My Father's Guru

by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

  Tyberg had written her own book in 1940 called Sanskrit Keys to the Wisdom Religion. In fact, this book was nothing more than a list of five hundred Sanskrit (and Tibetan) words from the major Theosophical texts. They were not really words, but Theosophical concepts, and I found them difficult to memorize. But when Dr. Tyberg decided to teach me the Sanskrit alphabet, I perked up. We had our first lesson a few days later. I could not believe I was learning this wonderful and strange new alphabet. I felt important. I could not have been a more eager or better pupil. Each word I learned seemed pregnant with spiritual meaning. Sanskrit appeared to be such an exalted language. No words struck me as trivial. Of course, this was because Tyberg was not teaching me to hail a cab in Sanskrit, but to read the Sanskrit scriptures. Or so I thought. Actually, I learned much later that Sanskrit is a language like any other, and that if you want to buy vegetables, or write a thank-you note, or sing nonsense syllables, you can, theoretically, do so. The language is there for you to do as you wish with it. Most people who say they “know” Sanskrit simply mean that they have learned a series of discrete words, much as the modern American will find a series of Sanskrit words in Webster’s Unabridged, like yoga, sutra, shastra, ashrama, mantra, karma. To know these words is not to know the language. No matter how many thousands of these words you know, you are no more capable of reading a sentence written in Sanskrit than I was able to read French because I knew all the words to Edith Piaf’s love songs by heart. Sanskrit has a grammar, a syntax, and a secular history like any other language.

  I also wrongly thought that Sanskrit is not read or spoken but chanted. The whole language, I assumed, was one vast mantra, a spiritual chant. My education was being channeled toward the solipsistic notion that everything that happened to me had a purely spiritual purpose, and nothing secular was of any value. I and my spiritual companions were all that mattered, and here was our true language. I was being offered a language that made “ordinary” thoughts seem unworthy. I was on the guru track.

  *

  By now I was considered mature enough to help P.B. in his work, especially since I had learned to type in school. So that same year, I became P.B.’s “secretary.” I was thus finally in a position to answer one of my own questions: What did P.B. do all day? He was living in a small apartment in Santa Monica. I loved taking the bus to his house and being able to smell the sea breeze as the bus got closer and closer to the ocean.

  My first job was to go through his rather voluminous correspondence and cut out any bits of blank paper that he could use for making notes. Even enough space for a single line was systematically kept. This included envelopes. P.B. also wanted me to transcribe and then file hundreds of scraps of paper on which he had scribbled notes or taken down quotations from his reading for use in his own books. He was a voracious reader of any book on mysticism. He knew stories about almost every mystic who had ever lived. Although I didn’t know it at the time, his most recent book, The Spiritual Crisis of Man, published in 1953, was to be his last. I was sure that I was helping to type his next magnum opus. After I transcribed these endless notes, I would file them away under topics of my own devising. I have no idea how he could ever have found them again, since my system was entirely idiosyncratic. Nonetheless, when I read his Notebooks, I recognized some of the entries I had made.

  My other task was to unravel many yards of string that had come to him on different packages. He kept them all and would often ask me to link two or three smaller pieces into larger ones. This seemed like such an inordinate waste of time that I couldn’t help wondering whether it wasn’t a test. He was extraordinarily frugal in other ways, however. He did not like to throw away paper towels. After using them, he would lay them out on his little balcony to dry for use a second and third time.

  P.B. lived not only a frugal but also a very abstemious life. His small apartment was almost bare, except for absolute necessities. The refrigerator contained little except one or two tomatoes and a carrot: lunch and dinner. He drank nothing but water and tea. There were no books, either. He explained that he kept his “library” in storage. I was never to see it and often wondered if it really existed. The only thing he had in abundance was tea.

  At least four times a day, P.B. would call a tea break. It was one of his obsessions. He had special teas from all over the Orient: Japanese green teas, black tea from China, Lapsang Souchong, and especially jasmine tea. The water had to be extra hot. He insisted on putting the loose leaves (he abhorred the idea of a tea bag) in a wooden holder for infusion and then in a little earthen pot. He drank young hyson green from Cathay or Taiwan for breakfast, semiblack oolong for midmorning, and smoky kapsan or flowered jasmine for midafternoon.

  “P.B.,” I asked him once, “why did you get upset when I brought you the Darjeeling tea from my parents?”

  “I have given up these stronger teas.”

  “Are they bad for your health?”

  He smiled mysteriously “Well, yes, but that is not why I don’t drink them anymore.”

  I really didn’t care why he preferred one tea to another, but I asked him why he didn’t drink strong teas anymore and was utterly fascinated with the explanation he came up with:

  “There is a fifteenth-century Chinese poet who drank only the mild tea that was produced from the tea leaves grown in Cathay.”

  “Yes?”

  P.B. smiled.

  “You mean, you are the incarnation of that poet?”

  “Yes.”

  This kind of “knowledge” that I got when I stayed with P.B. seemed to me in such contrast to the knowledge I got in school. At the time, I thought I was immeasurably fortunate to learn about P.B.’s earlier incarnations But I was not entirely certain how I was meant to put this knowledge to use. And to tell the truth, I was more interested in learning about who I was in former incarnations than who he was. Moreover, the snippets he gave me never added up to anything useful, never explained anything. I wanted these esoteric bits of knowledge to point to something significant, to explain some mystery. Instead, they always felt unsatisfyingly incomplete, like the spiritual gossip P.B. so much enjoyed, just interplanetary chit-chat. It would be years, however, before I could recognize this.

  P.B. never made it entirely clear from where he derived his knowledge. He rarely openly stated anything, he preferred to hint. So when he told me that people who speculate too much on former births can develop hallucinations, I was left to infer that what he did when he spoke about former births was not speculation. The notion that P.B. was hallucinating was risible. We speculated, he knew. He seemed to know everything.

  Once I asked him about the reincarnated life of plants:

  “P.B., do plants eventually become animals?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, how many times does something have to be born a plant before it can enter the animal kingdom?”

  “They cannot be counted.”

  “Aren’t there laws?”

  P.B. smiled. I sometimes heretically thought he smiled mysteriously when he simply didn’t know what to say.

  “And after we are animals for a long time, we become humans, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “What if we’re really bad? Do we go back, in the next incarnation, into an animal body?”

  Maybe he thought I was worried. “No, Jeff, the transmigration of souls from human to animal bodies is a fiction.” But then he seemed to reconsider: “Still, while rare, it is not impossible.” How exciting to think that P.B. knew the answers to such strange questions. My imagination would soar when I talked with him like this.

  I knew that P.B. loved pet animals, as I did, and I wondered what their fate was, especially that of my cocker spaniel. And so while working for him one day, I asked him, “P.B., will Taffy be reborn with me in her next life?”

  “When Taffy dies,” P.B. told me, “her invisible spirit will hover around you. She will be fully conscious, and as far as she knows, she will still be in her usual world. She will thi
nk you are petting her, and be happy. Yes, she will reincarnate with you, but as a higher animal.” I couldn’t imagine anything much higher than a dog.

  “Do all the planets have beings who reincarnate on them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are there any beings from other planets here?”

  “Living entities come here from less evolved planets. And we eventually go on to higher ones. But this has to be done within certain limited periods. After that, the possibility of entry ceases. Normally, animals don’t need much of a rest period between births. Humans, though, need many years of rest.” How much P.B. knew! What a joy to ask all these questions and be given such certain and precise answers. And yet how disquieting. Was it really all true? Was it at all possible? I was never entirely without the germ, at least, of skepticism. I rarely gave voice to it directly, sensing that it would not be well received. There was really nobody, at this time, to whom I could turn for an alternative view of the world.

  “Can we choose where we incarnate?” I asked him.

  “To some extent. If you love a race or an individual strongly enough, you will be drawn into its orbit when reincarnating.”

  Why, then, I wondered, had P.B. not been reincarnated in India, which he seemed to love? I was glad, though, to think that I had chosen to live with my parents. I liked the idea of having had some choice in the matter.

  Where did all this knowledge, which I could not learn from my schoolbooks, come from? It had to be direct experience, I thought. But I could not understand why he would not answer all questions so directly. Did he know? I always assumed it was the nature of the question that determined his answer, not the limitations of his knowledge.

  Once I asked him how he knew these kinds of things.

  “I know it from intuition.”

  “Are emotions involved?”

  “Not at all. What is important are spiritual and moral values, and metaphysical capacities and spiritually intuitive qualities. It is these values that contribute to my knowledge. Emotions have nothing to do with it.” P.B. seemed to have a horror of feeling something. At other times P.B. told me that he knew what he knew by “revelation,” that most mysterious of entities. What exactly was a revelation? I was never to find out.

  “Can anybody know it this way?”

  “No, most people depend on intellect and emotion Jeff, the difference between savage and sage may be only two letters in the alphabet, but two thousand incarnations.” He meant that the sage had reincarnated thousands of times, the “savage” but a few. It was all very neat and simplified, spiritual science fiction for children and adults alike.

  He was the sage. Was I the savage? No—and this was my salvation—I was the companion of the sage. I was blessed. I could not believe my good fortune. P.B. encouraged this budding elitism. He spoke constantly of the elect, of the special, of the privileged. Even though he believed these privileges had been won by hard toil in previous incarnations, he definitely subscribed to a stratified hierarchical worldview. Social justice and equal rights were foreign to his temperament, as they are to any mystical system. P.B. wrote explicitly: “Since all men are obviously not equal, it would be unwise to give all men equal rights.” He also wrote that “we must accept and submit to the World-Idea with its ascending hierarchy of creatures and pre-established order of things.”

  Every evening, I would go home and tell my parents about the wonderful day I had spent with P.B. They would look at each other significantly, as if they knew about some deeper purpose to all of this. I felt I was unbelievably fortunate to be in the presence of this great man and that all the trusted adults in my life were in agreement about this invisible world of power and meaning with which P.B. in particular was on such intimate terms. How could they all be wrong? Perhaps if I had spoken about it more openly to my teachers, friends, or relatives, I would have been given another perspective. But to do so would have been disloyal, a sign of weakness. How could I doubt the word of God?

  I did once ask P.B. why other people could not be told the truths he knew. He told me we had to be tolerant.

  “Remember, Jeff, we were once at the same level that they are on now. The notion of rebirth teaches us tolerance. Do not despise those of obvious inferior intelligence. Think of their internal age. They are still young. Young souls.”

  I never really did, consciously at least, doubt that P.B. was speaking the truth from direct experience. I think I quickly stifled any notion that he was simply inventing it all. But however briefly and stillborn, this heretical idea occurred to me. Something always felt a little odd.

  *

  One afternoon when my work was finished, P.B. invited me to take a bath with him. It never struck me as unusual until this moment, as I recount it. I remember the incident well and cannot recall anything sexual about it. We were about the same size then. I was very small for my age, short and slight. I remember thinking: “So it is possible to be small yet great.” P.B., too, was conscious of his tiny stature. I was surprised, looking at his genitals, that they so resembled my own. I suppose I thought that God, naked, would look different from his creatures. I also noticed at the time that he, too, was circumcised, which puzzled me, since I did not know then that he was Jewish. Actually, I felt quite proud that he had invited me to bathe with him, it seemed like a special favor, a mark of distinction. How many disciples got to bathe with their guru?

  That night, when I told my parents, they looked at each other with what I thought, at the time, was a look of pride. It seems odd to me now that it didn’t occur to them to be concerned at a grown man asking a thirteen-year-old boy to bathe with him. But on the other hand, our whole family took baths together, regularly. Even as an adolescent I can remember bathing with my mother, possibly until I was sixteen. The family was considered special and therefore exempt from ordinary rules. If I ever objected, which I sometimes feebly did, I was asked: “Are you ashamed of your body?”

  “Nobody else does it,” I would say.

  “Do we have to be conventional, like everybody else?” The flip side of P.B.’s “no sex” rules was the sexually charged atmosphere around our house. Purification and sexuality were not just opposites, they were fused in a dance of denial.

  Earlier, when we were younger, my mother had insisted that we children take enemas, given by her. My sister flatly said no. I went along. This continued, I believe, into adolescence. It was meant as a health gesture, a means of purifying the body. I don’t remember it as sexual, but memory or no memory, it was of course a form of bodily invasion. Cloaking sexuality in spiritual covers may have disguised the underlying sensations and the real meanings, but it did not eliminate them. A spiritual family could not abuse its children, therefore whatever happened in that family, it was not, it could not be, sexual abuse.

  Chapter Four

  Reincarnated from Another Planet

  Of all the conversations I had with P.B., the ones that seemed most to fire my imagination had to do with other planets and with reincarnation. I think, now, that P.B., like Judith Tyberg, was in fact much influenced by Theosophy, and particularly the writings of Madame Blavatsky, in which reincarnation plays a major role. But in my eyes at the time, he was just telling me things directly from his own experience. I had no inkling that he may have been repeating ideas he had read about. Most of his ideas came from India, and in Indian philosophy reincarnation is taken for granted. I cannot think of a single Indian philosophical tradition that does not accept the reality of reincarnation as too fundamental even to argue. It is simply stated as fact, whether in Buddhism, Hinduism, or Jainism. What is compelling about the theory is that death is only an interim event, a moment in one’s personal history.

  Exposed to the idea of reincarnation as a child, it was difficult not to think about it, even if only imaginatively. Who had I been? With whom had I been associated? To whom had I been married? Who were my mother and father? Brothers and sisters? Friends?

  What did I do? And especially, what had I done
wrong, for which today I am suffering the consequences? Particularly for a child, who is trying to figure out who he is and where he came from, reincarnation offers an easier and more complete explanation than one employing more complicated or critical or social or psychological factors for how we came to be who we are. If it was not ultimately convincing, it was certainly compelling.

  P.B. immersed himself, and the rest of us as well, in discussions of reincarnation on a regular basis. For him, and for me at the time, they were hardly fantasies. They were reality. So I took it that P.B. had memories of his earlier existences. Indeed, I remember when I was fourteen or so, walking on the beach with him in Lanikai, on the windward side of Oahu, early in the morning. We both got up at dawn and often took walks together. We were watching the crabs racing for their holes, when I asked him point-blank:

  “P.B., do you remember your past lives?”