spiritual search

7/30/2019 spiritual search

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Search for Spiritual Insight!

When I was a student at Kozhikode (Calicut) in Kerala, I took part in the Indian independence

movement. I was just 12 years old then. To avoid the wrath of rulers, the school authoritiesexpelled me from the school, thus ending my formal education. My father, however, took care to

educate me at home by keeping a private tutor.

As a teenager, I read extensively on yoga, spirituality, and other topics on religion. The fact that

my father was a theosophist also might be one of the reasons for my adolescent interests in these

subjects. In 1947, at the age of 17, I left home to learn yoga and to gain other occult knowledge.

As I was leaving home my father gave me ten rupees so that I could send a telegram to him in

case I wanted to go back home and be picked up. I never felt the need to spend the amount.

Moreover, I was eager to follow Swami Ramdas who in his book In Search of God said that he

had toured India without any money and god helped him everywhere. I also had similar

experiences when I was helped by people wherever I went. There is an important difference:

while Swami Ramdas gave credit to a non-entity called god, I give credit to the real people who

helped me.

In Rushikesh

During my travel I visited the ashrams of various Hindu sannyasins and gurus throughout India.


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Once I spent about six months at Rushikesh at the ashram of Swami

Shivananda alias Dr. Kuppuswamy Iyerof the Divine Life Society. One Balakrishna Menon

was then one of the senior inmates of the ashram. He, in his later avatar, traveled widely

throughout India and abroad giving religious discourses on Gita and was known as Swami

Chinmayananda. One of Swami Shivanandas pet topics was Kundalini and by raising which, he

told us, anybody could get rid of any diseases. Paradoxically, Swami Shivananda himself was

suffering from diabetes and other chronic ailments. When I asked him how he himself was not

free from those ailments, he said that he could easily get rid of those diseases if he really wanted

to. But since those diseases were due to, according to him, his past sins he wanted to endure

rather than recover from them! I, of course, was not convinced.

Later, in 1949, I spent about five months at the ashram of Swami Narayanananda, the guru of the

yoga expert BKS Iyengar, at Rushikesh itself. Here I had my first encounter with what could be

called a miracle. Narayanananda once showed us a blank sheet of paper and drew, in double-

line, the Sanskrit letter Om. When he touched it with a burning piece of wood, it seared the

paper precisely between the lines forming the Sanskrit letter Om, leaving the remaining part of

the paper intact! He explained that anyone could do it by chanting Om for one hundred

thousand times. I attempted to replicate it. I chanted Om as many number of times as he had

claimed and followed his instructions scrupulously. But nothing happened the letter Om

refused to appear on my paper! This naturally aroused my curiosity and I decided to find out the

truth behind it. One day I peeped into Narayananandas room and there he was, writing the letter
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Om on a sheet of paper using some chemicals! Once dried, the writing would become invisible

and he would show it to us as a blank sheet though it in fact was not!

Narayanananda had a habit of, like other Sannyasins, advising us on the importance of celibacy

(brahmacharya) to attain spiritual insights. He had written a few books on this topic. He

sprinkled his text with plenty of words borrowed indiscriminately from sciences, thus giving an

impression that he had approached the subject scientifically. But it was in fact all nonsense.

Every morning I used to go to the nearby river to have my bath. One morning when I returned to

the ashram, having forgotten to take my soap, I found Narayanananda in a sexually

compromising position with the landlady of the building where the ashram was located. This

showed me that his (and others of his ilk) talk ofbrhamacarya was only hogwash. I soon left the

ashram.

My experience with sannyasins and yogis taught me that the yoga and other tantric knowledge

imparted by these self-delusionary swamis, gurus, and tantrics had no scientific basis. I soon

returned home rather than wasting more time with these godmen. However, I continued to read

books on these subjects and also tried to find out the truth behind miracles. I never tried to

publicize my findings as I was doing all these for my own knowledge.

Arrival of Abraham Kovoor

All these changed in 1969, when I met Abraham Kovoor who was in India with his Miracle

Exposure campaign. When he came to Coimbatore at the invitation of Advocate Kasturi, he

took time to visit my home at Podanur. After seeing my collection of books and other records on

miracles and other occult subjects, Kovoor asked me to take up the cause of exposing the

spiritual fraudsters.


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Abraham Kovoor

When Kovoor came to India next time for his lecture tour (which also happened to be his last

tour of India), I accompanied him most of the time. An interesting episode of that tour happened

in Kollam (Quilon) in Kerala. A large crowd of followers of Sai Baba, including Mr. S.K.Nair,

the editor ofMalayalanadu, a popular Malayalam Weekly now defunct, confronted Dr. Kovoor

asking him to guarantee that he would be able to pay one LakhIndian rupees if they arranged an

audience with Sai Baba and showed him a genuine miracle. Since Dr. Kovoor was a Sri Lankan

national, they knew that he would not be able to satisfy their demand. I was in Podanur when this

incident happened. Dr. Kovoor phoned me up, narrated the incident, and told me that all his

efforts of twenty years would go up in flames if they were not confronted headlong. I asked

Johnson Iyeroor, a young rationalist activist, to come to Podanur and handed him over a cheque

written in favour of Dr. Kovoor for one lakh rupees, supported by a letter from the bank

vouching that there was a bank balance of one lakh rupees in my account and that the cheque

would be honoured. Dr. Kovoor produced the cheque at a meeting at the office ofJanayugam (a

daily owned by Communist Party of India) and asked the followers of Sai Baba to come forward.

They never turned up!

After the demise of Dr Kovoor in 1978, I decided to devote the rest of my life to spread scientific

awareness amongst the Indian people. I have continued his challenge of offering one lakh Indian
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rupees to any person/s who can demonstrate any psychic, supernatural, or paranormal ability of

any kind under fraud-proof conditions.

Jappanam Siddhan and the Media Exposure

In the early 1980s one Sri Lankan godman named Jappanam Siddhan (from Jafna) came to

Kerala. He broke 101 un-husked coconuts in one sitting smashing them one by one on his

forehead without any visible injuries to him. He attributed this miracle to his spiritual powers.

The local dailies, especially Mathrubumi daily, gave wide publicity to his activities. He was

portrayed as a divine man who proved through this miracle the existence of spiritual prowess.

The newspapers claimed that the rationalists had no answer to his. I decided to challenge this.

I conducted a series of sessions throughout Kerala demonstrating that there is nothing miraculous

about that and it could be done by anybody, even by those without any practice. My team also

decided to expose the godman.

We visited Thiruvananthapuram where he was having his show. We had earlier found out that

the coconuts used by the godman were extremely tender ones that could be broken easily even by

crushing them with ones bared hands. We also found out from where the godman was sourcing

his supply of coconuts. We made a clandestine arrangement with the supplier and the next day

out of the four sacks of coconuts supplied to the godman, only one contained tender ones; the

remaining three bags contained mature coconuts with hard shells. When the godman conducted

his performance that day, he obviously could not proceed further than the first bag of tender

coconuts. When he realized that somebody had out-cheated him, his imagination found out an

escape route. He imputed his failure to his seeing a naked woman in a nearby temple pond where

he had gone for his morning ablutions! This unholy sight of a naked woman had weakened his

spiritual powers, the godman claimed! Despite his claims, the people could see through what

actually went wrong. With this expose, Jappanam Siddhan left the shores of Kerala never to

come back. This was perhaps the first miracle exposure that gave me wide publicity.

Targetting Sathya Sai Baba of Puttaparthi


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In 1968 I had left Thikkodi (Kerala) and settled at Podanur (Tamil Nadu). I decided to distribute

the land inherited from my parents. At the request of K. Kelappan, a Gandhian and Congress

stalwart in Kerala, 90 acres of land was given to a trust to start a college complex. When

Kelappan later expressed his inability to continue with the project, the land was transferred to

Kerala Satya Sai Trust. Though the land was gifted to start a college complex, it was not used for

the purpose for which it was given. In fact, no such institution has ever come up on the land till

date, even after more than three decades. Aggrieved by this I filed a case against the Kerala

Satya Sai Trust for appropriating the land giving false promises. The trust then headed by a

retired Supreme Court judge retaliated and made me arrested during the infamous Emergency

falsely alleging that I was a Naxalite. I spent three days in a police station. It was my moral

outrage against this blatant act of misusing my land that first prompted me to investigate Sai

Baba.

The fact that Sai Baba cheated others too through his tricks was a motivation to debunk him. Hegave Vibhuthi (holy-ash) to his devotees to treat incurable diseases and thus made thousands of

crores of rupees by exploiting them. On the other hand, he started hospitals to treat his own

diseases. When he injured his hip-bones, he was not treated with his Vibhuti but was operated

upon in his super-specialty hospital.

On Yoga

After astrology, Yoga is perhaps the most pervasive superstition prevalent in India today. Yoga

is not an exercise though many people are taking to yoga believing that it is an exercise. When

you do exercises, you do not keep your body in a fixed position for a long duration. On the other

hand, when you do yogic asanas (except Surya Namaskar), you keep your body in a stationary

position up to twenty minutes. This is not very natural and it may adversely effect the blood

circulation in the joints. Almost all the yogis (Aurabindo Ghosh and Flying Swamy, for example)

whom I have known died after prolonged paralysis.

On being an Atheist


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When we explain miracle and expose frauds, it is the duty of the law enforcing authorities the

government, the police, and the judiciary - to initiate criminal action against such fraudsters. We

now hear, almost everyday, the arrest of this or that godman somewhere in the country. Had the

government done 60 years back what they are doing at present, our country would, by now, have

largely been free of these exploiters.

On being diagnosed with cancer

I am not afraid of death. When I was diagnosed with intestinal cancer during a campaign in

Mangalore about one and a half years back, I decided to terminate my life if my health worsened

as I had no money to go for an expensive surgery and treatment. Before leaving for Podanur, I

told my acquaintances that I would not come back if I were not able to sell a piece of my land

and get the money necessary for my treatment. As it turned out, I could sell the land and go

ahead with the treatment.

Being diagnosed with cancer has not changed my outlook on life. If at all, it makes me to strive

more, to be more aggressive with my activities, and spend the remaining part of my life still

more fruitfully to strengthen the skeptic community in India.

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