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SATHYA SAI CONFUSES, DELUDES AND CONTROLS WITH THE 'MIRROR TRAP'

"God is like a mirror. What you see is only a reflection of your own action and posture." (Sathya Sai Speaks - Vol. 23, p.92)

"Some people blame me for their own defects. It is a great mistake. There are no defects in Me whatsoever. I am the embodiment of sacredness and purity.
There is no scope for even a trace of impurity in Me. You see the reflection of your own feelings in Me as you see your reflection in a clean mirror.
"

Sathya Sai Speaks quotation
from Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 14, p. 271

It works like this: Sathya Sai Baba says he is God, so whatever you see, hear or feel that is not perfect and pure in him is not him, only you. Whenever he does wrong, he tells you that the fault is in your perception, your karma, your lack of faith. This he says to excuse not keeping his promises, failing to heal, not protecting his followers, exaggerating his importance, lying constantly, abusing young men, boys and worse than that, allowing devotees to be brutally murdered in his close vicinity by persons under his control! If you believe this 'teaching', your naive acceptance of this clever trick traps you into a hall of mirrors where no way out can be seen. This is the 'mirror trap', nothing more than a convenient invention for deluding people and keeping them in line. Adopting any variant of this idea from Sathya Sai Baba or his followers is to begin on a course of self-brainwashing. This 'mirror trap' is also part and parcel of the deceptions of many Indian gurus and swamis.

Sathya Sai Baba claims to be as a 'cosmic mirror' reflecting your mind and what you believe him to be!

The 'mirror trap' is the belief that you cannot see beyond your own reflection, and in the case of Sathya Sai it is supposed to apply only when you 'look at' him. But since no one can possibly extend this to all of what Sathya Sai Baba says, they forget (or conveniently overlook) that they supposedly cannot 'see' him and so they determine to view him as a good, selfless, pure, truthful and compassionate person living there in India. The 'double mirror trap' comes into play when they reflect on themselves as if through his eyes... and try to see that all bad things come from them, their minds, their thoughts, words and deeds... even when these obviously come from him!

This is simply to collude with the deceiver in denigrating oneself. It is always easy to find failings in oneself, even small ones can be blown out of all proportion. Sathya Sai Baba controls people by telling them to do this, pretending that there are rewards waiting for them... all unspecified and in the blue, of course, because even this 'omnipotent Creator' cannot possibly deliver anything NOW. Some believe he has delivered, but that is mostly only because of their forgetfulness of the mirror trap as just described.

Sathya Sai Baba repeatedly insists that the good you do for others is not even done by you, but by him! He is the Doer, yet only of good. It is you who do anything that is bad, and you suffer from false vision as to what is ultimately good or bad. Sathya Sai Baba will not take a jot of responsibility for what goes wrong, is bad and downright evil. YOU must shoulder that burden... even earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are the fault of people, according to this uneducated peasant! Failings can even be imagined in oneself (many people are prone to it from early induction of guilt feelings by parents and fundamentalist religious teachers)! Siddhis are doubtless extraordinary psychic powers which are not necessarily in any way divine by nature and have been practiced by innumerable individuals like yogis and shamans in many times and places. But through these, most Sathya Sai Baba followers have been induced into belief in him as a divine, perfect and pure nature. Then self brain-washing takes over and they soon spread the infection of unhealthy self-denial to others (which is not the same as reducing the ego and unhealthy selfish desires). So the deception goes on and on... He masquerades as what he is not (omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent etc.) so as to get power over others. He wants to make everyone think that they will be rewarded and protected for building him up in every way in the belief that they are serving God.

Devotees speak of Sathya Sai Baba as being a 'cosmic mirror' because he repeatedly says things like "God (or Divinity or also Sai) only reflects, resounds, reacts". (see Sathya Sai Speaks new eds. Vol. 10, p43 and p.216 and Vol. 14 p. 270). He claims to be God the Creator and all else that God is, adding that our minds reflect the nature of what attracts us. If one is attracted to him, then he claims the mind/heart will become pure and a clear mirror. If its surface is too 'dusty' then one may not be attracted to him (a typically invalid 'argument from analogy') This is all turned into a subtle kind of flattery of his devotees, who think that 'their mirrors are clean' compared to non-believers, and this self-inflating thought further binds them to his will. Fascination with the mirror image is at the core of narcissism, one wishes to see oneself as good without bad thoughts, so one can be happy with oneself.

The mirror comparison lends itself to making all kinds of confusion. For example, Sathya Sai Baba also claims that Nature is a mirror of divine forms (Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 21, p. 223), but Nature is hardly the same as God in his philosophy (it is matter/prakriti and God is Purusha/Spirit). In Kodaikanal he said in 1998 that the World is a mirror reflecting the divine in all beings. To add to the grand confusion, he also says that Maya is a mirror (Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 14, p. 159), that the human mind is a mirror and that the heart is a mirror. (Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 14, p 159 and p. 172) Further "Time is a mirror revealing our fancies and fantasies" (Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 15, p. 299). But Sathya Sai Baba wants everyone to clean their mirrors (i.e. minds, hearts, perceptions, consciousness) so the mirror shows God, and he most evidently wants the image of God to be his form!

However, one might just as well say that anyone can function as a mirror for us, being a physical form onto which we can see some of our own qualities or project onto them some of our own ideas and imaginings. The President of the USA is a convenient mirror for some, clouded or clear. We can see in him more or less what we wish, or we can try to observe him quite dispassionately. The same can be applied equally well to any people we know, even our closest relations. We cannot get into another person's consciousness and look out just as they do, just as we cannot see through a mirror.

All this juggling and mirror-talk is most clearly an inducement to confusion and ideological entrapment in the Sai doctrines. It is a clever and convenient invention (of many gurus long before Sathya Sai Baba ) for deluding people and keeping them in line as subservient followers of his wishes and plans. Adopting any variant this idea from Sathya Sai Baba or his followers is to begin on a course of self-brainwashing. There is no such thing as a 'cosmic mirror'. Sathya Sai Baba is no cosmic mirror, but rather a kind of cosmic lie.

EVIDENCE OF HOW THE MIRROR TRAP WORKS ON DEVOTEES: A self-declared 'Sai devotee' hiding behind the rather pretentious alias 'Projection analyst' (most Sai devotees who attack critics do so anonymously which says a lot about them!) wrote in a mail to the exposé:- "Albert Einstein and quantum physics illustrate the principle that we can only see what we are. Petition signers are indicting themselves... Baba is the cosmic mirror who reveals to each his or her own face. Poster knows many gay devotees whose polarities were gradually changed by Baba... most married. I began a lifetime of celibacy"

His purpose was evidently to defend Sai Baba's unreasonable claim that he cannot be known by anyone but himself, not least because he is a kind of 'cosmic mirror' which only reflects to each viewer their own nature, but not his! The idea was that - in exposing Sathya Sai Baba as a serial molester of boys and young men, one was only exposing oneself! One has to pity people in denail who rationalize like that and who are so confused as to think they are self-contained exclusively within the capsule of their own minds... so confused they must be!

The reply posted to 'projection analyst' (and anyone else who happens actually to be out there in 'the external world') was:-
Dear 'projection analyst',
You wrote about Sathya Sai Baba as a 'cosmic mirror the cosmic mirror who reveals to each his or her own face." Albert Einstein and quantum physics illustrate the principle that we can only see what we are." However, you proceed to draw a conclusion from this about others. That is untenable, however you look at it. You are, by your own major premise, excluding that you can know anything about anyone else! I would have thought you could also have analysed you own views as projections, then? Are you not, by your hypothesis, equally projecting all your ideas and imagined qualities onto Sathya Sai Baba? In your declared and lonely solipsism you must be aware that it means you cannot communicate anything to anyone else, for they are all figments. In fact, Einstein's relativity is in basic conflict with quantum physics and, actually, neither lend themselves to the assumption you have fallaciously drawn from them. From Robert Priddy (not a figment of your projection, but a former lecturer in philosophy of science, University of Oslo).

John Bright, in his highly credible but very shocking account on the Internet of how Sai Baba molested him sexually, refers to Craig Parker-Hamilton, whose website allowed him to discuss this openly, saying:-
"Before I go I want to thank you Craig for being open enough to allow this open debate despite your beliefs in Sai Baba's authenticity. However, there are two things that you mentioned that I want to address. You said that if a person sees Sai Baba as a molester then Sai Baba will become a molester and if we see him as God he will become God. I think I see where you are going with that. There is a philosophy that mind is the builder and that perception and belief create reality; while I believe there is truth in this I also believe that it gets twisted. For example: I may choose not to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow and this belief may prevent me from accepting that the sun will rise tomorrow but my belief will not prevent the objective fact that the sun will rise tomorrow. In a similar way my personal belief that Sai Baba is or is not a molester will in no way change the objective reality. Sai Baba either is or is not a child molester; my personal belief doesn't change the objective truth about Sai Baba only my acceptance or rejection of it."

Craig Hamilton-Parker's view - the distorted mirror of a self-promoting bogus 'psychic' - can also be said to take away all responsibility from Sathya Sai Baba for what and who he is, and placing it on each person who relates to him - depending on how they happen to experience him at any time. This is a confused idea of Sathya Sai Baba , common among various less intelligent would-be 'spiritual teachers'. Sathya Sai Baba has said that he merely 'reflects, resounds, responds' to the attitudes and expectations of devotees, if we think of him as God he will become that in our minds and if we think of him as a molester, he becomes that in our minds. But he does not himself independently become any of the many or even opposite things various devotees have in their minds. He exists independently of their minds (indeed, of all mind, he claims) and moreover, has a human form and body. He acts in the world like anyone else, falls on his soap and gets a hairline fracture of the hip, fell flat at darshan when a devotee held around his feet and so on. Either Sathya Sai Baba Baba is a sexual molester or he is not.

Many extremely serious and most credibly described allegations have been made by persons known to have long been very close to him. The evidence has becoming so crushing that anyone who goes into it fully even with a half-open mind and heart will be convinced. This means that one must free oneself from the mistaken and untestable belief that Sathya Sai Baba is God Almighty in Person, a belief that tends to bolster the ego of the believer who feels 'chosen' and therefore much better a person the he or she most likely actually is. I should say, however, that I have never received any kind of homosexual suggestion in my meetings with Sai Baba, nor in any of the several hundred dreams I have recorded in which he has figured prominently.

The Indian devotee, Dr. Naresh Bhatia, was well known to hundreds of devotees through his lectures at the ashram. He was known as a very close favourite of Sai Baba, and no mistake! He openly informed the author and Daily Telegraph journalist, Mick Brown, of his long-standing homosexual relations with Sathya Sai Baba and of how Sathya Sai Baba has misused very many pupils, including a boy in the 7th grade. Dr. Bhatia was banned from the ashram on trumped-up charges and was threatened by thugs in his residence there, so he had to flee to Delhi. His subsequent silence is eloquent of the methods employed by the ashram against persons over whom they can exert power. Conny Larsson of Sweden, I have come to hear from a number of long-standing friends of incidents they years ago happened to have heard of from persons involved that support these allegations. In two cases, young men from different Scandinavian countries (and who did not know each other) were, on quite separate occasions, shocked when Sai Baba kissed them voluptuously on the mouth when alone with him inside the private interview room. One of these young men, who eventually spoke out, had become extremely disturbed as the intimacies became more and more intrusive interview after interview. I knew several young Scandinavian men who were given more long private interviews (behind firmly closed doors) than anyone else and were provided with rings, bracelets and so forth from Sathya Sai Baba . These all left Sathya Sai Baba within a few years of these attentions. In view of the awe and admirations with which Sathya Sai Baba is held (admiration which is also extended by many to his favourites) it becomes very hard indeed to believe that this would happen without there being some serious negative reason.

A good friend of my wife and I, Mr. Tor Fotland of Oslo, Norway, who visited Sathya Sai Baba several times with his wife Felicia, when hearing about the allegations, told that he had known an Italian devotee who had told him that Sai Baba had handled his genitals. We also met a lady on many occasions - Mrs. Marge Hendel - who had been a Sai follower for decades, whose friends had brought their son to Sathya Sai Baba at least before the early 1980s and who had left for good in shock and disgust when Sathya Sai Baba had taken down the boys' trousers in private and massaged his genitals with oil. I had discounted this at the time as being some kind of spiritual 'treatment'. Only in view of subsequent very credible-sounding accounts, of which there are far too many for comfort, did these other incidents appear in a different light. Besides this, another friend who I met through the Sathya Sai centre in Oslo, a Turkish-Norwegian, who visited the ashram twice and experienced many extraordinary leelas from Sathya Sai Baba through several years, became aware of the homosexual allegations through the Internet. After considerable soul-searching, he denounced Sathya Sai Baba and told that he had been troubled by Sathya Sai Baba who appeared in his dreams and made sexual advances to him... something for which he had never had any inclination or slightest wish. Subsequently, I renewed our contact with another young man from USA, Mark Roche, who my wife and I knew well and had a very honest and open-minded relationship with during one of our long stays in India. This person, who has since made his experiences public o the BBC documentary 'The Secret Swami' was virtually forced into oral sex with Sathya Sai Baba back in the 1970s together with Mr. and Mrs. John Hislop and Walter Cowan and his wife, when he had a long series of interviews.

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