My Father's Guru

by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

  This is a different Jacques that is writing to you today. Certainly not that weak sick person you saw after 5 days of fasting. It is truly amazing to see the increase of strength and how well I feel considering it is now my 26th day of fasting. My mind is now so active I awake as early as 2 A.M. and do not need any more sleep after that. I intend to continue after the 40 day fast with mainly raw food with which to build a vital new bloodstream. Diana is also getting on very well after her first three days which were also weak days. She is now on her 16th day and intends to go on to complete a 21 day fast. She also requires much less sleep, arising in the wee hours of the dawn and is very active. It is a revelation to us both, never having known such mental activity, and have become voracious readers. Yesterday I weighed 101 pounds fully clothed and am quite near the skeleton stage.

  Two weeks later, on May 24, 1948, my father continued his account to P.B.

  Today I am very and extremely happy to write I have finished my 40 day fast, although in the strictest sense of the word it wasn’t a complete fast, as after the first 10 days of nothing but water I did resort to a weak dilution of orange juice. Of course after talking to you over the phone, I stopped that mixture and substituted diluted grape juice and watermelon juice. Anyway, today I have completed forty days, and now I am having some yoghurt and some pureed fruits which I will continue for a while. I am feeling well but of course still a little weak. However, my physical appearance is on the haggard side, with my face sunken in, but I’m not worried as I know this is only temporary. I want to thank you for having planted the seed that resulted in my taking this fast, as otherwise I never would have been able to do it. Now the report on Diana’s fast. After 21 days she proceeded to break her fast, but her best instincts would not allow her to and with the help of a still persistent headache she decided to follow her inward urge and continue fasting (that is, also the weak dilution of orange juice with water) until all trace of headache, etc. left. She had to continue for 28 days in all. Since this is Diana writing I shall switch to the first person here. I am feeling very well and am very happy I undertook this fast and of course most happy it is over, since it is not too pleasant. I am looking forward to spiritual benefits after a bit and shall resume my neglected practice and study of the Path. Talking to you before your departure inspired both of us a great deal and we thank you so much for your blessings.

  Even beyond food, the most dangerous of all spiritual snares was sexuality. My father’s sexuality was anything but dormant at the time. For if my father’s appetite for food disappeared during his fast, evidently his sexual appetite did not, despite what he told P.B. and his diary. I know this from later conversations with him.

  The whole purpose of the fast was to create purity of spirit. Pure in spirit meant many things, but the thing it meant most often and most importantly to P.B. was sexual purity. P.B. spoke about sexual purity constantly and seemed to have no sexual appetite himself. Or so he said. I don’t think my father ever asked him directly whether he ever felt anything so impure or mundane as sexual desire, but certainly my father believed firmly and with no doubt that P.B. did not.

  Sexual purity was easy to define. It meant no sexuality whatsoever in thought or in act. At least this was the goal. P.B. recognized, of course, that telling this to a young married couple was likely to be counterproductive, so he modified it. Married couples should be abstinent for as long as possible.

  As he told my father on one of their walks in India, P.B. believed that “lust” (a very bad word in P.B.’s vocabulary) belongs to a man’s “animal physical inheritance, and it must be brought under control and discipline.” Sexual desire was a “lower” instinct and had to be conquered before progress on the spiritual path could be considered. The way to do this was to engage in sex with less and less frequency. Fasting seemed the ideal time for abstinence. So my parents, as they later told me, had almost no intercourse during their fasts. P.B. encouraged abstinence among his married disciples, once in fact suggesting that my parents spend two years without sexual intercourse. But if the appetite for food was easily conquered, the sexual appetite proved far more elusive and cunning.

  Once my mother was over her fast, she set about looking for domestic help. She placed an ad in the local paper, and soon a stunning (so says my memory and my father today) twenty-one-year-old blond and blue-eyed aspiring actress named Martha answered the ad. My mother was interviewing Martha when they happened to pass the room where my father, in the last days of his fast, was confined to bed. Suddenly revived to an astonishing degree, he jumped out of bed and told my mother, “Hire her immediately!” Surprisingly, my mother obliged. Martha, whose fiancé was away in the service for one year, was hired on the spot, and she moved in with us the next day.

  P.B. often told my father that the disciple is frequently tested by his guru in odd and unexpected ways. Most of these tests were for the purpose of seeing if the disciple was worthy of the master. But there were also larger, more generic tests, provided by the higher powers, to see if a disciple was ready for progressing on the spiritual path. Shortly after Martha was hired, P.B. said to my father, “I think you are getting closer to illumination. A test is bound to be at hand, I think it will take the form of a sexual temptation.”

  Although P.B had met Martha, Jacques was thunderstruck: How could the higher powers know that this was indeed what was going on in his mind? Ever since Martha had arrived, he could not stop looking at her, and she was evidently not adverse to flirting with him. She took showers outdoors where he could see, and she knew he was looking at her with something bordering on devotion: “Everybody loved her,” he told me recently “How could you help it? You loved her, my father loved her, I loved her. She was the perfect woman, healthy, a beautiful body, she went to bed with a smile and woke up with one. Everybody who came to the house wanted to take her out. You loved to stroke her hair. She adored you. Could he make a deal with the higher powers? He was prepared to renounce intercourse if they would accept fondling. Maybe if he did not go below the waist—just the breasts? He decided this was acceptable and proposed it to Martha. She agreed, and he began fondling and kissing Martha’s breasts. I don’t know if I saw this at the time or if I learned it later, directly from my father, but it did happen, as my father now confirms. My mother, on the other hand, tells me that this is merely a wishful fantasy on my father’s part. “Martha was not that kind of woman,” she told me recently.

  Sexual abuse, whether of employees or children, occurs in many contexts, but a spiritual household offers the perfect cover for it, as if deploring something is the same as avoiding it. Paradoxically, I think, it even promotes the abuse. P.B. said he disapproved of sexuality; maybe abuse would have been unthinkable to him. But he created an atmosphere, I believe, in which it could flourish: one of secrecy, charged power, hierarchy, and a refusal to acknowledge what was actually taking place.

  Martha played a role in my sexual life as well, not entirely dissimilar to the one she played in my father’s spiritual tests. When my parents went out one evening, Martha asked me to come into her bedroom. She was on the bed, dressed only in her underpants, or perhaps it was a see-through nightgown. I was wearing my pajamas. She asked me to sit on her bed, and she began talking to me about her boyfriend, and how she wanted to get into the movies, and did I think she was pretty, and she didn’t know if she really loved her boyfriend—talk of that kind. I was fascinated. At ten o’clock at night, she turned on the radio to listen to her favorite program, something called The Inner Sanctum. It was a horror show and began with the frightening sound of a door slowly opening and an announcer saying “Open the creaking door.” I was terrified. This amused Martha, who told me to come into her arms and hold on to her if I was frightened. I was, so I did. I know it felt good. I have a vague feeling that I was assigned some specific sexual task, perhaps encouraged to surreptitiously rub up against her genitals, and possibly she did the same to me. I cannot really remember the details. She told me this was our
secret, and that if I never, ever, told my parents, she would let me come whenever they went out and listen to this program with her and hold her whenever I became scared.

  I remember some sort of code word I was expected to use to signal what I wanted. I knew this was a forbidden game, and I did not tell my parents. I wanted it to continue, I did not want to do anything to jeopardize the sexual pleasure I got from it. I also liked the fact that whatever we did, it was never explicitly acknowledged. As I look back on this incident from the vantage point of having written about the sexual abuse of children, I know this was unmistakably sexual exploitation. But I cannot remember feeling anything other than sexually aroused and thrilled. Perhaps if the first time one feels sexual feelings directly, it is in a context of abuse, the violation is transformed by the arousal, so it is not felt as violation. Abuse becomes sex. Possibly boys learn to boast rather than to admit helplessness. “Fixation” is not a concept I favor, but I can see how a certain attachment to secrecy and surreptitiousness developed from this early experience. For some time this was a necessary component of sexual excitement for me, “cheating” was exciting.

  Now I know that whatever she was engaged in with me, she was also involved in sexual acts with my father. This produces, today, an odd sensation of something quite awful going on—in her mind, at least. Did this “sharing” of my sexual life with the sexual life of my father, even as we shared a spiritual life in which sex, not to mention sexual abuse, was denied, have repercussions on my later sexual life? Might I have known about his involvement with her? These are all speculations, but she was using me in a way to which she had no right. I was not hers to toy with.

  I have just found a note I wrote her on January 6, 1949 (my father dated it!), when I was eight. It is bizarre:

  My own Martha Deir.

  Look Martha how about you and me haveing a conversation huh come on wonsh you please do it my swyt huh my puny lille haf-pint. Good by. Your good boy Jeffrey. Love Love Love Love Love

  In reading this note, which I did not remember and had never seen until now, I was suddenly reminded that “puny little half pint” was a phrase Martha used of me. Coupled with the vaguely sexual and ominous “please do it my swyt,” it suggests that more went on than I now know. This is probably why I only remember the pleasure. It sounds as if humiliation were the more likely emotion at the time, but one I changed into arousal, making it impossible for me to recollect. “Conversation” might well be the code word she devised for me. It does not sound like the word of an eight-year-old boy. On the other hand, my sister Linda remembers listening to this radio program at least once or twice with me and Martha. Perhaps Martha used our being all together as an excuse for later being alone with me. It was just something we all did. Perhaps, too, though unlikely, I am misremembering. This is, not unexpectedly, what my mother thinks.

  I now believe that this kind of abuse is inevitable in an atmosphere where physical desire is either denied, ridiculed, or feared, while power is worshiped and physical access unquestioned. The fact that these thoughts—not to mention deeds—were in such conflict with the spiritual life the disciple was supposed to be living made it even sexier, or led to intolerable tensions, depending on your point of view. The “sexiness” could not even be thought about, and the tensions could neither be acknowledged nor discussed. Such “temptations,” including the temptation to pursue the only sexual outlet the prohibitions allowed—abuse in secret—seemed so foreign to P.B., so far removed from his life. At a conscious level, this is no doubt true.

  It also seems possible that the abuse was one factor that made the spirituality so appealing. With sexual abuse, authority is all that matters, power is all that is real. Spirituality offered a nonintrusive authority and a seemingly benevolent power. With sexual abuse, secrecy must be maintained. Our spiritual life was an exciting secret, one of charged, shared meanings. Both sexuality and spirituality offer transcendence of the mundane. But spirituality offers a child dignity and control that sexual abuse takes away. It even promises a replacement for, and an end to, sex itself.

  Did P.B. know he was living in a hornet’s nest of sexuality? With all his talk of purity, and all his prohibitions, did he in fact help create it? Could this possibly—horrible thought—have been one of the ways that he found sexual excitement, by controlling everyone else’s sexuality?

  P.B. often said that the fact that most human beings make their paradise depend on the mere friction of paired bodies is something marveled at by planetary visitors. Presumably, beings from other planets, visiting earth in disguise (I think he meant himself), are amazed and repulsed by sexual intercourse. He also said that the philosopher (again, himself) finds wisdom only in total abstinence, and that voluntary celibacy within a marriage leads to peace and strength.

  In fact, as he told my father in India, P.B. had an entire series of reasons for discouraging intercourse among aspirants. “1) One’s karma becomes entangled with that of the other person. 2) One becomes infected with low thought-forms hovering in the other person’s aura. 3) It is retrogressive, not evolutionary. 4) Each time a person who practices meditation engages in intercourse it disintegrates something of his achievements. With the lowly evolved, it gives a special shock to the nervous system.” He also claimed that children born to parents who rarely practice intercourse are markedly superior in every way. P.B. told my father that he and other questers would “have to choose between abject unreflective surrender to a biological urge, grotesque over-evaluation of a glandular excitation on the one hand, and freedom, peace, and security on the other.” No wonder my father developed ulcers.

  *

  I had no idea what kind of world we were living in, outside the spiritual one that permeated our home. As it happens, my father was having financial difficulties at this time. It pained him to turn to P.B. for “mundane,” that is, nonspiritual advice, but he felt it was urgent. He sat down with P.B. and explained his entire financial situation to him, including a full disclosure of his present impasse. P.B. thought silently for a long time, and then spoke:

  “Jack?”

  “Yes,” my father said, eagerly leaning forward, the better to capture these words of wisdom.

  “There are only two solutions: Earn more, or reduce your expenses.”

  My father was deeply disappointed and said he could not help but be reminded of the French phrase “Cinq minutes avant sa mort il vivatt encore” (Five minutes before his death he was still alive), an expression for belaboring the obvious.

  I was profoundly ignorant of the world around me. What I knew about the Second World War, or any other major event in history, could have been exhausted in a sentence or two. I don’t think my parents subscribed to any newspaper. They certainly never encouraged me to ask questions about politics or current events. This would have been an insult to P.B. and his concern for eternal rather than mundane matters. But in another sense I actually had a life apart from the “spiritual” realm.

  It was 1952, I was eleven, and I loved to hike in the hills above our home in the Hollywood Hills. How many homes does a child have? One, I suspect. This one was mine. It was where I collected polliwogs, built a pond, cultivated a garden. I loved to race off after school with a band of friends to an abandoned quarry and hike around. One afternoon I persuaded Larry, Jerry, and Jan, my “gang,” to go there, but only Larry, my ever-faithful companion, would follow me up the steep cliff. About five hundred feet up, the shale loosened and Larry and I were left stranded on a small ledge, unable to go either up or down. Larry began to cry. Finally, I yelled to Jerry down below to run for help. A half hour later the firemen arrived, along with the press and our mothers. The firemen lowered one of their companions on ropes, and we were hauled up to safety. The next day, Saturday, April 5, 1952, the Los Angeles Times ran the following story, my first appearance in a newspaper:

  FIREMEN RESCUE BOYS STRANDED ON 500-FOOT CLIFF. Firemen in a dramatic two-hour rope rescue in the Hollywood Hills late yesterday brought
down two small boys marooned on the side of a 500-foot cliff. The rescue was accomplished by Cpt. Vernon Breadon and Frank Gorman of Truck Company 27. While the mothers of the boys watched anxiously from below, three firemen atop the steep bluff slowly lowered Breadon and Gorman on ropes to where the youngsters, imperiled by sliding shale, clung to the canyon wall. The young adventurers, who decided to try scaling the cliff on their way home from school, vowed afterward that they’d never try again. They are Larry Slater, 9, of 5715 Spring Oak Drive, and Jeffrey Masson, 11, of 2534 Park Oak Drive. Their homes are not far from an abandoned quarry which is frequently used for movie scenes. The steep cliffs, pocked with caves, rise almost vertically from the floor of the quarry. The mothers, Mrs. Diana Masson and Mrs. Erwin Slater, breathed sighs of relief when the boys were hauled to safety.

  The front page of the L. A. Daily News, too, shows photos of two ordinary, grateful little boys. But while I was on the ledge, I was chanting Sanskrit mantras to protect us.

  *

  In September, when I was still eleven and my sister Linda was eight, my parents left for Europe on an extended trip, for about three months, I think. It was the first time Linda and I had ever been separated from them for so long. My father’s sister Vicki and her husband, Avram T’homi, came to stay with us at our home in the Hollywood Hills. I liked Avram, a romantic figure who had been commander-in-chief for Jerusalem in the Jewish underground army, the Hagannah. He was intimately connected to the founding of Israel and the struggle against the British right after the Second World War in Palestine. The stories he told us had to do with adventures in the real world, a secular world, and I found them exciting. Vicki, too, was lively, skeptical, and completely unspiritual. She was a Communist and a dancer and was a lot of fun. She had no hesitation in debunking P.B. and everything he stood for. I think there was a certain amount of friction in the family because they so obviously disapproved of my parent’s obeisance to P.B. My loyalties were of course with P.B., nevertheless, I could see the appeal of a different kind of world.