Sai Baba’s humility and grandeur

The following is an extract of a talk by Mirinalini Mata, direct disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda, (Self Realisation Fellowship 1978, Cassette No 2402):

“…There is one quality you will always find in the true guru and that is humility – that humility was in Master. He could speak even about Himself. He could even speak about his accomplishments or even about his qualities, but when he said it – it was not a personality or an ego speaking about God. I don’t think I ever heard Master say, ‘My disciples.’ He would always say, ‘The Divine Ones that God has sent to me.’ He would refer to them as ‘the devotees,’ but he never said, ‘my disciples, my work, my accomplishments.'”That ‘I, Me, or Mine’ just didn’t exist in Master. I think that if anyone would to ask us who were around Master, ‘How would you judge one who is truly saintly – who is truly divine?’ – I would say that if one has not humility that I saw manifest in Gurudev – he is still lacking in spiritual accomplishment. The Guru has no ego. ‘The I shall die, than I shall know who am I.’ In the Guru the I has died. There is only God. He speaks only of God. He draws others not to himself, not even to his personality….”

 

This text expresses the nature of spiritual humility, whatever one may believe about the validity of Yogananda’s teaching besides. Sathya Sai Baba, who claims to be the Godhead and Creator of the Universe also emphasizes that we should all learn to recognize the Divinity within – that we are all Gods – yet he openly encourages and visibly loves his devotees to worship him as God. He looks smug when they grovel at his feet.

No spiritual figure on the current world stage can lay claim to greater fame and world-wide respect than the Dalai Lama. Beside him, Sathya Sai Baba is merely an also-ran. Yet if anyone bows to the Dalai Lama, he bows back lower. If one bows lower oneself, he bows yet lower. I have two friends who have experienced this independently of one another. It can be observed in his whole bearing and behaviour at any time. He sets people at their ease and invites questions… he replies to all attempts to put him on a pedestal with words like, “I am an ordinary Buddhist monk.” That is true humility.

By stark contrast, Sathya Sai Baba is domineering in all his relations to other people. He regularly makes interviewees the butt of disdain and the same cheap jokes at their expense. If one studies him without rose-tinted glasses and an indoctrinated mind, one sees that he is imperious, controlling, unaccountable, bossy to the n’th degree and shows most of the classic symptoms of a psychopath. He accepts only those who come with the attitude: “Swami, you are God Himself, please teach me….” Even the one Sathya Sai Baba claims as his son, Jesus of Nazareth, apparently did not adopt such proud behaviour, for instead he actually washed the feet of others. However, despite what is observable to all, some devotee hagiographers, such as the inaccurate and fabulating Mr. V. Balu of Bangalore, are so deluded about Sathya Sai Baba that they actually claim he is very humble! (See his book ‘The Glory of Puttaparthi’ (the term ‘glory’ refers directly to Sai Baba). However, turning black into white – that a man who claims he is God Almighty is ‘tremendously humble’ – is a travesty of truth. What precisely is so humble about him it is extremely hard to discover, when he constantly boasts that all the entire movement of thousands of people do and give is all done and given by himself!

seem to increase Sathya Sai Baba ‘s prestige. Is all this what his incessant self-trumpeted ‘love’ is all about? Why does he need to increase his prestige? Good questions…

After about seven decades protected in his cocoon of continual adulationand life within his fortress-built retreat encircled by trusted servitors and bodyguards, it is hardly surprising that Sathya Sai Baba has lost touch with what we all experience as ‘reality’, that is, the awareness and understanding of sensible, well-informed modern people throughout the world. He became so powerful so long ago that he is by now completely insulated from normal intelligent interaction or frank conversation and genuine feedback from people. He only speaks laughable nonsense about most science which demonstrates how out of touch with common knowledge he is. His discourses convey how completely he is out of step with the best developments in civilization and how dated many of his views are.

Sai Baba speaks as if he wielded absolute power, and we all know what absolute power implies… he appears to be the absolute master of many of his followers and certainly has power in high places, which protects him from all just official investigations. Yet in fact he cannot rule everyone even within his ashrams. He couldn’t stop his students being murdered in his bedroom, nor – according to V.K. Narasimhan – stop his own younger brother Janakiramiah from organizing four executions therein through blackmial of the police! Or could he have stopped him, but preferred not to? Well, he rewarded and praised this brother afterwards, making him virtual leader of the Sathya Sai Central Trust. Recently Sathya Sai Baba also praised this multi-millionaire property-speculating blackmailing brother for some few charitable works in the village, as follows:-

“Janakiramiah (younger brother of Swami) is also doing a lot of charity. All the men and women of this family upheld the ideals of this family of self-sacrifice and truth.” Sanathana Sarathi July 2003, p. 209)