Sathya Sai Baba Deceptions Exposed

In the 1980s, the Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning was granted the status of being a “deemed University” by Madhuri Shah, Sathya Sai devotee and Chairperson of the University Grants Commission. This strange status (not a full university, it seems) was an attempt to raise it closer to the prestige of some of India’s other centres of Higher Learning. Later the power and influence of Sathya Sai Baba over the politicians and judiciary caused it to be accepted as a full university. Good for the career prospects of its alumni perhaps, but not for the future of Indian learning, science, medicine or cutting-edge technology, that’s for sure! Some of the most fantastical claims by Sathya Sai Baba about the earth and human body and its organs are of concern when one realises that this rubbish is being presented as God’s truth to students under the indoctrination system which prevails at all Sathya Sai educational institutions. Here are some such:-

1. The human body’s gold content: Sathya Sai Baba said in his discourse after the Shivarathri lingodbhava two years previously (13/3/2002) “(Showing the golden Linga to the devotees, Swami said). “As you can all see, this Linga is rather bigger in size. There is a meaning behind this. This is five Tolas in weight. [one Tola is 11.66 grams. 5 Tolas = about 60.0 grams] Every human being possesses five Tolas of gold essence known as Hiranyagarbha… Gold represents energy in man and is the cause of his radiance. The gold content within each body is this size only. It is gold essence in the body that makes the eyes see, ears hear etc.“ (Sanathana Sarathi – April 2002, p. 127) Firstly, the human body cannot possibly contain so much gold! In Wikipedia we find that the amount of gold in the human body is vanishingly tiny: Gold constitutes 0.00000030 % of all the atoms in the body. Further: “only salts and radioisotopes of gold are of pharmacological value, as elemental (metallic) gold is inert to all chemicals it encounters inside the body” (see here) Sai Baba’s fantastic account of how the imaginary Hiranyagarbha ‘represents’ energy [but also ”makes the eyes see, ears hear etc.”] is beyond all reason and science. It is a primitive Vedic superstition, which led to the use of gold as an ayurvedic ‘medicine’. It is used in ayurvedic clinics even today, despite modern scientific knowledge of all the properties of gold in all its different forms on the human body as having very little effect except some reduction of some arthritic inflammation. In short, another myth perpetrated by Sathya Sai Baba with his ignorance of science and belief in ancient mythology as superior even to modern knowledge! Click here to see a continuation of this discussion.

2. Journey to the Centre of the Earth?

scanned quotation from 'Conversations with Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba' by Dr. John Hislop

Jules Verne was an imaginative writer, imagining a hollow earth. Now Sathya Sai Baba has seriously debunked that theory! “Mrs. Robert Bozzani (who is ‘Rb’ in the text on the left)) put the first questions, after Sai had made his ‘mystical statement’ out of the blue (i.e. “At the centre everything is liquid”). His explanation is the kind of absurdity that Sathya Sai Baba conveys to his students. One must ask how such untrue fantasy can be deemed worthy of any university anywhere. He assures Bozzani that the teaching of all courses at the University will be like that!

He identifies chemistry with liquids and physics with solids… most amusing. His ignorant legend-stuffed villager mentality is to the fore here. But his students surely understand far more of the real “full picture” of science better than he does, even before they start their higher studies!

3. Wilder and yet wilder… In many hundreds of discourses, published and personally approved by himself, Sathya Sai Baba had made a very large number of statements which exhibit a degree of ignorance and lack of learning and understanding that one would expect from a villager with only a very elementary education. Though Sai Baba does also make a lot of valid and well-informed statements too, it is known to his editors – who I also knew – that he had picked up almost all of his more interesting ideas from other – especially persons he has met in interviews, as well from his educated attendants like Prof. N. Kasturi, Dr. Bhagavantam and so on. His chief propagandist, one of India’s formed atomic bomb physicists, Dr. G. Venkataraman, dares not to mention these absurdities or challenge them… he considers Sathya Sai Baba to be the Creator of the Universe! Yet he must surely know that Sai Baba frequently used to come onto the veranda and misreport to his students things he has heard (but not properly understood) from some expert in the interview room. The evidence of Sathya Sai Baba’s total lack of anything remotely like ‘omniscience’ is found widely available in his own words. He and his zealous followers refer to his ‘teachings’ as ‘Saience’ in opposition to ‘Science – and ‘Sai-cology’ in opposition to ‘Psychology”! For the convenience of those wishing to investigate and research this somewhat further, the following pages have been made to document evidence of some of Sathya Sai Baba’s worst fallacies, faux-pas and fantastic statements.