Behind The Mask ~ MY EXPERIENCE
OF SAI BABA or HIS EXPERIENCE OF ME
Because I am often
asked if I know about Sai Baba or have met him, it
might save me some time if I wrote about my experience
of him. Although I’ve not actually met him,
I have seen him at his place, at the end of 1987.
What I have to tell of him, however, took place ten
years earlier, in the following manner:
One evening, in mid-1977, while I was strolling
up and down in front of a temple where I used to stay
in Singapore, an Indian woman and her teenage daughter
came up to me and asked where she could find a certain
Thai monk who was staying there and who was well-known
for fortune-telling, palmistry, and so on. I directed
her to his quarters and continued my stroll. A few
minutes later, she came back and said: "He’s
sick and cannot help me. Can you help me?" I
said, "What’s the matter?" She then
told me that her husband had gone off with a young
woman, and she—the wife—thought that the
woman must have charmed him away from her (the vanity
of the thought!), and she wanted him back. When she
said this, I heard alarm-bells ringing and thought:
"Beware; this is not your thing!" But as
I could see that she was genuinely upset, I said to
her: "What I can and will do for you, if you
like, is go with you to your home and bless it".
"Oh, would you?" she said, "I would
like that very much. Thank you".
I asked someone from the temple to accompany
me and we set off down the road to find a taxi. On
the way, she said: "I am a devotee of Sai Baba".
"Oh", I replied, "I was at his place
in India just a few weeks ago, but he was away at
the time, so I didn’t get to see him".
"Really!?" she said, "that’s
interesting, because before I came here just now,
I was in touch with him, mind-to-mind, and he told
me to come to this temple where I would meet a monk
who would go with me to my home and explain everything
to me. But I didn’t think he would be European!"
When we arrived, she showed me her shrine-room
where she kept pictures of Sai Baba, and all over
the walls, the ceiling and the floor, in great quantities,
was ash—vibhuti—the materialization of
which Sai Baba is famous for; it was as if someone
had taken handsful of wet ash from a dead campfire
and thrown it around. "I don’t know where
it came from or how", she said. "One day
there wasn’t any, and the next day it was everywhere,
just as you see it now". She then told me about
her husband—who was her second husband, and
much younger than she—how he was very lazy and
never worked and just lived off her. When she couldn’t
or wouldn’t give him money, he would take her
things, like camera or cassette-player, and sell them.
I thought to myself: "She’s better off
without this fellow; why is she worrying and wanting
him back?" But I didn’t voice my thoughts;
instead, I asked her for a photo of him that I might
take back with me and meditate over. She gave me one,
I blessed the house, and went back to the temple.
That evening, I meditated over the photo and tried
to tune-in to the person thereof.
The next day, when I was in downtown Singapore
for something or other, about to cross a busy street,
I found myself standing next to the man in the photo!
"Should I say something to him?" I thought,
but decided not to. When I got back to the temple,
I called her, but she said: "I can’t talk
to you now; would you call me back later?" When
I did so, she explained: "I couldn’t talk
to you before as my husband was here; he had come
to collect his things and told me that he would not
be staying with me anymore but would visit me from
time to time. And when you called before", she
said, "he asked me who it was, and I told him
it was a European monk I had met. ‘Oh’,
he said, ‘does he wear glasses and look like
..... ?’ ‘Yes’, I said, ‘how
do you know?’ ‘Oh, I saw him on the street
today’".
A few days later, when I was passing nearby,
I went to see her again, and she said to me: "After
you came the first time, I contacted Baba again, and
he told me: ‘Yes, that’s the monk I meant’".
This time, I told her, indirectly, "Look, better
let this fellow go; he’s not worth bothering
about".
Does this mean that Sai Baba knew me, even
though I’d never seen him before? I really cannot
say; however, it seems beyond doubt that he does have
powers that most of us would consider ‘miraculous’
but which have been spoken of in India for thousands
of years. India is a special country in this way;
strange things go on there. Can we say it is all a
hoax just because we—in our sophistication—do
not understand the principles behind it, or do not
even know of the possibility of such powers? That
would be to display our ignorance and dogmatism, would
it not? There is just too much evidence and too many
reliable witnesses for us to take such a stand. All
we can say, if we don’t know, is simply that:
"I don’t know. Maybe".
Now, I am not a follower of Sai Baba, but
I will not knock or decry him as his teachings are
eclectic and not narrow; moreover, he has given many
people a sense of direction in life that they didn’t
have before; surely, he is to be commended for this,
not denounced, as someone in Malaysia once requested
me to do. Knowing that I was quite close to some of
Sai Baba’s devotees, and thinking that they
might listen to me, this person wanted me to denounce
him as a charlatan and ‘magician’ who
was not worth consideration. I refused to do this
on the grounds just given: that he has helped lots
of people find a sense of purpose in life when they
were otherwise lost.
I was at Puttaparthi again in December 1987,
but it was so crowded, with Westerners forming about
half of the 4,000 people there, and many of them had
clearly come in hope of cures of their various ailments,
so I didn’t even bother asking for an audience;
I thought that others needed his time more than I
did, and that if he wanted to see me, he would send
for me. I guess this was a kind of test of him on
my part. He didn’t call me, and after a few
days I left and went on my way. |