There can be a major difference between telling facts truthfully and knowing what is true. A witness who has been unknowingly misled - or who eagerly trusted and believed may tell experience most honestly, but this may well still misrepresent actual states of affairs. Someone can be truthful about their subjective experiences, while these experiences may remain very far from penetrating to the truth of things. Not only may the experience be the result of framed and mind-distorted perceptions but it may conflict with the evidence both of systematic investigation, collective experience, factual knowledge and reason.

To be truthful may lead to revealing a more comprehensive or hidden truth, but what one tells can be distorted by one's subjective interpretations combined with what one thinks and believes in general, all bending one's perceptions. When one has developed a mindset which is largely organized by some doctrine or faith, the truth of any matter is always more or less clouded by that mindset. Those who have a very wide mindset will usually be able to interpret their perceptions in a less subjective manner than those who lack training in comparative studies, critical thinking, and psychological self-understanding.

In the case of Sathya Sai Baba, very considerable investigation is invariably required to remove or dispel mere appearances, the more so when secrecy is always the order of the day concerning his actual behaviour most of the time. Faced by concerted conscious deception, cover-up and deceit, it is very hard to get to the true state of affairs. For those who have developed the 'true believer' and blinkered self-programming and self-denigrating mentality of an emotional and dependent devotee, the task is almost insuperable. It require a figurative 'smashing of the mirror' of one's own preconceptions and even a dear part of one's self-image (i.e. that one could be dcceived so long and so much).

I was very close to being a true believer, though I always had some reservations about matters which I could not judge (some of Sai Baba's excessive claims, much of what I increasingly observed to be 'fishy' in the ashrams and the Sathya Sai Organization. However, I was very severely jolted out of my complacent acceptance of the main import of Sathya Sai Baba's life and work and much of his more acceptable Hindu-based teaching. It was above all V.K. Narasimhan's close observations of Sathya Sai Baba and his inside knowledge of what went on around him that gradually whittled away my mistaken interpretations of many things, until the bombshell of learning from him of the facts about the infamous police cold-blooded murder of devotees in Sai Baba's own bedroom. This I have described elsewhere (LINK)- and - after the spell was first broken - the aftermath of this is described in my subsequent long investigations. Freed from the self-programming that is inevitable if one becomes positively involved with the Sai movement - my attitude necessarily became the more questioning (I allowed myself to investigate the sexual abuse allegations in depth) and so progressively more critical of Sathya Sai Baba and a great deal of what he now represents.

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