Another Godman Coming To A Checkbook Near You

File under: Wackadoo Gurus

Yet another godman is about to hit the States (and the pocketbooks of the spiritually naive.) Sri Sai Kaleshwara, a recent export from South India, is presently on tour in Europe and coming to the U.S. with all the fanfare his little horn can muster. A quick survey of his web presence finds all the elements of the usual psychotic grandiosity, including having visions of a long dead Shirdi Sai Baba (not the doodle-diddling one) and receiving his posthumous blessing:

When he placed his head on Baba’s samadhi (tomb) he clearly heard Baba’s voice, “I have been waiting for you. Now is the right time.” Soon after, the young Kaleshwar began displaying miraculous powers and healing abilities. Shirdi Baba had opened his divine channels. His true dharma, his spiritual work, had begun. He was fourteen years old.

But since he's a godman, miracles were nothing new to his burgeoning divinity:

Miracles occurred around him: once his grandfather observed the divine appearance of the Goddess Saraswati standing guard over him while he slept; another time, it was a king cobra, its mantel spread, that shaded him as he napped soundly on the ground in the backyard at his grandfather’s farm.

Like any good showman, he lays it on nice and thick for himself:

No master for 2,000 years has given a guarantee to connect to the real Mother in physical form, to receive amazing healing abilities and enlightenment channels.

Until now, of course!

And every godman worth his ass fat makes this claim:

My mission and my aim is to bring a new kind of spirituality that creates happiness in every person’s heart, to change the world’s belief system and the way spirituality is practiced in the world, to make your life a divine message to this planet and to create spiritual masters, not students.

Very nice touch! Appeal to the desire for spiritual greatness and the allure of name and fame, some thing poor Kaleshwara has clearly succumbed to himself. And according to him, it's all we really want, too:

You really want to be a full moon, a purna avatar, a pure crystal drop, a shining person living your life as a divine message to this planet. A purna avatar shows the reality—what you can’t believe—and makes impossible things possible. Someone who can totally understand this beautiful dream and drama, this whole life and death. Until then, you have to live in the illusions.

Not surprising, coming from such a wailing windstorm of obnoxious self-glorification.

Once again, we're in the mood to disfigure ourselves over the fact that rational human beings actually believe in this cockamamie nonsense. It's as if a noxious black cloud spreads across the sky as minds pick up the idea that self-realization will make them a god. We'd go as far to call it demonic if we believed in that crap. As it is, one man's God-complex becomes a major source of self-realization prevention, thus insuring a steady supply of the continuously ignorant, all kept that way by what they believe about their godman, rather than learning to simply believe in themselves.