Robert Priddy's former promotion and elucidations of - and commentaries on - Sathya Sai Baba's teaching

NOTE: These articles were published while I was a follower of Sathya Sai Baba. There I attempted to make sense of many of his vague statements and unclear teachings and to bring them more into line with common sense, science and spiritual culture. Since events and inside revelations from V.K. Narasimhan and others forced me to review my adherence to Sathya Sai Baba, much if not all of of what I wrote concerning him I now see as unfounded.

The huge extent of the published materials of discourses and writings by Sathya Sai Baba, plus many verbatim quotations in biographical and other writings about him made it impossible for most people to obtain a thorough overview and deep insight into all the aspects of Sathya Sai Baba's entire eclectic doctrine. This I did through 18 years of continuous reading, analysis and note-taking. With my wife, I also organized- through about 16 years - some hundreds of small study circles in Oslo on set materials from his discourses, with written summaries of results from most of them. One result was that I complied a massive index ('Back to the Source) of all Sai Baba's authenticated statements, comprising over 18,000 compressed (one-line sentences) of source references. That index, now withdrawn so as not to encourage any belief or undue interest in the 'teaching', was circulated to many devotees in the 1990s after Sathya Sai Baba had endorsed it at darsan. I had reservations about a considerable number of his statements of alleged historical fact and predictions of events to come (and not least where he ventured into the field of philosophy in a badly misinformed way), but managed to rationalize or ignore these in view of the wider content of moral, 'spiritual' and religious materials. I had adopted and practiced Sathya Sai Baba's directives to think positively, non-critically of others and to seek to develop and bolster faith (through service and meditation etc.). Only when my suspicions about his honesty and purity were fully awakened from 2000 - and confirmed overwhelmingly by contacts I made - did I undertake to go through the entire doctrine in a systematically critical and analytical way, did I reject the whole as an unfounded speculation based on an eclectic hodgepodge drawing on all variants of Hindu doctrine and scripture (however conflicting) and also on traditional Indian religious beliefs and superstitions. Above all, I saw most clearly that he does not follow his own teachings and doctrine in many things, but cleverly hides his actual practices from the public.

 

 

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