Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB all or nothing culture

Below is another in a series of guest blog posts from Anon, an ex-RSSB initiate. RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years, which explains my interest in sharing criticisms of the faith that I also found lacking. What Anon describes about the demands put upon RSSB initiates seems particularly true for Indian members of the organization, whether or not they live in India. The pressure to be viewed as an exemplary RSSB member seems greater when a person's culture and family connections encourages this.…
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Posted inBooks Free will Reason

I’m enjoying The Daily Stoic, but can’t buy into the entire philosophy

Recently Bill Maher had Ryan Holiday on his Real Time show to talk about his book, The Daily Stoic, and Stoicism in general. Maher said that Stoicism was trendy now, so that made me think the book was recently published. Not so. It was published in 2016. Maybe it is Holiday's podcast that has generated the current attention. Regardless, I ordered the book and have been reading ten days worth every morning, since there's no way I want to read a single page for 366 days. (February has 29 pages, to cover leap year.) I'm fairly familiar with Stoic philosophy,…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, is a misogynist who insults women

It's a pleasure to share a guest blog post critical of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) from a different person than Anon, who has written quite a few guest blog posts that I've shared here on the Church of the Churchless. Below you can read this person's description of how the RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon (GSD), treats women in an insulting and misogynistic way. After the message, I'll share links to blog posts I've written that point in the same direction: the RSSB guru is a misogynist who insults women. Keep in mind that according to the RSSB teachings,…
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Posted inBooks Karma Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Seeing a video of a woman reading from Life is Fair got me thinking about how I’ve changed since I wrote those words

First time for everything, since I'm pretty sure I never saw a video of someone reading from one of my books until a few days ago, when someone emailed me a link to an Instagram post of a woman reading from the book I wrote in the 1990s, Life is Fair. The book was published in 1999 by Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an Indian religious organization I belonged to for 35 years. It's still being sold by RSSB, with this description. The mystics tell us that the law of cause and effect is the universal principle of justice that holds…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB recruitment triggers

Below is another in a series of guest blog posts from Anon, an ex-RSSB initiate. RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years, which explains my interest in sharing criticisms of the faith that I also found lacking. Well, based on what you'll read below, the other posts Anon has shared, what many other RSSB initiates have told me since I started this blog in 2004, and my own experience with RSSB, there's good reason to say that RSSB isn't so much a faith, as…
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Posted inArtificial intelligence

Yuval Noah Harari video a must-watch for anyone concerned about the future of AI

Over on my Salem Political Snark blog yesterday, I wrote "If you care about the future of AI, watch this astonishing video of a Yuval Noah Harari interview." I began that post with: Today a friend emailed me a link to a You Tube video where Yuval Noah Harari talks about AI in an amazing fashion that only a historian with his breadth of knowledge about how the past of humanity intersects with the future of artificial intelligence could pull off. This graphic provides an overview. The video is well worth watching. I found Harari mesmerizing. He's one of the…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Things I don’t miss about RSSB

Below is another in a series of guest blog posts from Anon, an ex-RSSB initiate. RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years, which explains my interest in sharing criticisms of the faith that I also found lacking. Things I don't miss about RSSB Initially when I joined RSSB it was all "light and love" but things changed. I did end up running for the door and I could never seem to get out. It reminds me of that song "Hotel California" by The Eagles.…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Life is mostly lived in the satisfactory middle, despite all the extreme talk about heaven and hell

Yesterday I wrote a post for my Salem Political Snark blog, "There's a middle way on AI and data centers between anything goes and everything stops." I noted that while I'm not a Buddhist, the general notion of the Middle Way appeals to me, since it applies to a lot more than the traditional moderate position between asceticism and sensual indulgence. In searching for an image to use in the post, I found this, which came from an interesting substack post by Daniel Jeffries, "The Middle Path for AI." That got me to thinking about the bell curve (or normal…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB manipulation tactics and culture

Below is another in a series of guest blog posts from Anon, an ex-RSSB initiate. RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years, which explains my interest in sharing criticisms of the faith that I also found lacking. Anon had sent me "RSSB manipulation tactics" and "RSSB culture" as separate guest blog posts. But they seemed fairly closely related, so I decided to combine them. RSSB manipulation tactics Lovebombing: Showering you with praise, acceptance, attention, validation, warmth at first in order to win you over,…
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Posted inPolitics Religions

Groupthink is a bad thing, whether in religion, politics, or elsewhere

We all want to belong. Isolation is scary. So most of us seek out groups where we have some sort of common bond. It could be a religion, a political persuasion, or a business association. Humans are social beings. We like to socialize with people who think like us. That's a good thing.  Where belonging to a group goes astray is the well-known phenomenon of groupthink. Wikipedia says: Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness,…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB: Confirmation Bias Loop

Below is another in a series of guest blog posts from Anon, an ex-RSSB initiate. RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years, which explains my interest in sharing criticisms of the faith that I also found lacking. Anon makes some perceptive points about RSSB. Based on my experience, RSSB is like other religions in that after someone has embraced it for a while, they absorb the culture of RSSB without realizing how different it is from normal non-religious everyday life. Some RSSB members are…
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Posted inScience

Good summary of The Blind Spot book in the Afterword

After I've read a lengthy complex book, struggling to understand the ideas expressed in it, fairly often I'll reach a concluding chapter where the author summarizes their book in a concise readable fashion -- causing me to feel, Geez, maybe I should have saved myself a lot of time and just read that conclusion. I had a similar feeling when I came to the Afterword of  The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson. Here's how it starts out and ends, providing a good summary of the core notions in the…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB Bingo

Below is another in a series of guest blog posts from Anon, an ex-RSSB initiate. RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years, which explains my interest in sharing criticisms of the faith that I also found lacking. I used to give frequent talks at RSSB meetings (satsangs). Having an iconoclastic slant even when I was an active member of RSSB, I'd do my best to keep people awake during my talk, even though sometimes this was a losing battle. Humor, quotes from non-RSSB sources,…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

A moving message to me that I found in a strange way

My wife and I are having our carpets replaced next week. That means getting everything off of our existing carpets. Today I was working away in the room where I keep many of my books and most of my files. After taking all of the files out of a cabinet that includes correspondence I want to keep, I saw a single sheet of paper lying on the rug where hanging folders used to be. It must have fallen out of a manila folder and sat there unnoticed for quite a while. I'd penned in a date on the lower right…
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Posted inConsciousness

The hard problem of consciousness may actually be easy

Way back in January 2007, when this blog was just a few years old, I wrote "Digging into the hard problem of consciousness." In that post I quoted Steven Pinker about what the hard problem consists of. It: Is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one’s head—why there is first-person, subjective experience….The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. Ah... or even…
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Posted inAwareness Reality Universe

The cosmos and us are intertwined in a strange loop

I've been a fan of "strange loop" ever since I read Douglas Hofstadter's book, I Am a Strange Loop. Which I've written at least five blog posts about. I've come across another mention of strange loop in The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson. While Hofstadter's conception is pretty darn complicated, so not amenable to a brief description, The Blind Spot describes it well in a single paragraph. Life-world means "the world we're able to perceive, investigate, and act in." You may want to say that the universe -- the…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB: Meditation is just inner strength and calm

It's been a couple of months, but they're back! Below is another in a series of guest blog posts from Anon, an ex-RSSB initiate. RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years, which explains my interest in sharing criticisms of the faith that I also found lacking. RSSB teachings since 1890 speak about meditation (through books, gurus, sermons, satsangs). RSSB meditation is the way to burn your karmas, the way to escape reincarnation and future rebirths, the path to enlightenment, requirement for salvation, way to…
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Posted inConsciousness

Don’t trust what you think you know about awareness

This is a truism, but frequently we forgot how true it is: We don't know what we don't know. This is much different from the less problematic condition of knowing what we don't know. I know that I don't know Japanese, aside from a few words. I know that I don't know any math beyond calculus, and very little of that. I know that I don't know how to ride a snowboard. I'm confident in stating these sorts of knowledge about my non-knowledge because they're so obvious to me. But there's plenty of things that I don't know that I…
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Posted inBuddhism

Dalai Lama’s brand of Buddhism believes in some really weird stuff

It was an eye-opener for me. Or mind-opener. A story in TIME magazine about what will happen after the Dalai Lama dies, how he became the Dalai Lama, and other details about his brand of Buddhism. I've had the impression that the Dalai Lama was a scientifically oriented person who didn't buy into the supernatural side of Buddhism. But I readily admit that this was based on my fairly cursory knowledge of books and talks by the Dalai Lama aimed at Western audiences. The TIME story by Charlie Campbell seemed like it was written by a devotee of Tibetan Buddhism.…
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Posted inArtificial intelligence Consciousness

AI is acting more like an organism and less like a machine. So what’s special about us humans?

I'm fascinated by AI. It seems increasingly clear that the distinction between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence is becoming increasingly blurry. As the two kinds of intelligence become more similar, the supposedly unique human mind is going to appear much less special. In their book,  The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson speak about the difference between an organism and a machine. In general terms, a machine is a device consisting of an assembly of components that operate in a coordinated way, according to a prescribed sequence so as to produce…
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