Sathya Sai Baba’s broad lunatic fringe

Robert Favour – a Dutch former follower of Sathya Sai Baba met various devotees who can only be described as belonging to the ‘lunatic’ part of the movement, as follows:-

“- Once in India we had two English friends visiting us, who both believed they had been Maria Magdalene in a previous incarnation. They did not know that from each other. That gave funny discussions. One woman had heard this from a spiritual counsellor who channelled the Akashic Records with the help of Sai Baba. I do not doubt the existence of past lives and the Akashic Records (the collective data bank of the earth, where the sleeping prophet Edgar Cayce also found his knowledge), but not to a sense that more souls can have lived the same life. It goes against all knowledge from Hinduism and new age thought.

Later I explained the incident to a friend. He said he was not surprised; according to him there were at least ten women in the ashram who had been Maria in a previous life.

– But even well developed authors like Joshua Stone did not see his tricks: Joshua wrote a whole book on him without seeing him in person. He claimed he would come to India when he was able to teleport. Maybe the phenomenon exists, but to my opinion not for this Californian PhD. He has never been seen circling above the ashram in India. He never went looking for himself and has never investigated what was really going on in India. What he did do was taking everything for true what Sai Baba told him in his inner ear; he dedicated the title of his book to Sai Baba. – In general this ‘holy man’ created little objects out of thin air, but sometimes he materialised a bigger Ganesha statue, but that only out of the sand if he put his hands in it. Many were blind for the possibility that the object had been put there before his miraculous creation.”  (from http://www.exbaba.com/witnesses/robertfavour.html)

I knew an American lady called Marge who told my wife and I – as a confidence – that she had been Mary Magdalene in her former existence. She claimed that Sai Baba had made her aware of this. She was a middle-aged person who had left her husband and children and was having an uncercover affair with a Christian minister in Norway (who would have lost his post if the relationship had become known).

In my many years as a leader and visitor to Sai Baba’s ashrams I met numerous people on the verge of normal sanity – and a number who went completely insane at Prashanthi Nilayam. I was called up by people who thought the green ‘diamond’ ring Sai Baba gave me was able to cure them. One asked me to save him money this way as he wanted all his amalgam fillings removed.

Among those who had to be taken to mental hospitals was  German man who confided in me that he had shot his own father, he was left by the ashram staff to wander in a filthy state in his ‘pyjamas’ for several days until they sent someone with a straightjacket and a car to take him away. He managed to thow himself from the car after it has got up some speed. That did not help him, as he was carted off. Then there was a young Danish woman who decided that ‘Love, Love, Love’ was the order of the day and stripped off, wandering around the ashram for days until the useless ashram staff humbly asked our group (mostly Danes) if we could somehow get rid of her! We achieved contact with her father in Denmark, a medical doctor, and she was admitted to a mental hospital in Bangalore. Such lunatic events occur with great regularity… my wife observed an American lady who lay on the sand of the compound when Sai Baba came out and she made the motions of giving birth, shouting “I am giving birth to the next avatar!”

There was the amusing ‘teeth-clacking’ medium too – see here.
Another instance is found here
Lunatic Devotee claims he is Prema Sai

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Information on the Public Petition for Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization
See also Devotee attacks on the Sai petition and petitioners

Public Petition for Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and his Worldwide Organization
View ex-follower signatures
(Spanish version PETICIÓNPÚBLICA PARA INVESTIGACIONES OFICIALES)

David Bailey’s ‘The Findings’ its consequences

Once the top favourite foreign devotee and classical pianist David Bailey, who attended over 100 interviews with Sathya Sai Baba, was fêted for years by countless Sai devotees. He performed occasionally for the British Royal family and taught one of the princes at a private school.   However, in 1999 he learned many hidden truths about his guru and his writings soon released the floodgates for testifiers of sexual abuses.

This most decisive phase of the exposé of Sathya Sai Baba – begun in the 1970s by Tal Brooke – took off with the publication in 1999 of ‘The Findings’ by David Bailey. When he was lecturing about Sathya Sai Baba and his ‘teachings’ around the globe, David Bailey was eventually so inundated with reports from parents of abused sons and of sexual molestation from students who he taught music at Sathya Sai Baba’s colleges that he began to investigate with an open mind. His discoveries set off a chain-reaction among those who describe how they have been abused, defrauded and otherwise seriously maltreated by Sathya Sai Baba. He had already been questioned about Sathya Sai Baba and by British MI5 who were waiting for him at the airport when he returned from abroad (evidently for reasons concerning the Royal family).

David Bailey now lives in Seclusion:

Some years after he made his decisive contribution, Bailey and his wife needed rest from the abusive and defamatory reactions and threats that poured in on him from Sai devotees. They tried to drag his name through the mud as a condemned paedophile in prison and even spread the story that he hanged himself in his cell. These are the utter depths of untruthfulness and malicious rumour to which many devotees have sunk in order to preserve their false faith in Sathya Sai Baba as pure and truthful. Of course, all such allegations are totally incorrect and David Bailey is alive and well, living in France. In an e-mail of 2006 he informed me that he no longer wishes to be active in the exposure of Sathya Sai Baba. Incidentally, he is not the owner of the David Bailey music website, as I once mistakenly assumed. His reluctance to continue in the crucial role he once held in revealing the truth about Sathya Sai Baba is most understandable considering the massive consequences his involvement had (losing teaching position at a private school due to higher intervention because one of the pupils was a British royal prince). Read a transcript of a phone conversation in which Bailey tells the details The campaign of character assassination and hate against David Bailey – and against all other defectors from Sathya Sai Baba – continues on the Internet.

Not only did David Bailey investigate the sexual abuse claims and publicise them, but he was led to uncover various kinds of fraud and sheer deceit by Sai Baba (valueless synthetic stones given as ‘diamonds’ in rings etc.) and in various of his projects (especially failures in the much-trumpeted Rayalaseema Water Project).

Therefore, for all his claimed ‘divine prescience’, Sathya Sai Baba had evidently not reckoned with David Bailey and his wife Faye, whose report on his wide-ranging investigations called his bluff in grand fashion. His findings were reported widely in the media. Comdot Free Information Exchange summed it up fairly well as follows:-

“Well-regarded former disciple, musician David Bailey and his wife went public with accounts of their experiences from spending three years as two of the guru’s closest disciples. This prompted the release of yet more material from former devotees around the world.

Response to these claims from Sai Baba’s ashram appears so feeble that to many it would seem an admission of his guilt. It is said that sources close to the guru claimed that as “a living incarnation of God”, Sai Baba could do what he pleases and it is not appropriate for mortals to question his activities.

“Faye’s own son had been kissed repeatedly on his cheeks and the corners of his mouth when alone in the inner room with Sai Baba, and also sexually touched. And when it was obvious to Sai Baba that this behaviour was unwelcome, he began berating the young man in subsequent interviews with Faye, calling him ‘Mad dog! Hard hearted!’ and so on. At the time this seemed incongruous; it was only after we began travelling the world that the inconceivable and incomprehensible began to make itself clear.

When I asked various co-ordinators about these many disturbing incidents reported to me in our travels, I was told that Swami was ‘raising kundalini‘. I questioned this in my mind. If he was capable of doing anything, why did he have to physically touch the boys, especially when they were unwilling? And what about when he had them actively engage in sex to him? It seems that an ongoing, serious and untenable infringement of basic human rights is being scurrilously perpetrated, in the name of ‘divinity’.”Also see this quote: “On my last visit to Puttaparthi, a male student came and asked me for help, on behalf of some of his fellow students, because they were desperately in need of someone to stop Swami sexually abusing them. I was told how Sai Baba had for years been demanding that these particular boys have oral sex, and group sex for his pleasure. Their details matched what I had already been told so many times round the world. I asked him if this was an acceptable practice in India, and his look of horror as he denied it, spoke volumes. Then he asked me a question I couldn’t answer. ‘Sir, why do you think ex-students tried to kill him in ’93 …?'”

Though David Bailey’s investigations left various details unresolved which one would have desired to know, the main thrust of all his chief allegations have proved true, according to the flood of exposures which have since resulted and are largely available on the Internet. (See The Findings here) One need hardly add that the vehemence with which the Sathya Sai Baba cult is responding unofficially demonstrates the continuing cover-up (leaks continue to occur from those who realise the facts and leave). The vested interests among devotees who are emotionally and psychologically totally dependent on their belief in him, and especially the interests Indians who have become entirely dependent upon the Sai Baba gravy train, are of course very powerful factors. Relatively few who have put in decades of service, written adulatory books about Sai Baba,  donated large sums, and have apartments in or near his ashrams  – have the courage or strength of personality to throw off the deep-seated illusions – or take the moral stand of decency against Sathya Sai Baba’s massive deceits, fraud and abuses.

Thus the cult continues – closing in on itself in secretive self-protection – as is the case with almost every religious personality cult whose figureheads have been exposed completely. One need only mention the example of the fraudulent Swami Premananda – serving a life sentence for rape and murder (a sentence confirmed after an appeal to the Supreme Court of India. There is a long, long line of famous Indian gurus who have been exposed, many convicted of major crimes, but they still have apologists and followers!

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Please go to the Public Petition for Official Investigations of Sathya (or Satya) Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization