My Father's Guru

by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

  It is hard to separate this from the fact that Linda was not as absorbed and obsessed with mysticism as I was as a child. She was altogether more skeptical, more practical, and less easily taken in. She never developed the “transference” I had to P.B. or the intensity of my connection with him. She did not, however, wish to be excluded entirely, and so she went through bouts of trying to become more of a part of P.B.’s circle of disciples.

  Before coming to Switzerland she had asked P.B. to suggest some reading for her. P.B. told her to read Brother of the Third Degree, a trashy romantic mystical novel of which P.B. was particularly fond. I remember walking along the little alpine path behind our school one day when I saw Linda walking toward me, looking rather peculiar She was gazing down at the ground and was taking very deliberate steps, as if she were lost in deep thought. I was intrigued and asked her what was going on. She continued to walk on in silence and did not answer me.

  I was puzzled. “Linda, Linda, it’s me, Jeff,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Linda, what’s going on?”

  “Don’t talk to me. I have just read the first chapter of Brother of the Third Degree.”

  I went into a rage of indignation and would gladly have burned the disgusting tome that could produce such a pompous reply from my good-natured sister, who had never before been pompous. Moreover, she was attempting to usurp my role of spiritual prodigy. I realize now she was just trying to join the group. It is easy enough to say as an adult that that particular group was not worth joining. For most children, there is no such thing as a group from which you are excluded that is not worth joining.

  *

  We were there for one year when the school moved into a larger and less personal building in the village of Chesieres-sur-Ollon. In the fall of 1956 our parents decided to move to Europe. They arrived in Paris in November, and after a month decided to rent a place in Geneva, where my father would be able to pursue his gem business, and where they would be able to visit us in school. My sister and I took the train together and met them there. That day I wrote in my diary:

  Today was one of my happiest days I’ve ever had. We found an apartment today, what luck, or rather, what destiny! We had a marvelous dinner. It is wonderful to be together again and now that we are together again I realize how lucky we are and I thank God for everything. I never before realized how good Mom and Dad have been to us, how mean I’ve been to them by being cranky, etc. It shall never happen again.

  I had my first real girlfriend in school. She was not the least bit interested in spiritual matters. One evening a hypnotist came to our school for a performance. He spoke melodramatically of unleashing dark forces into the room, and she became frightened. I told her she shouldn’t worry, because I could unleash white forces of my own that would counter his forces. She was much impressed, but I felt I had taken a first step on the path to charlatanism. I was so scared at my own lying that I wondered at the time what I could have meant that was true behind the obvious lie. I decided I had meant that I would call upon P.B. and he would unleash the white force. P.B. liked to talk of white magic as opposed to black magic, and to hint that he could call upon it, if forced. On the one hand, he and my parents mocked and ridiculed the belief in what the Indians call siddhis, magic powers. It was considered a lower stage of development to want these powers. On the other hand, it was always assumed that P.B. had them but simply chose not to use them. To demonstrate them would have been a case of lese majeste, and to ask him to do so would have been an unpardonable breach of manners. I was eventually to be guilty of this under momentous circumstances.

  *

  For a Christmas present that year, my father asked me how I would like to go with him for some months to India on a spiritual quest. I was delighted. While we were away, my mother would rent a chalet next door to the school. Now I wonder if they weren’t having problems in their marriage. P.B. had told my father that a two-year period of sexual abstinence would be good for his spiritual progress. So there had been no sex between my parents for a long time, or so they told me. I think one of their reasons for telling me about this was their hope of retarding my own sexual initiation. My father was convinced that his side of the family, at least, was “oversexed,” as he put it, and this had disturbed his spiritual advancement. He did not wish me to fall prey to the same difficulty.

  My mother took a house with a young German woman named Doris, whom everybody despised because of her blatant anti-Semitism. I don’t think she knew my mother was Jewish. The two beautiful women visibly flirted with the ski instructors in town. Linda tells me that she was horribly embarrassed and refused to visit our mother, even though she lived right across the street from the school. She remembers seeing her and Doris walking down the street arm in arm with two young Swiss ski instructors. She felt my mother was immoral.

  I knew nothing of this. For me, the trip to India had nothing to do with my parents’ marriage; it had only to do with my father’s urgent desire to meet sages. Years before, he had dreamed of meeting the Maharshi, the Indian guru P.B. had made famous in the West. But his dream had been shattered in April 1950, when P.B. wrote to tell him the Maharshi had died that weekend. My father had often told P.B. how much he had wanted to meet the Maharshi. P.B. had always suggested waiting. Now it was too late, and I think the trip to India with me may have been suggested by P.B. as a compensation. To this day neither my uncle Bernard nor my father can find it in themselves to forgive P.B. for preventing them from meeting the Maharshi.

  P.B. was not uncomfortable with my father’s desire to meet the very sages that P.B. himself had met while in India. Spiritual pilgrimages had a long and venerable history and were not regarded as a sign of disloyalty. For my father, however, I think there was still some vague hope that he would meet a guru who would instantly give him the mystic experience for which he had been hoping in vain from P.B. My father read about the spiritual experiences of others the way a bedridden invalid reads about travel adventures. Why could he not experience such wonders?

  He was especially intrigued by the Indian notion of the kundalini, which he had already encountered with P.B. on his first trip to India in 1945. The kundalini is a so-called serpent-power, a reserve of energy, coiled at the bottom of the spine. Certain exercises “awaken,” or arouse, the kundalini, which travels up the spinal canal through various centers of consciousness, called chakras, (circles), until it reaches the “highest” or seventh chakra, imagined to be somewhere in the brain, at which point a massive illumination is supposed to take place. Along the way, especially in the three lowest chakras, the trip produces certain extrasensory abilities. P.B. chided my father for searching for these “magic powers” so assiduously. But my father countered that they would serve merely to persuade him that the kundalini had in fact been awakened. Meditation was the primary means of arousing this beast, and my father had practiced it faithfully every day for more than ten years, with no result.

  I was always a bit struck by how honestly my father reported to P.B. his lack of progress, without ever seeming to feel defeat or losing any faith in P.B. My father always told me that he did not believe these things were unreal, only that he was not worthy of them. He always blamed himself. Still, he had the not-so-secret hope that the right guru would remove the obstacles that had been preventing him from discovering the truth and thus gain for him access to all of these wonders, especially magic powers. He would, of course, put these powers to purely spiritual use, for the benefit of mankind. But he was eager to experience them directly, and soon. Time was marching on. For all the years he had been meditating, he had, as he put it, “nothing to show for it.” A miracle, or at least a sign of some kind, was due.

  My father also felt that it was time for me to visit India. I had been a faithful son, having ingested all the spiritual ideas I was fed by my parents and P.B. In truth, I was both emotionally and intellectually immature, suffering from a kind of spiritually created retardation. I had almost no sense of a
real world: My knowledge of politics was zero; my awareness of the situation in Europe where I was living was nonexistent; my knowledge that other people did not live the privileged life that my family and I lived was nil. It was not that I was without empathy; I simply knew nothing of a real world of suffering, unhappiness, and especially social injustice (even the concept was unknown to me) to which empathy could attach. If ignorance is a sin, I was a terrible sinner. I was kept from the real world as effectively as the Buddha had been before his enlightenment. But I cannot merely blame other people. The world was there for me to look at, but instead I focused on an inward vision of a spiritual Shangri-La and buried my nose in my mystic books—a 1956 list I made of the five books I would have taken with me to a desert island included the Bbagavadgita, the Bible, the Upanishads, the Buddhist Bible, and the Encyclopedia Brill, whatever that is.

  I think my parents saw me as a kind of Jiddu Krishnamurti, “destined” to play a leading role in the spiritual life of mankind. I knew the stories of the young Krishnamurti, how he had been groomed for years by Annie Besant and the leaders of the Theosophical movement to become the World Leader they were waiting for. The material and emotional perks that came with this, including being the object of adoration of thousands of people, were considerable. It had taken courage for Krishnamurti to renounce it all, as he eventually did, proclaiming, “Truth is a pathless land.” He was no teacher. He accepted no disciples. Or so he said.

  Before the visit to India, we had visited Krishnamurti in Gstaad for a few hours. P.B. was, again, the facilitator. Krishnamurti was living in a luxurious Villa lent to him by—a friend? Not really, she was a follower, a disciple actually, though she would not have called herself that. If the land of Truth was pathless, some apparently knew their way around better than others. Krishnamurti allowed himself to be seen by others as a guide—which in the end was just a variation on the guru theme.

  Krishnamurti was a wonderful man to spend an hour with, however. Handsome, charming, humorous, witty, he had “charisma,” a quality P.B. lacked. P.B. had turned this lack into a virtue—it somehow gave authenticity to his teaching. But they shared some of their pretensions. Both pretended to know about matters in which everybody is equally and profoundly ignorant—death, for example. And while Krishnamurti rejected the teachings of his Indian background, he subtly and lucratively made himself an international superguru largely by denying the validity of being a guru.

  Around this time, I was slowly beginning to develop an interest in girls. It felt like an outside influence, an external force imposing itself on me. I was frightened that this interest would spoil my spiritual progress—not an idea I developed entirely on my own. All my spiritual reading reinforced it. An irresistible force, my growing sexuality, was hitting up against an unmovable object, the years I had spent as an aspirant to holiness.

  My mother wrote to P.B. from Switzerland:

  The children are quite content and well installed up in the mountains. Jeff has a girl friend there, quite nice, but he says he may not get married, though he’d love to have children. He says he’s afraid of being diverted and have to re-incarnate once again. He’s quite a fellow and growing up fast. Linda’s a real beauty, and sometimes feels inadequate in a house full of yogis, she says. But she’s doing quite well for her 14 years I assured her.

  My mother’s mention of my reluctance to reincarnate once again refers to the goal of all Indian philosophy; jivanmukta, or living liberation. This is the state of being freed from the cycle of births and rebirths, to have no further need of reincarnation because the goal of existence, self-realization (as P.B. called it), has been achieved. That is what I was seeking, and I was afraid that love for a person of the opposite sex would hinder my progress. This fear had been instilled in me by reading about abstinence, by P.B.’s many comments, and by my parent’s many reiterations of the same admonitions.

  I seem to have tortured my girlfriend Sara, and my sister as well, with my spirituality. I found a pathetic letter from my sister, whom I was desperately attempting to turn into my disciple:

  Baby Brother:

  “If you can’t be a well, be a bucket. If you can’t be a bucket, be a rope. If you can’t be a rope, be a pully. But never be a stone that the idling passer-by casts into the well to hear its waters splash.”

  After reading your letter I opened the Book of Mirdad by Michael Naimy. That was on the first page. How true it is Jeff and how sad it makes me. Perhaps this school year has shown us something we needed to learn. I’ve been swept up in a stream of superficial actions and will soon forget that which I am searching for. I need to be awakened—I need help. I love you, almost more than Mom and Dad because we have always been so close. Here we seem to lose that closeness. I fill my time with idleness—how well I know it. But I am so fixed in my ways I no longer have the will to struggle upward. Jeff, you know what it’s like and only you can help me. “The soul has its own currency.” It seems that mine is gossip, friends, parties, imitation happiness. These are only passing and I need to have that real happiness not just illusions. Jeff you are a seeker on the Path as well as my brother. You can help me. Why do you think I am depressed? Why do you think I want to get away? Jeff, I’m glad you’re awake, but wake me too.

  I love you more than anything in this world, Linda

  It is a touching and sad letter for a young teenage girl to have written her self-obsessed brother. She may have been three years younger, but she was emotionally much more mature than I was. She had been made to feel inferior to me when she ought to have felt infinitely superior.

  Sara seemed equally devastated by my constant judgments. “Women, you are both caught up in maya; meditate,” I would tell them both. A few days after Linda’s letter, Sara wrote me telling me how my spirituality (“you are a giant of character”) shamed her. I was “pure”; she had to be cleansed. She was not worthy of my love. What had I done to turn such lively girls into self-loathing disciples? Was I practicing to become a guru?

  *

  Growing up, I knew that P.B. considered sexuality to be the foil to spirituality. For my father, it was his demon, the recognition that he somehow could never be part of the world that P.B. represented. Sexual abstinence seemed to come easy to P.B. but was impossible for my father. He told me so often and talked to me about it even before I knew exactly what he was talking about. But as I entered my adolescence, I began to know from direct experience what he meant.

  In the summer of 1956 our family rented a house in Cannes, on the French Riviera, Villa Santa Roseline, from June through September. I was fifteen, and P.B. was spending the summer with our family. We lived in the hills, just a few houses away from Picasso. It was a significant time for me: I learned to drive, I took long walks in the beautiful wooded hills, I swam and attempted (unsuccessfully) to sail, something my father loved to do. But it was most significant as the summer in which I first became aware of strong sexual feelings. I had had fleeting moments before this, but now I was in a constant state of sexual arousal. I never told P.B. this, but I assumed he knew. I assumed he knew everything, and I knew that he did not approve of sexual desire.

  I spent most afternoons at the beach on the Croisette playing volleyball and soon became friendly with a group of slightly older French adolescents. One girl in particular struck my fancy. She was seventeen, the daughter of the sailing instructor. She had long blond hair and a beautiful, voluptuous body. I stared at her freckles for hours, filled with an infinite number of fantasies. One day she asked me to go out with her alone on a sailboat. She could sail; I could not. I was to go the next day. I was in an agony of indecision. What should I do? I wanted to kiss her, but I had not yet really kissed, and I knew, only vaguely, that I would never stop with a kiss. What would P.B think if he knew, and of course, he must know. Would he despise me if I kissed her? Would he be proud of me if I resisted?

  The next day we went on the boat, and sailed out about a quarter of a mile. Suddenly Daniella took off the top
of her bathing suit and invited me to admire and kiss her nipples. I began to tremble with fear as much as with desire. Here had come my moment of truth. My test. I told her I could not.

  “Why not?” she said reasonably. “You seem to like looking at me.” She pointed to my erection.

  I decided to tell her the truth. I began a long, more or less incomprehensible speech about P.B., not knowing the French for many a spiritual term, and obviously and painfully boring her thoroughly in the process. She put her top back on, turned the boat back toward shore, and deposited me on the beach with a less-than-friendly “adieu.” I did not feel triumphant.

  I was glad to be able to turn my attention to nonworldly matters, to Indian sages who never felt sexual desire, and to my trip to India, which was looming larger and larger in my mind.

  Chapter Seven

  In India in Search of Masters

  I liked to think of advanced mystics holding special councils (as a result of reading Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, which in turn was influenced by Buddhism and Indian philosophy), at which my “spiritual education” was discussed in great detail by elder statesmen of the spiritual world. But, of course, nobody other than my parents and P.B. (and even he only to a minor extent) was the least bit interested in what I did in India. This was probably fortunate for me. Still, if the trip to India was not carefully planned by a plenary session of adepts, my father certainly intended it to be a spiritual quest. We were not ordinary tourists; we were spiritual tourists, we were going to meet sages. The list of those to see—the few people P.B. considered “realized” beings, Ramdas, Atmananda, and Aurobindo—was provided by P.B., and so had his stamp of approval. The trip was not, therefore, an act of disloyalty. P.B. had met all the same people years before. We were simply following in his footsteps. My father sailed on the SA Asia for Bombay, where, since I did not want to miss more school than necessary, I met him by plane, in December 1956.