My Father's Guru

by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

  You, Jacques, were seen in a vision looking about 10 years older than you are now. By that time your appearance had markedly changed. Your face was darker and the expression on it graver. You had developed some Occult Powers and when you looked at a person, you saw at once the inner state of that person, his character, mentality virtues and weaknesses. Your reputation as a Seer was becoming increasingly known among the inner circles of Europe and consequently people would come to consult you from all over the world. You had entered into spiritual consciousness and had thus realized some of your chief aspirations. Your character was much purer, your lower nature was under control, and you were able to get messages from within very quickly. You reminded me in your manner and appearance of a medieval Kabbalist.

  My father wrote down the vision as P.B. dictated it to him. P.B. corrected the text the next day. As he reread it, he thought that other disciples, especially Bernard, should they somehow happen to read the vision, would be jealous, and P.B. instructed my father to change the account to the third person, calling himself “Althodas.” “I had no doubt in my mind,” my father recently told me, “that the vision did appear to P.B. I would be realized. It was a very great upheaval in my life, this vision, knowing for certain it would be fulfilled. I was absolutely convinced the vision was true and would come true. I prepared myself intellectually, deciding that if people came to me, I would never ask for monetary remuneration. I even kissed P.B., I was so exalted. He was very undemonstrative, however, and did not like that at all.”

  Althodas, P.B. told my father, was the name of a medieval Kabbalist, of whom my father was a reincarnation. (The name actually came from one of Marie Corelli’s pretentious novels that P.B.—along with Queen Victoria—liked so much).

  The ability to read another persons mind is a popular favorite in Hinduism. Whenever I met a “spiritual” person, the first story I was likely to hear was how that person’s guru could read thoughts. Ram Dass in his book The Only Dance There Is tells of meeting his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, in 1967 and immediately being told what his thoughts were from the night before. The guru has a powerful means of control over his disciple’s thinking if the disciple believes the guru can know what it is he is thinking. Would one ever dare to think a heretical thought? Even if it were true, it would be an extraordinary invasion of a person’s privacy.

  My father felt “protected” by this spiritual father as he had never been by his real father. They were in almost all senses polar opposites. My father’s father, Henry Moussaieff, later Henri Masson, was a large man, over six feet tall, noted for his physical strength as well as the strength of his “animal” passions. He liked to drink and to eat, and he liked surrounding himself with women he found pretty. There was a menacing aura of sexuality around him: He openly lusted after his daughters and was not opposed to using his own sons for his sexual pleasures either. He was also a violent man. My father tells of how a cat once scratched him, and his father closed the door, got a large stick, and beat the cat to death, to the absolute terror of his fifteen-year-old son. My father was small, delicate, and sensitive. Both as a child and as an adult, he abhorred all forms of physical violence, developed a great love for animals, and would never dream of harming them. He clearly longed for a gentle father. P.B. was in many ways that ideal.

  In Indian spirituality, the master/disciple relationship is patterned quite consciously (the very word guru also means “elder”) on that between father and son. On January 17, P.B. told my father (who wrote it down in his diary), “Once the Guru accepts the Chela [disciple] it is for a lifetime. Even if the Chela turns murderer, the feelings of the Guru towards the Chela do not change. If the Chela leaves the Guru, he can always come back knowing the Guru is waiting for him. And if the Chela does not reach the Ultimate in this life, the Guru will be waiting for him next life. He has coached him for many incarnations and will continue until the Chela reaches the highest stage.” It was the ideal way to speak to my father, making promises my father was eager to hear. P.B. was implying that he had brought my father to India in order to be with him, so his master could bring him to a higher consciousness, fulfilling the promise of an earlier incarnation. They were linked from a former life, was the implication of P.B.’s words, and there was work remaining to finish. Moreover, this work was of the highest significance, in fact, it was of cosmic importance. This was a hook that was hard, if not impossible, to resist, especially for somebody who longed so desperately for these qualities—that is, for connection to a higher power and a solution to the “meaning” of life in his own life.

  Like all mythic heroes preparing to undertake a perilous but essential travel adventure, preparations of a spiritual kind were mandatory. “Purification” played an important role. This was something “practical” my father could sink his teeth into, something he could begin to work on immediately.

  What P.B. meant by purification was quite clear. My father must rid himself of sexual thoughts. On the second day of their meeting, he told him: “Physical contact with women should be avoided. Otherwise, one picks up their bad karma and vibrations.” P.B. did not want a sexual interest in women interfering with the more important master/disciple relationship. A few days later P.B. had a minivision and told my father: “A beautiful woman will offer herself to you. It will be your first test. The Overself will test you. All the evil influences you feel will be just a test.” My father was to remember these and similar conversations many years later, when he received news of P.B.’s marriage. He was in Hong Kong, and my mother sent him a telegram. “‘How can God get married?’ I thought,” he told me recently, and said he became depressed for a period of time.

  In preparation for his return to America, my father and P.B. went to Ootacamund in the Nilgiri Hills, a favorite retreat for the English to avoid the heat of the plains. My father felt this was a rare privilege, as P.B. told him, “You are the first person that has been allowed to spend so much time in my presence.” My father was convinced he was proof of P.B.’s ideas, that they were taking on him, they were working. He felt he was in an accelerated spiritual movie. He was high. On their walks, P.B. would tell my father stories about the spiritual path and about the personalities of the spiritual movement—Blavatsky, Olcott, Leadbeater, Besant, Krishnamurti, and the Theosophical Society He would tell him stories of the life of the Buddha, repeat mystic gossip, discourse on Bahai, Thoreau, Emerson, Walt Whitman, the adepts of Tibet, how he will eventually retire into a cave. My father was utterly fascinated. It was on one of these walks that P.B. warned my father about sexuality:

  OOTACAMUND, FEBRUARY 6, 1946: The Sexual Problem At a certain stage of the Path the Neophyte must go through a Gate. On each side of the gate there are two lions and he must wrestle with both of them. Only after he has mastered his sexual impulses will he advance further on the Path and will then obtain Occult Powers, not before. He must get rid of the problem at its base, he must meditate on it, think of all the bad side of it, sexual disease, attachment, uncleanness, etc. etc. and whenever sexual thoughts come to him he must fight them by thinking of their opposites. A married Neophyte must not abuse it either, and at a certain stage of his development it would be better if he abstained from it for a while. When one practices meditation he becomes very sensitive, and sex is a shock to the nervous system. He must conquer that problem if he wants to advance and obtain Powers. He must have complete control over himself and time will test him and see how far he has advanced.

  “Why am I here?” my father asked P.B. on one of their walks in the Nilgiri Hills. My father recorded the answer: “The only reason that we are here in this world is to obtain Spiritual Consciousness, no other reason. The main thing is to purify one’s character first. Only then can you advance on the Path.” Purifying one’s character meant to become more and more like P.B. This was particularly difficult for my father to do, since he did not resemble P.B. in any way. He was volatile where P.B. was steady; he was passionate where P.B. was detached. P.B. did not ascribe all c
haracter traits to the individual. Some, he clearly thought, were racial.

  The last entry in my father’s India diary reads:

  FEBRUARY 27TH, 1946: Today is my last day in Ootacamund. I spent the whole day with P.B. He gave me his blessing before leaving. His departing words were: “Remember you shall not be alone any more. Your material and Spiritual life will change. Your Higher Self will protect and guide you. Take good care of yourself. The foundation has been laid. Your life will take a new aspect.”

  My father felt blessed and happy beyond description.

  *

  What was my mother’s reaction while all this was happening? Clearly women did not play a major role in P.B.’s spiritual universe, except as temptresses to avoid or triumph over. Nonetheless, there were exceptions, and wives of important and wealthy disciples had to be accommodated.

  My mother was born Dina Zeiger on September 9, 1918, on the outskirts of Vienna. She was one of nine children. Her father, Meyer Chaim, was fleeing from the Turkish army, in which he was expected to serve. At that time, Jews were given sanctuary in Austria by the Emperor Franz Josef. My mother’s mother, Sarah Zeiger, was a strong-willed and determined woman who suffered the death of many children during her lifetime. She was not given to mysticism. When my mother was a year old, the family returned to Palestine, where they lived until my mother was six. Just before they sailed for America, her only brother accidentally drowned at the age of seventeen, a tragedy her mother never got over. The family moved to America in 1924.

  My mother came from a large, tight-knit, Orthodox Ashkenazi (my father’s family was Sephardic) Jewish family. Her father was a quiet, scholarly, self-effacing man. Her mother had a zest for life, as I well remember, even though by the time she arrived in the United States she had lost five children. My mother, second oldest of the surviving children, was regarded as extremely pretty and very intelligent, and she had a great sense of fun. She was always an outstanding student and very much wanted to continue on to university. She began college, but the family needed her to work and she dropped out after a year. It seemed to her a very alien world, Indian spirituality, to which my father was introducing her. “Forbidding and severe” is the way she describes it now. But she had been brought up to “follow her man,” and she allowed herself to be introduced to vegetarianism, meditation, yoga, and gurus with seeming little reluctance.

  She first met P.B. when he returned from India and came to stay with our family in Los Angeles in 1946. At the very first meeting, they spoke about spiritual matters. For my mother, it was the first time she had ever heard such things. My father fell asleep, and my mother and P.B. spoke far into the night. “He asked me: ‘Would you be willing to give up your children for the quest?’ I said I didn’t know, but I didn’t think so. I felt I had failed my first test. A short while later Linda was very sick, and I prayed to God to cure her. P.B. told me that I had made a promise to God that if he saved Linda, I would do everything in my power to stay on the path. He warned me that I had to keep that promise.”

  P.B. was clearly much taken by my father. If we look at the photo of my father and P.B. in India in 1945 (when my father was thirty-three and P.B. was forty-seven), the two look like friends. But the friendship was never acknowledged as such. My father was looking for a guru, and it is clear that P.B. conformed to his expectations and encouraged them but never entirely satisfied them. P.B. would later claim this was because he completely denied from the beginning that he ever intended to be anybody’s guru. While this is not true, to judge from the contemporary letters I have seen, P.B. was obviously also divided. On the one hand he wished to be considered a guru—a potent, powerful figure like the men from his early books whom he so admired. On the other hand, he had had direct experience, in the ashram of Ramanamaharshi, of just how destructive this could be, both for the guru and for the disciple. What exactly happened between P.B., the Maharshi, and the Maharshi’s brother is not known. But whatever it was—evidently P.B. gave interviews in the Indian papers about the Maharshi that the brother did not find satisfactory—it soured the relationship between all three men. The guru/chela relationship, like most romances, tends to end badly, with both sides feeling aggrieved, hurt, misunderstood, and misused. P.B. was later to claim that all he wanted was friendship and companionship on his quest. But his letters clearly indicate that P.B. also wanted to be considered a sage, a guru, a mahatma, a rishi, a spiritual teacher. Bernard and my father thought of P.B. as a highly advanced adept, an illuminated one. It is of course impossible to be a guru all by yourself, by definition, a guru requires a disciple. The two are coterminous. It is a folie a deux, where the “insanity” is controlled, submerged, and even sanctioned by society. Or some societies. It was easier to be a guru and a disciple in India in 1945 than it was in America, even in Southern California where my parents lived.

  My father had gone to India as a young, somewhat immature man of thirty-three. He had had a childhood filled with loss and lack of love. P.B. offered him a new kind of permanent “home,” safety, and a direction and meaning to his life: the Spiritual Path. My father was treated as if he were very special. P.B. had told him that kings, ambassadors, ministers, and wealthy industrialists were all trying to have an audience with him. And here was Jack, able to spend several months more or less alone with him. Why? P.B. saw signs of specialness in Jack. They had been guru and disciple in a former birth, he was given a private mantra, he was told secrets about other disciples, he saw divine light emanating from P.B., P.B. had a vision in which Jacques was exalted. In short, Jacques was convinced that he had found a living god, and this living god loved him and saw a magnificent spiritual future for him. Is it any wonder that this meeting changed his life?

  Chapter Two

  Fasting Along the Path

  My father stayed in India for about four months, walking, talking, and meditating with Paul Brunton every day. He returned from India shortly after my fifth birthday a changed man. From now on, his life would be dedicated to spiritual matters, to the path. P.B. was his guru. Moreover, much to the thrill, excitement, and wonderment of my parents, P.B. had consented to live for some time in our house in Los Angeles.

  It was not easy to have a guru in urban Los Angeles in 1946. Certainly, in our immediate surroundings, P.B. was an embarrassment. He was our family secret. Family here meant only the four of us, my sister Linda having been born two years earlier. My father saw us as “special,” singled out by destiny to be disciples of one of the great masters of all time. But his family, apart from his brother Bernard, took it very differently. For them, P.B. was a joke, not because they saw through him but because he was so unfamiliar.

  This was even more true of my mother’s family. Unlike my father’s family, who were protected by international roots from complete parochialism, my mother’s relatives thought of themselves as American to the core. I can remember one of my uncles telling me proudly that he had never owned, and would never own, a Japanese car. “There is nothing foreign in my house,” he boasted. Well, P.B. was foreign, foreign by birth, by appearance, and by his interests, and my parents were always afraid that one of their relatives would bump into him in our house and an unpleasant scene would ensue, with the inevitable questions: Who was this man? Why was he staying with us? Why did we treat him with such reverence? We would be accused of retreating from Judaism. After all, we never attended synagogue. And wasn’t our vegetarianism a form of fanaticism? And we had all those books about Hinduism and Buddhism around the house.

  My mother tried to explain it to her mother one day: “Ma, he is a kind of rabbi.” “Oh yeah,” said my skeptical grandmother, whom I simply called Bubbi, Yiddish for grandmother. “He don’t look very Jewish to me.” Still, this did explain to Bubbi why we treated him with something bordering on worship. It did not help much with my skeptical uncles and aunts. My mother was one of four daughters, close in age and otherwise, except when it came to P.B. P.B., for his part, made it clear early on that he regarded all
of these people—those who had no interest in him or his teachings—as “lowly evolved.” I agreed with this evaluation.

  After all, had not my relatives come to my father as a group to point out that I was much too small and thin for my age, and that surely this was because I was a vegetarian? My father finally silenced them by telling them that I was really a midget, and he was trying to keep it from Di, so please do not mention it again.

  “Lowly evolved,” he told me, to explain them. This was one of the stock phrases I can remember hearing over and over again from a very early age. It seemed to explain all the evil in the world—wanton destruction, murder, plunder, rape—all came about because those involved were lowly evolved. Actually, I never knew how literally this was meant to be taken. I heard P.B. explain the phrase in several different ways, but the main thrust was that these people had not lived a sufficient number of lives. They were “new souls,” was another way P.B. had of putting it. The opposite was an “old soul,” or one “highly evolved.” While the upper reaches of higher evolution were pretty much reserved for P.B. himself, anybody who met with his approval was branded “highly evolved.”

  P.B.’s use of the word evolution was idiosyncratic. He did not believe, for example, in Darwinian evolution. Once when I was in school and was learning about it for the first time (it is a difficult concept for a child to understand), I asked P.B. if it was true that man evolved from the monkey. “No,” he said, “the race of apes came from a conjunction”—he did not like to use more explicit language—“of primitive man and female beast.” I had never heard that in school, which of course to me just went to show how ignorant my teachers were and how learned P.B. was. Apes were a degeneration from man, man was not an evolution. “Anyway,” he told me, “the monkey came after man, not before.” I didn’t get it, but I didn’t get evolution either, and I didn’t insist.