2024-12-09
37 分钟No matter how religious you may or may not be, or how much you do or do not know about the Sikh religion, there’s something we can all learn from their major philosophies. Simran Jeet Singh is the author of the book The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life. He joins Chris this week to talk about how to approach life with more optimism and shares how he’s navigated prejudice with humor and compassion. Hear about why he believes we all win when we show more curiosity and understanding for one another, even if we don’t subscribe to any particular set of beliefs.For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
You're listening to how to Be a Better Human.
I'm your host, Chris Duffy.
Sometimes when I'm trying to be a better human, I feel like my job is to reevaluate my actions or to think about things that I'm already thinking about in a new way.
What if I prioritized my work tasks differently or if I thought about my self worth from a different angle?
Maybe this one new life hack for loading the dishwasher is gonna be what pushes me over the edge into transcendent bliss.
Other times, I think you might argue more self aware times, I realize how vast the universe of ideas that I've never even considered at all is.
There is so much wisdom and perspective that I've never exposed myself to and that is a big reason why I am so excited that we have today's guest on the show.
Simran Jeet Singh is a professor of history at Union Theological Seminary and he's the best selling author of the Light We How Sikh Wisdom can Transform your Life.
Simran is also the host of the podcast Wisdom and Practice and he writes and speaks a lot about the Sikh religion, which I have to be honest, I was not very familiar with before.
I read his book.
That's actually kind of surprising to me in retrospect because it's one of the largest religions in the world with somewhere between 25 and 30 million believers, depending on how you count.
And for perspective, that means that about twice as many people, or almost twice as many people identify as sick as identify as Jewish.
I'm not going to try and sum up all of the Sikh beliefs for you, partly because who am I to do that?
And partly because I think Simran does such a great job of it in this interview and in his book.
But I will just say that it is a monotheistic religion that originated in Punjab in India, and that believers are often most visibly identified by their turbans.
But that visibility also means that they frequently attract prejudice, harassment, even violence.
And there's a lot of ignorance about what it means to be sick, what it means to wear a turban, and what they believe.
Here's a clip from Simran's podcast where he's talking about the ways that he personally has dealt with the confusion, the bias, and even the hatred that gets.
Directed towards his community.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s in South Texas, I was an easy target with my turban and beard and brown skin.