My Father's Guru

by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

  For my parents, being “on the Path” was primarily an inward matter, but it also had certain outward manifestations. From the time my parents first met him, P.B. was fascinated with crank diets of all kinds. He was vegetarian, but he carried vegetarianism further than most. He was unwilling to eat any animal product and periodically decided that only raw fruits or some other abstemious diet was the only spiritual way to eat. My parents went along with these diets, adding improvements and niceties of their own. For example, they were much taken with a book by a certain Arnold Ehret called Mucousless Diet, and another book whose title struck me the first time I saw it, Don’t Eat Bread. For a period of time I was fed no bread or bananas, which had been two of my favorite foods. I can remember one summer afternoon, when I was five, I was not to be found in the backyard of our house, which was a block from the beach in Santa Monica. My parents ran down to the beach, where I loved to go, and found me rushing at the pigeons, competing with them furiously for the crumbs of bread being fed to them.

  Like P.B., my parents were fascinated with dietary regimes stricter and more bizarre than vegetarianism. At one point they, too, decided to eat no cooked food, at another we ate only fruit. They read all the health-fad books as they appeared, books by Gaylord Hauser, and especially Bernard McFadden’s Encyclopedia of Health, and moderated their diet accordingly. On Sundays we often visited various eccentrics from the health food world like Mrs. Richter, an old woman who at that time operated the only raw-food restaurant in the world and who lived on an exclusive diet of raw fruit and nuts. We found her, spry at eighty, in the branches of a large walnut tree in her front yard, where she lived in the tree home she had built herself. “Healthier,” she explained in a word. To me, she looked wrinkled and ancient beyond calculation, but my parents were impressed, and for a while my sister and I were fed only fruits and nuts. Another time a visiting explorer came for dinner and insisted on making us milkshakes with olive oil. This time, we rebelled.

  It sounds worse than it was, though. For one thing, these enthusiasms rarely lasted very long, sometimes just a matter of days. For another, I was always a welcome guest in my friends’ houses, where I could indulge in “normal” food. Once, to my parents’ horror, they learned that I was eating immense amounts of bologna, which I thought was some kind of Mexican vegetable, from the refrigerator of a Mexican friend.

  While P.B. encouraged his disciples to be vegetarian and we complied, my father was after all French, and there was nothing quite like a good meal to him, meaning wine, meat, and rich sauces. Upon arriving in a strange town—our family was always traveling—P.B. would immediately begin scouting for a vegetarian restaurant: Could one be found, and if so, would it be sufficiently rigorous to meet his impossible standards? When he located a suitable spot, he would announce in triumph that we were very lucky that evening, for he had discovered the perfect restaurant. My father would go along glumly, and I can still remember him scouring the menu with shocked disbelief, and his mounting horror as he would see one raw-food platter after another arrive at our table. But in front of his guru, he would say nothing. I suspect that on such evenings, my mother had to later bear the brunt of his bad humor.

  Such was the household I grew up in. My parents did not identify, from the point of view of religion or spirituality, with the Jewish faith in which they had both been raised. (Culturally, though, they were Jewish.) If asked, I probably would have said that they were Buddhist or Hindu. They were not sectarian, in that they did not entirely identify with any one single religion from the East. They were disciples of P.B., and he was influenced by Buddhism, Hinduism, and most especially by a philosophical school within Hinduism known as Advaita Vedanta. Unlike mainstream Hinduism, Advaita regards the entire universe as a figment of one’s own imagination. Rituals, gods, reincarnation, karma, all of these staples of Indian religion are only true from “a lower point of view.” Eventually, they must all be abandoned when the truth, namely that they are only “ideas,” is realized. A somewhat watered-down version of this philosophy is taught at the Vedanta temples in the United States, and I was often taken to them on Sundays in lieu of synagogue or Sunday school. The one closest to us was in Hollywood, presided over by the chain-smoking Swami Prabhavananda, Christopher Isherwood’s guru, about whom he has written an evocative memoir called My Guru and His Disciple, which, unlike this book, is in praise of gurus in general, and the spiritual life in particular, especially the Vedantic version of such a life.

  I remember going up Ivar Avenue, climbing steeply from Hollywood Boulevard straight up to Franklin Avenue, to a small secluded nest of houses where there was a Hindu temple surrounded by little wooden bungalows. As a young boy I was struck by the gentle demeanor of Swami Prabhavananda’s junior colleague, whose name I no longer remember. He had a sweet, almost melancholy way of speaking about Vedanta that made me wonder, a few years later, if he really believed what he was saying. He was very young. Like me, he was probably born to it, maybe becoming a Hindu monk had not been entirely his own decision, any more than meditating with P.B. had been mine.

  *

  In 1946, when I was five, we lived between Beverly Hills and downtown Los Angeles, in a Mediterranean-style stucco house. Down the street lived my best friend Buddy McDonald. Apart from the food I ate, or didn’t eat, I was a pretty normal five-year-old, and at this early age, I think it was decided that I was still too young to be introduced to “the Path.” Besides, I had a remarkably foul mouth for such a young boy. I remember falling off my bike when I was six and being taken to a doctor for stitches. It hurt so much when he began the procedure that I started yelling “Giddami di Hell, ye sonny butch,” which he had no trouble understanding. I had no idea where these words came from or what they meant, but the doctor was so taken aback and so appalled that he refused to treat me on the spot, and my mother had to find another doctor to stitch me up. Afterward, as compensation for my ordeal, she took me to Sears and bought me a carpenter’s tool belt, which I wore around my waist. As we came out of the store, a little girl stared at me and asked her mother who I was. Her mother said, “Why dear, you can see from his tools that he is a carpenter.” “A real one?” asked the little girl in a dubious tone “Oh yes, a real carpenter.” I was extremely pleased and felt very self-important. I was a pretty normal little boy.

  My father had a kind of natural restlessness that he claimed came from his nomadic ancestors in the Central Asian desert. He sometimes said that, in his blood, he was a tent-person accustomed to moving from one oasis to another. He certainly loved to travel. As I write these lines in 1992, my father, at eighty, is just returning from yet another trip to India. I don’t think there has been a year in my father’s life when he has not traveled either to Europe or the Orient. The next year, 1947, the family moved to Tucson, Arizona, for one year. Bernard and Ida rented a house, “the ranch,” on the outskirts of Tucson, and P.B. moved in with them but spent most of his evenings at our house. My father was thirty-five, my mother was twenty-nine, my sister Linda was three, I was six, and P.B. was just about to turn fifty, my age today. One reason they chose Tucson was for P.B., he wanted to live in retreat, and he found the desert conducive to spiritual thoughts. But an even more important reason was that, in the desert, everybody could more easily indulge in the one thing they all wanted to do very badly but had a hard time doing in the city—fast.

  It is not surprising that somebody as abstemious as P.B. would discover fasting. Besides eating no animal products of any kind, he took no intoxicating liquors, no drugs or medication of any kind, drank no coffee (only tea, to which he was addicted more for the rituals than the taste, I think), and ate extremely little. But even that little was sometimes too much, and he would periodically engage in fasting.

  He told my parents a series of “facts”: Fasting cleanses the body of accumulated poisons and the mind of accumulated errors. It improves eyesight, “because millions of tiny capillaries in the eyes are choked by toxic debris.” “Twisted inclinat
ions” are eliminated. I think this was a reference to sexual desires. Certainly P.B. believed that a fast contributes to “liberation from passions.” In P.B.’s view, certain foods stimulate sexual activity, and it was best to eliminate those foods from one’s diet altogether: eggs, oysters, chocolate, and meat. “Superfluous nutriment” in general, he held, encourages sexual excitement, which may be one reason he ate so little. Spices, too, were bad, especially mustard, pepper, and paprika, which directly stimulate the sex organs. One odd reason P.B. gave for not eating meat had to do with the fact that animals that are killed and eaten by man owe their own existence to the sexual lust of their parents. He held that the lust permeates their flesh in an invisible psychic-magnetic aura. So in eating them, he maintained, we take in their sexual aura. He urged colon flushes and strong purges to help eliminate the waste toxins.

  P.B.’s fasts, however, were fairly mild, a few days at a time, sometimes a week on just water, but rarely more. When my parents become involved in fasting, they did it with much more gusto—with a vengeance, as it were. They did two-week fasts, twenty-one-day fasts, and even forty-day fasts. Sometimes they went on fruit fasts, at other times grape-juice fasts (where they drank only grape juice), and most commonly, pure water fasts, where they took no food at all, only plain water. The rituals accompanying these fasts were as important as the fasts themselves. Since at the end of a forty-day fast a person looks like a concentration-camp survivor, it was important to conduct the fasts away from the prying eyes of neighbors. Tucson was to be the first of many such retreats, where, in isolated houses, they could indulge in what they knew most people would neither understand nor approve.

  My parents read a great deal about fasting and its benefits. They decided, in 1948, to go on the ultimate fast, the forty-day water fast. This definitely took some courage, not to mention willpower. To the lay person, certainly to me now, it sounds dangerous. But my parents and other disciples would smile self-importantly at the naiveté of those who believed that the body requires food. They claimed that one could live for long periods without any food whatsoever. A fast up to ten days was considered easy. I think they believed that sixty days, however, was the maximum that could be attempted without injury to health. Unlike the Indians, nobody I knew as a child claimed to be able to live permanently on no food at all. This may have been, however, part of the underlying view.

  Short fasts of a week on fruit juice, or grape juice, were common and carried almost no prestige The major fast, the prize fast, to which everyone aspired, was the forty-day one. My mother did not believe she could complete it, but she began the fast with my father anyway.

  The ultimate goal of the fast was spiritual benefit, but the more immediate result was bodily purity. Their mythology about the body held that in the ordinary course of eating, the body is necessarily poisoned. Fasting was the quickest way to draw out these toxins. This was a popular word among the “health conscious” in those days. The body was supposedly filled with poison from all the bad food consumed. It was necessary to periodically cleanse it of all impurities. All the spiritual people I knew were preoccupied with bodily fluids of all kinds, both those that go into the body, and those that come out of it.

  My parents would prepare themselves for the forty-day fast by reading up on the subject (Fasting, Vitality and Nutrition, Fasting and Grape Cure by Edmond Szekely, Basil Shackleton’s About the Grape Cure, and Herbert Shelton’s Fasting Can Save Your Life are some of the titles I remember, and a book about fasting by Mahatma Gandhi), by discussing fasting benefits with other disciples, and of course by meditating and reading spiritual books. They often went to a place south of Los Angeles called McEachens, in Escondido, where they could fast hidden away from the rest of the curious world. My sister and I were left in the care of a housekeeper during these times. The two of us never fasted with them, with the exception of one three-day fast. I found it a decidedly unpleasant experience that I did not wish to repeat.

  The test was the tongue. My mother and father discussed the state of their tongues every morning the way other people discuss what they are going to have for breakfast. Generally a persons tongue is coated in the morning. This is a bad sign. My parents were ecstatic the day they awoke in the morning and could tell each other that their tongues were “pure,” without any coating. For years I was encouraged to use a tongue-scraper, to remove the morning coating, even though to some extent this was cheating, since the purity should come naturally as a result of an inner process and not by adventitious methods. To my parents the clean tongue was the surest sign that the fast was taking, that it was creating benefits. The nature of the stool was also carefully monitored, for color, consistency, smell, and so on. It was once explained to me that vegetarian animals, like horses and elephants, do not have stool that smells. The purer we ate, the less our stool would smell. They were looking for external signs of purity. The idea was that being pure in body would make it easier to be pure in spirit.

  My parents were both keeping a fast diary, in which the state of the tongue, the stool, and of course weight were all noted and annotated. Weight was never the real issue, but it was carefully written down, possibly as proof that there was no cheating. It was considered elementary knowledge that actual physical hunger would cease after a few days. I am not sure this is true, but in any event hunger was considered of minor consequence, since it is purely physiological. To conquer the body was certainly good, but the real enemy was the mind. The mind had to be conquered. It was backsliding if thoughts centered on food and its preparation. So diary entries would often say “Did not think of food once today!” except, presumably, in writing the entry itself. As the body became clearer, the mind, too, was supposed to clear up, and both the physical and mental energy level were to rise.

  My mother began her fast on April 23, 1948, when she was thirty years old. She kept a diary.

  5TH DAY–10TH DAY: Getting stronger all the time, not to the extent of very great physical activity, but feeling very good. Take early morning sunbaths—do quite a bit of mail for business and personal every day and much reading and much activity of the mind. Am beginning to marvel at the miracle of fasting and cannot conceive why it is not used more for the sick civilization that is all about us. Probably have to evolve to such great knowledge. It is truly my Higher Self and Power aiding me. Took enema today 10th day and passed quite a few hard little clumps of feces, natural color no odor. Sleep well every night from 9 P.M. arising by 6 A.M.

  My mother gave up the water-only fast after twenty-one days. But then she “felt badly” and decided to continue for another week: “Broke fast on orange juice on Friday, May 21, after 28 days—eating cherries, apricots, melon and yoghurt for three days. Have gas. Natural bowel movements in morning. Feel good.”

  My father, however, was determined to fast the entire forty days. Nothing less would make him a spiritual hero, and only thus could he possibly expect the ultimate benefit that he was always, and eternally awaiting: spiritual enlightenment. Meanwhile, his weight was dropping and dropping, from 140 when he began to 92 pounds toward the end. Eventually he was confined to bed, like Kafka’s hunger artist. Why was he not more alarmed, more insecure about the medical risks, I am not certain. An air of urgency and significance hung over these endeavors, and I think for my father the fast was a means of forcing the hand of the spiritual powers. The fast, he hoped, would produce the concrete, material proof of the spiritual progress that he was waiting for. He too kept a diary:

  STARTED FASTING ON APRIL 14, 1948 AT NOON. 2ND DAY: Felt weak but went downtown on errands which weakened me further. Tongue not coated. No movement. Pulse 62. Slept well all night. 3rd day: Very weak. Reclined most of day, too weak for anything. Looked very skinny, sunken eyes, face drawn. 4th day: Very weak, stayed in bed most of day. No energy whatsoever. 5th day: Slept well. Mentally active. Weight 110 pounds. 9th day: Feel better and out of bed most of day. 19th day: Feel better, tongue not coated. Took enema. Few feces. Slept from 10 to 3 A.M. Fe
lt refreshed. Mentally very alert. 21 day: Took enema, was surprised to see a few feces. Also took pictures. Went to a movie. Weight: 102. 22 day: Tongue much cleaner. Breathing better. Urine much clearer. 25 day: Feel hungry. Took watermelon juice [cheating]. It did not agree with me. Tongue heavily coated. Felt bad all day 28th day. Pulse 45. Slept well. Had very symbolic dream: Steep hill, could hardly make it—finally made it to top of hill. Probably signifies that I will achieve my goal of spirituality and good health only after struggling very hard for it. Exact weight: 101 lbs. What I did on 28th day of fast. Called Ahmed in New York, bought one star sapphire for $1000, made arrangements for a $5000 letter of credit for Ceylon goods. Spoke to P.B. in Croton. He told me to break the fast on yoghurt and have no roughage after the fast. Apple sauce, purees, no salt (he explained why). Little cheese. No vegetable fiber. He said that spiritual results will show later and finished by saying: “God bless you.” He is sailing for England in 36 hours. Ordered $2000 worth of cultured pearls from India. Went downtown shopping, bank, wrote business letters, etc. etc. 29th day: Nothing but a little water. Felt good. Slept well I have had no sex urge at all during fast, only one night emission. May 14, 1948 Exactly one month of fasting. Pulse 48, temperature 96. Weight 97 clothed, 92 naked. Felt very weak especially in the afternoon as I had to go downtown to mail some special delivery valuable packages. Nothing but water. No stomach pain. Left kidney hurts. Tongue coated but not too much. No bad taste in mouth. I look like a shadow of my former self. 36th day: Feel better, stronger I sleep about 3 hours at night, mind extremely active, transacted large business by mail and phone. Tongue still coated.

  On May 9, 1948, in the middle of this fast, my father wrote to P.B.: