“Children, don’t look at the moon. Look at Venus instead.”
“Why?” we both wanted to know.
“Dark forces are on the moon.”
“And Venus?” we asked eagerly.
“That is where the higher powers are.”
This I cannot forget.
* * *
My editor at Addison Wesley, Nancy Miller, has once again stood by me for each step of this book. She is the editor every writer hopes to have, and I am lucky beyond telling. I am honored and touched that Catharine MacKinnon took time away from her own important work to sit down and read this manuscript word for word, with a focus and concentration only she can bring to a serious topic. I am grateful to my uncle Bernard Masson (and his son Charles) for making his many letters to and from P.B. available to me and for telling me his memories of a thirty-some-year relationship. My sister, Linda Juson, and my mother, Diana Masson, did the same. But I am most of all grateful to my father, Jacques Victor Masson, for his many honest and painful conversations about P.B., the last of which we held today, his eightieth birthday. It is to my father that I dedicate this book.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Half Moon Bay
May 27, 1992
*
Many years have passed since I wrote My Father’s Guru, and much has happened since. My father died in 1996, at the age of 84. I have remarried, and have a son who is 16, and another son who is 11. My wife, Leila, is a pediatrician. We all live in Auckland, New Zealand, on a beach with lots of animals. My daughter Simone, now 38, married her partner Jaime, and they live in Auckland. Simone is a nurse practitioner. My mother is 94, and lives nearby, in a home for people with dementia. She sometimes reverts to Yiddish, and although she rambles in her conversation, mostly about the past, she has never once mentioned P.B. P.B.’s former wife (and still a “disciple”) was so furious with my mother and father for talking to me about P.B., and making his letters available to me, that she stopped speaking to them. In the world of Indian spirituality influenced by Paul Brunton I am still persona non grata. That’s ok, as I would not want to be part of that world in any event. I continue to write books about Freud, about psychology, but above all about animals.
Nothing I have learned since writing the book has led me to change my mind about the events I describe. I remain a firm skeptic, but I am still, I gladly acknowledge, rather fond of P.B., or in any event of the memories I have of him. It is possible my interest in animals goes back to his gentle ways with them.
It was, everything considered, at least not a boring or conventional childhood, and I am grateful that I seem to have emerged unscathed, at least in any way I can recognize.
It is quite a tale, and I hope you enjoy reading it.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Auckland
January 9, 2013
Chapter One
My Father and His Guru
I arrived in Mysore City, State of Mysore, South India, on Saturday, December 8th, 1945, at 8:40 P.M. and was met at the station by P.B. He immediately said to me. “You are here for a certain purpose which will be revealed to you before you leave. I wanted you to come here, that is why your trip was made so easy.”
* * *
So begins my father’s diary of his four-month stay in South India, where he went to meet, for the first time, his guru, Paul Brunton.
My father was born Jacques Victor Masson in Paris in 1912. During his early childhood his family moved about a great deal, living in New York, Paris, and Jerusalem, where most of his family still live. He was always considered different and felt different from other members of his family: They were physically large where he was small, they were crude where he was sensitive, they were loud while he was quiet, they (especially his father) were violent while he was gentle. “He looks so refined,” people would say when he was young. And who was he? Was he French because he was born in France? Or was he American because they moved to New York when he was small? Or Bukharan, because both his parents were from Bukhara? Or Israeli, because that is where most of his family lived? He was not even certain what his language was. French? Bukharan? English? Hebrew? Did he live with his mother? His father? His uncle? He moved with each in turn, unsure to whom he belonged. He lived in Paris until he was two, but when World War I broke out, his mother and three sisters went to New York, where his father was living, and stayed in New York for five years. The family then moved back to Paris, and in 1920, when my father was eight, he moved in with his father’s older brother, Sam, and his wife, Ida. In 1926, when he was fourteen, he moved to Jerusalem and lived in the Bukharan quarter with his father and his three sisters (Henriette, Vicki, and Rachel), surrounded by relatives. He remained there until 1930, when he was eighteen.
At that time his father was in his forties and had remarried a beautiful Bukharan Jewish woman, who was only eighteen, the same age as his son. She knew he had been previously married but had no idea that he had five living children. My grandfather was in Shanghai, China, and asked my father to bring his new bride and join him there. Shortly after arriving, however, his father and new stepmother left for an extended business trip to Bombay, Peshawar, and Burma, and my father was left alone with no money. He spoke French and Hebrew but almost no English and no Chinese. He was eighteen but looked fifteen. He felt completely abandoned. His father sent him several hundred kilos of rough lapis lazuli, which was almost unsalable in those days of economic depression. After about a year he managed to sell some of it. During the 1931–32 Japanese invasion, he joined the Shanghai Volunteer Corps.
At twenty, my father decided to migrate to the United States. In 1932, he left Shanghai on the SS Hoover to San Francisco, arriving in the middle of the Great Depression. He survived by doing odd jobs and working in a linen store on Hollywood Boulevard. In 1936 his employer, Norman Jemal, sent him to Honolulu, Hawaii, to open two stores. A year later he began his own linen business in Denver, Colorado. He moved his business to Tucson, Arizona, that same year and then in 1938 to Detroit, obeying a restlessness that has never left him.
My grandfather had not had any contact with my father in eight years. One day in 1938 out of the blue he called. “Jacques, come to Chicago I have a prospective bride for you.” In Chicago, my father met his father at Zion’s Kosher Restaurant on Roosevelt Road. The owners were my grandmother and grandfather. The woman who was to become my mother, Diana Zeiger, joined the two men at the table, and within five months, on January 22, 1939, she and my father were married in Chicago. The next year my father opened a large linen store on Michigan Avenue and another on South State Street, an enormous five-story store devoted exclusively to linen. At that time, it was one of the largest in the world. Two years later I was born, on March 28, 1941, at the Chicago Osteopathic Hospital, even then my parents were interested in alternative medicine. A year later, my parents moved to Los Angeles, California, where my father began a new career as a wholesale dealer in precious stones and pearls, the business in which most of his family had been engaged for as long as anyone could remember. He was successful almost immediately and has continued this business to this day.
During the war, my father was drafted but could not pass the medical test due to kidney problems. He nonetheless attempted to enlist in the Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army, since he spoke fluent French, but he was rejected for lack of qualifications. Although my parents were Jewish, they had no sense of the tragedy taking place in Europe and did not know what had happened until many years later. They were completely engrossed in a different world, the world of mysticism.
*
My father first learned of P.B. from his older brother, Bernard. The appeal of P.B. to Bernard is impossible to understand without knowing something more of the family history.
My great-grandfather, Shlomo Moussaieff, was born in Bukhara, a city along the silk route in the Central Asian province of Uzbekistan (formerly part of the South West Soviet Union in Asia). He was a gem merchant from a Jewish family with
a strong interest in Jewish mysticism (Kabbala), a system of esoteric Theosophy with occult elements developed by rabbis during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He had five sons and two daughters. One of the sons was my grandfather, Rafael Haim (later known as Henri), born in Bukhara on July 23, 1883. He, too, was interested in Jewish mysticism and became a gem merchant. At nineteen he married Penina (Hebrew for “pearl”) Abdul Kerjan, a young, pretty Bukharan Jewish girl. They moved to Palestine, where my uncle Bernard, their first child, was born in 1905. In 1910 the family moved to Paris, where my father, Jacques (Jack) Victor was born on May 27, 1912.
My grandfather was a large, passionate man, colorful and given to unconventional ways. In France he was a pearl and diamond merchant and led a flamboyant life. I was told that he seduced every girl and woman around him whether they were eight or fifty-eight. Nor did he exempt his own family. His wife came from a very simple background. When she arrived in France, she spoke no French and knew nobody. She sat on the floor in the middle of the apartment and attempted to cook rice pilaf in the ways she had learned as a child. She ate with her hands, which embarrassed my more worldly grandfather, who started dating and sleeping with dancers from the Folies Bergeres. The five children came in quick succession, and my grandfather got fed up with both his wife and the children and decided to move out, leaving my grandmother with no means of livelihood. She still spoke no French, had no profession, and knew nobody outside her immediate family. She had no money to run the household, nothing even to feed the children. Rumor has it (I heard this from my father’s cousin, Shlomo Haim Moussaieff, who now lives in London as a hugely successful gem merchant) that my grandfather ordered one of his employees in Paris, a man called Nissim Valero (who was eventually to become an Israeli judge), to seduce his wife, so that he could accuse her of infidelity. My grandfather was later to claim that my father, Jacques, was the son of this Valero, though my father laughs at the idea and says it is patently untrue, and his father knew it. It was his idea of a cruel joke.
One day in 1920 in Paris, my grandmother Penina decided that she could stand her life no more. She went to the Diamond Exchange on the rue Cadet and sent her son Bernard, not yet fifteen at the time, inside to call his father. He refused to see her. She insisted that she had something of great importance to tell him. Finally, he came to the top of the stairs and asked her what she wanted. She told him in Bukharan that she had no food to feed the children and they were all starving. He told her “Go to hell,” and turned to leave, when Penina started shrieking at him with cries of rage and curses in Bukharan. She then pulled a gun from her skirt and shot five times at my grandfather. He gave a loud yell and made a leap at his wife. Bernard swiped at his father’s legs and floored him. One bullet grazed my grandfather’s eye and left him bleeding profusely, but he was not seriously injured. Pandemonium broke out, with my grandfather shouting over and over, “My own son came to kill me!” The police were summoned, and my grandmother was put in jail. Bernard did not see her for nine years. The children then went to Lycee Michelet, a boarding school. Eventually my father went to live with a brother of his father, Uncle Sam, and Bernard moved to Palestine. Penina moved to New York, where she died of Bright’s disease in 1931. She had six children, not a single one of whom was with her when she died.
In Palestine, Bernard lived with his grandfather, Shlomo (a popular name in our family) Moussaieff, a wealthy gem merchant who had an all-absorbing interest in Jewish mysticism, Kabbala. He had an immense library, and Bernard spent a great deal of time reading Hebrew books about the Kabbala. Bernard was particularly captivated, as any adolescent might have been, with the notion that certain people have powers, mysterious powers, that exert an influence on the real world. These powers exist in all traditions, whether they are called miracles, oryogic powers, or gifts. They include such things as being able to tell the future, to read another persons mind, to move an object without touching it, to levitate, to become invisible, and so on. I said “any adolescent,” but I think I mean especially one whose life is filled with trauma and unhappiness, as Bernard’s was. To imagine that there is a world totally different from the one you are living in, a world of benign magicians of immense power, is bound to comfort anybody at the mercy of bigger, stronger, and meaner people.
Eventually Bernard left Palestine, moved to the United States, and entered the U. S. Navy. By 1934, at twenty-nine, he was chief petty officer in the navy yard in Charleston, South Carolina. It was there, on February 23, 1938, that he made his first attempt to connect with P.B.
Navy Yard
Charleston, S C.
23 February 1938
E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc.
300 Fourth Avenue
New York, N. Y.
Dear Sirs:
I desire to communicate with Mr. Paul Brunton, the author of The Secret Path, Search in Secret India, etc.
I would appreciate it very much if you would kindly inform me as to how to address myself in order to contact the gentleman by letter.
The letter was signed B. A Grand. Bernard regarded “Grand” as a kind of nom de guerre to which he was entitled in order to hide the fact that he was Jewish. It may be, too, that he rather liked the elevated sound of it. In any event, this letter began a thirty-year correspondence and acquaintance on the part of my uncle Bernard with the author Paul Brunton.
*
My father first heard about Paul Brunton from Bernard in 1939, when Bernard was thirty-four years old, and my father was twenty-seven. My father looked up to his older brother. He regarded Bernard as a kind of genius plagued with bad luck. Bernard gave my father three of the first books P.B. wrote, A Search in Secret India, A Message from Arunachala, and A Hermit in the Himalayas, and he spoke to him at length about mysticism and yoga but especially about magic powers, something Bernard had been interested in ever since he studied the Kabbala with his grandfather in Jerusalem. He told Jacques that P.B. had told him that “the only reason we are born in this world is to attain Self Realization.” I was to hear these words many times in my childhood: “Is he self-realized?” was commonly asked. “I was convinced that Bernard was telling the truth,” my father told me recently, and he decided then and there that he wished to become a “disciple” of this great man.
He wrote his first letter to P.B. in 1940, asking for spiritual assistance. P.B. wrote back, and so began their correspondence.
P.B. was in India throughout the Second World War, living there as a guest of the Maharaja of Mysore. At the end of the war, my father decided to travel to Mysore to visit P.B. The time was not propitious for travel. It was 1945, I was four years old, and was being raised as if I were the incarnation of a great Indian yogi. My father was determined that he would visit India and see these yogis for himself. The war having ended only a few months before, transportation was extremely difficult to obtain, especially for civilians, but somehow he managed to convince the U.S. Army’s Air Transport Command to take him to Bombay.
My father arrived in Mysore in early December and the next evening wrote my mother a letter.
Modern Cafe. Dasa Prakash. Mysore City. Sunday, December 9th, 1945.
Dearest Angel:
I arrived here yesterday at 8:30 P.M. and was met at the station by P.B. himself. It was dark and there were a lot of passengers—but he greeted me instantly. We then went to the Hotel. After I registered we went for a long walk, then to his house which is a Villa opposite the Maharajah’s palace. Then for another long walk and back to the Hotel. I am making notes of what he tells me, and shall show them to you one day. Will keep a full diary. I will learn a lot here dearest and it is very very fortunate that I came. He told me he did not want any one to come but me. Not M [a Chicago lawyer] who wanted to come three months ago, or Bernard. He told them he did not wish to see them. So you see how fortunate I am. He said I had a certain thing to learn and later on I would understand the reason I had to come to India instead of waiting a few months to see him in the States. Anyway he will be
tremendously busy when he goes back there. Here there is no one else to interfere. Please do not show this to anyone… Today, Sunday, he came to visit me in the Hotel and told me that we shall start my spiritual work today, also that he will give me some books on meditation for me to study. He will pick me up after lunch… Mysore City is a very beautiful place to live in, much nicer than Palm Springs, it is very quiet and peaceful, there are large parks and the Maharajah of Mysore’s Palace is just like a 1001 nights dream. His Highness the Maharajah of Mysore is a very modern man and his state is the finest in all India, it is very progressive and constructive God bless him. It is known as the “Garden City of India.” If you came here you would love it very much. The climate is ideal… How lucky I was to come by plane! I am one of the few if not the only civilians who came here not on urgent business by plane. Destiny has indeed been very good to me… Monday morning—Dec. 10, 1945. After lunch P.B. and I went for a long walk on the palace grounds, I took some color pictures of a Dome with a real gold top. Saw the Palace garage which houses about 40 high priced cars, Dussberg, Rolls Royce, and others. Then went to P.B.’s house [Jasmine Villa, Hyderali Road], had a long talk, read a while. Had tea with him and later on went for a long walk to the Zoo—had long discussions about various topics. You don’t know how fortunate I am, it’s just like taking a three year university course in 3 weeks. He has a very good sense of humor and we had some hearty laughs. The late Maharajah of Mysore was one of his best friends, kept P.B.’s picture on his desk constantly, gave him a big Dussberg car with a chauffeur and a big Palace to live in. Among P.B.’s students were a lot of high Ministers in Egypt who later rose to very high positions in the government—After our long walk we rested then we meditated. Spoke to P.B. about you dearest and he told me if you could not meditate then you should pray every day, praying should be easy for you dearest, just pour your heart out and pray daily. I will help you meditate and go on the path when I return. After meditating we walked to my hotel and I asked P.B. if he cared to have dinner with me, he said he would not mind celebrating our first day together, so we had a nice vegetarian meal, then talked and he went home—One feels at ease in his company, he is very friendly and frank. It’s a very wonderful thing for me to be here.
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