“I Lost the Desire to Live” B. Nelson was a follower of Sai Baba for 17 years.   Date: 12-25-06 Publication date: 01-31-02 By: Bettina Vilmun Copied from: http://home.chello.no/~reirob/Bitten.htm Translated from the Danish daily national newspaper, ‘B.T.’ p. 32. “I can well understand that people have difficulties believing it. I did myself. When at last the truth finally penetrated to me, I was shocked and entered a major life crisis.  I was not myself for a year.” For 17 years, the Danish lady, B. Nelson’s whole life had been concentrated around her guru, Sai Baba, who she believed when he said he was the manifestation of the divine principle. Her house was full of his pictures, books and music. She held lectures about him, arranged group journeys to India. She visited him 32 times and had an apartment in his ashram at Puttaparthi.  “I lived in a bubble where everything was about him. When I discovered that the accusations had to be true, I lost the desire to live. I was completely knocked out, couldn’t get up in the morning. I had no energy and everything I touched went wrong for me,” said Bitten Nelson.  Two years ago, when she heard the first allegations that Sai Baba was a paedophile and as a guru misused his power over boys and young men, she rejected them out of hand. “But nonetheless, doubt had been sown in my heart. In December 1999, I went to India where Father Thomas, who leads a social centre in Madras, gave me three articles from ‘India Today’ and said that he thought I should read them. When I returned here, I had them translated into Danish and got a shock. Thereafter I read the articles in B.T. and also found ‘The Findings’. Only then did I open to the possibility that it might well be true.”  Therefore, Bitten Nelson went to India and stayed there longer than usual in order to investigate the matter. Among others, she asked some of her good friends of many years who live in Puttaparthi beside the ashram if it really could be correct that Sai Baba was a paedophile and abused boys and young men.  “The first one confirmed this by nodding and looking around in a scared way to see if anyone observed us. I asked why he despite all had not told me anything before and he explained that everyone knew it, but no one said anything, because they feared for their lives. I asked another friend in Puttaparthi. He confirmed it too. Only then did I really believe it was true. I am normally a robust person, but this struck hard at me. A person with a weak psyche would probably have been crushed. I felt cheated, deceived and rather embarrassed over it all… all those who through the years have said, ‘How can you believe in such things? And then one cannot all at once understand how it is that one has not used one’s common sense, because there really were many signs. I was really helped by the books ‘Conversations with God’. Today I know that the only way of reaching God is by looking inwards / he lives there. And his name is not Sai Baba.