My Father's Guru

by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

For somebody with no sexual needs, P.B. managed to marry many times. The marriage I knew best was to Eve, a striking opera singer who was then, and remains now, a disciple of P.B. He married her, he explained to me, for the sake of convenience (his; he needed a new secretary) and to help her spiritual progress. There was no sexuality involved, I was told. I was fourteen at the time, and just beginning to awaken sexually. I marveled at his self-control. I would gaze upon Eve, her fair skin, her bright red hair, her large breasts, and be seized with desire. I remember once when I was fifteen going up to the roof of a New York hotel with her to look at the stars. There we contemplated P.B.’s earlier existence. She held me as she looked up, and I could feel her breasts pressing against my back. I thought I would faint with desire, and I imagined that her breathing quickened too. She told me that P.B. did not need sex in the ordinary sense. “What about you,” I thought, but did not dare ask. And in what sense did P.B. need it? I wanted it any way I could have it, and right then, with her, Eve. It was the most sinful thought a disciple could have. In India it is called gurutalpaga—soiling the bed of the guru, an ancient and much-written-about sin. Gurus who lived with their wives in the forest were often away and left their wives in the control of their young disciples. There was no greater wrong than a disciple sleeping with his guru’s wife during his absence. I had read such stories and imagined I was in that forest, with Eve and P.B., barely able to contain myself, waiting for him to take his trip.

  P.B.’s marriage to Eve came as a shock to many of his disciples. P.B. had declared so often that sex can only tear a person down, that a man is never satisfied, wanting constant change. It is dangerous, P.B. said, over and over, and should be avoided. All of this was well and good for the disciples, but the Master can make his own rules. Here is how P.B. explained his marriage to my father, recorded by my father in his diary.

  “During the past ten days I met and was deeply impressed by the inner affinity with a young lady who was having trances and did not know how to control them. For a whole month around Christmas she was in the God-illumined state. Then she lost it. Now she has to regain it (which is her strongest life-desire) in the gradual way. She had a two year course of typewriting and journalism and wanted to help solve my secretarial problem, which has become intense and troublesome. Anyway, we decided to marry almost immediately in view of the pending trip abroad, previously arranged for the same week. I have no doubts about this marriage. It is God-guided and God-ordained. I do not need to marry at all, but the inner affinity is so striking, and the need to solve the problem of my work and to get help in attending to the many details of day-by-day living which absorb so much time that I need for more important matters has been an important factor in my decision.”

  It seems that P.B.’s marriage was a trial to many of his disciples for one reason or another. My father told me that when my mother cabled him the news in Japan, where he was on a business trip, he nearly had a nervous collapse. “All those years I had trouble with my sexual desire, and P.B. made it clear that I could expect no illumination unless I was abstinent. And now he marries!”

  P.B. was fifty-four. Eve was nineteen.

  On January 19, 1952, P.B. wrote a letter to Uncle Bernard, informing him that he had gotten married at the beginning of December and that his wife was accompanying him abroad. He said that the marriage was a surprise to him and to many other people as well. On the seventh of July 1952, he wrote again to say that while Eve had made great spiritual advances in the marriage, she wasn’t able to keep her end of the bargain—to help him in his work. She wanted to help him; she simply lacked any capacity to do so.

  P.B. never lost his sense of humor about the marriage. I remember him convulsing with laughter when he told my parents about the actual ceremony: Eve brought her mother along; the three were standing next to the minister when he turned to Eve’s mother and asked “Will you take this man as your lawfully wedded husband?” P.B. interrupted: “Excuse me, I am marrying the daughter, not the mother.” The mother was his age; the daughter was young enough to be his daughter. P.B. thought this wildly funny; it never occurred to him that it could be construed very differently, as wrong.

  My father could never bring himself to ask P.B. directly whether he was sleeping with Eve. This was, however, uppermost in his mind. A lot of the disciples wondered. No answer was ever forthcoming. It was not that it was nobody’s business; quite the contrary, it was very much the business of the disciples, given P.B.’s stance on the matter. It was simply unthinkable that he would, and so nobody ever dared to ask if he did. P.B.’s description of it as a marriage de convenance certainly implied that no sexuality was involved. In fact, once the “convenience” was gone, once P.B. returned from abroad, he decided to divorce Eve. But within months, another trip came up, and P.B. married her a second time.

  After the second marriage, Eve began to study voice at the Academy of Music in Santa Barbara. Accompanying her on the piano was a young, handsome, and gentle musician, Beau Regard Glass, who had been Lotte Lehman’s accompanist. He was struck, he said, by her flaming red hair, white skin, and beautiful voice. He fell in love. She reciprocated the feelings, but was torn between the two men, her guru and husband, and the man she was in love with. Beau complicated matters further by asking her to marry him. She didn’t know what to do.

  One evening in 1957, when we were living in Hollywood, we invited Beau, Eve, and P.B. to dinner. The five adults and my sister and I were sitting around the table. At some point, Beau tried to reach Eve’s foot with his, but by mistake he connected with P.B. Turning to Beau, P.B. said with exaggerated politeness: “Excuse me, you’re playing footsie with the wrong foot.” Eve blushed. Beau merely hung his head, forlorn. The rest of us burst out laughing, with P.B. laughing the loudest. Eve began to cry and ran from the room. But P.B. was in fine humor. He liked Beau enormously, as we all did, and thought it was the perfect match. He divorced Eve to allow them to marry each other, which they did within months, with his blessings. Beau now became a disciple as well, and both of them and their daughter, Melody, are fiercely loyal disciples of P.B. to this day.

  I could never quite understand why I heard so much about sexual abstinence even at a young age. Did P.B. and my parents think that I should be caught early, before bad sexual habits began to build up? Was it part of my spiritual grooming? Abstinence continued to be held up to my parents as the ultimate goal to aim for, even if for a time they had to continue to be sexually active. After all, P.B. told them, as he told me, “Sooner or later, sex has to be given up.” He was of the opinion that people in their forties no longer required sex. He may have been projecting his own needs, or lack of them, onto others. Or he may simply have been parroting the Indian tradition, which discourages sexuality, even in marriage, after forty.

  One of the basic ideas of Vedanta is that “you” are not the body. A corollary is that other attributes of the body do not apply to “you.” Thus the disciple is constantly encouraged to “rise above” petty distinctions based on physical needs or characteristics. But for some peculiar reason, my parents seemed obsessed with physical attractiveness, who had it, and even more important, who was lacking it. P.B. did not discourage this. For one thing, he was himself preoccupied with what he considered his own unprepossessing appearance. But even more important, he believed that “the condition of a single organ or of a half-centimeter of gland may curse a man’s whole life more than any sorcerer can. The shape of his nose may be so disliked by others that his ambitions are thwarted or his desire for love defeated.”

  P.B. chose to deal with the problems of physical appearance not by transcending the prejudice through philosophic reasoning, which one might have expected. No, he thought it better to confront the problem surgically. And so at some unspecified time, P.B had a nose job. So did my parents, both of them. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time and was urged to follow suit, but refused. Did my family do this for aesthetic reasons? Everybody had looked fine to me before. If anything, their ea
rlier appearance had greater character and distinction. Did they wish to hide the fact that they were Jewish? I think so, in part.

  It was strange, this bias against being Jewish. I really don’t know if my parents adopted it from P.B. or from the culture around them. Being too Jewish for them meant that they were like the rest of their family, telling loud and crude jokes, or even worse, making fun of Eastern spirituality, hence P.B. But with all the emphasis on “the Truth” it seems odd that they should alter their appearance to hide the facts. Did they think it would help an unspecified sinus condition, as they said? I think that once P.B. lifted the sanctions on such an act, it was almost a prescription: If the guru wanted to change his appearance, surely we could and should. In many respects it had the opposite effect from what was intended. Instead of taking the family away from such trivial concerns as the appearance of the human body, it seemed to ground them more firmly in such a concern.

  They were now part of the elect, or at least they looked that way, as the photos in this book demonstrate. Moreover, it seemed to them, at least, that it opened certain societal doors that had been previously closed to them. The effect on me was not so positive. To a certain extent, I was now odd man out. I didn’t quite fit the picture of the perfect-looking family. I don’t know how I resisted the familial pressure to change my looks and with it the appearance of my heritage, but I am glad I did.

  *

  The very idea of being a disciple of P.B. was fraught with difficulties and contradictions. He hinted, often, that he had no disciples, the assumption being that nobody was good enough to really be his disciple. On the other hand, in moments of intimacy he would tell my father and me that we were his disciples. This was invariably followed by a list of who was not his disciple. Envy among the disciples was chronic and deep, especially between my uncle Bernard and my father Jacques. Each wished to consider himself P.B.’s special disciple; I believe that P.B. told each in turn that he, and only he, was that person He seemed to have something of a preference for my father, perhaps because my father was wealthier and able to provide P.B. with more comforts. Bernard was more cantankerous and altogether less reliable. My mother, being a mere woman, in his reflexively sexist cosmology, was often asked not to participate in the daily meditation, and sometimes was permitted to meditate only for a short period and then asked to retire.

  Had P.B. been a complete fraud, at least one motive would have been financial enrichment. P.B. did not enrich himself at the expense of his disciples in the way, say, that Rajneesh later did. On the other hand, he was certainly not beyond taking a gift, even a substantial one. To some extent he justified this by citing the common Indian practice of giving the guru a token of gratitude. In ancient India this almost always involved fruit. A guru was not supposed to be paid—a worthy tradition around which ways had to be found. The disciple, many gurus say, must not be frustrated in his attempt to demonstrate his love for the truth, represented on earth by the person of the guru. My father’s business evidently did not displease P.B.’s more practical side, for it meant that there would always be a steady supply of funds. Once, when my father was visiting P.B. in Mysore, India, he told him that he was inclined to cancel a trip he had scheduled to buy some gems in Sri Lanka in order to be able to spend more time with his guru. P.B. rapidly quashed the idea, saying to my father, “Your business is very important, and should never be neglected.” Whenever my father made a large sum of money, he would send some to P.B. Sometimes P.B. would accept; other times he would not. It did not seem to depend on the amount. On May 28, 1946, for example, my father sent P.B. five thousand dollars, a large amount of money in those days, which P.B. accepted, though a bit later he returned a check for a much larger amount.

  Over the years my father gave P.B. probably a hundred thousand dollars. Nor was it infrequent that a disciple would rent a home for him, in the desert, say, or by the sea. He always got the room he wanted, wherever we were staying, the one with the most spiritual (that is, the best) view. Once when I returned home from summer camp, I found that P.B. had been given my room, and I remember feeling very sorry for myself and not at all blessed or gracious.

  Chapter Six

  A Spiritual Boy in a Swiss Village

  In 1955, when I was fifteen and my sister Linda was twelve, my parents decided we should go to school in French-speaking Switzerland. This was partly so that we could learn French and partly because they felt life in Los Angeles was too provincial. The year before, P.B. had told my father, “You have a rare soul in Jeffrey. He will go far. He is well beloved all around. He can easily become a leader.” My parents were trying to find the right environment that would help me “further my destiny.” They could not believe that anything happened by chance or was done for reasons of less than cosmic significance. They believed P.B. when he told them that I was destined to become a spiritual leader.

  So our whole family left in June for New York; from there we would sail to London, spend the summer touring Europe by car, and in late August my parents would leave my sister and me in Switzerland. As ever, preoccupied with the spiritual life, I was concerned that I found it difficult to meditate in New York, as well as on the ship and in London. I wrote to P.B. to tell him this. He wrote back saying that I should get used to the fact that “the results of meditation are changeable and that often there are no apparent results at all. At an advanced stage these changes disappear and it will be possible to go quickly and directly to the blessed state of beautiful peace within. Wouldn’t you like that?” he asked. Indeed, I longed for these “advanced” stages of meditation. I did not want to be a beginner forever.

  P.B. also told me that he hoped I would be able to become friends with “one or two nice Hindu youngsters of the vegetarian, spiritually minded kind.” I was fortunate in my good karma and ought to make the most and best of it. I was destined to help many other people, P.B explained.

  We enrolled in a school called La Villan in a tiny village near Villars, about a two-hour train ride from Montreux on the eastern tip of Lake Geneva, not that far from the French and Italian borders and across the mountain from Gstaad. I felt as if we were entering a bewildering fairy land as Linda and I rode the little red Swiss mountain train from the plains up to the village. This was really our first time away from home, and a very close and somewhat insular home at that. To be leaving the United States, leaving our parents, climbing these alpine mountains for the first time was a strange and disconcerting experience. I wondered if Linda felt the same.

  The village was very small (so small it did not have a name), quiet, and rural, especially compared with the larger and more cosmopolitan Villars. My parents chose La Villan because it was coeducational and Linda and I could be together. Also, it was a tiny school, with only some fifteen students, in a large Swiss chalet, and the owners had agreed to accommodate our strict vegetarian diet. Surprisingly, Linda and I adjusted rather quickly and well to this very different environment. French was my first spoken foreign language and I took great pleasure in it. Nevertheless, we both thought of ourselves first and foremost as disciples of P.B. and seekers of a higher truth. Rereading my diaries from the time, I am struck by how young and insulated I was, lost in my spiritual preoccupations.

  Special announcement! P.B. was so right when he said my progress would slow up soon. I find it hard to meditate now, and so I’m taking the opportunity to build up my character which is improving considerably. I hate the talks with MacKibbin, the English teacher, as he is always tearing down my beliefs. It is, though, a good test.

  Today we couldn’t go skating or skiing, cause it rained all night. Everyone went to the movies so I got in bed early, read, and had my first good meditation since I’ve been here. Linda came up and we talked. She is very unhappy here, and I had to stop her from writing a letter to Mom and Dad asking to leave school. She misses Mom and Dad terribly. But I’ve explained to her that we don’t want to spoil their trip, and she understands. She is a good girl and very spiritually minded.


  It is hard for me to understand how I could have been such a pedant and prude, combining ignorance with arrogance and not have somebody tell me about it:

  We went skating today at the Palace. At night, Linda called me in on a discussion on religion. They were all yelling and arguing and as soon as I spoke they all shushed each other and listened. It was difficult to explain myself in French, but I found that Tin a Ling who is from Thailand, is on the Path, and Mademoiselle Franco almost. We are going to continue Saturday. It was wonderful to find people so interested in the Path.

  Or:

  When I was young [I was all of fifteen at the time!] I lived in a world of good and right where every man was consciously seeking God and where pleasures were those pure ones that today I can scarcely picture in my imagination.

  Or:

  How happy I will be when I shall be settled down, able to take solitary walks, meditate, study, with no interruptions. Where I will be able to crush worldly thoughts, petty desires, etc., and in their place lead a life of serious, but oh how joyous, contemplation.

  Linda was three years younger than I. Like many sisters growing up with an older brother, she wanted to be included in the more grownup things that I did. So she hung out with me. Generally I was good-natured about this. She and I were close and shared many of our thoughts. Naturally, therefore, she tried to be like me when it came to spirituality and P.B.

  But P.B., while fond of Linda, was not inclined to give much importance to women on “the Path.” He thought that modern man had left religious faith and mystical practice to women, which was a serious mistake, since a woman, in his view, could never rise to the mystic heights that a man could. He considered women’s intelligence negligible. Faith and mysticism had to be reclaimed from women. Perhaps because women were considered too “emotional,” he tried to distance himself from emotions. He was afraid of being thought “effeminate.” So Linda and my mother were both somewhat neglected. Linda twice, once for being a woman and again for being young.