My Guru and His Disciple

by Christopher Isherwood

  This sounded fair enough. And I was impressed by Gerald’s restraint. He didn’t urge me to start meditating then and there. He didn’t tempt me by describing the benefits he got from his own meditation—quite the opposite; he spoke of it in the same tone I would have used when complaining of my struggles to get a book written: it was a lot of hard work and most of the time it was frustrating. “When one comes to this late in life, one’s mind’s already so wretchedly out of condition.”

  Oh yes, Gerald impressed me enormously. Already I believed that he, at least, believed he was making some progress in contacting “this thing” inside himself. He couldn’t be lying to me; he hadn’t any motive for doing so. He couldn’t be shutting himself up for six hours a day in his room and pretending to meditate merely in order to impress Chris Wood. I didn’t deny that Gerald was a playactor, with an Irish delight in melodrama and arresting phrases. Indeed, I believed in him because he was theatrical, because he costumed himself as a ragged hobo, because his beard was Christlike but trimmed, because some of his lamentations over the human lot had a hint of glee in them and some of his scientific analogies a touch of poetic exaggeration. I should have been much more suspicious of him if he had presented himself as a grave infallible oracle. My own nature responded to his theatricality and found it reassuring, for I was a playactor, too.

  What made his company so stimulating was that he seemed to be so intensely aware. Awareness was his watchword. According to him, you had to maintain continual awareness of the real situation, which is that “this thing” exists and that we are therefore all essentially united. Whenever your awareness weakened, you slipped back into acceptance of the unreal situation, which is experienced as space-time and which imposes disbelief in “this thing” and belief in individual separateness. Gerald would quote Jesus admonishing the apostle Simon Peter: “Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat.” Gerald uttered the word “desired” with a kind of snarl, baring the teeth on one side of his mouth. Then, quite uncannily, he would mime Satan himself, separating the mortal ego-husk from the immortal wheat grain and blowing it to perdition with a gleeful puff of his breath. “Satan,” in Gerald’s interpretation, was the distracting, disintegrating, alienating power of space-time, operating through its agencies—the radio, the movies, the press. “It’s the very devil!” Gerald would exclaim in a whisper, his pale blue eyes wild, like those of a man in a haunted house, beset by terrors. (He had developed the theme in a book published that year, Pain, Sex and Time.)

  * * *

  Lao-tze’s Tao Te Ching was Gerald’s favorite gospel of pacifism. He often repeated a sentence from its sixty-seventh chapter: “Heaven arms with pity those whom it would not see destroyed”—meaning that to feel concern for others is the only realistic attitude, because it is a recognition of the real situation, our oneness with each other. Feelings of love and compassion are not merely “good” and “right,” they are ultimately self-protective; feelings of hatred are ultimately self-destructive.

  Lao-tze says that we should be like the water, because fluidity always overcomes rigidity; rocks and prejudices get washed away in the end. To illustrate this, Gerald used to say that Man, who has survived the dinosaurs and managed to evolve without growing wings or gills or poison glands, is descended from a small, weak, but adaptable tree shrew. (A famous biologist later assured me that Gerald’s sense of poetic truth had carried him too far; Man is more probably descended from a large and aggressive ape.)

  Gerald agreed with Lao-tze that one should never put the other party in the wrong if that can possibly be avoided. Martyrdom may be heroic if it is unavoidable, but you must be very sure that you have done everything permissible to save your persecutors from the spiritually self-destructive act of killing you. Otherwise, your death will be an act of passive aggression for which you will be partly to blame. Gerald would say with a sigh: “I’m afraid that that exceedingly odd individual, Jesus of Nazareth, deliberately got himself lynched.”

  But Gerald disapproved of Jesus far less than of his Church. Gerald said that he could never become a Christian as long as the Church claimed for itself a monopoly of divine inspiration—which Hindus and Buddhists do not—and as long as it represented the crucifixion as the supreme and crowning triumph of Christ’s career. Here, Gerald was joining Bernard Shaw in his condemnation of “crosstianity.” Which I found amusing, because Gerald’s meditative bearded beauty, high temples, and long red nose seemed to present the composite image of a Shavian Christ.

  * * *

  Gerald referred to the life he was trying to lead as “intentional living.” Its purpose was, as he put it, to “reduce” the “strangulated” ego; he was fond of using words in their medical sense. The intentional life required not only long meditation periods—he insisted that his own six hours were an absolute minimum—but also an attempted moment-to-moment vigilance over one’s every thought and action, since every thought and every action helps either to create or to remove the obstacles to union with “this thing.” No thought or action, however seemingly unimportant, can be regarded as neutral.

  What were these obstacles? Gerald, who had a tidy mind and an inclination to think in trinities, would tick them off on his long, expressive fingers—addictions, possessions, and pretensions. Addictions included their opposites, aversions. They therefore ranged from, say, a lust for blonds, heroin, or toffee to a disgust-fear of cripples, gangrene, or lizards. Gerald regarded addictions as the least harmful of the three categories. Pretensions were the worst, he said, because there is one of them which can outlast all other obstacles. You may conquer your addictions and unlearn your aversions; you may unload yourself of your possessions; you may resign from your positions of honor and retire into humble obscurity. But then, and only then, the most deadly of all the pretensions may raise its head; you may begin to believe that you are a spiritually superior person and therefore entitled to condemn your weaker fellow creatures. (Was Gerald himself in danger of yielding to this final temptation? Yes—if only because he did seem capable of overcoming all the other obstacles along the course which led to it. I could imagine that Gerald might one day begin to take himself too seriously as a religious teacher. But, surely, not for long. He was too much of a comedian not to become quickly aware of the funny side of his holiness.)

  As a concept, “intentional living” fascinated me. I saw how immensely it would heighten the significance of even the most ordinary day, how it would abolish boredom by turning your life into an art form. Indeed, it was related to the attitude which a novelist should have, ideally, toward his work on a novel. With one huge difference, however. The novelist is involved only with his novel and only during work hours; the intentional liver is involved with his whole life experience, and throughout every waking moment of every day until he dies. The finality of such an involvement scared and daunted me. To Gerald’s austere temperament, it strongly appealed. The negative side of his involvement was his hatred of space-time, and he gloried in his hatred. “It’s only when the sheer beastliness of this world begins to hurt you—like crushing your finger in a door” (here he winced, miming the physical pain) “that you’re ready to take this step.”

  Gerald accepted the Hindu and Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation—that life within space-time is a cycle of birth-death-rebirth; you are born again and again, whether you like it or not, as a consequence of your past deeds (your karmas). You can only free yourself from this cycle by achieving union with your real nature and thus breaking your bondage to space-time. That was why Gerald was working so hard to make sure that this life would be his last.

  I simply could not share Gerald’s feelings, much as I respected his beliefs. How could I hate space-time when it contained so much that was lovable and beautiful, including Vernon? Admittedly, my feelings for Vernon were hotly sexual and possessive. I found nothing essentially evil in this, but it was an entanglement with worldly life—an entanglement which was growing more extensive, for
now we needed a home and at least one car; transportation in the sprawling Los Angeles area being as much of a problem then as it is today. Chris Wood had guaranteed our security for the next few months by lending me two thousand dollars. But I should have to pay them back sooner or later by going to work, and I couldn’t work legally until I had got on the U.S. immigrant quota and become a permanent resident of the country instead of a mere visitor. And once I had done this, what kind of job could I hope for? It had been all very well for me, in New York, to decide that I would like “some sort of regular humble employment.” After spending a few weeks in Los Angeles, I realized that the economic depression was still on, and that all “humble employment” was being competed for by thousands of better-qualified applicants. The only available work I was really qualified for was writing movie scripts in a studio. So the only options open to me were to earn a great deal of money or none at all. I consulted a movie agent about my chances. She had never heard of me as a writer and obviously thought me a hopeless case; things were very slow just now in the studios, she told me. So I worried and worried, thereby entangling myself ever more deeply in worldliness.

  This made me feel that I must overcome my last remaining prejudices and try meditation. That might at least help me to take short rests from worry during the day. I already knew that Gerald himself had had lessons in meditation from a Hindu monk who was living nearby, Swami Prabhavananda. I now asked him to tell me what the Swami had taught him. Gerald became teasingly secretive, however. It was absolutely forbidden, he said, to repeat your teacher’s instructions to anyone else. Such instructions varied from pupil to pupil, according to individual needs and temperaments. It would be like letting a fellow patient drink your medicine. Gerald even hinted, in his melodramatic way, that, if he were to teach me what he had been taught and I were to try it for myself, I might suffer terrible psychic consequences, maybe even go mad.

  Then, relenting, he gave me some sensible and simple advice. I wasn’t to attempt actual meditation of any kind. I was just to sit quiet for ten or fifteen minutes twice a day, morning and evening, and keep reminding myself of “this thing”—what it was and why one should want to make contact with it. That was all.

  Now that I had made up my mind to try it, the mere idea of meditating filled me with a strangely powerful excitement. I thought of it as an attempted confrontation with something hitherto unencountered but always present in myself. When I try to recall how I felt, I think of entering an unexplored passage in a house which is otherwise familiar to me. The passage is in darkness. I stand at one end of it, on the threshold between the known and the unknown. I feel a certain awe but no fear. The darkness is reassuring and not alien. I have no need to ask, “Is anything there?” My instinct assures me that something is. But what? “This thing”? (Whatever that is.) Or merely my own unconscious? (Whatever that means.) At present, the question seems academic. I am content with simply being where I am, on the threshold of the dark passage.

  The only distraction I was aware of, in those days, was created by my own embarrassment; I was acutely aware of myself playing this exotic game, and I seemed to be playing it in the presence of all my friends, over there in England. “Christopher’s gone to Hollywood to be a yogi,” I heard them saying—it would be Hollywood rather than Los Angeles, because “Hollywood” represents the movie world and all its phoniness. I knew, of course, that my real friends wouldn’t sneer at me so viciously. Some might be pained or dismayed, nearly all would be puzzled, but they would take it for granted that my motives for doing what I was doing were at least honest. No, it was I myself—or, rather, a hostile minority in me—who was sneering.

  Vernon certainly didn’t sneer. Being young and curious about all ideas which were new to him, he was greatly interested and started questioning Gerald. He may have done some meditating on his own. The fact that I didn’t ask him about this suggests that I was feeling guilty because my sits were so irregular. I think I felt the inevitable dissatisfaction of a beginner who hasn’t been given any definite instructions. I can’t remember why it was that I didn’t immediately contact Gerald’s Swami Prabhavananda. Maybe the Swami was away from home. Anyhow, it wasn’t until late in July that Gerald took me to see him.

  Two

  In those days, and until the freeway was cut through Hollywood during the nineteen-fifties, Ivar Avenue climbed steeply from Hollywood Boulevard straight up to Franklin Avenue. There, Ivar appeared to stop. But it didn’t. A short distance to the right, along Franklin, there was a left turn onto an extra bit of it. This turnoff was easy to miss. Many of Prabhavananda’s visitors did miss it, the first time they came looking for him. Characteristically, Gerald liked to regard this as symbolic: where wells of eternal truth exist within space-time, they are always carefully hidden.

  If, however, you made the turnoff successfully, you found yourself on a stretch of narrow road which was only a block in length. Here the ground was more or less level, for you were now, so to speak, on top of the first step of the staircase of hills looking over the city toward the ocean. Hollywood Boulevard lay below you, busy with shops and restaurants. At night it sparkled brilliantly and often swept the sky with arc-lamp beams if there was a film premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. But, up here on Ivar, you felt secluded within a sleepy hillside suburb of little houses nesting amidst flowering bushes and vines.

  Halfway along the road, on the right-hand side, a surprise awaited you; a squat Hindu temple with white plaster walls and onion domes, their pinnacles painted gold. A flight of steps led up to it, with cypresses on either side.

  At number 1946, on the street corner next to the temple, stood a wooden bungalow—then one of the city’s most typical structures, originally adapted from the bungalows of the Orient, and perhaps for this reason small-windowed, with a shadowy interior, as if to provide coolness in a much hotter climate than ours. In this bungalow, Prabhavananda and two or three other people were living.

  I have absolutely no memories of my first visit. Can this have been because Gerald talked so dazzlingly that the Swami’s personality became dimmed, along with anybody else’s who may have been present? I had known him to have this effect on me before. Nevertheless, this visit accomplished all that was necessary, from my point of view: the Swami and I arranged that I should come back alone a few days later, so that he could give me some instructions. Our second meeting is recorded in my diary; it was on August 4.

  This time, he didn’t receive me at the bungalow but in a small study which was part of the temple building. I found him waiting for me there when I arrived. I was immediately aware of the atmosphere of calm in this room, rather uncomfortably so. It was like a sudden change in altitude to which I should have to get accustomed.

  The Swami is smaller than I remembered—charming and boyish, although he is in his middle forties and has a bald patch at the back of his head. He looks slightly Mongolian, with long straight eyebrows and wide-set dark eyes. He talks gently and persuasively. His smile is extraordinary. It is somehow so touching, so open, so brilliant with joy that it makes me want to cry.

  One of the Swami’s characteristics isn’t mentioned here; he chain-smoked cigarettes. Since I, too, was a heavy smoker, this wouldn’t have bothered me.

  I felt terribly awkward—like a rich, overdressed woman, in the plumes and bracelets of my vanity. Everything I said sounded artificial and false. I started acting a little scene, trying to appear sympathetic. I told him I wasn’t sure I could do these meditations and lead the life I am leading. He answered, “You must be like the lotus on the pond. The lotus leaf is never wet.”

  I said I was afraid of attempting to do too much, because, if I failed, I should be discouraged. He said, “There is no failure in the search for God. Every step you take is a positive advance.”

  I said I hated the word “God.” He agreed that you can just as well say “The Self” or “Nature.”

  He talked about the difference between yoga meditation and autohypnosis.
Autohypnosis or autosuggestion makes you see what you want to see. Meditation makes you see something you don’t expect to see. Autosuggestion produces different results in each individual. Meditation produces the same result in all individuals.

  I explained how I had always thought of yoga as silly superstitious nonsense. The Swami laughed. “And now you have fallen into the trap?”

  In this account, there is one enormously important omission. My vague reference to “the life I am leading” seems to refer merely to a worldly life in the conventional sense; my efforts to get employment and money. I must have told the Swami about these, too, thus prompting him to advise me to be like the lotus leaf—which is a standard Hindu precept. But the question I had actually come to ask him was a far more serious one. If his answer was unsatisfactory to me, there would be no point in our ever seeing each other again.

  I wish I could remember exactly how my question was worded. No doubt it was put apologetically. Perhaps I blushed and stammered. In essence it was: Can I lead a spiritual life as long as I’m having a sexual relationship with a young man?

  I do remember the Swami’s answer: “You must try to see him as the young Lord Krishna.”