Download Free Confessions Of An American Sikh Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Confessions Of An American Sikh and write the review.

Arriving in India to get his teeth fixed, Gursant Singh decides he needs a Punjabi wife and becomes embroiled with Dadaji, Amritsar's notorious marriage broker. When their search for the perfect bride gets them both thrown into Amritsar's Central Jail, Gursant has to look deep within himself and question everything he has been taught about the Sikh path - Sikhi. Gursant's encounters with crooked lawyers, corrupt cops and the enigmatic Indian legal system lead him from the radiant spirituality of Amritsar's Golden Temple, through labyrinthine back streets, chaotic lawyers' offices and the Amritsar Police station to the tranquility of an isolated yoga ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas. On the way, we meet an exotic cast of characters. Some venal and manipulating, others compassionate and generous; all of whom bring to life the contradictions, idiosyncrasies and excitement of 21st Century India. Gursant chronicles his adventures in a fast-moving, warts-and-all style to give the reader a searingly honest picture of his own spiritual loss of innocence. It was during my time in the Amritsar Central Jail that I thought of writing this book. As soon as I had Internet access, I began to research what it might take to create a written record of my experiences. In effect, this book was created as it happened and certainly before I knew how it would finish. My hope was that I could help others to learn from my experiences; not only those in India, but also those within the 3HO spiritual organization to which I devoted thirty years of my life. India can be fun, entertaining and spiritually inspiring; at the same time it can be harsh and unforgiving, especially if you fall foul of the law, as I did. The spiritual path of the seeker can provide endless inspiration and satisfaction. But, like India, it can bring you face to face with your deepest fears and weaknesses. It is my fervent hope that others will learn from my mistakes and perhaps deepen their own spiritual experience by reading about what I had to go through. Thus this book is the story of my spiritual coming of age; my loss of innocence, if you will. I wish to offer my deepest gratitude to Akal Purkh, Waheguru, the Creator and Sustainer of the incredible universe in which we live. Let me also give thanks to Guru Nanak Sahib and his nine illustrious human successors. It is the grace of Guru Nanak that brought me to his teachings and it was his kindness that enabled me to find the true path of Sikhi. Finally I humbly offer obeisance to Siri Guru Granth Sahib, the word of God and living Guru for all Sikhs. Gursant Singh
Let’s face and share the pain. This groundbreaking exposé, Under the Yoga Mat, lifts the veil on the underexposed dark side of the history of Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga and his revered 3HO Healthy, Happy, Holy community. This is the first book presenting the multifaceted character and extent of the wrongdoings and the tactics used by 3HO leadership to keep the horrific abuse hidden for five decades. This meticulously researched non-fiction work delves deep into the disturbing tragedies that unfolded when Harbhajan, a 39-year-old Sikh-born Indian customs officer, arrived in Los Angeles in 1968, posing as a master of Kundalini Yoga. Through a thoughtful selection of testimonies, historical records, and expert insights, this work unravels the captivating rise of Yogi Bhajan, as disillusioned American youth eagerly embraced him as the Eastern guru they believed they needed. As his following grew rapidly, he wove a narrative of destiny, proclaiming that his devotees were predestined to guide humanity in the transition from the Piscean to the Aquarian Age. Yet, behind the facade of spiritual enlightenment, Bhajan cunningly manipulated, controlled, exploited, and abused his followers and their children. He was involved in drug and arms smuggling and fraudulent businesses. Throughout his reign, Yogi Bhajan hobnobbed with the powerful, including encounters with presidents, popes, and the Dalai Lama. The governors of California and New Mexico became his confidants, unaware of the web of deception he spun. Under his leadership, billion-dollar enterprises like Yogi Tea and Akal Security flourished. Such was the influence of this enigmatic figure that upon his passing in 2004, the American Congress honored him with a two-page resolution, while New Mexico inaugurated the “Yogi Bhajan Memorial Highway.” However, it wasn’t until the early 2020s, when a former leader of the 3HO community came forward with her testimony, that the truth began to emerge from decades of silence. Under the Yoga Mat reveals the harrowing experiences of hundreds of ex-3HO members, shedding light on the isolation, neglect, hunger, and abuse they endured in schools in India from a tender age. Shockingly, it is estimated that Yogi Bhajan sexually abused approximately 100 women, justifying his actions with the chilling statement, “Rape is always invited.” At the heart of this extraordinary book lie the stories of these courageous 3HO survivors. Coenen’s masterful narrative not only exposes the crimes themselves but also explores why a culture of silence persisted for so long, engendering fear and obedience among the followers. As the shadows of the past give way to the truth, their accounts serve as a rallying cry for justice and healing. With its compelling blend of investigative research, personal testimonies, and historical context, Under the Yoga Mat challenges our perception of spiritual leaders, champions the resilience of survivors, and sparks a critical conversation about power, manipulation, and the darker side of spiritual movements.
Let’s face and share the pain. Under the Yoga Mat lifts the veil on the underexposed dark side of the history of Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga and his revered 3HO Healthy, Happy, Holy community. This is the first book presenting the multifaceted character and extent of the wrongdoings and the tactics used by its leadership to keep horrific abuse hidden for five decades. This meticulously researched non-fiction work delves deep into the tragedies that unfolded when Harbhajan, a 39-year-old Sikh-born Indian customs officer, arrived in Los Angeles in 1968, posing as a master of Kundalini Yoga. Through a thoughtful selection of testimonies, historical records, and expert insights, this work unravels the rise of Yogi Bhajan, as disillusioned American youth embraced him as the Eastern guru, they believed they needed. As his following grew rapidly, he proclaimed that his devotees were predestined to guide humanity in the transition from the Piscean to the Aquarian Age. Yet, behind the facade of spiritual enlightenment, Bhajan cunningly manipulated, controlled, exploited, and abused his followers and their children. He was involved in drug and arms smuggling and fraudulent businesses. Under the Yoga Mat challenges our perception of spiritual leaders, champions the resilience of survivors, and sparks a critical conversation about power, manipulation, and the darker side of spiritual movements.
“Confessions in a Crown Vic” is the story of professional displacement during the Great Recession, an Architect as Cab driver, while seeking Architecture work. It interviews Paolo Soleri the visionary Urban design architect, and the traffic engineer, Louis Lagomarsino, for Phoenix’s highways, and the author’s passengers’ marginalization for their lack of a car. It’s a journey through an Architect’s life, beginning with schooling, travels, design, internship, and practices in many genres of clientele from private to public projects for the U.S.P.S., U.S.A.F., and the U.S.A.C.O.E. It takes us through different cities and urban configurations. But most of all it takes us through history’s cycles of political change, the semantics of their origins, the delivery of designs, and the affects of expansion and colonialist attitudes in America. It’s a critique of Urban Sprawl, and the irrationality of relying on housing starts to determine a healthy economy. It examines Keynesian versus Classical economics, comparing them with the events of the last “American” century. He illuminates the American Dream’s unsustainable promise to even its poorest citizens, considering whether we can still re-materialize that dream out of its current mythological existence. Is this dream for everyone? Can we grow a culture based on the automobile and a limited fossil fuel economy? It challenges this dream’s configuration, while placing a heavy burden of responsibility for our economic demise on its mythical component, the greed that drove it, and the Sprawl that has burdened it. www.confessionsinacrownvicbook.com
Peter Macdonald Blachly takes us on a unique adventure, documenting the seventeen years he spent in a spiritual cult, while providing candid insights into the circumstances and conditions that set him up for manipulation by a charismatic and malevolent narcissist posing as a spiritual teacher. He provides a colorful and spellbinding description of adventures in India where he travels extensively with a group of fellow converts performing the sacred music of the Sikhs for audiences of tens of thousands. Back in the US, he forms a "spiritual" rock band that tours the country from Maine to Vancouver, weaving his travel adventures together with his own journey of spiritual awakening and his gradual disillusionment and eventual break from his Guru. Blachly's understanding of psychology and human frailties, make the lessons he draws from his own experiences universal and highly relevant today, when personality cults have infected both the political and religious life of the nation. While he pulls no punches about the moral failings of his Guru, the book is not an expose. Instead, while acknowledging that most people who started studying yoga with him in the late 1960s and early '70s did not join the cult, he writes with humor and introspection about his own vulnerabilities and the misplaced idealism that set him up for exploitation. Regarded by his fellow Sikhs as a powerful personality and pillar of the community, he is unflinching about acknowledging his own fractured sense of identity that he struggles to overcome. Most of all, "The Inner Circle" is an entertaining and compelling read about his journey into and back out of a cult that remains active today.
In The Subtle Body, Stefanie Syman tells the surprising story of yoga's transformation from a centuries-old spiritual discipline to a multibillion-dollar American industry. Yoga's history in America is longer and richer than even its most devoted practitioners realize. It was present in Emerson's New England, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was fashionable among the leisure class. And yet when Americans first learned about yoga, what they learned was that it was a dangerous, alien practice that would corrupt body and soul. A century later, you can find yoga in gyms, malls, and even hospitals, and the arrival of a yoga studio in a neighborhood is a signal of cosmopolitanism. How did it happen? It did so, Stefanie Syman explains, through a succession of charismatic yoga teachers, who risked charges of charlatanism as they promoted yoga in America, and through generations of yoga students, who were deemed unbalanced or even insane for their efforts. The Subtle Body tells the stories of these people, including Henry David Thoreau, Pierre A. Bernard, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Isherwood, Sally Kempton, and Indra Devi. From New England, the book moves to New York City and its new suburbs between the wars, to colonial India, to postwar Los Angeles, to Haight-Ashbury in its heyday, and back to New York City post-9/11. In vivid chapters, it takes in celebrities from Gloria Swanson and George Harrison to Christy Turlington and Madonna. And it offers a fresh view of American society, showing how a seemingly arcane and foreign practice is as deeply rooted here as baseball or ballet. This epic account of yoga's rise is absorbing and often inspiring—a major contribution to our understanding of our society.
One of the top scientists in the field of asteroid hunting explains how, for the first time, humanity could have the knowledge to prevent a devastating asteroid impact. --
Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage is a compelling and beautifully unfolding tale, offering a haunting look into a teacher/student relationship. This intimate memoir, written by one of Yogi Bhajan's prized teachers and exalted students, is full of devotion, love, dedication, betrayal, loss and the healing unification of the self. It also reads as a love letter to a unique time in history-the '60s in Los Angeles and New Mexico, where love, music, art, spiritual exploration, often led to self-transformation. As a historical treatise and a spiritual mystery, this book offers unique insight into the origins of the Western Sikh movement and the proliferation of Yogi Bhajan's kundalini yoga.
Five hundred years ago, Guru Nanak founded the Sikh faith in India. The Sikhs defied the caste system; rejected the authority of Hindu priests; forbade magic and idolatry; and promoted the equality of men and women -- beliefs that incurred the wrath of both Hindus and Muslims. In the centuries that followed, three of Nanak's nine successors met violent ends, and his people continued to battle hostile regimes. The conflict has raged into our own time: in 1984 the Golden Temple of Amritsar -- the holy shrine of the Sikhs--was destroyed by the Indian Army. In retaliation, Sikh bodyguards assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Now, Patwant Singh gives us the compelling story of the Sikhs -- their origins, traditions and beliefs, and more recent history. He shows how a movement based on tenets of compassion and humaneness transformed itself, of necessity, into a community that values bravery and military prowess as well as spirituality. We learn how Gobind Singh, the tenth and last Guru, welded the Sikhs into a brotherhood, with each man bearing the surname Singh, or "Lion," and abiding by a distinctive code of dress and conduct. He tells of Banda the Brave's daring conquests, which sowed the seeds of a Sikh state, and how the enlightened ruler Ranjit Singh fulfilled this promise by founding a Sikh empire. The author examines how, through the centuries, the Sikh soldier became an exemplar of discipline and courage and explains how Sikhs -- now numbering nearly 20 million worldwide -- have come to be known for their commitment to education, their business acumen, and their enterprising spirit. Finally, Singh concludes that it would be a grave error to alienate an energetic and vital community like the Sikhs if modern India is to realize its full potential. He urges India's leaders to learn from the past and to "honour the social contract with Indians of every background and persuasion."
What can century-old advice columns tell us about the Internet today? This book reveals the little-known history of advice columns in American newspapers and the virtual communities they created among their readers. Imagine a community of people who had never met writing into a media outlet, day after day, to reveal intimate details about their lives, anxieties, and hopes. The original "virtual communities" were born not on the Internet in chat rooms but a century earlier in one of America's most ubiquitous news features: the advice column. Newspaper Confessions is the first history of the newspaper advice column, a genre that has shaped Americans' relationships with media, their experiences with popular therapy, and their virtual interactions across generations. Emerging in the 1890s, advice columns became unprecedented virtual forums where readers could debate the most resonant cultural crises of the day with strangers in an anonymous, yet strikingly public, forum. Early advice columns are essential--and overlooked--precursors to today's digital culture: forums, social media groups, chat rooms, and other online communities that define how present-day American communicate with each other. By charting the economic and cultural motivations behind the rise of this influential genre, Julie Golia offers a nuanced analysis of the advice given by a diverse sample of columns across several decades, emphasizing the ways that advice columnists framed their counsel as modern, yet upheld the racial and gendered status quo of the day. She offers lively, surprising, and poignant case studies, demonstrating how columnists and everyday newspaper readers transformed advice columns into active and participatory virtual communities of confession, advice, debate, and empathy.