Abraham Kovoor’s Case Diary: Apparitions

Abraham Kovoor

In an article on Sai Baba Dr. T. Nallainathan, President of the Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba Manram, wrote in the Tamil daily Thinakaran (4.11.1966) thus:-

“A yogi is capable of leaving his physical body in one place and appearing in a distant place in his spiritual body. It was like this that Bhagavan appeared before the Rajah of Chingoli at Chingoli while his physical body was at the same time at Shirdi ... In April 1965 the 40-year-old Bhagavan Sathya Sai Baba appeared before me in person in Colombo and blessed me. Simultaneously he was going from town to town in Andhra Pradesh giving sermons. Both of us spent 45 minutes together in an office in Colombo. There he spoke in Sinhala to the Sinhalese officers. He had never learned the Sinhala language at anytime ... While at Madras I saw Sai Baba getting a golden image of Vishnu by simply waving his hand in the air, and presenting it to Professor T.M. Mahadeva”.

In this long article Dr. Nallainathan also wrote about apparitions claimed to have been seen by the late Madanle Blavatsky, Col Olcott and their colleagues at the headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar.

There are three possibilities in the apparition story of Dr. Nallainathan. They are:-

1. It is objectively real based on facts.
2. It is subjectively true though not real, being the hallucinatory experience of a mentally deranged person.
3. It is an utter falsehood. 

For verificational purpose we called for information about the name and loca­tion of the office where Baba appeared to Dr. Nallainathan, and the identity of the officers who held conversation in Sinhala with Baba, through the columns of the Ceylon Daily News and the Times of Ceylon. But there was no response from any one. This helped us to discard the first category. It was not based on facts.

All our efforts to get some information about this from Dr. Nallainathan hiimself also failed. He simply refused to speak on the subject. Thus we are forced to rule out the second category also. It is not based on fancy even! There is only one conclusion!

Now let us turn our attention to the claims of apparitions by the founder of the Theosophical Society.

Madame Blavatsky

In 1884 Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society visited England and gave to the principal workers of the Society for Psychical Research evidence that some Theosophists in India had produced apparitions of other .people, and that telekinetic phenomena such as are said to happen in the pres­ence of physical mediums, had also been occurring there.

Mr. Richard Hodgson was sent out to India by the S.P.R. to investigate it on the spot. He returned to England after his investigations with a most damaging report concluding thus:-

"I finally had no doubt whatsoever that the phenomena connected with the Theo­sophical Society were part of a huge fraudulent system worked by Madame Blavatsky with the assistance of Coulombs and several other confederates, and that not a single genuine phenomenon could be found among them all". (Proc. S.P.R. Vol. III, Page 210)

Sprague de Camp, one of the world's leading authorities on the occult and pseudo-scientific cultists, in his book 'Lost Continents' writes, “The greatest of modern oc­cultists, the successor of Simon Magus and Cagliostro, was Helena P. Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy. . . She was a fat middle-aged Russian woman living in New York City. She was the estranged wife of a Russian general, and had been succes­sively the mistress of a Slovenian singer, an English businessman, a Russian baron, and a merchant from the Caucasus living in Philadelphia, and had made her living as a circus bareback rider, a professional pianist, a businesswoman, a sweet-shop worker, and a spiritualist medium. Altogether she had led a pretty lively career, though in later years she undertook to gild refined gold and paint the lily by inventing an even more remarkable past wherein she was a persecuted virgin who traveled the wide world in search of occult wisdom.

“Mme Blavatsky took as her occult partner Henry Steele Olcott, a shrewd Ameri­can Lawyer who left wife and sons to live with her. Theosophy really got started when the pair moved to India, where Mme Blavatsky learned to combine her considerable knowledge of Western magic and occultism with a wide and inaccurate smattering of East Indian philosophy and mythology. She led a fascinating and turbulent existence, and kept a hold on sizeable body of followers even after she had been exposed in many chicaneries.

“In 1882 she was dazzling a pair of well-connected Anglo-Indian dupes, the newspaper editor Arnold P. Sinnett and the government official Alan Octavian Hume, by delivering letters she said were written by her “Master” Koot Hoomi, but which, as handwriting analysis later showed, she wrote herself." (Lost Continents, Page 54)

Dr. Nallainathan says that he saw Sai Baba producing a golden image of Vishnu from the air and presenting it to Prof. Mahadevan. How sensible it would have been on the part of the learned doctor to have written about this miracle after conducting a thorough investigation as Richard Hodgson did in the case of Blavatsky's claims! Has Dr. Nallainathan or anyone else searched Baba's body and dress before he performed the alleged miracle?

Has not Dr. Nallainathan seen the doyen of magic in this country Great Mudaliyar Amarasekera producing various articles including live animals from nowhere?

If Mudaliyar Amarasekera also can come down to the level of Sai Baba and fraudulently claim that he is able to produce these articles by his divine powers, we are sure there will be many gullible like Dr. Nallainathan and Mr. C. Balasmgham to believe it.

Our challenge to Sai Baba offering any amount up to Rs.25000 if he can miracu­lously produce articles immediately after his body and dress are searched by us is still in force. We request Dr. Nallainathan, Mr. C. Balasingham and other devotees of Sat Baba to persuade their god incarnate to face this test and prove that he is not a juggler.

Courtesy: Exposing Paranormal Claims - Abrahama Kovoor, Published by B. Premanand, Indian CSICOP, Podannur; Date of Publication: 15-3-2000. For other essays by Abraham Kovoor available on our website www.carvaka4india.com, please click here.

Posted in: Abraham Kovoor,Apparitions,Madame Blavatsky,Satya Sai Baba