The one area in which P.B. made no concessions to other people was his vegetarianism. He was very strict about it. This strictness was not, as he frequently reminded us, merely on humanitarian grounds. He certainly treated animals with great gentleness and kindness, something I always liked about him. But he also felt that eating meat had a bad effect on the psychic aura, and that that made it more difficult to see truth. He considered “pure food” a qualification for the Quest; all of his disciples, as far as I know, were vegetarians. He once complained that Alan Watts ate pork, saying that such “gross” food creates impurities that impede spiritual progress. Smoking, too, was frowned upon. Still, I remember how angry everybody was at my reaction when P.B., as we were driving in Hawaii, pointed to a man who he said had attained a high degree of spirituality. I was about twelve, and I smugly said it was impossible, because he was smoking a cigarette. I was admonished by everyone at once, including my father, my mother, P.B., and my sister.
I was a terrible little prig about such matters, even at an early age. I recently found a letter my sister Linda and I had written to P.B. in 1954 from the Edgewater Hotel in Waikiki. My parents’ trip to Europe, just before this visit to Hawaii, had “changed” them in ways that Linda and I found distressing. They were slipping from the path. Eating meat was the most visible sign of this descent. We wrote:
Dear P.B.
It has happened. They’re eating fish, like any other low developed cannibal. Could you please write to them and tell them to stop. For it is hard to live with a mother and father who are meat eaters.
Love: Jeff and Lin
I cannot help wondering how all of us—P.B. in particular—escaped being labeled mentally ill. While I reject the label, people who ferociously believe that they are in close touch with beings from other planets are, as we know, often locked up in psychiatric wards. Perhaps this was one of the reasons for all the secrecy in our house. For whatever reason, P.B. and our family completely escaped such a fate, and while P.B.’s behavior (fasting and meditating and searching out yogis) might well appear odd to many people, it was hardly as odd as what he believed.
It is equally odd that he was believed. I was a child, and I accepted what my family told me was true. My parents were disciples, and they accepted, for the most part, what their guru told them. Actually, my parents were slightly embarrassed by some of P.B.’s more outrageous claims, but they avoided any confrontation and have told me that they never even asked themselves point-blank whether they believed him or not.
Was it possible that P.B. himself did not believe what he said? I don’t think so. His whole life was predicated on following what he said he believed. But if he believed such ideas, how did he maintain an equilibrium within a world predicated on wholly other ideas?
Chapter Five
Living with a Guru
I was fourteen years old and remarkably small for my age. I remember sitting next to a young girl I liked and finally summoning up the courage to ask her out on a date. She startled me by asking the question I feared most “How tall are you?”
I lied: “Five feet.”
I squirmed almost as much at her next question: “And how much do you weigh?”
I lied again: “Seventy pounds.” She was considerably taller and heavier than I was. I was a boy, still a small child, and she was well on her way to womanhood. It was not that I was overcome with sexual desires at fourteen. I was not. But I definitely was interested in girls and wanted to be with them in some as-yet-undefined romantic way. My size was making this impossible. Nobody, in fact, could believe that I was fourteen. I looked more like ten.
And so I felt a certain bond with P.B. He too was small, almost as small and frail as I was. Yet he was an adult. And not just any adult, but the guru, the man to whom other, larger men deferred. I took my problem to P.B.
We were sitting in our garden, next to the pool at our house near Griffith Park in Los Angeles where we had recently moved. My tortoise was sunning itself in the rose bushes next to the water, my dog was sitting at my feet, and my cat was curled up in P.B.’s lap. It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and I felt lucky to be able to talk for hours with the family guru. I loved it when he would sit quietly watching the little birds building their nests. This gave him intense pleasure. It was one of the few activities he seemed to enjoy for its own sake, without seeking to moralize about it or use it for some spiritual lesson. He just liked birds. So did I. “P.B., it’s embarrassing,” I said “I’m so small. I’m tiny and my friends make fun of me. I feel like a midget.”
“Jeff, I know about your problem, for I have it too. You see, people come to me after reading my books. You will notice that I don’t put a photo of myself on the cover. This is because I don’t want to put people off. They call me and want an interview, and sometimes I grant them one. At least a single meeting. I feel I owe that to my readers. But I feel like doing it less and less, even the single meeting, because the same thing always happens. They come to the door, I open it. They stare, dumbfounded. I can feel that they want to leave immediately, they think they have made some sort of mistake. The tone in my writing is strong, and they are expecting a powerful man to appear in the door. Tall, majestic, with long flowing hair. Instead they see me, P.B. short, bald, thin. And then I ask them in. ‘Come in,’ I say, in a low soft voice, when they expect a trumpet to boom out of my mouth. And then I offer them a cup of tea and decline whatever they have brought me, and they are certain then that I am no guru.”
“So P.B., do you feel bad the way I do then?”
“No, Jeff, actually I don’t. And I’ll tell you why. For one thing, I know that many authors share two traits I have. They are of small stature. Also they have short arms, just like I do.” I had never noticed and could not see anything unusual about his arms. “H.G Wells, who was far more talented than I am, for example, had short arms. Also, you see, you must remember that everybody has some physical shortcoming, something they are ashamed of. Everybody. Superficial people believe that when they meet the body of an adept, they have met the adept. The body may be insignificant in size, unattractive in appearance, frail in health. But the man inside is altogether other.
And if people like us, you and me, think about it, we can rise above the insults, because we can apply philosophy. We are, after all, philosophers, aren’t we?”
Well, I was not entirely certain I knew what P.B. meant by philosophy. It was not what I heard about in school, nor what I read about in the books I would seek out to learn more. P.B. was not referring to a subject taught in a university. A philosopher, for P.B., was no academic, but a person who thought in a certain way. He thought “philosophically.” For me, this merely meant learning to think the way P.B. did. So I would apply his philosophy, his teaching, to all matters.
“Also,” P.B. continued, “remember, Jeff, that I am not just an ordinary philosopher. I am a hermetic philosopher.”
I did not know what a “hermetic philosopher” was. But it was clear to me what P.B. meant by the term: He meant that he was engaged in thoughts that others should not know about. It was secret. Being a philosopher was a little bit like being a secret agent. Other people were not supposed to know anything about P.B.’s life—not even his whereabouts or his identity. Especially if they were deemed to be hostile. He wanted to blend in, not to be noticed.
“I like to be inconspicuous in a crowd or when I am on the street,” he told me “That is why I dress so modestly. I could wear the robes of a philosopher (sometimes he did wear these “philosopher robes” around the house—a long flowing Chinese silk robe), but people would notice me then. I want to be ignored, for people to think I am insignificant”—he and I both smiled at the irony of it—P.B. insignificant!—“to be obscure, even anonymous. That way I can carry out my work without interference.”
“P.B., what do you mean by interference? Do people really interfere with your work?”
Again the smile. How much, I thought, he would like to tell me, and how constra
ined he must be. It would be dangerous, I imagined, for me to know too much. Clearly he had deep and mysterious reasons for avoiding people. He usually shunned any physical contact, and I thought this might be connected to the danger he perceived in other people. I asked him about it. “P.B., I notice that you don’t like to touch people. When my parents introduce you to somebody new here in the house, you nod, or raise your hands in an Indian greeting of Namaste, but you never shake their hand. Is there a reason for this?”
“Yes. You see Jeff, everybody has an aura,” P.B. explained, “a spiritual light that they give out. I perceive this, and I am very sensitive to it. I hate to shake anybody’s hands, because I get contaminated by their aura. I need to preserve my psychic purity. If I touch somebody the magnetic aura that surrounds his hands and body will mingle with mine. It is a kind of psychic contamination. I avoid it as much as possible, but it’s not always possible. I feel ill when I touch somebody who is lowly evolved. That is why I often carry papers in my hands, so that I can have a good excuse for not shaking hands. I do not want my karma entangled with that of the other person. You pick up low thought-forms hovering in the other person’s psychic aura, and they attach themselves to your own like crabs. You see, Jeff, the body is like a battery, and there are electrical radiations from certain parts, especially the eye. Through those radiations, a part of the aura is actually projected outward. This is why Indians of the higher caste do not like to have their food looked at by those of the very lowest caste. It is a polluting act.”
“Is it something physical that happens?”
“Oh yes, you see, when you shake somebody’s hand, it leaves an auric deposit on your own hand.” I was fascinated. An auric deposit! What a strange and wonderful idea. Or was it?
“Should you avoid touching another person then?”
“Oh yes. I don’t even like to be forced to sit in other people’s auras. You know how I like libraries, but it is a problem there, because of the proximity. As you become more and more advanced on the Path, you have to be very careful where you sit, or with whom you associate. You should refrain from associating with anyone who is a failure, as you will pick up something of his bad karma.” I wasn’t sure what a failure was when applied to a person. But I was a little worried. How would I know when contamination was near?
“Can you actually see their auras?” I asked.
“Oh yes. Jeff, you remember what I taught you about the three different forces, don’t you? Everything is susceptible to these three tamas, rajas, and sattva. Tamas is dark, evil, low. Rajas is red, lively, restless, energetic. Sattva is pure, white, quiet, calm, the Good.” I did remember. “Well, some auras are tamasic, they emanate an evil force. Each aura is a different color, depending on whether they are more tamasic, in which case they are darker, or sattvic, which means that the light will be very white. It is an indication of their spiritual progress, how far they have come on the path. When I see a dark light hovering over the head of some people, I avoid them. I don’t want to touch them, or even talk to them. That is why you will sometimes see me slip out of a room when I see somebody approaching.”
I had wondered about that. I could not understand why he would seem to be willing to meet some people he did not know, yet not others. I would be standing in a room talking with P.B., and we would look out the window and see my parents drive up to the house with guests. A man would get out of the car and start to walk up the stairs toward the house. P.B. would see him, gather up his things, and rush from the room, not to emerge until the person had left. Now I knew the reason for this. P.B. did not like his aura!
I remembered our earlier conversation about the people who wanted to interfere with P.B.’s work. For years, I had heard whispered accounts that usually stopped when I came near, as if the subject were too delicate or possibly risky to be discussed in the presence of a child. But I wanted to know more.
“P.B., is it true that lowly evolved people with black auras want to stop your teaching?”
“Well, yes, actually it is true,” he told me “I cannot tell you everything, Jeff, because it could be dangerous for you, but I want you to know that there are certain adverse forces at work in the universe, forces that try to prevent people from discovering their true Self, who want to keep people from entering upon the Path. These adverse forces are very powerful. I have my own secret ways of combating them. I have been locked in deadly battle with them ever since I was in Tibet.”
“Tibet?!” The word had almost magical connotations for me. Many of the more mysterious spiritual teachings (the so-called left-handed Tantrism, for example, that involved sexual practices—I heard it whispered about in the house) were said to have died out in India but were preserved in Tibetan monasteries. Many of the novels P.B. had suggested I read were set in remote monasteries in Tibet. But I had never heard that P.B. had visited Tibet. He talked a great deal about India, and the ashrams and the gurus he had met there, but never Tibet. Perhaps he had been waiting to reveal this secret to me. I was thrilled to hear it now.
The sun was beginning to set. It was one of those balmy evenings that still makes me love Southern California. All around me were homes where ordinary children were engaged in ordinary conversations. I thought this, and a shiver went through me as I realized how privileged I was to be in the presence of this great man who had learned secret teachings in Tibet.
I turned to P.B. and said, “I didn’t know you had been to Tibet!”
“Yes, I try to keep it a secret. Actually I wrote a book, called A Search in Secret Tibet. You don’t have to look surprised; you could not have seen the book. I never could publish it. You see, I met a highly advanced yogi there, a Tibetan lama of the Karmapa sect, a direct descendent of Tibet’s great Yogi Milarespa. When the Communists found out that I had secret meetings with him, they wanted to interrogate me. I was warned before they came, and I was able to flee Tibet. But I was in such a hurry that I had to leave certain valuable manuscripts behind.”
“But P.B., how did you talk to this lama?” I did not know if I would be happier to learn that he knew the mysterious language or that he communicated in some more basic fashion.
P.B. smiled enigmatically again, which led me to believe, of course, that both must be true, and that P.B. indeed did know the Tibetan language. I assumed, in fact, that he knew most of the languages of the earth. It startled me that his French and Italian were so bad, but I thought he must have been better with Oriental languages since India, I believed, was his true home. Actually, as I later learned, P.B. knew no Oriental language whatever. He derived all his knowledge from secondary and even tertiary sources. He did not outright lie, however. He would never say anything as crude as “I speak Tibetan” or “I read Sanskrit.” It would have been even cruder for a disciple to ask “Do you speak Tibetan?” or “Can you read Sanskrit?” The questions imply a degree of skepticism that was not permissible.
At the time, I did not suspect P.B. was inventing. Nevertheless, there was something about the way he described Tibet that sounded slightly unreal, some vague sense that he was simply amusing me, catering to my desire for the sensational. I am now convinced that P.B never went to Tibet. If he had, I doubt he could have resisted the temptation to boast about it in his later books. Perhaps he glimpsed Tibet from Nepal, I am sure he spoke to any number of Tibetan refugees in India, and no doubt he had asked for and been granted interviews with various Tibetan monks and abbots.
But P.B. was not only attempting to keep me spiritually amused. It must have served his own psychic economy to think of himself as engaged in events that were earth-shattering, of the most urgent significance. It filled the same function for his disciples. And on his own psychic plane, in his own mind, P.B. probably did meet with this guru and many others. He identified closely with the Tibetan monks, who were persecuted and their monasteries razed by the rabidly anticlerical Communist government of China. It increased his self-importance to think that the Communists wanted him as well.
“Did the Communists ever find you?” I asked him.
“No, but they continue to seek me out,” P.B. said. “They have followed me here to Hollywood, and that is another reason I must be so careful.”
At the time, I believed it all. I was ever-vigilant when walking with P.B., looking out for the man with the Russian features who could be a KGB operative searching for P.B to stop him from teaching The Truth. According to P.B., the Communists were just the outward manifestation of a much deeper hostile force at work in the universe. P.B. told me that he exposed himself to the attack of adverse forces almost incessantly. He had critically studied the ways of evil spirits, he said. “There is a psychological belt where millions of evil earth-bound spirits congregate and surround our planet. They become active at night. A human being can be infested astrally with psychic vermin.”
It was a terrifying prospect. Would P.B. protect me from these psychic vermin? Was he protected? I asked him.
“Yes, I have a guardian angel,” he told me.
This sounded Christian. I preferred it when he spoke of the “black depths of occult enmity” and the “harsh menaces of occult hatred” to which he had been subjected. I had been frightened but fascinated to hear him speak of the “Black Ones” and about “unseen malignant forces.” This was absorbing, it intrigued my spirit of adventure.
“What do you mean by a guardian angel?” I asked.
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