Sathya Sai Baba Materialization

[Thedore Rosa]

Myconcerns about Sathya Sai Baba

(1926-2011)UPDATE NEWS: Heartfelt condolences to the millions of Sathya Sai Baba devotees on his passing from this world. Baba's heart stopped beating at 7:28 am (India time) on Easter Sunday morning, April 24, 2011. He had been on ventilator support under critical care at his "super-speciality" hospital, the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences in Anantapur District, since he was admitted on March 28 with serious lung infection and chest congestion. Doctors confirmed that Sai Baba died of cardio-respiratory failure. He was 85 years old by western count, 86 years old by the Indian way of reckoning one's age. May his soul be eternally at peace.

It is a curious paradox in authentic spirituality that we do best always to see everyone in the most sublime light as embodiments of the One Divine Light, yet we must also be savvy and sharp about injustices, abuses of sentient beings, abuses of Truth, Virtue and Propriety. Jesus taught, "Judge not, lest you be judged." And yet Jesus himself could be quite "judgmental" and "critical," even in the most genuine earliest collection of his teachings, as carefully sifted by scholars (such as when he harshly rebuked the greedy money-lenders and threw them out of the temple). Hence, our mature spiritual intelligence needs to be a judge or a critic, that is, an evaluator, of proper and improper behavior occurring in ourselves (first and foremost, ourselves) and also in others, for the sake of the common good. Otherwise, "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" (a line famously attributed to Irish philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke, d.1797). We can criticize or judge our own behavior and the behavior of apparent "others" (the One Self in disguise) while fully loving them as the Beloved.

Alas, many of his former devotees or longtime critics (not including myself) view Sathya Sai as a "charlatan huckster," and/or "black magician," and/or "the very incarnation of evil." They base these charges not just on widespread revelations of faked "miraculous" materializations of artifacts and sacred ash (to go along with some evidently genuine paranormal capacities), but, more seriously, on numerous reported allegations of improper sexual contact with male youth. There are concerns over other serious matters as well, such as financial improprieties at the ashram, instances of plagiarism by Sathya Sai, and the apparent suppression of any meaningful investigation of the infamous six "bedroom murders" on the night of June 6-7, 1993 at Sathya Sai's main ashram, Prashanti Nilayam at Puttaparthi in South India.

-----------[UPDATE NOTE, 10/30/11: On Sathya Sai, a fascinating message was posted by Pratap Penumala to the internet board of the academic group RISA (Religion in South Asia) on April 24, 2011, the weekend of Sathya's passing. Note the implicit suggestion (as i read it) that the early teen-aged Sathya Sai might have been "gifted" with some paranormal powers by the postmortem spirit of "a certain mendicant" after the latter died... and that this could very well be the primary source of some of Sathya's powers. Here's the post:

Dear Folks,

I must say that I have never been a devotee of Sai Baba, but had the good fortune and privilege of being a student of his first cousin Shree Shankara Narayana Raju duing my undergraduate studies. He was a professor of Telugu at Bangalore University in the early 1970s where I studied with him. I was very close to him and he used to, now and then, relate things about his personal life with his cousin who later became renowned as Satya Sai Baba. He was a remarkable man with a remarkable memory. He never carried a book to the class room but could recite the entire MBH, Ramayana, and a whole range of Telugu poetic texts, including Sringaranaishadam without the aid of a text. I mention this little detail to indicate the intense religious background from which the Satya Sai Baba himself came. My teacher once told me that a certain mendicant visited their village (Puttaparti) and took ill and stayed at the temple shelter and apparently his cousin Satya Narayana Raju took care of him during that illness and three days later the mendicant passed away. It was a few days after that Satya (as he used to call him) began to display some 'unusual behaviour' and ever since began the story of what we today know as the Satya Sai Baba phenomenon. I have great regard for the work of the Sai organization, especially in the field of education for women in rural side of India. [...] --Pratap]

A summary point on this entire matter is something I learned in 1980 from listening to and observing two eminent sages of nondual wisdom, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj of Bombay and Annamalai Swami of Tiruvannamalai, along with many other true sages and saints of different traditions whom I've had the good fortune to observe. The point is this: This manifest world is all a perfect Divine dream, yet one must aspire (by Divine Grace) to act impeccably, lovingly and with complete integrity within the dream.

As for my own direct experience of Sathya Sai, I had many memorable dreams of him, along with dreams of other spiritual masters (on a few occasions two or more figures appeared in the same dream, such as Nisargadatta Maharaj and Sathya Sai). These very vivid dreams began the night after I first began to read of Baba in Sam Sandweiss' and Arnold Schulman's books on Baba in Summer of 1978, and occurred over the many years, even including a few dreams of SSB after I left his movement in early Feb. 2001. Such dreams almost always featured the personal form of Sathya Sai communicating a profound field of very loving, radiant, and blissful energy. Like it or not, this bodily form of Sathya Sai (along with the form of the old Shirdi Sai Baba) is used by the deep Self for millions of people worldwide as an archetypal image or instrument to communicate tremendous blessings, healings, and sense of well-being. (When I lived at the SSB Center household in S.F., we heard from many visitors and people calling on the phone how Sathya Sai had appeared to them in remarkable dreams and visions.)

On three different trips to Asia, in 1980-81, 1988, and 1995-96, involving over 8 months of travel in India, I spent a total of 4 weeks at Sathya Sai's main ashram, Prashanti Nilayam (Abode of Peace) at Puttaparthi, south India (north of Bangalore). Most of the rest of the time was spent at the late Ramana Maharshi's Ramanashramam (total of 7 weeks) and Papa Ramdas' Anandashram (2 weeks) and visiting with Nisargadatta Maharaj in Bombay (2 weeks in Jan. 1981), Mata Amritanandamayi at her Kerala ashram (1988), and many other persons, ashrams and sacred places in India (Mother Teresa and Dadaji of Calcutta, the Shirdi Sai complex, the Meher Baba pilgrim center, Bodh Gaya, Varanasi, Agra, Vrindavan, Sufi shrines, the Ajanta & Ellora cave temples, and numerous other impressive persons and places far less known).

During my four visits to Sathya Sai's Prashanti Nilayam ashram, my experience with him tended to be on a more transpersonal and Supra-personal level. In 1980-1, I serendipitously wound up being able to sit in the "front lines" quite often during SSB's twice-daily darshans (wherein he comes out and walks past the assembled lines of visitors), but I was never called for the smaller group interview with him, let alone the private interview. I had no craving for such an interview, and figured that it was good that other people who wanted this kind of personal interaction with SSB would get it in place of myself. One day in 1980, sitting on the front line along with the vast crowd assembled for his darshan, I asked Sathya Sai the only question I ever felt moved to pose to him, a question about liberation for all beings. He responded by casting an affectionate glance my way, and then he produced some vibhuti-ash (probably not paranormally but with the pellets of ash now known to be surreptitiously kept in the fingers of his left hand), he annointed the head of the person next to me with a bit of this ash, and then he dumped the bulk of the ash into my open palm as if to nonverbally affirm that liberation comes when all selfish desire is reduced to ash.

In sum, I had a most enjoyable experience with the Sathya Sai movement and with my limited exposure to the actual personality of Sathya Sai on physical and psychic levels. My only caveat to my friends during all those years was that I felt the higher levels of the organization were rather dysfunctional. A top-down, non-democratic management style, and certain less-than-sterling personnel at top levels in the American wing of the SSB movement (I'll not mention any names), were the two factors that especially gave me pause. I had a minor in Organizational Development at the California Institute of Integral Studies during my graduate studies there in the 1980s, so I was concerned about a rather unenlightened management structure and communication style and a few disagreeable personalities I observed for a short period during the mid-1980s when I had some occasional contact with this higher level of the SSB organization.

The really dark shadow side of Sathya Sai and of the higher levels of the movement's hierarchy was never really exposed to my view until February 2001, by which point I had not been an officer of any kind in the organization since 1987. There had been one early clue about SSB's homosexual orientation in an old book (Avatar of Night / Lord of the Air) by Tal Brooke, which I first lightly perused in the mid-1980s and fully read in 1987. But Tal was such an obviously biased messenger by the time he wrote his book in the early 1980s (a bigoted, fundamentalist evangelical Christian, adamantly anti-Hindu), and so megalomaniacal in his own descriptions of his time with Sathya Sai in the early 1970s (and in third-person accounts of Tal by a few friends who knew him back then), that Tal's message about SSB's shadow side, while noteworthy as an interesting "footnote" for all those years in the latter 1980s and 1990s, could not be reliably trusted. Moreover, there was no indication that Baba was sexually exploiting under-aged minors at the time for selfish pleasure. It was only when material emerged on Prof. David Christopher Lane's website in the late 1990s and then Britishers David & Faye Bailey stood up with their July 2000 revelations in "The Findings" (posted in various places online), that numerous persons began to realize that something was seriously wrong, and that lads under the age of 18 were being targeted by Sathya Sai.

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