Church of the Churchless

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

I now consider that I was a cult member for 35 years

Though for 35 years I was a member of an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru who was considered to be God in Human Form by his devotees, I didn't consider myself to have been in a cult.

But this morning I read these passages in the book I've been writing about recently, Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

Cults -- religious, Marxist, Trumpist, and others -- enmesh their adherents in infinite, impenetrable loops of self-reinforcing beliefs. They encourage and often require their members to isolate themselves from outside ideas and authorities.

...Inside the cultic bubble, every question has an answer, every implausibility an explanation, even if the answer is a change of subject or the explanation that you cannot believe your own eyes and ears.

"Well, damn," I thought, "given this reasonable definition of a cult, it does seem like I was in one." Namely, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a branch of Sant Mat (path of the saints, roughly translated).

Here's some reasons why I say that, referencing what Rausch says above.

Impenetrable loops of self-reinforcing beliefs. Here's an example. The guru, being divine, knows what is best for the disciple. That might mean inner progress through meditation that leads to visions of supernatural realms of reality. Or it might mean a lifetime of sitting in darkness and silence during the required several hours of meditation a day.

So whatever happens in meditation fits in with the RSSB teachings. There's no way for the disciple to say "this isn't working," because the guru knows what is supposed to happen to that person, not the person themself. Further, there's a prohibition of telling others about your spiritual progress, or lack thereof. Hence no possibility of learning from other people whether they're getting the promised results.

Isolate themselves from outside ideas and authorities. Faith in the guru is considered a requirement to make progress in meditation. Early on in the current guru's tenure, Gurinder Singh Dhillon said discussing the RSSB teachings on the Internet shouldn't occur. So he told RSSB disciples to isolate themselves from ideas that didn't come from official RSSB sources.

I ended up being fired as a speaker at RSSB meetings because I'd starting writing about RSSB on this blog. The reason that was given was that my blog posts were making people feel uncomfortable. Thus I was viewed as an unwholesome "authority" because I wasn't spouting the party line 100%, even though I'd written several books for RSSB and had been an authorized speaker for many years.

Every implausibility has an explanation. Ask why the RSSB gurus don't perform miracles if they're God in Human Form and you'll be told that the Big Man Upstairs has decreed that saints are forbidden to perform miracles because if they did, lots of people would want to be initiated by them in order to return to God, which would markedly reduce the number of souls in the physical creation, and that isn't supposed to happen. (RSSB believes in reincarnation.)

That's pretty much the same reason why the RSSB gurus forget people's names, make mistakes, get sick, and generally act like Non-Gods in Human Form. They have to disguise their divine nature or everybody on Earth would want to follow them.

What would be wrong with that, you may be thinking. Well, RSSB has the answer. When God created the physical universe, 90% of souls who were hanging out with God were eager to see what physical reality was all about. But 10% had to be dragged kicking and screaming into this universe.

Those 10% are destined to return to God after being initiated by a Perfect Living Master, which the RSSB gurus are despite not appearing perfect. So it's impossible for everybody to be God-realized, because most people on Earth are part of the 90%. OK, but how can you tell the difference between a 90% person and a 10% person? Ah, only the guru can tell. Which is why only some people end up following a RSSB guru, because they're part of the lucky 10%.

I could give more examples. But you get the picture. Of the cult I used to belong to.

Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

Well, the responses I got to my previous post, "Objective reality is validated by the reality-based community," were underwhelming. 

Not really surprising, since I said:

The question I'd pose to those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive view of reality is this: what alternative to Rauch's approach below do you suggest for determining the nature of objective reality?

Meaning, it is easy to criticize reason, rationality, facts, science, open discussion, criticism of propositions about reality, and such. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a better approach than the Constitution of Knowledge.

Read what follows.

Then, if you disagree with some of what Rausch says below, leave a comment on this post describing the nature of your disagreement. Others can then submit their own ideas. This is how knowledge is gained: by a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.

No one could suggest a better approach for gaining knowledge than a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.

So in this post I'm going to take a different approach, with the goal of convincing those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive perspective that there isn't any other valid means of gaining knowledge of objective reality.

Note that I said "objective reality." Obviously we all gain knowledge of subjective reality just by being ourselves. Every experience each of us has is subjective, since it isn't evident to other people.

There's no way anyone can put a thought, emotion, perception, or any other content of consciousness on a table and say, See, this is my experience.

Thus a basic assumption here is that there are almost eight billion subjective human realities, one for each person on Earth. Yet there is only one objective shared reality. Rausch writes:

The main idea of the Constitution of Knowledge, as we have seen, is that reality is what we know, not what you or I know. No purely personal belief can be knowledge, no matter how much merit you or I might think it possesses.

...A corollary is that members of the reality-based community accept that, despite their diversity, they are all exploring aspects of one reality. The Constitution of Knowledge does not require them to see the world the same way or to agree on facts.

In fact, it only works where people see the world differently and disagree on facts, so that they can test their ideas and surmount their biases.

Its unique capacity, however, is to force individual differences toward social convergence. It does so by requiring persuasion, which in turn requires that we try to account for our differences by comparing them.

Science has made astounding progress in the past several hundred years by doing just that. By and large, scientists the world over agree on the knowledge gained from the scientific aspect of the reality-based community.

By contrast, religious believers and mystics have made essentially zero progress in arriving at a common spiritual knowledge. The same questions are being debated today as were being debated hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Why? One obvious reason is that there's no persuasive evidence that a supernatural realm exists. Thus there's no way to test propositions about what that realm consists of, since almost certainly it exists only in the subjective minds of individuals.

Consider the religious belief system that I used to accept, that of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a form of Sant Mat, an India-based religiosity that claims Perfect Living Masters can guide their disciples back to God by connecting them to the shabd, or Sound Current, the power that activates the cosmos.

That'd be amazing if it was true. But how would it be possible to determine the truth of RSSB or Sant Mat?

It can't be by accepting someone's claim that they're experienced divine light and sound. Hallucinations of that sort are commonplace. Psychedelic drugs can produce those phenomena. People can be mistaken. People can lie. People can fool themselves.

No matter how strongly someone believes in a religious, mystical, or supernatural tenet -- whether this belief is held by a small number or billions -- the question remains, Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

Christians believe Jesus is the Son of God. Muslims believe there is no God but God and Muhammed is His prophet. Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, plus adherents of thousands of other religions all have their own unique beliefs.

Atheists and agnostics are skeptical about all of those beliefs. For good reason, because there is no reality-based community in the realm of the supernatural. Again, almost certainly this is because that reality doesn't exist.

Yet suppose you're someone who has had such a profound experience of a supernatural reality that you feel the need to speak your truth to others? (A number of those someone's leave comments on this blog.)

Again, why should I or anyone else believe you? 

It can't be because you've done the experiment of meditation, or whatever you want to call it, and the rest of us haven't. I haven't done any quantum mechanics experiments nor genetics experiments, but I accept the scientific knowledge in these areas.

I do so because there is a reality-based community -- researchers, journals, conferences, peer review, universities, government agencies, science writers, etc. -- that's skilled at assessing the validity of scientific propositions.

If a single scientist claims this or that is true, no one should believe them. Yet if their claim survives careful scrutiny by the reality-based community, there's good reason to believe them. At least until the claim is debunked.

With religious and mystical claims about the supernatural, so far none have become validated knowledge. 

Not miracles. Not ESP. Not life after death. Not astral projection. After thousands of years of attempts by humans to find proof of the supernatural, there's so little to show for this search, we might as well round it off to zero. 

The reason is that what Rausch says in his book is correct. 

By extension, the empirical rule also dictates what does not account as checking: claims to authority by dint of a personally or tribally privileged perspective. In principle, persons and groups are interchangeable. 

If I claim access to divine revelation, or if I claim the support of miracles which only believers can witness, or if I claim that my class or race or historically dominant status or historically oppressed status allows me to know and say things which others cannot, then I am breaking the empirical rule by exempting my views from contestability by others

...You have to check your own claims and subject them to contestation from others; you have to tolerate the competing claims of others; you have to accept that your own certainty counts for nothing; you have to forswear claiming that your god, your experience, your intuition, or your group is epistemically privileged; you have to defend the exclusive legitimacy of liberal science even (in fact, especially) when you think it is wrong or unfair.

No, communion isn't about the body and blood of Jesus

I speak from experience as a lapsed Catholic when I say that communion involves swallowing a wafer and some wine, not the body and blood of Jesus.

OK, that experience was brief, since after I had my first communion, thankfully my mother let me decide whether to continue on to be confirmed as a Catholic -- which I definitely didn't want to do, since the black-clad nuns were scary, the mass was in Latin, the wood we had to kneel on was damn hard, and my Presbyterian boyhood friends got to enjoy their more pleasant Sunday School while I was listening to a priest drone on in a language I couldn't understand.

The thing with religions is, they all seem really weird to anyone who isn't a believer in that particular faith, while to those who embrace a religion, mostly it makes great good sense to them.

So as difficult as it is for me to recall in my current atheist frame of mind, for 35 years I was a member of an India-based religion led by a guru who was considered to be God in Human Form. Yeah, that's weird.

Equally weird were the teachings that the guru planted his "radiant form" in the consciousness of the disciple at the time of initiation; that radiant form guided the disciple all the way back to God; the reason initiation was necessary was because the Eastern equivalent of the Devil had stood on one supernatural leg for like forever, earning him a gift from God to keep souls trapped in this physical world where he could control them until a God in Human Form rescued some of them; and a whole lot of other strange stuff besides.

Which means, I used to accept religious teachings that equaled or surpassed the dogmas of Catholicism when it came to difficult-to-believe'ness. (I didn't really believe in all of them, yet I overlooked the most bizarre teachings in order to embrace the more reasonable ones.)

But now I'm a critic of that Eastern religion, and so feel comfortable also being a critic of Catholicism. Which is why I read an opinion piece in USA Today, um, today, called "Catholic truth on Communion belongs in public square."
Download Catholic truth on Communion belongs in public square - USA TODAY

I could tell from the title that I wasn't going to agree with it. Prediction fulfilled!

The woman who wrote the piece, Katrina Trinko, says that it is perfectly fine that bishops are laying the doctrinal groundwork for President Biden, a devout Catholic, to be denied communion because he favors abortion rights.

For some reason the bishops aren't going after the many Catholic Republican politicians who favor capital punishment, which also is a Catholic no-no. 

Trinko is upset that so many Catholics don't accept everything that their religion says is true -- a quality that endears me to those independently-minded people.

But as a Catholic, I’ve been stupefied by the news coverage and punditry, which lacks awareness of what the Catholic Church teaches, what the Eucharist is and, yes, what it means to be a practicing Catholic.

In a way, I’m not surprised. Polls regularly show a gulf between the values of many American Catholics and the teachings of the Catholic Church. For instance, more than two-thirds of American Catholics support legalized samesex marriage, according to a 2020 Gallup survey. Fifty-six percent of American Catholics agree with Biden and Pelosi, backing abortion being legal in most or all cases, per a 2019 Pew Research Center survey.

And when it comes to the Eucharist, plenty of Catholics aren’t even aware what the Church teaches, namely that the Eucharist is truly the Body and Blood of Jesus. Only half of Catholics know what the Church teaches, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll, which also found that 69% of American Catholics don’t believe the Eucharist is the real presence of Jesus.

Well, duh, of course the Eucharist -- the supposed transformation of bread and wine into Jesus' body and blood -- isn't real. It's just bread and wine. In fact, there's no persuasive evidence that Jesus even existed, much less that he was a divine being. 

Yet the urge to believe in unbelievable stuff runs deep in the human mind. Thousands of years of cultural indoctrination in religious mumbo-jumbo has caused the brains of billions of people to embrace dogmas that make no sense and have no basis in fact.

Again, I've been there and done that. 

The guru who initiated me way back when in 1971 would bless food that then became sacred to his followers. Occasionally people would bring some of it back to this country after seeing the guru in India.

Then they might share it with other disciples. I recall the time I got a small bag of guru-blessed treats (could have been rice cereal; can't remember exactly). Before I meditated I'd carefully pick out two or three bits of whatever it was and savor it as the mystical treat I believed it to be.

If I dropped some on the floor, no problem. I still ate it.

This wasn't like believing that the blessed food was the body and blood of the guru, but it was close, since we initiates of the guru considered that somehow the food contained the guru's essence.

I'm glad to have given up that idea, along with the other crazy stuff I used to accept. Hopefully someday many more that 69% of American Catholics will stop believing that what's consumed at communion is the real presence of Jesus.

Shivinder Singh's bail revoked to uncover conspiracy hatched by him

It's been quite a while since there's been any news about the financial scandal involving the Singh brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder), their relative Gurinder Singh Dhillon (guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas), Sunil Godhwani (who used to be the guru's close advisor), and others.

But a few days ago this story appeared in The Economic Times. Similar stories ran in some other publications. 

It's good to see that the Delhi High Court revoked the bail that allowed Shivinder Singh to stay out of detention, a goal being to uncover the conspiracy hatched by Shivinder and to trace the funds that were siphoned off from Religare Finvest Ltd.

Previous news stories have indicated that Dhillon and his family received some of those funds, which naturally raises the question of whether the guru was part of the conspiracy. This case has been under investigation for a long time. It looks like it will continue to be investigated.

Here's screenshots of The Economic Times story.

Update your beliefs often as new information comes in

Every morning I read another chapter of Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, the subject of two previous posts (here and here).

I really liked her "How to Be Wrong" chapter.

Along with most people, I don't enjoy finding out I was wrong about something. But it's a heck of a lot better than continuing on in my wrongness, which keeps me from learning a more complete truth about that thing.

Below you can read excerpts from that chapter.

They're in three sections, dealing with changing your mind frequently, the ease of saying "I was wrong," and viewing beliefs as needing updating rather than being proven wrong or right.

After each section I'll provide an example of how I changed from being a firm believer in an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), to becoming an open-minded atheist.

(1) Changing your mind frequently.
Changing your mind frequently, especially about important beliefs, might sound mentally and emotionally taxing. But, in a way, it's less stressful than the alternative.

If you see the world in binary black-and-white terms, then what happens when you encounter evidence against one of your beliefs? 

The stakes are high: you have to find a way to dismiss the evidence, because if you can't, your entire belief is in jeopardy.

If instead you see the world in shades of gray, and you think of "changing your mind" as an incremental shift, then the experience of encountering evidence against one of your beliefs is very different.

If you're 80% sure that immigration is good for the economy, and a study comes out showing that immigration lowers wages, you can adjust your confidence in your belief down to 70 percent.

It may later turn out that study was flawed, or further evidence may come out showing that immigration boosts the economy in other ways, and your confidence in your belief may go back up to 80 percent or even higher.

Or you may find additional evidence about the downsides of immigration, which could gradually lower your confidence even further below 70 percent. Either way, each adjustment is comparatively low stakes.

This is pretty much how I gradually came to have increasing doubts about whether the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas were true.

I always had taken a scientific approach to meditation and spirituality. I liked how RSSB also was termed the "science of the soul." So I never considered that this religion was absolutely, positively, 100% true because scientific truths always are open to being modified or proven wrong.

I viewed the RSSB teachings as a hypothesis, an experiment to be conducted within the laboratory of my consciousness. As years, and then decades, went by, I revised my estimate of how likely it was that the RSSB teachings were true.

Because I hadn't started at 100%, but more like 90%, it felt comfortable to reduce that probability downward as I learned more and more about RSSB and had meditation experiences that failed to confirm the science of the soul hypothesis. 

(2) The ease of saying "I was wrong."
A friend of mine named Andrew was surprised when one of his colleagues accused him of never admitting he was wrong. In response, Andrew pointed out two recent occasions on which he had been wrong and readily acknowledged it -- in the company of that very same colleague.

The colleague, whom I'll call Mark, was surprised in turn. He replied, "I guess that's right. Why did I have the opposite impression?" Mark was silent for a minute, reflecting.

Then he said, "You know... I think it's because you never seem embarrassed about it. You're so matter-of-fact, it almost doesn't register to me that you're admitting you were wrong."

It's true. I've seen Andrew acknowledge he was wrong many times, and it usually sounds something like this: "Ah, yup, you're correct. Scratch what I said earlier. I don't believe it anymore." It's cheerful, straightforward, nonchalant.

Mark's implicit assumption was that changing your mind is humbling. That saying "I was wrong" is equivalent to saying "I screwed up" -- something you confess with contrition or sheepishness. Indeed, that's the standard way of thinking about being wrong.

...Scouts reject that premise. You've learned new information and come to a new conclusion, but that doesn't mean you were wrong to believe differently in the past.

I can't say that my shift from embracing RSSB teachings to viewing them as likely being wrong went as smoothly as Andrew's nonchalant manner of acknowledging being wrong.

However, I've never viewed this change as being anything to be ashamed or regretful about. As I've pointed out on this blog many times since I started it in 2004, I've experienced many other shifts in my beliefs.

To offer an example, for eighteen years I was married to a woman who I loved a lot at first, and then not so much. After our divorce, I remarried. Now I've been married for thirty-one years to a woman I loved soon after I met her, and continue to love now.

Similarly, I worked as a health services researcher and planner for quite a few years. Then I realized that I just didn't care anymore about the field that once was so important to me, and moved in a different direction.

Changing our beliefs isn't always easy. But it's less difficult if we hold on to those beliefs lightly enough that we aren't devastated when our beliefs change.

(3) Updating beliefs.
Even the language scouts use to describe being wrong reflects this attitude. Instead of "admitting a mistake" scouts will sometimes talk about "updating." 

That's a reference to Bayesian updating, a technical term from probability theory for the correct way to revise a probability after learning new information.

The way people use the word updating colloquially isn't nearly so precise, but it still gestures at the spirit of revising one's beliefs in response to new evidence and arguments.

...If you at least start to think in terms of "updating" instead of "admitting you were wrong," you may find that it takes a lot of friction out of the process.

An update is routine. Low-key. It's the opposite of an overwrought  confession of sin. An update makes something better or more current without implying that its previous form was a failure. 

This is a nice way of looking upon mistakes. Rather than thinking "I was wrong," we can say to ourselves "I've updated how I look upon this."

Over the years I've been asked by many RSSB devotees how I could possibly have been so wrong about the religion that meant so much to me for such a long tine. I don't understand this perspective.

As noted above, it wasn't that I went from 100% certainty to 100% doubt. I started at maybe 90% certainty that the RSSB teachings were true and steadily updated that probability, mostly downward. So I feel no need to admit "I was wrong" because I never considered myself to be absolutely right.

My iPhone has lots of apps. Almost every day one or more of them get an update. I don't view the maker of the app as having screwed-up when they release an update. Rather, I appreciate that now the app should work better than before.

In much the same way, every day I learn something. I assume this is true for you also. My wife and I enjoy our Apple TV device. We stream a show with it most evenings. 

Until today I was pleased with the device, which I bought five or so years ago, can't remember exactly when. Then I read a review of the updated Apple TV device with an improved remote.

That made me better realize the drawbacks of the device we have now. So this afternoon I ordered the new Apple TV.

I wasn't wrong to have bought the one we have now. I just updated my belief about how good that one was.

You have options. In religions. In everything else.

I'm continuing to enjoy my reading of Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, the subject of my previous post. 

Her core idea is that motivated reasoning, where we ignore what's true because our motivation is to preserve our current belief structure, leads to a soldier mindset aimed at defending our beliefs from that unwelcome intruder, reality. 

By contrast, a scout mindset values truth-seeking through accuracy motivated reasoning. Our goal is know what is really there, not what we hope is there, what we'd like to be there, or what others want us to believe is there.

One of the appealing things about a scout mindset is how it provides us with way more options than a defensive, protect-my-beliefs at all costs soldier mindset. 

In her "Why Truth is More Valuable Than We Realize" chapter, Galef speaks of tradeoffs.

We trade off between judgement and belonging. If you live in a tight-knit community, it might be easier to fit in if you use soldier mindset to fight off any doubts you have about your community's core beliefs and values.

On the other hand, if you do allow yourself to entertain those doubts, you might realize you're better off rejecting your community's views on morality, religion, or gender roles, and deciding to live a less traditional life.

Easy to say. Often not so easy to do. 

I regularly get emails from people who are encountering resistance from their family when they express doubts about the religion they were brought up in.

For example, the organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a guru-centered religious group headquartered in India. Traditional Indian families tend to be close-knit and hierarchical.

If a child decides to head off in a different religious direction after becoming an adult, they can be made to feel guilty, like they're doing something wrong and letting down their parents. 

This is unfortunate.

Family bonds are important, but not if it means someone has to live a lie, pretending to believe in something that no longer appeals to them. Wise loving parents understand that their children, along with everyone else, have to find their own way in life.

Feeling like you have no options is an indication that you've fallen into a soldier mindset dominated by motivated reasoning.

It's difficult to imagine doing something different when you're encased behind a high thick wall of firmly held beliefs. Questioning their validity would entail peering over that wall and trying to determine how true those beliefs really are.

If they're found to be deficient in truth, you might need to find a way to get over the wall of your beliefs and explore new territory that reflects reality more fully. 

There's no reason why you can't remain close to family and friends who choose to remain within the belief structure you've left behind. But sometimes there's a price to be paid for being independent: ostracism, criticism, shunning.

Everybody has to decide whether truth is more important than getting along.

But the way I see it, if someone is willing to ditch you for going your own way, they were never really your friend. Genuine friendships, genuine family relationships -- they're based on something much deeper than shallow beliefs. 

Notably, love. 

A message from someone who woke up to RSSB deception

Getting a message like this one makes me feel like all the work I put into this Church of the Churchless blog is worthwhile. 

RS stands for Radha Soami. RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the India-based religious group I belonged to for 35 years. Gurinder Singh Dhillon is the current RSSB guru.

         Dear Brian

I pondered upon your website quite a few years ago, and I thought this guy has lost it. He has lost the 1 valuable thing in life, the guru...

 

Fast forward to now.  I have been RS follower and initiate of gs dhillon for over 20 years.

Rssb is such a net, that once inside, its very hard to escape...and luckily I have realised that this large establishment is not going to get me God realisation. 

 

Never in history has any saints had large institutions and millions of followers and they achieved God.

 

I was attached to GS dhillon and thought guru knows best.  The teachings are good, but how can anyone teach and not have practiced or experienced anything, have any effect on us.

 

I am really sad that I wasted 20 years of my life thinking I was special, the chosen one...and its still very hard to get the establishment out of my head.

 

I wonder how you feel, you also left after a long time, and up till now, what thoughts or attachments crop up in your mind? How do you overcome them?

 

One thing i told my parents is that don't worry, study other things, if this is the true real master, then we have no worry, apparently he will fulfil his duty and come at death....

I tell the above to my mum, so that she can wake up, and understand that she has nothing to lose by exploring other ideas.

 

It's very difficult for a rs follower to come out of this.

I don't criticise the current guru or the following, just upset and sad that nothing was achieved.

 

I feel something went wrong long time ago, after the first 2 gurus, the first 2 had no large establishment or large monies involved, and from sawan singh, a large institution was created....what I am saying is maybe the path started of correct and got corrupted later on.

 

Thanks for reading my story.

Satan and Kal

Here's a guest blog post from Bob Russo, who sent this essay to me a while back. I recently discovered it in the depths of my email inbox, liked it, and asked Russo if it would be OK to share it on Church of the Churchless.

He said, "sure." Enjoy some thoughts about Satan and Kal. "Kal" is how the so-called Negative Power is viewed by an Eastern religion, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a branch of Sant Mat.

Growing up within the crystalline and dualistic (heaven and hell; Jesus and Satan) landscape of Catholicism and having the Pope to look to for spiritual direction (as a representative of Christ on earth), it was just one hop, skip, and a jump from that world to Radha Soami (Guru path). 

The only difference between the two was that I now had a Perfect Living Master to guide me out of Satan’s (Kal’s) world to Sach Khand (True Land) above.   

So what we have in both systems is the unruly hands of some “negative power” whose goal is to lead the spiritual seeker astray. 

This concept of a negative power or satanic force goes back thousands of years to Ancient Judaism and probably beyond that. Yet, apparently more strident than any “satanic” temptation is the use of this concept by religious leaders and spiritual groups to ingest fear into the minds of sincere individuals and thus control them. 

It’s the same ole problem, reaction, solution scenario that we see played out time and time again under authoritarian religious organizations, which RSSB is certainly one of. They identify YOUR problem and of course, as part of their modus operandi, have the solution.      

Consequently, during a recent trip to Shambala bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, I couldn’t help being drawn to a book entitled The Origin of Satan, by Elaine Pagels.

What made this book a must read for me was its historical overview of Satan from Judaism through early Christianity, and, IMO [in my opinion], seeing a blending together of adversarial roles he/she played (or plays) in both religions and with Kal’s role in Sant Mat.  I suspect the concept of a negative power or entity found its way to Northern India from the Middle East.  

Without going into too much detail, it appears that Satan may have evolved from being part of God’s Grand Hierarchy and his loyal servant, as in Sant Mat (Radha Soami path), to one opposed to God in his/her entirety in early Christianity (the fallen angel set apart from God). In Judaism, Satan’s role was to obstruct human activity, that is, to create chaos, misfortune, conflict, and to test the soul’s loyalty to God (see story of Job).       

During my years in Sant Mat, whenever mention was made of the hapless condition of the world, with its wars, hunger, and plagues, it wasn’t long before someone would comment or read something from an RSSB book on not expecting more from Kal’s domain.  

In RSSB, Kal is responsible for humankind’s screwups and misfortunes as we see with the Satan of Judaism (since Kal is the ruler of the three lower worlds). And as such, continues to confuse humankind as it helplessly and aimlessly drifts about with no direction in sight (until the Perfect Living Master comes to the rescue).    

According to RSSB theology, once an individual gets initiated the situation changes because although Kal rules the world, anything that happens to the Satsangi (followers of the Radha Soami path) is supposedly the amiable work of the Master. 

IMO, this whole thing is very confusing, because if an earthquake strikes and both Satsangis and non-Satsangis are injured, then who do we claim is responsible for the earthquake, the Master or Kal?   

Now, with the development of Christianity, Satan evolved into an evil entity completely opposed to God as seen in the New Testament where Satan was held responsible for the arrest and execution of Jesus.  And, the Jews unfortunately, were labeled as agents of Satan for having played their fateful part in Jesus’ death.

(We can effortlessly glance into history to see the results of this horrific prejudice that has cost the Jewish people countless lives and hardships over the past two millennium). Thus, a major rift grew between this new religious movement called Christianity (which had a lot of Jewish members), and the Jewish people, particularly the Judaic religious ruling class.   

Now, as Christianity grew, most people were looking for “rules” and guidance on how to be true Christians. Thus, an “orthodox” branch of Christianity made firm headway among this new religion, and as such, became institutionalized with its various do’s and don’ts, priests, and bishops. This new branch of Christianity (which evolved into the Catholic Church), ultimately labeled any other branch of Christianity and all other religions for that matter, as evil products of Satan.   

Certain members of this orthodox branch, such as Tertullian, whom according to Pagels, was a convert from Carthage in Northern Africa around 180 C. E., denounced all those who deviated from the “majority” or orthodox teachings as heretics. 

What I found interesting is that the Greek translation for heresy (hairesis) is choice. Therefore, one who makes a choice is a heretic. 

Pagels mentions on pg.164 of her book that Tertullian insists that making choices is evil, since choice destroys group unity (which probably means less control and $ for the spiritual elite leaders).  She goes on to quote Tertullian as saying “that church leaders must not allow people to ask questions, for it is questions that make people heretics.”    

Since Satan was opposed to God, it becomes quite clear that Christians were involved in a sort of spiritual cosmic war between good and evil. They, of course, represented good, while all “unorthodox” Christians and pagans were viewed as agents of Satan.

Pagels writes on pg. 165, “Instead of admitting Christians into debates over the Scriptures, Tertullian says, ‘straight thinking’ (the literal translation of orthodox) Christians must simply claim the Scriptures as their own exclusive property’…but, how do heretics come up with such ingenious and persuasive arguments from Scripture?  Their inspiration comes, Tertullian says, ‘from the devil, of course, to whom belong the wiles that distort the truth’”.

How’s that for enforcing mind control? We can also see how “ownership” of the “truth” as “exclusive property” is a prized tool in controlling the masses!

Thus, although more subtle, IMO, the Radha Soami tradition, at least in Beas, has firm distain for any polemic or  “revealing” questions that may potentially uproot the reality or spiritual competency of the guru and/or the philosophy he represents (this is quite obvious to me from their response to internet discussions of RS and their letters to David Lane). 

And, as a friend mentioned recently, a ”true believer” will never ask the real questions while those that would are probably never going to be there to ask them in the first place.

Here we are in the year 2002, and we can still walk the streets of Dera or stroll along the freshly landscaped gardens of Petaluma or visit the cascading waters of Calvary Baptist College (formerly Murrieta Hot Springs) and what will we find in common among the members of each group? 

A firm belief that they, themselves, are the “chosen” ones, the lucky few who have God on their side while the rest of the world wallows in Satan’s nebulous and dingy shadow! For the Fundamentalist Christian, the cosmic war between good and evil is alive and well today while for the satsangi, this dreary epic is faced each day in meditation.    

Unfortunately, this dualistic outlook has created a split society or “them and us” mentality that has caused unimaginable pain, suffering, and death to countless individuals and unbearable hardship to innumerable families throughout modern history. 

And, this “split” is not limited to externals but has caused considerable mental anguish and cognitive problems to individuals living within a strict right versus wrong world.  

Another RSSB follower sees the light and leaves

I love getting deconversion stories from people who feel that this blog helped them in breaking free of religious dogmatism. Here's a message I got recently from someone who belonged to the organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

Maharaji refers to the previous RSSB guru, Charan Singh. Gurinder refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, who is enmeshed in a financial scandal. Sant Mat refers to the teachings of RSSB. Satsangs are RSSB meetings where the teachings are discussed.

I've taken out some personal identifying information.

Hi Brian,

I wish to thank you for finally giving me the support with your church of the churchless site. To break with the cult of the Gurinder gangster clan. Originally a follower of Maharaji initiated in 84. Ten years of desperately trying to follow the present gangster. Wondering what was wrong with me for not being able to love him or even understand his take on santmat.

I then drifted for a further 20 or so years. Now as I say a very painful severance for me. Keeping a weekly watch on your site, about 3 years ago I stopped going to the Satsangs and functions or even wanting to see him on his visits to _______. All the things that were recently brought to the front by the young lady in her recent posting and more had over the years disgusted me. Finally making me leave.

Leaving at first was a rather traumatic experience. But over the first year I realised I had not only left santmat but any belief in any deity behind. Not the liberation of my mythical soul that I had signed on for. But undoubtedly a sense of being a liberated human being .

I see all around me how people are being tricked into some cult or other whether a political ideology, a religious one or any scam at all.  And daily I just avoid it with a silent laugh at all the rubbish that is peddled around this planet. In the name of some god or ideology.  

Thank you again Brian.

I am ________ of ________ and happily proclaim I am out of and free of the Cult of Santmat.

New development in Singh brothers/RSSB guru scandal may not mean much

Today someone sent me a link to a November 12, 2o20 story in the Economic Times, "Sebi disposes of proceedings against 16 entities in Religare Finvest fund diversion case."

That person wondered if this meant that Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, had been cleared of wrongdoing in the complex financial scandal involving the Dhillon family and their relatives, Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, along with associates of the guru such as Sunil Godhwani.

I've copied in the Economic Times story below. It's difficult to know what to make of it. As far as I can tell, no other publication in India has written about this development. So my suspicion is that this doesn't clear Dhillon.

Here's my reasoning.

Based on previous reporting in the Indian financial press, the 16 entities named in the story appear to be mostly, and maybe completely, shell companies. Meaning, they weren't actually doing business, but rather served as pass-throughs for other purposes, legal or illegal. 

This Business Today graphic, which I've shared before, shows the reputed scheme in broad-brush strokes. Money siphoned from companies once controlled by the Singh brothers flowed into the shell companies, then into the pockets of the RSSB guru and his family.

So it makes sense that currently the shell companies would have few, if any, assets. After all, the SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) allegation was that the shell companies were used to move money around, not that the fraud consisted of transferring money into the shell companies and leaving it there.

Further, my understanding is that the management (directors) of the shell companies has changed since the purported fraudulent transactions took place. This also could explain why the 16 entities no longer are part of the SEBI proceedings. 

Currently there is nothing to investigate at the shell companies. Rather, the questions are: (1) Who ended up with the money that flowed through the shell companies? and (2) Who orchestrated these transfers of money?

Again, I'm just expressing my opinion here, since the story below is vague about what the SEBI action means in the context of the accusations against Malvinder Singh and Dhillon, who has been accused by Malvinder of masterminding the diversion of money. 

Note that the story doesn't say that SEBI has given up on recovering the diverted money from every entity (which I assume includes individuals) involved in this case -- just from the 16 entities, largely or entirely shell companies, mentioned in the story. 

So I doubt that this is the end of the scandal. Perhaps we'll learn more on November 26 when a bail hearing for Malvinder in regard to the money laundering case has been rescheduled. Malvinder and his attorney keep saying that Gurinder Singh Dhillon is the real culprit, not Malvinder.

Here's the Economic Times story.

Sebi disposes of proceedings against 16 entities in Religare Finvest fund diversion case

Among the 16 entities, the names of two entities have already been removed from the list by the regulator.

Markets regulator Sebi on Thursday disposed of adjudication proceedings against 16 entities for their alleged involvement in Religare Finvest's fund diversion matter.
The entities were alleged to have been involved in diversion of funds amounting to Rs 2,315.09 crore from the books of Religare Finvest Ltd (RFL), a subsidiary of Religare Enterprises Ltd (REL), for the utilisation of promoters and promoter group entities of REL.

Shivinder and Malvinder Singh were promoters of REL.

Further, 14 names have been removed from the list of entities from whom REL and RFL were directed to recover the loan amount, Sebi said in an order.

Among the 16 entities, the names of two entities have already been removed from the list by the regulator.

Sebi, through an interim order in March 2019, had directed REL and RFL to initiate steps to recall all the loans, amounting to Rs 2,315.09 crore, extended directly or indirectly to certain entities -- including the 16 entities -- along with due interest, within three months.

The entities were also directed not to dispose of any of their assets or divert any funds, except for meeting expenses of day-to-day business operations, without the prior permission of Sebi, pending completion of the investigation and till further orders.

Subsequently, Sebi had confirmed the directions through an order passed in September 2019. However, the directions issued against two entities -- OSPL Infradeal Pvt Ltd and Bharat Road Network Ltd NSE 0.33 % -- were revoked.

Further, the names of OSPL Infradeal and Bharat Road Network were removed from the list of entities from whom REL and RFL were directed to recover the loan amount.

Pursuant to completion of investigation in the matter, Sebi, in an order on Thursday, revoked the directions issued through the interim as well as confirmatory orders against the 14 entities. The watchdog also disposed of the ongoing proceedings against all the 16 entities.

The other 14 entities are Platinum Infrastructure, Ad Advertising, Artifice Properties, Best Health Management, Devera Developers, Vitoba Realtors, Fern Healthcare, Modland Wears, Rosestar Marketing, Star Artworks, Tripoli Investment, Volga Management and Consultancy, Zolton Properties and Ranchem Private Ltd.

Through a separate order, the regulator has disposed of ongoing proceedings against three entities -- Best Healthcare, Fern Healthcare and Modland Wears -- in the Fortis Healthcare case.

It was alleged that the entities were involved in diversion of funds amounting to Rs 403 crore from the books of Fortis Hospitals Ltd, a subsidiary of Fortis Healthcare Ltd NSE -1.59 % (FHL) for the utilisation of promoters and promoter group entities of FHL.

The issue pertains to the affairs of FHL, which were being managed by the erstwhile promoters -- the Singh brothers. It was alleged that the Singh brothers had siphoned off the funds of FHL to promoter-related entities through layers of companies which were controlled by them.

Sebi, in October 2018, had directed FHL to recover Rs 403 crore, along with interest, from nine entities. The regulator had also directed the entities to jointly and severally repay the amount to Fortis Hospitals and FHL.

Besides, the entities were restrained from disposing of the assets pending investigation. The nine entities included Best Healthcare, Fern Healthcare and Modland Wears.

In its latest order, Sebi said it "revokes the directions issued vide the interim order read with confirmatory order against the... 3 noticees (viz. Best Healthcare Pvt Ltd, Fern Healthcare Pvt Ltd and Modland Wears Pvt Ltd ) and also dispose of the ongoing proceedings... against them".

How the RSSB guru was involved with Ranbaxy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

What else ? Hmmm... Yeah, there is a ton of stuff on Ranbaxy's dubious business practices. They were quite infamous for their animal testing methods, that is fine, but the promoters followed a rigid spiritual path that did not permit mayo. Oops ! Gurinder is the only " relative " who is a business partner and has made big money with the Singh Brothers. The rest of them are high paid employees, like Charan's son Cuckoo who works for Fortis Hospitals.
-------------------------

Familial Ties / Religare: Gurinder is Charan's nephew (his sister's son) and back in the day, Charan had nothing to do with Dr. Parminder Singh's (his son-in-law) fortunes. Nimmie (Charan's daughter) had a rather turbulent relationship with her husband (Dr. Parminder Singh) and Charan was often involved in resolving their marital issues. Towards the end Nimmie and Parminder were living separately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

Well, I don't think we'll find Gurinder absconding one day, my guess is that he may head out in an autonomous direction (the signs are already there) and may even renunciate his leadership and Guru-status in the years to come. This may be a long shot, but like all things RSSB - it will be well orchestrated and the Sangat will be satisfied.
-------------------------

SKat, Please read http://business.in.com/printcontent/932 and that should put the real facts in line. If Ranbaxy was all that cash rich, why did they sell out ? So, they sold the golden goose for ten thousand golden eggs ? Really ? Was it the current trend of intensifying generic competition and increased government regulation that got to them ?

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

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

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

 

And, in this case, they more than hint about the Guru's involvement. It is all very risky, and you probably also know that that if this is publicly proved, it may spell disaster for the RSSB cult. By the way ( as tAo well noted ) we at the Church of the Churchless had nothing to do with the near-collapse of the global banking system ! Gurinder is a bigger fraud than all those bankers combined and he hails from our land. Besides, how different are the business practices of Mukesh Ambani, Malvinder Singh and co. in this country for you to be pulling out a fair-play card ?
-------------------------

( The Singh brothers cannot be considered " family " in this regard as they " got into business " with Gurinder only in 2006, prior to which Gurinder had nothing to do with Ranbaxy and had no business of his own. ) B. There is no road-map to indicate how the Guru and his sons became ( now the largest ) shareholders of a two billion dollar company... ( ?? ) C. Why were shares transferred at a pre-issue price to Gurpreet and Gurkirat only ? Why is Gurpreet nowhere to be seen on the Religare India website ? Why is he tucked away in London ? Why has he never been interviewed ?

RSSB guru agrees to submit "sealed" tax returns to Delhi High Court

More news on the financial fraud scandal involving the Singh brothers and their relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

After the story I'll comment on something that I neglected to mention in a previous post on this subject -- how the guru has admitted to "round trip" financial transactions that appear to be illegal. Below is the Live Mint story.

Note: from what I can tell, a sealed court document means that only the court and parties directly involved in a court case can see it. The general public doesn't have access to it, which makes sense if the document contains sensitive information.

New Delhi: Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the spiritual head of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas and his family on Tuesday informed the Delhi high court that they are willing to file their income tax returns in a sealed cover before the registrar of the court.

The copies of the document will also be given to the decree holder --Daiichi Sankyo-- and the concerned judgment debtors, subject to their filing an undertaking to maintain confidentiality in the matter.

Dhillon had filed an exemption application against the court order citing “severe prejudice" to them.

The court has disposed off the application now.

The legible documents related to bank statements have to be filed within two weeks.

The court had deferred its order last week as the counsel for the applicant had prayed that final orders in the application be deferred to enable him to obtain instructions on whether the garnishees are willing to file their income tax returns in a sealed cover.

Former Fortis Healthcare promoter Malvinder Singh had filed an affidavit last month in the Delhi high court alleging that Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family owe him ₹1,473 crore, lent to them over a 10-year period till 2016.

In the affidavit filed on 13 August, Singh alleged that over 2007-12, the Dhillon family took loans totalling ₹578 crore from RHC Holding Pvt. Ltd and Today's Holdings, both funded by him and his brother Shivinder Singh.

In 2016, a Singapore tribunal asked the Singh brothers to pay ₹2,600 crore to Daiichi Sankyo in a case involving Ranbaxy Laboratories’ regulatory issues. The dues have now ballooned to ₹3,500 crore, including interest.

In a previous post about the Dhillon family tax returns, an Economic Times story was shared that said in part:

In an affidavit filed before the Delhi High court on November 12 last year, Dhillon had disclosed about the financial transactions between RHC holdings Ltd and his family members dating back to 2006. In fact he has also tried to establish that his sons Gurpreet and Gurkirat Singh Dhillon were young at that time, Gurkirat being minor and both his sons did not manage their financial affairs personally.

He had also revealed that RHC devised such a mechanism that transactions essentially involved transferring money from one subsidiary to a bank account of Dhillons and then transferring the same money either on the same day or shortly thereafter to another subsidiary of the group or usually to RHC holdings Ltd.

That second paragraph describes what's been called "round trip" financial transactions. These caught the eye of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), which called them fraudulent. The SEBI report contains a diagram of one day's circular, or round trip, transactions. 

So it seems significant that the RSSB guru has admitted to getting money put into his account through this sort of complex round trip transaction. The Economic Times story calls the entities other than FHL and RHC subsidiaries, but a better term seems to be shell companies.

There have been reports that at one time those shell companies were controlled by the Dhillons and their associates. Thus it appears very unlikely that loaned money could appear to the Dhillon family bank accounts without their knowing how it got there.

This is how I summarized things in a 2019 post, "Why the RSSB guru is responsible for financial fraud."

Some core facts are clear:

(1) The Securities and Exchange Board of India has determined that funds were fraudulently siphoned out of a public company into shell companies. 

(2) Those illegal money transfers involved "round trip" transactions that required the collusion of conspirators at both the public company and the shell companies.

(3) The RSSB guru, his family, and close associates controlled the shell companies that received the fraudulent funds. 

(4) The Dhillon family and their close associates used the fraudulently-obtained money, in large part or entirely, to buy real estate and the High Court of Delhi has ordered that this money be recovered from the RSSB guru, his family, and other entities.

At any rate, this saga has more twists and turns ahead, almost certainly. I'll share them as I learn about them. 

RSSB guru has to submit tax returns to Delhi High Court

There's another development in the lengthy saga of the Singh brothers' financial scandal that involves the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB0, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. 

The Delhi High Court says that the Dhillon family has to submit income tax returns and other documents to the court. Here's the Economic Times story.

The Delhi High court has dismissed an application filed by the head of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) Gurinder Singh Dhillon seeking exemption on filing income tax returns and other financial documents.

“In my view, these documents are essential to enable the learned Joint Registrar/Court to determine the merit in the stand of the garnishees who are disputing their liability qua the JDs,” said the court in its order dated September 11. ET has seen a copy of the order.

The court said that it sees no reason to exempt the applicants from filing copies of their income tax returns, bank statements and the balance-sheets.

Dhillon had sought exemption from filing Income Tax returns (ITR) in the Delhi High Court, citing that it contains “personal information” and it was not an “appropriate stage” to produce such documents.

The court had earlier asked Dhillon along with his family members to file ITRs after he denied of any liability towards RHC holdings Ltd, promoted by Malvinder and Shivinder Singh.

In an affidavit filed before the court, Dhillon has said that being individuals, the Dhillons do not “maintain balance sheet” and filing ITR would cause “severe prejudice” to them.

Dhillon had earlier admitted of his financial dealings with the Singh brothers by annexing copies of bank statements. However, he had denied of any liability to RHC holding, to which the court had asked those of who were disputing their liability to file their ITR, bank statements and balance sheets.

In an affidavit filed on January 30, Dhillon had sought an exemption from filing ITRs for himself, his wife, Shabnam Dhillon, his sons-Gupreet and Gurkirat and his daughter-in-law Nayantara Dhillon.

“In this regard it is submitted that the applicants have already placed on record in this court their relevant bank statements. Further, the applicants being individuals do not maintain balance sheets and hence the direction to that extent is not application to them,” read the 14-page affidavit.

In an affidavit filed before the Delhi High court on November 12 last year, Dhillon had disclosed about the financial transactions between RHC holdings Ltd and his family members dating back to 2006. In fact he has also tried to establish that his sons Gurpreet and Gurkirat Singh Dhillon were young at that time, Gurkirat being minor and both his sons did not manage their financial affairs personally.

He had also revealed that RHC devised such a mechanism that transactions essentially involved transferring money from one subsidiary to a bank account of Dhillons and then transferring the same money either on the same day or shortly thereafter to another subsidiary of the group or usually to RHC holdings Ltd.

He had also claimed that over the course of 2011-2015, out of the surplus of Rs 103.5 crores with RHC he and his family drew only Rs29.38 crores, leaving the balance surplus of Rs 74.12 crores. “Thus an amount of Rs 74.12 crores continued to be due from RHC holdings Ltd”.

"Mystical" experiences aren't what meditation is about

Today someone asked me and someone else some questions about the meditation I did during the 35 years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization headquartered in India. 

Here's what Tony Wims said in a comment.

Hey Brian or Osho. Just curious: Did either of you ever see the light or hear the sound during meditation?

If you did, what stopped you from developing your perception further?
If you didn't, I'm actually really surprised that you didn't and you were initiated.

Were you following the precepts? ( If you didn't see/hear).
Did you not start by placing your attention at the 3rd eye center?

I know I shouldn't be, because anything is possible, but I'm very surprised to hear of initiates who left the path. Especially if they had even a brief glimpse of the light or a snippet of the sound.

Thank you in advance for your answer. Forgive me for asking if you don't feel like it.

Hey, I have no problem with questions about my meditation experience. But before I get to the answers, I'll share some observations about the assumptions underlying Tony's comment.

The main assumption is that there's such a thing as supernatural light and sound emanating from higher spiritual regions of reality. I used to believe this was true, but beliefs are different from what actually is the case.

There's no demonstrable evidence of anything supernatural, much less mystical light and sound. So the burden of proof rests on those who claim that there is, not skeptics like me who doubt the existence of realms beyond the physical.

Another assumption is that meditation is aimed at anything other than being fully in touch with what appears in one's consciousness. Yes, I realize that Tony is talking about a very special form of meditation, Surat Shabd Yoga, or uniting one's soul with a divine sound current. 

Again, this is a religious belief, not a proven reality.

In fact, a comment Sonia left today appears to accurately describe how the current guru of RSSB, Gurinder Singh Dhillon (GSD), looks upon meditation. What Sonia says fits with the notion that Dhillon has moved RSSB to what's been termed v. 2.0 and v. 3.0. 

@Tony Most people don’t recognize the light or sound.

GSD just said some people go to the doctor thinking they have tinnitus when really it’s the “sound”. He also said if you want to see lights go to a disco. He’s made it abundantly clear that seeing the light or hearing sound is not what meditation is about. Many people won’t recognize it. He said just do your meditation.

The reason he says all of this is because satsangis complain over and over and over again to him about not hearing the sound or seeing light during meditation.

And the only reason I’m sharing this with you is so that you will understand that your Master never promised you a rose garden—he never promises you’ll see light and sound and most of your fellow satsangis don’t have that experience.

That was my clear impression also from the three-plus decades I spent talking with countless (more or less) RSSB initiates, or satsangis. i used to do a lot of speaking on behalf of RSSB, where one of my favorite lines was "The easiest vow to uphold is the one against talking about your mystical experiences, because no one is having any."

The line always got a laugh.

And no one ever came up to me afterwards and said I was wrong. As Sonia said, most RSSB devotees aren't focused on experiencing inner lights and sounds. They're focused on other things: the guru, going to RSSB meetings, being a vegetarian, socializing with RSSB friends, and such.

Getting back to Tony's questions, in 2014 I wrote a blog post called "I'm asked about my RSSB meditation experience." These lengthy excerpts address the more recent questions from Tony.

In "Why I'm justified in complaining about Sant Mat" I wrote:

I was initiated in the spring of 1971. For over thirty years—until 2002 or so—I was damn near a model satsangi (disciple).

I never missed a day of meditation. Mostly it was for the full proscribed two and a half hours. Sometimes less. One and a half hours was a minimum, such as when my daughter needed after-work attention and I was working full time. I followed the other vows perfectly, aside from having a single drink at my ten year high school reunion, which was just too freaking weird to endure without a dose of alcohol.

So don't tell me that I can't complain about Sant Mat and Radha Soami Satsang Beas. I'm totally justified in doing so. Because I know more about this philosophy and this organization than most initiates. Not just book knowledge—direct experience also.

Or, lack of experience, when it comes to meditation. I'm typical in this regard. Over those three decades I talked with hundreds, maybe thousands, of RSSB meditators. Very few, perhaps none, had experienced what they were told to expect. Those flights to inner mystical regions and the meeting with their guru's radiant astral form.

With me, it wasn't for lack of effort. Again, I did everything right. And the results were wrong. Now, many of the faithful would say, "Brian, you expected too much, too soon." Give me a break.

Thirty years isn't too soon. A glimpse of the promised spiritual land isn't too much.

In "Q and A about me and Sant Mat" I wrote this in response to another question that I'd gotten:

(2) Why do you think you never had a spiritual experience despite 30 years of devoted meditation?

Like I've been saying in several posts lately, including here, I'm not sure what "spiritual" means anymore. I had plenty of experiences in meditation.

What I didn't have was the sort of out-of-body, astral projecting, soul-flying, blasts of cosmic light and sound experiences that the Radha Soami Satsang Beas version of Sant Mat tells disciples to expect in meditation.

A few days after I was initiated I heard loud bell sounds inside my head while I was meditating. These never came back. I've had other glimpses of inner light and hearings of inner sound, but these could be (and probably are) produced by the brain, not immaterial soul or spirit.

Over more than three decades I've talked with lots of fellow RSSB initiates about their experiences in meditation. More accurately, their lack thereof.

When these people spoke honestly and openly (which usually isn't done in the formal satsangs, or talks), I learned that my lack of mind-blowing meditation experiences was par for the course in Sant Mat.

So there you have it.

Naturally I had lots of experiences in meditation. It was impossible not to have them, since I was awake and aware for most of the 1.5 to 2.5 hours of meditation I did each day for over thirty years. (Yeah, I'd fall asleep occasionally.)

I feel like I gained a lot from all that meditating.

It was a mix of "mantra meditation" (repeating a word or words to concentrate the mind) and "open awareness" meditation (trying to be still, mentally and physically, and being aware of what passes through consciousness).

Thus even though Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) views its meditation technique as something special, actually it is very much in the meditation mainstream. Mantras and open awareness are used in many other meditative practices.

The RSSB meditation did focus on "going within," though, to a much greater extent than mindfulness practices do. That is, the initiate was supposed to direct his/her attention to the third eye, or eye center, which supposedly was a gateway to higher realms of consciousness.

Now my daily meditation usually involves more of a balanced approach.

I like to follow my breathing for part of the time, either counting breaths or simply being aware of my breathing body doing its thing. I also enjoy mantra meditation. Usually I choose different words than the Five Holy Names taught by RSSB, but for old time's sake I'll occasionally return to the mantra I repeated for so many years.

It's difficult for me to describe what I experienced during my RSSB meditation years. As noted before, I've sat for tens of thousands of hours in meditation. How is it possible to sum that up in a few words? 

I laughed; I cried; I was joyful; I was sad; I was peaceful; I was restless; I felt at one with the cosmos; I felt alone. And so much more.

One of the key things I learned was the difference between what my conscious mind does, and what the rest of my mind does. Well, let me rephrase that, because I no longer believe there are two entities inside my head: me, and my mind. 

There is just one: brain/mind, or whatever you want to call it.

I used to enjoy, and still do, the sensation of either repeating a mantra, or doing nothing, and being aware of what happens inside my head when the brain/mind aspect called "I" isn't trying to direct the show of consciousness.

As anyone who meditates knows (or anyone who is alive knows)... a lot happens.

The brain/mind, like an iceberg, consists of a whole lot more than our conscious awareness, will, intention, and such. Dualistic forms of meditation, which see a distinction between soul and mind, or pure consciousness and impure consciousness, consider those unintended goings-on to be a distraction. Non-dual forms of meditation, such as mindfulness and Zen, don't.

To them, as to me these days, what happens in the brain/mind is what is happening. To deny it is to deny reality. Thoughts come and go. So do emotions, perceptions, intuitions, and much else. 

Thus whereas I used to believe that God and the guru were responsible for what happened within my consciousness when I wasn't trying to make anything happen, now I realize that the part of brain/mind outside of conscious awareness is responsible.

I still feel that I'm part of something much larger than myself. I just don't call it God, or divine. It is me. And the world, which really isn't different from me. 

RSSB guru's finances investigated by Delhi Police

Here's a September 3 story in The Economic Times about an investigation by the Economic Offences Wing of the Delhi Police into financial transactions involving Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), and other members of the Dhillon family.

lt's good to see that allegations made by Malvinder Singh, a relative of the guru, are being looked into. A RSSB book is titled "Honest Living." The Dhillon family tax returns and other documents requested by the Delhi Police will cast light on how honestly the guru has been living.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas chief summoned by EoW of the Delhi Police

Businessman Malvinder Singh had earlier filed a complaint against the spiritual guru Gurinder Singh Dhillon, and his family members, with EOW for allegedly siphoning off proceeds from the sale of Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd.

Teena Thacker

The Economic Offences Wing (EoW) of the Delhi Police has sought details from the head of Radha Soami Satsang Beas Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family members regarding the multi crore scam.

Businessman Malvinder Singh had earlier filed a complaint against the spiritual guru Gurinder Singh Dhillon, and his family members, with EOW for allegedly siphoning off proceeds from the sale of Ranbaxy Laboratories NSE 5.63 % Ltd.

He had also filed an affidavit last month in the court detailing transaction history of the loans transferred to the Dhillon family from 2006 onwards, along with the supporting Bank Statement showing such transactions.
The summons were issued by the EoW basis a FIR filed by the Religare Finvest.

The EoW in its summons dated Aug 26 has asked Dhillon to explain why the amount was transferred to him and his wife’s personal account from various entities. Dhillon has been asked to provide documents to show how these transactions in his income tax returns. “It was a loan transaction or otherwise,” the notice said.

“For the purposes of investigation, you are requested to provide documents,” it further said. Information has been sought regarding over Rs 26 crore which were transferred to him and his wife Shabnam Dhillon. Dhillons have been told to furnish details by September 7. An email sent to Dhillon did not elicit any response till the press time.

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

Earlier in the High Court, Dhillon had said that in 2010, RHC holdings Ltd through Singh brothers had approached him to assist them in subscribing for the rights issue, suggesting that they would finance Dhillons to subscribe to the rights issue. Dhillon has said that it was agreed that he and his family members would not be made liable to repay any amount or interest. “It was also agreed that upon the shares being sold or disposed of if the price realised was below the subscribed price, then the entire amount would be shared 50:50 between RHC and Dhillons family who had subscribed to the shares”.

He had further said that on the basis of “verbal agreement” in February 2010, RHC transferred Rs 219 crore each to his sons, which was then used to subscribe to the rights issue, resulting in an allotment of 61,83,013 shares of REL to each of his sons.

In a separate notice to his sons Gurpreet and Gurkirat Dhillon, the EoW has now asked both Gurpreet and Gurkirat to clarify how the transaction “was reflected in their income tax returns, whether the amount is loan from the RHC holding pvt Ltd or otherwise and what is the present status of these shares,” it said. ET has seen the copy of the notices.

The EoW has also asked the Dhillon brothers to explain the reason for transferring the money from their personal account to RHC holding. Both brothers have been asked to appear in person and file the reply by September 7.

In an affidavit filed in the Delhi High court last week, Singh had submitted that Dhillon and his family members owed Rs 1472.72 crores along with interest which is still outstanding.

He has further said that over the period of 2006-2010, a sum of over Rs 500 crores was directly transferred from his accounts to Dhillon and his family members.

In addition, between 2011-2016 approximately Rs 488.83 crores were advanced as loans to Dhillon and his family members from the companies of Best group, which at the time of advancement of loans were not subsidiaries of Singh. The Best group comprised of Best healthcare Pvt Ltd, Modland wears private Ltd, Fern healthcare private Ltd, Devera developers private Ltd, greenline buildwell Private Ltd and Adept Lifespace pvt Ltd.

“The monies received from the Best group was camouflaged by Dhillon and his family members to appear as if they were clearing their debt towards answering respondent and its subsidiaries with a view to window dress and attempt to show that there is no amount receivable from Dhillon and members of his family to the answering respondent,” the affidavit has said. ET has seen the copy of the affidavit.

Malvinder Singh provides proof of financial deals with RSSB guru

Here's two new stories in the Indian financial press about the fraudulent loan saga involving the Singh brothers and their relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

It sure looks like the guru wasn't being truthful when he reportedly said that he has never received money from anyone other than his parents, and also when he filed an affidavit saying he didn't owe money to Malvinder Singh. But I'm sure there will be more twists and turns in this seemingly never-ending scandal.

If my calculation is correct, 1,743 crore rupees equals about $200 million in U.S. dollars. That's how much Malvinder says he is owed by the Dhillon family.

First, here's an Economic Times story.

NEW DELHI: Former promoter of Ranbaxy, Malvinder Singh has filed an affidavit in the Delhi High Court detailing transaction details of loans he gave to Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family to back his complaint against the spiritual guru.

The undertrial businessman had earlier filed a complaint against Dhillon, head of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, among others, with Delhi Police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW) for allegedly siphoning off proceeds from the sale of Ranbaxy Laboratories.

In an affidavit filed in the Delhi High Court last week, Singh submitted that Dhillon and his family members owed Rs 1,472.72 crore along with interest to him.

Between 2006 and 2010, more than Rs 500 crore were directly transferred from his accounts to Dhillon and his family members, Singh claimed in the affidavit.

Further, approximately Rs 488.83 crore were advanced as loans to Dhillon and his family members between 2011 and 2016 through companies of Best group, he claimed.

Best group – which includes Best Healthcare, Modland Wears, Fern Healthcare, Devera Developers, Greenline Buildwell, and Adept Lifespace – was not owned by Singh at the time of advancement of loans. Earlier Malvinder had in a complaint filed with EOW alleged that his brother had fraudulently acquired Best group companies under RHC holding, which was Singh brothers holding company.

“The monies received from the Best group was camouflaged by Dhillon and his family members to appear as if they were clearing their debt towards answering respondent and its subsidiaries with a view to window dress and attempt to show that there is no amount receivable from Dhillon and members of his family to the answering respondent,” SINGH’S affidavit said.

ET has seen the copy of the affidavit.

Singh has attached supporting bank statements showing transactions history of the loans transferred to the Dhillon family, and claimed Rs 1,472.72 crore remained outstanding towards Best group as on March 2020.

Earlier Dhillon had filed an affidavit claiming that he did not owe money to Singh.

Singh has also accused his brother Shivinder Singh, family members of Dhillon and his former associates Sunil and Sanjay Godhwani of conspiring to misappropriate funds.

The Singh brothers are at present in judicial custody and are also facing contempt proceedings in the Supreme Court of India.

Here's a Business Today story on the same subject.

Ranbaxy case: Malvinder Singh submits 'proof' of Rs 1,473 cr Dhillon family owes him

BusinessToday.In

Former Ranbaxy promoter Malvinder Singh, in an affidavit filed in the Delhi High Court, has submitted proofs of loans worth Rs 1,472.72 crore owed to him by Gurinder Singh Dhillon, head of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, and his family members.

The development comes days after the undertrial businessman filed a complaint against Dhillon and others with the Delhi Police's Economic Offences Wing. He alleged Dhillon and others siphoned off funds from the proceeds of the sale of Ranbaxy Laboratories, and that Dhillon owed Rs 1,472.72 crore along with interest to Malvinder Singh.

Also read: The Baba, Singh Brothers and the Squandered Rs 225,00,00,00,000

The affidavit filed by Singh says huge sums of monies -- over Rs 500 crore -- were transferred from the accounts of Malvinder Singh to Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family members between 2006 and 2010.

Additionally, between 2011-2016, around Rs 488.83 crore were advanced as loans to Gurinder Singh Dhillon and family members from the companies of 'Best Group', which at the time of advancement of these loans were not subsidiaries of Malvinder Singh.

The Best Group comprises Best Healthcare Private Limited, Modland Wears Private Limited (JD16), Fern Healthcare Private Limited (JD17), Devera Developers Private Limited, Greenline Buildwell Private Limited and Adept Lifespace Private Limited.

Also read: Fortis Healthcare to be renamed 'Parkway'; hospital's logo to change

The affidavit alleges around December 2017, Shivinder Mohan Singh 'misused' his position, while concealing the precarious financial health of the companies under the Best Group. It alleges that Shivinder initiated the process to acquire these companies through Malvinder without any due diligence.

"Shivinder Singh misrepresented that this takeover is profitable. However, in October-November 2018, it was pointed out by the auditors that these companies are in fact debt-ridden. These companies had extended financial facilities to either Gurinder Dhillon, his family members, his close associates or the companies owned, controlled or managed by the Dhillon family," the affidavit alleged.

Dhillon and his family members received monies not only from Malvinder and his subsidiaries between 2006 and 2010 but also from companies of the Best Group (2011-2016), which weren't his subsidiaries when the loans were given and were acquired in December 2017.

Also read: Former Fortis promoter Shivinder Singh gets bail in money laundering case

"The monies received from the Best Group was camouflaged by Dhillon and his family members to appear as if they were clearing their direct debt towards Malvinder and his subsidiaries to window dress that there is no amount receivable from Dhillon and members of his family directly to Malvinder," the affidavit says.

However, the monies advanced by the Best Group directly to the Dhillon family i.e. a sum of Rs 1,472.72, crore along with interest is still outstanding towards the companies of the Best Group, Malvinder says.

He says Dhillon had earlier attempted to mislead the court by confusing the two sets of loans advanced to him and his families. "The same are to be paid back, along with applicable interest at the rate of 14.75 per cent quarterly compounding," he says, adding that this interest rate was mutually accepted.

Response from Malvinder came after Dhillon via an affidavit claimed he owed no money to Malvinder. Malvinder also alleged that Shivinder Singh and former associates Sunil and Sanjay Godhwani also conspired to misappropriate funds.

Both Malvinder and Shivinder are in police custody in a fraud case involving their former company Ranbaxy. The Singh brothers sold Ranbaxy to Daiichi Sankyo in 2008. In 2013, Daiichi paid $500 million as felony charges in the US for selling adulterated medicines, following which it filed an arbitration case against Singh brothers.

RSSB guru's personal life should be closely examined

Somebody sent me this screenshot from the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) web site. The message says that RSSB devotees shouldn't pay attention to the personal life of the RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, nor his private family matters.

I disagree, for reasons I'll share below.

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.

RSSB guru vents his anger, but says no one else should

Ah, the hypocrisy of so-called "spiritual" leaders. The rules don't apply to them, only to everybody else. I love pointing out how absurd this is.

Here's an example.

The guru of an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is featured in You Tube videos where his devotees ask questions and get answers.

Not good answers. Not reasonable answers. But answers, which sometimes are wildly hypocritical. I don't watch the videos, since I don't enjoy being exposed to religious mumbo-jumbo.

However, a commenter on one of my blog posts recently shared a link to a video where the RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, answered a question a woman had about anger.

You can see this exchange in the video below, which I've made start a few seconds before the woman's anger question. I'm also sharing a written transcript.

Note that Dhillon interrupts the woman when she starts to explain what leads her to get angry. So we don't know whether someone is abusing her, whether she is upset about an injustice, or if there is some other reasonable justification for her anger.

Astoundingly, Dhillon then tells the woman there is never a circumstance that justifies anger. Oh, that isn't correct -- because right after that the guru says that he often gets angry, at everyone. 

How does Dhillon justify this? By saying there is a purpose behind his anger, while supposedly there is no purpose behind the woman getting angry.

Of course, he interrupted her before she could explain what causes her to lose her temper. But whatever it is, the guru tells her not to be angry, but to be more loving. 

Meanwhile, the guru can continue being angry with everyone, because his anger supposedly has a purpose.

That's astoundingly egotistical and self-centered, since the woman may have a better reason to be angry than the guru does. Fortunately, the woman doesn't promise to only be loving, since anger sometimes is justified.

Lesson is, don't take the advice of a guru. They often have less understanding of psychology and mental health than the average person.

Here's the interchange.

Woman: Okay, Baba Ji, my next question is that I get very angry, and then when my anger crosses a certain limit, I cannot control it. So when I lose my temper, what should I do to calm down?

Dhillon: Should I get angry with you?

Woman: No.

Dhillon: So then why do you get angry with anyone?

Woman: Sometimes circumstances...

Dhillon: No, there is no such circumstance. What you can achieve with love never can be achieved with anger. It is true. I often vent my anger on everyone, but there's a purpose behind it. Now there's no purpose behind you losing your temper. And you see, most of the time, we take our anger out on our parents. If we take it out on anyone else, they will shout right back at us. We know that our parents will not say anything to us. So that is why we should be even more loving. Now promise me, "In future, I will only be loving."

Woman: You have a beautiful smile.

RSSB guru back in Singh brothers financial scandal spotlight

Here's a hot-off-the-press (August 13) story from The Economic Times about the latest turn of events involving the Singh brothers and their relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

Dhillon has been accused by Malvinder Singh of using his influence as a trusted spiritual guide and family advisor to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars from a company once controlled by Malvinder.

Fraudulent "loans" allegedly funneled money into the pockets of the guru and his family via shell companies headed up by directors associated with the Dhillon family and RSSB.

I've boldfaced portions of the story that mention the RSSB guru. It does seem extremely suspicious that the criminal complaint Malvinder filed against Dhillon and others back in February 2019 hasn't been investigated. 

Many people have left comments on blog posts I've written about this financial scandal and the guru's involvement in it. Fairly frequently it is observed that the Indian justice system has a lot of corruption and favoritism embedded in it. So powerful well-connected people get treated lightly, or not at all, while others get punished.

This is a test case of sorts for whether international investors can trust that the Indian justice system will investigate alleged corporate financial misdeeds fairly and openly.

So far, India is getting poor marks on this question. Malvinder presented compelling evidence in his criminal complaint that Gurinder Singh Dhillon was a mastermind of the fraudulent transactions that ended up enriching the Dhillon family.

Until the RSSB guru either is cleared or indicted by Indian authorities, there will always be reason to suspect that the supposedly "spiritual" leader of a large religious group is getting special treatment from the Powers-That-Be in India.

Malvinder Singh, former promoter of Religare NSE -0.56 % Enterprises who is under custody for alleged money laundering, has accused spiritual leader Gurinder Singh Dhillon of engineering “systematic downfall” of Religare group by misusing his influence over the former.

In his bail petition filed last week, Singh alleged that he has been falsely implicated and is “being made a scapegoat to shield certain individuals and the management of the complainant company (Religare) from legal action and claims”.

He alleged that Dhillon, head of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is the “culprit who has contrived the systematic downfall of the Religare group of companies as well as RHC group by misusing his filial and spiritual influence over the applicant as well as committing fraud” in conspiracy with Sunil Godhwani and Shivinder Singh, co-accused in the Rs 2,100-crore fraud case.

ET has accessed a copy of the petition filed before a local Court

“Gurinder Singh Dhillon has unwittingly left a trail of breadcrumbs revealing his involvement, including the appointment of many of his devotees as directors in the defaulting companies,” it said.

Malvinder’s lawyer Manu Sharma argued that a commercial dispute of loan default and alleged violations of prudential and corporate governance norms are being given the colour of a criminal offence, which ought not to be countenanced by the court.

Malvinder has claimed that he had filed a complaint against Dhillon and several others in the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Delhi police in February last year, seeking investigation against their alleged fraudulent activities. “However, to the prejudice of the applicant (Malvinder), the same has not been investigated,” the petition said.

It also claimed that he has no relationship with borrower entities used for the alleged fraud. There is not even a shred of credible material to show that Malvinder controlled the affairs of these companies, it claimed.

“Most of the directors of borrower entities were not only devout followers of Radha Soami Satsang Beas with unassailable reverence for Gurinder Singh Dhillon but were also inimically disposed to the Malvinder as he had filed a complaint against Dhillon with the EOW in February 2019”, Malvinder has stated in his petition.

Dhillon has denied allegations of wrongdoing.

Malvinder in his petition also claimed that the agencies' accusation that public money is involved in the instant case is nothing but a “myth”. He has contended that it is imperative to note that Religare Finvest, the group firm which the money was allegedly siphoned off, itself was not a public listed company and did not accept public deposits.

Malvinder is in custody for over eight months. He stands booked by the EOW and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in separate cases of fraud.

Referring to bail granted by the Delhi High Court to his brother Shivinder Singh last month, Malvinder has argued that he “deserves the benefit of parity”.

ED is expected to present its arguments on Malvinder’s bail plea next week.

In its charge sheet filed against the Singh brothers, ED had alleged in January that Malvinder and Shivinder Singh along with co-accused Sunil Godhwani laundered Rs 2,100 crore from Religare, using 19 ‘shell’ companies.

Why are beliefs so important?

Here's a guest post from Osho Robbins, who emailed what follows to me.

He points out the difference between the beliefs held by devotees of a particular India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, and the reality of what the current leader of the organization, a guru (Gurinder Singh Dhillon) says the RSSB teachings are.

Why are beliefs so important?

What do you think of a person who still believes that the earth is flat?  Or someone who knows it's a sphere, but believes it is the centre of the universe and that the sun rotates around the earth?

What about a follower of Ram Rahim, who still thinks he is innocent and is just being persecuted?

I dont think you would be very impressed with such a person. In fact you might consider a person like that to be insane. But now - what if that person was YOU?

Do you think its important that your beliefs are accurate? Or is it okay to have false beliefs?

Beliefs run your life. It is a well known fact that you don't live life. You live a limited life based entirely on your beliefs. Whatever you believe appears to be TRUE for you.

You alter your perceptions to make the world fit into your beliefs, so you never experience the world. You experience only YOUR VERSION, which is the world, seen through the filter of your beliefs.

Now look at the beliefs of an RSSB (Radha Soami Satsang Beas) follower and let's see how they have changed over the years. Does the follower have inaccurate beliefs?

Traditional beliefs about the master: 

1. The master is ALL KNOWING. He literally knows what you are thinking and he knows the future.

2. The master is ALL POWERFUL. He has the power to do anything he chooses.

3. The master is a super human with amazing powers beyond your comprehension. Do not consider him to be just a man. The Sar Bachan actually states "Do not consider the guru to be a mere mortal. He is the darling of Sat Purush." (God)

4. The master has the power to alter your karmas. So many stories and anecdotes portray this as true.

5. The master never makes a mistake - literally. How can the master make a mistake? There is a higher meaning and purpose in everything he does and says.

6. The master is perfect.

7. The master has the highest moral standard you can imagine

8. The master is an HONEST and decent human being

9. The master is not subject to karmas as he is God in human form

10. The master is above pride and ego

11. The radiant form of the master will come at death to meet each disciple and personally take charge of his soul.

Now compare this to the REALITY. I wont go into detail, but any intelligent person can make a realistic asessment of the truth. If the master himself says that he is not 'perfect' why would you insist he is? If evidence shows you something different, why would you ignore the evidence?

So then you have to re-assess what you really believe if you are intelligent. It is insanity to continue to hold outdated and inaccurate beliefs and you will pay the price because your expectations will not be met.

Traditional beliefs about the RSSB path and the teachings:

1. God is called Sat Purush and resides in Sach Khand, the fifth region. Just Google "Radha soami spiritual regions" and you will get graphic pictures of them (click on images). Your purpose is to meet him.

2. in meditation your soul leaves your body via the third eye and reaches the astral region where it meets the radiant form of the master, who then takes the soul through all the regions, and eventually to Sach Khand.

3. Once you are initiated, you will always come back only as a human and not lower species, and within four lifetimes you will reach Sach Khand.

4. The purpose of the spiritual path is to reach Sach khand. Others (like Krishna, Buddha and Jesus) never reached Sach Khand. They only reached the lower regions (region 2 or 3 of the 5).

5. The master will come at death and take your soul into safe care and put it where is can meditate and eventually reach Sach Khand

6. Sach Khand is a real place and so are the regions.

7. The advaita type of teachers were of a much lower standard and never got to Sach Khand

8. Only the people with the highest karma will find a true guru and Sant Mat is the ONLY valid way to get to Sach Khand. All other religions failed to reach Sach Khand. Read Dr Johnson's "The Path of the Masters" for validation of this point. The book even goes into a detailed comparison with other religions.

9. It's not just about Realisation or ONENESS. There are regions to traverse in the inner world.

How much of this still applies?

Some people justify the changes by saying "The gurus change and adapt with the times" but this is simply not true when the teachings fundamentally change. A person following RSSB in the 70's and 80's would not recognise RSSB today as the same path. There are just too many differences.

So then the uncomfortable truth has to be faced: that maybe i am following just another belief system but am convinced this is the real truth and that ONE DAY I will see this for myself, after lots of meditation.

But when will that ONE DAY arrive?

In the latest video Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, clarifies many of these beliefs we hold: invalidating them. Like that he is not knowing and there are no miracles and the guru cannot take on your karmas, etc.

GSD video no 16: 

05:24  As human beings we never learn in life. We are making the same mistakes again and again. We dont use our vivek (discrimination). We bring the suffering on.  

10:30  Seva (service) is not real seva because you cannot avoid the 'calculation' unless you are very elevated spiritually. 

12:00   Karmas have to ba PAID - cannot be forgiven except by "Shabd".

13:00 Books refer to miracles such as Bhai Shaadi when he was bitten by a snake and Sawan Singh healed him. Is this not a fact?  How do we know the snake was even poisonous? Video is then edited when the questioner says "But that is what is written in the books". 

The only miracle is that someone like me became the master.

14:00 I know some people who like to come back to this world again and again. Heaven would be so boring. (not me - others). He laughs. 

15:00  When did you get to know you would be the next master? No - I never knew - I was told. 

I shouldn't question, but I do! I should have faith in what Maharaj Ji did. (previous RSSB guru)

Let's say, I wonder "why me?" In my entire life I can't say that I excelled.

Maharaj Ji put me here to say "If such an average person can succeed, you can all succeed".

"That's your humility, Baba Ji..."

That's one thing I don't have (humility). Humility is not my strong point. Baba Vaswani was (humble) not me.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon, RSSB guru

RSSB guru asks good question: "How do you know I'm not a fraud?"

Back in 2006 I wrote a post called "Who is the guru?" In it I said this about the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

Gurinder Singh is fond of saying, “How do you know that I’m not a fraud?” and “Maybe I just have the gift of gab.” Devotees consider statements like these to be Zen-like pointers toward his divinity. But who knows? Maybe he’s pointing toward his humanity without being able to explicitly speak of who he directly knows himself to be.

I don't know if the guru has continued to say those words. But I was reminded of them yesterday when I responded to an email sent to me by a disillusioned RSSB devotee who asked me some questions about my previous involvement with the organization and Gurinder Singh.

In part I said:

There are thousands of religions in the world. There’s no demonstrable evidence that any of them is objectively true.

 

If such evidence comes along, I’d seriously consider believing in that religion. Absent that evidence, I consider all religions to be false, including Sant Mat/RSSB. There rarely is a way to prove that something doesn’t exist, so the burden of proof rests on those who claim that something does exist. We can’t be 100% sure about anything, of course. All we can do is pursue truth and evidence as honestly as possible, recognizing it always is possible that we could be wrong.

 

...All religious leaders sound convincing, but that doesn’t mean they are speaking the truth. Every good salesperson sounds convincing. But we still need to think for ourselves to make sure the product they’re selling really is as good as they say. Same applies to people trying to sell us on a religion.

 

...Soon after Gurinder became the guru he was fond of saying things like, “How do you know I’m not a fraud?” and “How do you know whether I just have the gift of gab? (of speaking persuasively) Those are still good questions. He’s now been viewed as God in human form by his followers for thirty years. I suspect that Gurinder either actually believes he is a mystical adept, or he has had so much practice acting as if this is true he now puts on a convincing show for his followers.

 

This morning I did some additional reading in a book about a woman's pursuit of becoming expert at poker, "The Biggest Bluff" by Maria Konnikova. In her Reading Myself chapter, she has some interesting observations about understanding (or reading) the motivations of other people at a poker table that pertain to the question of who the RSSB guru really is.

God? Or a fraud?

Basically, it's complicated -- in poker or elsewhere in life -- because we humans are complex beings. Here's an initial step at understanding, or reading, as described by Konnikova.

Frank Lantz has developed a poker concept that he calls "donkey space" about the dynamic between two expert players who understand the game at a high level and are playing a heads up match -- that is, one on one. There's perfect theoretical play, which is unexploitable by any opponent, and then there's adjustment to that play based on your opponent's strategy.

...You watch them act and react over multiple situations and you try to adjust based on that behavior, to be maximally profitable against that particular person.

But now, if your opponent is good, they realize what you're doing -- and they adjust in turn. It may even be the case that they moved to this particular spot in strategy space on purpose, Lantz points out, so that they now exploit you better. They've given up equity for a little bit to then kick you once you've moved.

"I call this donkey space because a donkey is a fish, a player who is not playing perfectly," Lantz explains. "But these two people are like fighter pilots, maneuvering around each other, because in a dogfight, what you want is to be on your opponent's tail. That's where you can shoot them." He continues, "You're doing barrel rolls and triple flips, and you're constantly trying to outmaneuver this other person."

So that's one lesson from poker, which I suppose most of us already know, at least intuitively. There are layers upon layers of possible deception. 

A guru says, "How do you know I'm not a fraud?" The person hearing this has to decide what to make of those words. Is the guru being honest? Is he admitting to being a fraud without outright saying this, making it into a question rather than a statement? Or is the guru casting the responsibility onto his devotees to find the truth about himself, which could be a positive thing?

But there are more complex possibilities. The guru knows he is a fraud, so he sounds like he is admitting this, knowing that most of his devotees will refuse to believe it and rather view his words as manifesting a divine humility that shows his godliness, not his fraudness.

Here's another factor Konnikova talks about: the importance of knowing yourself if you wish to know other people.

I've been so busy focusing on reading the motivations in play for other people that I forgot to factor in myself. 

...Through careful observation, you not only have to learn how to tell the difference between your faulty intuitions and real data, but understand how to exploit what you've seen -- and how to know if you're being exploited in turn.

That last part is the one I seem to have momentarily forgotten. I've been so busy reading others that I've missed the step of stopping to read myself. Blake can only tell me what I'm giving off physically [at the poker table]. He doesn't have enough to go on to unravel my inner psychology and understand the internal tug-of-war that may be governing my actions.

...In turning my mind to tells and reads at this stage in my learning, I may have missed a crucial step: the first person you have to profile -- psychologically, not physically -- is yourself.

Great point. When it comes to gurus, why does someone want to believe in them so much? What need is being fulfilled by embracing the notion that a guru is God in human form when there is no evidence of this? Why is blind faith so attractive in the realm of religion when so much care goes into not being taken advantage of in one's worldly life?

Gurinder Singh Dhillon

 

My talk about the One at a RSSB National Satsang Weekend

It's a discovery! Not of buried treasure, unfortunately, but of a post I wrote for my HinesSight blog a few months before I started this Church of the Churchless blog. 

I came across a link to it while looking through early churchless posts to include in a second book of post compilations. Since there has been recent discussion about oneness on this blog, I figured it would be good to share this May 2004 post.

Since I'd written a book about Plotinus' teachings, Return to the One, it was easy for me to talk on this subject.

Not lost in translation (May 30, 2004)

This morning I gave a 45 minute talk to the 500 or so National Satsang Weekend attendees at the Science of the Soul Center here in Petaluma, California.

No, I’m not a member of a cult, no matter what my wife says (jokingly, I should emphasize, just as I fondly call her “infidel” with a smile on my face). Aside from my talks, Laurel chooses not to attend meetings of my spiritual group, for reasons I can completely sympathize with.

I look upon spirituality as a science that investigates whatever may lie beyond the physical reality with which we are familiar now. So I resonate to the “science” aspect of the Science of the Soul. But other members take much more of a religious approach, believing that the mere fact of being accepted as an initiate by the Master who heads the organization makes you a Special Soul, marked for salvation while people like my wife are doomed to a lesser quality afterlife.

Today I couldn’t resist making some remarks about this annoying attitude.

I said that scientists the world over are united in their search for the truth about materiality. A physicist doesn’t care if a colleague comes from another country, another culture, another religion, another whatever. All that matters is their common commitment to unraveling the laws of physical nature through the scientific method.

So science unites people.

Strangely, most religions and spiritual paths divide people, even though they claim to be devoted to the one God, or the one metaphysical reality. Thus, I observed, it is strange that a materialistic enterprise, science, is a unifying force on our planet, while a supposedly non-materialistic enterprise, religion, is a divisive force.

My main theme was the One.

This is the best term for God, I argued, because it most clearly reflects an almost universal tenet of mystical philosophies: beneath all the manyness without and within us lies the ineffable, formless ground of being. Call it God. Call it the One. Trace anything in creation back to its source. There is the One.

Since the One is everywhere and everything, though also separate from everywhere and everything (statements like this are what make mysticism mystical), we too are the One. But this won’t be evident to us until we get rid of all the manyness that obscures our oneness. Meditation is the scientific practice that, theoretically, brings this about.

(I say “theoretically” because the practice is darn difficult to practice, for me as for most other people).

Yet meditation needs to be supported by a person’s whole approach to life. If this is divisive, as when someone thinks they are part of a special group that has a special claim to special spiritual knowledge, that attitude isn’t going to lead this person closer to unity. I think I got this point across pretty well, though it wasn’t my main emphasis. Mostly I talked about Plotinus’s teachings concerning the One and how we are able to return to this ultimate reality.

This was the first time I’ve had a talk translated.

Because many older members of the Science of the Soul group were born in India and don’t speak English well, 45 minute talks given in English get a 15 minute translation into Hindi (or maybe Punjabi, I don’t know which). The translator jotted down five or so pages of handwritten notes while I was talking, came out on stage and sat down next to me after I was done, and proceeded to summarize what I said.

It was sort of fun to listen to the cadences of a language I can’t understand, other than a few words. There were lots of “paramatmas,” which I’m pretty sure means God, or close to it. Heaven knows how some of my slang-infested English got translated, and whether “Stoic” means much to many of the traditional Indians—who also dress traditionally.

Laurel and I love the colorful attire of the Indian women, all the saris in every color of the rainbow. And the Indian food served at lunch and dinner brought smiles to our stomachs. All in all, a pleasant multi-cultural weekend, different sorts of people coming together in pursuit of the One.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon says we already are One

Here's a message that Osho Robbins sent me. He said it'd be fine to share it as a blog post. Since I wrote a book called Return to the One, naturally I'm interested in notions of the One -- which appeal to me more than dualistic religious teachings.

Hi Brian

Finally a Q&A session that makes it clear - there is no journey - we are already ONE.

4 mins 30 secs in there is a 2.5 minute clear exposition in which Gurinder Singh Dhillon says:

 

1. We feel separated from the father - but the separation is not there.

2. We are working towards a certain understanding (of oneness) / experience.

3. It's not about "working towards something." 

4. We dont have to go anywhere - we dont have to do anything.

5. We just need to experience it (oneness) within ourself.

6. So we are not actually separate.

7. We have created that separation (i.e. a perception ONLY) when we see ourselves as the physical body. 

8. The moment you see yourself as the SOUL (i.e. ONE) then you will never see yourself as separated.

9. We are as separated from the lord as a ray of light is separated from the sun - we are separated from the ocean of the lord as much as a drop of water is separated from the ocean.

10. So that is more in our MINDSET - we need just to FEEL that divine essence within ourself, and that will take care of this question of "separation" and "wanting to go back" or "achieving something." We are (already) there.

11. When he gave us human birth - we are there.

12. We come into life seeking to understand what it is to be human - the moment we learn what it is to be human - the merger will take place automatically.

 

However, how does repeating 5 holy words get us to a greater understanding? Greater understanding can come by contemplating on the nature of ONENESS and time/space and the meaning of eternal, which is exactly what the Japji of Guru Nanak explains.

 

Japji then defines the exact meaning of TRUE / REAL.

 

Aad Sach, jugaad Sach, hai bhi sach, nanak hosee bhi sach

translation: TRUE in the beginning, true, TRUE throughout all time,

TRUE now, TRUE forever and eternally.

 

All it's saying is: the ONE is beyond all time and space. (eternal)

and the JAP at the end means : think / contemplate

 

If you do this, it will dawn on you that YOU are not eternal, and that YOU will die (the YOU means the body) and that there is something (call it God or the ONE) that is the opposite to you - it does NOT die nor is born because it is outside of time.

 

If you DO this - i.e. contemplate - it's quite possible that you will UNDERSTAND the nature of us versus ETERNAL, and that we are not real - only the eternal is real.

 

Now that's not really a God - it's just a contrast between us (who die) and ETERNAL. The gurbani then says that eternal is your TRUE nature because it cannot be anything else (because all else is untrue). Only the TRUE exists - the rest (bodies) is MAYA (illusion) and MAYA is defined as everything that is NOT eternal.

 

Now that is just a simple true statement that cannot be refuted. It's made of definitions - not beliefs.

 

Once you accept these definitions - the rest all falls into place, nothing to argue over. 

 

You cannot say "I don't believe in the ONE" because it doesn't require belief. It is a definition. That which is beyond time and space is called the ONE by definition.

 

You cannot argue with a definition. 

 

So I can understand that contemplating on this can lead to a deeper understanding and then you can get insights. But simply repeating the scripture or repeating 5 holy names cannot get anywhere.

 

The gurbani even has a verse that says "Ram Ram sab koi kahe" - everyone says "god, god" by saying that he doesn't manifest. Yet still the religious person follows these rituals of repeating some words hoping for a miracle. This is the very thing the gurbani is preaching against. 

 

CONCLUSION

Gurinder Singh Dhillon is clearly saying that ONENESS is the reality and we have to realise it. There is nothing to do or attain.

 

It's not an attainment - but just a realization of what already IS the case. A realisation that this ME is a false identification with the body and that my true identity is the ONE which means there is no individual - no separation, only ONE.

 

That is what the gurbani says about dropping the haumi (ego) or sense of "I")

 

This notion that you are already there does not fit in with the RSSB path of effort and trying to achieve and intense meditation.

 

This is more a "drop all the doing" and just realise you are not the body. It's a deeper understanding of the nature of eternity. 

 

Anything that enhances the sense of a ME doing something (meditation or seva) is part of the delusion that keeps me stuck in maya and identified with a separate self so cannot possibly help in the realisation of the oneness.

 

A person sitting down and meditating is obviously trying to attain something, so he obviously believes he is separate and has to meditate to merge.

 

Yet GSD is saying clearly that he is already the ONE. So the old teachings have to be dropped.

RSSB guru sounded like a heretic in 2006

In the course of looking for posts I wrote in the early years of this blog so I could include some favorites in my next book, I just came across "Another RSSB initiate sees the light" from November 24, 2006. 

Here's the post, which I've copied in below. My words are above the dotted line. Howard's words are below the line. In light of recent videos showing Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the current RSSB guru, it's interesting to see what Dhillon was saying back in 2006. 

As Howard says, "Gurinder really is the number one heretic in the organization." Nice. I like to think that back then I was in the Top 10.

Howard and I are kindred souls. We’re of a similar well-aged Radha Soami Satsang Beas(RSSB) vintage, each of us having been initiated into this mystical meditation-based spiritual path over a third of a century ago.

We’ve also both come to view RSSB in a manner that seems heretical to true believers, but which seems eminently sensible to Howard and me.

Howard, who lives in Berkeley, and I have been carrying on an email conversation the past few days. He said it’d be fine if I shared his thoughts on the Church of the Churchless. I’ve mildly edited them, taking out only a few extraneous personal references and correcting some typos.

The two of us are alike in another way, as Howard pointed out:

Maybe you can use some of the things I have written to good use. Don't worry about editing it in any way you like. I am like you. I just write things out to get them clear in my own head.

While most readers of this blog aren’t associated with RSSB, many are. So I decided to share almost all of what Howard had to say in his email messages, even though it's lengthy.

I realize that his thoughts will be of most interest to fellow RSSB initiates, but his evolving take on spirituality and religious authority has its universal side as well.

The first part of Howard’s message is below. To read the rest, click on the post extension link [already included here]. I've added some explanations of RSSB-specific terms in [brackets].
--------------------------------------------
Funny finding you here [at the Church of the Churchless blog]. I’m a satsangi [RSSB initiate] of thirty-five years and just now beginning to see I have been deceiving myself for most of them.

I was at the Dera [headquarters of RSSB in India] two years ago and someone at my table said "Brian Hines [me, the blogger] is having difficulty on the path right now." I always want to talk to such people because I figure they are at least being real. I have had it with fundamentalist satsangis. Really, I just can't listen to them anymore, kind of makes me want to gag.

Looks to me like you are just starting to understand the path. I still am quite fond of Gurinder [Singh, current RSSB guru], but primarily because the last time he came to Petaluma [RSSB center in California] and spoke I came to the conclusion that if a tape of his satsang [spiritual talk] had been sent to the satsang reviewing panel he would never be invited back again.

He is not a party liner, even though everyone tries to make him into one. Very few are willing to accept that most of what they hold on to is a fragile belief system that does not give them what they need. Gurinder calls them on this and it is refreshing. Not that anyone does anything about it, but at least it appears he is doing his job.

There definitely has been a shift to 2.0 Sant Mat. I can tell you about a personal exchange I had with Gurinder that you may like.

A few years ago at Dera I got up and said "I just don't believe any of it anymore. None of it makes any sense to me. It used to feel so good when I knew all the answers and I could just look in my Sant Mat Recipes for Life book whenever I needed an answer. Now if someone asks me a question about the path I tell them to go talk to a seeker [someone interested in RSSB but not yet initiated]. They seem to have it all figured out while I have no idea!"

He told me that was real progress. That the people who seem to have it all together and look like they know what is going on are all faking it. He further said being in this state allows you to be open minded like a child. He said this is very important in order to be open to God. He also said that as soon as we adopt a rigid belief system we are cutting ourselves off from the spiritual world because now we can only see what our belief system filters and validates.

He also said spirituality has nothing to do with your beliefs but that it was more a matter of the heart and sincerity. He said it is the sincerity that counts and not the belief system. It does not really matter what you believe because beliefs are ultimately meaningless. God does not look at your beliefs. At the end he joked and said "When you meet someone like that who has all the answers, you really don't know if you should be happy for him or feel sorry for him!"

For me it showed Gurinder as being more like a Socrates than a God-man. He also put responsibility for our spiritual growth on us rather than on a flimsy belief system. I also asked him about the four lifetime guarantee [that an initiate will only be reincarnated for a maximum of four more times before reaching God permanently].

He said there is no four lifetime guarantee and just to forget about that. Kind of blew a much comforting thought we all had right out of the water. He said this, I was at the microphone, he said it directly to me. He also said we need to take responsibility for our spiritual life in this lifetime because as far we know this is the only life we have.

Most of us are still in the 1.0 belief system and I admit I still think in those terms. I just spent too much time being willingly indoctrinated for the last thirty years. As one friend of mine noted, B.S. stands for Belief System and any of us who believe the Sant Mat fairy tale that was given to us in the early days and in the books are following a bunch of B.S.

It is impossible to avoid this without mystical experience. Gurinder calls mystical experience "understanding" and opposes this to "concepts." As soon as you talk about or conceptualize a mystical experience it automatically sounds like bullshit unless you have actually had that experience yourself.

Even if you have had the experience it is impossible to describe with words something that is beyond words. Gurinder has also many times said "My experience cannot be the basis of your faith, you need to have your own experience" I am reminded of a wonderful Rumi poem that you may be familiar with.

"All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile, I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary. The day is coming when I fly off, but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?

Who says words with my mouth? Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all."

Gurinder really is the number one heretic in the organization, very much like Kabir and other masters. I just think the organization is way beyond what one person can control no matter how enlightened. He has to delegate and people who accept the authority are by default usually the least loving.

They drive everybody crazy, themselves most of all. I was there at the inception of Petaluma when all of the millionaires were taking over and bickering with everyone. The atmosphere was the exact opposite of love and harmony. I still don't go out there because for me it is the loneliest coldest place in the world. Early on I was getting upset because the old harmony we had felt in my then home Santa Rosa sangat had disappeared with the advent of Petaluma.

During this time an old 85 year old satsangi told me "If it stinks, don't put your nose in it" and that is what I started to do. Just stay away from those people if you can, they have probably succeeded in driving you away anyway. I admit it is a bit disheartening to see so many close disciples behave worse than the average slaughterhouse worker.

Concerning talking about inner mystical experiences, I heard Gurinder speak about this once saying it was not a big deal to talk about inner experiences but that it wouldn't do others or yourself much good to do so. There was none of that "You'll burn in hell if you do!" that I hear from disciples. He was quite matter of fact and did not seem to be all that against it if you got something out of it.

I am not quite at zero [mystical experiences], but not too far away either. The mystical experiences have been so minor and so seldom. Seems like everyone is at zero, certainly everyone acts that way. I remember looking at the satsangis and wondering why all of the initiates are such failures. Then I looked at myself and saw that I am also a huge failure. I either had to blame the practice or the disciples.

I am not sure where I land on that one. My very best friend told me about hearing the bell sound and seeing the inner star while we were roommates at Dera. I know he was telling the truth. He said it took a tremendous amount of hard work in meditation and he has never been able to work that hard again. Somehow he could not hold onto it though and is now struggling like the rest of us.

I remember Gurinder once saying "The reason a school such as Harvard is so renowned and considered so good is because of the quality of its graduates. It is the same with Sant Mat." I don't know where that puts us. I sometimes wonder if this practice is an anachronism. Living within the discomfort of being uncertain is the only honest place to be. Did you hear about the time Gurinder called everyone a bunch of Moonies?

It is a very awkward situation if you happen to be a mystic in charge of a multinational corporation that is supposed to promulgate an inward mystic practice. Gurinder definitely has the Greek understanding of philosophy and encourages open mindedness and direct experience. He has emphasized over and over again that you only know what you have experienced.

When he says "How do you know I am not a fraud?" he means it. He does his best to call us on our hypocrisy and ignorance because without realizing this we can go nowhere. I know what he told you about not molding Plotinus into the image of RSSB is what he really wanted.

Did you know that there is a publication in India that succinctly explains to people why they should not follow RSSB and that this is a recommended book for seekers in India? He really wants people to be open minded and from what I have seen the times he becomes the most animated and engaged is when somehow talks to him outside of party lines.

Maharaj Ji [Charan Singh, Gurinder’s predecessor] used to say that once a saint leaves this world his lofty teachings are taken up by lesser minds who then turn their teachings of universal love and the fatherhood of God into something rigid and intolerant. This is happening to RSSB right now, this is happening in spite of a living master. Visit any corporate satsang center and you will see what I mean.

It is hard to differentiate between what is coming from the master and what is coming from the management because the management is supposed to reflect what the master wants. In reality this rarely happens. At Dera the management fights and bickers all the time over the very smallest matters. No one will cooperate unless the master steps in and makes the final decision.

One of the big issues is whether or not the basic tenet of the path which claims the need for a living master has completely broken down because of the sheer weight of the organization. We are told that we need a master so that we have someone to go to with questions and with whom we can develop a loving relationship on this plane which leads to a loving relationship on the spiritual planes.

Maharaj Ji used to say that a dead master cannot help us because a dead master is as far away from us and as inaccessible as the lord himself. Now, you can't even write the master a letter, let alone have any type of meaningful relationship. In the present environment access to the master is a practical impossibility and to my mind this nullifies the basic tenet that the living master is the main difference between Sant Mat and a dead religion.

In other words, what is the difference between looking up what a dead master said in a book and hearing what a living master says in a two hour question and answer session every six years, especially when you don't even have a chance to ask one of the questions? I don't see much of a difference except that the book will probably have had meaningless extraneous material edited while the question and answer session does not.

I noticed something interesting about the claims that guru is god. In earlier days when disciples actually had a lot of physical contact with the master most of the writings emphasized that the guru was not like you and me. There is an old Sawan Singh initiate in Petaluma who told me when he was a young man the master used to chase the disciples around rather than the way it is now.

Everyone knew him and felt like he was their friend. People had to be reminded of his spiritual attainments because while interacting with him on a daily basis they noticed that the guru for the most part acted just like any normal human being. There was therefore a tendency to forget the spiritual nature of the master and people needed to be reminded that the guru was a messenger from God.

I believe this is why the earlier writings often emphasize the spiritual attainments of the guru in such exaggerated grandiose terms. Gurinder has often said "familiarity breeds contempt" when asked about having more contact with the master. I imagine there is a lot of truth to this. On the other hand, according to earlier writings of mystics it should also breed a lot of love and affection if the master is indeed a loving spiritual being that leads us to our spiritual home.

Now that practically no one has any contact with the master and the books have already taught the disciples to deify him, the master strongly emphasizes the human side of the master. One of his most common sayings is "Look at the master as your friend, walking beside you. Don't put him on a pedestal where you cannot reach him."

The fact of the matter is that he is not a friend and we cannot reach him. This is a fact and there is no getting around it unless you simply identify the master as a spiritual presence in your life.

No one appears to have a monopoly on this presence whether you call it Jesus, the master, the Holy Ghost, Allah, or whatever. Gurinder would be the first one to agree with this.

So the modern disciple has neither a relationship with the master nor an understanding of his spiritual greatness except conceptually. In other words, most of us have no relationship with the master at all. Now we have to ask ourselves if those who do have closer contact with the master have an advantage. I have seen none based on their behavior, in fact someone once told me, "A representative [of the guru] represents what we should not be like. If you want to see the wrong way to behave, just watch your rep."

My relationship to the Sant Mat path is changing and it seems like it is always changing. I try not to hold onto it very tightly. I know it will change again.

I gave a home satsang the other day and I came right out and said we know the master will come and get us at death just as surely as the Christians know Jesus will come down from heaven on a cloud. Unless we have some kind of mystical understanding to confirm our beliefs it is just another empty concept which Baba Ji [Gurinder] has been hammering on us about for years.

I think people took it just fine, though I was a little worried they wouldn't. I simply had to tell the truth like I saw it. People liked hearing something real and heartfelt for a change rather than the same old broken record. I think you should continue to give satsang but call people on their B.S. and hypocrisy.

Gurinder would like this. The worst they will do is excommunicate you just as the church did to Tolstoy. Now that would be an honor!

Howard and I are kindred souls. We’re of a similar well-aged Radha Soami Satsang Beas(RSSB) vintage, each of us having been initiated into this mystical meditation-based spiritual path over a third of a century ago.

We’ve also both come to view RSSB in a manner that seems heretical to true believers, but which seems eminently sensible to Howard and me.

Howard, who lives in Berkeley, and I have been carrying on an email conversation the past few days. He said it’d be fine if I shared his thoughts on the Church of the Churchless. I’ve mildly edited them, taking out only a few extraneous personal references and correcting some typos.

The two of us are alike in another way, as Howard pointed out:

Maybe you can use some of the things I have written to good use. Don't worry about editing it in any way you like. I am like you. I just write things out to get them clear in my own head.

While most readers of this blog aren’t associated with RSSB, many are. So I decided to share almost all of what Howard had to say in his email messages, even though it's lengthy.

I realize that his thoughts will be of most interest to fellow RSSB initiates, but his evolving take on spirituality and religious authority has its universal side as well.

The first part of Howard’s message is below. To read the rest, click on the post extension link [already included here]. I've added some explanations of RSSB-specific terms in [brackets].
--------------------------------------------
Funny finding you here [at the Church of the Churchless blog]. I’m a satsangi [RSSB initiate] of thirty-five years and just now beginning to see I have been deceiving myself for most of them.

I was at the Dera [headquarters of RSSB in India] two years ago and someone at my table said "Brian Hines [me, the blogger] is having difficulty on the path right now." I always want to talk to such people because I figure they are at least being real. I have had it with fundamentalist satsangis. Really, I just can't listen to them anymore, kind of makes me want to gag.

Looks to me like you are just starting to understand the path. I still am quite fond of Gurinder [Singh, current RSSB guru], but primarily because the last time he came to Petaluma [RSSB center in California] and spoke I came to the conclusion that if a tape of his satsang [spiritual talk] had been sent to the satsang reviewing panel he would never be invited back again.

He is not a party liner, even though everyone tries to make him into one. Very few are willing to accept that most of what they hold on to is a fragile belief system that does not give them what they need. Gurinder calls them on this and it is refreshing. Not that anyone does anything about it, but at least it appears he is doing his job.

There definitely has been a shift to 2.0 Sant Mat. I can tell you about a personal exchange I had with Gurinder that you may like.

A few years ago at Dera I got up and said "I just don't believe any of it anymore. None of it makes any sense to me. It used to feel so good when I knew all the answers and I could just look in my Sant Mat Recipes for Life book whenever I needed an answer. Now if someone asks me a question about the path I tell them to go talk to a seeker [someone interested in RSSB but not yet initiated]. They seem to have it all figured out while I have no idea!"

He told me that was real progress. That the people who seem to have it all together and look like they know what is going on are all faking it. He further said being in this state allows you to be open minded like a child. He said this is very important in order to be open to God. He also said that as soon as we adopt a rigid belief system we are cutting ourselves off from the spiritual world because now we can only see what our belief system filters and validates.

He also said spirituality has nothing to do with your beliefs but that it was more a matter of the heart and sincerity. He said it is the sincerity that counts and not the belief system. It does not really matter what you believe because beliefs are ultimately meaningless. God does not look at your beliefs. At the end he joked and said "When you meet someone like that who has all the answers, you really don't know if you should be happy for him or feel sorry for him!"

For me it showed Gurinder as being more like a Socrates than a God-man. He also put responsibility for our spiritual growth on us rather than on a flimsy belief system. I also asked him about the four lifetime guarantee [that an initiate will only be reincarnated for a maximum of four more times before reaching God permanently].

He said there is no four lifetime guarantee and just to forget about that. Kind of blew a much comforting thought we all had right out of the water. He said this, I was at the microphone, he said it directly to me. He also said we need to take responsibility for our spiritual life in this lifetime because as far we know this is the only life we have.

Most of us are still in the 1.0 belief system and I admit I still think in those terms. I just spent too much time being willingly indoctrinated for the last thirty years. As one friend of mine noted, B.S. stands for Belief System and any of us who believe the Sant Mat fairy tale that was given to us in the early days and in the books are following a bunch of B.S.

It is impossible to avoid this without mystical experience. Gurinder calls mystical experience "understanding" and opposes this to "concepts." As soon as you talk about or conceptualize a mystical experience it automatically sounds like bullshit unless you have actually had that experience yourself.

Even if you have had the experience it is impossible to describe with words something that is beyond words. Gurinder has also many times said "My experience cannot be the basis of your faith, you need to have your own experience" I am reminded of a wonderful Rumi poem that you may be familiar with.

"All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile, I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary. The day is coming when I fly off, but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?

Who says words with my mouth? Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all."

Gurinder really is the number one heretic in the organization, very much like Kabir and other masters. I just think the organization is way beyond what one person can control no matter how enlightened. He has to delegate and people who accept the authority are by default usually the least loving.

They drive everybody crazy, themselves most of all. I was there at the inception of Petaluma when all of the millionaires were taking over and bickering with everyone. The atmosphere was the exact opposite of love and harmony. I still don't go out there because for me it is the loneliest coldest place in the world. Early on I was getting upset because the old harmony we had felt in my then home Santa Rosa sangat had disappeared with the advent of Petaluma.

During this time an old 85 year old satsangi told me "If it stinks, don't put your nose in it" and that is what I started to do. Just stay away from those people if you can, they have probably succeeded in driving you away anyway. I admit it is a bit disheartening to see so many close disciples behave worse than the average slaughterhouse worker.

Concerning talking about inner mystical experiences, I heard Gurinder speak about this once saying it was not a big deal to talk about inner experiences but that it wouldn't do others or yourself much good to do so. There was none of that "You'll burn in hell if you do!" that I hear from disciples. He was quite matter of fact and did not seem to be all that against it if you got something out of it.

I am not quite at zero [mystical experiences], but not too far away either. The mystical experiences have been so minor and so seldom. Seems like everyone is at zero, certainly everyone acts that way. I remember looking at the satsangis and wondering why all of the initiates are such failures. Then I looked at myself and saw that I am also a huge failure. I either had to blame the practice or the disciples.

I am not sure where I land on that one. My very best friend told me about hearing the bell sound and seeing the inner star while we were roommates at Dera. I know he was telling the truth. He said it took a tremendous amount of hard work in meditation and he has never been able to work that hard again. Somehow he could not hold onto it though and is now struggling like the rest of us.

I remember Gurinder once saying "The reason a school such as Harvard is so renowned and considered so good is because of the quality of its graduates. It is the same with Sant Mat." I don't know where that puts us. I sometimes wonder if this practice is an anachronism. Living within the discomfort of being uncertain is the only honest place to be. Did you hear about the time Gurinder called everyone a bunch of Moonies?

It is a very awkward situation if you happen to be a mystic in charge of a multinational corporation that is supposed to promulgate an inward mystic practice. Gurinder definitely has the Greek understanding of philosophy and encourages open mindedness and direct experience. He has emphasized over and over again that you only know what you have experienced.

When he says "How do you know I am not a fraud?" he means it. He does his best to call us on our hypocrisy and ignorance because without realizing this we can go nowhere. I know what he told you about not molding Plotinus into the image of RSSB is what he really wanted.

Did you know that there is a publication in India that succinctly explains to people why they should not follow RSSB and that this is a recommended book for seekers in India? He really wants people to be open minded and from what I have seen the times he becomes the most animated and engaged is when somehow talks to him outside of party lines.

Maharaj Ji [Charan Singh, Gurinder’s predecessor] used to say that once a saint leaves this world his lofty teachings are taken up by lesser minds who then turn their teachings of universal love and the fatherhood of God into something rigid and intolerant. This is happening to RSSB right now, this is happening in spite of a living master. Visit any corporate satsang center and you will see what I mean.

It is hard to differentiate between what is coming from the master and what is coming from the management because the management is supposed to reflect what the master wants. In reality this rarely happens. At Dera the management fights and bickers all the time over the very smallest matters. No one will cooperate unless the master steps in and makes the final decision.

One of the big issues is whether or not the basic tenet of the path which claims the need for a living master has completely broken down because of the sheer weight of the organization. We are told that we need a master so that we have someone to go to with questions and with whom we can develop a loving relationship on this plane which leads to a loving relationship on the spiritual planes.

Maharaj Ji used to say that a dead master cannot help us because a dead master is as far away from us and as inaccessible as the lord himself. Now, you can't even write the master a letter, let alone have any type of meaningful relationship. In the present environment access to the master is a practical impossibility and to my mind this nullifies the basic tenet that the living master is the main difference between Sant Mat and a dead religion.

In other words, what is the difference between looking up what a dead master said in a book and hearing what a living master says in a two hour question and answer session every six years, especially when you don't even have a chance to ask one of the questions? I don't see much of a difference except that the book will probably have had meaningless extraneous material edited while the question and answer session does not.

I noticed something interesting about the claims that guru is god. In earlier days when disciples actually had a lot of physical contact with the master most of the writings emphasized that the guru was not like you and me. There is an old Sawan Singh initiate in Petaluma who told me when he was a young man the master used to chase the disciples around rather than the way it is now.

Everyone knew him and felt like he was their friend. People had to be reminded of his spiritual attainments because while interacting with him on a daily basis they noticed that the guru for the most part acted just like any normal human being. There was therefore a tendency to forget the spiritual nature of the master and people needed to be reminded that the guru was a messenger from God.

I believe this is why the earlier writings often emphasize the spiritual attainments of the guru in such exaggerated grandiose terms. Gurinder has often said "familiarity breeds contempt" when asked about having more contact with the master. I imagine there is a lot of truth to this. On the other hand, according to earlier writings of mystics it should also breed a lot of love and affection if the master is indeed a loving spiritual being that leads us to our spiritual home.

Now that practically no one has any contact with the master and the books have already taught the disciples to deify him, the master strongly emphasizes the human side of the master. One of his most common sayings is "Look at the master as your friend, walking beside you. Don't put him on a pedestal where you cannot reach him."

The fact of the matter is that he is not a friend and we cannot reach him. This is a fact and there is no getting around it unless you simply identify the master as a spiritual presence in your life.

No one appears to have a monopoly on this presence whether you call it Jesus, the master, the Holy Ghost, Allah, or whatever. Gurinder would be the first one to agree with this.

So the modern disciple has neither a relationship with the master nor an understanding of his spiritual greatness except conceptually. In other words, most of us have no relationship with the master at all. Now we have to ask ourselves if those who do have closer contact with the master have an advantage. I have seen none based on their behavior, in fact someone once told me, "A representative [of the guru] represents what we should not be like. If you want to see the wrong way to behave, just watch your rep."

My relationship to the Sant Mat path is changing and it seems like it is always changing. I try not to hold onto it very tightly. I know it will change again.

I gave a home satsang the other day and I came right out and said we know the master will come and get us at death just as surely as the Christians know Jesus will come down from heaven on a cloud. Unless we have some kind of mystical understanding to confirm our beliefs it is just another empty concept which Baba Ji [Gurinder] has been hammering on us about for years.

I think people took it just fine, though I was a little worried they wouldn't. I simply had to tell the truth like I saw it. People liked hearing something real and heartfelt for a change rather than the same old broken record. I think you should continue to give satsang but call people on their B.S. and hypocrisy.

Gurinder would like this. The worst they will do is excommunicate you just as the church did to Tolstoy. Now that would be an honor!

Excellent analysis of RSSB guru's absurd response to a question

lt's great that videos of Gurinder Singh Dhillon are being posted on You Tube by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the religious organization that is led by Dhillon -- a guru who is considered to be God in Human Form by the RSSB teachings.

This allows people to critique what the guru says.

Sure, RSSB devotees, like true believers everywhere, typically consider that Dhillon can speak no wrong and do no wrong, which ignores the fact that he is enmeshed in a financial scandal involving hundreds of millions of dollars.

Below is a comment on a recent Church of the Churchless post by "j" that I like a lot. It starts with a reference to a previous comment. Satsangi means an initiate of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. I've corrected a few typos.

The question asked of the guru pertains to why someone would leave RSSB, as many have done. I'm one of them. Dhillon's response is typical of fundamentalist religions, which denigrates anyone who chooses to deconvert from the religion. 

This is strange, since religions have no problem with someone leaving a different religion to join that one. But when a person decides that they've found a better spiritual path than the religion they joined, suddenly leaving a religion becomes a horrendous moral failure.

Doesn't make sense. Which isn't surprising, since religions don't make sense. Here's the comment from "j." After it you can view the portion of a video referenced in the comment.

"It was one sentence."

With all due respect, it was not one sentence. Gurinder Singh goes on at length to explain that leaving RSSB for any reason is inexcusable, and is due to:

1) The mental weakness and moral cowardice of the satsangi.

2) A personal rejection of the satsangi by God, who "only takes those he wants to take."

3) The satsangi acting like a willful and rebellious child, for whom the Guru has created a "conducive atmosphere."

4) The satsangi was done in by the "weight of his karmic burden" (huh?)

5) The satsangi is taking "the easy way out." "Then he will have to bear the burden" (again, huh? Wasn't Gurinder just saying that it's a misconception to believe that a Guru can take anyone's karma or bear anyone's burden?)

6) The Guru cannot "study" for the satsangi. This is an ironic choice of words for Gurinder to use, for it's study of our experience of the path and the guru's bold claims that leads many satsangis to abandon RSSB.

7) It is an error for the apostate satsangi to "choose his own path." Gee, I thought that Gurinder taught that all spiritual paths can lead to salvation. Or so I've been told by fans of Gurinder.

8) "The Lord is going to give what he's going to give." Gurinder is supposed to be the Lord, so that's just doubletalk.

9) To the question of whether errant initiated satsangis "get another chance" to come back to the path: This question has been answered ad infinitum by previous gurus that the guru never leaves the initiate for all eternity and watches over him until he finally returns to God.

But here Gurinder hedges and stops to think about the question as if he's never heard it before.

He then goes on with a bit of philosophical gymnastics to argue that since the satsangi has issues with the Guru now (like, for questions of financial impropriety, false claims about possible meditation experiences, false claims about the salvific power of the shard, false claims about RS history, false claims about the guru's power, false claims about the "law" of karma, disaffection with the guru's triumphalist claims for himself, etc), it follows that he may never come back to the path in future lives.

I find it curious that Gurinder equates initiation and RSSB's theological claims of the Guru's power and the power of initiation with "atmosphere."

We're told before initiation that it and the guru have the actual power to hasten our spiritual development, but here this is downgraded to "atmosphere," which seems to portray the path as nothing more than theater. Gurinder also likens initiation to a meal (gurus dearly love analogies, though an analogy is never an explanation for anything).

I've studied guru controversies for over 30 years now, and I know this pattern all too well. Gurinder is simply using the same trick that every guru uses when questioned: He blames the person leaving the path for being a weak and spoiled child.

If I may be so bold: READ CLOSELY (or should I say listen closely, since Gurinder never writes anything down) when the guru speaks.

Is he really facing the questions put to him, or is he dodging them with rhetorical BS? As as ex member of a sant mat path, I've found that it's easy to still buy into the guru's arguments even after one leaves the path. But a close reading of the guru's words can show the evidence of his linguistic sleight of hand.

Never forget, everyone joins Sant Mat because they were SOLD on it through words. People join Sant Mat because of the argument Sant Mat makes. But that argument is a sales pitch, it's not a description of reality.

It's important to really look closely at a guru's words to see if what he says actually makes sense.

There are a lot of things that gurus say that seem like strong and reasonable arguments, but they're just piles of analogies that never address the question being asked them. This latest Gurinder video is an example of that.

Above is the video, which I've made start at the 8:45 mark, the beginning of the interchange with a questioner discussed by "j."

Greatest comment about the RSSB guru ever. Behold!

l am awestruck. I bow down before the glory. I marvel at every inspired word. No, I'm not talking about God or a holy book. I'm extolling a comment "j" left today on a recent blog post.

Here it is. (UPDATE: it seemed obvious that this comment is fictional, but in case anyone thinks it is real, it was made up -- though there is considerable truth in the fictional exchange.)

The guru being referred to is the leader of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization based in India that I belonged to for 35 years until I deconverted. The comment is absolutely right-on as regards some of the contradictions and absurdities in the RSSB teachings.

It should appeal to anyone, though naturally it will resonate most with those who are familiar with those teachings.

If you aren't, know that shabd refers to a supposed divine power/energy that manifests as sound and light -- a sort of universal mystical consciousness. Charan Singh was the RSSB guru prior to the current guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

Questioner: Are you saying you have actual powers that make you the most evolved spiritual person in the world? And that only you can guide me to the True God?

RSSB Guru: No, the real guru is the shabd.

Questioner: Then who are you? What is your role?

RSSB Guru: I am merely doing the work that my guru dumped on me.

Questioner: I feel that your answer begs the question. Do you have actual powers of a guru or not?

RSSB Guru: Everyone who wants to find God needs a Spiritual Master to guide them on the Path.

Questioner: Okay, well, are you saying you're such a Spiritual Master?

RSSB Guru: The real spiritual master is the shabd. People who wish to find God need to take initiation from a competent Spiritual Master.

Questioner: So you're saying that if I take this initiation from you, you'll guide me on the inner planes and back to God?

RSSB Guru: Not necessarily. First of all, only marked souls are eligible for initiation. If you're not a marked soul whose karma it is to be initiated, I can not accept you.

Questioner: You're saying you have the spiritual powers to determine who is favored by God to return to God?

RSSB Guru: I do not say that. It is everyone's karma as to whether they are fit to be initiated. Karma is everything.

Questioner: Let me try another question. Are you saying that initiation by you is necessary to return to God?

RSSB Guru: RSSB teaches that all religions teach the very same spiritual truths. I am claiming nothing special. In fact, you'll see spiritual quotes on the RSSB website from Mother Teresa and Iggy Pop. And notice the statue of the Buddha right behind me. We are merely a philosophical organization, not a religion.

Questioner: I see. Then which sant mat guru today is your spiritual equal? Rajinder Singh perhaps?

RSSB Guru: Please do not ask me to give my opinion on any mystics or their teachings.

Questioner: Huh? I thought you just said that all religions are the same, and that "karma" (our efforts) are everything in the journey back to God.

RSSB Guru: No, the teachings of Sant Mat require that one be initiated by a genuine guru.

Questioner: OK then, who is a genuine guru? Can you name one?

RSSB Guru: Yes, Charan Singh ji Maharaj.

Questioner: OK fine. But can you name any genuine gurus outside of your own line of spiritual masters?

RSSB Guru: All saints and mystics teach the same spiritual truths.

Questioner: Fine, then just name one who you'd certify as being as authentic as yourself.

RSSB Guru: You see, we must all make our own spiritual search to choose an authentic guru.

Questioner: But doesn't the RSSB website strongly imply that you are one of these authentic gurus?

RSSB Guru: I am merely the leader of the RSSB organization, and it is not a role of my own choosing. RSSB is a philosophical organization, not a religion. I make no claims for myself.

Questioner: But by accepting the role of Perfect Master, aren't you implicitly making the public claim that you indeed are a Perfect Master?

RSSB Guru: You see, the real Master is the shabd.

Questioner: OK. How about teaching me this technique of getting the shabd?

RSSB Guru: Oh, I could teach the mere technique, but real contact with the shabd requires initiation from a Perfect Master, otherwise the special mantras will have no power whatsoever.

Questioner: Alright, fine, I'll take this initiation then. Will you initiate me now?

RSSB Guru: Now (much laughter). No, you need to get sponsored by an RSSB member and follow 3 vows for a year. Then, maybe I'll initiate you once the paperwork is complete. Bear in mind that once you receive initiation you must accept me as your spiritual master -- a "Godman" in fact -- for the rest of your life.

Questioner: Excuse me reverend sir, but I don't think so.

RSSB Guru: Too bad for you then. There is no other way back to God.

Questioner: But I thought you just said? Nevermind.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon, current RSSB guru

RSSB says don't directly quote the Master. So naturally I did.

Today someone sent me this hot-off-the-press notice from Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization based in India that I belonged to for 35 years before I saw the churchless light.

It decrees that even though videos of the RSSB guru are now online, directly quoting Gurinder Singh Dhillon isn't permitted.

Only paraphrasing of what the guru said is allowed. And for some inexplicable reason, the notice isn't supposed to be shared with all devotees of RSSB, only those who have some official capacity in the organization.

Well, after reading this I had two heretical thoughts: (1) I've got to share this notice on my blog so anyone who wants to can read it; and (2) I'm going to quote Dhillon directly. Ah, the pleasure of defying ridiculously rigid religious rules!

So here's the notice.

And here's a You Tube video of a Q&A session with the guru.

My transcript of the first question and answer follows. I did my best to make it as accurate as possible. One word was unclear to me, so it has a question mark associated with it. After the transcript I'll share follow-up questions that deserve to be asked of the guru.

QUESTION: Hazur, I have read that we have to live in master's will. And in bigger incidents like death, serious health, we all say that it is master's will and we accept it. But in our day to day life, small things don't allow us to accept his will. And there's a lot of confusion regarding that.

GURU'S ANSWER: First we have to divide it into two portions. One is on the spiritual aspect and the other is on the administrative side. So on the spiritual there should be no question. On the administration I don't think anybody creates that kind of a focus where he looks deep into everything.  

And that is why all of you are there as HODs [?] as sevadars, to look into it, to give the different perspectives. So definitely somebody could have a better perspective, and something could be more in tune to what the sangat needs. So sometimes in a hurry you overlook so many things. 

So in day to day life, in administrative things, you should use your own discrimination. Give your suggestions, and at the ending of the day if he takes a decision, then you follow that. This is why right from the beginning I have said in spirituality there is no question, and in administration you are most free to give your suggestions.

And where the spiritual aspect is concerned, also you see, learning to stay in his will means understanding his will first. If you don't know what his will is, how will you be able to stay in his will?

So it also is reaching that level of consciousness that we understand what his will is. Today everything for us is our perspective. We are searching in the dark as to what we think his will is. So again, only an elevated soul will know what that real will is and to be able to stay in that.

For modern people like us, we are all sort of searching in the dark trying to understand the why and when of this creation, why has this happened to us, why has this happened to somebody else.

These are some of the questions that came to mind about how Gurinder Singh Dhillon answered the woman:

(1) By "his will," do you mean God's will or the guru's will? Sounds like the guru is speaking about God's will, but this isn't crystal clear. If somehow the guru is talking about his own will, wouldn't it be easy for the guru to simply describe what that will consists of? Regardless, RSSB considers the guru to be God in human form, so I'm assuming God's will and the guru's will are one and the same.

(2) Since it appears that God's will is being talked about, why is God referred to as a "he"? Does God have XY chromosomes? Does God have a penis? Inquiring minds want to know. 

(3) How can anyone be sure that God exists? That's a prerequisite for God having a will.

(4) Assuming God exists (a huge assumption), where's the evidence that God has a will that humans are supposed to understand? This presupposes free will, since apparently we're supposed to choose to search for God's will, find it, and then remain in it.

(5) Every religion has a different idea of what God wants people to do. The guru says that only an "elevated soul" can know what the real will is. So why are there so many differing views of what God's will is? And how can someone recognize an elevated soul who supposedly knows for sure what God's will is?

(6) Is the guru claiming that he is an elevated soul who knows God's will? This is unclear, since he says "we are all searching in the dark" as to what that will is. Does this include the guru?

(7) And why should anyone care what God's will is? If God doesn't exist, obviously there's no such thing as God's will. And if God does exist, isn't the notion of God having a will regarding what people do horribly anthropomorphic? The guru's answer makes it sound like God is a bizarre ruler who demands that their subjects figure out what the ruler wants instead of the ruler making this clear directly.

You could be a fundamentalist satsangi if...

Here's another early (July 13, 2006) blog post that I came across while selecting Church of the Churchless posts to be in my next book. It rang true to me when I wrote it, and still does. Enjoy.

I enjoyed reading “Top ten signs you’re a fundamentalist Christian.” That stimulated me to jot down my own list for Satsangis, a.k.a. followers of the contemporary Sant Mat movement.

It’s a work in progress. If you're acquainted with this philosophy, feel free to add on to the list via a comment, if you like.

I need to point out that when I say “you,” a few years ago I could have said “I.” For I know whereof I speak with this list, having been a fundamentalist Satsangi myself for many years.

Now I’ve seen the light. And I like to believe that as a result I’m closer to the light.

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

(10) You have never had a profound mystical experience yourself, and you don’t know any other initiates who have had one. But you’re convinced that this is the highest mystic path.

(9) You believe that rites and rituals are useless for attaining God-realization. Yet you go to satsang every Sunday, folding your hands and saying “radha soami” when you walk in the door.

(8) You consider that engaging in pilgrimages and visits to holy places are pointless religious practices. However, the trip you took to India to spend time at the Dera was a highpoint of your spiritual life.

(7) You feel the guru’s loving presence keeping you company throughout the day. However, when you aren’t thinking about the guru or doing the practices he enjoins, you aren’t aware of him. You never wonder, “If someone is only here when I imagine him, is he real?”

(6) You look down on deluded intellectuals, Vedantists, and jnanis who believe they can think their way to God-realization. You know this isn’t possible because you read thoughts in a Sant Mat book that said just that.

(5) You feel terrible if you don’t read the label on a box of cookies and inadvertently eat some egg whites. You never give money to street people, no matter what condition they’re in, because that would be interfering with their karma.

(4) You have worked diligently for years toward merging your soul with God’s spirit, establishing a direct personal relationship with the divine. However, if an impulse or intuition comes to you that isn’t given a thumbs-up by the Sant Mat books, you’re afraid it’s a trick of the “negative power.”

(3) You are grateful that you’ve broken free of traditional religious dogma that required you, without evidence, to have faith that a dead Son of God will save your soul after you die. Yet the only difference is, now you have the same unfounded faith in a living Son of God.

(2) You are committed to expanding your circle of love, compassion, and selfless service beyond the narrow confines of sectarianism. But almost all of your friends are satsangis. And you believe that it is much more important to perform seva for the guru at a local, regional, or national satsang center than to volunteer at a nursing home.

(1) You are absolutely sure that you’re on the direct path of light and sound back to God. Except, you have never seen the light. Or heard the sound. But that doesn’t matter, because the Bible tells you so. Oops, did I write “Bible”? I meant to say “Guru.”

When a guru is an asshole

Now that I've got a Brian Hines, Author Facebook page, I'm more eager to fashion a second book from the posts I wrote during the early years of this Church of the Churchless blog. (On Amazon you can buy my first book, Break Free of Dogma.)

So the past few days I've been diligently working away at selecting blog posts that carry on from where my first book left off in February 2006.  Like Marie Kondo, I touch each post with my writer's mind, deciding whether the post still leaves me with a feeling of joy and inspiration that warrants including it in the second book.

Here's a post from April 2006 that I came across today which definitely will be included.

After all, any blog post with "asshole" in the title surely deserves to be in a book. The italicized introduction follows the format of my first book, where I make brief comments on how I currently look upon the blog posts from, in this case, fourteen years ago.

If someone is considered to be God in human form by their devotees, yet knows that they don’t deserve that divine title, what should we call them? I suggest, “Asshole.” 

God-man or Asshole? The guru conundrum. 
April 27, 2006

Ever since I met her, I’m been trying to convince my wife that I’m God. 

It just seems so obvious: I understand Windows XP and can fix her computer when something goes wrong; back when we used a VCR, I could program it to do whatever we wanted; I know how to hang a picture so it is centered perfectly over a piece of furniture.

Yet my husbandly divinity remains unrecognized. 

For some reason Laurel focuses more on such things as: my inability to put the kitchen sponge in its holder, rather than on the bottom of the sink; my incapacity to fold t-shirts properly and place them neatly in their designated drawer; my reluctance, after cutting off a slice of bread, to reintroduce the whole wheat loaf back into the bag where it is supposed to stay fresher.

Guess I should start calling myself a guru. Then my human failings could be construed as signs of my godliness.

This is what I learned by reading the May 2006 issue of the Western U.S.A. Newsletter, published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) America. Every month the RSSB representative for the Western states, Vincent Savarese, writes an article about some aspect of this organization’s teachings.

The issue that just arrived in the mail speaks about the guru as God-man, someone who has merged with God and so has no imperfections. If you want to know God, supposedly you have to be accepted by a guru.

The saints tell us that we need to find and associate with someone who is perfect. We say God is perfect and is absolute reality. But we haven’t seen or met God. Can we see that Perfect Being without an intercessor? Unequivocally all saints and masters say we cannot. We need a teacher who has met God and merged with God, an enlightened being, a God-Man, a Sat Guru, or Perfect Master.

Isn’t that amazing? Walking around on Earth are perfect beings who are incarnations of God, just as Jesus and Krishna were considered to be.

Why is it, then, that the multitudes don’t fall at their feet and worship them? What explains the fact that, back in the early 1990s, my wife got to sit just a few feet away from a purported God-man (Gurinder Singh Dhillon) and came away from a lengthy meeting with him saying, “I didn’t feel anything special. He just seemed like a regular person to me”?

Savarese offers up the reason:

Saints and mystics tell us only the soul is perfect and so also the Perfect Master. The Perfect Master is perfect within at all times and can be perfect outside if he wishes, but he guards his perfection very carefully… What is confusing to many people is that Masters may act forgetful, show fatigue or annoyance, may mispronounce a written name or call a female a male or vice versa.

Ah! This is exactly what I’ve been telling my wife! 

My seeming imperfections are just a necessary disguise to cover my Godliness. Otherwise, I’d be spending all of my time fending off wanna-be disciples who would desire to give me their devotion, money, and, in the case of young attractive women, their bodies. (Hmmmm. Now that I think about it, why would I want to disguise myself?)

So it turns out that there is no way to judge whether a guru is merged with God. 

If the guru acts perfectly divine, this is proof that he is an enlightened being. If the guru acts imperfectly human, this is proof that, in Savarese’s words, “He chooses to play the role of an ordinary man much of the time.” Why? Because, “If he didn’t he would attract all manner of miracle seekers and not the truth seekers he was meant to meet.”

Pretty good gig. Perfection means godliness. Imperfection also means godliness. It’s akin to a band being able to play as many off-key tunes as they wanted, because the audience would believe them when they said “We mean our songs to sound that way; if you are our fans, love the way we play them, not how you want to hear them.” 

Savarese writes:

For the disciple of the perfect Master, for the gurmukh, for the servant of the King, there is one simple and urgent rule… obedience. Logic and self-preservation, self-importance, must be set aside. He will provide everything for the thoroughly obedient disciple.

But not, apparently, for the disobedient disciple. As someone else put it, “He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!” Santa Claus, guru, God: what’s the difference? They all reward obedience and punish independence.

The nagging problem, though, is that nasty old fly in the ointment: reality. 

If Santa Claus, guru, or God aren’t really what we believe them to be, what then? Does it make sense to keep believing in the absence of evidence? What makes children stop believing in Santa Claus? Is this a mark of increasing maturity or a disturbing loss of faith?

Which brings me to the question with which I began: is the guru a God-man or an Asshole? Perhaps these seem like harsh choices. Indeed, previously I’ve suggested another option, the guru as loyalist (adding to the three traditional “L” options of the Lord, a liar, or a lunatic).

However, upon further reflection I’m beginning to think that loyalist and liar belong together in the broader “Asshole” category. This reduces the choices to two: God-man or Asshole, assuming that lunatic doesn’t fit. 

I realize that this may offend those who consider that the guru is God.

But here’s why it shouldn’t: if the guru truly is God, notwithstanding the lack of evidence, he, like God, isn’t affected by anything I or anyone else says about him. 

Heck, the same is true even for ourselves, really. I get put down, insulted, and criticized all of the time by other people who comment on my blog postings and send me emails. By and large, it washes off my back. With God, it wouldn’t even come close to his back.

On the other hand, if the guru really isn’t God, I don’t see how he deserves any other title than Asshole. 

What else should you call a man (or woman) who accepts the fervent devotion of his followers, who fails to dissuade those who consider him to be God incarnate, and who encourages absolute obedience to his dictates as the only means of spiritual realization — yet isn’t who he claims to be?

For many years, before I’d meditate in the morning I would carry on a one-sided conversation with the guru who initiated me: Charan Singh. “Good day, Master. How are you? Hope to see you soon, inside or outside, in the heavenly regions or when you come to visit us physically.” And so on.

I still talk to him. But in a different fashion now. 

“How’re you doing, Asshole? Don’t like that name? Well, either you’re God and am aware of me speaking to you, or you were a fake and aren’t aware of anything now that you’re dead. So, if you’re God, come and talk to me now that I’ve got your attention. If you’re not, then Asshole is the perfect name for a man who claimed to be a Perfect Master for almost forty years, but knew that he wasn’t."

It’s a conundrum. I don’t know which is true: God-man or Asshole. 

All I know is that for me, seeing is believing. I’ll believe someone is God when I see unequivocal evidence of this (as to what that might be, all I can say is that I’ll know it when I see it). Until then, if you say you’re God, I’m going to use my alternative title for you.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon, current guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas

I have a "Brian Hines, Author" Facebook page. And an extra copy of Steve Hagen's book.

Last week I got around to fixing two typos in my Break Free of Dogma book. That took some emailing back and forth with the folks at ebookpbook, as they had designed my 2019 collection of selected posts from the early years of this blog, 2004-06. 

After getting print and Kindle files with the typos corrected, I uploaded them to Amazon and basked in the good feeling of finally having a typo-free book. Which led me to think, "Now is the time to do some promoting of Break Free of Dogma," something I hadn't done much of before.

Being familiar with buying ads, or boosted posts, on Facebook due to my political advocacy of local progressive candidates here in Salem, Oregon, I wanted to start that way. 

And that meant fashioning a Brian Hines, Author Facebook page. Since I'd done that several times, it went smoothly. The toughest part was getting our dining room table set up for a cover photo to be taken by my wife. Here's the iPhone result. Not bad. It fits nicely on my Facebook page.

Only two of my four books would fit in the photo. Hopefully they aren't jealous of the books that were chosen to frame my face. I've given Facebook $100 to plug a post about Break Free of Dogma with atheists, agnostics, and free thinkers in the United States. 

If you want, give my Brian Hines, Author Facebook page a like by clicking on, not surprisingly, the "Like" button under the cover photo. 

In the course of re-reading the first part of my book to make sure there weren't any unnoticed typos, I came across a January 2005 post where I mentioned Steve Hagen's book, Buddhism Plain and Simple. I bought another copy a few weeks ago, having forgotten that I already had one. 

I'm glad that I did.

After 15 years of increasing churchlessness, my view on reality has become considerably more godless than when I first read Hagen's book. So reading it again was like the very first time. (Of course, even if my views hadn't changed, my memory of the book would have been dim.)

The 2005 post was called "Religious questioning is natural." Here it is. I've added a few extra paragraph breaks to make the post easier to read. (Blogs were called weblogs way back when.)

Like most bloggers, I love getting email. Making connections with like-minded (or unlike-minded) people from anywhere in the world is a wonderful reward for the time and effort that goes into a weblog.

Recently I got a message from another member of the spiritual group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that I’ve been involved with for thirty-five years. This is how my correspondent ended his email:

I do not know whether you will feel the following questions too personal to answer, but if you do not mind , will you mind answering them?: Are you or were you ever a satsangi? What is your spiritual philosophy these days? Can you comment at all on the Sant Mat Gurus, especially Maharaj Gurinder Singh? How do you recommend one seeks the Ultimate Truth?

By “satsangi” he meant specifically an initiate of the mystical path known variously as Sant Mat, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Science of the Soul, Surat Shabd Yoga, or Radha Soami. Satsangi is a generic word that literally means “one who associates with truth (sat).”

Since many spiritual groups in India and elsewhere consider that they are on the path to knowing truth, you can be a “satsangi” of various denominations—to use a rather ill-fitting Christian term. “Satsang” is a meeting of satsangis, a service if you will.

I was asked good questions, some obviously much easier to answer than others. Though personal, I didn’t mind making a stab at answering them and have shared my response below.

I realize my language will seem foreign to many people. But substitute, for example, “Pope” for “Master” and “Catholic Church” for “Radha Soami Satsang Beas” if my message seems too distant from your own experience.

My basic point is universal: after you’ve belonged to a religious or spiritual organization for more than a few years, it’s natural to be more critical of it. The more knowledgeable you become about a church, faith, philosophy, or theology, the more flaws you’ll find.

The ultimate reality we call “God” can’t be confined within any manmade system. Religions try to put bounds around boundlessness, but this is a futile exercise. Truth always finds a way to express itself. So I encourage people to trust their direct experience over abstract concepts.

When something seems wrong about the spiritual path you’re following, likely it is. If it appears that you can drop some inessential ritualistic practice, almost certainly you should. Keep what works for you; discard what doesn’t.

Here’s my mildly edited response to the questions I was asked:

Dear ________:

I am indeed a Sant Mat (RSSB) initiate, dating way back from the class of 1971. I now am inclined to shy away from labels such as “satsangi.” My wife is a non-initiate and I have found that this satsangi/non-satsangi distinction is unproductive, just as the Christian/non-Christian distinction is.

Sometimes a satsangi will phone us; my wife answers and hears the greeting, “Radha soami.” She then says, “Hello.” The caller again says, “Radha soami.” She refuses to go further with the conversation until the person communicates like a normal human being rather than a cult member.

I’ve become a bit of a Sant Mat “heretic,” just as you seem to be. Maybe more than “a bit of” in fact.

My quest these days is to discern the essential in spirituality. The rest seems to be in the realm of religion, not mysticism or what I like to call spiritual science. There is a lot of religiosity in RSSB even though this path supposedly isn’t a religion. When blind belief and faith are elevated over direct experience and questioning, I call that a religion.

I still feel a lot of fondness for RSSB/Sant Mat and continue to attend satsang most Sundays. But I’ll admit that I go more for the socializing than for the satsang. Our post-satsang coffee shop conversations go on for considerably longer, and with considerably more enthusiasm, than the 45 minute satsang.

My spiritual philosophy keeps evolving in the direction of Advaita and non-religious Buddhism, assuming those terms really mean anything, which I suspect they don’t. Immersing myself in the teachings of the Greek philosopher Plotinus exacerbated my existing tendencies in that direction.

I think you would enjoy my book “Return to the One,” though since I’m the author, I’m obviously horribly biased. Plotinus’ philosophy is remarkably close to that of Sant Mat, with the notable exception of not mentioning the need for a living “guru.” Or, for that matter, a dead guru.

I’ve been reading several books by Steven Hagen, who I like a lot.

His “Buddhism Plain and Simple” reverberates with me, as does “Buddhism is Not What You Think: Finding Freedom Beyond Beliefs.” I don’t agree with everything Hagen says, but I very much appreciate his attempt to get beyond the religiosity of Buddhism and reach the essential core, which he says is simply seeing.

I empathize with your frustration with Sant Mat meditation, and RSSB in general. We’re different people, so my experience may have no relevance to your own.

All I can say is that I’ve been energized by taking a fresh look at what seems to work for me in meditation, and what doesn’t, regardless of whether it is 100% Sant Mat certified. The goal in Sant Mat meditation, after all, is to do nothing. No mantra, no visualization. Just being there as soul, pure consciousness, and experiencing whatever is there.

This is perfectly compatible with Hagen’s plain and simple Buddhism, and also with Ramana’s plain and simple Advaita. Ramana is another teacher whom I’ve enjoyed reading, finding in him the core of mystic practice without the distractions of complex concepts and suppositions.

Re. Master Gurinder Singh, since I don’t know who I am, I certainly would make no claim to understanding anyone else. Only Master Gurinder Singh knows who Master Gurinder Singh is.

Since he doesn’t make any claims of godliness for himself, one can either surmise (1) that he is a humble god-man, or (2) that he isn’t a god-man. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter which is true. It’s my own experience that I’m concerned about, not the Master’s.

That is, my current approach to spirituality is basically this: I’ll do my best to meditate and discover what lies beyond appearances.

I believe that if the cosmos is One, and I’m part of it, that whatever the essence of me is, also is the essence of the cosmos. Wherever this journey leads, I’ll believe in what I see and experience directly. Everything else is just a hypothesis: Guru is God, spirit creates and sustains the universe, soul can unite with spirit, and so on.

I muse about this stuff on my Church of the Churchless weblog. I haven’t arrived at any real answers yet, but I’m enjoying the questioning. Trust yourself. If I have faith in anything, it is that the Truth with a capital “T” is able to burst through any and all barriers, and it makes its presence known in all sorts of highly individualistic ways.

My guess is that you already know what spiritual path attracts you, and you are just looking for validation.

I could be wrong, but I do this all the time myself, so the process is familiar to me. I look for books and people to affirm what I already am quite sure of, deep down. If I didn’t already know what I was looking for, I wouldn’t be attracted to it when I saw it.

Warm greetings, Brian

Like most bloggers, I love getting email. Making connections with like-minded (or unlike-minded) people from anywhere in the world is a wonderful reward for the time and effort that goes into a weblog.

Recently I got a message from another member of the spiritual group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that I’ve been involved with for thirty-five years. This is how my correspondent ended his email:

I do not know whether you will feel the following questions too personal to answer, but if you do not mind , will you mind answering them?: Are you or were you ever a satsangi? What is your spiritual philosophy these days? Can you comment at all on the Sant Mat Gurus, especially Maharaj Gurinder Singh? How do you recommend one seeks the Ultimate Truth?

By “satsangi” he meant specifically an initiate of the mystical path known variously as Sant Mat, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Science of the Soul, Surat Shabd Yoga, or Radha Soami. Satsangi is a generic word that literally means “one who associates with truth (sat).”

Since many spiritual groups in India and elsewhere consider that they are on the path to knowing truth, you can be a “satsangi” of various denominations—to use a rather ill-fitting Christian term. “Satsang” is a meeting of satsangis, a service if you will.

I was asked good questions, some obviously much easier to answer than others. Though personal, I didn’t mind making a stab at answering them and have shared my response below.

I realize my language will seem foreign to many people. But substitute, for example, “Pope” for “Master” and “Catholic Church” for “Radha Soami Satsang Beas” if my message seems too distant from your own experience.

My basic point is universal: after you’ve belonged to a religious or spiritual organization for more than a few years, it’s natural to be more critical of it. The more knowledgeable you become about a church, faith, philosophy, or theology, the more flaws you’ll find.

The ultimate reality we call “God” can’t be confined within any manmade system. Religions try to put bounds around boundlessness, but this is a futile exercise. Truth always finds a way to express itself. So I encourage people to trust their direct experience over abstract concepts.

When something seems wrong about the spiritual path you’re following, likely it is. If it appears that you can drop some inessential ritualistic practice, almost certainly you should. Keep what works for you; discard what doesn’t.

Here’s my mildly edited response to the questions I was asked:

Dear ________:

I am indeed a Sant Mat (RSSB) initiate, dating way back from the class of 1971. I now am inclined to shy away from labels such as “satsangi.” My wife is a non-initiate and I have found that this satsangi/non-satsangi distinction is unproductive, just as the Christian/non-Christian distinction is.

Sometimes a satsangi will phone us; my wife answers and hears the greeting, “Radha soami.” She then says, “Hello.” The caller again says, “Radha soami.” She refuses to go further with the conversation until the person communicates like a normal human being rather than a cult member.

I’ve become a bit of a Sant Mat “heretic,” just as you seem to be. Maybe more than “a bit of” in fact.

My quest these days is to discern the essential in spirituality. The rest seems to be in the realm of religion, not mysticism or what I like to call spiritual science. There is a lot of religiosity in RSSB even though this path supposedly isn’t a religion. When blind belief and faith are elevated over direct experience and questioning, I call that a religion.

I still feel a lot of fondness for RSSB/Sant Mat and continue to attend satsang most Sundays. But I’ll admit that I go more for the socializing than for the satsang. Our post-satsang coffee shop conversations go on for considerably longer, and with considerably more enthusiasm, than the 45 minute satsang.

My spiritual philosophy keeps evolving in the direction of Advaita and non-religious Buddhism, assuming those terms really mean anything, which I suspect they don’t. Immersing myself in the teachings of the Greek philosopher Plotinus exacerbated my existing tendencies in that direction.

I think you would enjoy my book “Return to the One,” though since I’m the author, I’m obviously horribly biased. Plotinus’ philosophy is remarkably close to that of Sant Mat, with the notable exception of not mentioning the need for a living “guru.” Or, for that matter, a dead guru.

I’ve been reading several books by Steven Hagen, who I like a lot.

His “Buddhism Plain and Simple” reverberates with me, as does “Buddhism is Not What You Think: Finding Freedom Beyond Beliefs.” I don’t agree with everything Hagen says, but I very much appreciate his attempt to get beyond the religiosity of Buddhism and reach the essential core, which he says is simply seeing.

I empathize with your frustration with Sant Mat meditation, and RSSB in general. We’re different people, so my experience may have no relevance to your own.

All I can say is that I’ve been energized by taking a fresh look at what seems to work for me in meditation, and what doesn’t, regardless of whether it is 100% Sant Mat certified. The goal in Sant Mat meditation, after all, is to do nothing. No mantra, no visualization. Just being there as soul, pure consciousness, and experiencing whatever is there.

This is perfectly compatible with Hagen’s plain and simple Buddhism, and also with Ramana’s plain and simple Advaita. Ramana is another teacher whom I’ve enjoyed reading, finding in him the core of mystic practice without the distractions of complex concepts and suppositions.

Re. Master Gurinder Singh, since I don’t know who I am, I certainly would make no claim to understanding anyone else. Only Master Gurinder Singh knows who Master Gurinder Singh is.

Since he doesn’t make any claims of godliness for himself, one can either surmise (1) that he is a humble god-man, or (2) that he isn’t a god-man. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter which is true. It’s my own experience that I’m concerned about, not the Master’s.

That is, my current approach to spirituality is basically this: I’ll do my best to meditate and discover what lies beyond appearances.

I believe that if the cosmos is One, and I’m part of it, that whatever the essence of me is, also is the essence of the cosmos. Wherever this journey leads, I’ll believe in what I see and experience directly. Everything else is just a hypothesis: Guru is God, spirit creates and sustains the universe, soul can unite with spirit, and so on.

I muse about this stuff on my Church of the Churchless weblog. I haven’t arrived at any real answers yet, but I’m enjoying the questioning. Trust yourself. If I have faith in anything, it is that the Truth with a capital “T” is able to burst through any and all barriers, and it makes its presence known in all sorts of highly individualistic ways.

My guess is that you already know what spiritual path attracts you, and you are just looking for validation.

I could be wrong, but I do this all the time myself, so the process is familiar to me. I look for books and people to affirm what I already am quite sure of, deep down. If I didn’t already know what I was looking for, I wouldn’t be attracted to it when I saw it.

Warm greetings, Brian

Repurpose your outmoded religious beliefs

When something has gotten worn out and doesn't work well for you anymore, it's natural to lean toward discarding it. But often it's possible to find another use for the item. 

For example, in my closet I've got a place where I keep my work-in-the-yard clothes -- old pants and t-shirts that I put on when I'm going to get dirty or sweaty. I didn't buy them for that purpose. They've just been repurposed from their original use.

Likewise, it makes sense to do this with outmoded religious beliefs. You've moved on from the dogmas that you used to embrace. Probably there's something about them you still enjoy, though. So adapt them to your new atheist, agnostic, or whatever frame of mind.

I thought of this yesterday when I was doing chores in our yard, trying to get as much of the grass mowed as possible before it started raining heavily. 

For 35 years I belonged to a guru-led religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that had its headquarters in India. Thus many of the central tenets of RSSB were expressed in Indian words. 

Like, seva. Which means selfless service.

Obviously this can be done by anyone, anytime, anywhere. We're seeing seva expressed wonderfully during the coronavirus crisis. Medical personnel, grocery clerks, cleaners, delivery truck drivers, and so many others are doing their jobs with steadfast dedication.

So it's ridiculous to view seva as something that one does for a religious leader or organization. However, that's how it was generally viewed by RSSB. People would travel to India or to RSSB centers in their country so they could perform selfless service. Which is totally unnecessary, of course, since there are plenty of opportunities for seva close to home.

Or, right at home. 

After I finished mowing, which took longer than usual because the light rain that had been falling, combined with tall lush grass, caused the discharge chute of my large walk-behind DR Field Mower (with lawnmower attachment) to keep clogging with wet clippings, I was ready to go inside and relax.

But then I realized that the lawn hadn't been edged for several weeks. And that the mower had left some pieces of mud and grass clumps in the carport as I was pushing it into the garage.

So I got out my battery-powered edger. Followed by my Stihl backpack blower. 

I knew that my wife, Laurel, enjoys seeing the edges of the lawn neat and clean. Probably more than I do, because Laurel does a lot of weed pulling, and that's more difficult when you can't see what's sprouting in the bark mulch that surrounds our lawn. And I also knew that if I left the clumps of dirt and grass in the carport, Laurel would get a broom and clean them up herself.

Doing those additional jobs, edging and blowing, felt good, even though I was tired and hungry. In fact, it felt exactly like the feeling I'd have when I was setting up chairs for the weekly meeting of our local RSSB group here in Salem, Oregon. 

I'd put extra effort into lining up the chairs just so, because I was imbued with the notion of seva, selfless service. That was a fine thing to do. What largely escaped me at the time, though, was something that now strikes me as obvious: as noted above, service to others can be done by anybody, anywhere, anytime.

During my religious believing years, though, I made the mistake of viewing seva on behalf of RSSB and the guru as somehow being more important than seva to my family, community, and others. 

Having seen the error of my ways, I've repurposed that word, seva, to encompass any and all forms of selfless service. Plus, I've pretty much discarded the "selfless" part. I really have no idea if my edging the grass and blowing off the carport was selfless or not. Since I got pleasure from imagining my wife feeling good about what I'd done, arguably I wasn't really selfless. 

But who is?

If Mother Teresa felt pleasure from serving the poor, does this take away from her "selfless service"? I don't think so. It would be crazy to think that we have to be miserable while serving others. If that makes us feel good, so much the better, because then we'll want to do more selfless service, more seva. 

Anyway, I could give more examples of how I'm repurposing outmoded concepts from my previous religious life. Another time, perhaps.

Excellent comments about RSSB guru's failure to be honest

Here's three comments by "j" on the post I wrote yesterday, RSSB guru wants to keep his tax returns secret. 

They're excellent. Reasonable. Factual. Well-written.

I heartily agree that Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, isn't living up to the ethical standard of even an average person, much less a religious leader who supposedly is God in Human Form.

Enjoy. I've corrected a few typos and added some paragraph breaks to make the comments easier to read.

Not "the appropriate stage" to reveal his tax returns? How many more of Gurinder's followers need to go to prison while he remains mum on using them for shady financial deals? Anyway, I thought Gurinder has retired from business life long ago and, as he told us, was just "living off the money his family gave him."

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

What happened to RSSB's much-trumpeted heritage of being the most ethical religion on the planet? For decades RSSB has portrayed itself as the religion known for "honest living."

Almost every RSSB book points out that the RSSB guru isn't like all the other gurus and religious leaders. He doesn't live off his followers. He doesn't receive gifts. He's in all ways a solid, peerlessly honest, straight dealing, law-abiding citizen.

Speaking of honesty, let's all examine our motives for taking initiation. How many of us took RSSB initiation in part because we were impressed by the claims it made for the guru's integrity? I'm not an RSSB initiate myself, but I have to admit that the rhetoric about the guru's impeccable honesty did have a significant effect on my opinion of him and this religion.

RSSB advertised itself as the only ethical religion left on the planet. I don't think that's an exaggeration. Charan's talks and RSSB books had nothing good to say about any other religions or even other sant mat gurus, and everything good to say about the other gurus in his line, and by extension, himself.

And the biggest claim that the RSSB gurus make, aside from being God? That they "live off their own earnings." That may have been true in the days of Sawan and Jagat Singh, but since they departed this world 70 years ago, the odds that the RSSB guru is self-supporting seem thinner than a 2 cent chapati.

Now we come to this financial scandal. I've given Gurinder the benefit of the doubt and have waited a long time for him to do or say something that suggests he's above suspicion of chicanery. But every time Gurinder is called upon to help straighten this matter out...he comes up with a flimsy excuse.

When he's called upon by the Sangat to say something to clarify matters, he is said to make smart remarks. Moreover, Gurinder refuses to go to court because he says his diabetes prevents him from leaving home. Gurinder refuses to let the court see his tax records, even though he stated that the only income he has is money his family gives him.

Gurinder is being sued for borrowing over 1M from a non-satsangi and not paying it back. Three of Gurinder's followers are in prison right now for a scheme that involved moving money through accounts connected to Dhillion family members -- who btw were paid a salary for taking part in money laundering, but are apparently getting off scot-free.

One of those followers is adamant that Gurinder was involved in ordering these movements of funds. OK, let's take all that together: Is it really unreasonable to suggest that Gurinder is less than honest?

Some of us have been saying from the outset that the truth behind this scandal, and Gurinder's guilt or innocence, will be discerned by the courts. I said that and still believe it.

But when I said it, I kind of expected for Gurinder to at least cooperate with the courts. I didn't expect him to embark on a strategy of stonewalling India's legal system with BS excuses, and that's exactly what the present Guru of Beas is doing.

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

"So is the concern for his health... unless you've now chosen to ascribe perfect health and 'superpowers' to him." From what I understand from the official RSSB website, Gurinder is still actively participating in giving public satsangs not only in Beas, but in Mumbai, Raipur, Indore, etc.

https://www.rssb.org/satsang_schedules.html

But according to Gurinder's lawyer, the Guru is far too frail to attend court and explain his part in a financial scandal. After all, the lawyer says, diabetics need their special meals. Does a diabetic's need for special meals mean they can't show up for court? That's what Gurinder is claiming through his lawyer.

Is that really true? I know of a diabetic who had his leg cut off and still got around town with riding the bus and a wheelchair. Perhaps he was a perfect master.

This is a financial scandal where we know considerable sums of money went into accounts controlled by the guru's family members and accounts associated with the guru himself. Yet the guru is refusing to step up in the most basic of ways to clear things up.

No, I'm sure not suggesting that Gurinder is Perfect. Far from it. I'm suggesting he's far from perfect. That is, far from being as honest as the average person.

As for Gurinder's personal finances and his tax statements, RSSB says right there on its website that Gurinder is retired and living off the money his family gives him. According to people who attend Gurinder events, Gurinder also says, boasts really, that he is innocent of any financial skullduggery because he only gets money his family gives him.

In other words, Gurinder has chosen to make his financial status public. He's claimed that his financial affairs are an open book. He's declared he's not a businessman and is simply living off the charity given him by his apparently wealthy family.

But now that Gurinder is called to prove that precious contention, he balks before the court with another empty excuse. All while the people he'd "advised" molder in prison. This makes twice that Gurinder has refused to cooperate with India's legal system.

On both occasions, his justifications for non-cooperation are transparently bogus. I think it's indefensible.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon

RSSB guru wants to keep his tax returns secret

Here's the latest development in the financial fraud saga involving the Singh brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder) and their relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Today a story in India's The Economic Times says that Dhillon has told the Delhi High Court that he wants to be exempted from producing his personal income tax returns.

Since Malvinder Singh has said that the RSSB guru and his family ended up with most, or all, of the money illegally siphoned from Religare, a public corporation, obviously it is important for investigators to see the Dhillon tax returns.

If Dhillon truly is innocent, as he claims, why doesn't he make his tax returns available to the High Court? His secrecy points to guilt, not innocence.

Or maybe the RSSB guru considers that he is God in Human Form and doesn't have to comply with worldly laws.

Gosh, I wonder where he could have gotten that idea. Oh, yes, that is a fundamental part of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas teachings. So that's how Dhillon would have come to think he is godly.

RSSB chief seeks not to put ITR on record

The chief of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon, has sought exception from filing income tax returns (ITR), telling the Delhi High Court that it contained 'personal information' and that this was not an 'appropriate stage' to produce such documents.

Teena Thacker

New Delhi: The chief of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon, has sought exception from filing income tax returns (ITR), telling the Delhi High Court that it contained 'personal information' and that this was not an 'appropriate stage' to produce such documents.

The court had earlier asked Dhillon and his family members to file ITRs, after he denied of having any liability towards RHC Holdings, a company promoted by Malvinder and Shivinder Singh. The Singh brothers, who had previously controlled Religare Enterprises and Ranbaxy LaboratoriesNSE 5.63 %, are facing probes by various agencies for alleged financial irregularities.

They were also ordered to pay Rs 3,500 crore to Daiichi Sankyo under an arbitration award over the sale of Ranbaxy to the Japanese company. In an affidavit filed before the court, Dhillon said being individuals, his family members and he did not “maintain balance sheets” and filing ITR would cause “severe prejudice” to them. Dhillon had earlier admitted of his financial dealings with the Singh brothers by annexing copies of bank statements.

UPDATE: Someone just sent me a photo the print version of the story. It has some content that wasn't in the online story.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon

Every religious person is wrong, almost certainly

One of the strangest things about this Church of the Churchless blog is how many thoroughly "churched" people visit here. I'm glad that they do, because a diversity of opinions in comments is a lot more interesting than a comment monoculture.

But as I've observed before, it's sort of like a bunch of confirmed carnivores frequenting a vegetarian web site, where they leave lots of comments about how wonderful meat-eating is. 

Anyway, I understand that devotees of the religious group that I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), don't have many places on the Internet to discuss the RSSB teachings and the RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, so I'm pleased to offer them this.

It's just that since I've been a happy atheist for so many years, seeing discussions of God, karma, divine regions of reality, the guru's miraculous powers, and such feels decidedly weird.

I find it difficult to believe that the true believers who comment on this blog actually consider that they have discovered the truth about ultimate religious reality that is hidden from the billions of other people in the world who believe otherwise.

After all, elsewhere on the Internet there are countless web sites, blogs, and discussion groups where believers in other faiths, mystical paths, and spiritual philosophies are talking in the same fashion about how fortunate it is that they know the truth about what supposedly lies beyond the physical.

Earlier this month I shared a post about what Ricky Gervais said in his most recent interview with Stephen Colbert. It bears repeating, because Gervais made so much sense.

GERVAIS: … Atheism is only rejecting the claim that there is a god. Atheism isn’t a belief system. So this is atheism in a nutshell. You say there’s a God. I say, “Can you prove that?” You say no. I say, “I don’t believe you then.” So you believe in one God, I assume?

COLBERT: Uhh…. in three persons, but go ahead.

GERVAIS: Okay. But there are about 3,000 to choose from… Basically, you deny one less God than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more.

So what are the chances that any religious believer is correct about what, if anything, exists in the realm of the supernatural? Very, very, very small.

First, something supernatural has to exist, and there's no demonstrable proof of that. Second, a particular religion (or religious person) has to have learned the truth about the supernatural realm that there's no proof of, and there's also no proof of that. 

But you wouldn't know this by listening to religious believers of all persuasions discussing the finer points of their chosen faith as if it was absolutely, positively, undeniably true. 

And that's just freaking strange. Of course, I've been there and done that, so I understand the appeal of considering that somehow, against all odds, the secrets of the universe have been revealed to a very special person, ME!

The fact that billions of other people around the world believe the same thing rarely enters the mind of religious believers. However, it sure enters my mind, which has been opened up now that I'm an atheist who doesn't feel special at all.

Malvinder Singh accuses RSSB guru of conspiring in financial fraud

Here's a more interesting story from the Indian Financial Press, as compared to the rather blah story I shared yesterday about the financial fraud saga involving the Singh brothers and their relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Below is a The Economic Times piece that echoes a point I made yesterday.

Investigators and courts in India appear to be doing their best to avoid taking a close look at the role Dhillon and his family may have played in conspiring to benefit from the money that was fraudulently siphoned from Religare, a company once controlled by Sunil Godhwani, the guru's personal financial advisor.

I could be wrong -- an ever-present possibility -- but it looks to me that if the RSSB guru pays back the money that he got (he's claiming he owes nothing; Malvinder Singh disagrees), then he won't face further investigation and possible charges.

This would be disappointing, both legally and morally. However, the justice system sometimes works in mysterious ways, and likely the Indian justice system is more mysterious than many systems.

I've boldfaced passages that refer to Dhillon.

NEW DELHI: Former Fortis HealthcareNSE 1.26 % promoter Malvinder Singh, arrested in a case related to alleged misappropriation of funds at Religare Finvest Ltd (RFL), told a Delhi court Tuesday he has paid back the money to the entities concerned. The submission was made before Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Gurmohina Kaur during hearing of arguments on the bail plea moved by Singh in the case lodged by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Delhi Police.

The court has put up the matter for further hearing on February 6.

Advocate Manu Sharma, appearing for Singh, further said that the probe agency “cherry picked” him because of his affiliation with the family of spiritual head of the Radha Soami Satsang Gurinder Singh Dhillon, who allegedly conspired with other co-accused in the case in carrying out financial fraud.

He added Singh, who is in judicial custody, claimed that he has paid back the alleged laundered money to 14 entities through which he had received it.

“The probe agency is not investigating the Dhillon family. Singh has paid the money back to 14 entities. The probe agency need to investigate why the money has not been paid back to Religare yet,” the counsel said.

“Also, the promoter does not have any direct shareholding with any of these entities. If these entities do not return the money to RFL, it is not his fault,” he said.

More of the same in Singh brothers/RSSB guru financial fraud case

There's not much noteworthy in yesterday's Business Today story about the latest development in the (seemingly) never-ending saga of the Singh brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder), their guru relative (Gurinder Singh Dhillon), and a supporting cast that includes the guru's personal financial advisor, Sunil Godhwani. 

The Supreme Court of India is once again telling the Singh brothers that they need to come up with the money to pay a $500 million settlement award to Daiichi Sankyo. And once again, Malvinder Singh is telling the court that he doesn't have the money, after which, once again, the court is saying that all those who owe money to a company once controlled by the Singh brothers need to repay the money.

Which may include Dhillon and his family, according to a previous order by the court. Or, it may not, since Dhillon has denied owing any money. Anyway, here's the copied Business Today story, which for some reason has yellow highlighting where links are included in the original online story. 

I've boldfaced two passages that I found interesting. The Supreme Court appears to be doing its best to not punish those involved in the purported financial fraud involving large amounts of money siphoned from the RHC Group once controlled by the Singh brothers. But if that money isn't repaid, perhaps punishment follows.

Hearing a case filed by Japanese firm Daiichi Sankyo, the Supreme Court on Monday asked former Fortis promoters Malvinder and Shivinder Singh to submit a plan to refund Rs 1,175 crore each by February 24.

Malvinder, through his lawyer senior advocate Dushyant Dave, told court he need more time to pay the amount. To which, the court asked him to issue notices to all those who owe money to RHC group.

The bench, headed by Justice Deepak Gupta, also granted two sessions of four hours each for Malvinder and Shivinder Singh to visit their lawyer's office and do the meetings. The Singh brothers are lodged in Tihar jail under judicial custody.

The bench also said they don't want to punish people if there is a scope for recovery and that every opportunity should be provided for recovery.

In the last hearing, the apex Court had held Malvinder and Shivinder Singh guilty of contempt of court for violating its order to not divert their stakes in Fortis Healthcare.

In March 2019, the Japanese firm had filed a contempt plea against the Singh brothers for disposing of their assets in violation of the court order. Daiichi Sankyo had alleged that the execution of the arbitrary award of Rs 3,500 crore was in jeopardy as the promoters disposed their controlling stakes in Fortis Group.

Daiichi Sankyo is locked in a legal battle to enforce a Rs 3,500 crore arbitration award against Singh Brothers, accusing them of concealing information after they sold Ranbaxy in 2008.

The apex court also asked Daiichi and Fortis Healthcare to reply to Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) plea on allowing Malaysia's IHH Healthcare Bhd open offer to take over the hospital chain. The court will hear the case on March 16.

Last month, market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) had filed special leave petition (SLP) in the Supreme Court to allow IHH Healthcare to proceed with an open offer for Fortis Healthcare, arguing that the Malaysian operator had completed the transaction before a court's decision freezing deal in December 2018.

The court's December 2018 decision came after Japanese drugmaker Daiichi Sankyo argued that certain transaction between Fortis Healthcare and IHH Healthcare violated the court's directions. It also alleged that the change in control of the hospital chain had been orchestrated by Singh brothers.

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

By Chitranjan Kumar

Investigation into Singh brothers and RSSB guru financial fraud saga continues

The Economic Times has a new story about the investigation into financial fraud involving the Singh brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder), Sunil Godhwani, Gurinder Singh Dhillon (guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas), and others.

I've boldfaced some passages for emphasis. Basically the story shows that authorities in India are still engaged in finding out in whose hands the illegal money transfers ended up, and where the money is now. So the financial fraud saga continues...

 

NEW DELHI: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) is in the process of approaching foreign jurisdictions, to get details of more people and entities that may have involved in laundering money linked to the alleged Religare fraud.

In its charge sheet that accused former Religare promoters Malvinder and Shivinder Singh of money laundering, the agency said it is in the “process of issuing letters rogatory (LRs) to foreign jurisdictions”.

The agency also told a local court that of the total Rs 2,036.69 crore of estimated proceeds of crime, investigation over Rs 300 crores has been completed. “Investigation in respect of identification of remaining proceeds of crime and accused that are involved in money laundering is in progress,” it said in the charge sheet, which ET has seen.

The matter came up for resumed hearing on Wednesday when copies of the charge sheet were supplied to the accused.

On account of the ongoing legal battle between Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, a copy of the charge sheet could not be supplied to RHC Holding, a company privately owned by the brothers which is also an accused in the charge sheet. This is because there was no legal representative to appear for RHC Holding.

Special public prosecutor for the ED, Nitesh Rana, told the court that the brothers, along with co-accused Sunil Godhwani and others, are “involved in process of acquisition, layering, possession, concealment, use and projection of proceeds of crime generated out of criminal activities”.

Singh brothers and Godhwani had denied any wrongdoing.

Elaborating on the alleged role of the two brothers, the charge sheet said, “Malvinder and Shivinder Mohan Singh incorporated and used multiple conduit companies for the purpose of siphoning off public funds from Religare Finvest Limited (RFL) by way of sanctioning and disbursal of loans under corporate loan book (CLB)”.

It said the conduit companies were associated with the Singh brothers. This is “clearly established on the basis that the directors of the said companies have accepted that they were relatives or associates of the promoters (Singh brothers). And that properties owned by the conduit companies were being utilised for the benefit of the promoters as also the fact that some of these companies were purchased by the promoters in 2017-18,” the charge sheet said.

It alleged that the funds “siphoned off” by the brothers and Godhwani through “sanctioning, evergreening, layering of CLB loans were ultimately utilised for repaying existing liabilities” of the company of Singh brothers “or the acquisition of properties for the benefit of Malvinder and Shivinder Mohan Singh”.

The agency said it may file a supplementary charge sheet if its investigation in India as well as abroad ascertains involvement of more individuals involved in laundering and parking of proceeds of crime.

Underlining the role of RHC Holding, the agency said the company acquired Rs 150 crore of proceeds of crime and “utilised the said amount in repayment of its existing liability towards RFL by projecting it as untainted”. It added: “RHC group entities have not only been used as conduit companies but in some cases are the ultimate beneficiary of the proceeds of crime.”

Elaborating on the alleged modus operandi, the agency said proceeds of crime “through a complex maze of interconnected transactions” have been layered and “integrated in the main stream economy for evergreening of old loans”. The proceeds were also used for other purposes and for the acquisition of property, it claimed.

ET was the first to report on January 22 that the Economic Offences Wing of the Delhi Police, in its separate charge sheet, had alleged that the Singh brothers had “diverted public money from group entity Religare Finvest to shell companies and used it to square off their personal liabilities”.

Executives at Religare Finvest, the group’s lending arm, had approved unsecured loans worth hundreds of crores to the shell companies within two hours of getting the proposals, even when these companies themselves had not sought the loans, the EOW said. The Singh brothers had joined the board of Religare Finvest in 2016 with the intention of diverting money to these 19 shell companies, the EOW alleged.

Fact gap in the Singh brothers and RSSB guru financial fraud saga

A few days ago I wrote about the latest turn of events in the fascinating drama of two once-billionaire brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder Singh), their guru relative (Gurinder Singh Dhillon), and the guru's right hand man (Sunil Godhwani). 

In that post, "Delhi Police financial fraud charges point to RSSB guru's involvement," I noted that there is a fact gap between the Singh brothers and Godhwani being charged with money laundering, and the apparent funneling of much, most, or all of that money into the pockets of Dhillon, his family and close associates.

So important questions remain to be answered.

Such as: (1) Are investigators in India going to reveal who ended up with the money diverted into loans to shell companies, who orchestrated this financial fraud, and what the purpose of the fraud was?

(2) Assuming Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family were the ultimate beneficiaries of much or all of this money, will Indian investigators have the political backing to delve into the Dhillon family's involvement in the illegal money transfers and hold them to account if they were active participants in the fraud?

Another way of looking at this admittedly confusing, complex case is to recognize that there are criminal and civil components to it. The Delhi Police charges address the current status of the criminal component.

And the High Court of Delhi has been addressing the civil component in the course of trying to figure out how the Singh brothers are going to be able to pay a $500 million settlement they owe to Daiichi, a Japanese company that bought their Ranbaxy pharmceutical firm.

In July 2019 I wrote about the Dhillon family's role in this part of the case in "Delhi High Court requires recovery of money from RSSB guru." I shared a Business Today story in that post. Here's an excerpt from that story.

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.

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

So we're left with the above-mentioned fact gap.

Malvinder, Shivinder, and Godhwani have been charged with money laundering. But Malvinder says that the laundered money, basically fraudulent loans, ended up with Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family.

Since the adage "follow the money" usually holds true in criminal financial conspiracies, loose ends will remain in this case until there's a definitive answer to who got the laundered money, why the laundering took place, and who organized the fraud.

There's a variety of ways to tie together what's currently known, or strongly suspected, in this case.

One of the best summaries was put together by Spence Tepper, a frequent commenter on this blog. Tepper appears to have modified his views to some extent, but I still consider what he wrote in July 2019 to be an excellent overview of the case, even though almost certainly it isn't a completely accurate description.

I shared Tepper's comment in a post called "Great overview of RSSB guru's financial fraud involvement." Here's the comment again. As noted in the post, I added some links and made a few corrections.

Hi Osho. You wrote, "I don’t think it’s a matter of 'guilty or not guilty' but more a matter of recovery of the money."

Logically that makes little sense nor does it reflect the High Court of Delhi order. The court determined responsibility, and therfore guilt, and on that basis moved guilt away from Malvinder and onto Gurinder and company.

The Singh brothers held the legal responsibility to pay the Daiichi FDA penalty against Ranbaxy. But the High Court transferred that to Gurinder and company in June.

Malvinder claimed that he and Shivinder had loaned money to Gurinder, his family and associates, amounting to more than enough to cover the penalty. At first the Supreme Court indicated that they didn't care about the Singh's other business dealings, and held them directly responsible for repayment.

But when Malvinder was unable to pay up he filed a criminal complaint with the EOW (Economic Offences Wing) of the Delhi Police pleading his case that Gurinder, his wife, sons and associates owed hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and interest and hadn't repaid for years. These were the monies he needed to pay the Daiichi penalty.

Malvinder went further to document his efforts, pleading repeatedly in writing with Gurinder to help, but with no response from Gurinder.

Even before Malvinder filed his complaint the SEBI and the Fortis board had conducted separate audits that showed fraudulent loans being siphoned through shell companies.

Business journals had conducted their own audits and found that Gurinder and his family were the recipients of nearly a billion dollars in loans through a variety of shell companies. And some of Gurinder's family were involved in the creation and maintenance of the frauds.

All the participants and recipients of the fraudulent loans are satsangis who pledged vows of loyalty to the Master, in this case Gurinder.

By June various additional detailed and indiependent audits had been conducted by the Serious Crimes Division of the Delhi police, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, and the new board at Religare (who filed their own complaint directly implicating the loan recipients and claiming this was all a big scheme involving several people who had knowingly participated in the construction and execution of several frauds).

Then in June, after much deliberation, the High Court of Delhi rendered a judgment that Gurinder, his family and associates, among others, were directly responsible for repayment of their delinquent loans, in full.

The High Court, essentially, verified what Malvinder claimed, and placed responsibility, and therefore culpability, directly onto Gurinder et al's shoulders. The High Court further froze Gurinder et al's assets as they were delinquent over several years in payment.

Guilt, culpability and responsibility have already been determined and payment ordered. For the funds Gurinder et al took, Malvinder is no longer responsible to repay that portion of the Daiichi penalty. The full responsibility is now directly upon Gurinder and company's shoulders, by judgment and order of the High Court of Delhi.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon

Delhi Police financial fraud charges point to RSSB guru's involvement

Below is a story in today's The Economic Times that appears to confirm previous reporting in the Indian financial press about the involvement of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), in financial fraud.

I've boldfaced the mentions of Dhillon and RSSB. 

The story restates what already was known. Money from Religare Finvest was diverted into shell companies, many or most of which were controlled by followers of RSSB. These were unsecured loans that reportedly went into the pockets of the Dhillon family. See two previous posts of mine on this subject.

RSSB guru identified as beneficiary of fraudulent funds
RSSB guru had better have a big bank balance

It's difficult to tell what exactly happened here, but the following Bloomberg graphic I've shared previously seems to reflect the basic money flows mentioned in today's The Economic Times story.

The Singh brothers (and Sunil Godhwani) used shell companies to extract money from Fortis and Religare and funnel it into the Singh brothers' private holding company, RHC Holding. Unsecured loans then were made to Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family, sometimes through other shell companies.

It's unclear why the money was never paid back.

There's been reporting that the Dhillon family invested the money they got into real estate deals that went bad. This would explain why the Singh brothers and Godhwani had to keep money circulating back and forth through shell companies to disguise the fact that money had gone out in unsecured loans that wasn't being paid back.

So important questions remain to be answered.

Such as: (1) Are investigators in India going to reveal who ended up with the money diverted into loans to shell companies, who orchestrated this financial fraud, and what the purpose of the fraud was?

(2) Assuming Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family were the ultimate beneficiaries of much or all of this money, will Indian investigators have the political backing to delve into the Dhillon family's involvement in the illegal money transfers and hold them to account if they were active participants in the fraud?

Here's the story in The Economic Times.

NEW DELHI: Religare EnterprisesNSE -2.10 %’ former promoters Malvinder and Shivinder Mohan Singh had diverted public money from group entity Religare Finvest to shell companies and used it to “square off their personal liabilities”, the Delhi Police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW) has said in its charge sheet against the brothers.

Executives at Religare Finvest, the group’s lending arm, had approved unsecured loans worth hundreds of crores to the shell companies within two hours of getting the proposals, even when these companies themselves had not sought the loans, the EOW said. The Singh brothers had joined the board of Religare Finvest in 2016 with the intention of diverting money to these 19 shell companies, it alleged.

The procedure adopted to peruse documents for approving loans was nothing but a “paper formality”, said the charge sheet filed last week in a local court, in a funds-misappropriation case filed by Religare Finvest. ET has seen the charge sheet.

Malvinder and Shivinder Singh had denied any wrongdoing on their part.

A “prominent feature” of the entire process was that these “shell/dummy companies” never made any request for loans, the charge sheet said.

It noted certain instances where the loan approvals were given almost immediately. On September 1, 2016, a loan of Rs 162 crore to Modland Wears Pvt Ltd was proposed at 3:14 pm and was approved at 4:36 pm — within 82 minutes. On the same day, another loan of Rs 165 crore to Artifice Property Pvt Ltd was approved in 103 minutes, it said.

The charge sheet alleged that after the Reserve Bank of India in 2014 redflagged abject lack of rigour deployed by Religare Finvest (RFL) in its corporate loan book, as opposed to strict scrutiny in SME loans, it resorted to “Google check”, as well Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction, Registrar of Companies, Cibil and KYC checks. “But no assessment of repayment capacity was done,” it said.

The agency said the only “precaution” it took was that the credit notes used to read “the corporate is known to the promoters of Religare and based on their comfort, we are proposing the deal”. The loans were cleared on "verbal instructions" of the promoters, it added.

Filing the charge sheets against the Singh brothers, former Religare chairman Sunil Godhwani and two others, the EOW said “despite being a listed company, no corporate governance norms were adhered with respect to the disbursal of loans”.

The EOW has questioned directors of the 19 shell/dummy companies named by it. Five of the directors told EOW that they were “namesake” directors and that they all were “followers of Radha Soami Satsang Beas and old acquaintance of late Parvinder Singh, father of Singh brothers”, the charge sheet said.

The “dummy” directors further claimed that they “signed the documents which were sent to their house through a messenger/employee of promoters at the year end and received salaries from the companies”, the EOW said. They also said none of them were signatories of the bank accounts of the companies.

According to the charge sheet, these directors claimed that all the 19 entities “were controlled and owned/operated by Malvinder and Shivinder Singh through their employees of RHC Holding Pvt Ltd (owned by the brothers) and its subsidiaries”, and that the companies were “not separate entities and were operating from the office of RHC Holding…”

“Malvinder and Shivinder used shell/ dummy entities along with the management of REL (Religare Enterprises) and RFL to divert the money from REL to their holding company, by adopting circuitous transaction to conceal the fake transactions and to make them appear genuine,” the EOW said.

During his questioning, Malvinder Singh told EOW that "Sunil Godhwani and his team at Religare managed and ran the affairs of RHC and its subsidiaries, decisions of money movement between REL, RFL, Babaji (Radha Soami Satsang chief Gurinder Singh) entities and RHC group entities".

Fastening entire responsibility on Godhwani and his team for "mismanagement" of RFL, Malvinder Singh told the EOW that "the management changes at REL in July 2016 were done at the direction and instructions of Babaji”.

Malvinder Singh has further alleged that "Religare and its subsidiaries owe money to RHC Holdings and not the other way around. Fern Healthcare, Modland (which are described as shell companies by the EOW) owe money to RHC Holdings and its subsidiaries and were fraudulently made part of the RHC Group without any diligence, valuation or any board approval. This was done by Shivinder Singh to shield Babaji and his family members to personally owe over Rs 1,000 crore to these entities," he has alleged.

Shivinder Singh, on the other hand, has denied the allegations stating that he took retirement from active life and went to Radha Soami Satsang Beas in 2016. He said he was completely unaware of the operations at REL and RFL.

Money laundering case leaves questions about Dhillon family involvement

It's difficult to know what to make of a development in the financial fraud saga involving the Singh brothers, Sunil Godhwani, and Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Godhwani was the guru's right-hand man and personal financial advisor.

An India Today story (see below) says that India's Enforcement Directorate has charged Shivinder and Malvinder Singh, plus Godhwani, with money laundering. But details are lacking as to how and why this occurred, and who the ultimate beneficiary was of the laundered funds.

Also, the story says that the amount of money in question is only Rs 150 crore, which I believe is about $20 million. Yet the total amount Religare Finvest Ltd. reportedly lost via fraudulently diverted funds was 2,397 crore, or over $300 million. So this seems to be an initial step by the Enforcement Directorate, not a final one. 

The company involved here, Star Artworks Pvt Ltd, was one of 21 entities mentioned in a March 2019 Business Today story that I cited in a blog post, "RSSB guru had better have a big bank balance."

I titled the post the way I did because it's been reported that the Dhillon family was the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars from companies once controlled by the Singh brothers and Godhwani, money that now is being required to be paid back by Indian courts.

A graphic I included in the blog post indicated that the Dhillon family got huge amounts of money via loans from RHC Holding, a holding company of Malvinder and Shivinder Singh. The address of Star Artworks Pvt Ltd. is the same as RHC Holding Pvt Ltd, which points to the tangled web of shell companies and financial transactions that authorities in India are trying to unravel.

Here's the January 10 India Today story.

The Enforcement Directorate Friday filed a charge sheet against former Fortis Healthcare promoters Shivinder Singh and his brother Malvinder before a Delhi court in a case related to alleged misappropriation of funds at Religare Finvest Ltd (RFL).

The final report, filed before Additional Sessions Judge Sandeep Yadav, also named former CMD of Religare Enterprises Ltd (REL) Sunil Godhwani (58) as an accused.

In the charge sheet, filed by ED's Special Public Prosecutor Nitesh Rana, the probe agency has accused all three of money laundering, punishable under sections 3 and 4 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

The court took cognisance of the charge sheet and issued production warrant against them for January 20. All the three accused are currently in judicial custody.

The ED also named RHC Holdings Pvt Ltd as an accused in its charge sheet.

It said the accused had acquired proceeds of crime to the tune of Rs 150 crore through Star Artworks Pvt Ltd, derived out of criminal activities and utilised the amount in repayment of its existing liability towards RFL by projecting it as untainted.

"Therefore, accused persons were involved in acquisition and utilization of proceeds of crime generated out of criminal activities and its projection as untainted property, thereby have committed the offence of money laundering as defined under sections of PMLA," said the charge sheet, filed through advocate A R Aditya.

The ED had alleged that both the brothers, along with others, transferred an amount of about Rs 1,000 crore to various persons from entities linked to the corporate loan book and finally, the money was siphoned off.

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

"They put RFL in a poor financial condition by disbursing loans to companies with no financial standing and controlled by them. The companies to which the loans were disbursed willfully defaulted in repayments and caused a loss to RFL to the tune of Rs 2,397 crore," the police had alleged.

RFL said in a press release that since the time the offence took place, the company has undergone a complete revamp of its Board of Directors.

"All efforts continue to be made to rebuild the business, mobilise fresh capital and correct the transgression and legacy issues of the past. The management and internal controls at the Group and all subsidiaries' level have also been revamped, bringing in much needed assurance to employees about a stable and action-oriented management," it said.

On being a Technicolor person in a black and white world

Recently someone sent me a message saying that it had been quite a while since I'd written about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the spiritual organization based in India that I was an active member of for 35 years.

This person wanted another RSSB post.

Well, though usually I write about what's on my mind (I have three blogs that represent different parts of my mind), and RSSB rarely makes an appearance in my psyche unless there's some news about the RSSB guru being reported in the Indian financial press, responsive blogger that I am, here's a RSSB-related post.

The theme -- Technicolor people in a black and white world -- popped into my head for a couple of reasons.

One is that when I've talked to journalists in India who want to learn about my history with RSSB and how I view the current guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, I try to convey to them the "magical thinking" that permeates ardent RSSB devotees and their gatherings, especially when the guru is present. 

Here's how I tried to describe that feeling in a 2005 post, "Bursting belief bubbles."

I used to believe in belief. It felt good to believe that my religious beliefs were better than other peoples’. I recall standing in line at a movie theatre, feeling exactly like someone standing in line at a movie theatre, when I remembered to do my guru-given mantra.

Instantly I thought to myself, “I’m special. I’m unique. I’ve got a spiritual practice known to only a few.” I stood straighter. I looked at the spiritually impoverished human beings around me with proudly compassionate eyes. “Ah, I have something they don’t. How fortunate I am not to be them.”

Now I pray, “God, whatever or whoever the hell you are, burst my belief bubbles and lead me not into self-righteousness. Blessed be reality.”

My believing now is centered around the notion of pressure. This isn’t something I believe in as much as I feel. I no longer like the feeling of being inflated more highly than the surrounding world. It takes too much effort to keep my ego-pump running all of the time.

Once I read on the Internet how members of my spiritual group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, considered themselves Technicolor people in a black and white world. That’s a telling and accurate image. It is true for virtually all types of religious people, though, not just a few.

That last line still rings true for me, but from my current perspective I'd enlarge it beyond religious people.

Sure, I still think religions encourage their followers to believe that they possess a certain vividness that those who belong to other religions lack. However, so do political parties, sports teams, colleges/universities, corporations, and so many other examples of how we humans collect ourselves into "tribes."

Religiosity really turns up distinctions, though, since true believers have so much at stake. Notably, life after death, heaven and hell, all that sort of stuff. 

I'd try to explain to the Indian journalists how devotees of the RSSB guru create an atmosphere of blind faith that makes it very difficult for ordinary reality to break through their thoroughly indoctrinated minds. I speak from experience, since I used to be one of those devotees.

Every little thing that happens in a gathering where the guru is present can take on an importance that seems ridiculous to those who don't share the RSSB belief system. OMG! The guru looked me in the eyes! OMG! Did you see how he smiled at that lady's question! Etc. Etc.

The thing is, though, that sort of We're so special mentality isn't founded in any sort of objective reality. My wife, who wasn't a RSSB initiate, attended a meeting in Palm Springs where she got to sit in a front row just a short distance from the guru. After the meeting was over, I asked her what she thought of Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

He just seemed like a regular person, she said. Which is true. For most people. But to those who are RSSB devotees, the guru is a hyper-Technicolor person in a black and white world. Otherwise, he's just an ordinary person, as I noted in "Did I see God in first class?"

I may have seen God in first class. The first class section of an Alaska Airlines flight from San Francisco to Palm Springs, to be exact. Or, maybe I didn’t.

In the early ‘90s I was traveling from Portland to attend a “bhandara," or spiritual gathering, of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) devotees in Palm Springs. After changing planes in San Francisco I found myself in a right side aisle seat in the coach row directly behind first class, idly watching other passengers board.

A middle-aged Indian gentleman caught my eye. Bearded, he was wearing a white turban and blue jeans. His first class seat was across the aisle and one row up from mine. Before sitting down he glanced around the rear of the plane and our eyes briefly met. Then he took his seat and I returned to perusing a magazine. Nothing special seemed to have happened.

But it had, to quite a few other people sitting near me. For they were Bay Area RSSB members who also were heading to Palm Springs for the bhandara where the satguru (true guru) was to speak. And that Indian gentleman sitting a few feet away from me was the satguru—Master Gurinder Singh.

I began to hear whispers. “That’s him.” “The master is sitting in first class.” “I don’t believe it.” I hadn’t recognized Gurinder Singh, even though I’d seen him before at a bhandara in Vancouver, B.C. Fervent RSSB devotees consider the satguru to be God in human form, much as Jesus is regarded by devout Christians.

The difference being, Jesus is dead and Gurinder Singh was sitting alive and well in an Alaska Airlines first class seat. Imagine that a Christian gets on a plane and sees Jesus seated a few rows ahead of him and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the atmosphere on the flight to Palm Springs—among the RSSB disciples, at least.

I got mildly caught up in the excitement. However, even back then, when I was much more involved—psychologically and otherwise—with RSSB than I am now, I didn’t consider that seeing the satguru was a big deal. And until I made the connection between “Indian man wearing a turban” and “Master Gurinder Singh,” seeing him wasn’t even a small deal.

For I didn’t feel a hint of anything special until the disciples around me started up the “It’s him!” whispering campaign. Wouldn’t you think that if a person truly is God in human form, such would be obvious? Not just to those who already believe in the person’s divinity, but to everyone—believer and unbeliever alike. Jesus, of course, suffered the same lack of recognition. If his purported godliness had been transparently apparent, impossible to deny, by the time he died Jesus would have had a lot more than a handful of followers.

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.

Yes, I've changed my mind about spirituality. That's a good thing.

Today a commenter on one of my blog posts said something astoundingly obvious -- that what I write about now is different from what I wrote about five or ten years ago.

Well, duh...

I'm constantly changing, as are we all. I learn, grow, evolve, change my mind, look upon things differently. 

Since I've published a book that consists of Church of the Churchless posts from the early years of this blog, 2004 to 2006, I'm well aware of how my approach to spirituality has changed since then.

If you read Break Free of Dogma, and naturally everybody should, you'll see that I've added a short introduction to each post that talks about how I look now at what I wrote back then.

That's because my own journey of breaking free of religious dogma was a gradual affair.

I can liken it to dismantling a Belief House that was built up over my 35 years of being an active member of a India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

It took me quite a while to figure out what parts of that Belief House still appealed to me, and what parts needed to be demolished because they didn't fit with my current understanding of reality.

Earlier this year I wrote "Changing your mind is a superpower. Use it." Here's excerpts.

I have a superpower. But unlike those with superpowers who inhabit the pages of comic books and the screens of movie theaters, my astounding ability is available to everyone.

It's called changing your mind. 

I'm sure you've used it  -- many times. After all, we change our minds about countless things during the course of our lives. For example, I've changed my mind about my...

Politics (Used to be conservative, now I'm a liberal).
Cars (I've gone from a 57' VW bug to a 2017 VW GTI, with many other makes in between). 
Marriage (Got divorced, then remarried).
Profession (Earned a master's in social work, then went into health planning/research).
Eating (Loved meat until I became a vegetarian in 1970).
Residence (Grew up in the country, then lived in cities, now back in the country again).
Religion (Was Catholic for a while as a child, then a believer in an Eastern religion, and now an atheist).

So how is changing your mind a superpower? After all, everybody does this, all the time. True, but since we're so used to changing our minds, it's easy to overlook how marvelous this ability is.

First, to change your mind you need to have one.

Rocks don't have minds. Nor do stars. Living beings, though, have various sorts of minds. We humans have a powerful one. Other primates, ditto, though to a lesser degree. Plants have some sort of cognizance, but probably not a mind. Computers are very adept at certain tasks, yet so far lack what we would call a "mind."

Thus people are able to learn, adapt, modify our thinking, feeling, intuition, and such.

Because very little of human behavior is controlled by instinct, we have the capacity to transmit knowledge between people and across generations. We can read Plato and understand a great mind that lived thousands of years ago, thereby altering our own.

One of the best things about being able to change our mind is how good it feels, and how freeing it is. 

...I'm not saying that change is always welcome, or even tolerable.

That isn't what I mean by changing your mind being a superpower. Sure, it is possible to reduce anxiety, fear, suffering, and such by altering one's thoughts and feelings, but I'm not aware of anybody who can remain completely unmoved by severe pain, disappointment, or loss. 

What is possible, though, is altering our psyche to embrace a new reality, even though it may be unwelcome. That's a superpower in and of itself -- the ability to say "This is...," no matter what those three dots stand for.

Here's some examples of what I mean.

On this blog I've been writing quite a bit about the legal, financial, and ethical troubles involving the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon. I was a member of RSSB for 35 years, so I like to use this organization as an example of how religions can be wrong, and do wrong, since I'm so familiar with it. 

(If I'd remained a Catholic for 35 years, then became an atheist, likely I'd be using Catholicism as an example of bad religion.)

Fairly frequently commenters on my blog posts about the Dhillon family's alleged criminality will say something like, "Brian, when it turns out that the guru did nothing wrong, you're going to be unable to accept this." 

That really isn't true. 

Because I'm adept at changing my mind, if the Indian legal system ends up exonerating Gurinder Singh Dhillon, I'll accept that reality with very little trouble. In the same fashion, back in November 2016 it took a few days for me to fully accept that Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States.

But it didn't take long for my mind to adjust to a new reality.

Now I'm hoping Trump will be a one-term president. If that doesn't happen, and he is re-elected, I'll be disappointed. However, I won't deny that this happened. (I do worry, though, that Trump won't be able to accept the reality of a 2020 defeat.)

I'll end by noting that even though I'm used to many varieties of religious craziness after 15 years of regularly writing here on the Church of the Churchless, it still surprises me when a commenter expresses extreme surprise at how I could have changed my mind about the validity of the RSSB teachings after being a member of the organization for such a long time.

Often I'll ask them how many things they have changed their mind about during their lifetime. Have you stuck with the same job, same car, same residence, same friends, same political views? Almost certainly not.

There's something about religion that encourages a rigidity of mind that isn't nearly as evident in other areas of life. Members of some religions, like Mormonism or Scientology, will shun people who leave the religion. Yet if someone changes their mind in a way that leads them to join the religion, that's not only fine, it's marvelous. 

For many fundamentalists, mind-changing is a one-way street. It's great if you convert to their religion, yet horrible if you deconvert.

Strange? Yes.

But since just about every religion believes that it, and it alone, is privy to the eternal ultimate truth of the cosmos, this encourages true believers to denigrate anyone who embraces that religion, then chooses to leave it. I guess changing one's mind makes those fundamentalists fearful that their chosen faith really isn't true.

Which, almost certainly, it isn't.

I feel good about having changed my mind to realize this. It's much more pleasurable to accept reality as it is, or at least as it appears, than to cling to a rigid way of thinking that no longer makes sense to me.

Indian Express story describes paradox of the RSSB guru

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the RSSB guru has broken an initiate's heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gurinder Singh Dhillon

Great comment about RSSB truth-telling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll comment on this development following the story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The court will now hear further arguments on Wednesday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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