British filmmaker Jeff Grant's 2011 blog posts about profound impact of his mid 1970s experience of Sathya Sai Baba's spiritual aura and charisma

Last updated on 11th Jan. 2020

Further to my recent post: British filmmaker Jeff Grant corroborates Aug. 2019 Sanathana Sarathi article paragraph about his mid 1970s film capturing Sathya Sai Baba's materialization of a necklace, though film is lost now, https://ravisiyer.blogspot.com/2019/12/british-filmmaker-jeff-grant.html, this post covers the posts about Sathya Sai Baba on Jeff Grant's blog. Mr. Jeff Grant is a former film director and now professional writer who lives in London, UK.

Note that these posts/articles are written in what seems to me to be an unbiased matter-of-fact manner. I consider them to be very well written accounts that portray the awesome spiritual presence/persona of Sathya Sai Baba and his power to give joy and peace to people. They also touch upon the spiritual teachings of Sathya Sai Baba.

All these 8 articles were written after Sathya Sai Mahasamadhi in April 2011, in the months from May to December 2011. Links to them are given below, along with some description of some of the posts and many extracts from them. I have chosen to include many extracts which I feel capture very well some unbiased experiences of Sathya Sai Baba's divinity (spiritual aura and charisma) in the mid 1970s by Jeff Grant, as I think that will help to share these experiences with a wider audience and also help to ensure more longevity. [See bottom of post for Jeff Grant permission to me for using his posts.] In a few places, I have given some comments prefixed with 'Ravi:' and enclosed in square brackets [].

1) Filming Sai Baba, https://besonian.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/filming-sai-baba/, May 31, 2011

Grant writes that he made a film of (Sathya) Sai Baba for American Television in the mid 1970s. He writes "The shooting of that film was the occasion for some of the most extraordinary things I’ve seen, heard or been involved with. The whole experience had a profound impact on me. The effects of it are with me still and I’m sure always will be."

7 of these posts are about his experience of making this film.

Grant writes, "Let me say at the start that I’m not here to make any claims about Sai Baba’s apparent mystical powers. Nor am I here to attempt to debunk them – many have tried and all have failed. I will relate only what I saw, what I felt, the impressions that he and the experience made on me."

[Ravi: It is very good to see a British film maker say that many have tried to debunk Sai Baba's (apparent) mystical powers and that all have failed. I think one can presume that would surely include such efforts by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).]

The film making was for American TV and funded (as per Grant) by a lady given the name Naseem (a pseudonym) by Grant, who was of Indian origin, was a devotee of Sathya Sai and well connected with top persons in India.

He writes of his and team coming to Prasanthi Nilayam ashram and being seated at a table in a room (which he refers to as "a little cold hut"), and being told that Swami (Sathya Sai Baba) would be coming to meet them. Grant expected some grand entrance being made by Swami along with trumpeteers and others or being picked up in "the Guru's Rolls Royce to some exquisite meeting place".

Grant writes that Swami came in by himself and closed the door behind him. He looked at them, giving them a huge welcoming smile and sat down at the table they were seated at. Grant writes of his and team's reaction: "We were dumbstruck. By just what I have no good idea to this day. Except that this individual (Sathya Sai Baba) carried about him and had brought with him into that room some sense, some aura, some intangible and indefinable ambience/charisma such that I’ve never in my life come across before or since. It felt to me like he brought with him all the power of the universe, that it was irresistible, it was all-encompassing and that it was good. And all that, not in a vast cathedral with pomp and organs playing, but in a little cold hut, entirely on his own and without yet once opening his mouth."

2) So what do you say to Sai Baba?, https://besonian.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/so-what-do-you-say-to-sai-baba/, June 12, 2011

An extract from it:
He (Sathya Sai Baba) looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Would you like some ash?”

I swallowed hard. Ash? What’s ‘ash’ in this context? What on earth does he mean? My head continued to spin. Had he meant ‘hash’ – at the time a common word for cannabis? [Ravi: Ha! Ha!] Or what? I nodded. Why not? It seemed the easiest thing to do. And I could see no reason not to. At which point he said to me, “Then hold out your hand.” I did just as I was told.

Now – it’s important to understand this exactly as it happened. He and I are sitting directly opposite each other, separated only by the width of a trestle table – about a metre – or three feet. I put out my hand. I hold it over the table just about halfway between the pair of us. He then raises his right hand, holds it a few centimetres above my open palm, extends his fingers downwards and rubs them together while at the same time performing a gentle circular motion with them.

Now remember that he is wearing nothing (in outer clothes anyway) but a saffron robe; that the sleeves of that robe, though fairly loose at the cuff, extend only about two thirds the way down his arm. Which means that some ten centimetres of his forearm from the wrist upwards, are totally uncovered and visible.

As he does this circular, rubbing motion with his fingers, there falls from the ends of his fingers what looked like grey powder. It fell into the palm of my outstretched hand and formed a little pile about a centimetre in height. I was speechless. The eyes of the others were standing out on stalks. Normal mental processes had come to a stop. This had happened. There was no normal, rational response to this. I think we all felt we were in some sort of time and reality warp where, understanding nothing of what was going on, it’s best you make no attempt to try.

I looked up at Sai Baba. What now did he want me to do? This was his show, not mine. “Now,” he said, putting his own hand to his mouth, “you eat it.” There was no question. I put the ash in my mouth. It tasted very Indian – joss-stick like. And swallowed it.
--- end extract ---

Another extract:

I have to say again that I am not attempting to prove anything here. To some it will probably seem fascinating and to others, ridiculous hokem designed to con the gullible. This sort of thing is not, in any case, subject to proof. If you see it, you see it. And if you see it, you are then forced somehow to come to terms with it in whatever way you find most appropriate to your own self. There will be more of it as I continue with this blog. But I want to make clear one thing. For many, many of the hundreds of thousands of the people who go to see Sai Baba – or did, for he is recently dead – this production of ash – and other objects – apparently from thin air is what impresses them more than anything. They run back to their home countries to amaze their friends with what they’ve seen. Sai Baba himself however, dismissed these ‘miracles’ as they were popularly called, as ‘the mosquito on the back of the elephant’. And further, he said, ‘I give you what you want so that you will come to want what I have come to give’. Think about it.
--- end extract ---

3) Return to Sai Baba, https://besonian.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/return-to-sai-baba/, July 3, 2011

An extract:
Suddenly, Baba emerged from the building on his own. An electric current ran through those waiting. They sat bolt upright, still as stones, and watched with great intensity the movement of this single, smallish, saffron-robed figure with the great shock of black hair. He walked towards them and as he did so, he did something with which I was to become very familiar while I was there. He closed his eyes and held one hand up before him, palm upwards with the fingers quite relaxed so they formed a sort of cup shape. And with this hand, as he slowly walked, he did small, circular movements, almost as though the hand was some sort of antenna. Then he stopped in his tracks. Opened his eyes and looked at the rows of cross-legged people with whom he had now drawn level and whose every eye was rivetted to him. “What,” he asked suddenly, in that rather strangely high-pitched voice of his, “do you come here for?”

After a moment’s silence, a woman near the front called back to him, “We come here to see God!”

I more than half-expected him to reply, “Then you’re looking at him,” – that being what millions around the world, including the woman who answered his question, think – or thought – of him anyway. But instead of that, what he said in reply to all of them and which surprised them I think as much as it did me, was, “If you want to see God, look at yourselves.”

What they all made of that, I’ve no idea. I think they were a bit dumbstruck – maybe even disappointed – at receiving such an enigmatic response. Nobody said anything. And me, I was surprised and rather pleased. He had made no personal capital whatever out of it. Had he, I wondered, in some almost casual, deceptively homespun fashion, told them what the Bible would also have told them – ‘Be still and know that I am God’? I am no conventionally religious person, but for this film I had done a certain amount of study of world religions, and his remark to them that rather chilly November morning sounded very much like that. I was intrigued. I was already very aware from our earlier experience of him, of the quite indescribable power that hung around this being. But now I started – albeit rather reluctantly –  to respect him.
--- end extract ---

4) The 50th Birthday of Sri Sathya Sai Baba, https://besonian.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/the-50th-birthday-of-sri-sathya-sai-baba/, August 5, 2011

[Ravi: Sai Love 178 - Arriving by Helicopter, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCOBpyRhXDw, 2 min. 30 secs. seems to show the helicopter landing mentioned in above post.]

5) Sai Baba and the power of silence., https://besonian.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/sai-baba-and-the-power-of-silence/, September 6, 2011

An extract (slightly edited to edit out irrelevant stuff):

His (Sathya Sai Baba's) unhurried walk through those massed crowds (around quarter million people in total at Prasanthi Nilayam then as per Grant) was the most impressive show of power I have ever seen. No shouts, no Hosannas, no ecstatic hullabaloo. Just – silence as they hung on his every move, and the sound of his bare feet on the gravel. Whatever this man was, he had a power the like of which I had never before seen, nor have done since. The best sense that I could make of it – for I was as aware of this power as much as anyone else – was that he was a major conduit for some awesome (and I mean the word in its true sense) force in which perhaps we all share, but of which each of us more or less ordinary individuals has only a minuscule portion.
--- end extract ---

[Ravi: Superb description of the absolute centre of power that Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba would be, during darshan. I experienced the same display of power during darshan in the mid 90s and 2000s going up to March 2011.]

6) Goodbye to Sai Baba. Or was it?, https://besonian.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/goodbye-to-sai-baba-or-was-it/, October 5, 2011

An extract:
It’s as though he knows just what’s going on in your head. And again as I’ve written here before, on at least two occasions in our time in Puttaparthi I experienced that very thing. It was almost an extra physical presence in my brain sharing my thoughts. It was spooky. But OK because utterly benign. Had it been other than benign it would, I’m sure, have been profoundly disturbing.
--- end extract ---

[Ravi: So well said. The first time I had an unmistakable experience of Bhagavan (Sri Sathya Sai Baba) knowing what's in my mind/head was in Jan. 2003 when I was seated in the teachers' block and Bhagavan gave me a look of fury from about 5 to 10 feet or so as I had some stupid thoughts in my head. I was scared out of my wits! But that was a look to discipline me. As I came to terms with unmistakable direct experience of Bhagavan knowing what's in my mind/head (and reacting to it), I learned to keep away foolish thoughts from my mind by Namasmarna (chanting name of the Lord). Some time later Bhagavan showed me an Abhaya Hasta (open palm raised in blessing, and which is a sign saying: do not fear) with a smile, once again at a distance of around 5 to 10 feet, though this time I was seated in the verandah, which I interpreted as Him showing happiness that I have kept out foolish thoughts from my mind/head. Bhagavan used his power of knowing what's in my mind/head to improve me - and so he used it in a benign/good way, in a way a spiritual master should/would.

Jeff Grant's words above, "Had it been other than benign it would, I’m sure, have been profoundly disturbing." are thought-provoking. As I think about it, I agree with him.

I should also mention that when I first unmistakably and directly experienced Bhagavan's powers of reading my mind (and reacting to what was in my mind then through facial/body expression), I could not but help thinking about the Mule character in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy (later Series) books, 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Foundation_series_characters#The_Mule, 'The Mule is one of the greatest conquerors the galaxy has ever seen. He is a mentalic who has the ability to reach into the minds of others and "adjust" their emotions, individually or en masse, using this capability to conscript individuals to his cause. Not direct mind-control per se, it is a subtle influence of the subconscious; individuals under the Mule's influence behave otherwise normally - logic, memories, and personality intact.'

The Mule character was NOT benign! end-Ravi]

Another extract:
Baba moved on to me. He placed a hand gently on the lower part of my chest. “Much better now,” he said. “Much calmer.” I wasn’t as sure as he was about that. Then when he went on to say to me, “Soon, I give you complete peace,” I was quite lost. He capped it all by saying, “You need something sweet to eat.” You don’t question it. It makes no sense in the way we normally use the word and most normal sense has, by this time, gone out the window anyway. “Hold out your hand,” he said. I did. Now, in Southern India there is a pudding whose name I do not know. But it’s sort of reddish-purple in colour, and in texture is rather like tapioca. He did the usual swirling motion of the hand – and as I write this I’m fully aware of how bizarre it all sounds – and from his fingers fell enough of this pudding to form in my palm a small heap about two centimetres high. “Now,” he said, “you eat it.” I did.

He moved on, ending with Naseem. He stood right in front of her. “I believe,” he said, “that you are leaving tomorrow.””Yes,” she replied. “We fly to Mumbai. Then we leave there for London on the tenth.” “Ah no,” he said, “you leave for London on the eleventh.” She corrected him. “I have the tickets,” she said. “It is definitely the tenth.” “Even so,” he said, “I think you will find you leave on the eleventh.” (The end of that story is that we were met off the plane the following day in Mumbai by Naseem’s attorney. “There’s been a slight problem,” he said. “I’ve had to delay your flight to London by a day. You now leave on the eleventh.”)

After this short exchange with Naseem, Baba said to her, “Now lean forward a little.” She did so. Whereupon he raised a hand right over her head, opened his palm and from it dropped a long silver necklace with what looked like charms on it. Kit, standing on my right, emitted a loud gasp of astonishment. Baba then placed the necklace around Naseem’s  neck and said, “Now please don’t take that off.”

My mind went immediately back to my conversation first thing that day with Naseem in which she said – a) he had never given her anything which he had materialized and for that she was thankful because she would find that very difficult to handle; and b) that he tests you, and tests you in ways that touch you where you are most vulnerable.

As ever in this blog on Baba I make no assertions one way or the other. I saw what I saw. We all did. But if, in the circumstances I’ve described above he was no more than a conjuror, then even the most sceptical would have to admit it takes some conjuror to have up the thin sleeve of a saffron robe enough loose ash to form a small pile, enough loose sticky-ish South Indian pudding to form another pile, and a heavy silver charm necklace without any of it showing under the material or his having to do the least apparent manoevre in order to eject all this stuff seamlessly at the right moment and in the right way. I am not however, in a position, to say it’s impossible.

As I’ve pointed out before, his ‘materializations’ were not, to me, the most impressive thing about Sai Baba. Nor were they to him. ‘They are,’ he said, ‘just the mosquito on the back of the elephant’. The most impressive thing to me was the fact that in his presence reality around me went through a fundamental change and took me back to something I had lost – hence my tears. At least, that’s how it seems to me.
--- end extract ---

7) Sai Baba – the aftermath, https://besonian.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/sai-baba-the-aftermath/, October 26, 2011

An extract:
A number of people, having read my blog, have asked where they may be able to see the footage we shot. The answer is I’ve no idea. It was indeed exhibited on PBS. But thereafter it seems to have disappeared. I had one copy of it which I lent to a Sai Baba group in Surrey in the UK. I’m convinced they returned it to me. But despite searching high and low, I have not been able to lay my hands on it in fifteen years.

Toby the cameraman contacted me asking if I had a copy. He had lost his – where and in what circumstances he couldn’t figure out. It seemed an odd coincidence. I suggested we both contact Naseem who, as Producer, must have, if not a copy, then at least access to the negative from which copies could be made. It turned out that she had no copy either. She, like us, had had one. But also like us, could not make out where it had gone. Nor, it seemed, did she know where the negative was. The laboratories in London where the film had been processed and where such a thing would normally be stored, did not have it. Nor did they know where it was.

The only occasion on which, since editing the film, I have seen any of the footage we shot was on TV some years ago, in one of the many – sadly uninformed – films which have been made about Sai Baba. The BBC aired some of our footage of Baba’s helicopter jaunt. Where they got it from, I’ve no idea – perhaps the company in Soho where I edited it. But that particular sequence never made the final. I cut it out, feeling it misrepresented both him and the film’s message. So even that footage was not from the finished film.

Nor was that the end of it. During the shoot, most of us on the unit had personal stills cameras. Between us we must have taken a huge number of shots, mostly of Baba, but also of the birthday celebrations in general and the amazing jamboree which it had spawned. When we were packing up to leave the ashram, Kit the camera assistant had suggested that instead of each individual taking their films to Boots or wherever to be processed and printed when we got back to England, we give them to him. He knew the people in the laboratories – they would be only too happy to process the stills for us as well as the movie and for free. It was a common, unofficial practice among film units.

Nobody got a single print out of it. The negatives of those stills also went missing along with the negative of the film. The situation was unheard of by anyone I ever met in the film business.

The result of all this was that after the initial showing of the film on PBS in the US, neither it, nor the images taken of Baba at the time by the crew, were ever seen again. What had Baba told Naseem? – at first many will see it; after that, very few. The last news I had of the film was that at least one copy existed, and that in Puttaparthi. It was reputed that Baba himself commonly used it during instruction for his students. That may be the case. But I have never had confirmation of  it.
--- end extract ---

8) Postscript to Sai Baba. Who or what was he anyway?, https://besonian.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/postscript-to-sai-baba-who-or-what-was-he-anyway/, December 28, 2011

This post deals with an interaction with a new devotee (given a pseudonym of Gill), (in the mid 1990s) 20 years after the above mentioned film was made. Gill went through some serious psychological problems and when looking for a way out, came across Sathya Sai Baba teachings and devotee groups.

An extract:

She (Gill) had begun to despair of finding a way out her problems when someone chanced to mention a ‘holy man’ in southern India – a man  named Sai Baba. He, it was said, had a reputation for being able to help the troubled and the oppressed – among whose numbers she surely counted herself. She had researched him, liked what she discovered, joined a local South London Sai Baba group and had become immersed in his teachings to the point where, by the time of her conversation with John, she accounted herself a devotee. This man, she told him, had changed her life. John himself told me he wasn’t quite sure how the guy had managed that at a distance of six thousand miles but he was in no doubt that something in her had changed fundamentally and for the better.

Gill, not unnaturally, was fascinated not just by Baba’s teachings but by the man himself. She was desperately keen to go out to India and actually get a glimpse of him. When John told her that a friend of his had actually made a film of Sai Baba at his ashram in Puttaparthi, she couldn’t wait to meet up with me.

Some days later, the three of us met in a pub in West London. I related some of the events I have covered in the earlier parts of this blog. Gill sat and listened as though mesmerized. And what, I then asked her, was it about Baba which, without any direct contact, had brought about a change where therapy and all the advice from friends and relatives had failed?

Her answer contained stuff with which I was by now very familiar – nothing concrete, nothing that could be effectively expressed in terms that would make much sense in a discussion around a dinner table. It was a feeling, gained by being around and with people who had met him and who had been devotees, some of them for a very long time and who seemed perhaps to pass on from him some aura of goodness, tolerance and love; a feeling gained by reading about him and hearing just some of his reported sayings – ‘There is only one religion – the religion of love’: ‘My miracles are the mosquito on the back of the elephant; I give you what you want so that you may come to want what I have come to give’. And the one which she felt spoke directly to her, ‘Shed just one tear and I will wipe away a hundred from your eyes’: – and so on and so on. From all this she had built up a very powerful sense of a presence not limited perhaps by space or time which carried about it – I’m reluctant to reduce Baba to ‘him’ or ‘her’ – a massive, all-enveloping charge of something totally positive, limitlessly good and completely reassuring; a knowledge that – to employ the words of a famous medieval English mystic – ‘all will be well’. And that is irresistible.
--- end extract ---

Concluding paragraph of post:
A lot of people have asked me who or what I thought Sai Baba was. The only honest answer is that I have no answer. I saw what I saw, I felt what I felt. I’ve seen others go through the same experience and the same subsequent intellectual and emotional turmoil. And that is as much and as little as I can say. Where would I – where would any of us – find the resources appropriate to making an assessment of a being so way beyond our understanding? It would be a bit like using the beam of a torch in order to try and locate the torch.
--- end extract ---

Jeff Grant permission for using his posts on this blog post

Note that Jeff Grant over email has indicated to me that he is OK with my usage of extracts from his posts on Sathya Sai Baba, (provided) that I will use "it only in the service of Baba and his work".

I felt it appropriate to reproduce my assurance to him (over email) in this regard:

Yes - I will use your material only for Baba's mission as I understand it. Let me elaborate that a little so that there is no confusion. I think Baba's mission involves reinforcing Sathya (truth), Dharma (ethical life), Shanti (peace) & Prema (love) in the world, along with rejuvenating faith in God as a spiritual force (across all religions and spiritual paths) that responds to prayer, at times (suitable times, I guess, but I have no precise idea as to the basis of when God/Divine force decides to respond to prayer), though the response may not be exactly how the person who prayed wanted it but would nonetheless help the person. And also reinforcing belief in Karma/Divine Judgement which is an important aspect of almost all, if not all, mainstream religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism etc.) - this makes people become more responsible as they realize that even if they are able to get away with unethical behaviour in worldly society, they will be made to pay for it by God/Divine power. I have heard Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba say, so many times, live in the Hall in Prasanthi Nilayam where I would be usually seated when Bhagavan was giving discourses from Oct. 2002 to Mar 2011 when I was part of the ashram system while Bhagavan was in living form: "Daiva Preeti, Paap Bheeti, Sangha Neeti" [English translation: (To) love God, fear sin, follow ethics of (your) community]. That was his simple but powerful mantra for people to lead good and meaningful and happy lives.

Further, I have absolutely no profit motive in the posts about this matter that I will publish on my blog and Facebook - and this applies to the future too. Ever since I created the blogs & Facebook account, they are free for anybody to access and I have not monetized them. And I will not be monetizing these blogs & my Facebook account in future. [If at all I get into such commercial work later, I will do it on new & separate blogs and a different Facebook account.]
--- end extract from my email response to Jeff Grant ---

I am very thankful to Jeff Grant for his posts on Sathya Sai Baba and for allowing me to use extracts from his posts on this free post of mine.
=======================================

11th Jan. 2020 Update

Given below is a screenshot of Jeff Grant mail to me approving of the above post contents and not wanting any changes (Grant was OK with me sharing his response). Note that one unrelated sentence in Grant's response has been blanked out.

[To open pic in larger resolution, right-click on pic followed by open link (NOT image) in new tab/window. In new tab/window you may have to click on pic to zoom in.]

The text part of the exchange from the screenshot is given below:

I (Ravi S. Iyer) wrote on 6th Jan. 2020 [Ravi: It was 12:15 AM on 7th Jan. 2020 Indian Standard Time as per mail timestamp seen on my PC in Puttaparthi, India, and which would have been 6th Jan. 2020 evening in UK]:
Dear Jeff,

I have put up the second post on my blog here: https://ravisiyer.blogspot.com/2020/01/british-filmmaker-jeff-grants-2011-blog.html and on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/ravi.s.iyer.7/posts/2716165788599981.

I have given below the above mentioned blog post contents. Do feel free to discuss any changes you would like. Once again, thanks a ton.

[This was followed by the blog post contents]
---

Jeff Grant responded on 8th Jan. 2020:
Great post, Ravi! I like it. I have nothing to add or to ask you to change or subtract. It's very long but it holds the interest all the way through. And you've included enough links to keep me occupied for quite a while.

Brilliant. And thank you for including my experiences in such a comprehensive manner. All fascinating and very rewarding. It brings it all back in quite a graphic fashion. [Blanked out sentence]

Take care,

Jeff
--- end text of exchange in screenshot ---

I thanked Jeff Grant for his co-operation.