Not once have I ever heard a Radhasoami guru (with the notable exception of Baba Faqir Chand) admit that a long held doctrine or tenet was mistaken. It appears that Radhasoamis want to embrace science provided that it dovetails with their own belief system. It seemed as if my wife Andrea (whose talk was even more pointed than my own) and I had hit a sensitive nerve since we were calling into question the absoluteness of Radhasoami’s cosmological schema. Satsangi, heard my entire talk and later after some impromptu remarks I made at a panel discussion, he spoke for about ten minutes expressing his disagreement with my emphasis on being skeptical of the mystical.
If our senses can (and do) betray us about what we see and hear and smell, so too can our consciousness mislead us about the reality of our inner experiences. It is a simple point, but one which has devastating implications for any religion that believes that it has already uncovered the ultimate truth of the universe. Just as we can be deceived by our brain in this world (what my wife Andrea calls the “cerebral mirage”) without being aware of it, so too can the meditator being duped by in his/her interior explorations. I argued that understanding how consciousness evolved in the first place was elemental and that would-be mystics should also be trained skeptics. This came into sharp focus for me this past year when I gave a talk in India at the International Conference on Quantum and Nano Computing Systems and Applications at the Dayalbagh Educational Institute in Agra. And, as such, gives one pause about whether Radhasoami is really a science or just wants to appear scientific so that its spiritual practices and aims will be taken more seriously. Yet, their respective definitions of science are invariably intertwined with a specific theological agenda. Satsangi (the current head of Dayalbagh Satsang Agra) want to emphasize how Radhasoami serves as a scientific model for exploring higher states of consciousness. Gurinder Singh (the current head of Radhasoami Satsang Beas) and P.S. Radhasoami fits Smart’s model almost to a tee and by his yardstick would be cataloged as a religion, albeit a new and emerging one worldwide. Ninian Smart, the late Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of many seminal books, argues that religion has seven major dimensions: 1) Myths 2) Rituals 3) Experiences 4) Doctrines 5) Ethics 6) Social Aspect 7) Material Forms. However, on closer inspection they both seem to have much more in common with religion than science, despite their concerted efforts to create a “science of the soul.” Radhasoami satsangs, particularly those at Beas and at Dayalbagh, have advertised themselves as a scientific enterprise. If Radhasoami really wants to be a science then it has to do that which it has failed to accomplish so far: be willing to be wrong.
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