Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Sikhism and How We're All Connected

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 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

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

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 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 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

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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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 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

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.

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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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. 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. 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.