Prashanthi in severe drought, but will get new arathi platform

Found on ‘Sai Bliss’ Facebook page. They built a platform to perform arathi (waving of the camphor light) every week at the (usually empty of water) Chitravati river in Puttaparthi? Trying to make this like the centuries-old worshiped ‘Ganga’ river in North India? The article states: “The Harathi point would soon have great fervour.” I hope no one is holding their breath awaiting that time. Laughable!

With ground water disappearing and bore wells drying up throughout the town and surrounding areas (most people have water in their homes only by purchasing water delivered by tankers at high cost), we are wondering where they will get water to fill the river, as stated in the article? (But the much touted water project has not succeeded, so maybe the last hope is pujas to Indra Sai Baba?). Any guesses as to how much of the $370,000 ‘beautification’ funds made it into the pockets of local officials? They will probably have trouble even finding a priest to do the weekly arathi (Harathi), and observers will probably be scarcer even than the water is. But as the Creator of the Universe (as he proclaimed himself to be), he once boasted:-

“Divine resolve is always true resolve. Remember there is nothing that divine power cannot accomplish. It can transmute earth into sky and sky into earth. To doubt this is to prove that you are too weak to grasp great things, the grandeur of the universe.” (43rd birthday Discourse, 23 November 1968)

Sathya Sai Baba explains water scarcity cause

YouTube exposé series start-up

In order that people who read about Sai Baba can better see what his main present-day ex-follower critics are like and what they have to say, the first of a series of YouTube videos made together with former insider and Telugu speaker Eileen ‘Divya’ Weed is now on-line. We both draw on our long experience of Sai Baba, the ashram, the teachings and – in my case – the international Sathya Sai Organisation. In the coming months, further YouTube videos will appear regularly and they will be announced with links on this site.

See Eileen Weed interviewed on The 1993 Prashanthi Temple Murders She was present during the entire episode, which she watched from the room of Sai Baba’s elder sister, Venkamma, just above the temple, and she was involved during that night in supporting the efforts of those who caught the intruders. So hear her most convincing and frank account of the facts.

‘Divya’ (Eileen Weed) with Venkamma in 1993

 

Sathya Sai and CIA in the 1990s

The Hindustan Times claims that a top-secret CIA 16-page report intended to be withheld from foreign nationals has been released. It is among some 13 million declassified documents from the CIA that have been released online. What is unusual about the contents is that its author (name unknown) spoke of  the growth of  a “worldwide mass religious movement” around the “alleged miracle worker” Sai Baba’ that was a “well-organised and financed movement…may even become another worldwide religion”. It listed the claims that Sathya Sai Baba was the “Kalki Avatar”, similar to the return of Jesus or the Muslim Mahdi who is expected to “create a new world of peace and justice”. The report lists many of the claimed  miraculous powers of Sai Baba, adding that these have not been scientifically verified.

At that time Sai Baba was still in the ascendency, the flood of serious and extremely well-founded allegations of his sexual abuses on male followers, murder involvement, fraud and a host of deceptions had not broken. Since 2000, however, all possibility of the spread of Sai Baba’s extraordinary megalomania and Hindu-based doctrine has virtually faded into anonymity, certainly so outside parts of India. This demise was hastened by a large number of abuse testifiers, critics and central defectors from Sai Baba and his organisation, backed by the JuST group and the tireless work of the exposé backers.

The report can be read in full here:  Cultural Trends Study: India’s Sai Baba Movement, and  the Hindustan Times article is CIA files: ‘Alleged miracle worker’ Sathya Sai Baba could start world religion’.

 

Pdf version of the Report can be viewed and downloaded HERE. 

sai-baba-cia-studyDownload

The Sathya Sai Baba exposé’s history in brief

At the beginning of the exposé in 1999 I was still in doubt about much of the material that had come forth about Sathya Sai Baba’s sexual abuses and worse. While getting involved in investigating the facts, I came into contact with defecting members (eventually over 100 at least). Not unexpectedly, though all found the sexual abuses abhorrent, most were of different opinions on many other aspects of the exposé. I was eventually urged by the most articulate group of activists (later composing the core of the 32-member JuST group) to coordinate the development of the Sai petition (and hence the core policy of the exposé). This involved up to 1000 e-mails in trying to get solidarity around its key aims, during which time those with cantankerous views, extreme agendas, and evidently unstable minds (of which the Sai movement had a high percentage) either left the process or were ignored. Meanwhile, the remaining core eventually hammered out a common overall policy.

The main targets for our information and agitation persons in public office, especially institutions like Governmental departments, United Nations’ branches, the UK Foreign Office and secret services, the US State Department, India’s CBI, law enforcement agencies, top human rights organisations and their key persons, other cult exposers, serous journalists and media, plus present and future researchers into religion, sects and cults. This has remained our focus, in accordance with our mutual agreements and trust. We aimed to try to protect and advise vulnerable persons seeking meaning who otherwise could only read the massive and unopposed propaganda praising Sai Baba uncritically exaggerating his own massive claims of his world-wide importance as a pure and divine saviour of humanity. Reducing the influence of the Sathya Sai Organisation and serving notice on devotees’ self-serving praise etc. on their deeply indoctrinated minds was also of importance, but was supplementary to the main aims. Indian devotees were – and still are – so entrapped in denial and their particular environments that it virtually takes a personal disaster for them to change completely (such as by being sexually abused, or close to badly abused and not least murdered devotees). However, the tremendous demise of the Sathya Sai Organisation was largely due to the exposé and its interventions… capped off by the ignominious ‘premature’ death and all that came out then.

The main work rested on the shoulders, so to speak, of the brave young men and their families etc. who stood forth and told of their experiences of sex abuse, but also of those who worked hard in exposing the infamous 1993 murders in Sai Baba’s apartment.  Meanwhile several bold apostates (especially David Bailey, Glen Meloy, Barry Pittard, Conny Larsson and other JuST members) were very active in campaigning to try to motivate officialdom: governments, UN bodies, human rights NGOs and embassies etc., for all of his various ‘victims’ their efforts being directed towards bringing SB and his cronies to justice, stopping sexual abuse, and organising various lines of inquiry and action. Of course, we eventually  learned that it was an impossibility to get him into court in India due to his control over much of the judiciary and government (a long line of Sai-devoted Indian Prime Ministers and Presidents too).

I had begun dealing with the revelations with the attitude that I would strike some balance between the good things about Sai Baba and the dark side. Only gradually did events – and a flood of information from intelligent, selfless and trustworthy former devotees who had found no forum for their discoveries while devotees, did I realise that – for all I had believed and given myself to promoting wholeheartedly – the dark side of him and his secretive conspiracy was far, far more extensive that I could have imagined. While still deceived by it all, I had written a book promoting him, so I had to make amends by presenting the other side of the coin fully in order to correct wrong impressions so as to protect the weak and vulnerable against him and the highly overrated and misunderstood motives behind his works.

On balance, the outcome of Sai Baba’s life was deception in the interests of self-glorification, financial, social and political power, sexual satisfaction and many deeply serious breaks of trust. Ultimately, through a long lifetime of experiences and disillusionments with many promising theories, movements and doctrines, I am convinced that all religious and most spiritual doctrines are largely unfounded and speculative, and can lead to very dangerous social conditions and only provide temporary comfort from the fears, problems and sufferings of mankind. No ‘balanced’ approach to religion or organised faiths can do other than help sustain their basic self-deceptive hopes and longings.

It is informative to see that the power and money-grabbers who control Prashanthi Nilayam today present the Sai Organisation on their website as being just as it was at the height of its membership… now a complete and total untruth as it has lost the vast majority of it’s former supporters world-wide.