In a 2000 public discourse, Sathya Sai Baba said,
“Today people are ready to believe all that they see on television and internet but do not repose their faith in the Vedic declarations. Internet is like a waste paper basket. Follow the ‘innernet,’ not the internet.”
(http://www.sssbpt.info/ssspeaks/volume33/sss33-17.pdf)
The Vancouver Sun in 2001 reported that Sathya Sai Baba told his adherents not to browse the Internet due to allegations rapidly circulating on various Internet websites and in a few newspapers. He wanted to hide of all the deceptions and crimes of which he stands accused on the Internet, such as the many credible accusations of his sex abuses, and also his fraudulent ‘manifestations’ and involvement in murders.
So he warned his followers to stick to the ‘innernet’ of the subjective mind, which meant they should not take in any new knowledge, but recycle ones indoctrination! That he advised always to shun both computers and the internet fits very badly with the way he soon began to promote Sai computers, the Sai computer centre at Puttaparhti, the SSO official web pages (for propaganda about himself).
By the ‘innernet’ he obviously meant what the inward-turned mind conceives. He had already spoken of the ‘inner voice’ as a way to contact divinity, superior to getting the much desired ‘interviews’ he gave. This doctrine of meditation or inward prayer also served as justification for a large number of zealous followers who claimed to hear his voice inwardly, often writing down long tracts which they claimed were his own words. Such ‘channeling’ of the supposed thoughts of apparent incorporeal entities is an especial fad of New Age proponents, while modern neurological researches have shown that the brain can creates such voices when there are no sound waves, firing neurons which interfere with the perceptual system. Brain hyperactivity in the temporal lobe (where speech sounds are processed) is seen by magnetic imaging when no external sounds are present, as also seen during hallucinations and when schizophrenics ‘hear voices’.
So Sai Baba held that his interviews were a worldly meeting, while the ‘innerview’, is the real encounter at a supra-mundane level. Thus he stuck with the famous dualism between the profane and the divine, where the profane has to be reinterpreted in terms of the divine. Despite all the talk of unity, oneness etc., strict dualism between body and mind, or body and spirit etc. is the basis of all spirituality (also of the avatar concept itself – Sai Baba as divine but also human).
Sai Baba preached that one must find the true self – eternal divine existence – through meditation, prayer and inner worship. However, all that actually only leads one to restrict oneself to a solipsist cocoon, cut off from all reality, because meditation activates what is already in the conscious and unconscious mind and, just as the mind also works in dreaming, imagining and ‘hallucinating’. Inwardness produces all manner of weird and wonderful fantasy combinations, voices, visions. The meditator usually takes these subjective experiences to be true insight or knowledge relevant to ‘self-realisation’. Yet to withdraw too much from the world into meditation, silent prayer is to isolate oneself in a cocoon of mental solipsism (if not physically in a dark cave). Nonetheless, meditation need not have any religious content whatever – and it has been scientifically proven to have effect in reducing stress levels, which are very widespread in the world and are a major cause of a range of illnesses. Thus, meditation has even been shown to have an effect on recovery from a range of physical illnesses and some research also shows that it also affects considerable changes in the genetic code.)
Had the mind been able to discover new knowledge of itself alone (i.e. through concentration, meditation, imagination etc.), and had it been able to gain access to the supposed fund of divine knowledge (jnana), then the ancient rishis and gurus of India would have discovered what science has taught us. But these ancients mostly only taught about how to assuage through prayer and hymns etc. an imaginary realm of divine beings and places the existence of which is totally unproven in any reasonable way.
Sathya Sai Baba Deceptions Exposed 