According to Karlis Osis, Research Fellow at the American Society for Psychical Research, who also investigated claims of Sai Baba’s feats of materialization: “the stories of Baba’s paranormal phenomena describe powers of a magnitude, variety, and sustained frequency not encountered anywhere else in the modern world” (quoted in Haraldsson, 1987, p. 9).
Sri Sathya Sai Baba (1926-present) was born in the small remote village of Puttaparti, in Southern India. With the name, Sathyanarayana Ratnakara Raju (a.k.a. Sathya Sai Baba). Sai Baba has been performing extraordinary feats of materializations ever since age 14 after recovering from a near fatal scorpion sting. Out-of-doors, in full daylight, and observed by literally thousands of witnesses including magicians, scientists, highly educated physicians, governors, judges, college professors, Sai Baba has materialized a range of materials including lockets, pendants, rings, finely crafted jewelry, Indian delicacies and sweets, vibuti (sacramental ash), amrith (a honey-like substance) in vast quantities many times a day in various locations over the past 60 years without anyone ever detecting a hint of deceit, fraud, or trickery.
Materializations of assorted objects “out of thin air.” Unlike the short-lived materializations attributed to the physical mediums of the 19th and early 20th century such as D. D. Home and Indridi Indridason, Sai Baba’s materializations remain as solid objects, appearing out the swami’s bare hand, except on the few occasions when he apparently caused them to disappear. Materialized objects have consisted of both inorganic (metal, stone) and organic (plant) material. They are produced invariably in full daylight or under normal lighting conditions.
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Practically all who have met Baba believed they had observed materializations, and most had a locket or a ring of some kind they were proud to show us. Each treasure had reportedly appeared out the swami’s bare hand, and he had made a present of it to them. These objects were varied and made of a range of materials, including gold and precious stones, some of the pieces being jewellery of exquisite quality. (Haraldsson, 1987, p. 29)
The charism of agility. Some observers have witnessed Sai Baba controlling the rain, levitating, appearing to groups of people at two different places at the same time, and suddenly disappearing at one place and almost instantaneously at another. For instance, one witnessed reported the following incident:
As we were approaching the river and passing a hill on our right side, he (Baba) would sometimes suddenly disappear. He would, for example, snap his fingers and ask those around him to do the same. And hardly had we snapped our fingers when he vanished from amongst us and we could see him on top of the hill waiting for us. (Haraldsson, 1987, p. 258)
Tranformation of matter. Baba has been observed in public and under well-lighted conditions to have changed water into sweet liquids, water into petrol, leaves or pebbles into toffees and lockets, coffee into milk, sand into bronze figurines, pieces of granite into sugar-candy, and a stone into an apple. In one instance, a witness reported the following:
In full daylight at Horseley Hills, Baba gave me a rather flat stone of irregular size and asked me to throw it up in the air. I threw it high up, and he asked me to catch it when it came down. I was afraid the stone might hurt my hands. By the time I caught it, it was an apple. I gave the apple to Swami, who took a knife and cut it into pieces, and everyone got a piece of the size into which we normally cut apples. From this one apple he gave pieces to some 25 people. This was a medium-size apple; normally it might have sufficed for 8 to 10 people. (Haraldsson, 1987, p. 222)
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Multiplying food. Witnesses report his multiplying food – both hot and cold, solid and fluid, homemade and even factory-produced - for large groups of people at a time. For instance,
Usually, after a namkara [a name-giving ceremony for a newborn baby], it is auspicious to distribute some sweets. After producing the pendant (a golden medallion with a chain given to the baby), Baba called my wife over, saying: “Let’s have some sweets.”He asked her to spread her palms to form a cup. Baba rubbed his palms together above hers and filled up both her hands with a powerlike sweet that we call crushed ladus. It took only a few seconds, and there was so much of it that it was pouring out of his hands like rain, making a mound perhaps half an inch higher than the upper part of her palms. Baba went around and distributed the sweet to the five or six people who were also present. There was enough for everyone, and a little more besides, so when he came to my wife, he told her: “See, a double share for you.” It tasted very good. (Haraldsson, 1987, p. 211)
Action-at-a-distance. Objects or materials inexplicably appear from Sai baba’s hands, forehead, mouth, and feet. There is also some evidence that objects appear at some distance from him (e.g., when he tells a person to pick an apple from a nearby tamarind tree and the individual finds an apple on a branch of that tree). Vibuti has appeared in distant places, such as on photographs of Sai Baba that hung on walls or that stand on tables in private homes, in some cases oozing out of the photo on and off for several months.
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Transcendental Meditation and Continuous Consciousness The experience of “enlightenment” has been characterized in the mystical traditions of the East as involving a form of heightened awareness during both waking and sleeping states of consciousness. Through advanced meditation practice, one can allegedly access so-called “pure consciousness” by developing a “witness” – a silently observing portion of the self that witnesses all other states of consciousness (waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep) without trying to change them (see, for example, Deikman, 1982). Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation (or TM) defined “cosmic consciousness” operationally as the ability to maintain pure consciousness throughout a 24-hour period of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep (Roth, 1987). Is such a state of consciousness fact or fiction?
Meditation stabilizes awareness in sleep. An advanced practitioner of Transcendental Meditiation ™ demonstrated enhanced awareness of dreams (called “lucid dreaming”) and the ability to the maintained heightened awareness in unbroken continuity throughout a twenty-four-hour cycle of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep (as operationalized by increasing EEG coherence across left and right hemispheres of the brain during both waking and dreaming states (Gackenbach, Moorecroft, Alexander, & LeBerge,, 1987).
Meditation serves to stabilize the experience of consciousness in sleep…. Meditation does contribute to the continuity of consciousness in sleep and helps to stabilize it Once an individual has reached this level, he or she may often or continually be an observer of him- or herself in the waking state. (Gackenbach & Bosveld, 1989, pp. 150-151)
The Great Realization. This state of consciousness is called “the Great Realization.” The lucidity that the subject brings into sleep causing her to “awaken” to the fact that she is dreaming is also brought into the waking state to cause her to “awaken” to the fact that her everyday waking experience is actually a dream (LeBerge, 1993).
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