SATHYA SAI BABA ‘CHANNELERS’ AND MEDIUMS

Sai Baba fakes ‘creation’ of lingam in himself – then said it weighed three tons!

Among devotees who believe they ‘channel’ the words and wishes of Sathya Sai Baba, one find a motley crew of absurd charlatans. The Sai officials have had to make strenuous efforts through the decades to discredit any number of imitators of Sai Baba, and especially men (almost never women) who are said to ‘materialise’; vibuthi, rings and what have you just like ‘Swami’! Most claim to be acting under Sai’s telepathic directions, or carrying out a mission he gave them, or even being Sai Baba in another form! Few manage to get to the ashram, and don’t last very long if they do.

In Jan. 1985, a Japanese man called Ken [who lived in Canada] installed himself in a room in Puttaparthi where he claimed that he had a ring given by Sai which he could use virtually ‘as a telephone’ to Sai Baba, and that he had been Shirdi Sai Baba’s cook in his former life! He claimed that Sai visited him in this room by walking out of the image of himself on the man’s shrine to gave him instructions, answer his and any devotees’ questions, take their letters and return into the picture! An Australian man I knew (Richard Prescott) – having failed to get an interview with Sai Baba – visited this fake because he needed to get Baba’s acceptance of an architectural drawing he had made for a circular domed kind of building which he wanted to be made a standard Sai Baba building around the world. As he knocked on the door he heard voices within. When it opened some short while later, he was told what a shame he had not come some minutes earlier as Sai had just been there and had gone back into the picture! But he left his letter to Sai and some days later was told it had been accepted. Of course, no such domed circular Sai centres have ever appeared anywhere so far as can be discovered.

However, the fraudulent Japanese man – whose fantastic claims had been written up naively and religiously by Robert Lowenberg in his book ‘At the Feet of Sai’ – was later discredited by a strong disclaimer in Sanathana Sarathi, warning devotees against him. He claimed too that Shirdi Sai used to appear and walk with him on his rounds (he was a postman) in the icy wastes of Canada! Also, Sathya Sai would materialise himself in his kitchen to do his washing up! He also told people that he had been instructed to start a community in Canada and prepare all for the coming world catastrophe, around year 2000! Now we know that it did not happen!

Nor did the Shivaratri ‘regurgitation’ of lingams happen this year – though it was faked in preceding years anyhow (students hold the lingam in a towel which Sai uses constantly until it comes from his mouth). But the BBC filmed this a few years ago and showed that nothing at all emerged, and Sai Baba had to be virtually carried off… few incidents are more revealing than this from the film ‘The Secret Swami’ (see overview and clips here).