The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Sikhism and How We're All Connected

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

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.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.

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. Simran Jeet 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 and my brown skin. And the reaction to Simran's physical appearance is often very dumb and very racist. The standard, especially at this point in my life, is terrorist, ISIS, Taliban, Al-Qaeda.

Simran's beard and turban are outward signs of his faith. Simran's Sikh, and as such, is part of a huge global community. Sikhism is estimated to be the fifth largest religion, with tens of millions of followers, both in South Asia, where it was first developed 500 years ago, and now in almost every corner of the world. where it was first developed 500 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 Sikhs or their beliefs.

And in the absence of any real knowledge about Sikhisms, teachings, and traditions, Simran says 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, 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 yeah, 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 Simran to find out who he is and what he's about. And along the way, we'll hear the important things that Sikhism has had to say about happiness over the centuries. In these shows, Simran 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, Dr. Laurie Santos. These are the first headphones I could get over my turban. Big moment for me. I just got them last week. Large hair and turbans, like headphones. It's like the Beats by Dre came out and I was like, man, I really want to be cool.

So, okay, let me plug these in. As well as being executive director for the Aspen Institute's Religion and Society program, Simranjeet 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 Sikhism 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 Sikh religion centuries ago, the same ones that Simran 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 Simran'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 Sikhs 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, they're like, what are you? 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 Sikh, 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 Sikh philosophy is with the first term, ik onkar.

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 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 a really great protection in a society where we're constantly falling into traps 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 engenders a feeling of love. And that's the promise of spirituality writ large, not just of Sikhism, that 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. 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 core 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 about letting that blossom and then extend outwards 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. The starting point in Sikh

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 Sikh philosophy generally, it tends 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 9-11. So talk to me a little bit about the story of what 9-11 was like for you. How old were you and sort of what happened to your family then?

Yeah, so I was 18 years old in 2001. I was a senior in high school. I was living in South Texas. old in 2001. I was a senior in high school. I was living in South Texas. I went to a big public school. My brothers 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 teacher's classroom, Ms. Strong, our history teacher who we were all close to. And we all just watched on television. We watched the towers come down. 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 oh shit 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.

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, right? What does it mean to be doubly attacked, right? As an American on the one hand and as a Sikh on the other, what does it mean when other people's perceptions

of you turn violent and you don't have the luxury to cast them aside or even turn the other cheek and then you mean when other people's perceptions of you turn 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 18 year, 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 Sikh philosophy, right? Like 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 chardikala. So what's chardikala and how does it kind of help you to get through tough times? Yeah. So chardikala is a nice pronunciation, by the way. Well done. It has a letter in there that most Americans have never heard before. Jardadikala 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 a big conversation culturally right now around toxic positivity. You just sugarcoat anything that comes your way and just say it's fine and ignore your actual feelings or the difficulty that that's brought to you. And Jardikullah strikes me as 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 in 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 18 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 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 an 18 year old, I'm thinking about it. I'm like, wow, like here's a situation situation in which I've been so engrossed by the difficulty and appropriately, 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 started to see the light around me. I started to see the goodness around me. I started to feel hope and love around me. And recognizing in that moment as an 18-year-old, in these difficult moments, we actually have a choice. And it doesn't feel natural. It doesn't feel intuitive. But 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 so that I don't get so lost in my own darkness or victimization or whatever it is that happens in that moment? And here, Simran'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'd probably be better off if we can find ways to accept the bad reality out there, and maybe even, as Simran's father did, search for things to be grateful for in the face of bleak events.

as we explore how Sikhism 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. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's

because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. Like many of the other religions you may be more familiar with, Sikhism teaches that there is a single God and that everything springs from this single source. But reading Simranjeet Singh's

book, The Light We Give, How Sikh 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. Ik Onkar, as Sikhs call it, is an idea that joins absolutely everything together. One of the teachings in Sikh philosophy that ties in here to Ik Onkar 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. And I'm not here spiritually yet, although I've inched closer and I feel the impact on it in terms of how I experienced 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 like, 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 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. He told a story about Guru Arjan who was using this idea of sweetness in the midst of something really terrible. I'm just wondering if you could 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, which means, God, whatever you do, that feels sweet to me. And again, like to go back to, to 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, 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 back to your question about Ikonkar, like how does this idea of oneness sort of tie into this experience? And I think, you know, part of what I understand from Sikh 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 alike, right? They're the same thing. There's no valuation difference. The 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 me 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 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 Sikh wisdom is also really helpful because it's not just a bunch of teachings about things like radical oneness and chardikala 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, vidya, is that it? This idea of knowledge. Yeah, 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 teachings today that we were just

talking about, so it's a really timely question, is about exactly this question. And Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh tradition, is critiquing scholars and knowledge. And, you know, for me as a historian and a scholar, it's kind of a slap in the face anytime I think about it. But he's saying like, 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 advance your own life or to serve other people, then who cares, right? 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 juxtaposition, right? Gyan 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 mirrors exactly a fallacy in the psychological literature that's known as the G.I. Joe fallacy. The fallacy didn't go back as far as Guru Nanak, but it went back to the 80s and G.I.

Joe, the cartoon. So if you remember the cartoon, the cartoon had this famous public service announcement at the end where G.I. Joe says, you know, now you know, and knowing is half the battle. I don't know if you're a child of the 80s like me, you're a little bit younger than me, so maybe you do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I am, I am, yeah. G.I. Joe 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, Sikh 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 things 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 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 hypocrisy 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, I, I feel guilty about it still. Um, I'm at the grocery store with my mom and we're at the cash register and you know how they have those candies set up at the front. I'm probably like 10, 12 years old. Um, 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 not looking, I grab a chocolate bar, a Snickers bar to put in my bag. One of the funny things about it is I don't even really like Snickers. 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 saw me trying to put it in my pocket. And, you know, I'm mortified. We don't say anything. She's shocked.

I come from a family of four boys. She probably saw a lot of stuff that most parents would never want to see. But this was not the type of thing that any of us had really dealt with before. So she's horrified. She doesn't say anything. I don't say anything. She pays for it. We go. Don't talk for... We go home. She pays for it. We go, don't talk for like, we go home. It's so awkward. Um, 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, she was going to yell at me or ground me or whatever our punishments were. And instead she starts getting into this conversation about my turban. And, and she's like, do you know why you wear a turban? And I didn't know what she wanted

to hear at that moment. So I didn't really answer her and was going to give her the 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 Sikh community did not stand up for their values and hold themselves accountable to them. And the leader at the time basically said, we're 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, 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 then all of a sudden she's like, maybe you don't actually deserve to wear one. And that, 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 than, 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, his 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 Simran, somehow make them public. That might involve signing a pledge, or putting up a sign, or 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 habit 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 Sikhism. But it is a challenge that requires constant work. So in the second of this two-parter, we'll talk to Simran about how he tries to incorporate the wisdom of Sikh gurus into each and every day, even if that means compassionately

confronting the very people who abuse him. I go up 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, Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co-written by Ryan Dilley and is produced by Ryan Dilley, Courtney Guarino, and Brittany Brown. The show was mastered by Evan Viola

and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carly Migliore, Nicole Morano, Morgan Ratner, Jacob Weisberg, my agent Ben Davis, and the rest of the Pushkin team. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by me, Dr. Laurie Santos.