MONUMENTAL CONFUSION ABOUT 'THE DOER' OR WHO DOES WHAT
Date: 08-26-02
By: Robert Priddy
Website: http://www.saibaba-x.org.uk/
Those of us who are engaged in exposé activities and plans are continually hearing from, or else finding out about, many once-active and long-term devotees who have left SB. Those who do so quietly are evidently in a large majority. Their reasons for not publicising their departure are many and various, which we respect. Their painful processes of self-regeneration surely happen at different paces and lead in different directions. Many say they just want to put the whole thing behind them. However, those who have investigated and become firmly disaffected of SB can naturally find it difficult to extract their feelings and minds from the mental mini-universe in which we were more or less encapsulated. Finding out what to retain and what is empty or deceitful is not so easy. Even after discovering SB's guilt, one tends to harbour lingering beliefs, such as by clinging to the idea of him being a guru still working behind the scenes for the best of everyone, despite debauched, criminal activities. Among both, the disaffected and followers, some think that he may have planned everything... that his flesh and blood activities would be exposed. To explain this, it is said that this would have a liberating effect on devotees, strengthening self-reliance, reliance on inner conviction etc. and help one to develop further spiritually by seeing through the need for a guru and understanding that worship in a personality cult will never lead to self-realisation. I hope to point out the sheer unreasonability of this.
That he might have arranged for us to free ourselves and gain non-attachment (to the form) by deceiving us firstly, then forcing us to realise is just too far-fetched, a very specious theory. It wholly contradicts his insistent calls ever since he started out always to recall the name and form and never relinquish them! What is gained by what could have been avoided? Such as the negativities of finding out how SB has deceived us about his true nature and actual behaviour and suddenly entering a kind of vacuum - emotional, mental, social, spiritual... A person whose actions belie his words cannot be a reliable spiritual guide in any case, and even SB has confirmed that! He evidently hoped his adharmic actions would be covered-up, and huge efforts were made - and are still being made - to do so! But in vain!
In a widely-distributed and hatefully vituperous e-mail from a rich long-term Australian lady and large donor to SB, Millie Phillips, who knew the Baileys well, she told David Bailey that he was merely an unwitting instrument of Swami in spreading the allegations etc. through 'The Findings'. "All part of Swami's plan" is the ingrained belief of so many devotees, a panacea argument used to help avoid thinking, observing sensibly or listening to one's own conscience! On the vague and unsupportable idea that 'Swami alone is the Doer' who uses people as 'his instruments' etc., even this writing would then also be straight from SB's all-grasping hand. But I can firmly assure that it is not! No more than 'The Findings' was! David Bailey was at about 100 interviews, so it took him some time to believe his own eyes and ears! These did not reflect David Bailey as in a "pure mirror" (as SB claims of everything about him), but to a great extent directly showed and told what SB actually does, confirmed by many others, including some other very close persons a number of whom who have not seen fit to tell the truth to the public (yet?).
Though SB supports and repeats the ancient teaching about the divinity of everyone, this teaching is not as it seems. He preaches tirelessly to make devotees dependent on him for discovering their own divinity, as by constant prayer to him, repetition of his name, worship of himself which he very willingly accepts etc. etc. This only leads to one becoming less self-dependent, less able to see one's own divine nature. He denies all free will (except for himself), dislikes all independence of himself and ridicules self-reliant thinkers, independent scholars, and genuine intellectuals. (The most plausible explanation of this is his envy, him being virtually uneducated and so ignorant of the sciences, other cultures, religions etc.?) His teaching as a whole is a catch-all web of Indian religion, including myth and supersitition, wile also containing all variants of the six Indian philosophies (watered-down), with an unintelligible intermingling of dualistic, monistic and vishtadvaitic perspectives, plus some ideas in India (eg. Ramakrishna, Yogananda etc.) of imported Christian values - amounting to a grand hodge-podge of conflicting elements and sweepingly vague directions. A kind of 'religious cash-and-carry'. Yet because it's horizons do not stretch beyond the Hindu-oriented world view, and not least with its insistence on him as the God-avatar, it fails signally to engage more than a tiny handful of Muslims, Buddhists, Christians etc. (Westerners are all classed as 'Christians' at SB ashrams - be they Jews, Mormons, agnostics, disinterested... or whatever).
Nearly all SB's activities are looking more and more self-centered, self-glorifying, exaggerated, opulent... and thus hollow at the core. It is all statues, tinsel thrones and pompous vehicles, monumental buildings with no purpose other than to try to improve SB's image (now so tainted) and the endless and wasteful personality cult of SB worship. The progressively emerging evidence about him - and his past - lead anyone with openness and perceptivity more and more to doubt the essentials of many stories. Much of what is told is evidently based on over-zealous interpretations and mental-emotional 'projections' of very subtle kinds. Most of the alleged healings are surely cases of placebo and/or concentration-projection focussed on SB, functioning as a symbol or 'spiritual catalyst'. These phenomena are also very common with countless other so-called 'healers'. SB is nonetheless able to appear involved, exercising some role, mainly through the powers of telepathy, entering dreams and such like, in many persons minds. It becomes increasingly evident that SB is also an agency of what - for want of a better word - we can call primitive or 'dark' forces, some very subtle ones. None of these abilities in employing 'disincarnate helpers' are unique to him, of course. They are and have always been at the core of magic white and black in societies where these flourish. The many 'poltergeist'-type phenomena that occur (eg. Sai books falling on people's heads, pictures falling etc. etc.) and masses of the other phenomena are well known from the mediumistic and spiritualistic traditions, and are held universally by mediums and religionists to represent low or 'primitive' forces (whether one calls them elementals, earth spirits, djinns, disembodied entities, disincarnate souls or demons etc.).That certain 'higher' constructive forces can also operate through any such persons, and even be the predominant ones, is certainly not excluded.
"In persons exhibiting such powers, the sexual force is almost always powerful and seriously out of control, as has been seen in the cases of most of the famous and rich Indian swamis of the 20th century, several of whom already languish in Indian gaols convicted for rape and murder. These powers are widely known, for example, in Brazilian spiritism, voodoo and other New World cultures. There are many known and lesser known precursors of this human phenomenon or predicament - spirit possession - often in African and Eastern culture, also were also exercised by many Europeans, eg. Norway's remarkable Marcello Haugen and the famous and enigmatic Rasputin 's well-recorded amazing powers."
As Kasturi related, the incarnate entity Raju/Baba was believed by his family (who were close enough to observe!) to be possessed by a Muslim spirit, which view the elder brother reportedly still held till his last days. It is being seen more and more clearly that Raju/Baba is something of a living contradiction, with many increasingly obvious faults and discrepancies between word and behaviour... and he is of course also suspected for impelling reasons of being a major criminal on various counts. He doubtless became aware in time that his sexual proclivities - though such is accepted fairly passively in village India - would, when known to the wider world, bring a dénouement eventually, hence all his predictions (an almost empty ashram in future, the grain to be separated from the chaff, big changes etc.), which have nevertheless very largely been wrong predictions as to when things would come about.
By cleverly confusing the monistic (advaitic) teaching that God is One/All is God with dualistic (dvaitic) guru worship - and digressing to middle positions (vishtadvaitic) to cover discrepancies, SB has made people think that it is he, SB, who should be worshipped as oneself! This self-destructive web of half-truths has sooner or later to be painstakingly unravelled by the disaffected devotee who remains a seeker of truth.