Newsletter - From Yoga to AI, Influence Affects Us All
Bad Actors Move with the Times, So Should We To Protect Ourselves
This week’s Influence Continuum podcast features author and musician Peter Blachly, who wrote The Inner Circle: My Seventeen Years in the Cult of the American Sikhs, Book 1. We discuss his time in the Yogi Bhajan still-active Kundalini Yoga cult 3HO. He recently appeared in an HBO MAX documentary called Breath of Fire, which explores the group and its abuses in depth. If you know anyone who is into Yoga, you won’t want to miss this one.
My latest blog post in Psychology Today, “Rethinking Humanity's Devotion to Technology,” discusses humanity’s growing dependence on and devotion to technology. My regular followers will recognize this as a further exploration of the issues I discussed with Harvard/ MIT Humanist chaplain Greg Epstein a few weeks ago. We must recognize and moderate our dependence on technology; our humanity depends on it! On the same topic, my friends at the Center for Humane Technology interviewed Epstein for their podcast, Your Undivided Attention titled “The Tech-God Complex: Why We Need to Be Skeptics.” Greg kindly mentioned my expertise (around 32 minutes in), but with Musk and other technology billionaires aligned with the incoming administration, you’ll want to listen to all of this fascinating discussion.
Last week, I hosted a multi-social media livestream from 3 to 4 p.m. EST; if you missed it, you can see the replay here. I plan to do another one tomorrow (Nov. 27th); I welcome everyone to tune in with questions and comments!
In this episode of The Influence Continuum, I spoke with Peter about his time in the group’s “Inner Circle” and his personal experiences with Bhajan. Peter told us about his appearance in the new HBO Max 4-part documentary called Breath of Fire on the topic. The doc is very well done and was based on a Vanity Fair article, “The Second Coming of Guru Jagat” by Hayley Phelan. “Breath of Fire: The Unbelievable Story of Guru Jagat, the Elizabeth Holmes of Yoga” is Hillary Busis’ follow-up article on the docuseries.
Read the blog post or listen to the podcast:
Technology has increasingly fulfilled roles historically served by religion, providing meaning, purpose, and answers to existential anxieties. This shift follows a broader historical pattern in which dominant cultural frameworks transitioned from theology in the Middle Ages to politics during the Enlightenment and later to economics during the Industrial Revolution. Technology is the latest framework to address humanity's desires for control and transcendence.
As always, please let us know what you think about these pieces or what you’d like to see us discuss in the future. Thanks so much!
