Who does Sathya Sai Baba think he is? Well, nothing less than the Creator of the Universe, the Father who Sent Jesus, the Deity of all Deities. No more incredible and unsurpassably bombastic, megalomaniac claim has ever been made by anyone! He tells his devotees on occasion that ‘the whole world loves him’ – he also assumes that the whole world loves God (quite wrongly because many don’t believe in any god ) – and that he is the one God above all! (see his pronouncements on himself and his ‘mission’)
Who is he – apart from what he admits? He is a man who is very widely and most credibly accused of sexual abuse of young men and boys (i.e. paedophilia) – openly confronted on BBC TV by two of his US victims (here and here). He is the ruler of his fiefdom, Prashanthi Nilayam, where six devotees were killed as he stood by and his brother blackmailed the police into executing four of them. He was active in the cover-up – so he is an accomplice to multiple murders.
Sathya Sai Baba wants to be ‘all things to all men’ … in short, the one and only God. In reality, he especially wants men rather than women, and not infrequently this has been as something they don’t always want him to be, i.e. as a partner. He pretends to be ‘the’ universal teacher, but he shows complete ignorance of many matters, and his ‘teachings’ on otherworldly matters are vague and – as usual in all such religions – highly speculative and uncertain. His endless and repetitive discourses are as a ‘pick-and-mix’ of all kinds of different vague tenets, many incompatible with one another and from conflicting sources. His inconsistent hodge podge of conflicting speculations in Hinduism (such as ideas of dualism, monism and in-between variants all mixed together in a pick-and-choose menu), along with a small portion of Christian (Love, love…), Buddhist and Parsee religion thrown in (often hilariously wrongly put). Meanwhile, Islamic ideas are a closed book to him, to judge by their glaring absence from his collected discourses and books on ‘universal spirituality’.