I received a communication from a member of a Facebook community.
“Radha Soami Satsang Philosophy is destroying Vedic culture by luring gullible Brahmins ignorant of Vedas
They look down at all hindu elements as worthless in the name of philosophy.
please help me combat them in theory.
My relatives are giving up hinduism plucking off sacred threads and mangala sutrams in the name of this bogus philosophy’
The writer blogged about this.
“Brahman is considered to be the highest reality in Vedanta.
The founders of Radhasoami faith, however, came forward with a new concept. According to them, TheBrahman of Vedanta is limited to the second grand division of the creation whom they call “spiritual-material region”.
They hold that the Brahman is not the true Supreme Being or the highest reality because he is not perfectly free from mind and matter.
They assert that though spiritual components predominate in Brahman, there is Maya latent in the seed form and a Supreme Reality having the least admixture of Maya cannot be styled as the highest truth.
They envisaged the highest and the first grand division of creation as the region of the true Supreme Being who is absolutely spiritual and totally free from mind and matter.
Such a Supreme Being they have named as Radhasoami. In view of the said difference between Radhasoami and Brahman, the meaning of the word is not Krishna or the Lord of Radha.
A casual observer however gets confused and straightway starts interpreting it for Krishna as Farquhar did when he observed :
“It is necessary also to realize that the real meaning of Radhasoami is Krishna as Lord of Radha (His cowherd mistress in the latest cycle of myth) that
Soami is only a curious phonetic misspell of Swami.
My answer.
These interpretations come from a half-baked understanding of the Vedas.
From what is posted on their site, i get the impression that they may not know Sanskrit at all, let alone the Veda such is the misinterpretation.
Nowhere does the Vedas proclaim that Brahman contains Maya or ‘ he is not perfectly free from mind and matter’,
Brahman perse is described by the Neti Nyaya or the process of excluding things, like
Not this, not his, neither tall nor small etc.
It is not described by direct by positive Attributes, excepting by the Realized qualities (which we are capable of perceiving) Sat,Chit,Ananda,
Pragyana Brahma, Sathyam Gnaam Anandham Brahma..
May is a concept that has been used to understand the manifestation or the differentiation of the Reality to enable one to understand the Reality.
Acquisition of Knowledge,unlike in the Western Philosophy, is a negative Concept,
The removal of ignorance is Knowledge , not the acquisition some thing from outside as you are a Part of The Brahman which is Knowledge personified.
You appear to be different from Brahman because of Avidya or Ignorance.
Avidya at the Universal level it is called Maya.
When your basic premise is wrong , your conclusions are also equally wrong.
As I noted earlier, the site abounds in inaccuracies down to out right lies on the Vedas.
One may have to write a rebuttal for every sentence they have provided.
One should never take umbrage under Lord Krishna to criticize the Vedas for Lord Krishna is The Veda and as Vyasa He compiled it.
The philosophy of Radhasoami Satsang is either a fraud being perpetrated to fill in some one’ coffers or the ravings of a delinquent or a clever ploy to
discredit the Vedas or a combination of all these
As to people discarding Upavedeeda, well it is your funeral.
As to Mangala Sutra, it is not a concept if the Vedas.
If some one wants to become a spiritual pervert, we can not do any thing about it.
Vedas are not The Bible to threaten people into believing it nor Shankaracharya a Christ who is proselytizer.
Sources.
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