Why was my father there? What did he believe? Almost everything my father knew about Paul Brunton before he met him he had heard from his brother Bernard. Bernard, my father later told me, “had completely brainwashed me. He told me P.B. was an avatar, that is, an incarnation of the godhead, that he was an ‘adept’ with tremendous occult powers. I was completely certain it was true. It was only due to my good karma that I was going to meet this extraordinary being.” He believed that P.B. did indeed have extraordinary powers. P.B. did little to disenchant him.
Rivalry among disciples is endemic to cults and cultlike associations, and this one was no exception. Bernard had told my father in 1940 that he, Bernard, was my father’s guru, and my father had more or less accepted this. Now here he was with a real guru, with Bernard back in the United States. It was a major triumph.
P.B. told my father, as he did Bernard and all others who came to him, that “discipleship under an adept is a privilege which can never be bought.” The only way it could be earned was over vast stretches of time, which was why more than one incarnation was required. It was all a matter of karma. Destiny had brought my father to P.B., it was not to be ascribed to his own puny will. And destiny is very choosy. “The adept,” P.B. said, “does not seek to recruit disciples. He knows that the few who could absorb his help will come by destiny.”
All of the disciples were made to feel that they were chosen, that they were special, unique, and extremely privileged. “It is divinely ordained,” explained P.B. P.B. let it be known that he accepted very few disciples. He would not teach the masses, he would not help them. “Ordinary aspirants are left to the guidance of more advanced disciples.” The master simply could not waste his time on them. Only those who had prepared themselves with “self-purification, mystical methods and philosophic understanding” could hope to come into the presence of the master. Actually, it is doubtful that P.B. was ever given an opportunity to teach the masses. It is unlikely that thousands were clamoring to hear him, or that he received many letters expressing the desire to become his disciples. But it would have risked his dignity to acknowledge this, perhaps. So my father and others, like my uncle Bernard, were given to understand that innumerable people desperately wanted to become P.B.’s disciples.
P.B. told my father that he had tested his disciples in former lives, and he would test them again now. Each day there would be a test. There had to be a “probationary novitiate before acceptance as a regular full-fledged student, with access to his intimate circle” could be realized. True, P.B. explained to my father, he corresponded with hundreds of people and granted interviews rather freely, but “I personally instruct or train very few.” Jack was delighted with his luck.
As for the tests, the major one seemed to be to make life for the disciple unpleasant, to ask him to do tasks for the guru that appeared unreasonable, silly, or a waste of time. The disciple had to be willing to make these sacrifices without hesitation and with a smile. My father and his brother were to be tested on many occasions. For the moment, P.B. said, it was time to be practical. P.B. was not unmindful of or ungrateful for my father’s ability to make money. P.B. wanted his disciples to bond with each other around their guru. And so he deplored the rivalry between Jack and his brother and told him, “If two brothers, both on the same spiritual path, cannot get along with each other, how can we expect nations to live in peaceful coexistence?” It was a fair point, and yet P.B. did much to fan the rivalry between them and would continue to do so for the next twenty years.
Within minutes of meeting him, P.B. was boasting to my father of his position, his knowledge, his past. But the boasts sounded to my father like simple declarations of fact—information he had to have.
The late king venerated him, P.B. said, and forced tokens of gratitude (a car, a small palace) upon him. I don’t know how much of this was true. There is an old tradition in India in which a king handsomely rewards somebody with spiritual power. It is almost a superstition. The late maharaja may have felt that P.B. was possibly such a person and that it was best to play it safe. It is also possible that P.B. imagined it. At the time of my father’s first meeting, in any event, P.B. had no car and no chauffeur, and his modest bungalow was anything but a small palace. There are no other eyewitnesses, and as far as I know, nobody ever wrote about this except P.B. himself. Actually, P.B. only hinted at it in his writings and told people like my father about it verbally. My father was prepared to believe it all. He was, he says now, very gullible.
My father clearly believed he was being singled out—and indeed he was. The traditional dance of master and disciple had begun. Jack felt himself elevated and special in the presence of this special and elevated man. Only if P.B. was an adept with occult powers could my father maintain his special status, so it was important that he have these qualities. If P.B. was such a being, then their meeting could not be accidental, just one of those things that happen in life, it had to have been planned, it had to have been destined. The hand of destiny was axiomatic. P.B. needed my father as much as my father needed him. What is a master without a disciple? P.B. depended upon the constant reassurance that a fawning acolyte could give. This subservient manner was a constant reminder of the stature of the guru. I can remember when I was teaching Sanskrit at the University of Toronto, my greatest fear was that the next day no students would show up. “Why should we?” they would say. “We aren’t learning anything worthwhile.” I needed them to reappear to validate what I was doing. No doubt P.B. too liked to see my father reappear, grateful for whatever he had imagined he received. No doubt they did give each other something, though perhaps not what they thought. A genuine friendship was forming, even if its premises were false, or other than what they seemed.
Certainly my father wanted something no person could ever give him, and P.B. claimed to be able to give my father what no person can ever give another. One wanted, the other offered, transcendence of this world, spiritual enlightenment, and wisdom. Such yearnings and such offers are clearly evident in the actual diary that my father started writing the same day he wrote my mother:
P.B. told me I eat very simple food and live almost like a monk. Yes, he had met [me] in a previous life. You see, once a guru is born he is usually born with all his former disciples and no matter in what part of the world they are, they are bound to get together sooner or later. Sometimes it takes 20 years to meet. Once the Chela meets his guru a certain contact is formed and another meeting is not necessary. A telepathic cord is formed, and the presence of the guru can be mentally formed. I have accepted only one student—he is an Indian, he obtained illumination, he is the only one I accepted as a student.
P.B. was already forging the notion of a secret brotherhood. All of P.B.’s disciples had been together in a former life and were destined to meet again in this life, to take up once again the search. It was a compelling idea. How nice to think that encounters are not random, chance, but that there is some all-seeing benevolent eye that is watching out for our good, busily bringing people together who should be together or who already were together. Especially if you meet somebody and there is an immediate spark, it is attractive to imagine that the encounter repeats an earlier relationship. Life might be more interesting or more meaningful if this were true (like survivors, we could seek out our real friends). My father’s trip to Mysore would have had purpose and not be just a futile search based on a casual misunderstanding. Both my father and P.B. were determined to believe this was true and to act accordingly. It definitely was a form of intimacy, even if based, as I believe it was, on false premises. The intimacy itself was real, beyond whatever false idea made it possible.
At their first meeting, P.B. gave my father a secret mantra: “You are the first student I have ever given a mantra to.” My father was delighted. “Before you leave, you may get a glimpse of the Light. I will try to give it to you. Make yourself receptive and still your thoughts.” They meditated. “At nine P.M. for a second the lights went out. P.B.’s
body was luminous, full of light.” P.B. believed it was his function, and that he had the ability, to “awaken people to the divine presence within themselves.” He did this, however, he later said, “mysteriously by some unknown process.” Unknown, that is, to the disciple. P.B. often said that “when the first meeting with the destined master takes place, the seeker will experience an emotion such as he has had with no other person before. The inner attraction will be immense, the feeling of fated gravity intense.” This is precisely what my father felt, much like falling in love.
That day P.B. also gave my father a ring of a snake eating its own tail, which he still has today. He said it had belonged to Allah Baha, the founder of the Baha’i faith. He told him, “Keep this ring and whenever you look at it think that you are here in this world to obtain spiritual consciousness. You can change the color according to your mood by reversing the top of the ring.” When my father attempted to change the color, he was unsuccessful, but he attributed his failure to his own character flaws: “I must try harder.”
The “training” began immediately. Instruction was passed on silently during meditation. It was during meditation that P.B. was able, like a skilled clinician, to make his diagnosis. On December 11, they meditated together, and P.B. told my father (as he wrote that evening in his diary), “You are still surrounded by gross matter which I will have to break through, it comes from your former associations. Now once it is broken it will not surround you any more. Yes, once you attain that ‘PEACE’ it remains with you. You feel it first with every meditation, then all the time, even when you are very active. You shall have that Peace and it will remain with you, then every time you meditate it will be a tremendous source of joy to you, and it shall always remain with you. Next time we meditate I shall ‘do’ something to you.” P.B. claimed that he could grant an illumination to others, if he wished, and they were “karmically” ready (though the two seem contradictory) by merely touching them with the tip of his finger. My father was ready for the touch.
This promise was to go unfulfilled “Perhaps,” my father thought, “I did not deserve it.” My father was convinced that P.B. intended to give him a “mystic experience,” something my father had hungered for as long as he could remember. His brother Bernard had had such an experience when he was sixteen (he called it “the great I am”—a sense of merging with the universe) and had been searching to repeat it ever since. It was what had initially drawn him to P.B. It was never entirely clear what my father understood by “mystic experience.” It was to include some alteration of consciousness, some sudden “illumination” perhaps about the nature of the world, and especially, visible proof that the person was special—for example, had the ability to do something that ordinary people could not do. My father was not greedy: He did not want the ability to become invisible, to fly, to transmute base metal into gold. It would be enough for him if he could read another persons mind. He thought of this as something quite literal, like reading a page in a book. You had no idea what was coming next, you simply read. And the person would stare at you in disbelief and say “It’s not possible! I am thinking to myself, and you are repeating it thought for thought.” In the mind of my father and P.B., it was no more of a miracle than the ability to read. For somebody who cannot read, to see a person speak words from a page seems miraculous.
It all made perfect sense, but Jack wanted proof. He wanted to see somebody, anybody, including P.B., do these things. “Mere tricks,” P.B. would say. “Easy.” Well, if they are so easy, thought my father, let him perform them. “I like tricks!” P.B. was well aware of my father’s yearning. He knew that he wanted something that conjured up this world of mystery and power. The next day P.B. obliged, using his magic sight to look into my father’s past life. He then told my father, “In your past life you obtained a higher advancement spiritually than you have now. You have yet to catch up where you left off.” The attraction, the pull, was obvious for my father. P.B. knew what Jacques wanted. He wanted the feeling, or rather the certainty that somebody knew something about him that he did not know himself, and that this known something was positive and betokened a great future. P.B. said that he knew about Jacques’s former incarnations—who he was, what had happened to him—and my father believed him. He was equally explicit about his powers to control other people’s destinies. This was much more powerful, in the hierarchy of mystic powers, than the mere ability to hear what somebody was saying when they were not present or to see something far away. P.B. claimed that he had once had such powers.
P.B. told my father that he had been clairaudient and clairvoyant when he was eighteen. “I can project my astral body, too.” “Well,” said my father, “do you still have these powers?” P.B. smiled mysteriously and only answered, “I was told to stop it.” “Why should I?” P.B. said he had asked. “Because,” had come the answer, “there is something much higher awaiting you.” My father was ashamed that he had doubted him. Of course there were higher things awaiting him. How childish of him to seek proof at this low level.
P.B. then told my father: “None of my Czechoslovakian students were hurt during the war. Only my enemies were put in a concentration camp and died.” The implication was that his students were protected. P.B. had cast an invisible shield around them, and while others died, they survived. Why, though, would P.B. have enemies in Czechoslovakia? my father wondered. And who were they? These are the kinds of questions my father quickly learned not to ask, for P.B. would go silent. Asking questions threatened to dry up the flow of information. P.B. then said, “Germany will produce some mystic now.” I am not sure what he meant, but the fact that Brunton’s enemies were put into concentration camps and died suggests that his enemies were Jewish and put into German death camps. Whom did he have in mind? Presumably Communists, since P.B. seemed to have an inordinate fear and hatred of communism as being “ungodly” and hence against mysticism, which meant against him.
P.B. exhibited a certain degree of healthy skepticism, which my father no doubt found attractive and convincing. He was always very concerned with my father’s character, especially its defects. Even before they met, P.B. wrote to my father (on October 24, 1945): “You have greatly improved since your first contact with me but there are still serious weaknesses.” The implication, for my father, was that P.B. had already exerted, on a level my father could not conceptualize, a benign influence.
P.B. seemed to have a great fear of insanity, in all its forms, and abhorred what he called “unbalanced” people, the fanatics, cranks, extremists, and monomaniacs who infested his domain of mysticism. Of Dostoevski, for example, he said that he was an “emotional psychopath” who “needed straightening out.” He would never dream that he could possibly fit into such a category. He neither appeared nor sounded the least bit crazy. He would often criticize people for believing “myths” about mystics, for example, that Tibet was peopled with “adepts.” “This is,” he explained to my father, “mostly mythical.” The “mostly” allowed him to claim later that there were a few, just a very few, and one of them, in fact, had been his teacher. This notion of a few good men is a common mythological theme. It is found in the Jewish idea of the “just” man and in other mystical traditions.
My father was fascinated by the notion of “occult” powers, but he was also a little bit embarrassed by the subject. P.B. was too. The topic came up often in their conversations. P.B. always dismissed them: Great yogis did not make such claims for themselves. But it was also clear that they did, or could, possess these powers whenever they wished. P.B. was interested in Helena Blavatsky, the leader of Theosophy, and seemed to think he had some mystic link with her. “I was born seven years after she died,” he told my father, “we were both born under the same Zodiac signs,” and she could “mentally access any book in any library in the world.” It is not that my father believed such wildly irrational claims, but he was attracted to the idea that they were true and especially to the idea that P.B. knew about such matters. He had to
have faith, he told himself. He not only told himself, P.B. told him too, often, as he wrote in his diary: “On the disciple’s side there must be complete faith, devotion, loyalty, and a willingness to subordinate his own little ego, his own limited intellect, should they ever find themselves opposed to the master’s guidance.” It was easy for my father to believe that his own intellect was limited, and it was tempting to ascribe omniscience to someone else (P.B.). It is not just a form of modesty but a way of enjoying power vicariously. If P.B. knew everything, then Jacques, by being in his orbit, was exalted as well. Also, it was always possible that P.B. was testing him. Faith in the guru was essential. Each story served to intrigue my father further, to lure him with the promise that he, too, would soon possess these magic powers, have access to occult forces. Let it be at a lower level, it was only right, after all, that he start low. He was ready.
P.B. found the ultimate hook, the perfect way to enchant my father. On December 20, 1945, Paul Brunton had a “vision” about my father. Its content, as immediately recounted to my father, was to have an enormous impact on him for the rest of his life. As dictated to my father it was:
My Father's Guru Page 3