My Father's Guru

by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

  “There is a higher power that is using me to write the books I write and also protects both my body and my mind.”

  Mind?

  “Yes, you see, just about anybody else subjected to this kind of daily attack would lose his mind.”

  We had been talking for several hours. The sun had gone down. The birds were still. It was time to go into the house. P.B. had taken me into his confidence, and this made me feel proud, special, singled out. I was eager for our next conversation. While P.B. was always immensely busy, or so it seemed, he often made time for me. I thought I occupied a special place in his universe. I was learning things that would be important for me to know later, when I too would have to face some of the same challenges that P.B. had. The more I knew about his struggles, the better.

  *

  A few days later we took a walk together in Fern Dell, the park just below our house, wandering along the little stream with its small islands of exotic ferns and large overhead shade trees. There were rarely many people there, and P.B. enjoyed walking among the ferns and talking. I was hoping he would tell me about the attacks we had talked about earlier. I presumed they went on whenever P.B. left our home, for I never saw any signs of a struggle in the house. I asked him about this.

  “Much happens at night, Jeff, when you and everyone else are asleep,” he responded

  “Are you asleep too then?” I asked.

  “Not really. You see, at night I wander through many lands, and a few are not even on earth. I travel.”

  “I was a little puzzled “With your body?”

  “Not exactly,” he said “I travel with my astral body.”

  I was delighted and curious. The next night I set my alarm for two A.M., and when I woke up, I tiptoed out of my bedroom and quietly opened the door to P.B.’s room He was in a chair, sitting straight, evidently absorbed in meditation. It was a position I was to see him in frequently. The next morning I told him this. “Yes, if you look in my room, you will think I am meditating, or quietly asleep in my bed. But I am actually traveling with my astral body.”

  “Astral body—what is that P.B.?”

  “It is what the Hindus call the sukshmasharira, or the ‘subtle body’. There is a magnetic field around our body, in which are stored all the thoughts and feelings from every incarnation we have ever had. This subtle body is not limited to time or space. It moves, in fact, much faster than the speed of light. It moves with the speed of thought. So you can actually visit any place you like simply by thinking about it.”

  “Can I do this too?” I was desperate to learn to do it.

  “You cannot travel alone, but I might take you along with me one day, if your progress is satisfactory.” I was afraid there was a catch. I didn’t know precisely what he meant; no doubt it had something to do with physical and mental “purity.”

  “How did you learn to travel astrally?” I asked.

  “My first teacher was an American painter, living in London He was an advanced mystic, a gifted clairvoyant, an adept. He was a great occultist, brother M.”

  “Why did you call him brother M?”

  Silence.

  “I mean, what was his real name.”

  “Thurston.”

  “What was his first name?”

  Silence. I had learned that these silences did not, as I had at first feared, mean that P.B. was angry. He never was. It was simply his way of signaling to me that a topic was too delicate to discuss openly, or beyond my comprehension. It did not occur to me that he didn’t know or, in some cases, simply forgot. P.B. liked a good story, though, and he always picked up the narrative. “He took me along with him on many of his travels.”

  “You mean to India and Tibet?”

  P.B smiled mysteriously. “No, places much farther away.”

  “You mean travels to other planets, to the stars, astral travels?”

  “Yes. Actually, we spent a lot of our time together at the Astral University, where I studied philosophy.”

  Wow! U of A! Since I was still young, my mind was not flooded with all the practical problems. How did one apply? Grades? Who attends classes? Are there bathrooms? Where do the teachers come from? Was Buddha a professor there? Do they have faculty meetings? Degrees? Maybe this is where P.B. got his mysterious Ph.D. I don’t think that as a child I was skeptical. I may, though, have wondered if he was just joking with me, but would I have dared to ask?

  I wanted to know if P.B. was protected against what he spoke of as the “evil forces.” Was this, I wondered, the function of the guardian angels? P.B. explained it to me.

  “You see, Jeff, there is a race of invisible demons kept separate from us by a strong psychic wall. I am sorry to tell you that there are conditions under which they can breach this wall. This happens most during the hours of darkness.”

  I was already frightened of the dark, and what P.B. had just told me did not help. P.B. noticed his mistake.

  “Of course, you should know that you always have a blessed presence at your side, and my power is greater than theirs. Mystic adepts helped me to exorcise these demons, and I can do the same for you. Should you ever feel a hostile force, open or disguised, immediately kneel, and then say very firmly, ‘I command you in the name, by the power and compassion of Paul Brunton, to come out of my body.’ Make a sign of the cross slowly with your right forefinger. Then inhale deeply and make the same sign, and this time repeat the same thing, but only to yourself, silently. No evil force can withstand this.” (P.B. was not just comforting a frightened child. In his posthumously published book, Essays on the Quest, the same description appears.)

  I was scared for a few days after that, and P.B. had me sleep with a green-colored light burning all night. This was something he recommended for all people, not just children, when there was “evidence of spirits.” There was almost no spiritual superstition in which P.B. did not believe, but he bristled at the notion that there was anything unscientific about his beliefs.

  By themselves, these conversations with P.B. probably did not make me feel any better—about being small, for example. But P.B. himself functioned a bit like an imaginary companion. I believed that he was a powerful, benevolent presence whose entire attention was focused on protecting me. My world was the ordinary world of a child. Instead of leaving me there to grow as a child, he took me into his world, with its bizarre suppositions and beliefs not shared by the world around us.

  I thought that P.B. was describing the true nature of the world to me, a reality that was merely invisible. It did not occur to me until many years later that he was creating an imaginary world, though not for my benefit. He believed in it too. His words were like an adventure story of a spiritual Tin Tin, the French comic book hero; they certainly kept me alert and entertained. If I was not a direct player, at least I was important enough to be a recipient of information. I thought my role in this world would grow. I was young, but P.B. was still imparting knowledge to me that would help me when I grew up; that is, this knowledge would help me in helping the cause. The cause here was spiritual advancement for me personally and the ultimate triumph of spiritual values in the larger world outside of me.

  It made the adventure even more exciting to think that it was also dangerous. P.B. liked to hint that those who opposed him would eventually come to a bad end. He often told me that it was not personal. He had nothing but goodwill toward his enemies, but the higher powers themselves were not so forgiving. It was, after all, he explained, the Law itself. By this he meant the law of cause and effect, or the law of karma. You get what you give. What goes around comes around. So P.B. explained that the Law would demand a hundredfold higher payment for every falsehood and every malicious word uttered against him. Forces were working for him—in the past, people had had to pay dearly for a hand raised against him. “And when the time comes,” he told me ominously, “when the hour is ripe, they will strike again.”

  He explained it to me; “It is the worst kind of karma to insult a spiritually advan
ced person. It must be paid for sooner or later. Such a person will be struck down in time. If a man rises up against me, I will withdraw my love from him, right until his dying moment. I will appear to him in a vision then, and will forgive and comfort him. If you make a sage frown, there is grave danger.” I vowed never to suffer such a fate.

  It seemed only just to me at the time. After all, how could any person of goodwill possibly wish P.B. ill? But I suspect that it was not so much that anybody wished him ill as that not everybody believed what he said. The question of P.B. telling a lie had never even arisen. It was an unthinkable thought, although in later years it did occur to me that perhaps P.B. was not as innocent as he seemed. He was, after all, a journalist, with access to many people. He traveled around the world a great deal, visiting countries few people from the West went to in those days: Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Ceylon. He sought out sages everywhere, traveling to remote areas. It is not impossible that some government agency, American or British, might have recruited him He certainly would have relished the intrigue and the air of secrecy that working for them, in however humble a capacity, would entail. No doubt he could think that he was advancing the cause of spirituality by supporting the forces of democracy against communism or socialism. If he were working for the CIA, it would not have been paranoid to believe that the “adverse” forces were after him.

  *

  While working for P.B. in his little apartment, I had been witness to the many hours he spent in meditation. Several times I was allowed to sleep over. At night I would get up to go to the bathroom and often see a faint light coming from P.B.’s meditation room. I would tiptoe to the door and peek through the keyhole. There I often saw P.B. sitting on the floor, his legs crossed in the lotus position, lost in meditation. He was perfectly still. He had learned all the breathing and chanting techniques and applied them assiduously on a daily basis.

  He spent at least two to three hours of every day in meditation. I find it entirely credible that he altered his body chemistry in some way, and I am sure this facilitated his withdrawal into another realm. Emerging from it, no doubt he felt that the experiences from within that world were as valid as those he had on this side. P.B. claimed never to dream. He told me that was why in just a few seconds of wakeful time he could have an entire night’s sleep. He certainly did not seem to emerge from his bedroom with the tie to daily reality broken, as one might have expected had he really passed over into some other form of consciousness. P.B. was anything but “psychotic.” He always knew what was real. But he chose, in some way, to ignore that reality in favor of another reality that he regarded as superior. When P.B. and his disciples used the term psychic reality, they did not use it in the psychological sense of “inner” reality. They meant a kind of higher reality, something from another plane, more rather than less real than this one.

  Did P.B. ever have doubts or suspect that perhaps some of what he took for reality was nothing more than fantasy? I cannot imagine that he would never experience doubts. He spoke of such doubts often, though generally for others, attributing them to adverse forces. Any negative thoughts disciples had about themselves—about “the path,” about gurus and their powers—were at best “tests” and at worst the work of external mischief-makers.

  For P.B., the external world could not be all there was. After all, in this world P.B. was almost the opposite of who his disciples took him to be; he was hardly a force of any kind. He had no noticeable gifts; he knew he was less talented as a writer than many; he was unassuming in size and physical appearance; he had little money and no valuable possessions; in the eyes of this world, he had no power, counted for little. His friendships were not, by and large, spontaneous, based on a mutual attraction, but came from his supernatural claims. He had students more than friends. Although he maintained that he could teach in any university he wished, there were no offers to teach. Whenever he claimed to influence people in “higher” spheres, either the people in question were dead or he did not feel free to reveal their identity.

  Perhaps it was to compensate for all of this that P.B. began methodically to create an alternative reality. In that alternative world, he was a man of immense significance. Perhaps, even, of unique significance. In his posthumously published Notebooks, he writes:

  Buddha himself foresaw that a new teacher would arise within a few thousand years after himself, and that this man would have a higher spiritual status than himself. But what is of special interest is his further prediction that a higher spiritual path would, through this medium, be opened to mankind Everything points to the fact that the date when this teacher and his teaching will appear is within the century.

  Now, in fact, the “Buddha himself” never foresaw any such thing, according to any text I have read, and I have read a great many Buddhist texts in the original Sanskrit and Pali. I think that what P.B. was hinting at, or at least hoping, was that he might be that very teacher. He certainly thought that while Buddhism was fine, there was a “higher” teaching, the one he was revealing to mankind, learned in India from teachers now dead.

  P.B. developed certain physical traits that somehow made up for what he regarded as his physical defects. He began to look the part of the Oriental sage. He worked hard, I believe, at cultivating a certain air of tranquillity that bespoke inner power. If he was going to be deprived of external power, he would have to have something in its place. People who displayed their power externally often behaved, in his eyes, like animals, that is, they expressed their emotions too freely He would do the opposite. This was his primary complaint about women: “too emotional.”

  P.B. never exhibited any obvious emotion. Never would he express anger, become testy, or look bored. He would not yawn in public or give any sign of being under the influence of any feeling. Especially bad were what he called “the lower emotions.” According to him, and from all external evidence, P.B. never felt a desire for revenge, he never felt anger, he never felt hatred. He did not appreciate the display of emotions in other people either. It came under the rubric “ego,” the ultimate negative word in P.B.’s philosophy. Almost everybody had “too much ego.” Except P.B., of course. My father was fond of saying “P.B. has no ego.” What this meant is that P.B. never expressed desires for himself in the usual way. It is not that he never expressed desire—he just expressed it differently. Usually he expressed it with respect to the higher powers. Thus when he wanted a house, it was not for himself (this would have shown ego) but in order to carry on his work for others. He never took a trip for its own sake (he would never use the word vacation) but to perform some essential service to others, or to engage in mysterious research.

  *

  It is true that P.B. had few physical possessions, but the ones that he did have, he claimed had special powers. He had, for example, a small Tibetan statue. When I asked him what it was, he told me: “Three centuries ago there was created at the great monastery of Tashilumpo a gilded figure of the Grand Lama of Tibet. It was ‘psychically magnetized’ in his presence. Eventually it came down to the thirteenth Grand Lama at Lhasa. He gave it to a close personal friend, who then gave it to me.” He kept it on his desk. “It is priceless,” he told me, and I believed him. “Any museum would dearly love to own it.” I was sure this was true. P.B. liked to think of his few possessions as “magic” objects, infused with spiritual power, although it is more likely that he picked them up in the Tibetan bazaar in Delhi The little bronze statue of the Buddha I remember so well sitting on his desk was also a gift, from “His Holiness the aged Supreme Monk of Siam.” It, too, was one of his personal treasures; it too was endowed with great power. What was important was the magic powers these objects possessed for P.B., and I think he considered them devoid of this power unless they had been in the hands of great sages.

  Power was everywhere in P.B.’s world. What was this power that so obsessed P.B. and all his disciples, including me? It was something that would protect. It was like a magic wand. In fact, P.B. said that h
is own guru, the mysterious “brother M,” always carried a magic wand. He said it was a glass rod, “potent with magic power.” Could he have believed this, or was he simply trying to speak in the language of a little boy? I think he believed it, for his books refer over and over to just such childlike notions.

  As for talent, while P.B. certainly did not have the illusion that he was a particularly gifted writer, he did like to hint that writers whom he greatly admired had some sort of secret relationship with him. When I was fifteen, I remember driving along the seashore outside of Cannes in the South of France, and we passed Somerset Maugham’s villa there. P.B. asked if we had read The Razors Edge and then said casually that the main character in this novel was based on him. Evidently, P.B. had met Maugham in Hollywood, years before and, seated next to him at dinner, had proceeded to tell him about his adventures in India. He was convinced that his life had so mesmerized Maugham that he had used him for the model of his novel, and the Indian guru, he said, was based on Ramanamaharshi. I was impressed and suggested that we all drop in on the writer and let him know who was passing by. My parents thought this was rather a good idea, but P.B. was adamantly opposed—no doubt with good reason.

  He was certainly not adverse to meeting famous people. He spoke of meeting Charlie Chaplin and G. K. Chesterton, R D. Ouspensky and Jiddu Krishnamurti, Rudolf Steiner, Karen Horney and others. He told my family about a conversation he had had with Carl Jung in Kiisnacht, in which Jung allegedly told him that he had to keep his mystical beliefs and experiences secret in order to guard his scientific reputation. He was very pleased at his friendship with the Queen Mother of Greece, who considered herself something of a disciple, or at least so P.B. always told us. Actually, my parents met her and her daughter many years later in Madras, and the meeting seemed to confirm that she had been close to P.B. Given her record of siding with the fascists during the Second World War, however, this would be little to brag about.

  *