Sai Baba and the lunatic fringe

Lissen is clairvoyant and an artist, but she does not wish to waste energy by interfering in God’s work, so she began to eat again. (Photo: Kristian Linnemann)

Sai Baba saved Lissen, who once lived only on light!

Under the title ‘Brown rice is the new light’ Michael Jeppersen of the Danish National Newspaper Ekstra Bladet  [17. sep. 2007] describes his meeting with a Danish Sai Baba follower called Lissen Seligmann.
Apropos, the Danish Sathya Sai Organization, led by Thorbjørn Meyer of Handelshøyskole in Copenhagen, has been propagandising for visits to Sathya Sai Baba for many years. Here is a report on one result of such a visit:

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Journalist Jeppersen joined a Biodynamic Consumer meeting in Copenhagen’s Fredriksberg, sat in a circle where participants presented themselves. One was an Indian man who does not eat, drink or sleep. Another was Judith who still does not eat, but unfortunately has fallen ill.  Others have tried to live without food or drink, others would like to, and one went over ‘into the light’ four days previously.
Lissen Seligmann began by telling of the advantages of not eating. One saves money, one needs no breaks for urinating, no more stomach aches, anorexia etc., an advantage to agriculture and the fishing industry and no more hunger in Africa.

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Saved by Sai Baba
Lissen told of her life, educated in business, she got psychic problems then physical problems, then she was saved by the Indian guru Sai Baba. “But if he had been a pedofile, then he would not have had the aura he has, so that’s that” she said suddenly somewhat excited. When she came back from India she began feeding on light for the first time, learning how from a book by Jasmuheen, who lives from small light particles in the air. (The Australian ‘60 Minutes’ TV team, however, monitored Jasmuheen for 3 days when she had to have medical aid).

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Feeding on light and meeting angels
Lissen first had classic symptoms of not eating or drinking: her vision blacking out, a bad taste in her mouth, a desire for fat food, sore legs etc. On the fourth day she met two angels who was shovelling coal into a fire. She asked why they had no wings. They replied: Wings, they are of course for galas.On the ninth day she passed a kidney stone while urinating in the bath. She held out for 3 months until she got to know that she should begin to eat again. Quite simply, she met Sai Baba and a locomotive which drove round five and a half times, and that was that! What happened afterwards is the interesting bit. In March, Lissen stopped eating again but she suddenly had a compulsion to burp, just as when she had been a child! She discovered that the pains in her mucus membrane was frozen tears and that her eye problems came from watching TV and reading.–

Then on April 18th, Lissen had a dream where she learned that she should eat brown rice.Two weeks later she dreamed of a mongrel bloodhound which howled. Her burping compulsion came of that, it was all connected. The hound was bloody, it was old karma, so it was washed and improved. Lissen pointed to her forehead “It is the forehead chackra which makes me a dirty mongrel”…And so on, wrote Jeppersen… until the break. Everyone clapped!
“I am letting it continue” said Lissen, and pointed towards the loft.

NOTE!
Other members of this fanatical lunatic fringe include Lisa de Witt, who claims to have communications from Shirdi Sai Baba, Sathya Sai Baba and Jesus… plus angels. She is the supporter and ‘colleague in ignorant and obsessional denial about Sai Baba’s failings’ of Gerald Joe Moreno, who believes Sathya Sai Baba is at least on a par with Jesus, also with Swami Premananda (in prison under two life sentences for rape and murder, confirmed after appeal to the Supreme Court of India) – all for Moreno qualifying as being ‘vishvarupa’ or incarnations of the Divine (see his http:///vishvsarupa.com site). Moreno is also a believer in the holy power of mandalas (which he produced with IT software and calls ‘art’), the power of crystals (and here he falsely identifies as being what is actually a plain glass ring-holder photographed on my mantlepiece which he has copied and annotated). He also firmly believes he was visited in the flesh by Sathya Sai Baba in his bedroom at night in New Mexico, when Sai Baba was demonstrably in India. (He was paralysed at the time and in great fear – symptom of narcolepsy).  Finally, he denies that Sathya Sai Baba having oiled his “lower stomach” in private in the inner interview room was not a case of sexual molestation, though that act fulfils all the requirements of sexual abuse under Indian (and foreign) law. Moreno has many other ‘lunatic fringe’ traits, such as believing that ‘holy nectar’ (amrit) is unearthly and is manifested by Sathya Sai Baba (as he believes many other objects are).

Indian Development, Religious Myth and Superstition

Indian Chief Minister insists that Rama is just a myth

>But political turmoil over the proposed channel which would go through the imagined ‘Rama’s bridge’ to Sri Lanka  continues unabated. Indian parents have overwhelmingly brough up their children to believe in Rama as God but also as a historical person. The Ramayana story is taken as fact by a vast number of Indians. This is not surprising since India never had a tradition of historical recording until the British became predominant there. As one small example, even now, many Indian books are published without the date of publication anywhere to be seen. Indian mythology is so ingrained in the life (and the countless thousands of temples or shrines) that it could be said to be ‘omnipresent’.  People will claim without blinking that this is the footprint or the tooth of Buddha, this is where Hanuman flew across the sea to Sri Lanka, or this is the mountain Hanuman carried on his back, and so on. The ‘national treasure’ guru of India, Sathya Sai Baba, talks continually about the Ramayana and always presents it as if it were factual.

One commentator has quoted Deepak Chopra who once wrote in The Times of India, “A brand is an encapsulated mythology. A person will buy a product not because she is consuming the product but because she is consuming its mythology.” The Sethusamudram project is designed to minimize ecological depradation in building a canal east-west seaway to shorten sea routes very considerably by cutting through the shallow area where a natural formation is believed by religionists to have been built by Rama’s monkeys. (see here – Times of India)

The Indian Express comments: “Even if we take the slightly hypothetical assumption that Lord Ram himself had to decide on whether to go ahead with a channel that would break through his own creation he would surely have done it so as not to deny the opportunities it would present to the people and the nation.
As for the Ram Sethu fading into oblivion, that will never happen because the protests of the past few days have ensured that nobody forgets the existence of this mythical bridge. Besides, the nation will forever be indebted to those who are considered the custodians of Hindu faith for letting a major milestone in the nation’s development go ahead as per schedule.” We shall eventually see whether religious sentiment again manages to suppress common sense, flout Indian law and derail governmental decisions, as it has done in the case of Premanand’s petition against Sathya Sai Baba under the Gold Control Act and the Indian Supreme Court’s Sai-devotee judges  throwing out the petition against Sathya Sai Baba forwarded by prominent lawyer Jasmini!” A professor of ancient history at Allahabad University, R P Tripathi, has stated “History requires concrete evidence in the form of coins, inscriptions, etc to prove the existence of a character. Even if we take into account places mentioned in the Ramayana like Chitrakoot, Ayodhya, which still exist, the fact is that Ramayana is not a historical text. So, from that perspective, there is no historical evidence available of Ram. Having said that, we still cannot negate Ram’s presence easily, since he has been a part of our collective consciousness for a long time.”

S. Settar, former chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research says, “In fact, it is precisely because of this, that we cannot look at Ram objectively, since he has made the transition from being simply a character in an epic to a religious figure,” In mythology, there are many characters who have been similarly mentioned. Does that mean that they all existed?” he asks. Settar also claimed that there is no evidence — either historical or archaeological — to prove that Ram ever existed or that he ruled Ayodhya.”

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/25601383.cms NEW DELHI: After Nasa, it’s the turn of Indian experts to declare that there is no evidence linking the mythical Lanka bridge built by Hanuman to the chain of sandbanks captured by the US space agency’s cameras across the Palk Strait. Eminent astrophysicist J V Narlikar, when contacted in Pune, said he had seen reports claiming about the mythical bridge, but there was no evidence to suggest that what had been located had links with the bridge mentioned in the Ramayana. “There is no archaeological or literary evidence to support this claim,” eminent historian R S Sharma told The Times of India in Patna. “The Ramayana itself is not that old. Nor had human habitation occurred 1.75 million years ago,” Sharma, an acknowledged authority on ancient Indian history, said. The oldest evidence of the Ramayana is around 400 BC and running across five strata, its shloka multiplying from 6,000 to 24,000, it comes up to 1200 AD. “Even if you want to rely on literary evidence, the oldest literary evidence available is only from 1500 BC.”

Chennai/New Delhi, Sept. 17: Tamil Nadu chief minister M. Karunanidhi repeated his statement within a few hours of shocking Hindus by declaring again late on Saturday night that Lord Ram was a mythical figure and had not built any bridge across the sea to Sri Lanka, and that the Ramayana was a work of fiction.”Some say there was a person over 17 lakh years ago. His name was Ramar. Do not touch the bridge (Rama Sethu) constructed by him, they are saying. But then, from which engineering college had he graduated? Is there any proof for this,” said Mr Karunanidhi, well known for his atheist views, while addressing a public rally at Erode. The occasion for the rally was DMK founder C.N. Annadurai’s 99th birth anniversary.In New Delhi, Union shipping minister T.R. Baalu on Monday indicated that the government would move the Supreme Court soon for appropriate orders to ensure that work continues in the Ram Sethu area of the Sethusamudram Project. Mr Baalu said that pursuant to the August 31, 2007 and September 14 orders of the Supreme Court, work in only the Ram Sethu portion of the project had been stopped. “The government will soon approach the Supreme Court and obtain appropriate orders to continue working in this region also and is confident of completing the project at the earliest,” Mr Baalu said.Mr Baalu said work on the Sethusamudram Project, “a 140-year-dream project of the Tamils”, was inaugurated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 2, 2005 and the project had been under implementation since then. The DMK leader, citing the Supreme Court judgment in the Narmada Bachao Andolan vs Union of India case in 2000, said the top court had then observed that when such projects are undertaken and hundreds of crores of public money is spent, any individual organisation in the garb of PIL cannot be permitted to challenge policy decisions after long lapses of time. “It is against the national interest and contrary to the established principles of law that decisions to undertake developmental projects are permitted to be challenged after a number of years, during which period public money has been spent in the execution of the project,” he said. BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad dared Mr Karunanidhi to make similar statements dismissing the heads of other faiths.