Sathya Sai Baba, The Dark Avatar is Dead | Indian Express

Tal Brooke’s book “Lord of the Air“, –
“The Hiddden Side Of Sai Baba”, – “Avatar Of Night”

India Puttaparthi/ Hyderabad: Sai Baba dead
Indianexpress.com, Sun Apr 24 2011, 10:18

Godman Sathya Sai Baba, a cult like figure who had a phenomenal following, including the high and mighty, across the globe, died in Puttaparthi on Sunday, battling illness caused by a multi-organ failure for nearly a month.

The 84-year-old Baba, died at 7:40 AM following multi-organ failure at the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences founded by him in this backward Anantapur district town in Andhra Pradesh, the place from where he ran his spiritual empire. “Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba is no more with us physically. He left His earthly body on April 24 at 7:40 AM due to cardio-respiratory failure,” A N Safaya, Director of the Institute, said. His burial will take place on Wednesday morning. More here …

In 1970, in the U.K., Tal Brooke published Lord of the Air, which, evidently because Sai Baba’s people have such political clout, was banned in India. It was re-written and published as Avatar of Night. Paperback: 400 pages. End Run Publishing; December 15, 1999. ISBN: 193004500X.

The following are excerpts from Tal Brooke’s book “Lord of the air”. This book tells the author’s story with Sai Baba. According to him, he has been one of the most intimate western devotees of Sai Baba, and his account tells of a many months-long descent to dark regions of spirituality: from the excitement for the new-found enlightened master (Sai Baba, indeed) to a state of psycho-physyical exhaustion, due to the continuous psychological stress induced by the master and also due to malnutrition, because of the poor and cheap food in Sai Baba’s refectories. After having discovered the “hidden and dark side” of Sai Baba, the author escaped from India. This book perhaps also contains the first open account of Sai Baba’s sexual misconduct and for this reason, always according to the author, it was censored and retired/destroyed when published in India. 

Below are some selected quotes to Sai Baba’s sexual misconduct, since all the rest of the long book tells the entire Tal Brooke’s story with Sai Baba, which is quite long.

WARNING: this page contains material of sexual and explicit nature, which could hurt the sensibility of those reading here, and particularly the sensibility of those having faith in Sai Baba. This as a due warning: please refrain from reading this page, if you get hurted by this arguments, or if as a Sai Baba devoted person you couldn’t bear this story.

Excerpts from Tal Brooke’s “Lord of the air” chapter 7, pages 103 to 105

[Tal Brooke is in interview with Sai Baba] “However as I stood before Baba this time, I was far less satisfied about myself. Whether it was my increasing alienation from Herman and Gill or such elementary crimes as oversleeping that morning, I wasn’t sure. I felt vulnerable.”

[Baba asks] “What do you want?” This was my second magic wish. “Baba, I can’t stand the evil in myself. Help me get rid ot if and other obstacles. Anything that holds me back.” “Yes, Yes” “Baba, I really want victory this time, too many failures in the past. I want to be certain.”

In patient understanding, Baba abstracted over my sins. “Too many bad thoughts, impure sanskaras (traits from past lives). Mind running around like a monkey. Thoughts of material things, anger, ego, jealousy, hate, quarreling, and thoughts of girls. Not good.” He wrinkled his face in disgust, in such a caricature of the usual expression, I wondered if the wavelength of the original thought impulse from overmind to avatar had mutated in transit.

Baba mounted the lower step again, as he had done the last interview. He wrapped his arms about me, hugged tightly, while I pondered. This pondering soon turned into critical relflection where my very survival under Baba was at stake. I was being thrown a “test” I was not sure I could handle. My mind was forced to suddenly make hair-pin turns.

If the hallmark of this session with Baba was my own impurity, then I was presently under a spiritual magnifying glass as never seen before. And any kind of unexpected key could squeeze open a new skeleton closet. Baba’s hug grew tighter. Then that subterranean spider of a thought crep out of some dark abyss. I almost repelled it before I fully sensed it, if that were possible. Nevertheless it got through in an icy quiet, and speculated deep things — notice how his [Baba’s] breathing has become a pant, deeper, more intensified. Feel his pelvis twisting. Why does he need to twist his pelvis. Especially in the region of the loins. Accidental? No, not for one who is that conscious. I doubt a detail slips by him. Then, is this some strange divine passion that only the initiates encounter at the higher stages, and could that be some kind of…well…nonspecific pan-sexuality, or bisexuality…or…or…am I twisting something that is innately pure into something that it is not, due to my own suspiscions and evils? Yet Baba’s pelvis kept nudging and twisting from my abdomen on down. Not hard but gently, almost as though it had the nerve endings of an hand.

Yet if Baba were healing me or opening skeleton closets, it was not without some risk — and you only take risks with things you value. Then I feared  that Baba might perceive my edginess — not that he shouldn’t know if he is omniscient, but he might choose to dwell on it. And my high sin would be the primal insult to God, blasphemy in the most profound sense. The penalty for which might be expulsion from his presence. Yet, could he in love test me beyond my capacities, knowing I would stumble?

I felt an electric flash of self-conscious anxiety as Baba broke the hug. He held me back and looked penetratingly into my eyes, asking, “What’s wrong, you do not like it?” Then I knew that I could not possibly bail out now, or call his cards, for I would hang in space with insufficient evidence to satisfy me either way. And I would go through life without a way of ever knowing for sure who or what he really was, with the perennial question, “What about his miracle?” hanging in mind. And certainly a hug was not as bad a cliffhanger as the least of the initiatory rites of the Himalayan nights of the rishis, or the heat yogas at Lhasa, and probably it all panned out as angels’ dreams anyway.

“No, Baba, I like it very much. Great gift, great privilege.”

“You are not pulling hard. Very weak hug. You do not like to hug?”

“Baba,” I justified, hoping I had some ground left not to back out, “I was afraid to hug too tightly, maybe some discomfort for you.”

“No, Rowdie. [Tal Brooke’s nickname given by Baba] ” In an instant we were embracing again until he was satisfied. I really locked in, giving almost a chest-crushing squeeze. His pelvis moved far less, still it moved. I wished I could just shoot the whole area with Novocain and forget about it. […]

Baba looked content, and I felt relieved, if not on the brink of a new breakthrough in understanding. The curtains opened and eyes glistened back from the dark corners of the room in ravenous wonder. It had been a long interview. […]

Tal Brooke is the President and Chairman of SCP and the author of eight books. His work has been recognized in Marquis Who’s Who in the World (Vols 12 & 13), Contemporary Authors (Vol. 93-96), and The International Who’s Who of Authors . Tal is also the recipient of an EPA first place award in the critical review category–SCP’s first EPA award. A graduate of the University of Virginia and Princeton, Tal has spoken at Cambridge (7 times), Oxford (4 times), Princeton, Sorbonne, Berkeley, the University of Virginia, and the University of Edinburgh.

Tal Brooke grew up in an American diplomatic family and spent the major part of his childhood and youth abroad in England, Europe, and the Middle East. For most of that time Tal intently explored the occult, an ongoing quest that ultimately landed him in the heart of India. There he underwent an extraordinary experience that was later written up in Lord of the Air. This 400 page book, the only full version ever published (an 800 page manuscript that took six years to write), rocked India before it was banned in India. After he returned to the West, Tal Brooke started writing critiques of Eastern, New Age, and occult thought from an insider’s perspective.

Avatar of Night has been published in its full edition in the West for the first time. Copies are now here at SCP. It is over 400 pages and includes over 180 photographs and graphic illustrations. Below is a brief description.

During the fourteen months that Brooke lived close to him, Sathya Sai Baba conferred on him, as he was later to do with David Bailey, a rare closeness – rather too close for comfort, as matters turned out.

Amazing Grace? Or Incredible Disgrace?

Tal Brooke is author of nine books (at my last count) and is listed in Marquis Who’s Who in the World (Volumes 12 & 13), Contemporary Authors (Vol. 93-96), and The International Who’s Who of Authors . The famous English intellectual and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge highly praised his work. Glen Meloy identified Tal Brooke as the ‘original whistle-blower’ against Sai Baba. Brooke had began to compose a work in praise of Sai Baba which he called The Amazing Advent. However, what he had thought of as such amazing Grace, became incredible disgrace.

Name-calling

It was too easy for some Western, Hindu and other Sai Baba devotees to allude to Brooke’s adoption of a born-again Christian faith, and to pass off his accounts of Sathya Sai Baba’s sexual escapades. Those with accounts of Sai Baba sexually abusing them come from many different backgrounds. Such accounts simply keep on coming, and core leaders of the powerful and mega-rich worldwide Sathya Sai Organization have refused to tell the truth about the abundance – and indeed cultural variety – of serious reports that Sai Baba, and some of those around him, have long engaged in sexual abuse (not to mention other abuses). In short, it is far out of line with many contemporary organizations, both civic and religious, which have clear and strong guidelines concerning accountability and transparency.

Adherents Alone Without Fault. Dissentors Must be Wrong

There is a severe and oft-repeated syndrome to be noted where supporters of a guru, with their whole belief structure at stake, immediately – and with utter emotional and intellectual dishonesty – attribute maleficence to those reporting abuse, who are assailed with the easiest slurs that come to hand. Brooke turned to evangelical Christianity – therefore, he must have a deplorable motive. What then, suppose an evangelical or any other type of Christian or Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist (or whatever!) believes a crime has been committed? Should he or she not report it? What suppose an author makes money out of a book that reports abuse or some other shocking fact? We should ban it? Ridicule it? Refuse to read it? Tacitly assume that what is alleged cannot possibly have been true? Suppose a doctor makes a lot of money out of treating cancer or writing a book about it? Should we thus assume that he or she does not know what they are talking about?

When, in early 1982, I glanced at a few pages of Tal Brooke’s Lord of the air, I thought (as so many Sai devotees before and since have thought) that he had totally missed the point of my spiritual teacher, for whom I thought there were good reasons for regarding as unique in history.  I still think Sai Baba is rare, if not unique in history – but now for reasons far from inspirational but which, rather, give great concern – not only to those who feel they have been catastrophically betrayed by him but to those individuals and institutions throughout the world whom his cult would seek to influence and transform.

Is Cultic Thinking Only Found In Cults?

What if cultic thinking is one of the great threats to a mature humanity? Is there no cultic thinking among terrorists? If there is, should it not be in our interests to understand it better? But, far more than that, what if some at least of its elements are present – all unquestioned – in our own belief systems, whatever they may be? What if the quest for charismatic leaders figures more widely than in those movements we so easily deem to be cultic?

Bizarre Content May Not Preclude Truthfulness Of Abuse Accounts

I now think that we have to take seriously certain reports (such as in the Brooke reportage) like Sai Baba morphing from one gender into another – NOT because they may be literally true but because the mind of a person in an abuse situation – especially with someone they believe is, for example, God incarnate, Christ-like, Buddha-like or whatever it may be – may well be undergoing some kind of pyschopathology. But one which, however, does not mean that they have not been sexually abused. They may indeed hallucinate in one respect – BUT not about the fact of abuse itself. They too have a right to be heard. Whether they have been abused or simply have imagined that they were abused, attacks upon them are reprehensible – and are clearly about defending a guru, and not about humane sensitivity and compassion for our fellow human beings.

Need For Independent Third Party Investigation

What, then, the case of someone who realises that they have had an experience of a kind bound to be disbelieved by most of their fellow human beings. Should they, too, fail to report their belief that they have been abused? Of course, most will take the ‘easy’ way out and shut up. However, there have always been examples of human beings propelled by conscience who will speak out for what they believe is true, even in the face of direst opposition?

Attackers Of Whistleblowers Have A Lot To Answer For

But suppose some human beings speak up because of conscience – for example, because those they have most loved, such as parents, or the founder of their faith or other inspirational role model have instilled in them the importance of telling the truth, even against the odds.

The fact that devotees of a guru under siege so vehemently attack those who dissent should not go unexamined. Their own assertions should be as rigorously examined as the views of dissentors. Indeed, the central contention all along of organized former devotees and other critics of Sai Baba is that independent, third party investigation of such serious allegations is of the utmost importance.