Posted inIndia Radha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB and izzat – “honor culture”

Here's another interesting guest post about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) from the anonymous person who has shared other messages with me via the Contact form on this blog. Since they don't use an actual email address on the form, I want to say in this fashion that I apologize if any previous messages have been sent to me that I've seemingly ignored. Actually, I never received them, since I didn't realize until recently that the Contact form -- which worked initially when I moved this blog to the WordPress platform after my previous blogging service went out of business…
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Posted inIndia Spiritual practice/meditation

Spiritual sickness arises from meditating too assiduously. Or viewing India as a promised land.

Most people view spirituality and meditation as a good thing. Often, it is. But almost always, too much of a good thing can become a bad thing. Too much eating leads to obesity. Too much exercising leads to muscle/joint problems. Likewise, too much meditating, or meditating in the wrong way, can lead to ill effects. That's one of the messages in the "Spiritual Sickness" chapter in Scott Carney's book, The Enlightenment Trap: Obsession, Madness and Death on Diamond Mountain. I'd never heard of lung, the meditator's disease, until I read this passage in that chapter. In 2002, she recited mantras…
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Posted inIndia Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Flooding along India’s Beas River likely made worse by Radha Soami Satsang Beas

A few days ago I got a message, shared below, from someone about flooding caused by a religious organization. The Dera, in India's Punjab, is the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious group that I was an active member of for 35 years, and have written about quite a bit on this blog. Gurinder Singh Dhillon has been the RSSB guru since 1990 and now is sharing guru duties with another man, to my understanding. Hi Mr Hines, Greetings. As you know Punjab in India is devastated by floods. Though Dera chief Mr Dhillon is trying to…
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Posted inIndia Mindfulness

How Amit Sood escaped his Asian Indian spiritual traditions

Once in a while I enjoy picking up Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, by Amit Sood, M.D. to remind myself why I liked the book so much when I first read it in 2019. Here's the blog posts I wrote about Sood's book back then. Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century -- my new favorite bookDalai Lama isn't big on single-pointed attentionDon't look within for inner peace. Look without. This morning I re-read the "Guilty and Back" chapter where Sood describes how the traditions he grew up with in India held him back from coming up with the modern…
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Posted inBuddhism India Religions

Classical Indian philosophy makes little sense to me

Well, I gave it a try. Today Google News, in its Picks For You section, presented me with a link to an Aeon article, "By the light of brahman: Ideas from classical Indian philosophy help illuminate the enigmas of selfhood, consciousness and the nature of reality." I decided to read the article, albeit quickly, because I hoped it would live up to the title by illuminating those enigmas. I did learn something: that classical Indian philosophy makes little sense to me. Of course, since this philosophy is the foundation of Hinduism, it isn't surprising that atheist me would find little…
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Posted inIndia

Blind faith is dangerous: 120 devotees of India “godman” killed in stampede

India has a well-deserved reputation for being a hotbed of religious fervor. I'd call that fanaticism, but I'm trying to be fair to India, since that country also is responsible for some of the most sophisticated faiths in the world. But when I heard about an estimated 120 devotees dying in a stampede after a popular Hindu preacher, Narayan Sakar Hari, had finished his talk ("satsang"), it was the negative side of religiosity that struck my atheist sensibility. Sure, the story in our local newspaper said: About 250,000 people gathered for Tuesday’s event in the Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh…
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Posted inFree will India Taoism/Tai Chi

Is romantic love a product of Western culture?

I wasn't expecting to find the "Love and Sexuality" chapter in Paul Breer's book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will, to be very interesting. After all, he'd already made his arguments for why free will is an illusion, along with describing the benefits of giving up the illusion. But his observations about how romantic love is largely a product of Western culture, and is at odds with Eastern philosophy, were thought-provoking. I'm not sure what to make of them, which is why the title of this blog post ends with a question mark. What do you think? Here's…
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Posted inIndia

Caste survey in India makes me wonder why castes still exist

Here in the United States we have a lengthy history of discriminating against people based on the color of their skin: Blacks have fared much worse than Whites.  But this sort of discrimination is easy to understand. Genetics explains the discrimination.  I find it much more difficult to fathom why caste is still ever-present in India. I realize that caste is based on the Hindu religion. However, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and other faiths are members of Indian castes. This seems bizarre to me. A story in the Washington Post got me thinking about this: "A caste survey in India could…
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Posted inBooks India

Purity vs. pollution is a bizarre aspect of caste

Since I'm reading, and enjoying, Isabel Wilkerson's great book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, I was especially interested to read a recent newspaper story about Seattle becoming the first city in the United States to ban caste discrimination. Caste, in Wilkerson's view, is at the heart of American racism, Nazi Germany's horrors against Jews, and naturally India's longstanding caste divisions. I noted in a previous post how Wilkerson discovered that even currently among Indian scholars studying caste, she was able to tell who was upper caste and who was lower caste by the way they carried themselves and how…
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Posted inBooks India

Caste is a powerful way of looking at prejudice in both India and America

Recently TIME magazine had a cover story about what's wrong with the United States (a big subject!) that featured a lengthy essay by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning Black author and university instructor. I was blown away by her emphasis on caste being at the core of our nation's social problems, rather than the more familiar racism. Wilkerson talked about her 2020 book, "Caste: The Origin of our Discontents," which focuses on caste in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany. Somehow I hadn't heard about that book until now. But I made up for that oversight by immediately…
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Posted inIndia Religions

India’s 1947 partition shows destructiveness of religion

My previous blog post was about Indian Prime Minister Modi's involvement in the Gujarat massacre of 2002, where about 1,000 people (mostly Muslims, I assume) were killed by Hindu nationalists. But that death toll is nothing compared to what happened after the British partitioned India into a Muslim territory and non-Muslim territory in 1947.  I don't know a lot about the Indian Partition. However, I learned something about it in an article in the January 2 & 9 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine article is called "Blood Lines: Seventy-five years after Indian Partition, have we learned how to…
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Posted inIndia Politics

India’s Modi doesn’t want people to see BBC documentary critical of him

Politicians are much the same the world over. They hate criticism. But in countries with robust freedom of speech and a free press, like the United States, politicians find it difficult to shut down criticism of them. Not so in India, where Prime Minister Modi and his allies are working hard to keep people from seeing a BBC documentary, "India: the Modi Question." TWITTER AND YOUTUBE censored a report critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in coordination with the government of India, according to a top Indian official. Officials called for the Big Tech companies to take action against…
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Posted inIndia

Hindu nationalism is affecting Bollywood filmmaking

Nationalism is bad enough, since most people love their country, and it makes little or no sense to claim "our nation is the best." But when it is paired with religious dogmatism, the result is doubly dangerous. The October 17, 2022 issue of The New Yorker has a really interesting story, "When the Hindu Right Came for Bollywood." Here's a PDF file if you have trouble with that link. (I'm a subscriber.)Download When the Hindu Right Came for Bollywood | The New Yorker It's unfortunate that India has become so polarized -- the fate of many nations, including the United…
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Posted inCoronavirus India

India’s worsening Covid crisis partly due to religion

Since for 35 years I was a member of a religious organization headquartered in India, I have a special interest in how that country has been doing during the Covid pandemic. Recently I've been seeing dire stories about rapidly increasing Covid cases and deaths in India.  The reasons for the deteriorating situation are complex, but a big part of the blame seems to be related to factors that have been evident here in the United States, especially during the time Trump was president. Namely, poor leadership from those in charge of the country; declaring victory over Covid prematurely; allowing large…
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Posted inCoronavirus India

A foreigner’s scary tale of being checked for COVID-19 in India

Here's a description someone emailed to me yesterday about what happened after they wanted to be checked out in India for possibly having COVID-19, the dreaded coronavirus. Hopefully this doesn't describe a typical medical experience in India. If it does, India is in deep trouble as it fights the coronavirus (currently the country is in the midst of a three-week stay at home lockdown).  If you aren't aware what paan is, check out the Wikipedia page about this commonly chewed substance in India. I was in India recently. Just got back a little over a week ago. Had a great…
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Posted inCoronavirus India

Be strong, India. Your 3-week coronavirus lockdown is a wise decision.

I'm no fan of Prime Minister Modi, because he reminds me of President Trump in some disturbing ways. But his decision to institute a strict lockdown of everybody in India for three weeks is the right thing to do -- even though this is going to create a lot of hardship.  A New York Times story, "Modi Orders 3-Week Total Lockdown for all 1.3 Billion Indians," describes why the lockdown is needed. NEW DELHI — India’s prime minister ordered all 1.3 billion people in the country to stay inside their homes for three weeks starting Wednesday — the biggest and…
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Posted inIndia

John Oliver shows how bad India’s Narendra Modi is

I'm not a fan of political leaders who base their policies on religious fundamentalism. Since the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, is doing just that, I enjoyed John Oliver's humorous takedown of Modi on last weekend's "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver."  Here it is, for your own enjoyment.  
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Posted inIndia

New Yorker story about Modi’s India is disturbing reading

Having been an active member of an India-based spiritual organization for 35 years, I have a fondness for that country. (Including its food!)  I've spent a lot of time with Indian people. I've visited India twice. Heck, I even volunteered to write a book about the karmic rationale for vegetarianism, Life is Fair, which is still being sold by the group I used to belong to, Radha Soami Satsang Beas. But I've paid much more attention to Indian spiritual philosophies than to Indian politics. Sure, I'm aware that Narenda Modi became the Prime Minister of India, and that he's a…
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Posted inIndia Politics

Nationalism is bad. Religious nationalism is worse.

I live in the United States. Misguided religious people call it a Christian nation. They're wrong. Likewise, misguided religious people in India call it a Hindu nation. They're also wrong. I got to thinking about religious nationalism after reading the first part of Arjun Sethi's testimony regarding Jammu, Kashmir, and minority rights in India. Maybe Sethi is exaggerating how bad things are getting in India, but even if what he says is only partly true, that's still really disturbing. Here's an excerpt from what Sethi wrote. In 1947, India created a constitutional republic based on the principles of secularism and…
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Posted inIndia Religions

Religious delusion is alive and well in India, as elsewhere

Here's a great example of how closed-minded religious believers are able to deny reality, an Economic Times story about how a spiritual leader is still trusted by his followers even after being convicted of rape and murder.  This is how the story starts out. SIRSA: Nothing has changed over the last two years for Baljeet Insaan. Her devotion to “pita ji” remains intact. She says prison bars cannot contain his healing effect. After all, she says, he cured her of cancer 20 years ago. There are many like Baljeet who swear by Dera Sacha Sauda sect chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim…
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