Church of the Churchless

RSSB guru makes light of wife-beating and sexual assault

It amuses me, along with disturbing me, when devotees of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an organization with headquarters in India, excuse Dhillon's bad behavior by saying "At least he hasn't been convicted of a crime."

Well, that's a pretty low bar for a guru who is considered by the RSSB teachings to be God in Human Form, possessing divine powers. One would expect that a guru who is supposedly so exalted would behave at least as well as a decent ordinary person would.

But as you can read below in a comment on a recent blog post by Simmi, the RSSB guru advised a woman complaining her husband beat her and sexually assaulted her daughter to "compromise" with him.

That's abhorrent. It's disgusting. Horrible advice. 

And this isn't the first time the RSSB guru has been accused of making light of sexual abuse. I wrote about another instance in Gurinder Singh Dhillon ignores sexual abuse of a child. Here's an excerpt from what the person who observed this instance said to me.

What BBJ [Baba Ji, Gurinder Singh Dhillon] did was not only heartless and ignorant. It was a crime and advice of the worst sort; as any mental health professional will tell you pedophiles do not quit. Pedophilia is a psychiatric compulsion with an almost non-existent rate of “cure”.

 

This is only one example of the many instances of disastrous advice BBJ is always anxious to espouse.

 

At least Huzur [Charan Singh, the previous RSSB guru] had the humility to preface the common sense advice he’d reluctantly give when asked, with the declaration that he himself was no expert in family matters and can be heard on audio tape admitting to be a poor example of a husband and parent.  

 

BBJ however fancies himself an expert in all things, above the law of man and blithely gives the most jaw-dropping and disastrous advice imaginable. The fact is BBJ's “advice” has caused satsangis I know personally the most painful consequences imaginable.

 

Here's the comment from Simmi. I fixed some typos and included definitions of a few words in brackets.

That is really funny thing about mix marriages. I got married with my husband. He was very much into this organisation. GSD [Gurinder Singh Dhillon] was like his God. I remember to support him.

l used to go with him to so called satsang [spiritual meeting] on Tuesday evening and Sundays morning, also so called Seva [volunteer service] regularly. All the preachers used to emphasise on how lucky we were that we got GSD and he is GIHF [God in Human Form].

I was very impressed initially and started believing in it...got initiated. Whenever GSD used to come, it was like OMG, l found the God. Many years l followed his meditation with my husband. Our life was just like around RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas] people. No social and always talk about GSD and how lucky we were, and everything happening in our life because of GSD.

One day in his satsang, one lady asked him that her husband used to beat her up and did wrong with her daughter. Instead of telling her to go to police and leave him GSD said it is all karma. You should talk with your husband and make compromise. I was shocked. How can he give this advice to a mum whose daughter was sexually assaulted

After this l started to see my life more closely and took my RSSB glasses off. l realised RSSB is a big cult and my husband and l was this Cult member. We were cut off from a normal life and wasted many years. I spoke with my husband and said l don't mind if he wanted to continue but l refused to follow GSD any more.

After all this, many other GSD frauds came in the light and my husband also realised that how big cult RSSB is. He also gave up eventually. He was in depression for few years that he wasted best years of his life behind this organisation.

It's been 5 years now..we studied more our birth religion Sikhism and found Sikhism is a real and first Sant Mat [path of the saints] as Sri Guru Granth Sahib has teaching of many saints. We are not very religious but we do our meditation as per Sikhism teachings.

We are very happy now and living a normal life. Whoever is in RSSB, this is the time. Come out ASAP. It is a very big Cult and you are wasting your life. Smell the coffee.

If art is separate from an artist, is a guru separate from their message?

In a recent issue of TIME magazine (May 8/May 15, 2023) there was an interesting story by Stephanie Zacharek, "What Lies Beneath: Grappling with how to approach great works of art by bad men in the book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma."

It got me to thinking about a roughly parallel question in the realm of religion and spirituality. Can the message of a guru be separated from how they behave as a person? Before I describe how I see this question, here's how the TIME story starts out.

You, me, and everyone we know: whether you're aware of it or not, you're in a relationship with a monster. 

There is surely some artist whose behavior, known to you or otherwise, is scurrilous, reprehensible, possibly worthy of life imprisonment -- and yet you continue to love the work of that artist, defiantly, secretly, or in ignorant bliss.

More often than not, it's brilliant men who get a pass when it comes to how they behave in everyday life. And so, when it comes to laying blame for these conflicts that roil inside us -- can I still watch Woody Allen's Annie Hall and not feel dirty? Is it wrong to feel a frisson of joy as I gaze at the aggressive angles of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon? -- the bottom line is that it's men's fault. Why do they have to spoil everything?

And yet -- with her exhilarating book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, essayist and critic Claire Dederer holds a small lantern aloft in the darkness. Is it possible to ever separate the art from the artist? And if not, is it possible to find the sweet spot between our rage and our rapture?

Those are just some of the questions Dederer both raises and responds to in Monsters, though this isn't so much a book of solutions as it is an examination of how we approach the art we love. Because the more deeply we engage with art, the more troubled we're likely to be over the sins of the people who make it.

In my case, I find it easy to separate an artist from his art.

But I realize this may be more difficult for women, since often a male artist gets into trouble for sexual misbehaving. I can't recall what Kevin Spacey did (sex with an underage male?) that led him to be ostracized by Hollywood, but whatever it was, my enjoyment of him in the House of Cards series is undiminished. 

When we enter the realm of religion, though, it becomes much more difficult to separate the messenger from his message. If a priest is sexually abusing an altar boy, almost everybody would say that no matter how good a priest he is, he needs to be dismissed from the Catholic Church and criminally charged.

Because for 35 years I was a member of an India-based religious organization -- Radha Soami Satsang Beas -- headed up by a guru, I find the messenger vs. message thing most interesting when it comes to a guru who, according to the RSSB teachings, is viewed as God in Human Form.

The current RSSB guru is Gurinder Singh Dhillon. He's been accused of making death threats and is deeply embroiled in a large-scale financial fraud mess involving his relatives, Malvinder and Shivinder Singh. Dhillon also has done other things that are, at the least, questionable for anyone believed to be Godly, if not a manifestation of God.

Yet Dhillon is a charismatic speaker and a beloved spiritual guide to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of RSSB followers. So in this case, is it possible to separate Dhillon's religious artistry from his worldly behavior?

I think not. Here's why.

An actor is distinct from the roles he plays. A painter is distinct from the paintings he creates. But a guru who acts in a way that's contrary to the message of his teaching -- this strikes me as a different situation.

For while in Christianity it is accepted that all are sinners before God, clergy included, so failings are to be expected, in RSSB, as in other guru-centered faiths, the guru is considered to be the living embodiment of the teachings. Meaning, if the guru is deeply flawed, so is his message.

This helps explain why so many devotees of Radha Soami Satsang Beas go to great lengths to deny that the RSSB guru has done anything wrong, even though much evidence points in that direction. For if Gurinder Singh Dhillon isn't living in accord with the RSSB teachings, this strikes a serious blow at the validity of those teachings.

A RSSB initiate expresses some concerns

Below is a message I got yesterday from someone who is a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization with headquarters in India that's led by a guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, which this person refers to as Baba ji. Darshan refers to being in the presence of the guru.

(I belonged to RSSB for thirty-five years, before I broke away from the group.)

The message describes concerns this person has about RSSB and the guru. They end with a request that I share my thoughts about what they said, which I'll do after the message. They also say that they'd like to hear from other like-minded people.

So leave a comment on this post if you want to share some thoughts with this person. Here's what they had to say, followed by my observations.

I have read your blogs about RSSB and I can relate myself to parts of it. I'm an initiate and have been attending satsangs. My concerns are:

 

-- Why two and a half hours of  meditation a day? It is not practical. If you are in a job and you do it continuously, day in and day out. you are not getting enough sleep and it eventually catches up on you. 

 

-- Daiichi vs. Singh brothers. Article comes on RSSB official website and goes off quickly. Was it a decision taken in panic?

 

-- Daiichi vs. Singh brothers. YouTube link to "Fortis tycoon steps down to walk down on the road of spiritualism". It was news that ran on India's mainstream media 7 years ago. Was it part of the financial deal?

 

--  Frequent visits by India's high profile politicians including the prime minister. I am trying to establish the motive. We all have our secrets.

 

-- What is the succession process of masters? Is it at the death of a master or earlier? Looking at the previous line of masters. Nepotism maybe?

 

-- Baba ji is all about simple living. He has had the same pair of trainers for a few years. Well not, when it comes to expensive cars, a charter plane and the helicopter. I am not aware of the other centres, but I know of 2 which have fully furnished houses exclusively for baba ji for his visits. You can imagine the bill if all centres around the world have this arrangement.

 

-- I can't comment on the charitable expenditure of RSSB. But there are a rising number of new centers lately both in India and overseas. Of course, it is creating more sewa opportunities?

 

-- Baba ji's satsang sessions are more like counseling sessions. Replies are standard, not going into details. Q & A sessions, I wonder why no one has raised the question of personal wealth yet. (Quite honestly, I'd be intimidated asking that myself.)

 

When I got initiated, I used to feel special and thought I am set for life. Just do my bit everyday and I will come out stronger and better. Whenever I had a chance to do darshan, I was thinking he could see my soul and was able to hear my prayers.

 

But that's all changed now. I feel that I am not special but just an ordinary, back to square one with no direction.

 

Thanks for listening and your thoughts please. I would like to hear from like minded people as well.

 

I agree with you about the vow to do 2 1/2 hours of meditation a day. Few RSSB initiates do this much meditation. It's a vow that is broken by almost everybody, likely including the guru himself. The RSSB guru who initiated me in 1971, Charan Singh, said that ten minutes of concentrated meditation is better than hours of distracted meditation. So I wouldn't worry about the quantity of meditation, just the quality.

 

Yes, the RSSB website did have links to articles about the guru and the Singh brothers' financial problems. The links were deleted in 2019. I wrote a blog post about this: RSSB deletes financial fraud stories from website. 

 

In 2018 I wrote a post, Gurinder Singh's billionaire nephew rumored to succeed him as RSSB guru. But in 2019 I wrote a post, Shivinder Singh lied about becoming a full-time RSSB sevadar [volunteer]. It does seem that Shivinder did this to get out of contempt proceedings.

 

I don't know much about politics in the Punjab. I suspect politicians like to visit Gurinder Singh because this helps them get votes from RSSB initiates, along with the guru's political support.

 

It is indeed strange that out of the billions of people in the world, the successor to a RSSB guru sometimes is a relative of the previous guru. Like you said, this looks like nepotism. 

 

Gurinder Singh does have a taste for the good life. Well, more than a taste. A full-blown diet. 

 

Back in Charan Singh's time as RSSB guru, he expressed no interest in building overseas centers, saying that meditation should be our main concern. Gurinder Singh changed that as you said, building expensive centers all over the world.

 

If Gurinder Singh is acting as a counselor, sometimes he does a poor job of offering advice. I wrote about one example of this in Why a guru shouldn't give mental health advice. There are other examples.

 

I think it's great that you're asking such good questions. I also really liked your statement that now you feel ordinary, not special. That's a sign of genuine spiritual progress. I say that as someone who also no longer feels religiously special -- though  I admit that I'm pleased and proud about my non-specialness, which shows that I have a ways to go before I feel truly ordinary. 

 

Truth-Default Theory explains a lot about religious belief and disbelief

A friend gave me his unread copy of Malcom Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know.

Since I'd heard of some of Gladwell's other books, like Blink and The Tipping Point, but not this one, I started reading Talking to Strangers with fairly low expectations. 

I was wrong. I ended up being fascinated by the book.

It's full of examples of people being fooled by other people who were lying, even though there was considerable evidence about the deception being foisted on them.

So Gladwell delves into the reasons why Neville Chamberlain was fooled by Adolf Hitler; why the CIA was fooled by a Cuban spy, Ana Montes, who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency; why sophisticated investors were fooled by Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme; why college officials were fooled by Jerry Sandusky, a molester of students.

In each of these cases there were ample warning signs that something wasn't right with how someone was acting. But those warnings were mostly ignored. Why?

Largely because of the dynamics of Truth-Default Theory. Gladwell writes:

We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest. 

...To snap out of truth-default mode requires what Levine calls a "trigger." A trigger is not the same as a suspicion, or the first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive.

We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion.

We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.

This proposition sounds at first like the kind of hairsplitting that social scientists love to engage in. It is not. It's a profound point that explains a lot of otherwise puzzling behavior. 

...You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't have enough doubts about them.

I'm going to come back to the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts, because I think it's crucial. Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar.

You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that's the wrong way to think about the problem.

The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren't, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.

We default to truth because we humans are highly social animals.

Homo sapiens wasn't the strongest species in the beginning of our evolutionary history (nor are we today, absent our technology). A saber-toothed tiger could tear us limb from limb. However, early humans were able to band together into cohesive groups. Together, we could accomplish much that an isolated individual couldn't.

That drive to be social, which is still very much with us, required trust. If humans had an innate propensity to doubt other people, it would be very difficult for us to form lasting groups: a tribe, a nation, a society, a sports team, a political party.

And yes, a religion. 

Religions benefit from Truth-Default Theory. When someone hears about a religious teaching from another person that they trust, they're inclined to accept it as being true. Jesus loves you. He died for your sins. Believe in Jesus and you will enjoy eternal life in heaven.

As someone learns more about their chosen religion, likely they won't believe everything about the faith that they've embraced. But as Gladwell noted, those doubts aren't going to make someone become an unbeliever in their religion, since they don't have enough doubts to do that. 

Until, they do. Then they probably will deconvert from the religion.

This describes my religious trajectory. Even though in college I was fooled by a crazed Greek Yoga teacher with a Christananda ashram who thought Jesus was talking to him, that experience of being disillusioned by a spiritual "guru" didn't stop me from jumping right into the religious arms of another guru soon after I escaped the grasp of the Greek guy.

I talked about this in "My strange RSSB initiation story." The beginning of that 2008 post has clear echoes of Truth-Default Theory.

A few days ago I talked about how I came to have doubts about the guru-centered faith, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that I followed diligently for over thirty years.

One of the commenters on that post asked a question about why I was so gullible in accepting teachings that, in retrospect, seemed so unlikely to be true.

I responded that all of us believe things which we're mistaken about. Discarding worn-out beliefs and accepting new ones is part of life's maturation process. I also said that to attempt to answer that question I'd need to tell the tale of how I came to be initiated into the RSSB fold.

This is a strange story. I don't think I've ever shared it on the Internet, though I've told it verbally quite a few times.

ChatGPT speaks about oneness, enlightenment, God, and chicken/egg firstness

Here's the second installment of an interchange Osho Robbins, a frequent commenter on this blog, had with ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot. The first installment is here. 

Even though I said in that first post that I'd share the rest of the chat in two additional posts, I decided to include all of the remaining chat in this second post. Because it's so long, you'll need to click on a continuation link at the bottom of this post to read the remainder of it.

This morning I shared in a post an interesting comment from Appreciative Reader, another frequent commenter on this blog, So if you want to see how a human looks upon God, in contrast to the artificial intelligence of ChatGPT, check out "People can't define God in any way they like."

Since I'm a big believer in spiritual independence, I resonated with a general sentiment that ChatGPT repeated numerous times using similar language in response to the questions asked by Robbins. Here's one example. ChatGPT speaks wisely here.

It is important to note, however, that the concept of enlightenment and the role of the perfect master may be understood differently in different spiritual traditions, and there may be different criteria for what constitutes spiritual realization and the ability to guide others on the path towards it. Ultimately, each individual must determine their own spiritual path and the guidance that is most helpful to them. 

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

since oneness is about "ONE" how can there be individual souls in oneness?

The concept of oneness can be understood in different ways depending on the spiritual or philosophical tradition in question. In some traditions, oneness may be understood as a state of unity or interconnectedness in which all beings and phenomena are ultimately one and the same, beyond all distinctions and separations. In other traditions, oneness may be understood as the ultimate reality or essence of all things, beyond all dualities and limitations.

In the context of the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the concept of oneness is often used to refer to the underlying unity and interconnectedness of all creation, including the human soul and the divine. While the ultimate reality may be understood as a state of oneness, it is also believed that individual souls exist within this oneness, and that the ultimate goal of spiritual practice is to realize this oneness while still retaining individual consciousness and awareness.

According to RSSB teachings, the human soul is believed to be a unique individual entity, capable of experiencing its own unique journey of spiritual evolution and growth. While the soul may ultimately merge with the divine and realize its oneness with all creation, it is believed that this realization does not involve the loss of individuality or consciousness, but rather a transcending of ego and separateness to achieve a state of higher awareness and unity.

In this sense, the concept of oneness in RSSB teachings does not necessarily negate the existence of individual souls, but rather suggests that individuality is ultimately part of a larger unity that includes all of creation.

it is said that "there is only the one nothing else is real"

The idea that "there is only the One and nothing else is real" is a common theme in many spiritual and philosophical traditions, including Advaita Vedanta, Taoism, and certain schools of Buddhism.

In Advaita Vedanta, the One is often understood as Brahman, the ultimate reality that underlies all creation and is identical with the true nature of the individual self (atman). The idea is that all phenomena in the world, including the individual self, are ultimately illusory or unreal in comparison to the absolute reality of Brahman.

Similarly, in Taoism, the One is understood as the Tao, the underlying reality that governs all creation and transcends all distinctions and dualities. The idea is that all phenomena in the world, including the individual self, are ultimately transitory and impermanent, and that true wisdom and fulfillment can be found by aligning oneself with the Tao and transcending attachment to the material world.

In both cases, the idea that "there is only the One and nothing else is real" suggests that the true nature of reality is beyond the limitations of language and concepts, and that ultimate reality cannot be grasped through ordinary modes of perception and understanding. Instead, it is believed that realization of the One requires a direct experience or insight that transcends the illusions and limitations of the material world.

It is worth noting, however, that interpretations of the idea of the One may vary among different traditions and individuals, and that the concept of ultimate reality or absolute truth is often approached in different ways depending on cultural, historical, and personal factors.

what does RSSB say about this

In the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the concept of oneness or unity is also central, but it is approached in a different way than some other spiritual traditions. While the ultimate reality is often referred to as the One, the emphasis is not on negating the reality of the individual self or the material world, but on recognizing the underlying unity and interconnectedness of all creation.

According to RSSB teachings, the ultimate reality is a state of consciousness that is beyond the limitations of the material world, and that can be directly experienced through meditation and spiritual practice. This state of consciousness is often referred to as Sach Khand or the Realm of Truth, and is described as a state of infinite consciousness, bliss, and love.

While the ultimate reality is believed to be beyond the limitations of the material world, it is also believed that the individual self is real and that the material world is a reflection of the ultimate reality. The goal of spiritual practice is therefore not to negate the reality of the self or the world, but to recognize their underlying unity and to align oneself with the ultimate reality through meditation, selfless service, and ethical living.

In this sense, the idea of oneness or unity in RSSB teachings is not a rejection of the individual self or the material world, but a recognition of their ultimate reality and interconnectedness with the divine.

in the ultimate state of oneness, is there time and space?

In many spiritual traditions, the ultimate state of oneness or unity is described as a state that transcends time and space. In this state, there is often said to be no separation between the individual self and the ultimate reality, and no distinctions or limitations of any kind.

For example, in Advaita Vedanta, the ultimate reality of Brahman is described as "beyond time, space, and causation," and as the underlying reality that transcends all concepts and limitations. Similarly, in certain schools of Buddhism, the ultimate reality of Nirvana is described as a state of "suchness" or "emptiness," which transcends all distinctions and dualities and is beyond time and space.

In RSSB teachings, the ultimate reality is often referred to as Sach Khand or the Realm of Truth, and is described as a state of infinite consciousness, bliss, and love. While the ultimate reality is said to be beyond time and space, it is also believed that the individual self can experience this reality through meditation and spiritual practice.

It is worth noting, however, that interpretations of the ultimate state of oneness may vary among different traditions and individuals, and that the concept of ultimate reality or absolute truth is often approached in different ways depending on cultural, historical, and personal factors.

in a state of no-time and no-space can there be individual souls and where will they exist

In a state beyond time and space, the concept of individual souls as we understand them in the context of our physical reality may not be applicable. This is because the concept of individual souls is often based on the idea of separate, distinct entities with individual identities and characteristics. In a state of ultimate oneness or unity, these distinctions may not apply.

Some spiritual traditions suggest that in the state of ultimate oneness, the individual self merges or dissolves into the ultimate reality, and that the concept of a separate individual self may become irrelevant. In this sense, the question of where individual souls exist in a state beyond time and space may not be relevant, as the concept of individual souls as separate entities may not apply in that state.

However, it's important to note that different spiritual traditions have different views on this subject, and interpretations may vary. Ultimately, the nature of the ultimate reality or state of oneness is considered beyond human comprehension and description, and it may be impossible to fully understand or describe it through language or concepts.

what does it mean to transcend the ego

Transcending the ego generally means moving beyond the limitations and illusions of the individual self, and realizing a deeper, more universal aspect of reality. In many spiritual traditions, the ego is seen as the part of the individual self that identifies with separateness, individuality, and the material world, and that is driven by desires, fears, and attachments.

To transcend the ego means to recognize that the ego is not the true self, but rather a temporary construct that can be transcended through spiritual practice and self-realization. This can involve letting go of attachments, overcoming fears and desires, and cultivating a deeper sense of connection and oneness with the world around us.

Transcending the ego can lead to a sense of inner peace, freedom, and liberation from suffering. It can also be seen as a step towards spiritual awakening and self-realization, as it allows one to connect with a deeper sense of truth and purpose beyond the limited confines of the ego.

In many spiritual traditions, practices such as meditation, self-inquiry, and mindfulness are used to cultivate awareness and move beyond the limitations of the ego.

does RSSB lead to the transcending the ego

Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) is a spiritual organization that aims to help individuals achieve spiritual growth and self-realization. One of the key teachings of RSSB is the importance of transcending the ego, as this is seen as a crucial step towards achieving spiritual liberation.

RSSB teachings suggest that the ego is a temporary construct that arises from identification with the body and the material world, and that it creates a sense of separation and isolation from the true self and the ultimate reality. According to RSSB, transcending the ego involves recognizing the illusory nature of the ego and cultivating a deeper sense of connection with the inner self, others, and the universe as a whole.

RSSB teaches that the practice of meditation is a powerful tool for transcending the ego and achieving spiritual growth. Through regular practice, meditation can help individuals cultivate inner awareness and develop a deeper understanding of the nature of the self and the universe.

Overall, while there are many different approaches to spiritual growth and self-realization, RSSB teachings suggest that transcending the ego is a key step towards achieving a deeper sense of inner peace, spiritual growth, and liberation.

paltu sahib, a famous mystic says "there is only ONE - there is no other" please explain

Paltu Sahib was a 19th-century Indian mystic and poet who is known for his spiritual teachings and poetry. One of his key teachings is the idea that there is only one ultimate reality, which is often referred to as the Divine, God, or the Ultimate Truth.

When Paltu Sahib says, "there is only ONE - there is no other," he is expressing the idea that there is only one true reality, and that everything else in the universe is a manifestation or reflection of that ultimate reality. This can be understood as a statement about the nature of existence, and the idea that all beings, objects, and phenomena are interconnected and part of a larger whole.

From this perspective, the concept of individuality and separation is seen as an illusion that arises from the limitations of human perception and understanding. The ego, or the sense of individual identity, is seen as a temporary construct that arises from the identification with the body and the material world, and that ultimately obscures the deeper truth of oneness and interconnectedness.

The idea of oneness is a common theme in many spiritual traditions, and is often associated with the idea of enlightenment or spiritual liberation. Through practices such as meditation and self-inquiry, individuals may seek to transcend the limitations of the ego and realize the deeper truth of oneness and interconnectedness that underlies all of existence.

ChatGPT speaks about the RSSB guru, Singh brothers, and RSSB teachings

Today Osho Robbins, a frequent commenter on this blog, sent me an interesting chat he had with ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that I asked about me a few days ago.

In this post I'm sharing questions Robbins asked ChatGPT about this blog, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the Singh brothers, the RSSB teachings regarding Sach Khand (heaven, basically) and life after death. The entire chat is over 6,000 words, so I'll share the rest of the chat in two additional posts.

With one exception I didn't find anything seemingly inaccurate in what ChatGPT said. Its responses were clear, well written, and included appropriate caveats about the subjectivity of religious and mystical experience. 

The only thing that surprised me was ChatGPT saying that the Singh brothers are the grandsons of Jagat Singh, "RSSB's former head." I suspect that actually the Singh brothers are the grandsons of Charan Singh, who was the RSSB guru prior to Gurinder Singh, though I've never been sure how the Singh brothers are related to Gurinder Singh.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that one of the things I like about ChatGPT is that being an artificial intelligence, it looks at the world, and reality, in a generally objective fashion. Meaning, while humans obviously created ChatGPT, and every human has subjective biases, those biases are comparatively minimal in an artificial intelligence. So, for example, when ChatGPT notes "There have also been allegations of financial impropriety and fraudulent activities involving the Singh brothers and their associates, including Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family members," that statement is based on information obtained by ChatGPT in its Internet searches, not on a malevolent motivation against the RSSB guru. 

Enjoy. Robbins' questions are in bold type and the ChatGPT responses are in regular type.

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

who is brian hines

I am not able to definitively identify any specific person named "Brian Hines" without further context. There may be many individuals with this name. Can you provide more information or context about the person you are referring to?

he has a blog called church of the churchless

Brian Hines is a blogger who runs the "Church of the Churchless" blog, which focuses on topics related to spirituality, religion, and philosophy. The blog features posts and articles that reflect Hines' perspective as a former member of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a spiritual organization based in India. Hines' writing often explores themes such as the nature of consciousness, the meaning of life, and the pursuit of truth and understanding.

who is gurinder singh dhillon

Gurinder Singh Dhillon is a spiritual leader who is the current head of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a spiritual organization based in India. The RSSB was founded in 1891 and is dedicated to the teachings of Sant Mat, a spiritual path that emphasizes meditation and the realization of the inner self. Dhillon, who was born in 1954, became the RSSB's leader in 1990, succeeding Charan Singh, who had held the position since 1951. As the RSSB's head, Dhillon oversees the organization's various activities, including its charitable work, and provides guidance and teachings to its members. He is also known for his emphasis on simplicity, humility, and personal spiritual development.

tell me about the singh brothers involvement with rssb

Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh, who are brothers, were previously involved with the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) through their family's longstanding association with the organization. The Singh brothers are the grandsons of the RSSB's former head, Jagat Singh, and are believed to be close associates of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the current RSSB head.

The Singh brothers have been involved in various business ventures and investments over the years, including their roles as executives of the pharmaceutical company Ranbaxy Laboratories, which was founded by their grandfather. In 2008, the Singh brothers sold their stake in Ranbaxy to the Japanese firm Daiichi Sankyo, but in 2014, they were accused of misleading Daiichi Sankyo about Ranbaxy's regulatory compliance issues. The dispute resulted in a legal settlement in 2016, and the Singh brothers were ordered to pay Daiichi Sankyo $500 million.

There have also been allegations of financial impropriety and fraudulent activities involving the Singh brothers and their associates, including Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family members. These allegations are the subject of ongoing legal proceedings in India, and the Singh brothers and others have denied any wrongdoing. It is important to note that these legal proceedings are separate from the activities and teachings of the RSSB, and do not necessarily reflect on the organization itself or its members.

why are the singh brothers in jail

As of my knowledge cutoff date of September 2021, Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh, the Singh brothers, were facing legal charges and had been arrested by Indian authorities in connection with allegations of financial fraud and misappropriation of funds. The charges were related to their involvement with various business ventures, including the pharmaceutical company Ranbaxy Laboratories and financial services firm Religare Enterprises.

The Singh brothers were accused of diverting funds from Religare Enterprises and using them to repay loans, invest in other companies, and enrich themselves and their associates. The allegations also involved Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family members, who were accused of receiving funds from the Singh brothers through shell companies.

The case has been ongoing for several years, and there have been multiple investigations and legal proceedings involving various parties. The Singh brothers and their associates have denied any wrongdoing, and the case remains subject to ongoing legal proceedings in India. It is important to note that these legal proceedings are separate from the activities and teachings of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), with which the Singh brothers and their family have been associated.

is gurinder singh dhillon a good person and a genuine perfect master

The question of whether Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the current head of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is a good person and a genuine perfect master is a matter of personal belief and interpretation.

In the teachings of RSSB, a perfect master is considered to be a spiritual guide or teacher who has attained a high level of spiritual realization and can help others on the path towards enlightenment. The qualities of a perfect master are described as compassion, wisdom, humility, and a deep connection to the divine.

Many followers of RSSB believe that Gurinder Singh Dhillon embodies these qualities and is a genuine perfect master who can provide guidance and support on the spiritual path. However, there have also been allegations of financial impropriety and other controversies involving Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family members, and these issues have led to criticism and scrutiny from some individuals and groups.

Ultimately, whether Gurinder Singh Dhillon is considered to be a good person and a genuine perfect master is a matter of individual belief and interpretation, and there may be different opinions on the matter among RSSB followers and others.

Are there really inner regions like sach khand 

In the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), there is a belief in the existence of inner spiritual regions, including Sach Khand, which is considered to be the highest spiritual realm. These inner regions are believed to be accessed through a process of meditation and inner transformation, and are said to be populated by various spiritual beings and entities.

Ultimately, whether or not it is possible to achieve permanent residence in Sach Khand or to transcend the cycle of birth and death is a matter of personal belief and interpretation, and may vary among different individuals and traditions.

It is worth noting that while the experiences and teachings associated with the inner regions may be deeply meaningful and transformative for many people, they are not necessarily subject to empirical verification or scientific proof. As such, they are often regarded as matters of faith or personal experience, rather than objective fact.

who is alakh agam and anami

In the spiritual teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Alakh, Agam, and Anami are three terms used to refer to different spiritual realms or regions that are believed to exist beyond the physical world.

Alakh means "beyond the visible" or "invisible," and refers to a spiritual realm that is beyond the reach of the senses or the mind. Agam means "beyond the reach" or "inaccessible," and refers to a spiritual realm that is beyond the realm of human experience or understanding. Anami means "nameless" or "formless," and refers to a spiritual realm that is beyond all distinctions and categories, including those of form, name, or experience.

Together, these three terms represent a progression of spiritual realization or attainment, with Alakh representing the first stage of transcending the physical realm, Agam representing a deeper level of spiritual realization, and Anami representing the ultimate realization of the divine, beyond all names and forms.

These terms are used in the context of the RSSB teachings to convey the idea that there are levels of spiritual reality that are beyond the physical world and can be accessed through the practice of meditation and inner transformation.

it is possible to transcend death and live forever in sach khand

In the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), it is believed that the ultimate goal of spiritual practice is to achieve liberation from the cycle of birth and death, and to attain permanent residence in Sach Khand, the highest spiritual realm.

According to RSSB teachings, the human soul is eternal and exists beyond the physical body. By practicing meditation and following the path of inner transformation, it is believed that the soul can gradually detach itself from the material world and achieve union with the divine, ultimately reaching Sach Khand and achieving liberation from the cycle of birth and death.

While the idea of transcending death and achieving immortality is a common theme in many spiritual traditions, including RSSB, it is important to note that the nature of this immortality is often described in metaphorical or symbolic terms, and may not necessarily be understood as a literal physical state. The attainment of Sach Khand is often described as a state of oneness with the divine, beyond all distinctions and limitations, and may be experienced as a state of bliss, love, or awareness.

Ultimately, whether or not it is possible to achieve permanent residence in Sach Khand or to transcend the cycle of birth and death is a matter of personal belief and interpretation, and may vary among different individuals and traditions.

Great questions to ask of Gurinder Singh, the RSSB guru

Here in the United States, candidates for a high political office typically have to answer many questions from citizens and journalists. The background of the candidate is looked into. The sources of their income are divulged. They're asked their opinion on important policy issues.

This is as it should be. A person who wants to occupy a high-ranking position needs to show that they deserve the public trust before asking citizens to vote for them in an election. That's how democracy works.

But when it comes to a person seeking initiation from the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a religious organization based in India, it is very difficult to get answers about the personal life of the guru, who currently is Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

That bothers someone who recently sent me questions that they think should be asked and answered by the guru. Here's what they said. I corrected some typos and translated a few words in an Indian language that would be unfamiliar to most readers. The Dera is the RSSB headquarters in India.

Brian, I've been wondering about a subject for many days: that there should be a dialogue between the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) guru and potential disciple from both sides and not from one side only.

For example, at the time of applying for initiation in India, questions are asked from only the guru's side. If the applicant has any questions, he does not have any solid means of knowing the answers, while every potential disciple wants to know the complete information about his future Guru.

Most of the time information regarding the RSSB guru is being denied by the Dera authority on the basis that the personal information of the guru could not be revealed.

Whenever a person goes to the Dera to apply for initiation, some questions are asked of that person. Like, when did he give up meat, fish and eggs; do you smoke or use alcohol; how many talks given by the guru have you attended; what is your education qualification; what work do you do; how much money do you earn; are you married; why do you want to get initiated; is there any other devotee in your family, etc.

These same questions are asked many times of different persons applying for initiation. However, no questions are asked of the guru who is going to give the initiation, while transparency should be maintained equally from both the guru and the disciple.

There are some questions which I believe every disciple deserves the answer to before initiation.

Has the guru ever eaten meat and eggs?

Has the guru ever taken any kind of intoxicant: alcohol, drugs, etc?

Has the guru had a physical relationship with anyone other than his wife before or after marriage?

What is the educational qualification of the guru?

What is the value of the ancestral or personal property owned by the guru?

What is the source of the guru's income?

How many people are in the guru's family? What sort of work do they do? What are the sources of their income?

How much income tax was paid by the guru in the most recent year?

Has any criminal case been registered against the guru in India or outside India?

Is the guru a party in any court case?

How many hours usually are spent each day in meditation by the guru?

Does the guru claim that he has access to Sach Khand [highest heaven]? Does the guru have the ability to take his disciple to Sach Khand?

Has Gurinder Singh ever lied after becoming the RSSB guru?

The sevadars who cook food, do cleaning or do the guru's personal work at the Dera, are they paid by the guru, or by the RSSB trust, or is free service taken from them?

How many sevadars are appointed by the RSSB trust at the houses of the guru's family members and relatives? Do they work for free or are they on a salary?

Regarding the helicopter which is used on various satsang tours in India by the guru, who is the owner of the helicopter and who bears the expenses of the helicopter like pilot's salary, airport rent, petrol etc.?

Does the guru also use the helicopter for his personal trips? If so, then who bears the expenses?

Who is the owner of the private jet which is used by the guru?

Who bears the expenses of private jet foreign tours?

Does the guru also use the private jet to meet his family in England or Singapore? If so, then who bears the cost?

Who bears the expenses of the guru's clothes, food, personal needs, expensive cars etc.?

Has the guru accepted any gift (money, expensive item, land) given by any disciple or relative?

Who can become part of the RSSB trust? Is it allowed to a common poor RSSB disciple to become part of the organization as a trustee? What are the requirements to become a member of the RSSB trust?

Spirit isn't supernatural. It's physical.

Looking back, one of the strangest things about the India-based religious group I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is how the RSSB teachings taught that the mind wasn't to be trusted, supposedly being an agent of Kal, the negative power that rules the lower regions of creation.

Yet like all other religions, RSSB was thoroughly in the grip of mental concepts that had no foundation in any sort of discernible reality. 

Of course, I didn't realize that at the time, since I was in the grip of a mental concept called "blind faith" that led me to believe that what the RSSB gurus said was true, really was. So even though there was no demonstrable evidence of soul, God, Kal, divine light/sound, heaven, or any of the other entities RSSB claimed to exist, I trusted that with time all would be revealed.

That didn't happen. Not for me. And not for anybody else in RSSB that I knew. Which was a lot of people given how long I was a member of the organization.

So this taught me to be wary of any theology or philosophy that claims knowledge of a supernatural realm, because invariably the proof of that claim is mere words and concepts, not anything substantial. If I want empty promises, it's easier to listen to politicians rather than embrace a religion.

Yesterday I attended a 3-hour seminar that focused on the martial art aspect of Tai Chi. I wrote about it on my HinesSight blog: Why I enjoy Tai Chi as a martial art. 

Having spent about 12 years practicing the hard martial art style of karate, and now about 19 years practicing the soft martial art style of Tai Chi, with a bunch of years playing competitive tennis before that, like so many other people I enjoy the physicality of sports and physical activity. 

One reason is that physical activity can't be faked. You either can do something physical, or you can't. While naturally there's talking involved in learning a physical activity, a sermon can't be a substitute for it, whereas with religions words and concepts are their foundation.

Recently I wrote about Seth Gillihan's talks about Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on Sam Harris' Waking Up app. I liked what he had to say so much, I ordered his most recent book from Amazon. 

Here's some excerpts from the book that's called, unsurprisingly, Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Simple Path to Healing, Hope, and Peace. Though Gillihan says he embraces Christianity along with secular Buddhism, his religious approach is pleasingly rooted in reality.

When I first heard the call of my inner self, I thought it was beckoning me to become "more spiritual," as if my ideal self were a disembodied spirit, floating through life unfettered by thoughts and untouched by feelings.

But idolizing our spiritual selves would mean abandoning our minds and bodies and becoming less of who we are. In truth, our spirits are not narrowly focused on "spiritual" things, to the exclusion of our physical and mental realities.

...Our spirit permeates all of our experience and is intimately connected to the rest of us. 

...Knowing what is true about ourselves does not need to be deep and mysterious. My wife reminded me of a truth about myself when she encouraged me to go swimming at Cape May. She knew I am happiest when I am swimming; that is one of my truths.

We know mental truth when we practice right ways of thinking that bring us happiness and peace. We can find that truth in our relationship with our thoughts as we see through the endless fictions our minds create that can make us miserable, such as that we don't deserve to be happy and that we aren't lovable. 

The cognitive part of CBT helps us to replace these false beliefs with ones that are faithful to reality. We find joy as our mind dwells in the truth.

We experience physical truth when we give our bodies what they need and consistently do the things that bring us alive. We can enact truth through eating nourishing foods, getting adequate rest, moving our bodies every day, spending time with our favorite people, being of service, and doing work that we enjoy.

...We find spiritual truth through being wholly present in our lives because our spirits are always in the here and now of our experience. My swim in the bay was an encounter with spiritual truth as I reconnected with myself and what I love.

As my example shows, mindful presence is not an esoteric experience that's available only to a select few; being in our lives is a habit that all of us can cultivate in each moment. 

Our mind, body, and spirit form an integrated whole, intersecting with and affecting one another. For example, our bodies affect our minds, as when we're well rested and it's easier to recognize our negative thinking.

Our bodies affect our spirits, too, as when we step out of compulsive activity and thereby enter into connection with our spirit. 

And our spirits affect our minds, as when we focus our awareness on the present and discover that in doing so, it's easier to recognize when our thoughts are telling us lies. 

...We are constantly thinking: even if we decide to stop thinking, our minds will keep doing it anyway. It's what they are good at. If they aren't telling us stories in words, they're crafting made-up scenes or pulling up images from our memory banks.

Our minds are actually so caught up in thinking that we don't realize we're thinking.

We assume that the nonstop stream in our heads is something real and meaningful, and we mistake thoughts for actual observations of something true. In subtle ways we probably don't notice, mental events in our brains are fashioning our lives.

...We often don't realize when our mind has shifted from reading us front-page news to reading the op-eds. If we don't recognize our thoughts for what they are and treat them accordingly, we'll live in a false reality of our mind's creation.

That's a great description of what religions offer: a false reality of our mind's creation.

"Truth-Default Theory" helps explain why religions get away with falsehoods

Last Sunday a friend gave me his unread copy of Malcolm Gladwell's 2019 book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know.

I hadn't heard of the book before. It seems to be less well known than Gladwell's other books like Blink and The Tipping Point.

I'm enjoying it after reading the first few chapters. This morning I read "The Queen of Cuba."

A primary focus of the chapter is on how Ana Belen Montes, a Cuban expert at the Defense Intelligence Agency, got away with being a double agent for Cuba even though warning signs about her were obvious in retrospect, after it was discovered she was passing American secrets to Cuban officials.

Here's excerpts from the chapter that bear on the question of why people continue to believe the teachings of a religion even though they have doubts about it. 

The point of [Tim] Levine's research was to try to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies? You'd think we'd be good at it. Logic says that it would be very useful for human beings to know when they're being deceived.

Evolution, over many millions of years, should have favored people with the ability to pick up the subtle signs of deception. But it hasn't.

...Tim Levine's answer is called the "Truth-Default Theory," or TDT.

...We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest. 

...To snap out of truth-default mode requires what Levine calls a "trigger." A trigger is not the same as a suspicion, or the first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive.

We do not believe, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion.

We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.

...Over 40 percent of the volunteers picked up on something odd -- something that suggested the experiment was not what it seemed. But those doubts just weren't enough to trigger them out of truth-default.

That is Levine's point. You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't have enough doubts about them.

I'm going to come back to the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts, because I think it's crucial. Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar.

You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that's the wrong way to think about the problem.

The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren't, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human. 

...In the movies, the brilliant detective confronts the subject and catches him, right then and there, in a lie. But in real life, accumulating the amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts takes time.

...This is the explanation for the first of the puzzles, why the Cubans were able to pull the wool over the CIA's eyes for so long. That story is not an indictment of the agency's competence. It just reflects the fact that CIA officers are -- like the rest of us -- human, equipped with the same set of biases to truth as everyone else.

This fits with my own lengthy process of deconverting from the India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that I was an active member of for 35 years. After I left the group and started writing about my doubts on this blog, some people would leave comments along the line of "How could you have believed in RSSB for so long, then rejected it?"

The obvious answer, which I recognized but couldn't give a name to such as Truth-Default Theory, is that I always had some doubts about RSSB and its teachings. After all, few religious people believe everything about their chosen faith 100%.

My doubts just didn't reach the enough level as mentioned above until I'd had sufficient experiences of RSSB not being what I originally thought it was to warrant cutting my ties with the organization. This is similar to how I felt about my first marriage, which lasted 18 years.

My wife, Sue, and I got along well for much of that time. But not perfectly. No marriage is perfect. Gradually, bit by bit, Sue and I grew farther apart, until one day the strains in our marriage passed the some level and hit the enough level where both of us felt a divorce was the way to go.

So even though someone may leave a religious group unexpectedly to those in the group, usually they've been having doubts about that religion for a long time. It just took a while for those doubts to rise to the level where they felt they needed to leave the group.

Here's what I said to someone with doubts about Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Recently I got an email from someone who is an initiate of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization based in India that has centers around the world.

This person said that they've been having doubts about RSSB and don't feel connected to the RSSB guru.  Not being able to express their doubts with other initiates, I was asked to provide some feedback to what the person had to say.

Below is my response. My mention of Sufism relates to the person saying that they had a Sufi background.

Nice to hear from you. Yes, we seem to have come to similar conclusions about RSSB and Sant Mat, though it took me about 35 years to do so, and for you it was less than 5 years. But time isn’t the important thing. In my view, it’s being honest with ourself.

If we believe something, it’s very difficult not to believe it just because someone says, “Don’t believe.” Likewise, if we don’t believe something, it’s very difficult to believe it just because someone says, “Believe.”

RSSB is into believing, as is every religion, pretty much, maybe aside from Buddhism, but even there you’re expected to accept certain precepts as a basis for following the Buddhist path. Same thing applies, I’m pretty sure, to Sufism, though I bet it’s much less dogmatic than RSSB.

The way I see it, we can’t get through life without holding on to certain precepts or assumptions about life that could broadly be called beliefs. However, with our own set of life-oriented beliefs, we can pick and choose from the wide variety the world has to offer rather than accepting what an organized religion or philosophy offers as a package.

So in my case I’ve assembled a fairly coherent life belief system out of secular Buddhism, Taoism, Tai Chi (Taoism in motion, basically), modern neuroscience, mindfulness, and some other areas. I feel comfortable with this, though it took me quite a few years to break out of the RSSB mindset, even after I wasn’t formally associated with RSSB any longer.

In your case, I suspect you’d find it easier to cobble together a RSSB belief replacement, since you haven’t spent as long buying in to the RSSB teachings. I’m assuming you end up wanting to do this. Given the tone of your message, that seemed a fair assumption.

Anyway, naturally I feel like you’re on the right track. After all, the tagline of my Church of the Churchless blog is “Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence.” I’m Buddhist’y and Science’y enough to believe that everybody and everything exists within a web of interdependence and complex causal factors that act upon us from many directions.

But I see this as compatible with spiritual independence. Life and existence can’t be boiled down to a single belief system, like RSSB. What makes who we are, and who we want to be, is wonderfully unique for each of us. So when you felt like RSSB was right for you, that was the whole cosmos speaking through you. And if you come to feel like RSSB isn’t right for you, that also is the whole cosmos speaking through you.

I talked about this sort of thing in a blog post back in January about the words “It had to be.”

Feel free to write to me if you feel like it again. My experience is my own, but we seem similar enough that maybe some of my experience could be of some help to you.

Why a guru shouldn't be worshipped

Recently someone sent me a link to "The Guru Has No Turban" by Greg Leveille.

It's well worth reading if you've ever believed that a guru should be worshipped as a divine being. Or worshipped for any other reason, like their supposed perfection.

The article is centered on the Sant Mat teachings that I followed for thirty-five years.

Leveille appears to believe in a basic truth of those teachings -- that it is possible to know a formless Celestial Awareness -- but rejects the Sant Mat notion that the guru is greater than God, because God isn't available to help us while the guru is.

So he manages to balance some justified skepticism about gurus while embracing a mystical approach to meditation.

I like this part of his article.

If you read about (or follow) five or more spiritual groups during your lifetime, there’s a good chance you will hear a high percentage of these common myths that Kabir and other advanced teachers have complained about.

“Only the guru can take you to Heaven.”

“Only the guru can save you.”

“Everything that the guru says is the absolute truth.”

“A true guru never has to think or use the mind.”

“Once you’re initiated, the true guru will always be inside of you.”

“The true guru is God in a human form.”

“A perfect master will always be there when you die.”

“Guru worship is essential.”

“The guru is greater than God.”

“You can’t see or feel God inside or outside of you”

“But you can always see your guru inside and outside of you.”

“My guru died, but he can still help me while I’m alive.”

“He died, but he can still perform miracles and take me to heaven.”

“The mantra won’t work unless it’s blessed by the guru.”

“Your life is wasted without initiation by a perfect guru.”

“A perfect living master (PLM) will help you clear all your karma.”

“A perfect master will take you to heaven within 1-to-4 lifetimes.”

“A PLM is responsible for all of the miracles that you experience.”

“Gurus never make mistakes.”

“Until you meet your perfect master/guru within you and talk with him, then you cannot go to heaven.”

“You have to serve, honor, love and worship your guru above and beyond everyone and everything else.”

I also enjoyed the short quote Leveille included from David Lane's 2011 book.

This is the description that Amazon used to introduce David’s Book, The Guru Has No Turban.

“One of the more celebrated, if inappropriate, honorifics we have bestowed on our chosen gurus is the term "Perfect Master." It may be one thing to call a teacher a master (he or she may know more than us in a certain subject), but it is quite another to call such mastery "perfect." The first and most troublesome problem is one of definition: what do we actually mean by "perfect"?

My sense is that we fundamentally misunderstand the honorific and we do not fully understand the implications involved when applying such terms to living human beings. My argument is a very simple one: The guru is not perfect, at least not in the ways that we may assume.

But despite the fact that we can easily demonstrate the limitations and fallibilities of our gurus, we somehow hold on to the naive concept that a guru can be an all-knowing and all-powerful being.”

So true. I'm not sure why guru-worship has such a hold on so many people.

In my case, I was attracted to the idea that it was possible to traverse supernatural regions of reality in the company of a Perfect Living Master who had been sent by God to collect certain souls whose destiny was to return to heaven, known as Sach Khand.

I went to high school and college in the 1960s. The Beatles were a big part of my musical life. The teachings of Sant Mat in the guise of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) seemed like the ultimate Magical Mystery Tour. 

And you didn't need LSD or any other psychedelic. Just a guru who could take you on that tour and a willingness to accept the vows required to be initiated by the guru, which included several hours of daily meditation.

But that was then, and this is now. I have a very different attitude toward Sant Mat and RSSB after spending most of those thirty-five years deeply devoted to the teachings, yet eventually realizing the truth of what Leveille says in his article about gurus.

He's much more positive about mysticism than I am. However, I resonate with much of what Leveille says at the end of his piece.

Not everyone is ready to tread the inward mystic path of divine awareness. If, as a spiritual seeker, you’re drawn to some other type of yoga, mindful awareness, or guru-bhakti path, then that is perfectly fine.

If you follow your heart, you can’t go wrong.

Divine awareness is a long and winding road that eventually causes everyone to choose and then to grow from different spiritual experiences along the way.

However, those souls who have begun to feel the inner pull of divine awareness are ready to follow this very precious path. It’s the secret path of many of the greatest ancient Taoists as well and most modern Sant Mat, Sufi, Celestial Awareness, and direct consciousness teachers. It’s the path that Lao Tzu, Kabir, Hafiz, Soami Ji, Shiv Brat Lal, Faqir, and Captain Ji followed as well.

These are teachers who don’t want to be worshiped. These are teachers who help you to discover and follow the divine awareness within you.

I'm told that the RSSB guru said I'm good, or am a good soul

Today I got this message from someone who, unlike me, still attends the satsang meetings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the India-based religious organization that I belonged to for 35 years, before RSSB and me parted our ways.

Baba Ji refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

I heard today from someone who said “Baba Ji said that Brian Hines is good (or a good soul).” I am not sure which or maybe both, because his English is a little hard for me to understand.

I told this person, Ah. That's nice.

I said that because it was indeed nice to hear this unsubstantiated rumor. For even though I've been critical of Gurinder Singh's business dealings while the RSSB guru, and I have problems with other aspects of his stint as guru, I don't feel any personal ill will toward him.

During the period I was writing three books on behalf of RSSB, I met with Gurinder Singh occasionally and found him a pleasant competent person to deal with. We also exchanged letters and I was pleased to perform security seva (volunteer work) during some of the guru's visits to the United States and British Columbia.

It isn't that I spend much time, or any time, really, wondering whether Gurinder Singh has a favorable opinion of me. I simply felt good when I heard that reportedly the RSSB guru thinks I"m good, or am a good soul.

I prefer the former, since I no longer believe that I have, or am, a soul. 

The broader issue here, I guess, is whether it ever makes sense to say that someone is bad. Or, I suppose, good. For it seems to me that most people, and this might even include all people, try to do the right thing insofar as it appears to them.

Of course, there's no doubt that some people do terrible things: murder, rape, torture, and so much else that's despicable. But we can harshly criticize the doing of those things without calling the person who does them "bad" or "evil." 

Good and bad are words that imply a choice in how we act. I'm deeply skeptical that free will actually exists. More likely is that we all are simply acting in accord with what complex and difficult-to-discern causes both inside of us and outside of us have determined that we must do.

So I don't look upon myself as being a good person, or a bad person. Sure, I feel that by and large I'm a decent human being, but I'm well aware of my defects and shortcomings, which are numerous.

At any rate, I'm pleased that the RSSB guru supposedly looks upon me positively. Though I don't mind being argumentative and confrontational, I prefer to get along with other people whenever possible, even when we disagree.

More on why mindfulness is better than mantra meditation

It goes without saying, but I'll say it regardless, that my Church of the Churchless blog posts reflect what I find interesting and what makes sense to me. 

If you disagree with a post, naturally that's wonderful. You're you. I'm me. We're different people, so we're going to look at some things differently. Maybe a lot of things differently. 

All I can do is explain myself as best I can, while all you can do is explain yourself as best you can in comments on my blog posts -- should you choose to do that.

So here's another try at explaining why I view mindfulness as being better than using a mantra, either in meditation or outside of meditation, which is what I did for the 35 years I embraced a mantra when I was devoted to the spiritual practice taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

I'll start by sharing what a friend said to me recently. She was meditating in the evening before going to bed. She likes the idea of oneness (as do I) and was getting frustrated with how her busy thoughts were keeping her from the inner quiet that she thought was needed to feel a sense of oneness.

Then a realization came over her: oneness means accepting everything, including her thoughts. Thus by viewing her thoughts as unwelcome, she was moving further away from oneness, while accepting them would bring her closer to oneness.

That happens to be a basic tenet of mindfulness, which typically is defined along this line: "a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations."

A mantra, on the other hand, generally is used as a means to stop thoughts other than the repetition of the mantra. 

That can be a way to practice concentration, a laudable aim. But it comes with a cost, since obviously when the mantra is the focus of attention, that leaves the mantra-repeater with less of an ability to focus on other things, both outside in the world and inside their mind.

In the case of RSSB, this was taken to an extreme. The mantra was composed of the five names of supposed rulers of supernatural regions of reality. By repeating these "Five Holy Names," the idea was that the consciousness of the meditator would leave behind the physical world and enter a higher one.

Thus this is an example of a mantra being a world-denying technique. RSSB disciples also were supposed to repeat the mantra as much as possible during the rest of the day outside of meditation, so long as they didn't have to concentrate on other things.

The "so long as" echoes what I've been saying in both my previous post on this subject, and this one. By its very nature, a mantra prevents us from paying full attention both to things out there in the world, and to things in here in our mind.

Imagine having an intimate conversation with someone who, while you're talking about something important to you, is mentally repeating a mantra instead of closely listening to you. If their mantra is "God," they're saying God, God, God... with their inner voice rather than focusing on you and what you're saying.

Aside from being impolite, this shows that a mantra can divide us from the reality both outside and inside us. It isn't quite like a child yelling at a parent "I can't hear you! I can't hear you!" as they stick their fingers in their ears after being told it's time to get ready for bed.

But it's damn close to that. I know, because like I said, for 35 years I did my best to repeat my RSSB mantra when I didn't have to concentrate on something else during my time outside of mediation. 

I'll admit that during the latter part of those 35 years I repeated the mantra less and less, since by that time I'd come to realize that repeating it was distancing me from other people, nature, and many other things.

That said, I understand why a mantra appeals to people. It's a simple way of meditating. It's easy to repeat a mantra. If you want to stop unwelcome thoughts, a mantra can be an effective way of doing this.

However, I've come to view a mantra as being akin to the hard style martial arts I embraced for about 13 years during my karate phase. It can knock down thoughts and feelings with a sort of brute force. Often effective, it isn't very elegant.

Mindfulness, on the other hand, is more difficult to learn than mantra meditation. It's akin to soft style martial arts like Tai Chi, which I've been practicing for the past 19 years. Mindfulness accepts whatever is present in reality, gently dealing with feelings, thoughts, and other things that need redirecting not through force, but by welcoming them as they are, then altering their direction with minimal exertion.

Again, though, you may disagree. This is just my experience.  

The "magic" in magical moments comes from our own mind

After including a quote in a previous blog post about how we construct the environment in which we live, thanks to how the human brain functions, I got to thinking about the implications for magical moments.

We all have them, though it's difficult to say whether there's much agreement between people as to what constitutes a magical moment. Here's some examples from my life, using my own intuitive definition.

Birth of my daughter
Catching big waves on Maui with my boogie board
Marrying my wife
Seeing Janis Joplin perform in person 
Taking mescaline with a friend in the Sierra Nevada mountains
Spending two weeks in India with the guru who initiated me

Since I'm writing this post on my churchless blog, I'll use the last example as a focus of my discussion about what makes a moment seem magical.

For a long time -- I went to India in 1977 because I wanted to see Charan Singh, my guru, face-to-face, having been initiated by a proxy in 1971 -- I believed that what made those two weeks at Dera Baba Jaimal Singh in the Punjab so magical was the atmosphere emanating from the guru.

However, this doesn't make much sense. 

As I wrote about back in 2005 in "Did I see God in first class?", my wife didn't find seeing Gurinder Singh, Charan Singh's successor, to be at all magical, even though devotees of the guru undoubtedly did.

Psychedelic researchers speak of the importance of set and setting in determining the nature of a LSD (or similar drug) experience. “Set” includes the personality of the individual; “setting” includes cultural views about what is real. If someone with a devotional frame of mind joins a group like RSSB that affirms the divinity of a guru, then this person may very well see God sitting in first class. I, on the other hand, just saw an Indian man.

My wife, Laurel, joined me in Palm Springs a few days later. She was more interested in shopping and sunshine than attending the bhandara, but I did talk her into going to two RSSB meetings. At one of them she got to sit in the front row, just a few feet away from the stage where Gurinder Singh spoke and answered questions—a highly favored spot to devotionally-minded disciples.

Afterwards Laurel said to me, “He just seemed like a regular person.” I couldn’t argue with her. I believed then, and still do, that Master Gurinder Singh is uncommonly intelligent, insightful, well-spoken, charismatic, and inspiring. But I had no reason then, nor any now, to assert that he is God in human form. I’ve stopped being concerned with the level of divinity someone else possesses, and now am almost exclusively focused on getting in touch with my own hypothesized higher self.

So I now see magical moments as being akin to a happy moment, sad moment, exciting moment, boring moment, or any other kind of moment where someone's frame of mind generates the adjective before "moment."

Sure, there has to be a substantial outside reality in a moment. It's a mistake, though, to view external circumstances as producing the magical aspect of a moment, because different people will view those circumstances differently.

My wife saw an Indian man sitting on a stage. Many of his devotees saw a guru who is God in Human Form. Big difference. I highly enjoyed catching big waves that would scare someone who wasn't used to doing this. Big difference. I found Janis Joplin's singing and overall style really appealing. Others with a different musical taste wouldn't like her voice. Big difference.

Thus it's wonderful to experience a magical moment. But almost always the credit for the magic should go to the brain of the person having that experience, not to the external circumstance.

My daughter Celeste is a much better skier than I am, or my wife is. I remember us going with Celeste to ski on Mt. Hood here in Oregon many years ago. Celeste talked us into taking a lift up to the highest point on the mountain, where we'd never been before.

When we got off the lift, I instantly realized that the snow was much more akin to a sheet of ice. Celeste took off down the steep slope, turning with ease, giving every sign of having a magical moment up there on a sunny cold day with such a beautiful view.

Me, all I could think of was "I hope I don't break a leg" as I gingerly made my way down, snow-plowing in an inelegant fashion. My daughter and I shared the same external circumstance, but for her it was magical and for me it was terrifying. 

Shabnam Dhillon's "usual address" belonged to RSSB insiders

Someone just sent me information regarding the house in England shown on Shabnam Dhillon's death certificate as her "usual address." 

She was the wife of the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Since RSSB headquarters are in India, it was a surprise to me to see that an English house was shown as Shabnam's usual address. 

The person also sent along a Google description of when an inquest is performed after someone dies, which happened in this case.

A coroner must hold an inquest if:

• • the cause of death is still unknown
  • the person might have died a violent or unnatural death
  • the person might have died in prison or police custody

Here's the home ownership information. It appears that the Dhillon family didn't own the house that was Shabnam Dhillon's usual address. This shows the connection between the Dhillons and wealthy RSSB devotees.

A land registry search on the address quoted reveals it belongs to:

Rahendra (DOB Oct 1961) and Sunita Naidoo (DOB April 1965). Bought in May 2001 for £500,000.

Both are dental surgeons. Both are connected to RSSB (chairperson) of the charity.

https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/1013061/trustees

Shows Sunita Naidoo as chairperson for RSSB charity.

Company RSSB Southall Limited  shows Sunita Naidoo as director since 2010 (address is Haynes Park, a RSSB center in England).

Company info is here: 

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/03551429

This company is also related (RSSB is parent company). Sunita Naidoo is director

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/06558863/officers

Doesn't lead to anything sinister - but it's always rich people involved with the guru. 

If the inquest knew that she was due to appear in court and that her appearance would be hugely detrimental to RSSB and the guru, I am sure the inquest would look at this in a different light.

Here's Shabnam Dhillon's death certificate (wife of RSSB guru)

Having been an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) for about 35 years, I follow goings-on with RSSB when they come to my attention. That includes news involving the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

On November 26, 2019 I wrote a blog post, "Shabnam Dhillon, wife of RSSB guru, has died." I included a Business Today story about her death which said in part:

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

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

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

On October 14, 2022, last month, I wrote another blog post about her death, "Shabnam Dhillon's death leaves questions unanswered." Here's one question.

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

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

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

After I made that request, someone figured out how to get a copy of the death certificate and left a comment with that information. I managed to set up an account with the General Register Office and ordered a copy of Shabnam Dhillon's death certificate. 

It came yesterday. Here's a scan. My comments are below.

The death certificate says that she died at Luton and Dunstable University Hospital in Luton, Bedfordshire, England. It looks like Luton is close to London, so the Business Today story mentioned above had that more or less right.

It's a bit curious that her usual address is shown as 6 Church View, Clapham, Bedford, Bedfordshire. That's the most expensive property in the area (I want to say zip code, but that's a USA term). I thought the RSSB guru and his wife were usual residents of India. 

Her occupation is Housewife, Wife of G S Dhillon, Spiritual Master. 

The death certificate was registered by Emma Whiting, Senior Coroner for Befordshire and Luton. An inquest was held on April 23, 2020, about five months after Shabnam Dhillon died. According to Wikipedia, an inquest is held when a death is sudden or unexplained. 

Whiting's conclusion was that she died after developing septicaemia following a complicated medical procedure. 

It seems that she went to England for a revised bariatric surgery. Bariatric surgery makes changes to the digestive system in order to help someone lose weight. 

Naturally it's sad when a 57 year old woman dies. I find it especially sad that Shabnam Dhillon died because she wanted to lose weight via surgery. I'd envisioned her going to England for treatment of a medical condition.

Though I guess she did have a medical condition of sorts, since the 2019 bariatric surgery was "revisional," which I gather means necessary to fix a problem with the original surgery.

Lastly, all the time I spent as a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas taught me that the RSSB guru is viewed by devotees as having mystical knowledge akin to that of God -- since the guru traditionally is seen as God in Human Form.

There are many stories of previous RSSB gurus saving their disciples from harm by intervening in some way. That obviously didn't happen in this case, since the wife of the RSSB guru traveled to England for surgery and ended up dying from multiple organ failure.

I no longer believe that the RSSB guru is anyone special. So I just see this as an unfortunate death caused by a surgical mishap. But those RSSB members who believe the guru can save them from misfortune should remember that Gurinder Singh Dhillon wasn't able to save his own wife.

Meaning, in my view, he's just an ordinary human being like the rest of us. That makes his wife's death sad, not anything with spiritual significance beyond the usual meaning of an untimely death.

Why I find mindfulness so appealing after 35 years of religion

Having given up on organized religion, an Eastern/Indian variety, after 35 years of embracing the lure of returning to God by traversing supernatural realms, I've become enamored of mindfulness.

(See here and here for some previous blog posts explaining why.)

Before making another attempt at this, this is how a book I'm reading, and enjoying, "The Mindful Way Through Depression," describes mindfulness.

As we said toward the end of the preceding chapter, mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, to things as they are. It's a way of shifting from doing to being so that we take in all the information that an experience offers us before we act.

Being mindful means that we suspend judgment for a time, set aside our immediate goals for the future, and take in the present moment as it is rather than as we would like it to be.

It means we approach situations with openness, even if we notice that they bring up feelings such as fear. Being mindful means intentionally turning off the autopilot mode in which we operate so much of the time -- brooding about the past, for instance, or worrying about the future -- and instead tuning in to things as they are in the present with full awareness.

It means knowing that our thoughts are passing mental events, not reality itself, and that we are more in touch with life as it is when we allow ourselves to experience things through the body and our senses rather than mostly through our unexamined and habitual thoughts.

This is a wonderful balance to how religions typically view life, which definitely includes the religion I was a part of for those 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

The present moment isn't valued highly by religions. Neither are the body and senses. Nor is looking at things as they are rather than as they're hoped to be. Or giving up judgment.

For over three decades I accepted (with gradually increasing doubts, admittedly) that the purpose of life wasn't to be found in this physical world, but in leaving material existence and entering higher domains of reality beyond the physical.

So what RSSB taught basically was an anti-mindfulness: fill your mind with thoughts of God, the guru, and returning to the supernatural realm of Sach Khand; reject your weaknesses, often summarized as lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism; continually judge yourself to see if you're living up to the other-worldly standard of the RSSB teachings; look upon everyday life as an illusion not meant to be taken seriously, since your genuine divine form of existence lies elsewhere.

When I broke away from my religious dogmatism, it felt wonderfully refreshing to simply look upon myself as a human being having a human experience. Yeah, I realize that if you've never been religious, you're probably thinking, "Well, duh, why'd it take you so long to realize something so obvious?"

Good question. But not one that I spend a lot of time pondering.

The past is gone. I try to learn from my past mistakes. However, since they didn't seem like mistakes at the time, I do my mindful best to stay focused on the present rather than dwelling on what could have been if I'd done something differently in the past.

In no way do I claim to be proficient at mindfulness. I regret things that I've done. I worry about things that might happen to me in the future. I judge myself. I judge other people. Still, learning about mindfulness has helped me tone down all that.

I've learned that whatever I may think about reality, including the reality of my own life, the actuality of reality often turns out to be quite different.

So being open to surprises, to new information, to fresh insights, to being wrong -- that feels wonderful after so many years of erroneously believing that I knew what life was all about, including cosmic secrets that one day I would be privy to thanks to my initiation by a RSSB guru.

Now I look upon myself as an ordinary person living an ordinary life. After 35 years of religiosity, that feels absolutely extraordinary to me.

Shabnam Dhillon's death leaves questions unanswered

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

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

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

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

Here's the photograph.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...These are my takes on the excuses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the timing of her death definitely raises questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, the group is not without its controversies. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, some news about the Singh Brothers/RSSB financial scandal

It's been quite a while since there's been any news about the financial scandal involving brothers Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, their relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), and others connected with RSSB such as Sunil Godhwani. 

Here's screenshots of a story in The Times of India that was published yesterday. I'll comment on the story below.

It's difficult to understand why, exactly, the Singh brothers were jailed. In 2019 I wrote about how the Supreme Court had issued a contempt decree against them, but didn't enforce it. Here's part of what I said in that blog post.

Not being familiar with Indian legal language, which differs some from what's used here in the United States, I'm assuming that "reserved its order' means that for now Malvinder and Shivinder Singh aren't being served with a contempt of court order, even though they haven't paid the Rs 3,500 crore [$507 million] arbitration award to Daiichi Sankyo.

So it appears they're being given more time to come up with the money, though the story goes on to say that the Supreme Court justices weren't happy with the progress made by the Singh brothers on this front.

The "baba" who duped the Singh brothers, according to Malvinder Singh's attorney, is Gurinder Sigh Dhillon -- who allegedly siphoned off Rs 6,300 crore from companies once controlled by the brothers. That's $913 million.

It looks to me, from the last paragraph in the excerpt above, that Malvinder wanted the court to order the sale of properties owned by the Dhillon family (and maybe others also) that were bought via the siphoned/fraudulently-obtained Rs 6,300 crore worth of money.

But the court said, "No, you sell the properties on your own."

Much, if not most, of the above-mentioned money went into real estate investments made by the Dhillon family. Another Business Today story, "How Singh brothers got into trouble -- bit by bit," includes mentions of the RSSB guru and his role in the downfall of the Singh brothers business empire. Here's excerpts from the timeline.

It still appears that Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, is responsible for financial fraud. At the moment Dhillon is akin to Donald Trump: people close to him have been indicted and jailed, while so far the guru hasn't been held to account.

But this situation could change, though I've heard that the legal system in India doesn't always hand out justice fairly or in a timely manner. (Same is true in the United States, but India reportedly is more prone to legal favoritism.)

In June 2019 the RSSB guru was among those ordered by the High Court of Delhi to repay money owed to the Singh brothers that could then be used by Malvinder and Shivinder to pay the award to Daiichi.

The guru and his family owed a lot, $842 million -- which is an outlandish amount of money for a guru who is considered to be God in Human Form and preaches about the need to make god-realization the top priority in life.

For other people, I guess. Gurinder Singh Dhillon seems to view making money through means fair or foul as his top priority. 

 

How the RSSB teachings preserve the illusion of a "perfect master"

Religions evolve in accord with a sort of cultural natural selection.

If a religion is obviously false, not being able to back up its claims with demonstrable evidence even though that evidence supposedly is there for all to see, then it won't take long for people to reject the religion and it dies out.

So many religions rely on a claim that only after a believer dies are they able to know the truth of the faith that they followed while alive. That's an easy way out of the "where's the evidence?" problem.

But what's a religion to do when the divine being at the core of the faith is a human who looks just like everybody else, yet is believed to be God in Human Form possessing all of the powers of the Almighty? How does the religion reconcile the human's outward averageness with their supposed inward godliness?

Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) is an India-based religion led by a guru who is considered to be just that: God in Human Form. I was an active member of RSSB for 35 years, so I'm familiar with the techniques this religion uses to deflect pointed questions about the guru's divinity.

Here's some examples that I've taken from a book published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas, "Philosophy of the Masters (Abridged)" by Sawan Singh -- the RSSB guru from 1903-1948 who often is called the Great Master. So what he says has a lot of RSSB credibility.

My comments on the excerpts from the book (pp. 221-233) are in italics. 

To know a Master or to understand His real significance or reality is, in fact very difficult. To do this, discerning eyes like His own are necessary. Only a Godman can know a Godman. How can a person, who is confined in the case of the body, realize the Lord's glory? Unless we are as great as he is, we cannot understand Him.

OK. But the guru has, or is, a body just like everyone else. So how is someone able to know that the RSSB guru is God inside while being human outside? There's no way to know, it appears, unless someone becomes God in Human Form just as the guru is supposed to be. Nice way of making sure that no ordinary mortal challenges the divinity of the guru.

Unless the Lord or the True Being is Himself kind to a person, that person will not recognize the Guru as Guru. Unless the perfect Master, who is Truth incarnate, reveals himself, one cannot recognize him. Even if the Master should live next door, an undeveloped person would not know him. Very often, the members of a perfect Master's own family fail to recognize his stature.

Here too, we see that the RSSB teachings claim that no one can tell that the guru is perfect, Truth incarnate, unless the guru chooses to reveal himself. If that doesn't happen, the guru appears like an ordinary person, even to members of his own family. Again, this serves to deflect doubts about the guru's godliness, since if you have doubts, it's because the guru hasn't been kind to you.

A perfect Master can, with a single glance, find out one's inner condition. He then instructs us according to our condition. When anyone visits him he can see the visitor's inner condition as if that person were encased in transparent glass, but he keeps it a secret.

Ah, so the RSSB guru supposedly is all-knowing as regards a visitor's inner condition, yet doesn't reveal what he knows. Kind of like a magician who says, "I could show you this amazing trick, but I'm not going to, so you'll have to believe that I'm doing it even though there's no sign I'm doing it."

The perfect Master in an incarnation of the Lord. Just as the Lord communicates His teachings to the Saints without the agency of speech, similarly, the Saints impart their message to their disciples by means of internal experiences, and without the use of speech.

So the RSSB guru appears like an ordinary person to everyone who he chooses not to reveal his godly nature to, and the guru also teaches his disciples internally without the use of speech. Pretty crafty. Easy to understand why so many look upon the guru as a normal human being.

With perfect Masters it often happens that seekers after Truth have no need to put questions during discourses. They get answers to their questions without asking them.

Wow, it gets even better. Not only are the answers given by the guru communicated without speech, so are the questions. This means that when the guru is just sitting with disciples, wordlessly doing nothing. that's when everything is going on. If you're gullible enough to believe that.

Despite the fact that he is all-powerful, he does not boast that he can do anything out of the ordinary. He always says that it is the Lord who does something, or that it is being done by his Sat Guru. Truly, a fruit-laden branch bends humbly.

Thus it doesn't go any good to ask the guru if he is God in Human Form, because he won't admit that he is anything but ordinary. Yet as we've seen, if the guru appears ordinary, RSSB teaches that this is because the guru hasn't deigned to be kind to the person who sees him that way. 

He does not perform miracles like a juggler to please his audience. Although he is all-powerful, he keeps his powers hidden. But he does sometimes use them if he is so disposed. His disciples are always benefitted by his grace.

Hmmmm. The RSSB guru doesn't perform miracles to please an audience, so that's why no one sees him doing miraculous things. However, sometimes the guru does do miracles to please himself. So the RSSB teachings have it both ways: if you don't observe any miracles, that's what the guru wants; if you do observe a purported miracle, that's also what the guru wants.

Whenever Saints and holy men appear, they sometimes create an atmosphere which is not liked by the worldly-minded people. They do so, so that the slaves of the world and worshippers of mammon, who often gather round them like flies, may leave them, and the real seekers may not suffer. They intentionally provide some cause for criticism so that only the deserving will come to them.

This is probably my favorite RSSB ploy to prop up faith in the guru's Godman stature, no matter what the guru does. If the guru appears to act badly, as the current RSSB guru (Gurinder Singh Dhillon) has done, this is because he wants to make sure only the deserving will come to him and stick by him. And of course, if the guru acts in a good way, this shows his divinity. So whether the guru is bad or good, this shows he is a perfect Master. 

Reminds me a lot of how Donald Trump's devotees view their political master. He can do no wrong, because even when he seems to do wrong, there's a good reason for his actions.

Best way to change someone's mind is to let them change it on their own

I've read another chapter in How Minds Change, by David McRaney.

This one is called "Deep Canvassing," as opposed to the shallow sort of canvassing that I've done occasionally where you knock on the door of a person you want to encourage to vote in a certain way, have a brief chat with them, and hand them a brochure about your favored candidate.

Deep Canvassing is the brainchild of a California group, the Leadership LAB (stands for Learn Act Build), which is the political action arm of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, the largest LGBTQ organization on earth.

The LAB wanted to change opinions about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other people with a queer identity. Through a lot of experience knocking on doors in southern California and having fairly lengthy conversations with people, they evolved an approach to changing minds that research has shown to be effective even with just a single conversation.

(See here and here for stories in the Atlantic and New York Times about that research.)

Below are excerpts from the Deep Canvassing chapter that provide a pretty good overview of what was found to work, and not to work, in changing minds. Basically, providing facts or arguing with someone rarely is productive. Encouraging the person to think about their own thinking -- that's the way to change a mind.

Naturally my own mind wondered about how that applies to this Church of the Churchless blog. After all, since 2004 I've been encouraging people to be spiritually independent rather than a follower of an organized religion, mystical path, or form of spirituality.

Since regular commenters on this blog run the gamut from avid religious believer to fervent atheist, over the years I've observed that by and large, trying to convince someone to alter their frame of mind regarding religion/God/spirituality may be interesting and entertaining, but almost always fruitless.

My own conversion from religious believer to skeptic was along the line of what the LAB folks found, albeit slower. The change in my outlook didn't come from any outside pressure. It evolved organically over quite a few years as, bit by bit, I came to see things differently as regards the guru-led organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

If someone had come to my door during the time I was a RSSB devotee and told me that I'd be better off leaving the group, I would have shut the door in their face. Instead, Laurel, the woman I married in 1990 after getting divorced from my first wife, would simply ask questions about RSSB, some of which I had difficulty answering.

I didn't have a dramatic change of heart about RSSB in the same way the LAB has found that attitudes to LGBTQ people can sometimes alter significantly after a single meaningful conversation. Probably this is because religious beliefs tend to be more complex and more central to a person's identity than how they feel about gays.

But my many talks with Laurel about our spiritual beliefs (at the time she followed a New Age channeler, which caused me to question her about him) seemed to help sow some seeds within my mind that eventually sprouted into me changing my mind about RSSB.

Here's the chapter excerpts. The "I," of course, is the author, David McRaney.

I couldn't shake the idea that I, too, was probably one conversation away from changing my mind about something, maybe a lot of things. But I also recalled how many conversations I'd had that only made my convictions stronger.

I thought about the truthers and all the conversations they had in New York. I wondered what made these interactions different. 

In the training after the videos, Laura handed things over to Steve, and I got my first clue. He opened by telling the crowd that facts don't work. A serene man with a gentle and patient spirit, Steve put away his persistent smile and raised his voice to address the audience on this point.

"There is no superior argument, no piece of information that we can offer, that is going to change their mind," he said, taking a long pause before continuing.

"The only way they are going to change their mind is by changing their own mind -- by talking themselves through their own thinking, by processing things they've never thought about before, things from their own life that are going to help them see things differently."

He stood by a paper easel on which Laura had drawn a cartoon layer cake. Steve pointed to the smallest portion at the top with a candle sticking out. It was labeled "rapport," the next smallest layer was "our story," and the huge base was "their story."

He said to keep that image in mind while standing in front of someone, to remember to spend as little time as possible talking about yourself, just enough to show that you are friendly, that you aren't selling anything.

Show you are genuinely interested in what they have to say. That, he said, keeps them from assuming a defensive position. You should share your story, he said, pointing to the portion of the cake that sat on top of the biggest layer, but it's their story that should take up most of the conversation.

You want them to think about their own thinking.

The team tossed out lots of metaphors like these. For instance, Steve later said to think of questions as keys on a giant ring. If you keep asking and listening, he told the crowd, one of those keys was bound to unlock the door to a personal experience related to the topic.

Once that real, lived memory was out in the open, you could (if done correctly) steer the conversation away from the world of conclusions with their facts googled for support, away from ideological abstractions and into the world of concrete details from that individual's personal experiences.

It was there, and only there, he said, that a single conversation could change someone's mind.

...Steve would tell me later that they had learned over many conversations that reasons, justifications, and explanations for maintaining one's existing opinion can be endless, spawning like heads of a hydra. If you cut away one, two more would appear to take its place.

Deep canvassers want to avoid that unwinnable fight. To do that they allow a person's justifications to remain unchallenged. They nod and listen.

The idea is to move forward, make the person feel heard and respected, avoid arguing over a person's conclusions, and instead work to discover the motivations behind them. To that end, the next step is to evoke a person's emotional response to the issue. 

...I nodded, still unsure why facts and logic were such a bad idea.

Steve explained that after thousands of recorded conversations they had found that battling over differing interpretations of the evidence kept the people they met from exploring why they felt so strongly one way or the other.

People could remain in the logic space doing battle with the canvasser's facts for hours and never leave, safe and unable to tap into why those facts evoked such powerful feelings. The LAB tried arguing the facts for years, and it had long proved a waste of time.

"Doing this work has taught me that people make their decisions about issues like this, in their life and when they're voting, at a really emotional, visceral level," said Steve.

"What I envision when I'm standing in front of a voter is that people have this intellectual, logical reasoning process. That's one part of how they process the world and make decisions. But they have this almost entirely separate emotional reasoning process which is based on feelings and things they've experienced."

Steve said they used to hand-hold people and try to walk them through why certain facts should be compelling, why they should obviously change their minds, but his hunch now is that it will never work. 

A canvasser's reasoning can't be copied and pasted into another person. The facts that matter to them probably won't matter to the other person at all.

How minds change. It isn't by brute force.

Since I started this blog in 2004, I've been trying to change the minds of religious believers in the direction of being less dogmatic, judgmental, and rigid.

In this endeavor I've been guided mostly by my own experience and intuition. So when I saw a book review in the July 2 issue of New Scientist about "How Minds Change: The new science of belief, opinion, and persuasion" by David McRaney, I was interested to see what the book is all about.

After all, how many of us have changed our mind about something after someone started screaming in our face that we were wrong, they were right, and we needed to start thinking like them?

In my case, exactly never. So these passages from the review rang true to me.

McRaney spends time with former members of the Westboro Baptist Church in the US, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America", learning how they came to disavow their vitriolic beliefs and become more beneficent to others.

The answer, he finds, isn't willing people to come around to your point of view, but letting them realise the folly of their ways.

...The concept -- that, with more knowledge, long-held hypotheses can be disproved -- isn't likely to be news to New Scientist readers. But it doesn't make McRaney's book any less interesting.

Indeed, his writing is a tonic for those who might scratch their head at how others could be so nonsensical as to distrust vaccines, believe the Earth is flat or subscribe to any other number of conspiracy theories.

It helps shift perceptions from the unhelpful attitude of "this person is stupid and beyond help" to "this person has a different frame of belief, and they can be encouraged to think more deeply about the issue."

Because that is the big discovery of those Californian campaigners and the neuroscientists behind them: simply shouting facts at disbelievers doesn't change their minds, rather it entrenches their belief -- as anyone who has tackled a tricky dinner table conversation will know.

Instead, to change minds, you have to not change minds at all. You have to let people come to their own conclusions -- though, of course, you can help them get there by posing the right questions.

Makes sense. 

When I got remarried in 1990, my second wife, Laurel, didn't share my belief at the time that the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) was God in Human Form. Though she made no attempt to dissuade me from belonging to this India-based religious organization, Laurel would ask good questions.

Such as, how can you be sure the guru is God in Human Form? I'd basically reiterate the RSSB teachings, which came down to an unconvincing "I have faith that this is true and by following the instructions I was given at initiation by the guru, hopefully one day I'll know for sure." 

If Laurel had been been confrontational, I would have become more defensive than I already was, hardening my religious conviction rather than softening it. 

Her questions, though, slowly seeped into my mind, along with other ways that gradually brought me to doubt that what I wanted to be true, actually was. So in the end I came to my own conclusion that I needed to distance myself from the organization that I'd been a devoted member of for 35 years.

That conclusion, though, was the result of all kinds of influences.

My meditation experiences. Books I'd read. Discussions with other RSSB members. Learning more about the guru. Giving talks on behalf of RSSB that required me to ponder which parts of the RSSB teachings seemed reasonable, and which were difficult to believe.

I think it's easier to help someone with changing their mind when you have a genuine relationship with them. This is why counseling can be effective at resolving a personal problem, while reading a book generally isn't. 

On this blog, as is the case with social media in general, most people only know each other as existing in cyberspace, not physical space. This makes it more difficult, though not impossible, to pose questions that will help the other person see things differently, and not be even more determined to look upon those things in the same way.

Appreciative Reader, a frequent commenter on this blog, is quite skilled at this. He's adept at questioning assumptions of other commenters without being excessively confrontational.

For example, recently someone claimed that consciousness has to exist after we die, because nothing existent can be destroyed. Sure, that's a tenet of matter/energy. It changes form, yet still exists. But Appreciative Reader pointed out the obvious.

Since consciousness almost certainly is a product of the brain, then when the brain and body die, changing form into the constituent atoms, consciousness, like life itself, no longer exists -- just atoms do, which become new entities. 

A few cogent questions and observations revealed the hollowness of a belief that consciousness is eternal. I'm not sure if any minds were changed, but they might have been.

Dibloggenes explains the universe in a mere 1,070 words

Here's the second comment from Dibloggenes that I've elevated to the profound status of a Church of the Churchless blog post. (I can hear the typing of Dibloggenes as he redoes his resume to include this newfound honor; the first elevated blog post is here.)

I admire any and all attempts to explain the universe, especially when they clock in at a sparse 1,070 words. The Bible, Newton's Principia, and Darwin's Origin of Species are all much longer. And, without the occasional bursts of humor that make Dibloggenes' treatise more sparkly than it would otherwise be.

One reason I like what follows is that it mentions the One so often. If your interest in the One is stimulated by Dibloggenes, clearly your best move is to buy my book, "Return to the One: Plotinus's Guide to God-Realization." I can't guarantee that the One will be pleased with this, but I sure will be.

Enjoy...

And now, as previously threatened: The Universe Explained for Dummies. These are my own conclusions to date, subject to revision at any time. They have been abbreviated to allow the reader less of a commitment to follow along. I have placed these under four topic headings to make it easier to dismiss large chunks of my thinking at one fell swoop.

THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM
1) In a universe that requires material (or attenuated material) bodies to manifest the limitless creative urge of the One, by necessity this involves conflict, i.e., the introduction of the no longer unitary awareness. This is a concomitant of the polarities we see everywhere, and that have been philosophized about for 3000 years, give or take.

2) We are steeped in the appearance of “individuation.” This is prior to individuality, which is a showing forth of those tendencies we associate with personality. Individuation is simply the atomizing of everyone and everything into constituent parts. Our senses report at a level in normal consciousness that what we perceive is real, but actually it is an abstraction. If we could see at the energetic level ( more than a few claim this ability) we would understand foreground and background, player and play are really all just one.

3) Human beings have truly made God in man’s own image. Believers are so wedded to the idea of a personal God that they are horrified at the suggestion this may not be true. Test it yourself: you’ll find folks are more gracious to quiet atheism than they are to a quiet belief in an impersonal deity. And what is that, but no more than the One, the unitary consciousness, that which precedes any individuation at any level, conceivable or not.

FROM THAT FLOWS
A personal God is a god...

1) Who is free to pick winners and losers; 2) to have chosen people and nations as His main squeeze; 3) to appeal to as if He were deaf and dumb to our needs; 4) who will remain forever an enigma to us as the problem of the origin of evil is one that monotheism never has been able to satisfactorily scrape from the bottom of its shoe.

Instead, think Universal/Unchangeable/Immutable Law. This Law subsumes all lesser laws, known and unknown, on all levels of manifested existence. Magic is the conscious or unconscious understanding and application of the Law, either in white (selfless) or black (selfish) flavors. The vast majority of humankind practice gray magic throughout their life, alternating between white and black as their lower faculties buffet them.

The One IS the Law; the One is A collective dynamic, for lack of a better term, that is inexorable in its workings. All justice, all mercy, all vengeance, all indifference are contained within it in exquisite balance. Appealing to It is pointless, as it already has done the math and set in motion the sequence of events most conducive to the ends of the One. When miracles happen after prayers are made, it is because the faithful harnessed the Law, albeit without their knowing it.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF EARTH LIFE?
Assuming there IS a purpose, I propose it is the conscious re-integration of the faux individual personality into a unfettered experience of unity with the One, an oceanic immersion that overwhelms our sense of isolated individuality. Sound familiar? Sure it does; it’s been preached by esoteric schools and natural mystics for thousands of years. It also dovetails nicely with the idea if we are looking for the anchor that keeps us in the world’s harbor, look to individuation. Examine it, turn it to and fro and really understand what it is...and what it is not.

Our individuality, from life to life, seems to be as substantial as leaves, twigs and grass that are swirled together in a stream by the various eddies and vortexes. This flotsam comes together due to obeying certain laws of fluid dynamics, but there is no substantial reality to this observed instance. It may drift downstream, or break up before our eyes.

Was it real? Yes. What was the purpose? None we may discern. What happened to the wreckage when it dissolved? Went their separate ways, perhaps to reunite, perhaps never to be in contact again. Why would we care if “we” don’t continue since the vast majority of humanity have no recollection of anything more than early childhood. The cases of seeming recall of a previous life is more interesting as it brings into focus the question, “What is doing the remembering here?”

TORA! TORA! TORA! DERA! DERA! DERA!
How do the above conclusions pertain to the value of participating in Sant Mat, and RSS Beas flavor? I believe the Audible Lifestream is an authentic account of how humans may experience a direct connection with the Law, that foundation and organizing principle of all creation.

For anyone who cares to spend the time assaying the world’s esoteric literature and reports of mystics, it appears to me to be a foregone conclusion that concept is a more or less accurate representation of a phenomenon foreign to all but a relative few.

However, for those few, I do not doubt the authenticity of that experience. In fact, how we choose to engage with this Word—when once we are made aware of it—is the crux of the question of participation in the most important activity we will ever undertake in this life.

Do we need a guru to connect us to it? Some gurus say yes, some gurus say no. What is the appropriate response if we believe our Contact may not be of the caliber we assumed was required? The truth is, each one of us by necessity must own our beliefs. Who calls us, who is worthy, what sect or branch do we trust, why am I feeling shaky on this path?

We can’t escape the need to erect a superstructure of beliefs, whether they originate within ourselves, are influenced by the thinking of others, or blindly follow someone who claims insights that we don’t possess. Those who claim no religious beliefs have expressed their own beliefs. This is an unavoidable and inevitable outcome. The question is, what will be our response to it?

If you’ve read this far, please use the code VISINE 2022 upon checkout to help with the eyestrain you are probably experiencing. Have a great Sunday!

An entertaining message about RSSB from Dibloggenes

I love to get emails from people who are having doubts about the religious organization I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). When a message is written in an entertaining fashion, I doubly love that email.

Here's what someone who wants to be known as Dibloggenes had to say to me, along with my response.

For those who aren't familiar with some terms in the message, Gurinder Singh Dhillon is the current RSSB guru who has been in a lot of controversy. Tara was a frequent commenter on this blog some years back who was a well-informed and eloquent critic of RSSB and Dhillon. Kal is how RSSB refers to the Devil, or Negative Power. Charan Singh appointed Dhillon to be the successor guru before Charan died.

Hello, Brian:

As these things are wont to do, I came across your Church of the Churchless blog re Gurinder Singh Dhillon one day after I decided to try reconnecting with satsang after 20+ years of non-involvement. Does the Lord loveth a cheerful heart or what?

 

I think if I had read material like this when I was still participating it would have been shattering, but at this stage, I am 100% on-board with the Theosophists: "There is no religion higher than Truth."

 

I am fine with discovering my inclination to return either was 1) a blinding flash of spiritual illumination that you, Tara and Kal are trying hard to derail, or, 2) a wholly unproductive idea that confirms the value of my long-ago separation from the fold.

 

A couple of questions, if you would indulge me:

• • Is there a page that covers your journey away from RSSB?
  • What are your thoughts now, if any change from the blog posts I saw of a couple of years ago?
  • Do you think it is worthwhile for others to still post and respond on your blog re these topics or do you feel everything has been said that is germane, and one either stays or bails?

I immersed myself in all the back and forth chatter that your blog offered and I will say, at this point, my default position is this is not a case of the guru picking his nose/huddling in a hut with a nubile young woman/asking a disciple to eat a corpse, all to dissuade the unworthy lukewarm.

 

My draft opinion is that, as those in this lineage predicted, RSS Beas has become a religious institution, heir to all the foibles that entails, and that it no longer should be looked to for spiritual guidance or comfort.

 

Not to excavate everything now, but the most troubling thing to me that a rogue guru calls into question is an almost infinite regression of perfect saints and their judgement/insight.

 

If Gurinder is not kosher, so to speak, that means Charan didn't have insight re a worthy successor, and if that's the case, you just keep running back in the hall of mirrors for the whole line. If you're going to claim an uninterrupted line of perfect gurus, you can't have this kind of seeming corruption of the teachings in the leader. Who's guarding the gurus?

 

My thinking is now to continue as I have in the intervening decades and simply chart my own course, reflect on the words of the best who have come before, and avoid the third-party risk that trusting someone who claims spiritual intermediation brings along with the promises made.

 

A sincere thanks for posting your thoughts on this, at least to me, important topic...and also to Tara, in absentia. Like Jamie Dimon, you're doing God's work : ))

 

Well, I really like the idea that I'm doing God's work by promoting an atheist point of view on this blog, since that would show what I've always suspected -- that God doesn't believe in herself. 

 

But after consulting another form of divinity, the Great God Google, it appears to me that I shouldn't be compared to Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, but to Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs.

 

LONDON (Reuters) - The chief executive of Goldman Sachs, which has attracted widespread media attention over the size of its staff bonuses, believes banks serve a social purpose and are doing “God’s work.”

Regarding the questions I was asked by Dibloggenes, this was my response.

 

I’ve written a lot about my journey away from RSSB. One attempt is here, which includes some links to previous attempts:

 

https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2019/03/my-definitive-answer-to-why-i-left-radha-soami-satsang-beas.html

 

My attitude toward RSSB hasn’t changed in the past few years. I give RSSB little thought, writing about it mostly only when someone else brings it up, or there’s some news in the Indian press about Gurinder’s financial and other troubles. 

 

As I sometimes observe, if I was a lapsed Mormon, I’d be writing about what I didn’t like about the Mormon Church. Since I spent 35 years as an active RSSB member, I use RSSB as an example of what can go wrong with religion.

 

Good question, whether everything has been said on my blog that is germane. Probably. But since I’m addicted to blogging, and I enjoy sharing my thoughts about philosophy, science, neuroscience, and all that, I keep on with this blog, which I started in 2004 — about a thousand years in blog years.

 

The cast of characters keeps changing, meaning the frequent commenters. Strangely, or maybe not, many of those commenters are fervent RSSB devotees. I’ve stopped trying to understand why.

Examples of RSSB guru's authoritarianism

Since there's currently some comment discussion about whether the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) is an authoritarian who believes he can do whatever he wants, being considered God in Human Form by devotees, here's links to some blog posts I've written about questionable activities during the reign of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the current RSSB guru. There's more posts, but this is a good sample.

(I keep adding to the list as I think of additional blog posts I've written over the years that pertain to this subject.)

Malvinder's criminal complaint casts light on RSSB guru's role in financial fraud
Devastating criticism of Gurinder Singh Dhillon by a RSSB insider
Delhi Police financial fraud charges point to RSSB guru's involvement
Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, accused of making death threats
Sheetal Talwar talks about death threat made from RSSB satsang office
Sheena's "Memoirs of a Seeker" throws light on Gurinder Singh Dhillon
Bloomberg story shows Gurinder Singh Dhillon's shady business dealings
RSSB guru appears to have lied about his financial problems
Shocking tale of a punch in the face at a RSSB meeting
RSSB guru and his family ordered to repay up to $842 million
RSSB fined $484,000 after Haynes Park death
Gurinder Singh Dhillon ignores sexual abuse of a child

Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru

I respond to a B.S. comment about my 52 years of meditation

UPDATE: Spence Tepper has apologized to me for his ridiculous attempt to claim that my 35 years of daily meditation while a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, usually for several hours a day, amounted to "nothing." Good for Spence. He recognized how wrong he was.

Hopefully from now on he will realize that my approach to meditation is the wise one: don't challenge someone's personal experience in meditation, but DO challenge any claim that this experience proves the existence of a supernatural realm beyond the physical.

Spence doesn't like my skepticism toward his brand of religious fundamentalism. I've pointed out to him that his proselytizing comments are being left on a Church of the Churchless blog, not a Church of the Churched blog. For 18 years I've criticized religious fundamentalists who want others to believe in their dogma without any evidence. I sure won't stop now.

One of the joys, if that's the right word, of having a churchless blog for the past 18 years is that I get a lot of first hand experience responding to religious fundamentalists who, for reasons known only to them, like to leave judgmental comments on a blog devoted to spiritual independence.

Here's a latest example, a comment from Spence Tepper today which was so ridiculous, I figured it deserved to be elevated to a blog post so its absurdity could be on fuller display. My responses to Tepper are in bold italics. 

Hi Brian Ji
You wrote
"Hope this clarifies things. Demanding proof of someone who, say, claims to have experienced the divine sound and light that creates and sustains the cosmos is fully warranted."

Exactly. And that's why there is the meditation.

Had you conducted the practice with any discipline at all you would have your own evidence first hand.

Wrong assumption #1. I was initiated by Charan Singh into the practice of meditation as taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) in 1971, after first learning to meditate from a yoga teacher while in college.

I diligently followed the RSSB meditation instructions for 35 years. Never missed a day of meditation. Mostly I meditated for 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours a day. When I was working and had a young child, it was more difficult to do the prescribed 2 1/2 hours. So I had plenty of discipline in my meditation. You shouldn't make assumptions about someone else's meditation experience.

Also, hope you realize that RSSB stresses that initiates shouldn't talk about their meditation experiences. I'm OK with this being done, since I've done it myself. But you, like me, are breaking a RSSB rule.

You could have said," Yes, I saw the blinding light and have been able to reproduce it at will. Then I saw the sun, then the moon. I'm convinced it is simply the brain gaining access to signal directly outside the visual nervous system....but why the sun, why the moon? I'm still investigating to try to see where these images may have come from. They are far more intense than memory, especially when I can take time to look at them, even approach them... "

You could have developed a real theory around real information.

I did develop a real theory around real information. Based on my 35 years of RSSB meditation experience, and countless (almost) conversations with other members of RSSB about meditation, I've come to the conclusion that while some people report seeing scenes of supernatural regions of existence beyond the physical, almost certainly these don't reflect an objective reality but rather are subjective emanations of their brains, since there is no demonstrable evidence of those supernatural regions other than subjective reports.

Now all you have is the second hand evidence of the founders of every religion. And of every mystic who ever lived and documented what they went through.

Utterly false statement. There are lots of different approaches to meditation. What I experienced during my 35 years of RSSB meditation was very close to, if not exactly, how Buddhist and Taoist teachings describe meditation. I felt my self slipping away, probably because I don't have or am a self. I felt a sense of unity with all things, probably because everything is interdependent. Mystics have all sorts of different experiences. I don't really consider myself a mystic, but I've certainly had mystical experiences that are very difficult to describe in words.

Yes it evidence. And yes it deserves to be evaluated. But the only way to do this objectively is create the conditions to recreate the experience in your own lab and then you may test it as millions of others have done and are doing every day, with any way you like, including testing your own hypothesis about the causes.

You failed to do this.

Not true. I conducted the experiment of meditation, RSSB style, for 35 years. I've written a lot on this blog about what I found. Use the search box in the right sidebar to find those posts. Your fundamentalist attitude prevents you from realizing that different people can meditate and have very different meditation experiences. There isn't one right way to meditate, and there isn't one genuine meditation experience. If you believe there is, you're hugely mistaken about what meditation is all about. 

Let me be more pointed, Brian Ji.

You didn't have to reproduce the entire journey.

Again, you're assuming there's only one journey people take in meditation. Actually, people have all kinds of different journeys. 

Any part of it would have been fine. But what you report is zero.

Not at all. Every day I meditate, continuing to the present -- today -- I have a decidedly-nonzero meditation experience. Just because it isn't your experience doesn't make it any less meaningful or valid for me. 

That's practically impossible.

It's very possible. You should get out more and talk with other people about their meditation experiences. Since I did so much public speaking for RSSB, wrote three books on behalf of RSSB, and was the secretary of our local group for many years, as noted above I've talked with lots of people about meditation. Again, a Buddhist or Taoist would find my meditation experiences perfectly compatible with their spiritual outlook.

Anyone with a minimum of self-discipline can conduct any of a variety of meditation methods and at least watch their thoughts.

I've done that, and much more, for 52 years of daily meditation. It's astounding how you believe that, without ever having met me or knowing me in person, somehow you believe that you're privy to what I've experienced in meditation. How do you think you know this? Obviously it isn't possible. 

They could at least report what was happening to their body as they did so... And as they worked to gain some control, some level of mastery.

Geez, unbelievable. All of your own meditation sure hasn't affected the Judgmental part of your brain. I could ask, "Spence, how could you do so much meditation and end up such a religious fundamentalist with an exaggerated sense of your own divinity?" Oops, looks like I did just ask that.

They could at least notice the change in their thinking during meditation. And even learn how their brain reacts to different thoughts, how simran works, how distraction alters your level of consciousness wakefulness, and how focus raises it to observe more thoughts, their seeds and their destination all at the same time.

Been there. Done that. For 52 years.

But you report zero.

Wrong.

Not only does that make no sense at all. It is downright suspicious.

And not in any way scientific.

So there is no point in leaping to conclusions when you have not made the least effort to note just exactly what happened and to report it here for peer review. Then we can discuss what is going on within.

Why? I'm preaching the gospel of spiritual independence on this blog. I don't view meditation the way you do, as a way of demonstrating how evolved meditation has made me. I see meditation as a form of mental exercise and relaxation, in much the same way I view physical exercise. Tai Chi helps me understand what my body can do. Meditation helps me realize what my mind can do.  

As to what others report, they are reporting what happened to them, not for you to take second hand, but to note as their guide, testable reference points. Your own experience from your own effort is all that matters.

Hey, I agree with your last sentence. So why did you write this lengthy comment, most of which goes against what you just said?

The other testimony is meaningless to you because clearly you didn't take it seriously. Sorry to be so blunt.

I'm sorry to be so blunt in return, but you're totally wrong.

But you are being less than candd to suggest that 35 years x 365 days x 2.5 hours was spent entirely unconscious.

Wrong again. Amazing how many times you can be wrong in one blog post comment. I was awake and aware for virtually every moment in my 52 years of daily meditation. Sure, occasionally I fell asleep, but that was fairly rare.

31, 937.5 hours...

That's not meditation. It's sleep.

And what you just said isn't an intelligent observation. It's bullshit. 

Cognitive dissonance is alive and well in commenters on this blog

It's amusing to observe how much work some religious believers who comment on my blog posts go to in defending an obvious fact. 

A recent example is me stating in several blog posts that the notion of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) guru being God in Human Form, or GIHF, is a central RSSB tenet. How can you have a "Path of the Saints" without a saint?

The whole rationale behind the RSSB teachings is that God manifests in the form of a Perfect Living Master (PLM) to guide souls back to Him, because otherwise God remains an unseen, unheard, unknown entity beyond the bounds of time and space.

Today "Appreciative Reader," a commenter who almost always makes a lot of sense, wrote a comment that made me think, right-on. I've shared it below. The blog post the comment was left on is "RSSB teachings: 'The perfect Master is the Lord in human flesh'."

The quotations in the comment below come from another commenter, Spence Tepper. I'll observe that Charan Singh, a previous RSSB guru, said "We're unable to look at simple things in a simple way," or words to that effect. I no longer agree with a lot of what Charan Singh taught, but I heartily agree with that sentiment.

As Appreciative Reader says, it's a simple fact that RSSB teaches that the guru is God in Human Form. Anyone who can't recognize that in a simple way is willfully ignoring reality.

"The belief in GIHF isn't actually encouraged by the Masters, as you see here."

Ha ha ha, back playing cat and mouse, are we? Regardless of what's said *here*, GIHF/PLM has been referenced, as a core teaching, plenty of times *elsewhere*, as Brian's amply shown, and as you've agreed with him already; and indeed, as you've admitted to me as well, and what's more even put forward a conjecture about why they have done it. So no, it isn't true that belief in GIHF isn't actually encouraged in RSSB. Quite the contrary.

"Here is what Maharaj Charan Singh said about this in answer to a question: ...In the beginning we should just take him as a preacher or a teacher or a guide. And when we go in, we will realize what he does for us. We automatically see what he is. In the beginning we are just to take him as a guide, as a friend, as a leader, somebody to put us on the path. Then we ourselves will realize more and more why we need him..."

That's complete, utter BS. Sure that's what MCS says here, but had that been what RSSB is actually doing, then like I'd said they'd simply have actually walked the talk, and actually taught that the master is simply a teacher, and left the initiate to find out for himself what there is to find out. They wouldn't have taught that the master is GIHF, in that case.

You can't have it both ways. You can't, at the end of a long chase, after finally having been cornered, buckle down and admit that RSSB teaches GIHF/PLM; and after I ask, then after a few further rounds of the chasing-the-tail routine, finally buckle down again and put forward your conjecture about why it is RSSB teaches GIHF/PLM; and then after all of that suddenly change tacks and try to present a random quote and basis that quote try to claim, afresh, all over again, that RSSB does not actually teach GIHF.

That's simply trying the old cat-and-mouse routine all over again, that carousel ride I referred to in my first comment in this thread.

Brian had been wondering why you, and a few others following your lead, are trying to claim that RSSB does not teach GIHF/PLM, when it is plain as day that they do. The answer, I conclude, from all of these exchanges, is cognitive dissonance plain and simple.

As I've clearly shown here, RSSB teaches blind faith in essence exactly as the monotheisms do, despite the vow-not-vow thing. That's exactly what my last comment to you was about. To admit that would be to show up RSSB in an unflattering light, as a purveyor of woo; to admit that is to back oneself into a position there can be no defending against rational criticism; therefore the kneejerk reaction is to try to slide off to a different position, even if that position isn't quite based in reality.

Hence these incessant sidebars, and changing the subject, and verbal feints and tricks galore, in these threads. I hope the latest round of rinse-repeat-afresh cat-and-mouse, where after all is said and done you try yet one more time to claim that RSSB does not teach GIHF/PLM might break through that cognitive dissonance and, just perhaps, impinge on an awareness trying desperately to keep its eyes blinkered.

On the other hand, maybe not: because that is the nature of this animal, this cognitive dissonance thing. Fascinating.

RSSB teachings: "The perfect Master is the Lord in human flesh"

Recently I wrote two blog posts about the notion of a guru being God in Human Form. First, I said that this makes no sense. Then I said that Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) does teach that the RSSB guru is God in Human Form. 

Since some regular commenters on this blog are familiar with the RSSB teachings, I was surprised with the pushback that second post got. Even though I'd provided quotes from two previous RSSB gurus saying that, indeed, the RSSB guru is God in Human Form, for some reason this obvious fact was being denied by a few people.

So here's even more definitive proof. I've given away almost all of my RSSB books, but I kept a 1973 first edition of "Philosophy of the Masters (Abridged)" by Sawan Singh, a RSSB guru who often is called the Great Master. 

Understand: I'm not saying that this section below, which was titled Master is the Lord, is true. After 35 years of being an active member of RSSB and writing several books for the organization, I now have big doubts about the RSSB teachings.

Instead, I want to lay to rest any doubt that the RSSB guru is considered to be God in Human Form. Sawan Singh makes this crystal clear. If the current guru, Gurinder Singh, is teaching something else, that could be because he doesn't believe in the RSSB teachings, as I noted in another blog post.

I've boldfaced passages that relate most closely to the guru is God in Human Form teaching, and a related concept -- that no one can know God without being initiated by a Perfect Living Master. Shabd is a supposed divine energy that manifests as sound and light.

Back in 1970, when I first learned about the RSSB teachings, I viewed the following as an exciting invitation to undertake what's been called the Journey of the Soul. Now, though I wish it were true, I see little reason to consider that it is. Further, the idea that there's only one way back to God, that possessed by RSSB, strikes me as cult-like, since this is a claim that all religions are false except RSSB and related Sant Mat teachings.

Here's what Sawan Singh says. Or as his name is shown in the book, Huzur Maharaj Sawan Singh Ji.

The perfect Master is the Lord in human flesh. He is the Shabd personified, "the Word made flesh." Unless we are familiar with the human Master, how can we realize His subtle form, which is the Shabd? The Shabd and the perfect Master are the two means of taking the soul to its original Home.

No one but the Master can reveal the secrets of Reality, and without Him no one can gain release from the bondage of mind and Maya. No one can meet the Lord except through the Shabd, and it is only the Master who can connect the soul with the Shabd. This is the only purpose of their manifestation in this world.

Human beings are endowed with the gifts of intelligence and discrimination to a far greater extent than all the other creatures in this world. All other creatures are, therefore, not worthy of our devotion. Actually, devotion to them would pull us down.

The relationship between beings of the same species has a great deal of power in this world for creating love and attraction. We are on the physical plane, and we can only love one who is also on this physical plane. We are human beings and we should love only a human being.

We have not seen the Lord. How can we offer our love to Him? In other words, it is clear that in order to love the Lord we must love Him through one of his manifestations. Such a man is the Master.

The question arises, why should a man worship another man? The answer is that there is a great difference between one man and the other. A Master has assumed the form of a man, but he is not an ordinary man. Internally He is always in conscious contact with God.

To our limited understanding, the Master may appear to be finite. Actually, he is Infinite. He is the medium for attaining God-realization. He is the medium for taking us from the physical to astral, from astral to causal planes, and even further up -- stage by stage -- to the Unlimited Power above, by means of his instructions and discourses. 

If one were to assert that he worships and contemplates on the form of God, which is omnipresent, it can be said that at the most he contemplates on the form of a vacuum or of the ether. Besides, it is not visible to our sense of sight and it will not be helpful in awakening in us the currents of spirituality.

A Master has two forms. Externally he is a human being; but internally he is, in fact, God. He is in the form of a human being outside; but he is God in man, or God plus man. He has contact with human beings on one side, and with the Lord on the other.

From this point of view he has two aspects. One is that of a human being, and the other is that of God. His real form is Shabd. Shabd creates the physical body and dwells in it. "And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us."

A Master is the medium through which individuals are connected with God. In other words, God, Shabd, and Master are three different forms of the same Lord. If we offer devotion to Shabd in the physical form, which is the Master, we are then immediately connected with the Lord inside. 

Devotion to the Master is, in fact, true devotion to the Lord.

A study of the ancient history of India will reveal that in prior ages education was imparted by the Masters in places far removed from human habitation, and the student was wholly occupied physically, mentally and spiritually in the service of his Master. Later this type of education began to disappear slowly and in its place idol worship started.

In the present age, such rendering of service to the Master has altogether disappeared except in the case of a rare few. Now God Almighty, in His abundant Grace, has sent His own Incarnations into this world to preach the doctrine of Master-Disciple Service. This tradition of Master-Disciple relationship continues today.

The perfect Master or Sat Guru has a very clear inner vision and can at once see who is fit for this Path. Those that are ready are accepted. He, in His grace, chooses them and makes them followers of the Truth.

When our soul grows weary in its search for the Lord, and is anxious to return to its home, when our eyes long to see the Lord and we hunger for Him, then, in order to fulfill our intense desire, He incarnates as a perfect Master or Sat Guru. 

In order to release the seekers from their bonds He himself comes as a redeemer. He gives the seekers instructions according to their development, and connects them with the Lord.

The secrets of spirituality, or of the practical means by which the soul can become united with the Lord, are given out by a living Master only. This teaching is imparted through an unspoken language. There is no spoken language by means of which it can be imparted. Religious books merely give a few hints about the ascent to the spiritual regions.

The scenes witnessed by the soul with the help of the Master in the subtle regions cannot be fully described. The books, being inanimate, cannot help the soul in its ascent. In the writings of the Saints there is a reference to internal experiences.

The bliss of these experiences can be had by internal progress and not otherwise. It can be achieved through the Sat Guru only. It cannot be had by reasoning. Holy books and scriptures describe it to a certain extent only; but it cannot be experienced except through a living Master.

Sometimes the RSSB guru sounds like he doesn't believe the RSSB teachings

Sort of weirdly, in a recent post, "RSSB does teach that the guru is God in Human Form," atheist me was arguing that the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), my spiritual home for 35 years, say that the RSBB guru is God's right hand man (no female gurus yet) while some current members of RSSB were arguing the opposite -- that the guru is just a regular human like everybody else.

This perplexed me for a while. 

Then I came up with a theory. Being an ancient 73 years old, I was initiated into RSSB way back in 1971 when Charan Singh was the guru. He died in 1990, appointing Gurinder Singh as his successor. So my formative years as a member of RSSB were in the days of what I've called Sant Mat 1.0.

(Sant Mat means the path of the saints; Radha Soami Satsang Beas is part of the contemporary Sant Mat movements.)

In that original Sant Mat philosophy as taught by RSSB, there's absolutely no doubt that a central tenet was that the RSSB guru was God in Human Form, just as Jesus is considered to be in Christianity. In fact, several RSSB books relate the New Testament to the RSSB teachings. 

More: the RSSB teachings v. 1.0 also clearly said that it isn't possible to return all the way to God, a realm known as Sach Khand, without being initiated by a Perfect Living Master, another way of saying God in Human Form. This was noted in the quotes from RSSB gurus prior to Gurinder Singh that I included in the above-mentioned post. 

But in 2006 I wrote a post called "Sant Mat, version 2.0."  Here's what I said.

I’m wondering if there’s been a new release of Sant Mat, a north Indian spiritual philosophy centered around the need to follow a God-realized guru. It certainly seems that way from the remarks of several Church of the Churchless commenters.

Maybe version 2.0 has superceded the original Sant Mat that I was initiated into thirty-five years ago, and which I’ve written about in two books distributed or published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

Though now I’ve been called “Beas’ most articulate critic” (and not only by myself), I still have a genuine fondness for Sant Mat, a.k.a. Radha Soami teachings, and I want to be sure that I’m keeping up with the latest theological developments.

So if you’re a member of RSSB, help me out here. Am I wrong in assuming that the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh, has updated the Sant Mat philosophy? Since Gurinder Singh doesn’t write anything for publication, nor allow his talks to be recorded, nor permit attendees to take notes about what he says, it isn’t easy to make a comparison between the original Sant Mat teachings and the new guru’s version.

But here’s the impression that I get from hearing Gurinder Singh speak four times, spending two weeks at the Dera in India eight years ago, and reports I’ve gotten via this weblog and other sources about what he’s said more recently.

Sant Mat v. 1.0
--The guru is God in human form
--The guru is perfect, possessing God’s divine qualities
--God has chosen certain souls to return to Him
--God delegates the guru to initiate these “marked souls”
--Without initiation by a perfect guru, God-realization is impossible

Sant Mat v. 2.0
--The guru is a human who is seeking God, just like us
--The guru is imperfect, just like us
--Whether we want to pursue God-realization is up to us
--The guru is a spiritual guide, not a savior
--There are many paths to God, not just Sant Mat

This is just an off-the-top-of-my-head summary of several seeming differences between the old and new Sant Mat (or more accurately, RSSB) philosophies. However, if I’m even halfway right about v. 2.0, then kudos to Gurinder Singh. For this is a considerably improved Sant Mat, being closer to a science and further from a religion.

However, I’m a bit skeptical that either the RSSB organization or formal teachings really have changed to this extent. My take is that Gurinder Singh’s breath of fresh spiritual air is being diluted by those RSSB’ers who are either unwilling or unable to understand that this 2006 version isn’t your grandfather’s Sant Mat.

For example, a friend told me that when he went to India he’d hear Gurinder Singh say “We are all gods” when asked if the guru indeed was God. After the meeting ended my friend would ask other attendees what they thought of that rather heretical utterance. Most of them didn’t know what he was talking about. They only had heard what fit with their v. 1.0 conception of Sant Mat.

The winds of change may be blowing, but not in the mind of the typical RSSB initiate. Which isn’t surprising, given that Gurinder Singh has been so reticent to write or speak on the record. The current guru likes to say that he has nothing to add to the historical Sant Mat teachings, so the old books, tape recordings, and videos still serve as the official RSSB party line.

I could be wrong (naturally), but in my more optimistic moments I sense an increased openness in RSSB. This supposedly mystical organization has been heading down the road of becoming a hidebound religion, but maybe Sant Mat v. 2.0 will fix the dogmatic, fundamentalist glitches that are keeping this mystic philosophy from being a true spiritual science.

We can only hope.

After 16 years, now I'm not as positive about RSSB as I was in 2006. But I'm still interested in the apparent mismatch between what Gurinder Singh says in his talks and Q&A sessions, and the original RSSB teachings that I was exposed to for so many years.

It's as if the RSSB guru doesn't believe in some key parts of the RSSB teachings. I have no problem with that, since I'm a big believer in changing one's mind when it comes to religion and spirituality. In fact, in 2011 I suggested that Gurinder Singh has gone further and now has embraced Sant Mat v. 3.0. 

The roots of RSSB are traced back to Shiv Dayal Singh ("Soamiji Maharaj"), who taught from the 1850s until 1878. After him, a lineage of RSSB gurus continues to the present day. So for over 150 years, 1850 to 2000 or so, there was a consistent RSSB teaching.

This is obvious to those of us of the Charan Singh era who repeatedly read all the RSSB books ever published, including Shiv Dayal Singh's Sar Bachan. I'm not aware of any guru who made a significant change to the RSSB teachings until Gurinder Singh in the early 2000s. And then only verbally, since the current RSSB guru hasn't written any books as the previous gurus did.

So the past 15-20 years have been an aberration. I'm not saying Gurinder Singh is a RSSB heretic, though from what I've heard, sometimes he can sound that way. Which to me is a good thing, since I like heretics.

Again, my big insight, which I guess will sound obvious, is that members of RSSB in the Gurinder Singh era have been exposed to a considerable different version of the RSSB teachings than those of us who were part of the Charan Singh era. 

The mystery of Julian Johnson's death at the Dera in 1939

Recently I heard from someone who asked if I had read a book about the death of Dr. Julian Johnson. Johnson wrote "The Path of the Masters," a book about the philosophy of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based spiritual organization headed up by a guru.

I told the person that I wasn't familiar with the book about Johnson's death and asked if the person could summarize it. With their permission, here's what I received. I did some minor editing and added a few links.

Dear Brian,

The extremely short version is that the Dera tried to cover up a crime that happened there and by doing so ruined the life of a man who was innocent. Paul Pezoldt spent his whole life living with this heavy cloud over his head. 

 

Here is my summary of the book. It is a bit long but the book is far more detailed.  

 

It is The Mystery of Dr. Johnson’s Death: A Scandal in the Punjab by David Christopher Lane. The book tells the story about the death of Dr. Julian Johnson at the Dera in India which the RSSB is curiously silent about. Dr. Johnson wrote the book Path of the Masters.

 

Johnson never finished the book as he died on January 25, 1939 before it was published. But how he died is still a bit of a mystery today. There were three major rumors about his death:

 

The first was that a young mountaineer named Paul Petzoldt murdered him at the Dera.
The second was what most satsangis get told, that he just fell, hit his head and died.
The third is what outsiders think, that there were dark occult forces that killed him.

 

It’s a complicated story as eyewitnesses are dead and all they had to go on was some documents and memoirs of those now deceased. (All copies of these documents are printed in the book.)

 

At the time Johnson lived at the RSSB headquarters, the Dera, in the Punjab with his master Sawan Singh, who was called the Great Master. The book recounts how he became a follower of the guru. Johnson met his wife Elizabeth Bruce in India as she was at another ashram following another guru and had become despondent with them.

 

She then joined Johnson at the Dera and also became a devotee of Sawan Singh. Bruce was in her mid thirties at the time. She was a herbalist and a nurse who assisted Johnson at the hospital he formed at the Dera.

 

They used to summer in Kashmir due to the weather. In 1938 that is where they met Paul, a young mountaineer who at the age of 16 had already scaled one of the highest peaks in Wyoming USA. The reason he was in India at the time was he had just finished a route up the K2 mountain with a team of mountaineers.

 

He and his team split as they were hiring a bus to go through Afghanistan and Iran but there was no way Paul could afford to join them. Paul, although sceptical, had a deep interest in spiritual matters. Eventually Johnson invited him to work as his assistant at the Dera.

 

At the end of that summer Paul came down to the Dera. Paul's wife never saw him for months. Arrangements were made for her to join him. Paul's wife was Catholic. In her accounts of staying at the Dera, she reported about liking Johnson and the Great Master but Johnson's wife Elizabeth had been cold.

 

At the time in the Dera, there were only a handful of westerners. It was Johnson and his wife, a older man named David Elliot and an American couple with the surname of Rimstone. Also, there was Bhagat Singh, a lawyer, who in 1938 was considered that he was going to be Sawan’s successor. He attended to all the legal work of the master.

 

Paul was intrigued but he was not convinced of the philosophy. According to Paul’s wife’s recollection, he did not stick to the diet and also drank whiskey on some nights. He had also kept a loaded shotgun in the kitchen to shoot the rabid dogs that came to the Dera. Nobody else there would kill them for fear of bad karma so Paul was the one who did it.

Paul’s wife had become sick from nausea at the Dera which was not uncommon for newcomers to India. She was too sick to get out of bed.

 

For some unknown reason, Paul and his wife suspected Elizabeth’s cooking as Elizabeth was feeding them different food than what she was feeding the others. They even suspected Elizabeth was poisoning her.

 

On that fateful winter’s night at the Dera, there was an argument that broke out between Elizabeth and Paul or Elizabeth and Paul's wife. The accounts of what transpired differ.

 

The reason for the heated arguments is either about the raising of the kundalini or Elizabeth’s cooking.  In Paul's version, he made a bad crack in poor judgment. He was interested in mysticism and the kundalini. He commented that he wondered if you kick someone in the butt if it would help raise the kundalini. This remark was supposedly what sent Elizabeth into a rage.

 

The other account is that it was Paul's wife who said the same remark which made Elizabeth mad. The other version is that Paul picked up a plate of food to take to his wife and Elizabeth tried to stop him and wanted him to give it to a servant to take to his wife. He then turned and told her that he would take it himself and she got into a rage.

 

But what transpired out of the argument was this: Elizabeth screaming that she was going to kill Paul. She picked up the shotgun and pointed it at Paul. Paul pounced on Elizabeth to take the gun away from her. Singh the lawyer and Elliot for some strange reason attempted to stop Paul from taking the gun from Elizabeth.

 

Johnson either also attempted to stop Paul at the time or was trying to pacify Elizabeth in this commotion.

 

Paul allegedly in one version of the story tried to punch Elliot to get him off him and missed and hit Johnson by mistake who fell and hit his head. The other version is Paul managed to get away from the men and ran out and collided with Johnson and he fell and hit his head.

Johnson was put onto the couch where he died from his injuries at about one am.  After the incident, the lawyer went to Paul and his wife and convinced them Paul should plead guilty to a charge of hurting someone (similar to manslaughter). He claimed that it would be better for Paul, otherwise they would put a case against him. So he concocted a story leaving out the part that there was a shotgun involved and an argument.

 

The police came and arrested Paul on charges of culpable homicide. His plea of guilty had stopped any help from the courts for his case. He pleaded guilty to simple hurt, meaning he would face at least one year in jail.

 

The story gets even muddier. Paul states the reason he pleaded guilty is because of the lawyer Singh. He said this was because Singh did not want the Dera to have bad press and word getting out to foreigners. This he saw as damaging and could stop the cash flow from foreigners. He was also at the time thinking he would be the next guru.  

Paul, while under arrest, then contacted the US consulate and sent a lawyer and some members to investigate what had happened. The Rimstones then told the consulate official that Elizabeth had picked up the shotgun to shoot Paul.

 

Elizabeth then confessed to the official that she had picked up the gun but she knew it was not loaded.  The information about the shotgun would not have come out if the US consulate had not investigated and questioned the witnesses.

Paul then changed his plea to innocent and the court found him innocent because of the conflicting statements from the witnesses and the information about the weapon.

Strangely, the Dera then paid for Paul and his wife to take a lavish trip, including visiting Europe on the way back to the USA. Plus they gave his wife a gold bracelet as compensation for the trauma they had experienced.

 

Bhagat Singh the lawyer died a few years later, so Sawan Singh then appointed Jagat Singh as the next RSSB guru. The Rimstones also left India and went back to the States. Elizabeth and Elliot were the only ones left at the Dera. Elizabeth spent the rest of her years close to the Great Master and then died from dysentery.

 

What is also interesting is that Lane adds a transcribed letter that Johnson wrote that was never published. In it, Johnson recounts an encounter where he met Jesus.

 

He said Jesus was a tall, thin man with dark hair and light eyes. He said he told him his mother had become much higher spiritually than him. He also told Johnson that he was higher spiritually than him (Jesus). He also said that he had married Lazarus’s sister Mary during his life. (No wonder RSSB never published the letter.)

RSSB does teach that the guru is God in Human Form

Since I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization, for about 35 years, wrote several books for RSSB, and did a lot of speaking on behalf of RSSB, obviously I'm very familiar with the RSSB teachings.

So when I saw this comment appear on a recent post about the idea of a guru being more than human, it struck me as astoundingly wrong. (GIHF refers to God in Human Form.)

Clearly Karim Rahmaan knows very little about the RSSB teachings. So I'm pleased to correct him.

I can easily do this because because in the course of writing my first book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, which ended up being sold under the auspices of RSSB even though it was published commercially, I took copious notes on certain subjects from every book sold by RSSB at the time (early 1990s).

Here's quotes regarding the RSSB guru and his relationship to Shabd, otherwise known as the Sound Current, which is believed to be the power that creates and sustains the cosmos. All of these quotes come from books written by one of the RSSB gurus (name in parentheses).

The True Form of the Guru is Holy Sound, and in that form the Guru permeates every hair on your body and is seated within you. (Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, p. 220)

The Master is only one -- Shabd -- and whosoever initiates you will project himself from that Shabd, because the Source is one. All Masters are one, which means the Shabd is the Master... Your real self is the soul, and the real self of your Master is the Shabd, the Word. (Charan Singh, Die to Live, p. 213)

The body is not the Master. The Master is that Power, that Shabd, manifested in human form; but the form itself is not that Power or Shabd, which is the real Master. Through the body we are in touch with the Shabd. Masters are nothing but the waves of the ocean of the Lord. (Charan Singh, The Master Answers, p. 65)

There is no difference between the Master and the Sound Current inside. The Sound Current is your Master. Every human being needs a Master who is in the human form, to connect him with the Master, the Sound Current inside. (Charan Singh, The Master Answers, p.216)

The Master is the beach of the limitless ocean of the consciousness of the Lord. (Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters Volume 3, p. 122)

However virtuous a man may be, he cannot, by his own efforts alone, contact the Sound. Unless the Master gives him the gift of the ray of life and initiates him, he cannot contact the Divine Sound. At the time of initiation by the Master the soul becomes fit for being connected with the Shabd... The Master 'injects', as it were, his consciousness and light into the soul of the disciple at the time of initiation. (Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters Volume 5, p. 17 )

The Shabd or divine Music is the perfect Master. The Shabd is indistinguishable from the Supreme Lord. It is a conscious current of that great power which created the universe and which fully pervades it. All the universe emanated from this Shabd. (Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters Volume 5, p. 66)

The Master, so to say, is the bulb is which the electric light is made to appear... The Sat Guru is the place where the sun of Reality rises. (Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters Volume 5, p. 173)

The Lord is hiding behind the garb of the Saints and speaks through them. (Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters Volume 5, p. 185)

True Masters bear the same relation to the Lord as the waves bear to the sea. Huzur Maharaj Ji [Sawan Singh] used to explain this by giving the example of a large number of radios lying in a room but not connected with either a battery or electricity. Under those conditions you may tune as much as you like, but you can never hear the news from any station. Similarly, Masters are radios who are connected with the Lord. (Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, p. 171)

So it's absurd to claim that the RSSB teachings don't clearly say that the guru is God in Human Form. This is a central tenet of both the RSSB teachings and the broader Sant Mat philosophy. 

I was totally correct when I wrote in the above-mentioned blog post:

Again, I'm talking here about gurus who are viewed as being more than human, as possessing some sort of divine quality, as having attained knowledge of a supernatural realm beyond the physical. I'm not talking about a "guru" who is merely a meditation teacher or a moral guide.

Of course, just because the RSSB teachings say that the guru is God in Human Form, this doesn't mean that the RSSB guru actually is the closest thing to God than God herself.

My point is simply that any attempt to make the guru into just a regular human being (which I believe is the truth) is at odds with what the RSSB teachings say the guru is. And that claim is so grandiose -- that a human can possess the consciousness of God -- it deserves to be subjected to serious criticism.

Sure, religions make all sorts of claims. But to elevate a living person to the same level as God, that is especially dangerous, since it encourages a special sort of fanaticism on behalf of the guru who is believed to be God in Human Form.

The idea of a guru being more than human makes no sense

Sometimes the obvious escapes us because our mind has been distracted with other stuff. This just happened to me.

I was idly thinking about what I should write about in tonight's churchless blog post, remembering that my previous post was about how to prove that a guru is a fraud.

What suddenly struck me was the simple reason why this is so difficult: believers in a guru typically consider that he or she is qualitatively different from other humans. 

Meaning, the guru isn't just someone with some special talents, abilities, and traits. That's true of lots of people. Sports stars. Talented actors. Brilliant scientists. Masterful politicians. Amazing musicians. So many other examples.

No, a guru often is viewed as being more than human, possessing some sort of special attribute that makes them stand apart from other people. 

The weird thing is that whatever this attribute is, it isn't apparent.

If a dozen people were put in a room and the goal was to determine which person was a guru who, say, was God in Human Form, there's no test, examination, questions, or any other means that would distinguish the guru from the others.

The guru wouldn't be more intelligent. Or more wise. Or more ethical. Or more kind. Or more eloquent. Or more anything. 

Gurus stand out only because other people say, "He or she is a guru." So it's virtually impossible to prove that a guru is a fraud, because there is no way to tell the difference between a non-fraud guru and a fraudulent guru.

Again, the reason is that there's no way to tell the difference between any sort of guru and other humans.

I'm reading a story in The New Yorker about a talented big wave surfer from Hawaii. He has many videos showing how he not only can surf giant waves, but can do tricks on them in pretty much the same way other surfers do tricks on much smaller waves.

There's no problem identifying this person as a big wave surfer. But there's a big problem identifying a person as a guru. 

Again, I'm talking here about gurus who are viewed as being more than human, as possessing some sort of divine quality, as having attained knowledge of a supernatural realm beyond the physical. I'm not talking about a "guru" who is merely a meditation teacher or a moral guide.

That sort of guru is firmly in the category of other teachers and guides, a normal human being with a talent that can be conveyed to others. 

Since the other sort of guru, the God in Human Form variety of guru, has no attribute that sets them apart from other people, it's no wonder that they typically get the title of Guru in one of two ways. Either they are anointed as guru by another guru, or they start calling themselves a guru.

Pretty good game. It fools many people. No talent required.

All you need to set up shop as a guru is the title, which you can give to yourself or inherit from a previous guru. Then money, prestige, and power can be yours if you play your guru cards properly.

While some may call you a fraud, there's no way for them to prove this, since there is nothing that distinguishes a guru from a non-guru other than the fact that people have chosen to believe that one of them is a guru and one isn't.

How is it possible to prove the RSSB guru is a fraud?

A few days ago I got a message from someone who said this in her email regarding Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years.

I am not a member, my close friend has been a member for 5 years and I started to research it as I wanted to know more. That’s how I found your blog. Some of the things I’ve read are alarming and I found even the information on the RSSB official website disturbing.

 

My friend is very set on the organisation, and the master. I have tried to show her various posts regarding other peoples bad experiences and she is adamant that they’re all lies. 

 

I would love to be able to find some sort of evidence that shows this master is a fraud but it would have to be more than peoples experiences. Is there any information you could share with me which might help to open her eyes?

 

I am just someone who wants to help my friend, she is very vulnerable and I strongly believe she has been swayed during a time when she was fragile. 

This was my response.

 

Probably there’s no evidence regarding the guru that would convince your friend he’s a fraud. Someone has to come to that conclusion for themselves.

 

There’s plenty of evidence on my blog and the Internet, but true believers in RSSB just explain it away. The basic problem is that disproving the existence of something can be very difficult.

 

Is the guru God in Human Form? There’s no evidence of this, but of course there also isn’t any evidence disproving it. God works in mysterious ways, say believers. Even if the guru does bad stuff, that could just be God’s mysterious way — making hundreds of millions of dollars in a shady fashion, for example. Here’s one of many news stories.

 

https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/corporate/story/pay-up-singh-brothers-dues-in-30-days-delhi-hc-tells-rssb-chief-dhillon-wife-ex-religare-chief-godhwani-231660-2019-10-09

 

I’ve written a lot about the guru in the “Radha Soami Satsang Beas” category of my blog. One post included 27,000 words shared in comments on my blog from a RSSB insider who revealed a lot about the inner workings of RSSB and the guru. See:

 

https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2018/07/devastating-criticism-of-gurinder-singh-dhillon-by-a-rssb-insider.html

 

I singled out financial dealings in this post:

 

https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2019/03/rssb-gurus-shady-financial-dealings-were-known-on-this-blog-5-9-years-ago-1.html

 

But again, if your friend doesn’t want to open her eyes to all this, the blog posts and newspaper stories won’t make any difference. Keep trying, though. Eventually your efforts may help her see the reality of RSSB.

RSSB guru in poor health, cancels satsangs for six months

Today someone left this comment about the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. (Quite a few people who visit this blog have an interest in him, being either currently associated with RSSB or having done so in the past, as I was for 35 years.)

Well, it appears RSSB has finally updated their website. All satsangs in India and abroad have been cancelled, including the dera effective immediately until end of November. The update says GSD has been told to rest for his health. Sounds serious if he's cancelled the next 6 months of satsangs and initiations. Hope he recovers quickly from this.

I visited the RSSB web site and confirmed this is true. Here's a screenshot. Baba Ji is a term of respect for the RSSB guru.

It seems a bit strange that more information about the guru's health wasn't communicated. Yes, usually health and medical care is a private concern. But in the case of a public figure, it makes sense to share more information publicly. Maybe this will be done at some point.

God can be an imaginary friend, even if you're an atheist

Recently I heard from a woman who has distanced herself from the Indian religious organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

Her family is still very much into RSSB, so she asked me some questions about how I adjusted after being, like her, initiated by the RSSB guru and then coming to see that the RSSB teachings no longer made sense.

Here's one of her questions, along with my response. "Babaji" refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

Question for me: I find myself saying when I need help (to myself) Babaji help me- and then I realise that I don’t believe in him anymore and I don’t believe in god either- do you think there’s some sort of universal energy around us? 

My response: I wish there was, but I don’t think there is. But I could be wrong. Like you, I don’t believe in the RSSB gurus or in God. But I still talk to my guru, Charan Singh, and also to God. Life can be difficult. I like having imaginary friends.

To me it’s like watching a compelling TV show or reading a good novel. I can believe the show or novel is real and get all excited about what’s happening, even though I know that both are made up and aren’t real.

In the same way, I like to pretend at times that I believe in guru/God, just because it makes me feel better to do that, and I enjoy telling my problems to my imaginary friends, since my wife can get tired of hearing me complain about the same things after so many years of marriage (32 years).

Like I said, I don't find anything unusual in talking to someone who isn't real as if they could actually hear you. This isn't so different from sports fans yelling at the TV in a bar, exhorting their team to win the game.

 

Or me getting so nervous about what's going to happen in the Israeli spy thriller "Tehran" that I'm watching on AppleTV+. I realize that Tehran features actors, not real spies. But when there's a cliffhanger at the end of an episode, I can hardly wait to see if the woman who plays an undercover agent in Iran is going to succeed in her mission.

 

So it's no big deal for atheist me to lie in bed and say to myself, as I'm drifting off to sleep, "Hey, God, how are you doing? I doubt very much that you exist. However, if you do, it'd be great to get to know you. Feel free to pay me a visit, either while I'm awake or in a dream. And if you could do something to fix the sciatica in my right leg, that'd be great. Good night."

 

I talk in a similar fashion to Charan Singh, the RSSB guru who initiated me (by proxy) in 1971. I used to carry on a one-sided conversation with Charan Singh when I was a RSSB believer and thought it likely that the guru actually did reside within a corner of my consciousness, where he could guide me as need be.

 

Now I find that to be extremely unlikely.

 

However, occasionally I still have some things to say to Charan Singh, just because it makes me feel good to have him as an imaginary friend, along with God. This seems absolutely fine to me, since I'm well aware that an imaginary friend is much different from a real friend. 

 

 

RSSB training produces zero results in satsangis

I always enjoy getting emails from people who used to be churched, and now are churchless.

Usually I hear from initiates of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), as that was the "church," Eastern religion variety, I belonged to for 35 years.

Recently I've gotten two messages from former satsangis, as RSSB initiates often are called, using an Indian term. Each warmed my heart, since the emails described how the people realized that the RSSB dogma didn't match up with truth.

One person included a nicely caustic observation about RSSB satsangis.

I have pointed out that you could compare Satsangis to Navy Seals. They train every day by meditating, they eat only certain things. Eventually, you should see some form of result. All I have seen are fat lazy Navy Seals. That training produces zero results. In fact I think it creates more psychological disorder.

You won't get much of an argument from me about that. My main caveat regarding the Navy Seal analogy is that members of this elite American military group actually do train hard every day. 

But RSSB initiates, not nearly as much, especially when it comes to meditation, which is supposed to be done for 2 1/2 hours a day. 

However, most satsangis do seem to stick to a vegetarian diet, along with not drinking alcohol or using recreational drugs. And quite a few attend the equivalent of RSSB church services every week, satsangs.

So you'd think all this religious activity would produce some positive changes in RSSB initiates, even if their meditation didn't match up to the ideal. I agree that those changes often aren't apparent, which makes the "fat lazy Navy Seals" analogy an apt one.

I also agree that many satsangis end up more psychologically screwed-up after years of RSSB practice. My theory about why this happens is that the RSSB teachings are highly dualistic. 

Satsangis are supposed to make their top priority leaving this physical world behind and supposedly rising to higher regions of reality. This fosters an over-attachment to the RSSB guru, and under-attachment to family members, friends, and other loved ones. 

Thus rather than being of service to people in your immediate surroundings, many satsangis prefer to travel long distances to perform "seva" (volunteering) for RSSB, such as building or maintaining the centers where RSSB meetings are held.

Often this leads to an unhealthy attraction to their chosen religion, RSSB, since that focus takes time and energy away from being a good spouse, parent, friend, companion, or whatever to people who previously were near and dear to the satsangi.

In December 1977 I went to India for two weeks around Christmas. I'd been initiated into RSSB in 1971 and had never seen my guru, Charan Singh, in person. I was married with a five year old daughter. I'd gotten a temporary appointment as a manager with Oregon's State Health Planning and Development Agency and was waiting for it to become permanent.

My wife, Sue, wasn't happy with me going to India, given our circumstances. It cost quite a bit to get there. We'd gotten Celeste, my daughter, her first real bicycle. Sue wanted me to be home for Christmas. But I chose to put my devotion to RSSB above my devotion to family.

It turned out that I had an amazing two weeks in India, a time with Charan Singh I'll never forget. And after I got home, I ended up getting a permanent appointment to the manager position. But I readily admit that perhaps spending Christmas with my wife and daughter would have been as memorable as going to India, though I doubt it. Regardless, I put my relationship with RSSB above my family duties.

I also believe that the RSSB teachings lead initiates awry by emphasizing the Five Deadly Sins of lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism -- which actually are normal aspects of being a human, so long as they aren't engaged in to an extreme.

This causes many satsangis to be hyper-conscious of engaging in "bad" thoughts and actions, sort of like Christians who fear the Devil leading them astray. Not mentally healthy, for sure.

"Under the Banner of Heaven" a compelling story of religion gone bad

Having just written the title of this of this blog post, the question that comes to mind is whether there's ever a compelling story of religion gone good. 

In my current atheist frame of mind, the answer is no. But during the 35 years I was a believer, Eastern religion variety, I would have said, "Of course there is, my chosen faith."

Problem is, everyone who buys into a religion thinks the same way. Their faith is absolutely great, almost faultless. It's those other faiths who give religions a bad name.

My wife and I have started watching Under the Banner of Heaven on Hulu, which is based on a true crime story involving the Mormon religion. The first episode shows the grisly murder of a woman and her child.

At first the husband is the prime suspect. But it doesn't take long for the Utah detectives on the case to realize that a lot more is going on involving a very large Mormon family. (Is there any other kind? Mormon tend to have many children.)

Several things struck me about what we've watched so far.

One is how religion does bind people together strongly. This can be good or bad, depending on the nature of the religion. When Allen, I think his name is, brings his girlfriend to a gathering of his Lafferty family, everybody there greets her warmly in a decidedly Mormon fashion.

They do so because she's introduced as a devout Mormon.

That makes her part of the religious club to which they all belong. So there's much talk of Heavenly Father this and Heavenly Father that. (So far, it appears Mormons don't use "God" very much, preferring "Heavenly Father.")

I used to enjoy this feeling of belonging when I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an Indian religious organization headed up by a guru. I knew that I could go anywhere in the world and be warmly welcomed at a meeting of the group, especially if I said some magic words.

Not "Heavenly Father." Rather, "Radha Soami." That was an all-purpose greeting of the group. Also, a way of saying thank you with hands folded. Or a way of ending a talk. Kind of like Aloha, I guess. 

During the many years I was the secretary/leader of our local RSSB group, my phone number was listed as a contact person for the organization. My wife, Laurel, wasn't a satsangi, as members of RSSB were called. 

Often when the phone rang and it was a RSSB initiate on the other end, Laurel would hear "Radha Soami." She'd then say, "Hello." Typically the other person would repeat, "Radha Soami." Laurel would keep saying "Hello" until she heard "Hello" in reply.

I thought this was great.

Every religion has some cult-like aspects. Radha Soami was used as a phrase in much the same way the Mormons in the show we're watching would say Heavenly Father. It marked you as part of the in-group.

But my wife wasn't part of RSSB, though she supported me during the time I was a member of RSSB. So people didn't know what to think when they'd phone my number and hear "Hello" rather than "Radha Soami."

Of course, this wasn't a big deal. It just indicated how every religion has ways to tell the difference between those who belong to that faith and those who don't. Mostly those ways don't cause any real problems.

It'll be interesting to learn, as we get further into Under the Banner of Heaven, what caused some members of the Mormon religion to murder the woman and her child.

I suspect those who did this ghastly deed were under the sway of an extreme cult-like frame of mind, as opposed to the usual "normal" religious cult-like attitude.

 

Zen'ish adage: when you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy

Whenever I have a Grand Intuition about something that really is obvious, I'm never sure whether (1) I deserve to be honored in the Great Hall of Enlightened Beings or (2) laughed at for not realizing sooner what I should have understood long ago.

(Personally, I'll go with #1, but I can't argue with someone else who favors #2.)

The core of today's Grand Intuition is the title of this blog post: When you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy. It's an emotional echo of some familiar Zen sayings.

Chop wood, carry water. 
When hungry, eat. When thirsty, drink. When sleepy, sleep.

Probably what got me to pondering this today was a slightly delayed reaction after listening to part of an interview on Sam Harris' Waking Up app yesterday. Harris spoke with a woman who said that equanimity was a central pillar of spiritual practice.

I didn't listen long enough to learn what she meant by equanimity. I'm assuming that this refers to remaining in a more or less steady calm emotional state no matter what happens to you: good things, bad things, neutral things.

This is in line with what the Sant Mat teachings I followed for thirty-five years as a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based spiritual organization, taught.

Lust. Anger. Greed. Attachment. Egotism. 

Those were the five deadly sins RSSB books and speakers warned against. Each has an emotional component. And in my current state of mind, each seems perfectly fine to me. They're simply a part of being human.

Sure, it makes sense to keep emotions within certain bounds. But those bounds are pretty damn loose. 

For example, lusting after someone you find attractive is how relationships, and marriages, often get started. Forcing them to have sex is out of bounds. Otherwise, lust is a natural feeling. Ditto with anger, greed, attachment, egotism, and every other feeling/emotion.

What I realized today more clearly than ever before was how, even though I'm no longer overtly religious, I still carry around vestiges of the religious teachings that were such a big part of my life for over three decades.

One vestige is how I've been considering that meditation and mindfulness were supposed to help me not get very upset when something went wrong in my life, nor unduly attached to the pleasure I feel when something goes right in my life.

In other words, I'd bought into that whole equanimity thing, albeit semi-consciously. 

Suddenly it hit me that life would be a whole lot simpler if I took a different approach. Be sad when I feel sad. Be happy when I feel happy. Be angry when I feel angry. Be ________ when I feel _________.

Again, not crazily emotional. Not emotional in a way that harms anyone. Just honestly emotional, embracing whatever I'm feeling at the moment without wondering, "Is it OK to feel this way?"

Yeah, it sure is OK. In fact, I've been feeling especially good today, because it feels like a weight has been lifted from my emotional shoulders. For a long time, more than 50 years, I've felt a need for self-improvement.

Simply being the person I already was -- not good enough.

I needed to meditate every day, read spiritual books, write spiritual books, improve how I related to other people, be kinder, more loving, less prone to negative emotions, you know, all that stuff the self-improvement/spiritual realization proselytizers tell us is necessary to truly be a Decent Human Being.

Which mostly is bullshit. Yes, if someone has a serious psychological problem that prevents them from functioning well or being satisfied with life, that points to a need for improvement.

But the notion that we need to become anyone other than the natural human being we already are is entirely false. When you feel good, feel good. When you feel bad, feel bad. Likely neither feeling will last very long. Embrace each while it lasts.

No pressure to become your "higher self." For one thing, there's no high or low when it comes to being human. For another thing, you aren't a self. You're simply you. 

Thoughts on the Sant Mat teachings

Today I got this message from someone who wants to be referred to as Godot. They are still dedicated to the spiritual philosophy of Sant Mat that I embraced for thirty five years.

But they have problems with the direction Radha Soami Satsang Beas has gone since the death in 1990 of Charan Singh, the guru who initiated this person and myself.

My thoughts on the teachings of Sant Mat.

In 1972, I received Nam. The Path is inside, and meditation has been my focus. When Charan Singh passed away in 1990, I was not concerned that he had left this world.  During his lifetime, he used to advise us not to run after the physical form of the guru.   

I have known satsangis who have not seen the guru in the flesh, and felt no urgency to do so. The organization has never been of interest to me, I’ve gone for years without attending Sant Mat group meetings. 

Around the time I was Initiated, I bought a number of Sant Mat books, and still have them. After 50 years, I can say that the time I have spent in meditation has been the best investment of time in my life.  

I spent about five weeks in the physical presence of Charan Singh. At no time did he say or do anything that indicated he was under the sway of the mind and senses. I am disillusioned by the nepotism of anointing his nephew as his spiritual successor. 

I am further disillusioned by developments/events since 1990 until now. It looks as if rssb.org has regressed into a cult. As I remember Dera Baba Jaimal Singh Ji, it was a small ashram dedicated to the teachings of Sant Mat.   

In the past few years, newspapers have described rssb.org as the most powerful sect in India - not a compliment.

Life is a journey, not a destination. The Path is within. The technique of meditation we are given at the time of Initiation takes us back to our source. 

"My only advice is that whatever we may do and in whatever circumstance we may live, our meditation should be our main concern, and this should never be sacrificed to anything of this life.”     
         -- Charan Singh

Some thoughts about Shivinder Singh and his wife

Here's a message someone sent to me about Shivinder Singh, the brother of Malvinder Singh and a relative of Gurinder Singh -- the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a religious organization based in India. Charan Singh was the previous guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

There was a recent article in India Today that describes how Shivinder Singh’s wife was conned out of 215 crore rupees by a man who posed as a high government official. He told her he could spring her husband from jail where he has been in custody for a quite a while. This brings forward quite a few questions. 

If she is the daughter-in-law of God in Human Form, why would she bribe a government official when God is her father-in-law? If she thought she was bribing a government official, shouldn’t she also be in jail? Last I heard, this is illegal in India. 

215 crore is around 30 million dollars. That would certainly be a good faith gesture for paying off the debt that landed Shivinder in jail in the first place. He told the courts he would cooperate and pay his debts but it looks like he is hiding his cash. I imagine the courts took notice of this and are wondering where the rest of the loot is.  

If we are supposed to obey the laws of our country, why is he hiding his money rather than doing what he promised when initiated into the Radha Soami faith? 

He is Charan Singh’s grandson and was raised by Charan Singh’s daughter. The entire family had the great boon of the “company of the saints” yet raised two crooks whose greed knows no bounds. Charan Singh used to say if you put a good man with a gang of thieves he will soon become a thief himself. Did all of this start when they came under the influence of their guru and mentor, Gurinder Singh?

I am not sure what happened here because I still have a lot of faith in Charan Singh’s  good character and spiritual attainment. I guess I don’t have any choice but to live with the cognitive dissonance. 

Next time I will look for a guru like Bhagat Singh though, I expect it will take some time to recover. 

I give away eight boxes of books. And a lot of fond memories.

I woke up yesterday morning with a fresh insight: time for the books to go. Not just the small box of giveaway books that had been sitting on a table in my bedroom for quite while. 

Also, the boxes of books that had been languishing in the storage space above our carport for much longer, about fifteen or twenty years, I can't remember exactly.

Those books had a lot more sentimental value, which might explain why I hadn't thought of donating them before, even though I'd glance at the boxes every time I climbed up the dropdown ladder to get something out of the crawl space.

(Aptly named, since you have to crawl around on the sheets of plywood placed over the rafters, there not being nearly enough room to stand up.)

The eight boxes that I took this afternoon to the Friends of the Salem Public Library for their annual book sale mostly contained books that I'd used as research for three books I've written: God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder; Life is Fair; Return to the One.

Each was written in the spirit of seva, volunteer service, during the time I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a guru-centered religious organization with headquarters in India.

So the boxes of books were sort of like a mental archaeological excavation. They contained mostly fond memories of a period in my life when I held considerably different spiritual beliefs than I have now. I took photos of the boxes before I put them in my car.

The bottom box in the photo above contained some of the books I'd used in research for my first book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder. I started to write it not long after Gurinder Singh Dhillon became the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas following the death of Charan Singh, the guru who initiated me in 1971.

I'd never even had a high school physics class, even though the book was about the relation between mysticism and the New Physics (quantum mechanics, relativity theory, etc.). It took years of reading, note taking, pondering, writing, and re-writing before the book was published by Threshold Books.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas had agreed to buy several thousand copies to resell at a low cost, which sweetened the deal enough for Threshold Books to agree to publish the book -- which they found appealing because I'd included so many Rumi quotes, and Threshold was a Sufi-oriented publisher.

Having developed a writing relationship with the folks in charge of books published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas, my next book project was Life is Fair. This effort was even more meaningful to me, since I was told that Charan Singh had wanted to have a little book describing the karmic rationale for vegetarianism that he could hand out to people. 

When I was asked if I wanted to take on the project after it had stalled with other people attempting to write such a book, it took me about one millisecond to say "Yes! Absolutely." Being able to fulfill a wish of my guru before he died was a dream come true. Hey, maybe my meditation sucked, but I felt like I could write a book about karma and vegetarianism.

At times that feeling seemed like a fantasy. There were so many changes of direction and rewrites, I almost lost hope. Almost. Eventually I went to India to finish the book at the RSSB headquarters and it ended up being published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas. One of the pleasant parts of writing Life is Fair was finding cartoons to illustrate some key points in a humorous manner.

I spent a lot of time at the marvelous Powell's Books in Portland, an hour's drive north of where I lived in Salem, sitting on the floor of the Humor section, thumbing through cartoon books featuring Calvin & Hobbes, Dilbert, and other comic strips.

Today I couldn't bear to let the cartoon books I'd bought go when it came time to unload the box they were in onto a library cart. Those were the only books I took home with me. I looked at a few pages and started laughing, then figured that while my spiritual/philosophical views have changed considerably, my love of humor hasn't.

The bottom box above mostly held books I'd gotten for my research into Plotinus, a Neoplatonist Greek philosopher. After Life is Fair was completed, I wrote Gurinder Singh and asked him if there were any other books I could write for Radha Soami Satsang Beas. He replied that they'd like to have a Mystics of the West series and listed some possibilities. Plotinus was one of them.

I'd heard about Plotinus but knew next to nothing about his philosophy. So even though Plotinus is notorious for being one of the most difficult Greek philosophers to understand -- his Enneads are full of confusing passages -- I dove into the deep waters of Plotinus and read every book about him in English, along with every translation of the Enneads in English. 

Return to the One was quite a writing journey. After several years of work, just as with the other two books I despaired that I'd ever reach a satisfactory endpoint. But I refused to give up, telling myself that if I had to write out the book on paper bags and leave them strewn on park benches, that's what I'd do. (Yeah, unrealistic and kind of dramatic, but writers have strange ways of getting through dark periods.)

In the end, Return to the One wasn't published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas for reasons I've talked about in other blog posts. A sticking point was that the RSSB publishing department wanted me to include a quotation from Charan Singh at the beginning of each chapter. I wasn't willing to do that, since this was a book about the philosophy of Plotinus, not a book about how that philosophy could be seen as relating to the RSSB teachings. So I published the book on my own. 

Anyway, I feel good about sending those eight boxes of books off to the Friends of the Salem Public Library. It was time to let the books go. I like to think that they'll end up with people who enjoy reading them as much as I did. They're filled with notes and highlighting. So whoever buys them will see what I found important, which may be quite different from what they think is important. 

Lastly, a (very) minor miracle. The eight boxes fit into the not-very-large back of my Subaru Crosstrek.

Courageous criticism of Gurinder Singh Dhillon

Today "Natasha" left three comments on a recent blog post, "RSSB guru standards have sunk a lot since Charan Singh's time." RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an organization currently led by Gurinder Singh Dhillon, often abbreviated as GSD.

I admire people like Natasha who speak truth to power. Here's what was said in the three comments. It takes courage to stand up against people like Dhillon, especially in a country like India where religious zealots often treat critics harshly. RS is a shorter way of referring to Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

I have RS friends in India that say the lower caste members of RS say that GSD only meets with rich people. He only appoints rich people from higher castes to positions of authority. This is common knowledge of the lower caste members of RS who do seva at the Dera. Their kids get denied admission to the Dera school but no one will admit to that. And they don’t get the same level of care that higher caste RS sevadars or westerners get. They say the only reason the officials protect GSD from legal troubles is in order to get the votes from his followers. This is common knowledge in the Punjab. Westerners are so naive with what they believe about the guru. The caste system is alive and well at the Dera.

And many of them believe his wife was murdered to keep him and his sons from going to prison. In the Punjab this is very common behavior from powerful people. They have also little respect for women.

Westerners can’t speak to the kind of person GSD is because they don’t know the Punjabi culture. They don’t know how he behaves in Punjab and with officials. They don’t spend anytime with him and don’t know him on a personal basis. They only know what they are told by high caste members of RS. If Americans lived among the poor people in Punjab they would understand what he is really like and they would know what people think of him here. He just another powerful guru who says what people want to hear but does only what is in benefit for him. This is very common with gurus. I don’t understand how westerners can serve someone they don’t know. And they don’t know him at all.

RSSB guru standards have sunk a lot since Charan Singh's time

Writing recently about how the current guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon, threatened people whose village is involved in a property dispute with RSSB, got me to thinking about how different things are guru-wise compared to the time Dhillon's predecessor, Charan Singh, headed up the organization.

I was initiated by Charan Singh in 1971. He died in 1990. So for nineteen years I was exposed to how Charan Singh handled being guru.

This included two weeks in 1977 I spent at the Dera, RSSB headquarters in India, when I got to hear him speak and answer questions in English at evening meetings along with having two brief personal interviews with Charan Singh.

Plus, I read all of his books numerous times, listened to cassette tape recordings of him speaking and answering questions, and repeatedly watched several RSSB videos made during the time Charan Singh was guru. 

There was never any doubt in my mind that Charan Singh was a deeply warm, friendly, honest, humble, sincere, compassionate person. Let's leave aside the question of whether he was God in Human Form, as the RSSB teachings say.

Charan Singh was an exemplary person. He fulfilled his duties as RSSB guru with grace. The only "scandalous" talk I ever heard about him was that he had disciples bypass India customs through some scheme involving watches, if I recall correctly.

The fact that I can't remember this very well shows that it wasn't a big deal. 

Compared to what Gurinder Singh Dhillon has been accused of, it's absolutely nothing. I have no problem recalling most of the scandals the current RSSB guru has been enmeshed in, though I may have omitted some in this 2020 post, "RSSB guru's life should be closely examined."

Here's an excerpt from that post, which nicely sums up why I think it makes sense to pay close attention to how Dhillon has been behaving. In short, not very well, especially compared to previous RSSB gurus.

Dhillon is a public figure. He is the leader of a religious organization with millions of followers. He is shown in You Tube videos that are viewed by many.

And Dhillon also has been the subject of many stories in the Indian financial press regarding the involvement of the guru, his family, and close associates in a financial scandal where allegedly hundreds of millions of dollars were illegally siphoned off from companies once controlled by the Singh brothers, who are relatives of the guru, into shell companies and unsecured loans to the Dhillon family.

Here's a sampling of blog posts I've written about the questionable activities of the RSSB guru.

Malvinder's criminal complaint casts light on RSSB guru's role in financial fraud
Devastating criticism of Gurinder Singh Dhillon by a RSSB insider
Delhi Police financial fraud charges point to RSSB guru's involvement
Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, accused of making death threats
Sheetal Talwar talks about death threat made from RSSB satsang office
Sheena's "Memoirs of a Seeker" throws light on Gurinder Singh Dhillon
Bloomberg story shows Gurinder Singh Dhillon's shady business dealings
RSSB guru appears to have lied about his financial problems

It is easy for a guru to appear all spiritual, loving, and trustworthy when he or she is sitting on a stage, surrounded by fawning followers, with nobody asking tough questions about the guru's personal life outside of his religious duties. 

But none of us is only who we are at our best public moments. There's much more to us that only comes to light in private moments. Knowing the full picture isn't important when it comes to most people we know.

For example, I don't need to know the private life of my doctor, hair cutter, plumber, or electrician, because this isn't relevant to my relationship with them. However, in the case of a guru who is considered to be God in Human Form by his devotees, a trusted spiritual guide with upstanding morals, it definitely is highly relevant how the guru behaves in his private life.

I just spent an enjoyable four days, Monday through Thursday, watching every prime time minute of the Democratic National Convention. It didn't feature just the public side of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It also showed lots of details about their personal and private life.

That's the only way to understand who a politician really is. And it's also the only way to understand who a guru really is. You can't claim to be a "perfect" guru if in your personal life you're doing some decidedly imperfect things.

So if you're a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, ignore the admonition to not be interested in the guru's personal life. Sure, usually a person's private life should be off-limits to public scrutiny. But not when a person occupies an important public role, like wanting to be President or Vice-President of the United States.

In that case, as in the case of a guru who supposedly is a highly elevated spiritual being capable of guiding people back to God. it makes sense to get to know the entire person, not just their public persona.

Description of Gurinder Singh Dhillon "secret" video

I've gotten a description of the video shared in a recent blog post where Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) in India, is talking in Punjabi. 

Apparently Dhillon is threatening those who live in Waraich, a village that is next to the boundary wall of the RSSB headquarters in the Punjab known as the Dera. Reportedly Dhillon was instrumental in acquiring the land of Waraich and the villagers filed a petition in the Punjab high court that made Dhillon angry.

The guru visited the village gurdwara (Sikh temple) where a local person made this video. Even though Dhillon and previous RSSB gurus used to be against India's caste system, in the video Dhillon says "mei ve jatt da put haa mera pind bhindranwale de naal hai," which means "I am son of jatt [upper caste and very aggressive in nature] and my village is next to Bhindranwale's village."

A Britannica article says that Bhindranwale was a "Sikh religious leader and political revolutionary whose violent campaign for autonomy for the Sikh state of Punjab and armed occupation of the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) complex in Amritsar led to a violent and deadly confrontation with the Indian military in 1984." The article about him concludes with:

In July 1982 he moved to the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) complex in Amritsar. He gathered a considerable following of like-minded Sikhs and stockpiled weapons. In early June 1984 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered Indian troops to attack the complex, and, in the fighting that followed, several of its buildings were heavily damaged. According to the government authorities, hundreds of people were killed in the action, including Bhindranwale. Other reports (notably from Sikhs) put the death toll considerably higher, possibly as many as 3,000. For many Sikhs, he died the death of a martyr.

Assuming this summary is correct, and I have no reason to believe it isn't, it sure seems like Dhillon is acting very unlike an enlightened guru in the video. His mention of Bhindranwale appears to be a threat directed at the villagers, implying that Dhillon can be as tough as Bhindranwale was.

Great Zen advice: be natural, not intentional

During the 35 years I was an active member of an India-based spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), I observed a lot of unnatural behavior. 

I did this myself, though not to the degree that I observed in many others. They would put on what they thought was a virtuous demeanor, though from what I could see, it just looked fake, artificial, pretentious. 

The RSSB teachings decried the "five deadly sins" of lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism. So some members of the group took this to mean that they should look as if they had overcome these supposed character defects, even if in reality they still possessed them.

I came to feel that I'd rather be in the presence of an honest sinner than a hypocritical saint.

It was aggravating to talk with someone who wasn't really there, because their mind was split between attending to our conversation and monitoring whether they were coming across as the exemplary RSSB disciple that they wanted others to see them as.

Today I read the Communication chapter in Shunryu Suzuki's book, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind." It was a breath of natural fresh air, compared to the often artificial atmosphere I experienced at RSSB gatherings.

Here's excerpts from the chapter.

When you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions; you should just listen to him, just observe what his way is.

We put very little emphasis on right and wrong or good and bad. We just see things as they are with him, and accept them. This is how we communicate with each other.

Usually when you listen to some statement, you hear it as a kind of echo of yourself. You are actually listening to your own opinion. If it agrees with your opinion, you may accept it, but if it does not, you will reject it or you may not really hear it.

...A mind full of preconceived ideas, subjective intentions, or habits is not open to things as they are. That is why we practice zazen [meditation]: to clear our mind of what is related to something else.

To be quite natural to ourselves, and also to follow what others say or do in the most appropriate way, is quite difficult. If we try to adjust ourselves intentionally in some way, it is impossible to be natural. If you try to adjust yourself in a certain way, you will lose yourself.

So without any intentional, fancy way of adjusting yourself, to express yourself freely as you are is the most important thing to make yourself happy, and to make others happy. You will acquire this kind of ability by practicing zazen.

Zen is not some fancy, special art of living. Our teaching is just to live, always in reality, in its exact sense.

...So we should be concentrated with our full mind and body on what we do; and we should be faithful, subjectively and objectively, to ourselves, and especially to our feelings.

Even when you do not feel so well, it is better to express how you feel without any particular attachment or intention.

So you may say, "Oh, I am sorry, I do not feel well." That is enough. You should not say, "You made me so!" That is too much. You may say, "Oh, I am sorry, I am so angry with you." There is no need to say that you are not angry when you are angry.

You should just say, "I am angry." That is enough. True communication depends upon our being straightforward with one another.

A message from a disillusioned RSSB initiate

UPDATE: I should have noted in the original post that I strongly support Covid vaccine mandates, so have no problem with a religious group having vaccinated and non-vaccinated people sit in different locations. That protects the vaccinated, who are still at a small risk of getting Covid, from those who aren't vaccinated. 

It always makes me feel good to hear from someone who has come to see the downside of belonging to a religious organization.

Today I got this message regarding the organization I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), which is headquartered in India. Gurinder Singh Dhillon is the RSSB guru.

Hi Brian, I hope that you’re well.

I ran across your site a few years ago and was at the time, perplexed by why someone would move away from RSSB in that fashion. I remember your book ‘Life is Fair’ well and have a copy of it - great book.

Anyway, I’ve been visiting your site more recently for some inspiration and support really. I am now at the final tipping point to breaking away from RSSB for good.

The organisation has become massive, with definite hierarchies despite the suggestion that all seva [volunteer service] is equal, and GSD’s [Gurinder Singh Dhillon's] financial dealings/misdemeanours are of great concern.

There is no contact with the Master who is so far removed from the average initiate. He is entirely unapproachable. Hell, if you write him a letter you simply get a cut and paste response from a sevadar [volunteer]. He obviously has no idea of the real struggles initiates are facing and he is presumably not interested in them.

He is treated like a celebrity and possibly gets a real kick out of this. Is he a true living Master? Does he really give a shit? I have doubts in that regard.

Of particular concern currently is the treatment of vaccinated vs unvaccinated initiates. Those who are vaccinated get to sit at the front near the Master while others get relegated to the back of the hall. World-wide one cannot do seva unless vaccinated. Apartheid much?

People who have dedicated countless years and much effort to seva have been entirely sidelined with instructions from those in ‘power’ who throw their weight around all with of course, the promise that it is all being done with love. Not good.

Further, NRIs ]Non Resident Indians] can only be initiated at the Dera with a vaccine passport. He is now trying to force every initiate into becoming vaccinated. While I am neither for nor against the vaccine, I am pro choice (but I have chosen not to take it).

In a spiritual organisation there should be no divisions, but he is fueling them. Considering his dealings with big pharma - is there a link here to the vaccines? Just a thought. The churches and mosques (certainly locally) are not taking this route. There, everyone is welcome. And that should be the case with RSSB - if it were truly non discriminatory.

There are a great number of disillusioned initiates out there. With the most recent developments they’re dropping off the path at an alarming rate.

We live in interesting times.

It took a while for this person to give up on RSSB

Yesterday I got this message from someone who said it would be fine to share what they said, but not their name. I always feel good when I hear that someone has benefitted from my blog posts.

I've told this person that I don't know what has happened to tAo. His comments were indeed interesting. But change is inevitable, including who comments on this blog. 

Hello Brain , how u doing n hope u r doing great at ur end. I am ________, initiated by Baba Gurinder Singh G in 2003. I am 45 years old now. I born and brought up in Orthodox Rssb family , my great grand father initiated by baba sawan singh g in year 1922 , my grand father spent 26 years in sewa at dera after getting retirement from punjab police as an officer , he was dera resident and died in dera .

I have been reading ur blogs on site church for churchless since year 2010 . I didn't like ur views at first . But after a year or more I found some reality in ur writings . I read all of ur rssb blogs twice or may be thrice with all comments on that .

I gave up my faith on baba g and rssb in year 2019 with very heavy heart , I had my own reason's for living the rssb faith with no hard feeling's. Actually I never had a pure faith or belief on rssb I was just keep going with it as told by my family and being told or preach by in weekly satsangs . I am very emotional person and feel guilty deep inside me for living the path , my heart says guru is true but my brain says Big No . 

I like ur blogs . I enjoy to read the comments also specially by tAo , Spence , osho , Tuscon , jesse , Jen etc. 

I missing tAo , why is he not commenting any more ,is he okay ? He is much experienced person regarding cult , I would love to hear about him from you , that's the reason also I'm mailing you. 

 

I like ur blog , please keep going , my best wishes always with you.

 

Regards , ___________

I'm asked how to adjust to life after leaving RSSB

Here's a message I got recently from someone who has left the India-based religious organization I was an active member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). My reply to this person follows the message.

"baba ji" refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. "Seva" means service, volunteering. "Satsangi" is a RSSB initiate. "Satsang" is a RSSB meeting.

Hi Brian,

I came across your blog a while ago and it has been instrumental in helping me question my beliefs. My family is satsangi and I was raised in it. I think you and I had a similar loyalty to the path.  I would attend seva every weekend and sometimes in the weeknights too and was heavily involved in the regional and national satsangs when baba ji would come.  I always considered myself a satsangi; however, for seven years I was very deeply entrenched in the satsangi way of life.  For those seven years, my life revolved around seva, satsang and satsangis to the point that I sacrificed my non-satsangi friendships for the sake of the rs path.

10 years ago, I moved to a different city where I didn’t have access to the teachings.  The sangat was small, I attended a few satsangs but I didn’t put in the same amount of effort.  Now, 10 years later, I am slowly realizing that the path isn’t for me.  The financial scandal pretty much ended any hope for reconciliation, especially when I read on your blog that baba ji said he has diabetes and can’t attend court yet was holding satsang on the same day.  It is always preached that we need to be the best representatives of the guru so we do not bring shame to him.  What about him bringing shame to us?  How is he being a good representative of us? He also preaches about ‘haq halal di kamai’ or earning an honest living.  It is all so hypocritical.  

The worst part is, the fear is still there.  I’m typing this, but will something horrible happen to me now?  Will I go blind because I’m rejecting the guru?  I know it’s ridiculous, I’m a rational person, yet these wayward thoughts that have been programmed into me since I was 5 years old keep popping up and I don’t know how to shut them up.  There isn’t any guilt, I’ve been freely telling my family and close friends that I’m not binding myself to arbitrary restrictions anymore and I do truly think it’s a sham centred around cashing in. I’m still a vegetarian since that’s my own morality but I’ve pretty much stopped asking about ingredients at restaurants and do have a drink when I feel like it.  By all outward appearances I am untangling myself from the situation but inwardly, there is a smidgeon of fear that I can’t seem to erase.

At the end of the day, I’m not overly angry but more so disappointed and very very sad.  It is just so sad, I can’t believe it.  I feel as though I’m in mourning.  I guess the reason I’m writing to you is because you are so far ahead of me in this journey.  Did this happen to you?  How did you ‘unlearn’ the programming?  It seems you bought into the teachings as much as I did, maybe you can give me some advice on how to deal with this.

Thanks for your blog Brian.  I know you get a lot of flack for it, but it was instrumental in helping spur my critical thinking of the path.

This was my reply.

Thanks for your message. It makes me feel good to hear from people like you who find some value in my Church of the Churchless blog. 

Yes, I was very loyal to Charan Singh, who initiated me. Gurinder Singh, not quite as much, though I certainly did a heck of a lot of seva after Gurinder became the RSSB guru. 

 

Here’s some thoughts about how to adjust to life after RSSB.

 

(1) It takes time. To me it’s a lot like going through a divorce, something I did after 18 years of marriage. I loved my first wife. But we grew apart. At first I thought about her a lot, wondering if there was anything we could have done to save our marriage. Now I’ve been remarried for 31 years to a woman I love even more. And my first wife is happy with the man she has found. 

 

Likewise, it’s natural to spend considerable time thinking about your RSSB years, since this path meant a lot to you for quite a few years. That isn’t time lost. It’s time gained, since you’ve learned a lot about yourself, how you view spirituality, and such. Now I rarely think about my first wife, since I’m happy with my current wife. I also rarely think about RSSB now, except when I use it as an example in one of my blog posts. 

 

So my advice is to let your adjustment to breaking away from RSSB happen naturally. As the days, weeks, and months pass, you’ll find yourself feeling more comfortable not being involved with RSSB.

 

(2) Regarding fear, I don’t think this can be a productive basis for spirituality. Isn’t love much more important? What kind of god or guru would punish you for deciding to deconvert from a belief system? Certainly not any god or guru deserving of devotion. 

 

Yes, the RSSB literature contains references to nasty stuff that happens to disciples who stray from RSSB after being initiated. But almost certainly these are superstitions, written by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. And I speak as someone who wrote several books for RSSB. I did a good job with the books. However, I didn’t have any special mystical knowledge. Nor do, in my opinion, the authors of other RSSB books.

 

If it gives you some comfort, I broke away from RSSB around 2004. Seventeen years later, I haven’t noticed any bad things that have happened to me beyond what happens to everyone, like health problems as I’ve aged. 

 

(3) Keep in mind that nothing is 100% certain. That’s a scientific perspective, since science always is open to having hypotheses or theories revised or even overturned. Thus there’s a chance RSSB is correct in how it views reality, just as there’s a chance that any of the other thousands of world religions and mystical paths is correct. 

 

What you and I have done is increase our chances of learning the truth about God, life after death, and all that. Speaking for myself, what I do every day is spend a minute or two talking to God and the guru who initiated me, Charan Singh. 

 

I say something like, “Hey God/guru, I’d like to know you. I’d like to learn from you. I don’t know how to find you, assuming you exist. So it’s up to you to reach out to me. I’m here. Pay me a visit in my consciousness. Or if you want to prove that you exist in a physical manner, feel free to manifest a new Tesla in my driveway. Then I’ll really believe in you.” (I’m hoping God/guru have a sense of humor.)

 

Just because you have given up on RSSB doesn’t mean you have given up on searching for meaning, or on opening yourself to a possible supernatural reality. When I got divorced, I didn’t give up on women. I just gave up on a particular woman, and then found a different woman who was a better fit for me.

 

Likewise, the only reason you might feel like you’ve lost something is the strong devotion you had to RSSB still lingering in your mind. As I said, this is natural. You should feel good about that devotion. Just turn it in other directions now.

 

There are lots of things, people, causes, and such to be devoted to. Or to love. There’s nothing special about the devotion you gave to RSSB. What matters is devotion itself, not where it is directed. Every religion wants its followers to put the religion first, or at least above most other stuff in life. That’s crazy. Only you can decide what is most important to you now. Trust yourself.

 

Hope this helps at least a little bit. 

 

     — Brian