Rereading my translations of the Murphet and Sandweiss books and other material I did in the eighties and early nineties, I shudder and feel heartily ashamed that I set aside my better judgment and went along with this rigid, blind regimen, which we called ‘faith’ at the time. The very fact that I was forced to relinquish all legally obtained copyrights to my translations and photographic material used in the Dutch versions showed how far the Organization went in controlling their followers and the stream of publications as early as 30 to 40 years ago, by the way. We were actively encouraged to behave like monks, claiming no credit for work done: work was worship, after all, like in most cults.

A couple of personal examples of the kind of trickery Sai Baba used, and what it resulted in, spring to mind:

You mention the deep-seated urge to read ‘deep’ meaning into mundane mistakes ‘the Beacon’ made, Robert. I remember Sai Baba asking me several times in darshan and during interviews, within a matter of weeks or months: ‘Where is your wife?’ The sheer number of doctrinal and intricate reasoning which that simple, false statement (I was single at the time) evoked in me and all those who were witness to it, or heard about it afterwards, was mindboggling. Especially the Indian community in Holland wanted me to get married to one of their devotee daughters straight away.

Another simple example of this kind of self-inflicted delusion (as a result of SB’s trickery!) was him asking me my name (My surname being Dokter): ‘Ah, Dokter, Dokter, Dokter…’ he murmured and gazed meaningfully into space, and then piercingly into my eyes. The same routine then followed: him repeating this in interviews and during further darshans. It caused me to greatly doubt my choice of career, since I, and others, understood it to be a hidden clue, of course…
A couple of months after having been present at an interview in early 1983, in which SB promised to cure a case of cancer of a young Australian girl, I received word that she had died. I remember my sense of horror and betrayal, but at the same time, a whole bunch of devotees explained the whole matter away by referring to it as ‘his leela’ (or karma or what not). Ergo: you needed to EXPECT the unexpected, try to be unperturbed, so in the end nothing could shake your devotion. If he promised you an interview tomorrow, and it never materialized, it was his divine play: what a ruse to turn lies and unfulfilled promises into spiritual sense/mumbo-jumbo. How efficiently brainwashed we were…

I think Eileen Weed is right in her comment, stating that most Indians had far less trouble with this kind of incongruent behavior of their guru than most westerners.

All the explaining, making excuses and explanations was mainly the pastime of foreigners, I would venture to say. The Indians, brought up on a diet of the scriptures which described Krishna has having 16,000 wives (and children with each wife) and all their gods having affairs and children with other’s wives and doing other dubious, non-holy things, it is a matter of course for them to accept their holymen not being bound by traditional ideals of morality.