Healing by Sathya Sai Baba

Healer Heal Thyself? This is what Sathya Sai Baba has said of healers in general. He claims to have healed himself only once, saying that he is not so selfish as to heal himself when so many millions are suffering, not least among his devotees. Still, despite that (a fact he most likely forgot)  he did claim to have healed himself and in a very grand public fashion on July 6 1963. Whether he actually did this is highly controversial, of course.

According to the Sathya Sai Baba mythology, he cured himself of a series of seizures affecting the brain and the supposedly resulting paralysis of the left side of his body by a “miracle”. He did the apparent cure by taking water with his right hand and sprinkling it over his left side. He did this after a dramatic build-up of a week, during which he convinced his servitors he was suffering a massive brain hemorrhage, he arranged to appear staggering and to sit before the crowd gathered for Guru Purima (the auspicious day of the guru in Hindu religion). The audience consisted in a large number of Indians, very largely uneducated local villagers – hardly any foreigners.

Those who do not believe in self-healing miracle men would say that the scenario was set up by him most cleverly. Seeing how accomplished an actor he was reported as always having been, he could also doubtless have carried off a faked  serious condition for a week that he was semi-paralysed and suffering dreadfully. That he could convince those with him of this depended on the fact that they were all devotees who already believe him to be God Almighty Incarnate – even the doctors who looked at him, but whose services he refused (he would have had to do that!). He was surely able to take the risk of such a deceit, knowing how easily he had already managed to convince countless people that he was capable of miracles of manifestation (but not without his cynical helper, Colonel Joga Rao, who did not believe in his miracles but who worked for him because of the social improvements his whole ‘mission’ promised).

In his book ‘Modern Miracles’, the para-psychologist Erlendur Haraldsson reports on how he tried to investigate healings by Sathya Sai Baba, but without definitive results, no positive cases, but rather a fair amount of negative evidence… i.e. absence of healing when promised most forcefully by Sathya Sai Baba. This included the claimed ‘resurrection from the dead’ of Walter Cowan, which Haraldsson investigated most thoroughly and discovered from the doctors involved that Hislop never died, nor was any death certificate ever issued there. Haraldsson lists several other incidents of non-healing at length, not least of the repeatedly-promised cure of a seriously disabled child of close followers Mr. and Mrs. Hanumantha Rao (who eventually left him as a result of Sai Baba not healing the child) and several others at that time around 1952-3.

See also on healing here