Healing and protection promises by Sai Baba avatar

Sathya Sai Baba pretended that he looked after the well-being of all his devotees most carefully. Indeed, much of the huge and mainly amateurish ‘literature’ praising Sai Baba contains stories of miraculous healings – including of incurable diseases – attributed by devotees to his intervention. There is, however, no scientific evidence presented by any of the claimants that such cures were effected by him, as is often the case with alleged ‘distant’ or miraculous healings, and, strangely enough, not even by doctors who confirm these claims. Only in a very few cases would the writer admit that the effect was temporary or inexplicably did not occur… whereupon a simple (or sometimes convoluted) explanatory rationalisation of the failing would be made by the author. When the avatar’s promised healing did not occur, statements about it were looked down upon and so were seldom accepted by any pro-Sai publishers.

Yet, when one talked freely to people, one heard quite other information. I met many persons and also read many testimonies from dissidents (in the petition and by e-mails to critics) detailing failed promises of healing by Sai Baba.  The famous newspaperman and editor, V.K. Narasimhan, who followed his wife to live in the ashram in 1980, V.K. Narasimhan, startled and shocked me once by saying that he had never seen a single genuine cure by Sathya Sai Baba in all the years he had been living close to him! Narasimhan himself was told his eye was cured with vibuthi ‘made’ on the spot for him, but within two days he has lost it completely. While he was the editor of Sai Baba’s journal Sanathana Sarathi, he avoided publishing claims of healing by Sai Baba, he also failed to report his own negative experiences, being dependent upon the Sai Baba’s ashram by that time.

Sai Baba’s made many personal promises to people in interviews. It was known that what he said and did in interviews was supposed to be kept strictly private. But intense curiosity and gossip almost always prevailed (something on which he apparently cynically reckoned). Numerous books and articles about him told how he had promised persons by saying “I shall protect you“; “I will build an iron wall around you!” “Cancer cancelled!” and “I give you liberation, you will not have to take on another body!” Other standard sentences of assurance he repeated was, “I give you a long life, healthy life, happy life!“, another “I will look after everything” (Unasked, he made both of these promises explicitly to me – yet I can hardly be said to have a particularly healthy life since then, having had to retire from work from my 50th year).

‘Medical diagnoses’ Sai Baba sometimes made were never properly documented except in most general terms. One apparent (but undocumented) exception apparently was the case of Phyllis Krystal: “Baba then launched into a detailed diagnosis of my physical problems which Dr. Bhagavantam translated from Telugu into English. Baba spoke very fast and used complex medical terms which neither of us was able to comprehend and which I would not have been able to spell even if I had tried to take notes…” (Krystal, ibid., p. 37) However, from his frequent laughably absurd statements about health, eyesight, bodily functions, it is clear that Sai Baba knew no modern medicine. So he would have bluffed with some kind of pseudo-medical jargon he had picked up. He would also often speak unclearly so people could not be sure what he had said, and asking him to repeat a thing would not go down well, or would simply make him shift attention to someone else.

In ‘The Findings‘ by the former very close devotee David Bailey, we read: “I have not seen him do a genuine healing on anybody in all my time of being close to him, and having had innumerable interviews. I have seen him tell people to stand up, and get out of wheel chairs, but the effect is not lasting. He generally ignores the sick and frail ones, giving out as reason, their karma.The Australian “pink twins” continue to use wheel chairs, in spite of Sai Baba’s claims of healing them and their claims of being healed. A sad case for me is Maynard Ferguson. Over three years of deterioration in his hearing; during several interviews with him and his wife, he, his wife and myself asked – pleaded with Swami, to heal him. Every time, he promised to do so, but now Maynard is very deaf and has to rely on two powerful hearing aids to help him. As a fellow musician I know what this must mean to him in his heart.
Once Faye and I had an interview in the company of an elderly, rather frail Indian gentleman who used to sit on the verandah near me. He asked Sai Baba for help for his failing health. Swami, behind his back shrugged his shoulders at us, saying in what we both thought was a rather an unfeeling aside “And what can I do? Cancer. Too far gone, too far gone.”

Faye has had her own experience of him giving health advice she trustingly followed, which nearly caused permanent damage to her, before she at last resorted to western medical treatment for her complaint. Faye Bailey wrote in the introduction to ‘The Findings’: “David has spent long hours and many months, talking to people all over the world, whilst unravelling this tangled skein of years of deceit accumulated around the said “divinity incarnate”, but he is not alone in this. Courageous people on every continent are banding together to expose the monumental spiritual fraud which has been perpetrated for the personal gain of a select group, headed by Sai Baba. The German coordinator whom I visited in the super specialty hospital after he’d had a stroke, was eventually taken back to the verandah, but Swami did not heal him. The elderly man has gone back to Germany, and some two years later is little improved.” (Note: The German Sathya Sai Organization leader and Central Coordinator in Europe was Mr. Bernhard Gruber, who I knew well and who recovered partly and temporarily from his stroke – as so many usually do anyhow – before dying not long thereafter.)

Close Sai devotees who were utterly abandoned to their medical fates by Sathya Sai Baba included top favourite US devotee, Dr. John Hislop, who died of brain cancer years earlier than Sai Baba has said he would. Another favourite Sai Baba author – Mrs. Joy Thomas – was told she had no cancer, but died of it within a matter of a few months. A long-serving Head of Prashanthi Nilayam ashram, Y. V. Kutumb Rao, died of massive incurable cancer, died 29/3/1989. Sai Baba’s ‘official biographer’ and close devotee through decades, N. Kasturi, suffered 6 weeks intense lung pain before dying. Kasturi’s replacement, my close friend V.K. Narasimhan, who served him for 20 years, developed water on the lungs and, receiving no care for it, had to leave the ashram, whereupon he suffered a long choking death.

A young American friend I met at the ashram, Michael Oliver, and his two US friends (both killed outright) were crushed by falling dome in Eternal Heritage Museum in 1992. Michael suffered 11 hours hell in taxi to Bangalore with 9 fractures and broken cranium before tearing off his life support system and dying en route. (See a full account here).

As to divine protection, the King and Queen of Nepal were devotees who visited and were blessed by Sai Baba in April 1999, were shot down by their son in a horrific bloodbath in June 2001.  How can one rationalize as ‘His Grace’ the horror gone through which the King and Queen of Nepal – close devotees who visited Sathya Sai Baba? Both shot down and killed by their son along with others in a regular bloodbath! I knew several other Sai devotees who died terrible deaths among Sai devotees, even within the group I led. Dozens more awful deaths among close servitors and devotees, too many to list here, are known to former devotees.

EXCERPT FROM THE TESTIMONY OF NORBERIU AIELDO written November 30, 2002.

My third trip, made in September 1994, it was beautiful because this time Sai Baba called my group. At one point I asked him if he wanted to help me… …He replied that I had problems in the abdomen. and his hand went around his stomach, and he told me that it was very difficult, but if he wanted anything could (and I believe it seriously). “Ok” he said. “you gift of healing.

Beaming with joy. I asked the interpreter if I understood that he meant the recovery from this terrible and incurable disease. The interpreter asked confirmation of what Sai Baba. and he said “yes”. We left the room and in front of everyone. I asked him a gift and he materialized a ring with his picture on it.

I continued to be his devotee for years to come, in fact, a year later, I returned to India in September 1995. he called us and did not approach either, however I still believe that I would be healed, and so I went on for another five years. Time has passed, my faith has wavered and my illness has only gotten worse. Norberto Aiello.

by: Fabio De Gregorio to: webmaster@exbaba.it Posted: Monday. April 25, 2011 – at 00:22

His friend Fabio De Gregorio wrote on April 25, 2011 (to exbaba.it):-

“This is to tell you that Norberto Aiello. of which I was lucky enough to be a good friend, died May 16, 2008. I visited him once or twice a week. I can confirm that, fatefully, his physical condition began to deteriorate just from when he had the promise of miraculous healing by Sai Baba. On his return from that trip. in fact, began to need ventilator with oxygen and then her condition worsened gradually. Norberto much regretted the fact that so many other people with physical problems continue to fall victim of the treacherous games snake oil salesman of Sai Baba.”

Dozens more of awful deaths among close servitors and devotees, too many to list here, are known to former devotees and these continue to this day in the case of almost lifelong and some most self-sacrificing foreign devotees who still believed in him.