“Of course,” he replied, looking somewhat astonished.
“All of them?” I persisted He hesitated for a moment, perhaps taking in the enormous implications of an affirmative answer.
“Not all, but many.”
“Well, how many?”
“Oh, quite a few.”
I was not to be put off. “But how many were there in all till now?” I think I was beginning to irritate him, for I sensed that he was about to change the topic, and I dearly wanted to hear more about reincarnation. It is not that he was ever reluctant to speak about it, but perhaps a concrete answer to such a clear-cut query would have risked raising more troubling questions.
“Tell me about one,” I quickly said.
“Well, not long ago I was sitting at my desk, writing out a sentence from a Chinese classic, when I suddenly realized that I was the very person who wrote those lines more than two thousand years ago!”
Though I was deeply impressed and suitably awed, I felt compelled to ask, because I really wanted to know the answer:
“But how do you know that?”
P.B. answered in words I was often to hear: “I have reason to believe so.” But it was this reason that I wanted. Always, whenever it looked as if we were getting to the bottom of some topic, P.B. would either resort to silence or give me and everybody else the impression that somehow he had to be elusive, mysterious. He simply knew more than he could possibly reveal. The world he lived in was highly charged, heavy with mysterious, secret, potent, even deadly forces.
“Can you remember my past lives, too?” I wanted to know. “No, I cannot remember them, but I can remember some of mine in which you played a role.” This memory business was tricky for me. What exactly did P.B. mean by “remember,” and why was it that other people could not remember their past lives? According to P.B., everybody had past lives, but of course not everybody could remember them. Especially unable to remember them were people who did not believe in them. But why was memory so selective this way? If I can remember something from my past, I cannot claim that such a thing is impossible, or could not happen. Even if skepticism dictated that such events were unlikely, if I remembered them, I would choose to suspend my skepticism and trust my memory So among the many hundreds of millions of people who had past lives, but did not believe in the existence of past lives, surely some of them would remember these lives in spite of themselves. But none ever did. And those who did, amazingly, always came from within the ranks of those who just happened to believe in the existence of reincarnation, or were raised in societies in which belief in reincarnation is a staple of growing up. Actually, in terms of population, those societies probably outnumber the rest of the world.
But here P.B. was touching on a topic that could not fail to ignite my most passionate curiosity: my past lives. He knew who I was. “Well,” I persisted, “who was I in your incarnation?”
“We were once fellow monks together, in ancient Egypt” “Yes, yes,” I said, urging him on. But that was all he was going to tell me. The mysterious smile appeared, and I knew this foreshadowed the end of the conversation. But why? Was the memory only a faint, dim glow? Again, I could not help but be fascinated by this thing he called “memory of past lives.” Not only did I not have it, I could not imagine it, and I could not imagine how one got it.
“P.B., how can I remember my past lives?”
“Most people cannot, fortunately, remember. It would be most distressing if they did. Imagine all the awful things that have happened to you.”
I did. He was right. Still, I wanted to know if it could be done.
“Yes,” he explained, “in meditation, in time, with practice, it could come. I will give you a series of exercises that will help.” And indeed he did give me some breathing exercises, and some obvious mnemonic devices, like trying to remember the earliest memory I had, and then pushing memory to go beyond that, to my actual birth, and then even beyond. But it never worked. My earliest memory at that time was from when I was five or six, and try as I might, I could never get beyond that. I could imagine what had happened earlier, but I could not remember it. I did not remember my birth, and I knew nobody who remembered theirs. I could certainly imagine what had happened to me in a former life, but I could see no way in which it would be possible for me to remember what had happened in it. None of this, however, made me skeptical. The existence of past lives was a “given” in our family, a staple of dinner-table conversation. We talked about reincarnation and past lives the way other families discuss Super Bowl Sunday.
What I could never understand, and still do not, is precisely what relationship reincarnation had to the existence of beings on other planets. One day when I was fifteen, P.B. and I were sitting in my room next to a little shrine I had prepared, with statues of the Buddha, incense from India, Sanskrit sayings, and other odd things for a boy to have in his bedroom. I decided to ask him, because I knew that P.B. believed that there was life on other planets as well.
“P.B., were all your incarnations on this planet?”
“No.”
“Is life on other planets similar to life here?”
“No, other planets are inhabited by higher beings.”
Higher beings.
“How come they never come to visit us?”
“We are not worthy”
“But they could come to talk to you and your disciples, couldn’t they?” I asked, hoping he would take the hint. The mysterious smile again. He knew something he could not tell me—I hoped it was that they were on their way. I would sit in my garden at night, looking up at the stars, and watch for the spaceship that was bound to come soon. How much P.B. could reveal to our space scientists if only he were willing to talk! Why, the mystery of whether there was life on other planets could be solved in a single conversation with him! All he had to do was tell the scientists the truth.
Once, in Los Angeles, walking to the observatory in Griffith Park in the Hollywood Hills, I asked him “How do you know for certain there is life on other planets, P.B.?” His answer was all a young boy could ask for: “Because I have lived on another planet.” There it was! I knew it all along: Higher beings lived on other planets; P.B. was a higher being; P.B. came from another planet. He was not speculating, he was remembering. But if he “came” from another planet, there was the mystery of how he got here. This exercised my imagination for quite a long time. Since I knew so little about P.B.’s early life, I was not certain he had actually been born here. I asked my parents about this mystery, and they seemed a little puzzled too. Evidently P.B. did not look kindly upon questions about his early life. He simply refused to answer. My parents really did not know where he had been born, nor to whom. I was therefore not certain that he had been born at all. Maybe he came here fully formed, straight from the other planet.
I asked him: “Did you come from another planet before you were an adult?” He did not answer directly, but he told me that he had had personal experience with UFOs, both saucers and ships. I imagined he was telling me that he had come on one of these ships He also told me that “the move was a foolish one. I was very tranquil there, and here my life is troubled.” He looked pretty tranquil to me here, too, thanks in great part to my parents’ spiritual and financial devotion, but I imagined some blissful tropical paradise on Venus where all he did was sit on a cosmic beach and meditate next to a cosmic ocean. Was he alone, I wondered? Had others come with him? I asked him.
“No, I am alone,” he answered “But superior beings came to this planet ages ago. They completed their work, and they left. There are visits from time to time from different parts of outer space.”
Just as I had hoped, P.B. was receiving visitors from outer space. If only he would let me meet them. But to ask seemed impossible. After all, I was not a superior being, I was just an ordinary boy from this planet—although an ordinary boy fascinated by the notion that beings from other planets were visiting my father’s guru in our own house. I assumed they were not just
paying a social call, a chummy visit from old friends back home. No, there was probably a purpose to their visit; vastly important work needed to be accomplished. What was the nature of this work?
“Nothing, Jeff, is accidental,” P.B. told me often “Everything is preordained.” The universe was very orderly, in P.B.’s view. “Higher beings are listening to us all the time.” I had a vision of giant TV screens on another planet on which all our conversations were being recorded and filmed. The secret visits must have been a result of such monitoring. They knew what was happening here in the immense detail that no one human could know. An interplanetary benevolent plot was afoot to save the world from some enormous catastrophe. What was that catastrophe? I was not to learn for several more years, though clearly it was the motivating force behind many of P.B.’s most mysterious gestures from the early 1950s on.
*
What did P.B. really believe about himself? I think that at some point he became convinced that he had indeed come from another planet. This is an unfamiliar variation on a familiar theme, known to psychologists as “the family romance,” where a person, unhappy with his parents and his current position, imagines that he comes from some exalted lineage, usually royalty. P.B. was later in life to drop hints to other disciples that he was from another planet. In volume eight of his Notebooks, he writes, “When after the act of dying I shall be carried away to my own star, to Sothis of the Egyptians, Sirius of the Westerners, I shall at last be happy.”
There is no question that P.B. believed not only in the existence of other planets with people living on them, but that these other planets are more “advanced” than ours. Already in 1935, in The Secret Path, P.B. had written, “For Christ descended on earth from a superior planet, which was His real home, and which is far ahead of ours in spiritual consciousness.” In his A Hermit in the Himalayas, written a few years later, he says explicitly that Sirius is inhabited by superior beings:
The beings who people it [Sirius] are infinitely superior in every way to the creatures who people Earth. In intelligence, in character, in creative power and in spirituality we are as slugs crawling at their feet. The Sirians possess powers and faculties which we shall have to wait a few ages yet to acquire. They have detected our existence already, when we do not even know and often do not even believe that the star-worlds are inhabited.
P.B. implied that he came from Sirius, and here he says that Sirius was a superior star, peopled by supermen, that is, people like himself. But he rarely said these things in any direct way. Why the hints, the allusions, the mysterious smiles? Was he afraid of being taken for insane? I think so.
In addition to being an expert on reincarnation, P.B. claimed to be a great authority on death and dying, and not in any academic sense, either. He knew, he always said, from direct experience. I don’t know if he was referring to his memories of former incarnations, or to the fact that he had visions about it, but he was insistent He knew exactly what happened after death.
“P.B., what happens when a person dies?” I asked him one day.
“The body is discarded, but the mind remains.”
“Does the person know he is dead?”
“No, many times they think they are still physically alive. They can see others and hear voices and touch things just as before.”
It sounded creepy to me “What happens then?”
“The mind will go through many different experiences, and then will sleep for a long time. When it awakens, it will be deeply refreshed.”
“What kind of experiences will the mind go through?”
“Everybody is shown what he has really done with his earth-life, what he should have done with it, and what he failed to do with it.” That was frightening, even for a little boy with not all that much life behind him.
“Can anything be taken along?”
“No, nothing. You cannot take anything with you at all, no object, and no person or personal relationship.”
“Will I be all alone?”
“No, when you die, you will vividly see a mental picture of your master, and he will guide you safely into your new existence. He will explain it and will reassure you. Because it will be very new and unfamiliar to you.” I assumed he meant himself, and I was much reassured. It was a great comfort to believe that P.B. knew all about death and what happened after death, and that he would be with me.
*
In the fall of 1953, P.B. was traveling in Europe. On October 23, my father wrote to him. “Omar Garrison, a writer for the Daily Mirror, is writing a series of articles on Pseudo-mystics in Southern California. He spent a few years with Mahatma Gandhi in India. He and his wife are coming to our house for dinner tonight. Jeffrey is beginning to show quite an interest now in The Path, and we have started him with spiritual novels like Brother of the Third Degree which impressed him greatly.”
I remember that dinner party. We were living back on Park Oak Drive in the Hollywood Hills, and I was about twelve. I was instructed to ask Mr. Garrison the following question, and I remember it well, because I had to memorize it carefully. “Mr. Garrison Sir, do you believe in metempsychosis?” (a pretentious word for reincarnation). I cannot remember his answer, but I know that it was the basis for the discussion that followed. It was also what allowed my family to bring up the subject of spirituality, while giving them first some idea of how their guest would react (you never knew when you might be in enemy territory). Although P.B. was not at this particular party, he almost always attended these functions incognito; that is, he would be present because it was considered “research” for him, but for reasons that he never made quite clear, his identity was not to be revealed.
P.B. did not want to be recognized in public. I could never understand what he was afraid of. Suppose he were “recognized”—what possible effect could this have on him or anybody else? But in any event, he insisted that we never introduce him as “Paul Brunton, the author,” but always as “Philo S Opher.” P.B. called himself a philosopher, using the word in a rather archaic sense of a man pursuing or having wisdom. We were “questers”; he was a philosopher.
When it was absolutely necessary to introduce P.B., I was instructed to slur over his name, say something indistinct in the hopes that nobody would ask anything further. If that seemed unlikely, then I was instructed to say, as did my parents, “A friend, Mr. Opher.” “Glad to meet you Mr. Ofer, what line of work are you in?” P.B. never came up with a satisfactory answer to this obvious question. The less people knew, the better, as far as he was concerned. He would be as vague as possible and immediately change the topic. He did not wish to be “discovered.” It was as if he were on a secret mission. Moreover, from his point of view, what could he say? “I am Dr. Brunton, from another planet, reincarnated to save you and your ilk from deep ignorance?”
In 1955 we were together in Rome for a week’s vacation, and my mother, P.B., and I decided to go to a movie. P.B., though, was afraid he would be recognized and so insisted on wearing a pair of dark glasses into the movie house. I was sure there was no chance at all of anybody recognizing him in this obscure theater and told him so. He reluctantly agreed to remove the sunglasses. Immediately, a man rushed over to him in the aisle and said, “Aren’t you Paul Brunton, the author?” P.B. shot me a look of sad victory, and I learned my lesson, though I could not help wondering to myself, even then, if perhaps he had not orchestrated the incident precisely in order to demonstrate his correctness to me. I don’t think he admired my budding skepticism when it appeared to turn in his direction.
During that same visit to Rome, P.B. went for a stroll with Linda and me one afternoon. Like most adolescents, I was easily embarrassed. P.B. spoke atrocious Italian, with an extremely marked English accent. (The same was true of his French.) He was speaking quite loudly, much to the amusement of some Italian onlookers, and Linda and I were acutely uncomfortable. He turned to us and said, “You are probably wondering why I speak such good Italian.” Sort of, we nodded. “It is because in a
former incarnation I was the secretary to the Black Pope.” I did not know who the Black Pope was, but it sounded deliciously ominous and of enormous importance. I was young and resilient and would not allow anything to make a permanent dent in my devotion.
P.B. regarded any criticism as lack of loyalty. He felt free to talk about anything within the circle of our family, but he would go silent when faced with any question that even hinted at hostility. I may have entertained doubts, but never hostility. This made it fun for me, because I could ask anything I wanted. About death, for example I once asked P.B. if he knew the date of his death.
He smiled “It’s already been fixed.”
I thought so. “By whom?”
“The Overself.”
I had heard about this Overself, a very slippery character. Sometimes P.B. called it The Mind Behind the Universe or even more mysteriously, The Mind Back of Things, or the World Idea, and sometimes just God. But his favorite term, I think because he invented it, was the Overself. The Overself was not up for discussion. It was. “You must have faith in the Overself, Jeff,” he would tell me. “It will protect you, especially in difficult times.”
“But where is the Overself?”
“It is your own innermost nature.”
“But I can’t feel anything inside like that. Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am sure. And you must have full faith in its presence and power.”
“Will it help me?”
“Yes, but only if you have this full faith. It cannot help you without it. But with it, it will heal you when you are sick, and help you whenever you need its help. But you must pray to it every day.” I found it hard to have “full faith” in something I could not see or feel, but P.B. was so certain, I did not dare doubt him. Besides, to doubt him was to doubt the Overself itself, a distinctly dangerous proposition.
*
Living with P.B. involved adhering to many rules, and hearing many legends about health, the body, and the advantages of living the kind of “clean” life we did (I wondered why people who had no such rules often seemed so much healthier physically). P.B., for example, had in his disdain for the body such elaborate rituals of what he could and could not eat that a good part of his day was spent trying to conform to these rules. I am reminded of George Orwell’s comment about Gandhi. “It takes a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty.” Attempting to avoid the needs of his body, P.B. seemed preoccupied with it to a degree rarely encountered elsewhere. Yet P.B. and my parents prided themselves on their lack of fanaticism when compared with some of their friends.
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