My Credo and Rejection of Sathya Sai Baba
by Robert PriddyI was once almost entirely positive to all and everything having to do with Sathya Sai Baba (SSB), his ashrams, his representatives, his teachings and himself. That changed, at first only gradually and peripherally. Though I am presently concerned only to expose wrong-doings, misguided teachings and false promises by Sathya Sai, this is simply to 'balance the account' as it were, since the positive propaganda machine around Sai (to which I once contributed too much) is so massive, so prone to use disinformation and so closed to any sincere discussion or investigation of unpleasant but crucial facts. Once I thought the teaching of Sathya Sai Baba to be largely sublime, but it proved otherwise in so many aspects - both in his word and action - especially since the 1993 murders.
For those who may like to know, as well as those who wish it were not so, I am as bright of mind and more at ease with my conscience than ever. I have faith in the sense of trust and loyalty to the good and true and what is best in and for mankind, but I avoid having beliefs about anything beyond investigation in every way I can. Belief in something one cannot know seems to me a psychological failure, a crutch which is needed only while the disability prevails. The truest faith in my view is the faith in one's own truth, which becomes a matter of direct experiential knowing.
I ceased to have any Christian beliefs before I became of age. As time has progressed, I became convinced on a scientific historical basis of the inauthenticity of most of the Gospels. I have followed research into the history of the Middle East, including the Nag Hammadi texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls and much else in a lifelong studious interest in the history of idea and philosophy, and the history of all major cultures and religions. Consequently, even before I came to visit Sai Baba at age 48, I did not believe in most of the contents of the Gospels (which researchers have shown to be 60% extremely doubtful), nor can I believe that Jesus was a holy Messiah, the son of god or the only way or any of that Biblical mythology. I recognise that there was a historical basis for many of the stories, but also that most of the New Testament 'miracles' and stories predate Jesus and are found attributed to half a dozen semi-mythical figures in other religious cultures well before he lived.
Though I agree with what I see as positive human values expressed in the New Testament and incorporated in various Christian doctrines, I differ from all Christian doctrines on many basic issues. For example, I do not support the doctrine of unconditional forgiveness, for forgiveness should be granted only as a result of changed behaviour on the behalf of the offender, or at least on showing remorse through recognition and admission of own culpability. I do not accept any doctrines of heaven, hell, inherited sin or redemption, which I regard as primitive traditional thinking. I am not even any longer an outright believer in any form of god, though I am not an atheist either. I am philosophically and scientifically informed and inclined and have studied both the sociology and psychology of mysticism and transcendental experience deeply to find that there are alternative down-to-earth (i.e. scientific) explanations of most of these phenomena. This is not just an academic study, I have involved myself deeply and genuinely in the practices and found their claims - though producing extraordinary results - to be often largely bogus and leading to self-mystification and loss of reality sense. I have survived it all... one of the few, it seems. The idea of an all-knowing and all-powerful divine creator - and the various external or internal forms this may take for the human mind can be studied in many ways. For example, it can often be shown to be connected with a particular kind of psychology or need for protection from fears or for support against enemies. It can be seen as an imaginative and ingrained attempt at explanation of all that one so far does not know with reasonable certainty about nature and mankind.A summary of certain events: When first I set out to visit Sai Baba, after powerful paranormal experiences which were somehow apparently connected to his agency, I thought how truly wonderful it would be if even half of what he claimed in his frequent discourses were true. I set about finding out for myself, with considerable hopes. This was no simple investigation, for it involved full commitment - also in action - from both my wife and I for close on two decades.
While still an active follower, I wrote a pro-Sai book (Source of the Dream: My Way to Sathya Sai Baba - Bangalore, 1994 & Samuel Weiser Inc. USA 1998.) The process by which I became a follower is fully described there. It was of exclusively positive (and comparatively unexaggerated) about SSB and his movement and described some of the very many very extraordinary paranormal phenomena I experienced in connection with worship of SSB. Though I stand by the facts I state, I now admit that the descriptions and were often tainted by over-heated interpretations false indoctrination, and erroneous opinions. I also contributed many long SSB-supportive articles (over 25) to the Sai-journal Sanathana Sarathi. My wife and I were the active leaders of the Sathya Sai Organisation in Norway for about 18 years. There are plenty of people still stuck in the happy delusion who cannot understand for the life of them that I have moved on... how could I ever do that? This website gives some of the answers...
On what happened to destroy my entire faith in Sathya Sai Baba: Almost every time I went to Sai's ashrams, (nine long visits since 1984) I have - despite myself and my best hopes - I gradually came across suspicious and wrong things around Sai which seemed far too closely connected to him and in contradiction to his whole teaching. These did not then weaken my faith in him, however, for I exercised much ingenuity in rationalising them away for myself and to others. But I could still not but sometimes wonder if there were not many things we were being kept in the dark about too. My own strongly-held belief that he could be a world avatar was not shaken, even as it was gradually being nibbled away at the edges all the time by disturbing incidents and fishy explanations.I watched as many people I met leapt to conclusions either for or against the welter of claims by Sathya Sai and about him, for - though I long bought a large part of the whole expensive package - I could not rid myself of a questioning attitude as events unfolded. I also did my best to like and help all those who he had put in place in the Sathya Sai Organisation, which eventually proved not only to be too hard a course to complete, not only for me, but for almost all the people I liked and respected who went through similar trials with uncivil and unloving people in high places. From being a convinced follower of SSB and a believer in many of his claims and teachings, I gradually became more discerning, sceptical of his more extravagant claims and less clear and untestable teachings.
In 1996, my extremely good friend V.K. Narasimhan told me in secret - and in a carefully lowered voice - some key facts about the murders at the ashram in 1993. This shocked me into investigating further for several years, which led to my much greater disillusionment with the ashram and high office-bearers, but from which I somehow managed mainly to exempt Sai Baba himself. It was for years mentally too large a hurdle for me to surmount to regard him as an accomplice to murder through covering up the facts and manipulating his followers in the highest positions in India. Yet, since I rather believed he was 'omnipotent' in some sense - well, at least within his own Prashanthi Nilayam - (and even though he clearly failed to exercise his supposed omni-will for the good of all devoted followers), in the long run it was simply not possible for me to sustain belief in his innocence.
SSB's acceptance of the actions of those directly involved - particularly his own younger brother Janaki Ramiah - and his avoidance of any public questioning etc. caused increasing doubts about his claimed purity and divinity. In 2000 these doubts received an unwanted strong boost by the emergence of an ever-increasing number of independent allegations world-wide of sexual abuse of young men and boys by Sai Baba, who so far remains wholly unaccountable through political and judicial protection in India at the highest levels.
However, the strength of my trust in Sai was so strong that it took four years for me slowly to investigate and come to terms with the murders evidence, plus many months even to look into the sex abuse allegations, which I had brushed aside. It took a year of fence-sitting while examining and following-up the facts before I could no longer remain in doubt of Sai Baba's guilt! This conviction has only been confirmed time and time again since then. Even then, I tried in many ways to see how such facts could be explained in the context of SSB being an divine avatar, or through mental disturbance, delusional states, jealousy and other possible aberrations on the part of the many and varied accusers. None of these considerations would hold up against common sense, reason, human understanding or even against what Sai teaches and preaches himself.
In short, I did not jump to any conclusions without deep conviction based on most thorough consideration (as it seems that most people did one way or the other). It was the sheer weight of objective events 'external' beyond my control which shifted the balance. The process was very disturbing and painful, obviously, after so many years total absorption in Sai Baba, his teachings and spiritual practices - involving the sacrifice of time, energy, money and many former social contacts.
On the one hand, I have been grateful to him for a number of extraordinary things he had apparently done for me, some of which I have - in retrospect - come to look as having other possible (and sometimes much more likely) explanations. On the other, I am very disgusted and cannot accept many things for which I am convinced that he is personally responsible. Besides, gratitude is best expressed in actions, which I have done… but it cannot and should not be sustained permanently despite so much deceit and worse. I do not expect eternal gratitude for any good things I have done, so why should Sathya Sai Baba, who claims to be selfless, so often express how much he expects it?
So, as an ex-participant in the Sai movement, I found myself becoming yet more and more of an independently-minded observer of the whole Sai phenomenon and movement. This does not mean that I have no antipathy to Sai Baba's great deceits, simply that I am able to study them critically and more dispassionately than persons without long acquaintance and deep insight into him and what is around him. Obviously, I have disdain for him and scorn him entirely because of his untruthfulness, fraudulence and defects in his character and behaviour (of which I now realise that there are many), because I am committed to the truth and the good of the public and not because of personal bitterness, anger or the other base motives which Sai Baba repeatedly ascribes to anyone who criticises him to the slightest degree, and which his devotees repeat mindlessly.
I have done plenty of what Sai Baba has asked of devotees and I can even regard myself as one of the financiers of his easy and luxurious lifestyle, having donated very large (for me) sums of money, even though I was having to live on a disability pension. My wife and I did thousands of hours of seva. So did others we organised, but those of them who did any genuine seva also left not long after we did. I was the active worker/leader in Norway for 18 years. But I found him out well and truly! I feel I am no longer wasting my time, not being deceived at all by the Sai phenomena, hype, corruption and lies any more.
Once the first doubt of Sai Baba's honesty was firmly established, a progressive collapse of many accompanying beliefs followed, a liberating mental domino effect which successively readjusted the whole set of interpretations of experiences and putative facts and even some of the moral principles on which my former faith in Sai Baba was based. The result of this renovation of the entire SSB phenomenon and my experiences relating to it is expressed in my current writings.
Looking back, I recognise that some of my personal experience in going to India, in plunging deeply into the spirit of it all, was instructive and had some benefits for me. These came to rights mainly when I eventually 'surfaced'. Having had to really examine myself thoroughly and consciously evaluate my beliefs and actions and how I could have been duped, I learned very much about the entire human condition that one cannot learn properly and definitively without getting so involved in some kind of deep engagement outside everyday experience. Fortunately, my character and basic values were already well developed and what I regard as my 'everyday spirituality' was essentially sound before Sai Baba came into my life with his paranormal powers. When I discovered the worm at the rotten core of the Sai apple, I fortunately had well-established insights and well-tried ways to fall back on. Young people who get inducted do not have such an alternative, so awakening to knowledge that one's life has been surruonded by such deceptions can surely be very traumatic. From all this I learned first-hand something of how those who have embraced a set of beliefs and have invested in them very much personal thought and feeling, can react to crucial facts which, if true, will cause a complete overturn of those beliefs.
My dilemma was that I had written a book praising Sathya Sai for doing much good, about which I now realise I was being at least partly deceived, and in very cunning and wilful ways. My considerable exaggeration of his importance was based on my having been fundamentally misled to believe (firstly by him... then by all the many indoctrinated and confused followers) that he is all that he says he is. He leaves no middle ground - it's either the whole package or nothing. So, since I am concerned to correct false perceptions I have helped spread, I am not inclined to laud him for whatever good works he may personally actually have done or does. I want to right the balance, and the other side of the scale has been far too over-weighted. That is how objectivity is approached, on an informed, insider basis, and no one who has not this kind of experience can speak with any real authority on the actual nature of religious sects and cults.
Many of us had many experiences. These turned out not to be of a divine nature but largely either 'interpreted phenomena', often only sleight of hand, and other illusions and delusions called 'leelas' arising partly through one's own mind plus intense concentration or strong longings, not forgetting the synchronicities of the unconscious mind, and other events apparently partly through an etheric medium. Beside all this, all kinds of people have all kinds of "inner talk experience" even with aliens and angels, madmen and famous writers etc., which puts Sai Baba's alleged 'appearances' in perspective.
Sathya Sai Baba has shown himself to be an outright liar, self-contradictor, boaster, gigantic self-promoter, and a 'healer' who says he was cured faster than any other human being, but he is unable even to walk properly and is half-paralysed and failing mentally (he claimed the earth was attracted by his love, which was why he stumbled due to the intense magnetism! But it was just a failing hip joint) He who had audacity to repeat the adage, "Healer, heal thyself!" What deceit! What foolishness in those who believe such deceit.
It took a long time to discover enough about the secretive and largely unapproachable and incommunicative, manipulative person that Sathya Sai Baba really is to realise that - despite all my faith and best hopes - he is a narcissist and uses many methods or tricks to attract and control people. He has all the qualities of the classical psychopath, and delusions of grandeur of a megalomaniacal dimension. My disillusionment meant that I had to cut away all the redundant ideas about hism and superfluous advice that he employs largely to keep people subservient to him, uncritical and entrapped in his movement, whether emotionally, mentally, socially or all of this at once.
My doubts were further reinforced as events unfolded, not least by the way Sai and many of his most keen followers have reacted, in a manner quite contrary to his teaching and their proclaimed ethos, which puts truth on a pinnacle (but actually only in word, not action). The rationalisations, lies and often slurs and defamations - also from SSB himself - speak loudly for themselves. This is indeed a threadbare 'God Almighty'!
A person whose charisma and social power (backed up by some scientifically-inexplicable psychic powers had overwhelmed me, as it still does probably more than a million people), Sai Baba has turned out to fit too many of the characteristics of a psychopath and sociopath, with megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur and a power complex, which is also expressed through the constant homosexual abuses as described in various of the allegations. I could not find out definitely certain basic things about him that are not told openly until many years had passed (which is also the situation of the great majority of followers). Yet I came to learn of them mostly from V.K. Narasimhan (who died in 2000) and I am still somewhat amazed at how I could have remained so effectively blinded by his whole doubtful set-up for so long. Only because of my belief in his integrity did I manage to entertain much of what he 'teaches' (which I was also aware is nevertheless standard Indian religious fare - often superficial - all taken from a rich tradition). The greatest possible abuse of others is abuse of their faith. This, above all else, I consider the most serious accusation laid at the door of Sathya Sai Baba.