The Fame of Name and Person – Sai Baba part 1

Personality cults: There are many personality cults in the world, some probably harmless enough, such as those surrounding most stars of screen and stage. Others known to us from the history of the past century were both highly organized totalitarian cults and had sinister aims and means… best known are the personality cults of Stalin, Hitler and Mao Tse Tung. Similar in some respects, yet less totalitarian and less aggressive are the religious personality cults (with the exception of the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini cult and the despotism of a religious leadership it involved and still involves). What makes a personality cult dangerous varies with the character of the person worshipped and the manner of its organization and the involvement in secret, unaccountable and clandestine activities. All major personality cults – political or religious – present their figureheads as infallible, impeccable, truthful, good or loving and NEVER allow the publication of critical or negative information about the leader, often not even about the followers.

The religious kind of personality cult: A number of self-styled gurus from the East have achieved temporary followings running into the several millions, such as Maharaji, Maharishi, the Rev. Moon, Rajneesh, the ‘Ananda Marga’ Baba and many others of a more or less unscrupulous sort. Events have shown that the Sathya Sai Baba movement very largely fits the pattern of these cults… with huge waste of money, sexual aberrations and murders as the main themes. The mass psychology at work there is similar in many ways to that operating on Sathya Sai devotees. Totalitarianism is not usually possible in religious cults – unless they are very limited like the Jim Jones cult was.

Sathya Sai Baba’s Organization – and his various other institutions in India – all exhibit strictly authoritarian rule from the top downwards. These organized activities are kept largely secret (no minutes of meetings are ever published or accessible, nor can the finances be scrutinized by the public. Numerous major crimes have occurred within the ashrams, but none have been brought before any court, due to protection by the devotees in the government and the judiciary. This means that Sathya Sai Baba heads a socially dangerous personality cult. By comparison, the Roman Catholic Church exhibits some features of a personality cult (i.e. the Pope being supposedly infallible) and it is a hierarchical system, but there are many dissenters to some of its publicised policies or ‘bulls’. It is not strictly unaccountable either, neither financially nor legally. It has an authoritarian structure but hidden agendas are neither the historical nor the present reason behind it (though it is asserted that some clandestine groupings work to their secret ends within this vast organization, like Opus Dei).

Who does Sathya Sai Baba say he is? Sathya Sai Baba is an assumed name, his real name being Sathya Narayana Raju. By taking the same name of Sai Baba, the departed Saint of Shirdi, he succeeded in assembling some kind of spiritual lineage for himself, regarded as a bogus usurpation of the fame of Shirdi Sai by that saint’s followers and the official Shirdi Sai Sanasthan. Sathya Sai Baba claims to be both Shirdi Sai, Krishna and Rama reborn – a claim of divine reincarnation often made by Indian gurus and swamis. He does not stop there, he is Vishnu come again, and his biographer N. Kasturi vouched that he claimed to be “all Deities rolled into one”.

One basic assumption upon which Sai Baba builds his teaching and all his enterprises is that he personally possesses the fullest possible divine powers… he alone knows the truth of all matters and can right anything he wishes through his omnipotence, which he purports to demonstrate through miracles, especially the apparent manifestation of small objects. He relies on the traditional guru-disciple relationship, and anyone who will not adopt the role of `ignorant disciple` is always rejected sooner or later. Those who come to see Sai Baba invariably have already generated some faith in him, whether through personal experiences of the paranormal kind or through hearsay, literature and videos. Many come already ostensibly entirely convinced that he is the avatar of the age, God in human form etc., while others see him at least as a highly-developed or `self-realised` soul. Some are seekers with hopeful faith, but are unconvinced, without compelling personal experiences and so still have various reservations and doubts which, however, are often swept aside by the extraordinary scenes of mass worship of Sai Baba and the enthusiastic atmosphere of being among so many who have had paranormal experiences apparently related to him.

Sai Baba has charmed royalty, statesmen, and many politicians, plus rich and famous persons from many countries, to whom he gives pride of place before all other followers whenever they visit his ashram. Thus, he has influenced many followers to believe that he will become (some even believe he already is) the de facto ruler of the whole world! This is remarkable to anyone with knowledge of the world and religious cults… to believe such a thing is certainly nothing but to be badly deluded, if only due to ignorance of Sai Baba’s own published words, which demonstrate fully to any educated, independent person the ignorance and inconsistency that runs throughout his ‘teachings’.

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