March 27, 2023 • 26 mins
Educator and author Simran Jeet Singh is Sikh. Most of his fellow Americans have no idea what Sikhism is - causing some to treat Simran with suspicion and hostility. But one of the key teachings of his religion is that all things and all people are connected - something that offers Simran comfort and hope in even the darkest moments.
In the first of a two-part show, Dr Laurie Santos talks to Simran about his book - The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life - and finds that the centuries-old traditions of Sikhism map surprisingly well over the latest happiness science.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. When people see me on the street, I often
wonder what they think about me. I mean, I know
sometimes what they think, because they'll tell me. Simrn Jet
Singh is an educator and best selling author, but it's
not his work that prompts some strangers to interact with
him in public. They see my turban and my beard
(00:35):
and my brown skin, and the reaction to Simren's physical
appearance is often very dumb and very racist. The standard,
especially at this point in my life, is terrorist isis
Taliban al Qaida. Simmern's beard and turban are outward signs
of his faith, Simmern's sick and as such, as part
of a huge global community. Sickism is estimated to be
(00:56):
the fifth largest religion, with tens of millions of followers,
both in South Asia, where it was first developed five
hundred years ago, and now in almost every corner of
the world. Yet, particularly in America, only a tiny minority
of people have any idea about six or their beliefs,
and in the absence of any real knowledge about Sikhisms, teachings,
and traditions, Simmerens has, many people just reach for stereotypes
(01:18):
or lazy assumptions. People will see that I'm visibly religious,
and they'll assume that I'm misogynistic or homophobic or close minded, right,
like all these other assumptions we have about people who
are quote unquote hardcore about religion, And I get it.
I mean, I mean, to be honest, I find myself
struggling with the same biases about other people who are
(01:39):
visibly religious. So it's kind of weird to realize that
the same things that bother me about what people assume
about me, like, I have those same prejudices inside of
me too, so I try and notice them whenever they happen.
But yet it is strange to walk around and know
that constantly I'm being judged even though people don't even
know me. So over the next two episodes, we're going
to get to know Simren, to find out who he
(02:01):
is and what he's about, and along the way, we'll
hear the important things that Sickism has had to say
about happiness over the centuries. In these shows, Simren will
introduce us to the concepts that are key to his faith,
things like kindness, gratitude, and radical connectedness. But we'll also
explore an idea that underpins all the happiness science. We
discuss on this podcast that merely knowing about this stuff
(02:21):
doesn't help unless you put it into practice each and
every chance you get. So welcome back as we explore
sick teachings on happiness lessons of the Ancients with me
doctor Laurie Santos. There the first headphones, Nah, big moment
(02:41):
for me. I just got him last week. Large hair
and turbans like headphones now are like you know, it's
like I beat by Drake came out and I was like, man,
I really want to be cool, but so okay, let
me plug these in. As well as being Executive director
for the Aspen Institute's Religion and Society program, Simmerin Jeet
Singh is also the author of The Light We Give,
(03:02):
How Sick Wisdom Can Transform Your Life. It's a book
that really opened my eyes to so many aspects of
sickism that had previously passed me by. The Light We
Give isn't a book about theology. It's an honest and
really insightful memoir packed with teachings from the gurus who
established and developed the sick religion centuries ago, the same
ones that Simren honors and observes today. In modern day America.
(03:24):
Reading the book, I was struck by how relevant and
relatable Sikhism is to all the happiness challenges we face today,
but also by the fact that Simmeren's religion is a
total mystery to many of his fellow Americans. It's such
a bizarre feeling to realize I am a highly visible minority,
and in this country we are a minority. But in
this world there is a big population of sex who
(03:46):
have made all kinds of contributions to global communities, who
live all over the world, not just in the homeland
of Punjab and South Asia, but I mean scattered all
across the world as a diaspora. And so in my
heart and in my head, I know we're not a
tiny community. But in other people's perceptions are like, what
are you like, where do you come from? I know
(04:07):
nothing about you? And so for the most part, that's
fine in a lot of cases, right, Like we can
get by not knowing everything about everyone around us. But
when that ignorance meets bias or meets stereotype, it can
be really dangerous. So talk a little bit about Sikhism.
Give me the kind of introduction to this religion for
folks who haven't heard much about it. If I had
to tell you one thing about what it means to
(04:29):
be a sick, I'd start with my principles, because that,
to me is like what keeps me within this tradition,
what I value about it most, and that is, I think,
in some ways a really simple framework for looking at life,
but also something that's really practical and transformative, at least
for me. And so the place to begin in sick
philosophy is with the first term ongar. It refers to
(04:50):
the oneness of all creation, of all humanity, and it's
the basis of so much of what we believe and
how we try to live, our commitment to non discrimination,
for example, on the basis of anything right, gender, sexual orientation, religion,
I mean everyone, the way we talk about it, everyone
has the same light within them, and so we have
(05:11):
no place to judge them. I mean, it's it's a
really great protection in a society where we're constantly falling
into drafts of hierarchy and supremacy. So that's one, and
then the idea from there is if you can really
learn to feel the interconnection within the world, then that
engender is a feeling of love and that's the promise
(05:32):
of spirituality at large, not just of sickism. That you know,
the height of human experience is this feeling of love,
and you can have that at every moment in your
life through this broader feeling of interconnection. That to me
is the second building block of sick teachings. And then
the third is that when you feel connected and when
you feel love, then your natural impulse is to show
(05:53):
up for the people around you, especially when they're suffering,
and so service and justice become a really cool part
of how we understand ourselves, but also what it means
to be spiritual, what it means to be a good person.
It's not just about cultivating something inside of you, it's
it's about letting that blossom and then extend out words
to the people around you so that you care for
them in the way that you might care for yourself,
(06:15):
with an understanding that it's all a shared sense of reality.
At the starting point in psych philosophy is we're all
in this together. This is one of the reasons I
was so excited to talk with you for this podcast, right,
is that if we look at sick philosophy generally attends
to map on a lot to a lot of the
principles that we see in the modern happiness science. But
I think it's a philosophy that's especially useful now, and
(06:36):
especially useful for someone who has a marginalized identity, because
you're constantly facing these threats that kind of challenge this
sense of shared connectedness. Reading your book, I was really
struck by kind of how some of those moments of
feeling discriminated against kind of took a fever pitch in
your life around nine to eleven, you know, So talk
to me a little bit about the story of what
nine to eleven was like for you. You know, how
old were you and sort of what happened to your family. Then. Yeah,
(06:59):
So I was eighteen years old in two thousand and one.
I was a senior in high school. I was living
in South Texas. I went to a big public school.
My brother and I were some of the only kids
who wore turbans in all of South Texas. And I
remember we heard the rumors, the whispers that an attack
had happened. We ran to my teachers classroom is Strong,
(07:21):
our history teacher who we were all close to, and
while just watched on television, we watched the towers come down,
and nobody said anything. Very quiet. After about half an hour,
one of the anchors announced that they had a suspect,
and they share a name of somebody I'd never heard
of before, Osama bin Laden, and then they flash an
image of him on the screen and I look at
(07:43):
him and my heart just sank because it's another man
with a turban and a beard and brown skin, very
much like me. I knew my friends in the room
with me. I knew them well enough to know they
weren't going to judge me or associate me with him,
and I could see them looking at me. What I
saw in their eyes was a kind of sympathy, like
(08:03):
an oshit moment, like what is going to happen to you?
And I wondered the same thing myself. I mean, I
knew in that moment that my life would never be
the same, and it hasn't been. I mean, it really
hasn't been. That That afternoon, my mom came to school early,
pretty much immediately picked us all up, took us home.
We locked the doors. I remember that vividly because we
had never locked the doors growing up in our neighborhood.
(08:25):
That afternoon, the death threat started first by phone, then
people driving by So I mean it was a really
intense moment in my life that raised a lot of
questions too, write what does it mean to be doubly attacked?
Right as an American on the one hand and as
a sick on the other What does it mean when
other people's perceptions of you turned violent and you don't
(08:46):
have the luxury to cast them aside or even turn
the other cheek, and then you have to meet them
head on? Like what do you do when everything feels
so dark and difficult? Like where do you find hope?
What's the light at the end of the tunnel that
keeps you going? And so it was just a really
tough period for me that actually, in retrospect, I could
see that I'm also, as an eighteen year old being
shaped and formed as I figure out the answers to
(09:08):
these questions. And it seemed like one of the spots
you went for hope was actually to go back to
sick philosophy, right, Like, these these teachings that can be
powerful from a religious perspective in terms of what they
cause you to do, but I think can be really
powerful from a psychological perspective in terms of the kind
of resilience and the kind of strengths that they give you.
And so one of the teachings that I know you
turned to at that time was the sick idea of chardycola.
(09:31):
You know, so, what's chardi coola and how does it
kind of help you to get through tough times? Yeah? So,
Jarda vigola is a nice pronunciation, by the way, well done.
It's it has it has a letter in there that
most most Americans have never heard before. Jarda kola is
basically this idea of everlasting optimism, of staying in high
(09:52):
spirits regardless of what's happening around you. You know, in
some ways, we could talk about this in a really
superficial way, you know, we have we have a big
conversation culturally right now around toxic positivity. You just sugarcoat
anything that comes your way and just say it's fine
and or your actual feelings or the difficulty that's brought
to you. And Jodie Nikola strikes me to something that's different,
(10:15):
or at least the way that I've understood it and
tried to apply it. And it's basically this approach that
enables you to recognize the complexity of life at the
same time and also reinstill agency. And I'll sort of
talk through that. Basically, the idea and sick philosophy is
that difficulty is real, challenges are real. It's okay to
(10:36):
acknowledge them and to feel the pain, and at the
same time, it's possible to find hope within that, to
find goodness within that. And so in this moment when
I'm eighteen years old and the terrorist attacks happen, and
as I've described, it feels really different. I mean, we're
getting death threats, We're watching TV and seeing our country
falling apart. It really feels like there's no hope. And
(10:58):
after a few days, my dad said something to me like,
aren't we so fortunate? And I look at him like
he's lost his mind, right, Like in what world is
there's something to feel fortunate about? And he goes on
to say, well, you know, we're so lucky that your
neighbors have been coming by to give us food, that
your teachers and your teammates have been checking in to
see if you're okay. I mean, aren't we so lucky
(11:18):
to have all these people around us? But as in
eighteen year old i'm thinking about it, I'm like, wow, Like,
here's a situation in which I've been so engrossed by
the difficulty and inappropriately right, It's not like I'm wishing
that I hadn't paid attention to the hardship, But somehow,
because I was so focused on that, I was missing
all the other things that were true. And the truth
(11:40):
of the experience was as I started to open my
eyes to that, I started to see the light around me.
I started to see the goodness around me, like I
started to feel hope and love around me, and recognizing
in that moment, as in eighteen year old, in these
difficult moments, we actually have a choice. And it doesn't
feel natural, it doesn't feel intuitive, but but like to
step back and say, okay, I'm going to take a
(12:02):
second and just notice around me, what is the good?
What are the people doing that can reinstill hope in
me that I don't get so lost in my own
darkness or victimization or whatever it is that happens in
that moment. And here Simron's centuries old sick faith reflects
the latest science on things like toxic positivity. Too often
(12:22):
we think the path to happiness involves ignoring our negative emotions,
but the scientific evidence shows that we probably be better
off if we can find ways to accept the bad
reality out there, and maybe even as Simmern's father did,
search for things to be grateful for in the face
of bleak events. After the Break, we'll take this idea
a step further as we explore how sickism links all
(12:43):
things good and bad together, and how this concept of
oneness can allow us to both weather hardships and reach
out to the people around us, no matter what their
faith or background. That's all to come when the Happiness
lab returns in a moment. Like many of the other
(13:04):
religions you may be more familiar with, sickism teaches that
there is a single God and everything springs from this
single source. But reading Simernji Singh's book The Light we
Give How Sick Wisdom can Transform your life, it's clear
that his concept of oneness isn't an abstract or theological detail.
It's central to how he lives his everyday life. It
own car as six call. It is an idea that
(13:26):
joins absolutely everything together. One of the teachings in sick
philosophy that ties in here to Ikonkar is that if
you can really get to a place where you at
least start to see the divinity, the oneness, the interconnection
in everything that's around you, then there's not a value
(13:46):
judgment on whatever it is that you encounter. Right And
I'm not here spiritually yet, although I've inched closer and
I feel the impact on it in terms of how
I experience this world. If you can get to a
place where you're not constantly seeing the world and your
life through the lens of good and bad, right Like,
(14:08):
I have this difficult thing that's happening at work. Let's say,
and I come home and I'm like, oh, that was
a terrible day today sucked. Like, of course, your experience
of that day is going to be rough, and that's
how most of us operate day to day. I mean
me too. But what sick philosophy offers is what if
you can own the pain of that day, but also
(14:29):
through this practice of gratitude and through this perspective of oneness, say, oh,
I'm not sugarcoating it, I'm not dismissing the pain, but
I can see the goodness and all of it and
live with equanimity. Right Like, see this thing that keeps
me in balance all the time. And then so that
the idea is you can taste the sweetness of life.
(14:49):
That's the word we use in our tradition. It's mitas sweetness.
You can taste the sweetness of life even when you're
in the midst of pain. And that's yeah, that's such
a powerful thing. And I think there was also a
really interesting like sick teacher who talked about this. You
told a story about grew R. John who was using
this idea of sweetness in the miss of something really terrible.
(15:10):
I'm just wondering if you'd share that story. This is
like one of those stories that for me felt so
far fetched most of my life, at least as a
kid growing up. The short version of the story is
he is imprisoned, as many religious leaders and prophets are,
he ends up being imprisoned by the state, and their
(15:32):
intention is to either have him take back what he
said or to have him executed, and as part of
the path towards that decision point, they torture him. And
as he's being tortured, he is singing this composition, these
lines that say dada kia metanage which means God, whatever
(15:53):
you do that feels sweet to me. And again, like
to go back to it's what we were saying before,
like it's it's at least in my read of the tradition.
It's not to say that he didn't feel pain. Of
course he did, right, I mean, at least in my
view of it. He's human. But there's a difference between
pain and suffering, right, he wasn't suffering in that moment. Like,
(16:14):
the pain was there, the hardship was there. I mean,
not an ideal position for any human being, but even then,
his experience of it was through sweetness. And you know,
going going back to your question about ikon Gar, like
how does this idea of oneness sort of tie into
this experience? And I think, you know, part of what
I understand from sick philosophy is that if we can
(16:36):
move beyond the binaries that so often dictate our lives, Right,
a truly wise person, as we learn in our tradition,
is someone who sees gold and iron as ali right there,
the same thing. There's there's no evaluation difference. That truly
wise person is someone who sees the humanity in a
(16:57):
friend and in a stranger, and the teaching is actually
we can get to a point where we don't see
strangers anymore at all. Right, everyone is familiar in a sense,
and I think it's that experience of the oneness that
has enabled me, in the context of really intense racism,
to be able to find the humanity in people who
(17:17):
don't see my humanity right Like, they think I'm the
worst person in the world, and they'd rather not be here,
and they tell me to go back to my own
country or whatever, And of course it annoys me, and
of course I wish they didn't see me that way,
but I don't have to be in a place where
I am reflecting that anger and ugliness back to them.
To me, it's it's only really been possible through this
(17:39):
teaching of radical oneness and interconnectedness. But of course, you know,
even with the teaching of radical oneness, it's really hard
to put that into practice, you know, especially if you're
like your actual humanity is being attacked in some cases.
But I think this is a spot where sick wisdom
is also really helpful, because it's not just a bunch
of teachings about things like radical oneness and chartique law
(18:00):
and things like that. There's also a really emphasis on
how specifically you can put these things into practice. So
talk about this idea, Vidia, I said, it m this
idea of knowledge. Yeah, it's it's it's so cool that
you bring this up because in our daily prayers. I
have two young daughters and we're teaching them every morning
as we walk to school, we practice the morning prayers
(18:23):
and they're learning them and then we talk through what
they mean. And one of the one of the teachings
today that we were just talking about. So it's it's
a really timely question is about exactly this question. And Grunani,
the founder of the Sick tradition, is critiquing scholars and knowledge.
And you know, for me, as a historian and the scholar,
it's kind of a slap in the face anytime I
(18:43):
think about it. But he's he's saying, like, you you
can read as many books as you want, you could
read boatloads of books, you could collect all the knowledge
in the world. If you don't put that knowledge into practice,
if you don't use that to to advance your own
life or to serve other people, than who cares, right,
it doesn't it doesn't really make a difference. And so
his point really is that knowledge is not the path
(19:04):
to liberation, and really what takes you there is wisdom.
That's the Juck position, right, John is the term that
we use. And so it's really interesting to me, as
I'm raising these kids and collecting my information and knowledge
as a scholar, to recognize that, you know, it has
limited purpose if we're not thinking about how to leverage
it for our own growth and for justice within the world.
(19:28):
And so this mirror is exactly a fallacy in the
psychological literature that's known as the Gi Joe fallacy. The
fallacy didn't go back as far as Greu Nanak, but
it went back to the eighties and Gijoe the cartoon.
So if you remember the cartoon, and the cartoon had
this famous public service announcement at the end where gis
Joe says, you know, now you know, and knowing is
half the battle. I don't know if you're a child
of the eighties like me. You're a little bit younger
(19:49):
than me, so maybe you do. Yeah, I am Gijoe
is a thing in South Texas, I imagine, but yeah,
but this is this idea that we think, right like,
knowing is half the battle, but the cognitive science work
suggests that that's not the case. Knowing is not half
the battle. You can know all these principles about what
you should do to be happy, you know, do your
gratitude list, meditate, whatever it is, But unless you actually
do that stuff, unless you put it into practice, that
(20:10):
knowledge isn't really changing anything about how you feel and
the well being that you experience. And so I love
that you know, sick tradition was kind of on top
of this really early on, but also that they have
lots of practices that help you with this. And I
think one of the things I find so fascinating is
that just the act of what you wear can be
a reminder to put these things into practice, just the
act of kind of wearing your turban. I know you
(20:32):
had a story in the book about realizing, you know,
that wearing your turban is a time when you really
need to be putting these springs into practice. I'm thinking
specifically of the story with your mom and the incident
in the store. Oh my god, I hate that story.
I will tell it, but I will also tell you
that until I wrote this book, I'd never told anyone
because I felt so much shame around it. And you
know it's it's kind of one of these moments in life,
(20:56):
and we all have them in our own ways where
we sort of connect the dots between how we're living
versus how we want to be living and what it
really means to be aware of our own hip hop
percy or imperfection and to want to do better. But
the embarrassing story, which I understand is not like the
(21:17):
worst thing in the world ever, but it's for whatever reason,
I feel guilty about it still. I'm at the grocery
store with my mom and where at the cash register,
and you know how they have those candies set up
at the front. I'm probably like ten twelve years old,
and when she's not looking, I grab I grab a
chocolate bar, a Snickers bar to put them up. And
(21:37):
I one of the funny things about it is I
don't even really like Snickers. Like I didn't even like
it then, I don't like it now. It's just like,
you know, the temptation is there, you give in, and
I gave in, and my mom taught me trying to
put it in my pocket, and you know, I'm mortified.
We don't say anything. She's shocked, Like I come from
(21:58):
a family of four boys, Like, she probably saw a
lot of stuff that most parents never want to see.
But this was not the type of thing that any
of us had really dealt with. So she's horrified. She
doesn't say anything. I don't say anything. She pays for it.
We go don't talk for like, we go home so awkward,
(22:19):
and eventually I go to her room to apologize, and
she started to get into this really unexpected territory for me,
Like I thought I was going to yell at me
or around me, or whatever our punishments were, and instead
she starts getting into this conversation about my turban, and
she's like, do you know why you wear a turban?
And you know, I didn't know what she wanted to
hear them moments didn't. I didn't really answer her and
(22:40):
was going to give her this space to say what
she needed to. And she started to talk about this tradition,
this memory in our tradition that I hadn't really heard before,
at least I hadn't thought about it in this way,
about how, in short, the decision to start wearing turbans
had to do with a moment in which the sick
community did not stand up for their values and hold
(23:02):
themselves accountable to them, and the leader at the time
basically said, we are never going to be in that
kind of position again. We are not going to be
able to hide from who we are and who we
say we are. And so from now going forward, people
are going to know us. And so you're going to
start wearing these turbans. And so for me, this was
an unexpected direction of the conversation. It was a tradition
(23:27):
and a memory that I hadn't really thought of before.
And then my mom goes, yeah, so maybe if you
can't handle that, like maybe you should stop wearing a turban.
And I was like, oh shit. My whole life she's
been like, don't listen to people when they tell you
to take it off or to stop wearing it, right, Like,
don't give into that. And all of a sudden she's like,
maybe you don't actually deserve to wear one. And that
(23:49):
how hard that hit me? That statement in the context
of what she was trying to say, like really lifted
up for me that maybe there was more to this
cloth that I wrapped on my head and then hey,
I belong to this tradition or my family lives in
this way or whatever. It meant to me up until
that point. Like all of a sudden, now it became
a public announcement, like every time I walked out the
(24:12):
door of my house, these are my values. This is
what you can hold me to, This is what you
can expect of me, and to me. It's a challenge,
and I still feel like this every day when I
walk out the door. It's a challenge to live by
what I say I will, and then to move beyond
that gap between the aspiration and the actual daily behaviors.
At the start of this episode, we heard that Simran's
(24:34):
turban is a sign of difference that, along with his
beard and brown skin, has marked him as an outsider,
which has subjected him to lots of vile, racist abuse. Sadly,
has turban's true moral and historic significance is utterly lost
on his abusers. Publicly affirming our beliefs and intentions is
an important way to ingrain good habits. Simran's turban is
(24:54):
an outward sign that he intends to live by sick
teachings and research shows that this is a good strategy.
We're more likely to live up to our values and
moral aspirations if we like Simrin somehow make them public.
That might involve signing a pledge, or putting up a sign,
getting a bumper sticker, or even wearing a T shirt.
It sounds cheesy, but the science shows that acts like
(25:14):
these can serve to remind us and others that we're
aiming to adopt and maintain particular habits and behaviors. But
it's worth noting that making all these habits and behavior
changes isn't easy. The evidence suggests that all of us
can find happiness by living the kinder, more connected life
that's celebrated by sickism, but it is a challenge that
requires constant work. So in the second of this two parter,
(25:36):
we'll talk to Symrin about how he tries to incorporate
the wisdom of sick gurus into each and every day,
even if that means compassionately confronting the very people who
abuse him. Yeah. I go to him and he's like, sorry, sorry,
I was just kidding. He must have been terrified. Yeah, exactly.
This was like a combination of teacher mode and dad mode.
So be sure to come back next time for more
(25:58):
happiness lessons of the Ancients with me, Doctor Laurie Santos,
The Happiness Lab is co written by Ryan Dilley and
is produced by Ryan Dilley, Courtney Guerino and Britney Brown.
The show was mastered by Evan Viola and our original
(26:18):
music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Greta Kone,
Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori, Nicole Morano, Morgan Ratner, Jacob Weisberg,
my agent, Van Davis, and the rest of the Pushkin team.
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
and by me, doctor Laurie Santos.
Pushkin. When people see me on the street, I often
wonder what they think about me. I mean, I know
sometimes what they think, because they'll tell me. Simrn Jet
Singh is an educator and best selling author, but it's
not his work that prompts some strangers to interact with
him in public. They see my turban and my beard
(00:35):
and my brown skin, and the reaction to Simren's physical
appearance is often very dumb and very racist. The standard,
especially at this point in my life, is terrorist isis
Taliban al Qaida. Simmern's beard and turban are outward signs
of his faith, Simmern's sick and as such, as part
of a huge global community. Sickism is estimated to be
(00:56):
the fifth largest religion, with tens of millions of followers,
both in South Asia, where it was first developed five
hundred years ago, and now in almost every corner of
the world. Yet, particularly in America, only a tiny minority
of people have any idea about six or their beliefs,
and in the absence of any real knowledge about Sikhisms, teachings,
and traditions, Simmerens has, many people just reach for stereotypes
(01:18):
or lazy assumptions. People will see that I'm visibly religious,
and they'll assume that I'm misogynistic or homophobic or close minded, right,
like all these other assumptions we have about people who
are quote unquote hardcore about religion, And I get it.
I mean, I mean, to be honest, I find myself
struggling with the same biases about other people who are
(01:39):
visibly religious. So it's kind of weird to realize that
the same things that bother me about what people assume
about me, like, I have those same prejudices inside of
me too, so I try and notice them whenever they happen.
But yet it is strange to walk around and know
that constantly I'm being judged even though people don't even
know me. So over the next two episodes, we're going
to get to know Simren, to find out who he
(02:01):
is and what he's about, and along the way, we'll
hear the important things that Sickism has had to say
about happiness over the centuries. In these shows, Simren will
introduce us to the concepts that are key to his faith,
things like kindness, gratitude, and radical connectedness. But we'll also
explore an idea that underpins all the happiness science. We
discuss on this podcast that merely knowing about this stuff
(02:21):
doesn't help unless you put it into practice each and
every chance you get. So welcome back as we explore
sick teachings on happiness lessons of the Ancients with me
doctor Laurie Santos. There the first headphones, Nah, big moment
(02:41):
for me. I just got him last week. Large hair
and turbans like headphones now are like you know, it's
like I beat by Drake came out and I was like, man,
I really want to be cool, but so okay, let
me plug these in. As well as being Executive director
for the Aspen Institute's Religion and Society program, Simmerin Jeet
Singh is also the author of The Light We Give,
(03:02):
How Sick Wisdom Can Transform Your Life. It's a book
that really opened my eyes to so many aspects of
sickism that had previously passed me by. The Light We
Give isn't a book about theology. It's an honest and
really insightful memoir packed with teachings from the gurus who
established and developed the sick religion centuries ago, the same
ones that Simren honors and observes today. In modern day America.
(03:24):
Reading the book, I was struck by how relevant and
relatable Sikhism is to all the happiness challenges we face today,
but also by the fact that Simmeren's religion is a
total mystery to many of his fellow Americans. It's such
a bizarre feeling to realize I am a highly visible minority,
and in this country we are a minority. But in
this world there is a big population of sex who
(03:46):
have made all kinds of contributions to global communities, who
live all over the world, not just in the homeland
of Punjab and South Asia, but I mean scattered all
across the world as a diaspora. And so in my
heart and in my head, I know we're not a
tiny community. But in other people's perceptions are like, what
are you like, where do you come from? I know
(04:07):
nothing about you? And so for the most part, that's
fine in a lot of cases, right, Like we can
get by not knowing everything about everyone around us. But
when that ignorance meets bias or meets stereotype, it can
be really dangerous. So talk a little bit about Sikhism.
Give me the kind of introduction to this religion for
folks who haven't heard much about it. If I had
to tell you one thing about what it means to
(04:29):
be a sick, I'd start with my principles, because that,
to me is like what keeps me within this tradition,
what I value about it most, and that is, I think,
in some ways a really simple framework for looking at life,
but also something that's really practical and transformative, at least
for me. And so the place to begin in sick
philosophy is with the first term ongar. It refers to
(04:50):
the oneness of all creation, of all humanity, and it's
the basis of so much of what we believe and
how we try to live, our commitment to non discrimination,
for example, on the basis of anything right, gender, sexual orientation, religion,
I mean everyone, the way we talk about it, everyone
has the same light within them, and so we have
(05:11):
no place to judge them. I mean, it's it's a
really great protection in a society where we're constantly falling
into drafts of hierarchy and supremacy. So that's one, and
then the idea from there is if you can really
learn to feel the interconnection within the world, then that
engender is a feeling of love and that's the promise
(05:32):
of spirituality at large, not just of sickism. That you know,
the height of human experience is this feeling of love,
and you can have that at every moment in your
life through this broader feeling of interconnection. That to me
is the second building block of sick teachings. And then
the third is that when you feel connected and when
you feel love, then your natural impulse is to show
(05:53):
up for the people around you, especially when they're suffering,
and so service and justice become a really cool part
of how we understand ourselves, but also what it means
to be spiritual, what it means to be a good person.
It's not just about cultivating something inside of you, it's
it's about letting that blossom and then extend out words
to the people around you so that you care for
them in the way that you might care for yourself,
(06:15):
with an understanding that it's all a shared sense of reality.
At the starting point in psych philosophy is we're all
in this together. This is one of the reasons I
was so excited to talk with you for this podcast, right,
is that if we look at sick philosophy generally attends
to map on a lot to a lot of the
principles that we see in the modern happiness science. But
I think it's a philosophy that's especially useful now, and
(06:36):
especially useful for someone who has a marginalized identity, because
you're constantly facing these threats that kind of challenge this
sense of shared connectedness. Reading your book, I was really
struck by kind of how some of those moments of
feeling discriminated against kind of took a fever pitch in
your life around nine to eleven, you know, So talk
to me a little bit about the story of what
nine to eleven was like for you. You know, how
old were you and sort of what happened to your family. Then. Yeah,
(06:59):
So I was eighteen years old in two thousand and one.
I was a senior in high school. I was living
in South Texas. I went to a big public school.
My brother and I were some of the only kids
who wore turbans in all of South Texas. And I
remember we heard the rumors, the whispers that an attack
had happened. We ran to my teachers classroom is Strong,
(07:21):
our history teacher who we were all close to, and
while just watched on television, we watched the towers come down,
and nobody said anything. Very quiet. After about half an hour,
one of the anchors announced that they had a suspect,
and they share a name of somebody I'd never heard
of before, Osama bin Laden, and then they flash an
image of him on the screen and I look at
(07:43):
him and my heart just sank because it's another man
with a turban and a beard and brown skin, very
much like me. I knew my friends in the room
with me. I knew them well enough to know they
weren't going to judge me or associate me with him,
and I could see them looking at me. What I
saw in their eyes was a kind of sympathy, like
(08:03):
an oshit moment, like what is going to happen to you?
And I wondered the same thing myself. I mean, I
knew in that moment that my life would never be
the same, and it hasn't been. I mean, it really
hasn't been. That That afternoon, my mom came to school early,
pretty much immediately picked us all up, took us home.
We locked the doors. I remember that vividly because we
had never locked the doors growing up in our neighborhood.
(08:25):
That afternoon, the death threat started first by phone, then
people driving by So I mean it was a really
intense moment in my life that raised a lot of
questions too, write what does it mean to be doubly attacked?
Right as an American on the one hand and as
a sick on the other What does it mean when
other people's perceptions of you turned violent and you don't
(08:46):
have the luxury to cast them aside or even turn
the other cheek, and then you have to meet them
head on? Like what do you do when everything feels
so dark and difficult? Like where do you find hope?
What's the light at the end of the tunnel that
keeps you going? And so it was just a really
tough period for me that actually, in retrospect, I could
see that I'm also, as an eighteen year old being
shaped and formed as I figure out the answers to
(09:08):
these questions. And it seemed like one of the spots
you went for hope was actually to go back to
sick philosophy, right, Like, these these teachings that can be
powerful from a religious perspective in terms of what they
cause you to do, but I think can be really
powerful from a psychological perspective in terms of the kind
of resilience and the kind of strengths that they give you.
And so one of the teachings that I know you
turned to at that time was the sick idea of chardycola.
(09:31):
You know, so, what's chardi coola and how does it
kind of help you to get through tough times? Yeah? So,
Jarda vigola is a nice pronunciation, by the way, well done.
It's it has it has a letter in there that
most most Americans have never heard before. Jarda kola is
basically this idea of everlasting optimism, of staying in high
(09:52):
spirits regardless of what's happening around you. You know, in
some ways, we could talk about this in a really
superficial way, you know, we have we have a big
conversation culturally right now around toxic positivity. You just sugarcoat
anything that comes your way and just say it's fine
and or your actual feelings or the difficulty that's brought
to you. And Jodie Nikola strikes me to something that's different,
(10:15):
or at least the way that I've understood it and
tried to apply it. And it's basically this approach that
enables you to recognize the complexity of life at the
same time and also reinstill agency. And I'll sort of
talk through that. Basically, the idea and sick philosophy is
that difficulty is real, challenges are real. It's okay to
(10:36):
acknowledge them and to feel the pain, and at the
same time, it's possible to find hope within that, to
find goodness within that. And so in this moment when
I'm eighteen years old and the terrorist attacks happen, and
as I've described, it feels really different. I mean, we're
getting death threats, We're watching TV and seeing our country
falling apart. It really feels like there's no hope. And
(10:58):
after a few days, my dad said something to me like,
aren't we so fortunate? And I look at him like
he's lost his mind, right, Like in what world is
there's something to feel fortunate about? And he goes on
to say, well, you know, we're so lucky that your
neighbors have been coming by to give us food, that
your teachers and your teammates have been checking in to
see if you're okay. I mean, aren't we so lucky
(11:18):
to have all these people around us? But as in
eighteen year old i'm thinking about it, I'm like, wow, Like,
here's a situation in which I've been so engrossed by
the difficulty and inappropriately right, It's not like I'm wishing
that I hadn't paid attention to the hardship, But somehow,
because I was so focused on that, I was missing
all the other things that were true. And the truth
(11:40):
of the experience was as I started to open my
eyes to that, I started to see the light around me.
I started to see the goodness around me, like I
started to feel hope and love around me, and recognizing
in that moment, as in eighteen year old, in these
difficult moments, we actually have a choice. And it doesn't
feel natural, it doesn't feel intuitive, but but like to
step back and say, okay, I'm going to take a
(12:02):
second and just notice around me, what is the good?
What are the people doing that can reinstill hope in
me that I don't get so lost in my own
darkness or victimization or whatever it is that happens in
that moment. And here Simron's centuries old sick faith reflects
the latest science on things like toxic positivity. Too often
(12:22):
we think the path to happiness involves ignoring our negative emotions,
but the scientific evidence shows that we probably be better
off if we can find ways to accept the bad
reality out there, and maybe even as Simmern's father did,
search for things to be grateful for in the face
of bleak events. After the Break, we'll take this idea
a step further as we explore how sickism links all
(12:43):
things good and bad together, and how this concept of
oneness can allow us to both weather hardships and reach
out to the people around us, no matter what their
faith or background. That's all to come when the Happiness
lab returns in a moment. Like many of the other
(13:04):
religions you may be more familiar with, sickism teaches that
there is a single God and everything springs from this
single source. But reading Simernji Singh's book The Light we
Give How Sick Wisdom can Transform your life, it's clear
that his concept of oneness isn't an abstract or theological detail.
It's central to how he lives his everyday life. It
own car as six call. It is an idea that
(13:26):
joins absolutely everything together. One of the teachings in sick
philosophy that ties in here to Ikonkar is that if
you can really get to a place where you at
least start to see the divinity, the oneness, the interconnection
in everything that's around you, then there's not a value
(13:46):
judgment on whatever it is that you encounter. Right And
I'm not here spiritually yet, although I've inched closer and
I feel the impact on it in terms of how
I experience this world. If you can get to a
place where you're not constantly seeing the world and your
life through the lens of good and bad, right Like,
(14:08):
I have this difficult thing that's happening at work. Let's say,
and I come home and I'm like, oh, that was
a terrible day today sucked. Like, of course, your experience
of that day is going to be rough, and that's
how most of us operate day to day. I mean
me too. But what sick philosophy offers is what if
you can own the pain of that day, but also
(14:29):
through this practice of gratitude and through this perspective of oneness, say, oh,
I'm not sugarcoating it, I'm not dismissing the pain, but
I can see the goodness and all of it and
live with equanimity. Right Like, see this thing that keeps
me in balance all the time. And then so that
the idea is you can taste the sweetness of life.
(14:49):
That's the word we use in our tradition. It's mitas sweetness.
You can taste the sweetness of life even when you're
in the midst of pain. And that's yeah, that's such
a powerful thing. And I think there was also a
really interesting like sick teacher who talked about this. You
told a story about grew R. John who was using
this idea of sweetness in the miss of something really terrible.
(15:10):
I'm just wondering if you'd share that story. This is
like one of those stories that for me felt so
far fetched most of my life, at least as a
kid growing up. The short version of the story is
he is imprisoned, as many religious leaders and prophets are,
he ends up being imprisoned by the state, and their
(15:32):
intention is to either have him take back what he
said or to have him executed, and as part of
the path towards that decision point, they torture him. And
as he's being tortured, he is singing this composition, these
lines that say dada kia metanage which means God, whatever
(15:53):
you do that feels sweet to me. And again, like
to go back to it's what we were saying before,
like it's it's at least in my read of the tradition.
It's not to say that he didn't feel pain. Of
course he did, right, I mean, at least in my
view of it. He's human. But there's a difference between
pain and suffering, right, he wasn't suffering in that moment. Like,
(16:14):
the pain was there, the hardship was there. I mean,
not an ideal position for any human being, but even then,
his experience of it was through sweetness. And you know,
going going back to your question about ikon Gar, like
how does this idea of oneness sort of tie into
this experience? And I think, you know, part of what
I understand from sick philosophy is that if we can
(16:36):
move beyond the binaries that so often dictate our lives, Right,
a truly wise person, as we learn in our tradition,
is someone who sees gold and iron as ali right there,
the same thing. There's there's no evaluation difference. That truly
wise person is someone who sees the humanity in a
(16:57):
friend and in a stranger, and the teaching is actually
we can get to a point where we don't see
strangers anymore at all. Right, everyone is familiar in a sense,
and I think it's that experience of the oneness that
has enabled me, in the context of really intense racism,
to be able to find the humanity in people who
(17:17):
don't see my humanity right Like, they think I'm the
worst person in the world, and they'd rather not be here,
and they tell me to go back to my own
country or whatever, And of course it annoys me, and
of course I wish they didn't see me that way,
but I don't have to be in a place where
I am reflecting that anger and ugliness back to them.
To me, it's it's only really been possible through this
(17:39):
teaching of radical oneness and interconnectedness. But of course, you know,
even with the teaching of radical oneness, it's really hard
to put that into practice, you know, especially if you're
like your actual humanity is being attacked in some cases.
But I think this is a spot where sick wisdom
is also really helpful, because it's not just a bunch
of teachings about things like radical oneness and chartique law
(18:00):
and things like that. There's also a really emphasis on
how specifically you can put these things into practice. So
talk about this idea, Vidia, I said, it m this
idea of knowledge. Yeah, it's it's it's so cool that
you bring this up because in our daily prayers. I
have two young daughters and we're teaching them every morning
as we walk to school, we practice the morning prayers
(18:23):
and they're learning them and then we talk through what
they mean. And one of the one of the teachings
today that we were just talking about. So it's it's
a really timely question is about exactly this question. And Grunani,
the founder of the Sick tradition, is critiquing scholars and knowledge.
And you know, for me, as a historian and the scholar,
it's kind of a slap in the face anytime I
(18:43):
think about it. But he's he's saying, like, you you
can read as many books as you want, you could
read boatloads of books, you could collect all the knowledge
in the world. If you don't put that knowledge into practice,
if you don't use that to to advance your own
life or to serve other people, than who cares, right,
it doesn't it doesn't really make a difference. And so
his point really is that knowledge is not the path
(19:04):
to liberation, and really what takes you there is wisdom.
That's the Juck position, right, John is the term that
we use. And so it's really interesting to me, as
I'm raising these kids and collecting my information and knowledge
as a scholar, to recognize that, you know, it has
limited purpose if we're not thinking about how to leverage
it for our own growth and for justice within the world.
(19:28):
And so this mirror is exactly a fallacy in the
psychological literature that's known as the Gi Joe fallacy. The
fallacy didn't go back as far as Greu Nanak, but
it went back to the eighties and Gijoe the cartoon.
So if you remember the cartoon, and the cartoon had
this famous public service announcement at the end where gis
Joe says, you know, now you know, and knowing is
half the battle. I don't know if you're a child
of the eighties like me. You're a little bit younger
(19:49):
than me, so maybe you do. Yeah, I am Gijoe
is a thing in South Texas, I imagine, but yeah,
but this is this idea that we think, right like,
knowing is half the battle, but the cognitive science work
suggests that that's not the case. Knowing is not half
the battle. You can know all these principles about what
you should do to be happy, you know, do your
gratitude list, meditate, whatever it is, But unless you actually
do that stuff, unless you put it into practice, that
(20:10):
knowledge isn't really changing anything about how you feel and
the well being that you experience. And so I love
that you know, sick tradition was kind of on top
of this really early on, but also that they have
lots of practices that help you with this. And I
think one of the things I find so fascinating is
that just the act of what you wear can be
a reminder to put these things into practice, just the
act of kind of wearing your turban. I know you
(20:32):
had a story in the book about realizing, you know,
that wearing your turban is a time when you really
need to be putting these springs into practice. I'm thinking
specifically of the story with your mom and the incident
in the store. Oh my god, I hate that story.
I will tell it, but I will also tell you
that until I wrote this book, I'd never told anyone
because I felt so much shame around it. And you
know it's it's kind of one of these moments in life,
(20:56):
and we all have them in our own ways where
we sort of connect the dots between how we're living
versus how we want to be living and what it
really means to be aware of our own hip hop
percy or imperfection and to want to do better. But
the embarrassing story, which I understand is not like the
(21:17):
worst thing in the world ever, but it's for whatever reason,
I feel guilty about it still. I'm at the grocery
store with my mom and where at the cash register,
and you know how they have those candies set up
at the front. I'm probably like ten twelve years old,
and when she's not looking, I grab I grab a
chocolate bar, a Snickers bar to put them up. And
(21:37):
I one of the funny things about it is I
don't even really like Snickers. Like I didn't even like
it then, I don't like it now. It's just like,
you know, the temptation is there, you give in, and
I gave in, and my mom taught me trying to
put it in my pocket, and you know, I'm mortified.
We don't say anything. She's shocked, Like I come from
(21:58):
a family of four boys, Like, she probably saw a
lot of stuff that most parents never want to see.
But this was not the type of thing that any
of us had really dealt with. So she's horrified. She
doesn't say anything. I don't say anything. She pays for it.
We go don't talk for like, we go home so awkward,
(22:19):
and eventually I go to her room to apologize, and
she started to get into this really unexpected territory for me,
Like I thought I was going to yell at me
or around me, or whatever our punishments were, and instead
she starts getting into this conversation about my turban, and
she's like, do you know why you wear a turban?
And you know, I didn't know what she wanted to
hear them moments didn't. I didn't really answer her and
(22:40):
was going to give her this space to say what
she needed to. And she started to talk about this tradition,
this memory in our tradition that I hadn't really heard before,
at least I hadn't thought about it in this way,
about how, in short, the decision to start wearing turbans
had to do with a moment in which the sick
community did not stand up for their values and hold
(23:02):
themselves accountable to them, and the leader at the time
basically said, we are never going to be in that
kind of position again. We are not going to be
able to hide from who we are and who we
say we are. And so from now going forward, people
are going to know us. And so you're going to
start wearing these turbans. And so for me, this was
an unexpected direction of the conversation. It was a tradition
(23:27):
and a memory that I hadn't really thought of before.
And then my mom goes, yeah, so maybe if you
can't handle that, like maybe you should stop wearing a turban.
And I was like, oh shit. My whole life she's
been like, don't listen to people when they tell you
to take it off or to stop wearing it, right, Like,
don't give into that. And all of a sudden she's like,
maybe you don't actually deserve to wear one. And that
(23:49):
how hard that hit me? That statement in the context
of what she was trying to say, like really lifted
up for me that maybe there was more to this
cloth that I wrapped on my head and then hey,
I belong to this tradition or my family lives in
this way or whatever. It meant to me up until
that point. Like all of a sudden, now it became
a public announcement, like every time I walked out the
(24:12):
door of my house, these are my values. This is
what you can hold me to, This is what you
can expect of me, and to me. It's a challenge,
and I still feel like this every day when I
walk out the door. It's a challenge to live by
what I say I will, and then to move beyond
that gap between the aspiration and the actual daily behaviors.
At the start of this episode, we heard that Simran's
(24:34):
turban is a sign of difference that, along with his
beard and brown skin, has marked him as an outsider,
which has subjected him to lots of vile, racist abuse. Sadly,
has turban's true moral and historic significance is utterly lost
on his abusers. Publicly affirming our beliefs and intentions is
an important way to ingrain good habits. Simran's turban is
(24:54):
an outward sign that he intends to live by sick
teachings and research shows that this is a good strategy.
We're more likely to live up to our values and
moral aspirations if we like Simrin somehow make them public.
That might involve signing a pledge, or putting up a sign,
getting a bumper sticker, or even wearing a T shirt.
It sounds cheesy, but the science shows that acts like
(25:14):
these can serve to remind us and others that we're
aiming to adopt and maintain particular habits and behaviors. But
it's worth noting that making all these habits and behavior
changes isn't easy. The evidence suggests that all of us
can find happiness by living the kinder, more connected life
that's celebrated by sickism, but it is a challenge that
requires constant work. So in the second of this two parter,
(25:36):
we'll talk to Symrin about how he tries to incorporate
the wisdom of sick gurus into each and every day,
even if that means compassionately confronting the very people who
abuse him. Yeah. I go to him and he's like, sorry, sorry,
I was just kidding. He must have been terrified. Yeah, exactly.
This was like a combination of teacher mode and dad mode.
So be sure to come back next time for more
(25:58):
happiness lessons of the Ancients with me, Doctor Laurie Santos,
The Happiness Lab is co written by Ryan Dilley and
is produced by Ryan Dilley, Courtney Guerino and Britney Brown.
The show was mastered by Evan Viola and our original
(26:18):
music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Greta Kone,
Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori, Nicole Morano, Morgan Ratner, Jacob Weisberg,
my agent, Van Davis, and the rest of the Pushkin team.
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
and by me, doctor Laurie Santos.
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