Essence of Sant Mat

Radha Soami means Lord of the soul and Beas refers to the town in India near the headquarters of the community where the Radha Soami faith originated. Its central tenets are that there is one God, human beings are expressions of God’s love and divinity, and that there is a spiritual purpose to human life.

The Radha Soami teachings, also called Sant Mat (Teachings of the Saints) or the Science of the Soul, is a path of self-realization and God-realization under the guidance of saints or mystics who are appointed as spiritual masters qualified to initiate and guide the faith’s practitioners. God-realization is the highest experience of God’s presence in the world and in oneself. Throughout the ages, saints and mystics have emphasized the importance of prayer and meditation to enable practitioners to develop a personal relationship with God and deepen their spirituality. The essence of Sant Mat is reunion of the individual soul with God and the experience of the redeeming power of God’s love and the fellowship of all humanity.

Saints and masters teach that the purpose of human life is for the individual soul to return to the Lord, its creator. This can be accomplished only by receiving initiation from a true living master, who connects the soul of the disciple to the Shabd, another word for the current of divine energy that created and sustains the universe, also known as God, the Word, or holy spirit. When the master initiates a person, he guarantees to take that soul back to its true home (the Lord), and from that moment onward he never leaves the disciple. The master places his radiant form (spiritual essence) within the disciple and constantly guides and helps the disciple on both the inner journey and in this world as well.

In Spiritual Gems, Maharaj Sawan Singh summarizes the teachings of the saints:

Briefly, it is a practical method of separating the soul from its combination with the mind and the body, and then uniting it with its source, or the supreme Creator. It aims at the union of the soul with its origin.
_{Spiritual Gems, Maharaj Sawan Singh, 1960, RSSB, p.193}

In Light on Sant Mat, Maharaj Charan Singh describes God and the purpose of saints:

People give God different names, according to their liking, but He who is known by all these is one without a second. They call Him ‘Ram’, ‘Allah’, ‘Vah Guru’, ‘Radha Soami’ or ‘God’, but He is one and the same. He is the one God of us all. There are no differences or limitations of caste, creed, color, or country for Him. He is eternal and for all times and ages. He alone is eternal, permanent; all else is mortal, transient. In the beginning – before time – He alone was and created the whole universe out of Nam, which is also called the Word, Logos, or Shabd. Man is the epitome of the universe and is also the real temple of God, where He can be realized. It is for teaching this technique that Saints come into the world.
_{Light on Sant Mat, Maharaj, Sawan Singh, 1985, pp.3-4)}

According to the Radha Soami teachings (and many other faiths and philosophies as well), every soul has taken birth innumerable times in the cycle of reincarnation. In each birth the individual has performed both good and bad actions (karmas), which must be balanced at a later date by appropriate reactions, or consequences. Because so many karmic debts are created in each life, the individual is forced to return to this plane, birth after birth, in order to balance these debts. But in the process of repaying the old karmic debts, new karmic debts are also being created. It therefore becomes impossible for a soul to escape from the wheel of reincarnation by its own unaided efforts. This can be accomplished only with the help of a master.

At the time of initiation, the seeker is asked to take four vows, promising to abide by them for life. These four vows are commitments made by the disciple to the master; following them implicitly is essential for a disciple to make progress on the path. The four vows are:

• To adhere to a lacto-vegetarian diet;
• To abstain from alcohol, tobacco products, habit-forming and mind-altering drugs;
• To lead a pure moral life while performing one’s duties in the world and earning one’s own living by honest means;
• To practice meditation with sincerity and dedication for two and a half hours daily, as taught at the time of initiation.

True worship lies in the soul’s contacting the Audible Life Stream [Shabd] for it is this that can lead the spirit to its salvation and take it to its true destination. It is this worship that purifies the mind, rids it of its various coverings, physical, mental and causal, and merges it in its Source [God].
_{Discourses on Sant Mat, Vol. 1, Maharaj Charan Singh, 1993, RSSB, p. 34}

True devotion is related to the heart, not to any external place or practice. If one worships God with a pure heart and asks for nothing from God but God himself, that kind of worship will be fruitful.
_{My Submission, Maharaj Sawan Singh, 2004, RSSB, p. 15}