gurus work in mysterious ways...blah, blah, blah."

Well, it looks increasingly likely that Gurinder Singh Dhillon, his family, and close associates are going to have to come up with as much as $842 million by the end of October.

The exact amount to be gotten from these sources is a bit unsure, even though it seems clear that most (or all) of the 55 entities mentioned in the Economic Times story are connected to the RSSB guru in some fashion.

The big remaining question, after this huge amount of money is paid to RHC holding, is whether Dhillon, his family, and close associates got the money by fraudulent means, as has been alleged by Malvinder Singh. 

What we do know at this point is that the RSSB guru and his family have failed to repay money that they obtained through dubious "loans" (more like money siphoning) from the coffers of RHC Holding. So this demolishes the guru's undeserved reputation of being a Perfect Living Master, since his behavior doesn't even rise to the level of an average moral human who pays their bills on time.

Sunil Godhwani, by the way, used to be the guru's right-hand-man and managed financial affairs at the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. Here's a description of his role from a Bloomberg story posted on the RSSB web site:

• Sunil Godhwani: The money man. Said to have been friends with the Dhillon family since childhood and to have grown up in the dera itself, Godhwani was managing the finances of the dera.

Godhwani has been charged with cheating and criminal conspiracy. Godhwai became head of Religare Enterprises at the behest of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, after which Godhwani is alleged to have funneled money into the pockets of the guru and his family.  

For my birthday, I've giving myself death

OK, readers of this blog post title should refrain from contacting a suicide prevention hotline.

The form of death I've decided to give myself for my 71st birthday is writing another book comprised mostly of what I've already composed for my Church of the Churchless blog on the subject of death.

After publishing a book, "Break Free of Dogma," that consists of 93 early churchless blog posts (2004-06) on various subjects, I decided to give a theme-based book a try.

Death seemed like a great subject. Not cheery, but inevitable. 

I have no problem admitting to a fear of death. I understand why many people, including my wife, Laurel, say they aren't afraid of death, but rather of suffering in the course of dying.

That makes sense, since I'm afraid of that also. But the idea of not-existing for eternity after I die strikes me as decidedly dreadful also, not that I, or any other living being, has a choice in the matter. So many of my Church of the Churchless posts deal with the fear of non-existence.

I devoted a couple of hours today to seeing how many blog posts I could find that dealt with death. From November 2004 to March 2007, I copied in over 10,000 words of death-related posts. 

So, yay, it looks like I should be able to cobble together an interesting book just from what I've already written about death. And I can always write more on some aspect of death that has escaped my attention previously.

If anyone who comes across this post has written about dealing with the fear of death from a non-religious perspective, I'd be interested in reading whatever you've put together. Again, non-religious. I realize that believing in life after death is how most people cope with their eventual demise, but as an atheist I reject that approach.

My email address is in the right sidebar. Or, click here. Here's a link to a recent post I wrote about death, "Recognizing the reality of death is key to living life."

Our essence is more iike a spider web than a diamond

Take a look at these images. Which do you feel best describes your essence? Is the real you more like a complex spider web with lots of gossamer interconnections, or a simple unitary, unchanging diamond?

Most people have the feeling that they possess, or are, a core consciousness that often is termed the Self or Soul. This is the dominant religious philosophy, whether Western or Eastern (Buddhism and Taoism excepted).

So the goal of a "diamond" perspective is to get in touch with an unchanging essence that remains the same in the midst of an ever-changing world.

That perspective almost certainly is wrong. Modern neuroscience and psychology, along with the aforementioned Buddhist and Taoist teachings, hold that what we are is, to use a Buddhist term, empty of inherent existence.

In this context empty doesn't mean non-existent. Rather, it points to the fact of everything, including us, being part of a web of interconnections, causes and effects, relationships with countless other things.

Almost every guided meditation I listen to on Sam Harris' Waking Up iPhone app contains requests to look in a certain fashion. 

Look for the center of consciousness.
Look at that which is looking.

Finding nothing -- which is my experience, along with that of most meditators who attend to what is really there in one's psyche, rather than what is conceptually thought to be there -- is the point of the exercise.

Things simply appear and disappear in consciousness. There is no place from which we sit and observe what is transpiring within our awareness. The idea that there is, such as a mythical "eye center" or "third eye," is just another appearance in the spider web of consciousness.

I'm an avid reader in the fascinating area of modern neuroscience. The title of a cover story in the September 21, 2019 issue of New Scientist asks a big question, "What is consciousness?" 

Michael Graziano, the author of the article, has written a book called "Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience." Here's some quotes from his New Scientist piece.

Our attention schema theory explains why people think there is a hard problem of consciousness at all. Efficiency requires the quickest and dirtiest model possible, so the attention schema leaves aside all the little details of signals and neurons and synapses.

Instead, the brain describes a simplified version of itself, then reports this as a ghostly, non-physical essence, a magical ability to mentally possess items. 

Introspection -- or cognition accessing internal information -- can never return any other answer. It is like a machine stuck in a logic loop. The attention schema is like a self-reflecting mirror: it is the brain's representation of how the brain represents things, and is a specific example of higher order thought.

In this account, consciousness isn't so much an illusion as a self-caricature.

OK, if that isn't crystal clear, and I'm sure it isn't, let's take a look at a seemingly related conception of consciousness in a book that was the subject of my previous post, "The Feeling of Life Itself," by Christof Koch.

According to integrated information theory (IIT), consciousness is determined by the causal properties of any physical system acting upon itself. That is, consciousness is a fundamental property of any mechanism that has cause-effect power upon itself.

...The theory takes the five phenomenological axioms of experience that I introduced in the first chapter -- any experience exists for itself, is structured, is the specific way it is, is one, and is definite -- and formulates for each one an associated causal postulate, a requirement that any conscious system has to obey.

The theory reveals or unfolds the intrinsic causal powers of any system that obeys all five postulates. These causal powers can be represented as a constellation of points (distinctions) linked by lines (relations).

According to IIT, these causal powers are identical to conscious experience, with every aspect of any possible conscious experience mapping one-to-one onto aspects of this causal structure. Everything is accounted for on either side.

All these causal powers, including their degree of intrinsic existence, can be evaluated in a systematic fashion, that is, algorithmically. Figure 8.1 illustrates this structure by way of a visual metaphor, a byzantine tangled spider web.

Koch ends that chapter with an apt observation: "If you've made it through this chapter, congratulations, as the covered material stretches anyone's mind." For sure.

After I finish his book, I'll try to summarize this spider web'y theory in (hopefully) my own understandable language.

Quantum theory isn't needed to explain consciousness

If I wasn't an atheist I would have called out Thank God! when i read the following passages in Christof Koch's book, "The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed."

Koch, who is President and Chief Scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, doesn't see any need to invoke mysterious quantum phenomena when attempts to understand consciousness are being undertaken.

As I noted recently, it irritates me when someone -- who almost always isn't a scientist -- tries to inject quantum theory into a discussion of meditation, consciousness, or such. As Koch says below, it is extremely unlikely (though not impossible) that quantum mechanics influences brain functions.

I'm enjoying Koch's latest book and will have more to say about it when I've read more of it. Here's what he had to say on the subject of quantum mechanics and consciousness.

That a conscious observer is required to convert the superposition of states of a quantum system into the single observable outcome has always troubled physicists. If QM [quantum mechanics] is really a fundamental theory of reality, it shouldn't need to invoke conscious brains and measuring devices. Instead these macroscopic objects should emerge naturally from the theory.

Many solutions have been proposed, but none have found acceptance. It is this dilemma at the root of such a successful theory of reality that has prompted Roger Penrose, a brilliant cosmologist, to propose a quantum gravity theory of consciousness that remains popular with the public.

Precious little evidence supports the idea that the brain exploits macroscopic quantum mechanical effects. Of course, the brain has to obey QM, as when photons of light meet retinal molecules inside photoreceptors. Yet the body's wet and warm operating regime is inimical to quantum coherency and  superposition across neurons.

Today's quantum computer prototypes need extreme vacuum and temperatures close to absolute zero to avoid decoherence, when so-called quantum bits disentangle and become regular bits of classical information theory. That's why quantum computers are so difficult to build.

Furthermore, it has never been properly explained why phenomenological aspects of consciousness or its neurobiological substrate require quantum properties.

I see no need to invoke exotic physics to understand consciousness.

It is likely that a knowledge of biochemistry and classical electrodynamics is sufficient to understand how electrical activity across vast coalitions of neocortical neurons constitute any one experience. But as scientist I keep an open mind. Any mechanism not violating physics might be exploited by natural selection.

Recognizing the reality of your death is key to living life

One of the best things about being human is also one of the worst things: understanding that your death is inevitable.

We have this capacity because of our evolved brain. Other animals, almost certainly, lack the ability to envision a far-off future that bears no resemblance to what's being experienced in the present. 

This enables us to construct civilizations that have transformed our planet. Cell phones, symphonies, electric cars, and so much else wouldn't exist without our ability to imagine possibilities that could exist, but don't at the moment.

But there's a dark side to what evolution has wrought. We members of Homo sapiens know that along with every other living thing, each of us will die one day. 

I call this dark because the fear of death isn't pleasant. Nor is dying itself, unless our suffering is so great, death is a longed-for release, not a dreaded tragedy. 

As I wrote about in Death and the primal fear of non-existence, I've had glimpses of the void that follows our last breath. It's more frightening than anything I've ever experienced, because nothingness is an absence, not a thing.

I’ve come face to face with not-existing. It’s scary. Really scary. I’ve never experienced anything scarier. I can call it “fear,” but it’s more than that. Worse than that. Regular fear arises when something bad is happening or could happen.

But primal fear is looking into the maw of nothing happening to you, because there will be no you around for anything to happen to. Do you get the difference? I hope so. I don’t know if I can describe it any more clearly.

This experience has come to me about a dozen times. Mostly while I’m going to sleep. Occasionally in meditation. It isn’t something that I can bring about on my own. It isn’t a thought; it isn’t an emotion; it isn’t a perception. It’s as if a curtain covering non-existence opens for a moment, giving me a peek into a nothingness that is absolute.

Because I’m not there. I mean, I’m obviously there at the moment, looking into the depths of not-existing for eternity. Yet what I feel all the way down to the marrow of my being is what it means to live for a time and then to not live for all the rest of time.

Yesterday I had a milder version of what I tried to describe above. I was exercising at our athletic club, doing my usual thing in the room with weight-training machines, when a sudden realization hit my mind with the force of a heavy bar-bell striking a mat.

Eventually I'm going to die. That will be the end of exercising. Also, of life, of consciousness, of existing as anything else but insentient atoms.

I let that feeling wash over me for a few seconds. Then I moved to the next machine. Soon I felt "normal" again, though that word has ceased to carry a definite meaning for me. I really have no idea what is normal and what is abnormal when it comes to the deepest questions of life.

Is it normal to go through life without a stark realization of our inevitable upcoming death? When I was younger, I thought so, given that dying typically is far from the forefront of what youthful people are concerned about.

Now I'm 70. 

I've had friends and family members die. Many of them. When I get together with others my age or older, health problems often are a prime conversation topic. We don't talk a whole lot about death in a direct fashion, but the prospect of it lurks in the background.

This is good. In fact, I do my best to keep death in the foreground, since I find that life feels sweeter when I have the attitude of Not only will this moment never come again, there will come a time when no moment will ever come again.

Sure, I still get upset, frustrated, angry, worried, and all the other negative emotions that come with being human. But embracing the reality of my eventual death puts things in perspective. Compared to (1) being dead and not-existing at all, I find (2) dealing with life's problems as best I can a lot more appealing.

No matter how joyful I feel about doing something -- and sometimes the joy is minimal -- I'm grateful that the cosmos has conjured up my brain, body, and consciousness as existing for a certain amount of time on a planet circling one of the hundreds of billions of stars in a galaxy that is one of hundreds of billions of other galaxies in a universe some 14 billion years old.

That is so freaking far out, I don't even need to be high on (totally legal) homegrown Oregon marijuana to be blown away by the marvelousness of it all.

Would I prefer to not know that I'm going to die? Well, I have no choice about it, though I suppose there's a slim chance I'll develop some sort of condition that makes it impossible for me to envision my eventual demise.

Unfortunately, that condition likely would also make it impossible for me to do most of the things I enjoy doing: write, read, ponder, plan, look forward to the future, engage in citizen activism aimed at improving the world for future generations.

So I'm happy with being fearful about death.

That anxiety adds an extra "spiritual" dimension to my life, using that word in a decidedly non-supernatural sense. I'm pleased that I've given up the fantasy of life after death, since believing that this world is merely a stepping stone to some imagined eternal existence diminishes the priceless value of our one and only human existence.

Mary Oliver, the poet, put it beautifully. (Paraphrased in the image.)

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Don't look within for inner peace. Look without.

This Pearls Before Swine comic humorously sums up my evolving approach to meditation. Which, as you can read below, also is the approach favored by my new favorite mindfulness teacher, Amit Sood, M.D.


Now, actually I'm more of a blend of Rat and Pig. I still enjoy closed-eyed meditation, but I no longer am devoted to what the spiritual organization I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, referred to as "going within."

That notion was based on religious assumptions I've come to reject.

Namely, that supernatural realms of reality exist, and it is possible to experience them through meditation aimed at bringing every bit of conscious attention away from one's body and the outside world through concentration on what lies within one's head.

I have no problem with focusing attention on what lies within -- thoughts, emotions, imaginings, visions, inner speech, and such -- but this is a one-sided approach to meditation and mindfulness. 

At its worst, and I experienced this during my time as an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, avid devotees of "going within" can become seriously damaged psychologically. They lose interest in work, family, and other normal human pursuits, having become fanatically committed to detaching from the world and entering imagined non-physical domains of existence.

Not good. Meditation should make us a better person, not a worse one. If we aren't becoming a more loving, caring, and compassionate friend, relative, spouse, employee, volunteer, or parent, meditation isn't working for us.

After all, what makes us feel better when we're listless, lacking energy, down in the dumps, sad? (1) Sitting by ourselves in a room with eyes closed, focused on the contents of our mind, or (2) Getting out and doing something like walking in nature, talking with friends, patting our dog or cat?

I don't know about you, but I find #2 much more appealing.

Here's some quotes from Amit Sood's book, Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, along these lines. I shared Sood's seven tenets in my previous post. The third tenet is: Intentional attention, external or internal, engages the same brain network. Focus your meditation on the world if you struggle with the mind.

In the third tenet, we explored ways to develop meditative attention by cultivating curiosity and focusing on meaning in the outside world. This helps us with engagement and flow.

These externally oriented practices are not only easier but also more effective than trying to see the light in an inwardly focused meditative stance.

The pursuit also makes you a more engaged spouse, parent, employee, and citizen. Attention so strengthened loses its rigidity, It becomes supple and flexible. Flexibility gives you freedom. In most situations, flexibility is a sign of health.

...An important aspect of the brain is that thinking about an activity engages similar brain areas to those engaged in actually practicing the activity. Thus research shows that imagining playing piano or violin or imagining dancing can help you improve your piano, violin, or dance performance.

When I read all this research, I speculated that the same networks should be engaged whether you focus externally or internally (playing piano versus thinking about playing piano). Thus meditation with eyes closed (internally directed) or eyes open (externally directed) should engage the same or similar parts of the brain. I was excited to see that an interesting study supported precisely this speculation.

In this study, investigators evaluated which brain areas activate based on two variables: external versus internal focus, and intense versus low-grade attention. Researchers found that the intensity of focus had much greater effect on the activation than did the direction of focus.

Thus, very similar areas were activated when the participants were intensely focusing, whether looking out at an object externally or thinking about the details of the object internally. An additional research team has recently corroborated these findings.

Realizing this has freed me. I meet so many colleagues who find the internally focused meditation practice very difficult. I have similarly struggled with sitting meditation. I feel comfortable now in suggesting externally focused meditation, in which you experience your world with full attention.

Because from the brain's perspective it doesn't matter whether you are focusing externally or internally. Therefore, in addition to or in lieu of sitting with the eyes closed, you could meditate immersed in the world, with your eyes open. It will activate the same or similar areas of the brain.

Since we spend most of the day in the world and not sitting on a cushion, we could get ten thousand hours of training (which some but not all experts suggest is needed to become really good at anything) in just a few years.

The third tenet builds on intentionality and emerging research, offering you a different way to meditate: instead of meditating with eyes closes, you meditate with eyes open by intentionally projecting your attention externally. 

...A few thousand years ago, when our threats were mostly external, training attention would have meant pushing it toward the depths of the mind, the basis of most meditation practices. A lot has changed since then, such that the definition of escape isn't escaping into the mind but escaping from the mind.

Dalai Lama isn't big on single-pointed attention

Here's some good news for everybody who has difficulty concentrating during meditation. The Dalai Lama does too! And he doesn't think that single-pointed attention is the best way to meditate. Analytical meditation is. 

A few days ago, in a blog post I shared a lengthy passage from my new favorite book, Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, by Amit Sood, M.D.

That passage ended with Sood mentioning that it was the Dalai Lama who provided the final push that got Sood to break away from the traditional meditation approach he learned growing up in India, and to embrace a modern version of mindfulness founded in a blend of modern science and ancient spirituality.

This is how Sood describes his conversation with the Dalai Lama at a Mayo Clinic event. The boldfacing is in Sood's book. I've added a section from the following chapter where Sood summarizes the seven tenets that have become the basis for his redesigned approach to mindfulness -- each of which makes a lot of sense to me.

It was a dramatic ninety minutes. I found the Dalai Lama to be kind, gentle, encouraging, fun, and wise. Spending time with him was like learning from my very sweet, very loving grandpa.

I asked the Dalai Lama lots of questions --- about human struggles, compassion, his childhood, and more. Then, in his presence, I asked these two questions to the audience of about five hundred people, the who's who of the meditation world.

(The answers would truly shock me and steer me forward in my path.) "How many of you have practiced meditation?" and "How many of you have found meditation a piece of cake, very easy?" 

As expected, the majority of the participants raised their hands in response to the first question. In response to the second question, barely one or two hands went up.

At that point, the Dalai Lama, in all his humility, shared his insights about meditation. I have watched this clip several times on YouTube. He described two types of meditation: analytical and single pointed.

Analytical meditation cultivates a sense of curiosity -- an alert mind that is busy exploring the nature of the body, world, humanity, and mind. Such a mind analyzes all it sees and connects different experiences to learn about the world.

Analytic meditation helps develop a holistic view. It decreases the gap between appearance and reality. This form of meditation he found easy, and he thought it was more important than the second form of meditation -- focused attention.

For the second form of meditation, which creates a single-pointed mind (in which you focus on a single object of attention), the word Dalai Lama used was impossible. It needed a lot of time -- four, five, or six hours a day.

...Talking to the Dalai Lama was a moment of great realization for me. I felt uplifted, absolved, freed. My cage had been opened. This hummingbird was ready to fly.

If the Dalai Lama struggles with single-pointed meditation and promotes a more wisdom-seeking analytical process, why was I seeking single-pointed meditation as a first step. Why were many other programs doing the same?

I realized my folly. I was copying and pasting practices I had learned without much thinking. I had picked cliches. I was talking about the "now" without knowing what it meant. I was evangelizing about being in the present moment without knowing how difficult it was.

I was sharing practices that didn't work for the majority of the people for the long term. They were just too polite to tell me. I was setting them up for failure, swapping one trap for the other. This wasn't right, and I needed to fix it.

If the basic concepts of diet and exercise are simple and can be learned in a very short time, why shouldn't mindfulness resilience, happiness, and stress management be equally simple and accessible? I thought.

...Here are the seven tenets presented as seven tweets. 

(1) Ancient wisdom relied on philosophy; modern wisdom increasingly consults twenty-first century science.
(2) Time is fleeting and untethered. Anchor presence by intentionality instead of time.
(3) Intentional attention, external or internal, engages the same brain network. Focus your meditation on the world if you struggle with the mind.
(4) If the short-term is challenged, think about the long term; if the long term is challenged, live for the next moment. Keep a flexible zoom.
(5) A non-judgmental stance can be comforting but is unachievable. Being grateful and compassionate is an easier and more accessible solution.
(6) Mindfulness isn't a practice; it is a way of life.
(7) Instead of emptying the mind, fill it with hope, inspiration, and courage.

You can see the Dalai Lama's response to the questions Sood asked the audience in this video of the event. I've set the You Tube video to start at the appropriate place, a bit after 1:05.

Musings of an ex-Christian atheist

Here's another email I got from a guy I correspond with regularly. I always enjoy his messages. This time it is about the irritating nature of fundamentalist Christians, plus some right-on observations about the Bible.

Enjoy.

Hey Brian, how are you?

I’m… ok.

As always, I enjoyed your latest post. This part really stood out to me:

“Atheists like me have seen through the trickery. We're no longer willing to play the God Game. We have no patience with those who promise salvation after death. We recognize the con job being promulgated by religious leaders who lust after money and power while hypocritically preaching worldly detachment and humility.”

I have a friend who has offered me some free career counseling. She is very good at it so it sounds great, right? Right. 

She is a very devout, hardcore Christian. Shouldn’t be a problem right?  Right…

She is a woman that my wife prays with and does not know that I am an atheist. I can tell by some of the things she talks to me about that my wife has said something to her about certain changes in what I believe.  So instead of career counseling, most sessions so far turn into a Bible study of sorts. 

Yesterday’s session started out on the right track, talking about my resume and other opportunities in the field that I’m currently in. By the time I politely let her know that I had to go teach a self defense lesson, it had turned into her talking about us living in the last days and that there is a call on my life to teach and I need to seek God regarding that. Ugh.

I was surprised at the anger that came up in me later in the day. 

Seek God about the “call” on my life? Yeah, I did that for about 30 years. You know what God said to me about it? Nothing! Not a damn thing! Because he’s not there. And if he is, in the Christian sense, he’s an asshole.  Now that I’ve learned to use logic and reason and common sense, it’s amazing how glaringly obvious things about religion are to me now.

My wife could tell something was up, so she asked me. I watered it down a little, but I think I shocked her a bit.  LOL  Some things I threw out there…

Let’s assume, for just a minute, that the Bible is true/accurate. Isn’t it interesting that there are only a handful of people, all from the same small part of the world, who had spectacular encounters with God, and many of these folks tell the rest of “us” that we just have to believe by faith. 

If I told someone that I was abducted by aliens, but had no proof, they just have to believe because I said so, they’d probably think I’ve finally lost it. Yet, that is what religion is asking us to do. 

Preachers from the flavor of Christianity I came out of talk about how God wants to have this real and amazing relationship with humankind. But he is markedly silent and the amazing encounters we read about in the Bible cannot be proven and apparently, only happened during that time.

She said something about getting into the word of God more often, meaning the Bible. I should have just left it alone… but I did not. I basically said that I do not believe the Bible to be “the word of God”.  It’s a collection of books/stories, songs, poems, letters, etc. The book of John clearly states that Jesus is the Word of God. Not a book. Yeah, that went over well.

Anyway. Like you said about no longer being willing to play the God game, I’m not sure how much longer I can pretend that I’m not an atheist.  I’m pretty sure people close to me will start to figure it out.

Helium balloons are a bad way to grieve someone's death

Yesterday my wife and I went on our usual late afternoon dog walk. Meandering along a trail here in rural south Salem, Oregon, I spotted something unusual about twenty feet away. 

Walking over to it, I realized it was a deflated helium balloon. Here's what was written on it. (Hard to tell whether the words came from one person, or several people.)

Dear Grandma, I really wish you were here. I love you so much. Thank you so much for having your kids. They are a blessing. I love them so much.

I wish you were here. See you in heaven, someday soon. Have fun in heaven, Grandma. I love you so much.

Leaving aside the sentiments, it's a really bad idea to set loose a helium balloon for any reason. They litter the landscape. They can be harmful to animals. And helium is a rare element that is needed for reasons other than sending a message to a dead woman. 

I understand why people want to engage in some sort of ceremony after a loved one has died.

Whoever wrote on this ballon obviously was religious. But why would someone think that Grandma was better able to read words written with a sharpie on a balloon, than to tune into a relative's thought?

I've talked to my mother after she died. I didn't believe she could hear me, yet it felt good to speak to her as if she was still alive.

I never had the slightest inclination to write to her, though, especially not on a balloon. 

So Christians, or any other religiously-minded group, should ponder the absurdity of believing that someone who supposedly is in heaven needs to be communicated with via decidedly materialistic means. 

If you believe in the supernatural, shouldn't it be possible for a deceased person to use a divine means to tap into the sentiments of those here on Earth?

Sure seems so. Thus ditch the writing on balloons thing and simply think, Grandma, I love you so much. That will be cheaper, easier, and way more environmentally-friendly.

Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century -- my new favorite book

A quantum experience led me to a book that I'm loving a lot, Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, by Amit Sood, M.D.

More precisely, it was an absurd mention of "quantum" in another book that led me to Sood's creative re-imagining of what mindfulness is all about.

There I was, semi-happily reading Loch Kelly's Effortless Mindfulness, which I wrote about in a recent blog post, when I came to a passage that caused me to give up on the book.

Self-essence is an invisible source, prior to energy. In turn, Self-energy is both wave -- flowing, boundless dynamism with relational qualities -- and particle -- active, compassionate, embodied, and full of vitality. The waves and particles are made of the invisible potential of the quantum field of Self-essence.

Those incomprehensible words violated one of my current Book Commandments: thou shalt not invoke quantum theory in an area where it has no application. Like, awareness and mindfulness. 

I then headed to Amazon to reinvigorate my brain by searching for a book that took a genuinely scientific approach to mindfulness. After a bit of browsing I came across Sood's book, and ordered it. 

I'm enjoying it a lot.

I intend to discuss Sood's approach to mindfulness in some detail in future posts. But for now I want to share a section where Sood describes how he came to an understanding that the ancient Asian Indian spiritual teachings he grew up with needed to be updated for the 21st century. 

Sood came to the United States in 1995 from India. Here's his "About the Author" bio on Amazon:

Dr. Amit Sood is a Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic. He directs the Mind-Body Medicine Initiative, and is the creator of the Mayo Clinic Healthy Living Resilient Mind Program. He is the author of the books, The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-Free Living, The Mayo Clinic Handbook for Happiness, and Immerse: A 52-Week Course in Resilient Living.

Dr. Sood received the 2010 Distinguished Service Award, the 2010 Innovator of the Year Award, the 2013 Outstanding Physician Scientist Award and the 2016 Faculty of the Year Award from Mayo Clinic. He was honored as Robert Wood Johnson Health Care Pioneer in 2015. The Ode magazine selected Dr. Sood as one among top 20 intelligent optimists helping the world to be a better place.

In 2016, he was selected as the top impact maker in healthcare in Rochester, MN - a community of over thirty-thousand dedicated health care professionals. Personally, he loves power naps and dark chocolate, detests flossing, likes love and logic, and cares a lot about children - all the children. Dr. Sood lives with his lovely wife of twenty-five years, Richa, and their two princesses, Gauri and Sia, in the occasionally frosty, but always caring and compassionate, Rochester, MN.

Impressive guy. Here's how he came to embrace a scientific approach to mindfulness, as described in his book's "Guilty and Back" chapter.

Feeling Guilty

Challenging an age-old practice was extremely difficult for me. If you understand my background, it will make sense to you.

Meditation practices and teachers are highly respected in Asian Indian families. Many teachers are revered as spiritual leaders of the society. 

Their images are placed in each room. In daily prayer, people bow to the images, decorate them with flowers, and light incense sticks in front of them. People see their teachers in dreams to solve personal problems.

In families with a faith-based practice, these teachers are considered a conduit to God. Annoying or disbelieving them or their instructions would be considered worse than heresy.

I have met several teachers who indeed deserve a high pedestal, but some do not. Nevertheless, if a teacher is caught committing nefarious practices, as has happened numerous times, instead of lowering the pedestal, the unsuspecting students often reframe by saying that the teacher is testing their spiritual resolve by creating the drama.

With this cultural perspective etched within me, my guilt, conflict, and anxiety grew along with the doubts I shared in the previous chapter. I felt vulnerable. 

Will these doubts bring bad luck, illness, or curse to my family? I thought. The scientist in me conflicted with myths and rituals I had learned as a child. A master at overthinking, I did what I do best with such conflicts. I stopped thinking about it and tabled the idea.

Overcoming guilt

I didn't stay put with the idea for very long. My return journey started when I heard about people with no meditation experience who were perceiving the deepest samadhi states as a result of acute stroke. I read about brain tumors and seizures causing sacred visions and spiritual experiences.

Could these states and visions just be a product of the brain's electrical activity? I asked myself. If that is the case, will it be worthwhile to spend my entire life seeking such experiences?

Then I read about swamis who had obtained these experiences but were doing very bad things. I heard stories about self-styled gurus who claimed to be adept at awakening people's kundalini (and many of their followers felt their "energy" and saw the "light" with their help) but were nothing but greedy, immoral charlatans.

They were illegally usurping money and property, abusing women and children, and committing other unspeakable crimes. 

I saw a few of them get caught, was amazed at how low they could go in trying to defend themselves, and could clearly see the selfish psychopath beneath the long hair and saffron color. My uninformed faith in some of these traditions began to crack.

That worked wonders on my guilt. (I should mention that not all swamis are fake. I have personally met several masters of meditation who I deeply respect, who are humble, selfless, and kind, and are truly living each day to help the world.)

Looking deeper

With my blind faith unblinded the more I studied, the deeper I looked and the more learners I worked with, the more convinced I became that most mindfulness programs in their current form need editing  before they can optimally help twenty-first-century brains.

In our effort to make mindfulness simpler, despite our good intentions we have misrepresented some of its constructs. 

Further, some of the language and philosophy is 2,500 years old. It simply needs to be refreshed. What is old and practiced for thousands of years doesn't always have to be perfect or even right.

After all they anointed cow dung on umbilical cords that caused tetanus, didn't believe in pasteurization, practiced child labor, and bad-mouthed any woman who stepped outside the house to join the workforce. (Unfortunately all of these are still happening in some parts of the world.)

The result of my deeper search was freedom. While I still revere the timeless wisdom of many scriptures, I have largely escaped my childhood blinders, partly because I feel confident in the new tool we now have to study the truth: science.

Using the scientific method polished with common sense I came up with a few key ideas for how to better align our understanding of mindfulness with twenty-first-century challenges so it can better serve resilience.

Few ideas

Here is what I thought was needed:

-- Integrate twenty-first-century neuroscience to help better understand the human condition. Philosophy alone isn't enough.
-- Offer skills that emphasize uplifting emotions and not just attention training.
-- Have more explicit focus on compassion, gratitude and forgiveness.
-- Abbreviate the training time.
-- Offer practices that are shorter and more relevant to people's lives.
-- Enhance focus on relationships to decrease perceived loneliness.
-- Integrate hope, inspiration, and courage in the program.

In addition to above, I felt adding humor to the program (and life) was vital. Fun and laughter are great sources of bonding and inspiration, and if we keep the training and the skills dry, they will remain inaccessible, particularly to the younger generation.

I debated and doubted these thoughts for months but couldn't negate any one of them. As a next step, I considered a three-part solution:

(1) Educate people about their brains, emphasizing how our neural traps generate negative emotions and hurt our attention.
(2) Offer different (briefer and deeper) attention practices that are easier to practice and adopt, that provide uplifting emotions, and that center on relationships.
(3) Return mindfulness to its ecosystem in the company of compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, relationships, hope, inspiration, and courage.

I strongly believed I was moving in the right direction, but received pushback from some old colleagues in the field. Pushbacks often demoralize me and they worked their magic this time also. But each time I saw someone struggling whom I couldn't optimally help, the thoughts creeped up again.

I needed one final push. Then His Holiness the Dalai Lama came to my rescue.

Magic is in the details of everyday life

One of the most important things I've learned in my 70 years of living is this: the world is way more interesting than I am.

So the more I can get out of my head, and into what surrounds me, the happier I am. By and large. There are exceptions to every rule, including this one. 

As I've noted before, and surely will note again, mindfulness has become my meditation. I'm no longer seeking enlightenment, mystical uplift, or even self-knowledge. 

In fact, I don't believe that I have, or am, an enduring self. The world exists. I exist. When I'm fully aware of the world, that's enough for me.

Sure, I also spend time aware of my thoughts, emotions, memories, anticipations, and such. These internal experiences just have come to seem less real, less absorbing, and less interesting than what lies outside of me.

Today's guided meditation on my iPhone's Calm app was titled Immersion. Tamara Levitt ended the meditation with the following words. I liked them so much, I transcribed what she said to share in this blog post. 
       

Immersion -- part of a guided meditation by Calm's Tamara Levitt

By quieting our mind and body and tuning in, we can open up to our inner landscape. And in doing so we also develop the capacity to be fully present with our external environment.

When we really notice our surroundings, we can tune in to a universe of detail, discovering magic in places we normally pass through on autopilot. 

And we don't have to be at the top of a mountain. Our practice can help us find that fascination even in the mundane places we go each day. 

The next time you find yourself in a familiar setting, use your practice to see it anew.

You might be standing on a subway platform, sitting in your car waiting for the light to change, or standing in a cafe waiting for your morning coffee. 

First, make a conscious effort to slow down and tune in to your senses.

Let them fully immerse you in your environment. Get really present, and tune into the orchestra of sounds around you. Take in all the sights and smells. Notice any movements. The spin of a ceiling fan. The quiver of a beam of light coming in the window. 

Take in the sounds, the voices, or vehicle. Notice the expressions on people's faces. Observe colors and patterns with an intricacy you never had before. 

Pour over all the details of this space you've seen a million times before, but have never really seen. And then bring that attentiveness into your day. And see what happens. Who knows what moments you might capture. 

A furry caterpillar climbing on a leaf. A sunset. Or a new friend sitting right beside you. 

To quote from the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." 

Ten reasons why Radha Soami Satsang Beas is a cult

For 35 years I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization with headquarters in India. Back then I believed that RSSB taught a semi-scientific approach of uniting one's personal consciousness, soul, with universal consciousness, God. 

But now that I've been able to look upon RSSB more objectively, I view it as a cult. Here's how a knowledgeable person defined a cult. I've boldfaced certain parts for emphasis.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who once taught at Harvard Medical School, wrote a paper titled Cult Formation in the early 1980s. He delineated three primary characteristics, which are the most common features shared by destructive cults.

1. A charismatic leader, who increasingly becomes an object of worship as the general principles that may have originally sustained the group lose power. That is a living leader, who has no meaningful accountability and becomes the single most defining element of the group and its source of power and authority.

2. A process [of indoctrination or education is in use that can be seen as coercive persuasion or thought reform [commonly called "brainwashing"].

The culmination of this process can be seen by members of the group often doing things that are not in their own best interest, but consistently in the best interest of the group and its leader.

Lifton's seminal book Thought Reform and Psychology of Totalism explains this process in considerable detail.

3. Economic, sexual, and other exploitation of group members by the leader and the ruling coterie.

So based on my extensive personal experience with Radha Soami Satsang Beas, which encompasses many communications with people associated with RSSB, including the current guru of the organization, here's ten reasons why RSSB is a cult.

(1) The guru is viewed by the RSSB teachings as God in Human Form. As a supposed Perfect Living Master, the guru is considered to be infallible. His commands are to be carried out without question.

(2) Volunteer service to the guru, or seva, is viewed as highly important. RSSB devotees commit vast amounts of time, energy, and money to the organization, which operates as a strict top-down hierarchy. 

(3) Doubts about the RSSB teachings are strongly discouraged. Thinking for oneself is a no-no, as the human mind is considered  to be the agent of a negative power, much as the Devil is viewed in Christianity.

(4) The current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, has garnered hundreds of millions of dollars for himself and his family through shady financial transactions orchestrated by his close associates, some of whom are being investigated by authorities in India.

(5) Dhillon has been accused of making death threats through RSSB devotees who do his bidding.

(6) There is no independent board or other entity that serves as a check on the RSSB guru's power. The group's finances are largely a secret, though RSSB owns expensive properties all around the world, including private residences for the guru.

(7) Credible reports show that RSSB has allowed volunteers to act violently toward someone who attended a meeting of the group, and the guru has ignored sexual harassment at the RSSB headquarters.

(8) Most RSSB devotees consider that the guru can do no wrong, even in the face of evidence that he has indeed acted wrongly.

(9) The RSSB guru enjoys a lavish lifestyle while preaching that the central purpose of human life is to return to God, not make huge amounts of money.

(10) Well-off people, political leaders, and RSSB insiders receive favored treatment at gatherings of the organization, while ordinary Indians receive second-class treatment.

There are more reasons why RSSB is a cult, so feel free to share your own in a comment, if you're familiar with this group. For example, the current RSSB guru forbids people to photograph him without his consent, and has issued an edict against taking notes at his talks.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru

Effortless mindfulness versus deliberate mindfulness

Mindfulness has been my meditation for quite a few years. As I wrote about recently, being mindful of what actually exists here and now strikes me as way preferable to fantasizing about supernatural realms and mystical mumbo-jumbo.

Thought I'm not 100% sure about anything -- the way of science -- I consider it highly probably 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.

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. 

Here's an excerpt from Kelly's book that describes how effortless mindfulness differs from deliberate (or effortful) mindfulness.

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 interconnected 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.

By and large, this makes sense to me.

I'm not convinced that it makes sense to speak of consciousness without content, since seemingly this would leave us completely unaware of everything, including consciousness itself. But I agree that awareness does appear to be the backdrop of all that we've experienced from the moment of our birth.

Each of us has been aware of countless different things during our lifetime, while awareness itself hasn't changed.

Kelly doesn't view awareness and consciousness as being the same, even though in everyday speech we often consider them to be equivalent. Kelly says, rather mysteriously, "Awake awareness is what makes consciousness conscious. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations are dancing patterns made of awake awareness."

Also: "Awake awareness is the same in all of us, yet our individuality arises from it." And: "Once we experience awake awareness as the foundation of our identity, we experience our conditioned thoughts, emotions, and sensations as waves within the ocean of our life."

Mindful Glimpses are the key teaching method in Kelly's book. They're designed to show us what awake awareness is all about. Here's two of his early Mindful Glimpses.

Background Awareness

(1) Take one slow, deep breath.
(2) Let out a sigh.
(3) Now, let your awareness open to discover the background awareness that is already effortlessly awake and aware without your help.
(4) Notice that you can effortlessly focus from this background awareness.

Eyes of Awareness

(1) With a soft gaze, simply see what is here in front of you.
(2) Notice the awareness that is looking through your eyes.
(3) Now close your eyes and notice the same awareness that was looking out is still here.
(4) Simply rest as this wordless awareness, which is now aware of itself.
(5) Without creating a thinker, be the awareness that welcomes and includes everything.

Shocking tale of a punch in the face at a RSSB meeting

Here's Part 2 of Osho Robbins' (not his real name) tale of what happened to him at a meeting of Radha Soami Satsang Beas devotees at the RSSB Haynes Park center in England.

Part 1 can be read in "Osho Robbins' 'Crime of the Century' at a RSSB Haynes Park satsang."

Part 2 is long, so you'll need to click on the continuation link to read the full account. Here's some definitions of a few words Robbins uses in his report. "Satsang" is a spiritual talk. "Baba Ji" refers to the RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. "Sevadar" is a volunteer.

I'm sharing this story because it illustrates the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of religious people, whether of the East or West. When volunteer devotees act much worse than ordinary human beings, and apparently no higher-ups care about their bad behavior, this reflects badly on their religious organization -- in this case Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

---------------------------------------------------------

17 August 2019 Haynes Park
Seven sevadars attack one satsangi,
completely unprovoked and without reason

This account from Saturday 17^th August 2019, describes how I was peacefully walking towards the exit of Haynes Park to leave, and was stopped and held by seven people and dragged to a private spot and then intimidated and punched in the face and then later pushed into the back of a pitch black van to intimidate me further. Further threats were also made.

You can make up your own mind as to whether the actions of those seven people were reasonable. What I can guarantee is that this account is accurate. Furthermore I have no reason to lie because I am not seeking any specific outcome. I am simply presenting the facts of what happened. Beyond that it is not of my concern. I don’t even care about being “re-instated.”

So, I got banned from satsang. How the heck did that happen?

Oh yes, now I remember: it was because I took a mobile phone into satsang and recorded 5 minutes of an English speaker.

But wait a minute… LOTS of people do much much much more than that.

A quick search on YouTube shows there are MANY satsangs / Q&A of BabaJi already online. I stopped counting at 200. Clearly its not a big issue, otherwise RSSB would have done something about it.

Here’s a few examples: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPsz5Z2JvpA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXX6t1F9ZBA&t=113s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2E86eQPNwU

Now contrast this with what the sevadars did:

1. Took my phone, lied about where it was, refused to return it for approx. 5 hours. 
2. Sent a lower sevadar to officially take responsibility for it – if it got lost.
3. Fabricated a story about me threating to “kick a sevadar in the nuts” : something I can prove 100% to be a lie because it’s simply out of character.
4. Forced another sevadar to lie 
5. Banned me without authority because it was based on a lie.

Now I know that sevadars are not perfect, but give me a break.

We’re not talking about perfect here. 

We’re talking about NORMAL, DECENT human beings.

If this is the result of following RSSB for maybe 30+ years, then clearly it’s not working.

“By their fruits Ye shall know them.” Says the Bible. 

But no matter…  Let’s carry on…because the show must go on…

Now we get onto Day 2: the Saturday satsang. There was simply no way the ban was real as it was based on a lie. I also did not think that the person who banned me had any authority to ban me. He also gave me nothing in writing, giving me even more reason to question its validity.

And to add to it all, I had a dream that night. In the dream, I was on the mic, and it was a Q&A session, and BabaJi was saying “Absolutely, the master loves every disciple like his own child.”

I can only guess, my subconscious mind created the dream from the words of the old satsangi I had met that day who had moved me to tears by saying “Does anyone ever forget his own son?” when I had asked him if he recognised me.

Anyway, I took that to mean that BabaJi wants me to attend satsang that day and if he wants me to attend, who am I to fight against that? I am not saying it was some inner revelation – just what I took the dream to mean.

So I decided I would attend satsang that day (Saturday). nThis time I took my own car because I did not want to inconvenience anyone else. I drove into Haynes Park and nobody paid any special attention to me. So clearly I was not banned, because if I was banned, at least some sevadar would have recognized me. 

If I was banned, they would all have a photo of me. So I parked up and walked to the satsang tent. Once again, nobody paid any special attention to me. Even more evidence the ban was a lie.

As I walked along, I saw the same guy who I had met the previous day: Sevadar #2. The one with the short term memory problem. This time he did not ask me “do you know who I am?” so his memory may have improved. A good sign I guess.

He asked me to step to the side of the main walkway, but after the previous day’s experience, I decided to ignore his request. After all, it was only a request, and it was a free country.

I said “No thank you. I am going to attend satsang. I have no mobile phone with me. You can check.”

Then something happened that frankly shocked me.

He started physically pulling me to the side, by grabbing my arm. This was uncalled for.

“Please let go of me, this is assault” I said as I tried to get free of his grip.

Next thing I know, another guy grabs my other arm. 

Now I was getting a little concerned as this was not normal behaviour. If they had an issue, all they had to do was get one guy to watch where I sit and phone the police to get me removed. That would be the legal and proper procedure to follow. Physically grabbing me was going beyond the call of duty.

“Let go of me, and I will leave” I said. Still they held onto me as if I was some criminal, which I guess in their mind I was.

Open Thread 24 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

I appreciate that off-topic comments have been going in a previous 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 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 devoid of substantive content are an exception.

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.

Crackdown on off-topic comments coming on Wednesday

I've been engaged in a blog "Tune-Up" with Typepad staff that is leading to some appearance and content changes. For example, a Navigation bar has been added at the top of the page.

So I figure I might as well make a long-considered change to my commenting policy.

Well, it isn't really a change, since I've always asked visitors to this blog to keep comments related to the subject of a post, with off-topic comments going either in an Open Thread or in a post related to whatever the commenter wants to talk about.

Since this request has been widely ignored, starting next Wednesday, September 11, I'm going to stop approving comments that aren't related to the subject of a blog post. That gives a two day (secular) grace period for people to adjust to this new policy.

Remember: there are still two ways to say what you want on this blog, so long as a comment isn't excessively critical of another person, insulting, or profane.

(1) Leave a comment in an Open Thread. These free speech posts can be found either by looking in the Recent Posts section in the sidebar, or by clicking on the Open Threads category in the sidebar.

(2) Search for a post related to what you want to say. This can be done via the Google search box at the top of the sidebar. Since 2004 I've written about a great many spiritual, religious, philosophical, and scientific subjects. Most likely someone will be able to find a post related to whatever they'd like to share in a comment.

I'm cracking down on off-topic comments because I find them annoying. I read a lot of news stories online, and regularly visit blogs and web sites with information I'm interested in. 

When I click on a "comments" link, I want to read what other people think about the subject of the article or story. When there's a bunch of off-topic comments, that makes it difficult to find the comments that actually relate to what I care about.

A relatively small number of commenters on this blog have been using it as a sort of message board where they engage in personal discussions, debates, criticisms, and such unrelated to the subject of the post the comments are appearing in.

That's fine in an Open Thread from now on, because an Open Thread has no subject.

However, as noted above, on September 11 my time (Pacific Coast of United States), I won't be approving comments outside of an Open Thread that don't relate to the subject of the blog post the comment has been left on.

Thomas Nagel on why free will doesn't exist

I'm really enjoying my decision to buy a used copy of Thomas Nagel's The View from Nowhere via Amazon. But after reading the "Freedom" chapter this morning, I'm convinced that I didn't freely choose to buy the book.

It felt that way to me, though. Which doesn't mean a whole lot, truth-wise, because reality is what it is, not how we consider it to be.

I've written a lot about free will on this blog. (You can find those posts by using the Google search box in the right sidebar.)

I don't believe it exists. Neither do many neuroscientists and philosophers, including Nagel. Pleasingly, he approaches this subject in a different way than other people whose writings on free will I've read and enjoyed. Yet he comes to the same basic conclusion.

Free will as commonly conceived is highly unlikely, if not impossible. Here's a passage that encapsulates Nagel's basic approach to this question.

I wish to act not only in light of the external circumstances facing me and the possibilities that they leave open, but in light of the internal circumstances as well: my desires, beliefs, feelings, and impulses. I wish to be able to subject my motives, principles, and habits to critical examination, so that nothing moves me to action without my agreeing to it.

In this way, the setting against which I act is gradually enlarged and extended inward, till it includes more and more of myself, considered as one of the contents of the world.

In its earliest stages the process does genuinely seem to increase freedom, by making self-knowledge and objectivity part of the basis of action. But the danger is obvious.

The more completely the self is swallowed up in the circumstances of action, the less I have to act with. I cannot get completely outside myself. The process that starts as a means to the enlargement of freedom seems to lead to its destruction.

When I contemplate the world as a whole I see my actions, even at their empirically most "free," as part of the course of nature, and this is not my doing or anyone else's. The objective self is not in a position to pull the strings of my life from outside any more than TN [Thomas Nagel] is.

At the end of the path that seems to lead to freedom and knowledge lie skepticism and helplessness. We can act only from inside the world, but when we see ourselves from outside, the autonomy we experience from inside appears as an illusion, and we who are looking from outside cannot act at all.

Part of what Nagel is getting at here is that human actions are determined by a host of influences outside of our control. Genetics. Culture. Education. Experiences of many varieties. Society. Other people. Unconscious influences. Emotions. Instincts. Nature. And more besides.

From the inside, most of us feel that we're freely choosing to act. However, when we look at other people, it is easy to think "They're acting that way because of _______," with that blank being filled by many possibilities of determining factors. 

That's easy to do, because we view other people much more objectively than we view ourselves. Yet as Nagel says, when we subject our own actions to the same sort of analysis we apply to others, it becomes obvious that we are equally influenced by factors beyond our control.

I don't have a problem with that. 

Being strongly inclined to philosophical Taoism and Buddhism (leaving out their religious aspects), I like the idea of being a humble part of the whole, a tiny bubble of being whose movements are directed not by me (whoever that is), but by my interactions with the big wide world that surrounds me.

Sure, like almost everyone I have a feeling that I'm free to choose what to do, think, and such. However, I also have a feeling that the sun sets, which also is an illusion, since actually it is our planet which is moving.

Nagel has some ideas about how to deal with the fact that it is very difficult to avoid feeling that we possess free will, in much the same way that it is very difficult to avoid feeling "the sun is setting" -- even if someone is an astronomer. 

Here's part of what Nagel has to say on this subject.

We might try, first, to develop as complete an objective view of ourselves as we can, and include it in the basis of our actions, wherever it is relevant. This would mean consistently looking over our own shoulders at what we are doing and why (though often it will be a mere formality).

But this objective self-surveilance will inevitably be incomplete, since some knower must remain behind the lens if anything is to be known. 

Moreover, each of us knows this -- knows that some of the sources of his actions are not objects of his attention and choice. The objective view of ourselves includes both what we can know and can use, and what we know that we do not know, and therefore know that we cannot use.

Let me call this the essentially incomplete objective view, or incomplete view, for short. The incomplete view of ourselves in the world includes a large blind spot, behind our eyes, so to speak, that hides something we cannot take into account in acting, because it is what acts.

Yet this blind spot is part of our objective picture of the world, and to act from as far out as possible we must to some extent include a recognition of it in the basis of our actions.

(My first post about Nagel's book is here.)

"The View from Nowhere" is a laudable goal

Quite a few years ago I heard of Thomas Nagel's book "The View from Nowhere," liking the provocative title. Nagel is better known for his What Is it Like to be a Bat? paper, which raised equally profound questions about subjectivity and objectivity. 

No human knows what it is like to be a bat. Only a bat does. 

The same is true of every species, and indeed of every individual within a species. I've been married to my wife, Laurel, for 29 years. So obviously I know her very well. But I don't know what it is like to be Laurel. Only she does. 

I perceive my wife from the outside, an objective perspective. She perceives herself from the inside, a subjective perspective. What Nagel seeks to achieve in The View from Nowhere is a philosophical argument for how subjective and objective views of the world can be harmonized.

I've only read part of this book, yet feel that I've grasped enough of Nagel's way of thinking to fashion a blog post based on the first five of his eleven chapters. 

Here's how Nagel encapsulates his goal.

A theory of reality with pretensions to completeness would have to include a theory of the mind. But this too would be a hypothesis generated by the mind, and would not be self-guaranteeing. ... The idea of a full conception of reality that explains our ability to arrive at it is just a dream.

Nevertheless, it's what we aim toward: a gradual liberation of the dormant objective self, trapped initially behind an individual perspective of human experience. The hope is to develop a detached perspective that can coexist with and comprehend the individual one.

That's certainly a laudable goal. It reflects what science is all about, though Nagel seeks a perspective that is universal, not limited to scientific investigations. 

Appealingly, he simultaneously asserts the truth of our inherent subjectivity -- the fact that each of us knows ourself from the inside, while everyone else knows us from the outside -- with a commitment to fashion our ways of knowing into a perspective that comes as close as possible to being a view from nowhere.

Meaning, an objective view that minimizes the biases of our species, and our personal individuality as a member of Homo sapiens. In the chapter that I finished today, Nagel says that a "double vision" is needed.

I'm not completely sure what he means by this, assuming that the rest of the book will lead to an explanation. It isn't bouncing back and forth between a subjective and objective view, but rather involves combining subjectivity and objectivity in some way that eludes me at this point in my reading.

Here's some additional passages from the Double Vision chapter.

When we view ourselves from outside, a naturalistic picture of how we work seems unavoidable. It is clear that our beliefs arise from certain dispositions and experiences which, so far as we know, don't guarantee their truth and are compatible with radical error.

The trouble is that we can't fully take on the skepticism that this entails, because we can't cure our appetite for belief, and we can't take on this attitude toward our own beliefs while we're having them.

Beliefs are about how things probably are, not just about what they might possibly be, and there is no way of bracketing our ordinary beliefs about the world so that they dovetail neatly with the possibility of skepticism. The thought "I'm a professor at New York University, unless of course I'm a brain in a vat" is not one that can represent my general integrated state of mind.

The problems of free will and personal identity yield similarly unharmonious conclusions. In some respects what we do and what happens to us fits very naturally into an objective picture of the world, on a footing with what other objects and organisms do.

Our actions seem to be events with causes and conditions many of which are not our actions. We seem to persist and change through time much as other complex organisms do. But when we take these objective ideas seriously, they appear to threaten and undermine certain fundamental self-conceptions that we find it very difficult to give up.

For sure.

Looking at other people and other living beings, we see that everything which lives, dies. Looking at other people and other living beings, we also see that if a brain is seriously damaged, the consciousness of the being with that brain is altered for the worse.

Yet most humans have a belief that some part of them will continue to live on after their death, often termed a soul, no matter what happens to their body and brain.

That's because from the inside our consciousness seems to be ethereal, unitary, and timeless in some sense -- since we have been conscious from birth until now, while our body and mental contents have changed in countless ways.

I share Nagel's goal of doing our best to view ourselves, and the world, in as objective a fashion as possible.

This requires that we subject our own beliefs and ways of knowing to scrutiny, which isn't at all easy, because how see our own self and the world typically seems so natural, it's difficult for us to envision how that perspective could be any different.

One of Nagel's key ideas is that an objective viewpoint has to include the subjectivity of the viewer as one aspect of what is being perceived. Otherwise we make the mistake of considering that we know everything about some aspect of the world, whereas actually that knowledge should include the knower.

I enjoy learning about neuroscience and human psychology for this reason. I just wish that religious people also would consider that their sense of knowing what God, spirit, soul, heaven and such are like could be mistaken. Not just by a little, but by a lot. Still, we have to keep seeking truth while knowing that it won't be possible to grasp truth completely.

Nagel writes early on in his book:

I believe that the methods needed to understand ourselves do not yet exist.

So this book contains a great deal of speculation about the world and how we fit into it. Some of it will seem wild, but the world is a strange place, and nothing but radical speculation gives us a hope of coming up with any candidates for the truth.

That, of course, is not the same as coming up with the truth: if truth is our aim, we must be resigned to achieving it to a very limited extent, and without certainty.

To redefine the aim so that its achievement is largely guaranteed, through various forms of reductionism, relativism, or historicism, is a form of cognitive wish-fulfillment.

Philosophy cannot take refuge in reduced ambitions. It is after eternal and nonlocal truth, even though we know that is not what we are going to get.

Osho Robbins' "Crime of the Century" at a RSSB Haynes Park satsang

Following is a report Osho Robbins sent to me of what happened after he used his phone to record five minutes of audio at a meeting of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in RSSB's Haynes Park center in England.

It's long, so you'll need to click on the continuation link to read the full tale. Here's some definitions of a few words Robbins uses in his report. "Satsang" is a spiritual talk. "Baba Ji" refers to the RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. "Sevadar" is a volunteer. "Seva" means volunteer service.

What I find most interesting about this saga is how it illustrates the dangers of religious rigidity and dogmatism. The problem with Robbins using his phone to record part of a talk could have been handled smoothly in a few minutes if the Radha Soami Satsang Beas volunteers had acted like normal human beings rather than religious robots.

Instead, their fanaticism led them to believe that a rule against audio recordings was an edict from God, since the RSSB guru is believed by devotees to be God in Human Form. So RSSB volunteers (sevadars) often become irrationally fanatic about carrying out their assigned tasks.

As weird as this may sound to non-religious people, it's much as if Jesus returned to Earth and asked some devout Christians to serve him in certain ways. Is there any doubt that they'd obey with gusto, viewing this as service to God?

The downside, of course, is that since it's virtually certain God doesn't exist, bad things are done in the name of religion for purely human reasons. As you will read below, the RSSB volunteers Robbins encountered were willing to lie, cheat, and steal in the name of service to their guru.

This makes it wholly believable that other volunteer sevadars were willing to do even nastier stuff, as has been alleged by two people who claim that associates of the RSSB guru made death threats against them (see here and here). Thus I find what happened to Osho Robbins consistent with the attitude of a disturbingly large number of RSSB devotees.

Whatever I'm asked to do, if the order comes from the guru, or flows from the guru's directives, I'll do it, whether or not I have to act unethically or wrongly.

Read on...

------------------------

"Crime of the Century"

Osho Robbins caught red handed recording 5 minutes of satsang of the English speaker before the Q&A session. Charged with two offences: bringing phone into the tent and recording 5 minutes of audio. Case heard informally and further evidence fabricated to add another offence: threatening to kick a sevadar in the “nuts”.

Result: made to wait 3+ hours for his phone to be returned

Sentence: Unlimited Ban from ALL satsangs worldwide until further notice.

It’s an ordinary Friday morning at Haynes Park. It's the start of the National satsang programme. Osho Robbins is about to discover what happens when you “break the rules” at RSSB. 

It started with a crime - that Osho Robbins committed. Let's call it "The Crime of the Century".

He recorded the english speaker before Baba Ji's satsang for 5 minutes.

Well technically it was two crimes:
1. Taking the phone in to the satsang hall (many do it - but it's against the rules)
2. Recording the English speaker for 5 minutes. Not sure why this was an issue as it was not even Baba Ji’s voice that was recorded

A quick perusal of You Tube will show that  Baba Ji’s satsangs have not only been previously recorded by others but also been uploaded onto You Tube. So this was really a “non-offence” compared to the actions of those who uploaded all those audios of the satsangs.

Let's start at the beginning.

Osho Robbins arrived for the Friday satsang. He went to the back of the tent. Mobile phones are not allowed, but no big deal is made of the matter and there are no sevadars searching or even caring if anyone takes their phone in. 

There must literally be hundreds of them in the tent. Not a single person asked Osho Robbins if he had a phone on his person.

Osho Robbins had his mobile phone with him, turned into airplane mode. The purpose was to be able to stay in contact with various people at the end of the satsang.

As it happens, the English speaker was saying some interesting things, so Osho Robbins decided to press the “record” button, not knowing that all hell was about to break loose.

So pause for a moment and use a little logic.

What is so horrendous about that? He decided to record it so he could listen back to it later. How exactly is that going to be a problem for anyone else on the planet? 

Seriously, why would it be anyone’s concern? Did anyone get hurt? Is it a security risk? It's not even the voice of Baba Ji, but the speaker before the satsang, and it's for his own private listening after the satsang. By no stretch of the imagination can this be considered a major issue.

Yes, technically “the rules” were broken – but no harm was done to anyone. As you will see later, the sevadars will commit much bigger crimes as the events unfold. To name a few: 

Lying, deceit, forcing another sevadar to lie, stealing the phone and illegally keeping hold of it for approximately 5 hours.

As Osho Robbins was recording, the phone fell on the floor and a sevadar pounced on him, "Ah - you have a mobile phone”. He asked Osho Robbins to step outside the tent while he went to get “backup". 

So Osho Robbins stepped outside. What happened next was more like what you might see in a movie, than in a spiritual satsang. The sevadars seem to think it was a major crime to break the rules. Osho Robbins said "I will delete the files in front of you".

"No - give us the phone and WE will delete them, we have to make sure we delete them all."

Saying that, they snatched the phone from Osho Robbins and deleted the files. Not satisfied, they wanted to know if the files had been uploaded to the cloud.

"What cloud?" Osho Robbins asked, wondering why they are taking things so far over 5 minutes of audio recording that was not even of Baba Ji. They checked and decided it had not been uploaded, but kept hold of the phone, despite Osho Robbins asking for his phone back.

By then a more senior sevadar turned up and asked the classic question:  "Do you know who I am?" Osho Robbins replied quite honestly, "I have no idea."

Obviously the "sevadar" had delusions of grandeur, the exact opposite of what seva should be about. And he obviously had a short-term memory problem, and kept forgetting his own name, hence the question, "Do YOU perhaps know who I am?"

Osho Robbins resisted the temptation to tell him "You are the ONE" or "Best to ask Baba Ji”.

The sevadar handed the phone to the senior sevadar. For clarity, we will call this senior sevadar, sevadar #2. Remember this is the one with delusions of grandeur who keeps forgetting “Who he is”.

Osho Robbins calmly asked for his phone back.

The ego-filled sevadar #2 refused to return the phone, saying it would go to the "IT Dept" to get checked. and be returned at the end of the satsang. This was ridiculous behaviour and also illegal. There was no audio of Baba Ji so why the big drama? 

Osho Robbins explained that he was there with his cousin who also had a child with him as well as his wife. And since he did not want to waste their time, he (Osho Robbins) would leave Haynes Park immediately if that is what it would take to get his phone back.

For some reason the sevadar #2 would not agree to this reasonable request. That would have been the most reasonable way to resolve the matter.

"It's my personal property. I would like it back now please and if you want me to leave, I will leave Haynes Park immediately." said Osho Robbins, clarifying his position.

"You will get it back after the satsang." insisted the sevadar with delusions of grandeur.

"No - I want my phone back now, please" insisted Osho Robbins "and I will leave Haynes Park. It's my property and you have no legal basis to keep it or tamper with it”.

There was no raising of voices, no threats by anyone. However, Osho Robbins was simply firm in his request to be given his phone back, which was a very reasonable request, especially as he was offering to leave the site and wait outside Haynes Park. 

"I do have the right to retain your phone" replied the sevadar, "You broke the rules and recorded the satsang and now your phone will be examined”.

It is indeed unfortunate that Osho Robbins had to resort to the legal position to ask for his legal rights to be upheld, but it seemed there was no other alternative. The sevadar #2 clearly had no respect for his legal rights.

The sevadar #2 put the phone in his pocket and now the lies began.

Mindfulness meditation is much better than mystical mumbo-jumbo

I've meditated every day for about fifty years, starting in 1970 when I was in college and began studying yoga with a crazed Greek guy whose Christananda Ashram blended Christian and Hindu philosophies in a decidedly weird fashion (for details, see here). 

After giving up on the Greek yoga teacher, for the first 35 years of so I followed the meditation practice enjoined by the Indian religious organization I belonged to at the time, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

It had a strong mystical bent, being focused on concentrating one's attention totally within the mind/brain, with the aim of detaching consciousness from this physical world and entering higher regions of supernatural reality.

All that now strikes me as highly implausible and unappealingly dualistic. 

So I've embraced a Buddhist style of Vipassana/Mindfulness meditation. Mainly I follow my breath, sometimes counting breaths, and sometimes simply being aware of my breathing and other perceptions.

I also enjoy listening to guided meditations by Sam Harris via his Waking Up iPhone app (plus Tamara Levitt's Daily Calm).

From his books, I'm aware that Harris has had considerable training in Dzogchen, a Tibetan form of Buddhism. So I assume that his Waking Up meditations reflect that philosophy to a considerable degree.

I found today's guided meditation to be insightful. Nothing special or new, really. What Harris said just appealed to me.

As is common with Buddhist meditation teachers I've listened to via the Internet, Harris started off by suggesting meditating with eyes closed, then becoming aware of the breath. After a few minutes, he said something like, "If you've been captured by thought, bring your attention back to the breath."

There's nothing wrong with thinking, of course. Obviously it's an essential part of being human. However, i agree with Harris that it's the automaticity of thought which is the problem. Or, if "problem" is too strong a word, perhaps "issue" is a better term.

Thoughts do tend to repeat. (I almost added "like a broken record," but likely many people haven't experienced a scratched record playing the same part over and over, a fairly common occurrence in my record-playing youth.) 

And those repeated thoughts do have a certain automatic quality to them. It's as if the mind is stuck in a certain pattern, based on prior experiences, where habitual thoughts spring up unbidden. That wouldn't be a problem, or issue, if the thoughts were productive.

Often, though, and maybe even usually, unbidden thoughts aren't necessary or useful. They just seem to be the mind talking to itself. And since I obviously am myself (same is true of you), this inner dialogue is kind of weird.

Just imagine if our thoughts could be amplified and broadcast to people around us. Much of the time they'd view us as stangely as passers-by react to a homeless person with mental problems who is chattering away on a street corner, making very little sense.

So today Harris suggested that if we can markedly reduce the automaticity of thought, what's left are perceptions and emotions. Meaning, seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, along with the feelings that arise within us. 

This puts us into closer contact with the only reality that is known with certainty to exist: this world, this universe. We can perceive it directly, whereas there's no demonstrable evidence that supernatural realms exist anywhere but in the imagination, fantasies, and illusions of the minds of religious believers.

What about intentions, though? Aren't these necessary to perform the many actions we need to engage in each day? Brushing our teeth, going to work, cooking dinner, writing emails, and so much more. And aren't thoughts like "I've got to wash the dishes" essential for action?

Well, the way my mind works, and likely yours is similar to mine, a thoughtless intention almost always precedes an action-related thought. For example, when I write, like I am right now, an intuitive image of what I want to say comes before the words that I use to express that intention.

Thus it seems highly probable that each of us could go on a "thought diet" without losing any of the functionality of our mind/brain. While thoughts appear to be highly useful when, say, a difficult problem needs to be addressed, likely we could ditch many or most of our daily thoughts and still function just fine.

The reason being two-fold.

One, many thoughts fall into the automatic category, being repetitive habits of self-talk that serve little or no purpose. Two, often thoughts interfere with actions that we're already skilled at. This is reflected in the oft-heard sports commentary, "She's playing out of her mind."

Meaning, highly skillfully, without the distraction of unnecessary thoughts.

This is readily apparent in basketball games where the score is tied near the end of a game, and a player goes to the free throw line. When the player is loose, smiling, and joking with his teammates, it sure seems like a made free throw is more likely than when a player grits his teeth, stares fixedly at the basket, and looks like he's trying really hard. 

Life is too short to spend it unduly stressed, tense, and worried. I love to say to myself, Relax and Let go. Or, I simply relax and let go, which is even better.

Deep thoughts about a typo in my new book

I'm eager to write about a newfound typo in my recently published book, "Break Free of Dogma," for a couple of reasons. One is that this gives me another chance to plug my book, which is prominently displayed at the top of the right sidebar. 

Also, I've got some deep thoughts about the typo that I just discovered in the book. It came to light today after I gave some copies of the book to my fellow Tai Chi students.

Handing a book to Jeremy, I told him that several of the mini-chapters refer to Tai Chi, such as the last one. I turned to that page, reading aloud the mention of how our Tai Chi instructor, Warren, reacted when I wore a t-shirt with the Chinese symbol for Wu, which indicates negation or nothing.

I was shocked to see that rather than saying I wore it to my Tai Chi class on Monday and today, in the book it says boon Monday and today.

Wow. The original blog post had "on," but when I copied the post content into a Pages file, autocorrect must have changed "on" to "boon." I then proceeded to proof read the manuscript at least three times, failing to see the typo each time.

This is common in human perception.

For example, our eyes don't faithfully reflect what is out there in the world, as a mirror would. Instead, the brain actively makes predictions about what it expects to see, filling in aspects of reality in surprising ways -- such as by eliminating the blind spot with surrounding images. 

Some process in our brains interpolates the blind spot based on surrounding detail and information from the other eye, so we do not normally perceive the blind spot.

I expected to read "on, in part because I'd written the blog post that became a chapter in my book. So my brain failed to recognize the "boon" typo.

The lesson is that we can't always trust what we believe we're perceiving, because the brain often fails to show us what is really there.

A classic experiment along this line is a video of a person in a gorilla suit walking through some people passing a basketball back and forth. When an onlooker is asked to count the number of times the basketball has been passed, typically they fail to notice the "gorilla."

Expectations play a large role in perception. This is one reason I'm deeply skeptical about tales of mystical experiences. Almost always these reflect whatever religious teaching the person embraces. Muslims rarely, if ever, have a vision of Jesus, but Christians do.

Likewise, followers of a guru will claim they had a vision of him or her, not a vision of the Buddha or Krishna.

Thus almost certainly mystical visions are produced by the mind of the person having the vision, since otherwise we'd have to accept that a supernatural realm is populated with every conceivable religious entity that has appeared to devotees of the thousands of world religions.

I came to recognize the typo in my book. But most religious believers never realize that they are creating their own inaccurate images of their chosen faith. 

So just as it makes sense to have several people proofread a book, something I chose not to do, claims of a mystical vision need to be examined extremely closely and skeptically, since chances are that vision has been fashioned by a human mind, not an actual divinity.

If God is beyond thought and language, then shut up if you're religious

I'd like to rephrase in a more blunt fashion what I quoted Donald Hoffman as saying in yesterday's blog post. Here's Hoffman.

If a system of thought, religious or otherwise, offers a claim that it wants taken seriously, then we should examine it with our best method of inquiry -- the scientific method. That is taking it seriously.

Some topics -- such as God, the good, reality, and consciousness -- have been claimed to transcend the limited scope of human concepts and thus the methods of science. I have no quarrel with someone who claims this and then, being consistent, says no more about these topics.

But if one does say more, then "What can be said at all can be said clearly" and probed with the scientific method.

And here's my blunter rephrasing:

If you believe that God, or anything else supernatural, is so ineffable it's beyond thought and language, then, please, shut the fuck up and don't say anything to the rest of us about what can't be talked about.

On the other hand, if God, or anything else supernatural, can indeed be discussed in thought and language, then be prepared for some damn tough questions about what evidence you have for your belief.

Do you get it, religious believers? You can't have it both ways.

Meaning, you can't blather on about God, soul, spirit, karma, heaven, astral regions, mystical powers, or any other sort of supernatural shit if you claim that all this stuff lies beyond the domain of human concepts, thoughts, and language.

Just be silent. Keep your ineffable experience to yourself.

Because believe me, there's nothing more boring than to have someone drone on about their supposed experience of God or something else divine, then have that person respond with "It was a personal experience" when asked to provide evidence of its existence.

Guess what?

Everything anyone experiences is personal. There's no such thing as an impersonal experience. But it's possible to talk about personal experiences when what's been experienced exists in a realm of shared reality. 

For example, yesterday my wife and I went on a bike ride at Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon with my daughter and granddaughter that involved stopping for a photograph in front of Black Butte. You don't have to take my word for it. Here's a photo. (I don't like to smile much, or at all, in photos because I don't like my smile.)

But no one really knows what my experience of the bike ride that included a stop to feed carrots to horses grazing in the Big Meadown was like. Yet obviously I don't go around claiming that everyone should do what I just did, and have the same experience that I did.

So why do religious believers talk endlessly about how everyone should love Jesus, follow the teachings of Muhammed, embrace a living guru, or whatever? I have much more evidence to support my experience of Black Butte Ranch than any believer has about a supposed supernatural experience.

The difference between us is that I know that my experience was of a genuine reality, so I feel no need to try to convince others that what I experienced was real. On the other hand, religious believers like to blab on, and on, and on about things that there is no evidence for -- except in their own minds.

This is why they should shut their mouths unless they're prepared to present persuasive evidence that what they experienced is true. Please, don't bore those of us who like to exist in reality with your fantasies. Look, I'm fine with fantasies, so long as they are acknowledged as such.

That's what every book of fiction is: a fantasy of the author's mind. Ditto for every movie other than documentaries, or every piece of art that isn't a photograph. I have no problem with people sharing supposed supernatural experiences if they admit that there's no reason for anyone else to believe that the experience was of something objectively real.

But as Hoffman said, once you claim to be able to express your religious experience of a supernatural reality in words or concepts, be prepared to have skeptics like me try to tear apart your arguments. Reality is too precious to be diminished to someone's personal fantasy.

Science is our best method of knowing reality

Here's a basic fact: science is well-suited to understanding the nature of reality.

Religion, on the other hand, is a very poor way of knowing reality. So religious belief must bow down to the scientific method if a believer makes a claim about God, soul, spirit, heaven, life after death, or some other supernatural subject. 

Below are excerpts from a book that I've finished reading, "The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes." In a concluding chapter, Donald Hoffman, the author, makes some great points about the primacy of science in separating fact from fiction. 

Because we humans are prone to so many perception and thinking errors, science uses debate, arguments, and reason to distinguish flimsy dogma from solid truth. 

I especially liked how Hoffman demolishes the viewpoint that because some aspect of reality supposedly is beyond the bounds of language and concepts, beliefs about this ineffable something-or-other have to be accepted by other people. Wrong. If something is outside of language, nothing can be said about it.

Including "this is true." Meaning, if someone claims to have experienced the ineffable existence of God, they should say nothing, because there's nothing that can be said about God. 

On the other hand, if this person wants their belief to be adopted by others, then they've entered into the realm of science. Present your arguments for the existence of God. Show us your evidence for God's existence. Engage in debates with people who disagree with you. Refute arguments for the non-existence of God.

Here's the excerpts from the "Community" chapter of The Case Against Reality.

Science, like philosophy and religious practice, is a human endeavor. It is not infallible.

Each of the many attempts to demarcate, from first principles, science from pseuodscience remains, at best, controversial. What science offers is not gold-standard beliefs, but a potent method for winnowing beliefs that derives its power from the way it engages with human nature.

We are a species that argues.

Experiments show, and evolutionary theory explains, that we reason best when we argue for an idea that we already believe, or against the idea of another that we disbelieve. We did not evolve our ability to reason in order to pursue the truth. We evolved it as a tool of social persuasion. 

As a result, our reasoning is plagued with foibles, such as a bias toward information that supports what we already believe. The scientific method exploits all of this.

Each scientist argues for her idea, and against contradictory ideas of other scientists. In this argumentative context, our reason is at its sharpest: each idea garners the best support of reason and evidence its proponents can muster, and each endures the best impalement by reason and evidence its detractors can counter.

Add to this sharpening of reason the demand that ideas be precise -- mathematically precise, when possible -- and the phoenix of science arises from foibles of human nature.

Science is not a theory of reality, but a method of inquiry.

It orchestrates the better angels of our nature to promote reason, precision, productive dialog, and an appeal to evidence. It curbs our proclivity for the vague, deceptive, dogmatic, and imperious. Inquiry into any question that captures the human imagination -- including meaning, purpose, values, beauty, and spirituality -- deserves no less than the full benefit of this orchestration.

Why not deny our best chance to better understand?

...If a system of thought, religious or otherwise, offers a claim that it wants taken seriously, then we should examine it with our best method of inquiry -- the scientific method. That is taking it seriously.

Some topics -- such as God, the good, reality, and consciousness -- have been claimed to transcend the limited scope of human concepts and thus the methods of science. I have no quarrel with someone who claims this and then, being consistent, says no more about these topics.

But if one does say more, then "What can be said at all can be said clearly" and probed with the scientific method.

Can science describe who we are? I think so, in the sense that we can, by the scientific method, evolve and refine theories of who we are. But if science cannot describe who we are, then imprecise natural languages such as English certainly cannot describe who we are.

We have no better means of crafting explanations than the scientific method. An explanation that descended from on high, but could not be tested and debated, would be no explanation at all.

Let's take a break from "message board" commenting

As I've noted before, and surely will note again, I try to strike a balance in my comment moderating between keeping comments on-topic (of the blog post they're associated with) and free-floating comment conversations, which sometimes veer into "message board" sorts of frequent back-and-forth talk.

Things have gone too far in the message board direction, with an excessive amount of personal attacks, insults, and such. So if someone's comment hasn't been approved today, don't take it personally. This is just my way of bringing back an added dose of civility, respect, and relevance in comments.

I just added a new Open Thread post where comment standards are less strict. So please keep "message board" sorts of interactions there, and personal insults to a minimum. If your argument depends on calling someone else an insulting name, consider whether you even have a reasonable argument.

Open Thread 23 (free speech for comments)

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 devoid of substantive content are an exception.

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.

Reality is here and now, not there and then

If we aren't in touch with the reality of what is actually present before us, right here and now, there's little point in conjecturing about what might be, there and then.

This is my main problem with religiosity.

Like a magician, religions do their best to distract our attention from what is really going on, so they can astound us with supposed miracles: A rabbit popped out of a hat! A woman was cut in two! is similar in kind to God so loved the world he sacrificed his only begotten son! and Heaven awaits those who have faith!

Atheists like me have seen through the trickery.

We're no longer willing to play the God Game. We have no patience with those who promise salvation after death. We recognize the con job being promulgated by religious leaders who lust after money and power while hypocritically preaching worldly detachment and humility.

Today I went on a bike ride with my daughter and granddaughter at a resort in central Oregon, Black Butte Ranch. Near the end of the ride we pedaled across the Big Meadow, which is both big and a meadow. 

You won't find truth like that in any religion. 

A fenced area adjacent to the bike/pedestrian path contained a bunch of horses and their foals. Some of them came to the fence to be fed, either with grass or tastier morsels. A woman had planned ahead and brought a bag of baby carrots. She kindly gave some to my granddaughter. Which ended up in the mouth of a horse. That was real. Very real. I saw it happen. 

You won't find truth like that in any religion.

Look, I've done more than my fair share of theorizing, philosophizing, and fantasizing about what might lie beyond this physical world. It was fun, and I still enjoy dipping my toe into this sort of maybe, could be, perhaps. 

But my passion is this world, this time, this place. Hopefully those who read these words are similarly immersed in the reality of here and now. That's the treasure which keeps on giving, not supernatural dreams.

Here's a few photos of what I experienced today.

My daughter, in black, and my granddaughter, in grey. Plus a horse in light brown.

The horse enjoying a baby carrot.

A foal lying in the grass.

Two other foals either playing dead, or taking a nap in the warm summer sun. 

"The Case Against Reality" seems more right than wrong

It's rare that I find it difficult to put down a non-fiction book because I'm so eager to read the final chapters and grasp the author's concluding arguments.

Such was the case, though, with The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes, by Donald Hoffman. I hadn't planned to spend so much time reading the book this morning, but I carried on until I'd read all but a technical appendix.

Hoffman's Big Idea is this: evolution selects for fitness, not truth. If a living organism perceives reality well enough to be able to pass on its genes, that's what evolution is all about. Or at least, mostly about. In shorthand, FBT, Fitness Beats Truth.

Another acronym Hoffman uses a lot is ITP, the Interface Theory of Perception. Here's a paragraph that encapsulates key ideas in the book.

Perception is not about truth. It's about having kids. Genes that fashion perceptions that help us raise kids are genes that may win the fitness game and elbow their way into the next generation. The FBT Theorem tells us that winning genes do not code for perceiving truth.

ITP tells us that they code instead for an interface that hides the truth about objective reality and provides us with icons -- physical objects with colors, textures, shapes, motions, and smells -- that allow us to manipulate that unseen reality in just the ways we need to survive and reproduce. 

Physical objects in spacetime are simply our icons in our desktop.

This Big Idea strikes me as being more right than wrong. Which means that I agree with most of what Hoffman says in his engrossing book.

Still, a Publisher's Weekly review had some key words that reflect how I see The Case Against Reality. "Intriguing but overreaching treatise."

I'm a believer in objective reality. So I resonated with Hoffman's contention in all but the final chapter that objective reality exists. For example, he writes:

According to the FBT Theorem, if selection shapes perceptions, then perceptions guide useful behaviors rather than report objective truths about an independent world. Something exists independent of us, but that something doesn't match our perceptions. This feels difficult to understand because of our penchant to reify our interface. 

Hoffman notes that a Maserati certainly seems real. It can be seen, and touched with eyes closed. However, Hoffman says:

It proves nothing. It suggests, but does not prove, that there is something objective. But that something could be wildly different from anything you perceive. 

When you open your eyes, you interact with that unknown something and create a visual icon of a Maserati. When you close your eyes and reach out your hand, you create a tactile icon. The same is true for all the other senses.

OK, that seems reasonable.

There's an objective reality, but all sentient beings perceive it differently. We humans view reality in one fashion, while other species view it quite differently. An ant, bat, dolphin, and eagle all have their own way of looking upon the world, as would, almost certainly, aliens from a galaxy far, far away.

I certainly agree that there is no one way, or preferred way, to perceive reality. Evolution has led each species here on Earth to possess different reality interfaces, in Hoffman's language. So the icons that populate these interfaces also are going to be unique.

No two people perceive the world in exactly the same way, and certainly no two species do. Hoffman appears to be on solid ground when he says this in his Preface:

The purpose of a desktop interface is not to show you the "truth" of the computer -- where "truth," in this metaphor, refers to circuits, voltages, and layers of software.

Rather, the purpose of an interface is to hide the "truth" and to show simple graphics that help you perform useful tasks such as crafting emails and editing photos. If you had to toggle voltages to craft an email, your friends would never hear from you.

That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enough to raise offspring. Space, as you perceive it when you look around, is just your desktop -- a 3D desktop. Apples, snakes, and other physical objects are simply icons in your 3D desktop.

Those icons are useful, in part, because they hide the complex truth about objective reality. Your senses have evolved to give you what you need. You may want truth, but you don't need truth. Peceiving truth would drive our species extinct. You need simple icons that show you how to act to stay alive.

Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.

However, Hoffman casts independently existing objective reality aside in his final chapter. I found this intellectually dubious. He spends nine chapters arguing that evolution has fashioned interfaces for determining what is useful for us, fitness-wise. So what we perceive is objective reality filtered through both a species-specific interface and our personal interface.

(A blind person, for example, has a decidedly different interface than a sighted person.)

Then, in chapter 10, Hoffman casts objective reality aside. Or at least, objective reality that is independent of conscious agents. He writes:

"But," you might object, "didn't you earlier define 'objective reality' as that which exists when no one observes? And don't conscious experiences exist only when some agent observes? Haven't you contradicted yourself when you propose conscious realism, and claim that objective reality consists of conscious agents?"

Indeed, for sake of argument, I adopted a notion of objective reality that is accepted by most physicalists. Then I used evolutionary assumptions that are also accepted by most physicalists to make the case against physicalism and its notion of objective reality.

Now that I have presented that case, I am proposing a new ontology, and with it a new notion of objective reality in which conscious agents, with their experiences and structures, are central.

Well, I think his original ontology was stronger. Somehow Hoffman ends up arguing that "Objects, shapes, space, and time reside in consciousness. If the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated." 

That's a huge argument to make in the concluding pages of a book where Hoffman argued quite differently up to that point. Understand: he isn't saying that living creatures perceive space and time from their own unique evolutionary perspective. Rather, he claims that there is no such thing as space and time absent a conscious observer.

He may be right. Perhaps the universe was just sitting there doing nothing for billions of years after the big bang, waiting for conscious observers to bring it into being.

But how did conscious observers come to exist if there was no space and time for evolution to work its magic? This strikes me as a major flaw in Hoffman's replacement ontology. His final two paragraphs sound way too New Age'y for my tastes.

What is spacetime? This book has offered you the red pill. Spacetime is your virtual reality, a headset of your own making. The objects you see are your invention. You create them with a glance and destroy them with a blink.

You have worn this headset all your life. What happens if you take it off?

That said, I still hugely enjoyed his book. Again, it seems much more right than wrong. Check out his TED talk, and I think you'll agree.

More evidence of Hindu nationalism in India

It's amusing how some commenters on a recent blog post where I shared an opinion piece about India trampling on the rights of people in Kashmir (who are mostly Muslim) are claiming that Hindu nationalism is "fake news." 

Actually, Hindu nationalism is real, and dangerous in the same way that Christian nationalism in the United States is. For more evidence, here's a New York Times story, "India Plans Big Detention Camps for Migrants. Muslims Are Afraid." Excerpts:

NEW DELHI — More than four million people in India, mostly Muslims, are at risk of being declared foreign migrants as the government pushes a hard-line Hindu nationalist agenda that has challenged the country’s pluralist traditions and aims to redefine what it means to be Indian.

The hunt for migrants is unfolding in Assam, a poor, hilly state near the borders with Myanmar and Bangladesh. Many of the people whose citizenship is now being questioned were born in India and have enjoyed all the rights of citizens, such as voting in elections.

...But the governing party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not backing down. Instead, it is vowing to bring this campaign to force people to prove they are citizens to other parts of India, part of a far-reaching Hindu nationalist program fueled by Mr. Modi’s sweeping re-election victory in May and his stratospheric popularity.

...Among Mr. Modi’s critics, events in Assam and Kashmir are Exhibits A and B in their conviction that the prime minister is using the early months of his second term to push the most forceful and divisive Hindu nationalist agenda ever attempted in India and to fundamentally reconfigure the concept of Indian identity to be synonymous with being Hindu.

Many Indians, on both sides of the political divide, see Assam and Kashmir as harbingers of the direction Mr. Modi will take this nation of 1.3 billion people in the coming years.