My Father's Guru

by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

  My parents returned from Europe in May 1953, with my father announcing to us that he had “retired.” I was not sure what he meant, but he told us that he wasn’t going to work anymore, and we should all get ready for a long vacation in Hawaii. On June 26, 1953, my mother wrote to P.B., “We are all leaving for Honolulu on the 29th of June by United Airlines and expect to remain there two months. The kiddies are looking forward to this vacation, and are very excited, as they have never been in a plane before.” I was indeed very excited. I adored Hawaii. I suppose it was my first concrete vision of paradise. We lived on the beach in Lanikai, and I often swam to a small island just off the coast. We all liked it so much that we decided to spend one year there with P.B. as our guest, in 1954.

  Our house had a pond in the garden filled with turtles. I had a boat, and friends. I loved going to school barefoot, where I was the president of the eighth grade (My slogan for the election capitalized on my smallness, “The little guy with the big ideas.”) I loved coming home to take my motorboat on exploratory trips to the little islands close by. I am struck, in looking at scrapbooks from the time, how “normal” I appeared. The Windward Reporter, the local newspaper, said this: “These are the students you picked as your students of the semester. In the eighth grade division, Jeffrey Masson came in unanimously. Jeff lives with his parents, Jack and Diana Masson, at 838 Mokulua Drive. He’s president of the eighth grade class, and also secretary of his home room. Asked about his grades, he said if it’s possible, not to have them published. If that’s the case, they merely must be good. He likes swimming and is very active in sports. He is well liked by his friends, teachers, and especially popular with the opposite sex. Quite a guy.” But I was not just the little guy with the big ideas, I was the little guy with the secret guru. This is the life I never talked about outside of the house.

  I don’t think I was ashamed or embarrassed, though it is difficult to know from this distance. I only knew that having P.B. live with us was a special privilege that other people were not to be told about. I knew, too, that P.B. thought the world was hostile to him and his ideas, and he discouraged us from speaking about him, or telling “outsiders” that he lived with us. Cogent or viable alternatives to the life I was living were ruled out by this secrecy. Whether that was disturbing to me then, as it ought to have been, I cannot now say. Every impulse I had to live like others was countermanded in the house. I was, in fact, popular with girls in my school. But I knew that this was not well regarded by P.B. Other stirrings were even less acceptable.

  * * *

  P.B. did not approve of any physical demonstrations, and particularly not of a sexual sort. I knew this, and I knew that on this road, I was headed for disaster. I can remember one day in Hawaii in 1953, at twelve, playing hide-and-seek with a neighbor girl. Crouched in the garden shed together, I found my arms around her waist. Without realizing what I was doing, I put my hand between her legs. She giggled and squirmed and told me it felt good, before running off. The physical feeling was totally new to me. I can still remember clearly her face and how she looked at me, I must have connected those feelings I had for her with P.B.’s frequent condemnations of sexuality: It was the ultimate example of being “caught up in maya,” a cosmic illusion. “You cannot simultaneously be on the path and engage in sex” was what P.B. had said. Sexuality and spirituality were mutually opposed. You could not have both. This was disheartening to my father and frightening to me, as I began to have a sense of what he was referring to.

  But if sexuality was forbidden, it was also highly visible. The topic always seemed to come up in conversation. I don’t know if this was P.B. or my father, or both, but for a man who claimed never to have any sexual desire, P.B. certainly never tired of engaging in conversation about sex. The conversations revolved around spiritual disasters caused by sexual desire. How a guru had revealed himself to be a hoax by sleeping with a disciple, or how a disciple (invariably male) had destroyed his chances for spiritual advancement by giving in to a sexual urge. He knew of many instances and told them with great gusto. We all listened, a little sheepishly, but fascinated.

  I had some vague sense that spirituality also somehow tied into unusual bodily practices. We had taken one of P.B.’s poorer disciples as a housekeeper. Her name was Margo, and she was a health fanatic. The bathroom and her room in our house were filled with little yellow bottles, and with a curious smell that for some time I could not place. It turned out that she believed drinking and bathing in her own urine was the cure for all current and possible diseases. Her boyfriend was a weight-lifter, and I often found them locked in an embrace on the living-room couch. P.B. did not approve. He did not like the sex, and he did not like the urine. He abhorred what he called “unbalanced” people or fanatacisms of any kind. It obviously never occurred to him that his own views would ever be seen in this way.

  The combination of spirituality with intense (if sometimes negative or eccentric) preoccupation with the body was part of the world my parents inhabited. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I learned that we were not the only ones. Staying at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, my sister and I were in the elevator, discussing something to do with Buddhism, when an extremely tall stooped man entered. He joined in our conversation, asked me what book I had in my hand, then brought it up to his face to examine it more closely. I remember thinking he was totally blind. He was not, but nearly. He told me that bad eyesight could be cured by something called the Bates method without the use of glasses. I remember thinking that he was not a particularly good example of the truth of his belief. We chatted some more, and he said he would very much like to meet the parents of two such unusual children. We proudly took him up to our room, where he introduced himself to my parents as Aldous Huxley.

  My parents attempted to convince Huxley that they knew a guru—not P.B.—he should visit in India, and he clearly looked as if he knew that he was incapable of making such a visit. I could not take my eyes off his and noticed that each time he wrote something down—names of books and gurus—he brought the paper to within an inch of his eyes.

  I was disappointed with the conversation. I think I was expecting Huxley to acknowledge P.B.’s preeminence in the “perennial philosophy” and that my parents and he would trade spiritual war stories late into the night. Huxley, after all, was a great admirer of Hinduism and especially of Vedanta. I wanted to hear more secret doctrine, feel that I was in the presence of a sage, for I knew that P.B. admired Huxley. But I felt no such thing, and it occurred to me, albeit for only a fraction of a second, that perhaps we were all mistaken, we had all been taken in. A gigantic hoax had fooled us all, even—terrible thought—P.B., the master himself. Such thoughts, however, were intolerable.

  Chapter Three

  Meditating to Illumination

  During the years that P.B. lived with us, meditation was the most serious and important of all household activities, the essential element of our spiritual life. Meditation sustained P.B. as sex and food sustain other people. He lived for it. He talked about it constantly. He wrote about it. He practiced it for long periods, every day. It was considered a very special privilege for a disciple to be invited to meditate with the master. The main spiritual advantage of having P.B. live with us for long periods of time was that we all got to meditate with him on a daily basis. Meditation was usually in the evening, before dinner. This was a solemn occasion, for it was really only during meditation with the guru that one could have a transcendental experience.

  P.B. was not without a sense of humor, even when it came to meditation. But his highly developed sense of humor was almost entirely confined to making fun of people who laid claim to spiritual powers they did not possess. He loved to ridicule other gurus who believed in the supernatural. He thought this crude. I never understood, and do not to this day, how he differentiated their beliefs from his. Not infrequently a rival guru—all other gurus were rival gurus—would visit the house. After his departure, my parents and P.B. would spend hap
py hours dissecting the absurdity of his beliefs, his naiveté, crudity, and ignorance.

  P.B. did not like rivals. He abhorred “cranks,” a word commonly spoken in my family but reserved for others. The fact that their own relatives considered my family and especially our guru as cranks was too absurd to even contemplate. P.B. often told us that the true sage spoke and behaved without any quackery and without the tone of pontifical infallibility, so that when “questers” as he called them (those on the Quest for Truth) came to see him for advice, they were helped without all the mumbo-jumbo of the usual guru. P.B. insisted on speaking in simple language. But we were not to mistake the simplicity of his language for a lack of depth in his thought, or even to falsely believe that we were at the same level. P.B. explained that he could gauge the truth of any situation better than could the disciple, since the disciple’s vision was clouded with ego, and the ego of the ordinary man was constantly caught up in the net of desire. P.B., we all believed, was entirely without desire.

  “The impact of my aura will gradually strengthen, calm, and uplift any sensitive disciple,” P.B. told us. Certainly he believed that in his presence there were healing vibrations that had miraculous healing powers. P.B. said there was nothing miraculous about these vibrations, it was merely the innate tendencies born of former incarnations that are beneficially influenced by the healing association of an adept. He didn’t actually say “I am an adept,” but it was hard to mistake the gist of his words. We all wanted to be more and more like him.

  I can remember my father putting his two hands together, standing straight, and looking very solemn and calm when P.B. walked into the room. After all, he did not wish to appear insensitive. In fact, my father and I did everything we could to imitate P.B., with no apparent success. P.B. was the expert on everything; at least, his opinion counted more than anybody else’s. My father encouraged this by asking P.B. a constant series of questions and acting as if the answers came from God. P.B. was duty-bound to answer—how could the guru not know everything?—but I think that sometimes playing the part of the guru became wearisome even for him. This might explain some of his desire for solitude.

  P.B. somewhat reluctantly allowed my father’s cousin Shimmy to meditate with us. In this important ritual, P.B. would fold his legs in the lotus position (easier for him than for many people because of his diminutive size), let his arms rest over his knees with his forefinger and thumb forming a magic circle, and begin by chanting the Tibetan Buddhist formula Om Mani Padme Hum (“Hail to the jewel in the lotus”). He would chant this Sanskrit mantra in a deep and resonant voice, allowing the Hum to echo for perhaps a minute. An altogether impressive performance, learned in India.

  Shimmy too was impressed and determined to imitate the master. So one evening, during meditation, after P.B. chanted, Shimmy began to chant the same mantra, but he did so in a squeaky falsetto voice, mispronouncing the words and losing his breath before the end. P.B. could not contain himself and burst into laughter. He had a hearty laugh, and once he got going, he could not be stopped. My father and I joined him, and soon we were all three rolling around on the floor in a paroxysm of laughter. What made me laugh was simply the performance itself. But for P.B. it was more serious: a disciple was laying claim to the privileges of a master. Shimmy was deeply humiliated and never attempted to chant again.

  *

  I was always a little bit nervous about pretending to have knowledge, especially spiritual knowledge that I did not really have from direct experience. I wanted so much to be like P.B., just as Shimmy did. I also wanted to please the adults around me. I wanted to make them proud of my spiritual abilities. But I feared I had none. At some level, I knew I had none, I simply didn’t know that this could be a normal thing, even a good thing. Instead, I was always afraid of embarrassing the adults around me and of being humiliated myself.

  Once the actor John Hall, who played Tarzan after Johnny Weismuller, visited us in Hawaii and insisted on hypnotizing me in front of our guests. I was given a posthypnotic suggestion—when he spoke the word cloud, I was to leave the room and bring him an umbrella. I was fully conscious and totally unhypnotized and only frightened that I would forget the cue and bring down embarrassment on our guest. As it turned out, I acted as expected and then blushed scarlet at my deviousness. How can adults believe this rubbish, I remember thinking; I was equally embarrassed for John Hall and my parents. The fact that I knew my parents were skeptical (they asked me after the guests left whether I was pretending and I admitted I was) protected me to some extent from entering this make-believe world entirely. This was true in general. My father was a very shrewd businessman, requiring a certain lack of fanaticism for financial success. You could not be too gullible and expect to make a profit. So while my father totally believed in P.B., he was less easily taken in by other matters. His skepticism, however, never encroached upon his complete certainty in P.B.’s stature as a mahatma, a great sage. My mother was less inclined to complete surrender to P.B. For one thing, she was immensely sociable. Considered a very pretty woman, she derived great pleasure from the way she was perceived. She loved to have people around. She flirted and laughed and enjoyed herself. Others responded positively to her. For P.B. and my father, this was merely proof of her being “caught up in maya,” a phrase often hurled at me as well, as the ultimate insult. In the spiritual atmosphere I grew up in, the real world was called maya, “illusion,” while the illusions were considered ultimate reality.

  *

  The goal of all P.B.’s disciples was to have an “illumination,” that is, an intense mystical experience that puts one in touch with a “higher power.” My “illumination” came when I was thirteen I had been meditating with P.B. for some years, more or less daily when he lived with us. I found it hard to stay still for the thirty or forty minutes that a meditation usually lasted. P.B. never moved. My mother coughed constantly, whether from boredom or nervousness or for spite, and my father gave her looks of annoyance.

  For my thirteenth birthday, just around the time of my bar mitzvah in fact (my parents remained culturally Jewish in spite of their spiritual allegiance to P.B.), P.B. said that I could have a special meditation with him. I determined that no matter how uncomfortable I became physically, I would sit still and not break my concentration. Usually what I thought about during meditation was what could possibly be going on in the mind of P.B. Where was he? Was he, too, thinking, like me, about other people and what they were thinking about? Impossible, I thought. He was, I was certain, lost in some kind of supramundane, otherworldly experience. He was, I was absolutely convinced at the time, in an altered state. This time, as usual, I was thinking about all these things. My legs began to hurt, my eyes burned, my arms were tired, my skin itched, and I longed to stand up. But I persisted—and it paid off. For soon everything began to feel better, and I could actually feel myself entering a kind of altered state. No doubt the rhythmic breathing helped. It was the first time I had ever felt anything like this, and I was ecstatic. It did not last long, but P.B. seemed to sense it and asked me afterward whether I had felt anything special. I told him I had. He said he had known it, and that this was my illumination.

  It was not entirely unlike my earlier experience with hypnosis: I could not help but feel that I was fooling everyone. I wanted to believe that something out of the ordinary had happened to me; it made everyone, including me, feel so happy, not to say exalted, and very special. While I had definitely entered some sort of “altered state,” altered need mean nothing more than that it was in some minor way different from my ordinary state. I was willing myself with all my might to “have an illumination.” It was expected of me. It was the right time. The circumstances were right. I was with the right master. It was really up to me. It would have been churlish not to experience something around this time. If it had been a pretense on my part, as I often guiltily thought it was, at least it was for a good cause. P.B. may have been all-knowing, but perhaps I could somehow get around his o
mniscience and make him, my parents, and myself believe that I had achieved the first major goal of the aspirant.

  Through my “illumination,” I was now definitely considered to be on the spiritual path. My parents seemed suitably impressed. Even my father, whose main complaint, after all, was that he had never had an illumination, seemed more pleased than jealous, although it made me nervous, especially since I knew my illumination was falsely acquired. I was treated, from then on, with a new kind of respect. I was a little guru in the making. I can’t say that it gave me no pleasure, or that I was displeased at the whiff of power a guru could command, even a little one. I can remember embellishing the experience itself with each telling, until I had just about convinced myself that I had seen the face of God. P.B. and I were both rather pleased with ourselves.

  *

  I was thirteen years old. With both my bar mitzvah and my “illumination” behind me, I was beginning to feel more and more like an important little man. It was time I learned something special. What could be more special than Sanskrit? Sanskrit, I had always been told, was the language of the gods, the ancient sacred language in which all the very texts that P.B. revered were written. I assumed, as did everybody else, that P.B. had completely mastered the language. As I later found out, this was wrong, but in any case, P.B. knew a teacher, Judith Tyberg, who was dean of studies and professor of Sanskrit and Eastern religions at something called the Theosophical University in Point Loma, California, which I strongly suspect now had no more than a handful of students and a smaller number of teachers. She lived in Glendale, in a house that also served as the Sanskrit Center and a bookshop. When we returned from Hawaii, I called her, made an appointment to see her, and the next day arrived on her doorstep. An elderly woman answered. “Hello,” she said, “I’m Judith Tyberg.” I was invited into her house, and ushered into a sitting room that was filled with Oriental art. Buddhas, rugs, Tibetan tankas on the walls, incense burning. I felt right at home. The room smelled mysterious. I loved it. Dr. Tyberg herself seemed to me ancient and very serious. Within minutes she told me that “Sanskrit is truly the mystery language of the Aryan race, the divine language. It is the instrument used by high initiates [yet another term for masters] to impart Truth to men [sic] in the early days of our Fifth Race.” I didn’t really know what she was talking about (what on earth was a Fifth Race?) since all her terms came from modern Theosophy, something I knew nothing about. (Theosophy is a system of mysticism founded in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and continued by Annie Besant, drawing heavily on Indian “wisdom.” Tyberg had gone to Benares to learn Sanskrit so that she could understand the Sanskrit words used by Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine, an incomprehensible book written in 1888 that she tried, wholly unsuccessfully, to interest me in.)