Although P.B. had originally narrowed down the choice to South America, he continually hinted that it might be necessary, for mysterious reasons, to change plans. He wrote my father and Bernard saying that information had come to him, and developments had occurred, that might make it necessary to tell everybody to go someplace else. He was awaiting further developments. There was mystery, always mystery, and secrecy, with implications of direction from the higher powers.
Slowly it began to dawn on the questers that there was something a little bit suspicious about these higher powers. For a guru, P.B. seemed inordinately interested in what he termed “practical affairs” but that appeared to everybody else to be harebrained schemes. In 1957, he wrote to Bernard to investigate, when in Ecuador, “a business in which I am personally interested in starting. This is the drying of bananas for export trade, as well as for storing for home use.” For what possible reason could the higher powers be concerned with dried bananas?
Bernard and Ida finally did move to Brazil, to a small farming community outside Sao Paolo. P.B. thought it would be safest to live on a farm, so that there would always be food in the event of a worst-case scenario. From there, they attempted in vain to interest P.B. in the place. P.B. answered everybody’s letters but remained aloof, seemingly unable to make up his mind where he should go. He responded from New York on December 21,1958, that as usual he was engaged in an activity requiring great secrecy, at the very highest levels, involving the fate of our planet. P.B. was not to be budged.
Bernard wrote him a series of letters with more and more grievances from the past. He complained that P.B. had stayed with him in Cuernavaca to write a book but never wrote a line. The book he finally did write, The Spiritual Crisis of Man, according to Bernard, “was an inducement to sleep, no doubt because you wrote it in Jack and Di’s house, where you were deprived of proper nourishment.” In spite of his complaints, Bernard was still hooked in and could not let go. He told P.B. that he and Ida had left all their property to him in the case of their death. He said he did this on the very day he learned that P.B. had told everybody, except him, where to go to escape the nuclear disaster. The letters sound as though they come from a deeply hurt son.
My parents decided to move to Montevideo. Linda and I were still attending high school at our boarding school, La Villan. I was convinced that my parents were right to leave America. Since we had been taking Spanish in school, we were looking forward to living in Uruguay. The world we had known was going to end, but we would be safe. I don’t think I ever really believed that the world as such would end. I thought of it more as an adventure story, a metaphorical struggle between the forces of evil and the spiritual forces of good. That real people would actually die never occurred to me. The coming war was more of an idea, a test, a theory, a vision, than an actual event. I believe now that all of us—me, Linda, and my parents—were never entirely convinced that P.B. was right.
Still, here we were, moving our lives about to accommodate his vision. We arrived in Montevideo in 1959. I was eighteen, my sister fifteen. My parents were waiting for us in an airy, sunny, apartment they had just bought.
My parents wanted to find a chacra, a farm, about an hour away from Montevideo. Since I spoke Spanish and quickly began making Uruguayan friends, I was asked to find the farm. I must have visited about fifty farms, looking for the perfect refuge. Finally I found one with five thousand mature fruit trees on 150 acres of fertile ground on the banks of a large river. I negotiated the sale, and we had our farm. But my parents could not bring themselves to move. We had a lovely apartment across the street from the golf club in Montevideo, and life there was both cheap and good. We kept the farm as a kind of insurance and continued to live in the city. We also bought a parcel of land in the beach resort of Punta del Este, some one hundred miles west of Montevideo, where we spent the summer and my parents decided to build a resort home.
P.B. meanwhile was seemingly not yet ready to join his disciples. He kept making exploratory trips to other parts of the world. The disciples living in South America were beginning to resent this, since they had only moved there on his recommendation. In all his letters to us he spoke about joining us any day, but in subsequent letters he would postpone the trip by just a few more weeks. It began to seem as if he would never come.
In fact, P.B. never did come to South America even on a visit. Instead, he suddenly and mysteriously moved to Australia, briefly, and then to New Zealand for a longer period. Everybody was puzzled. None of the disciples knew what had happened. Later, in his book about P.B., his son Kenneth explained:
What was my father doing in Australasia? He resided in Perth, Sydney and Auckland for a combined period of three years. I feel it is now permissible to disclose the reason. He explained to me at the time that there were a handful of spiritually advanced people around the world whose mission it was to concentrate mentally during meditation upon the leaders of the chief nations. Their mission was to “pray for peace,” to concentrate on raising the consciousness of the world’s leaders to a level where their own higher selves could work on them for peace and restrain them from any rash warlike actions. He explained that this work was most effective if carried out in reasonable proximity to the geographical location of those leaders. I gathered that he had been allocated the task of mentally working upon Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader.
Did P.B. really believe that somebody had “allocated” such work to him? Was this a “message” he received in meditation? Did he simply take it upon himself? Is this a retrospective rationale for moving to New Zealand? One would think these “higher powers” would have had more direct and effective methods of communicating with the Chinese leader.
P.B.’s disciples felt abandoned, some even tricked. Especially my uncle and the family in Ecuador. They had not only turned their lives upside-down for him, they had destroyed themselves financially to follow his instructions and move to South America. And now the guru was not coming. Their disappointment and, in the case of Bernard, anger were palpable. It seemed like a cruel joke. What if P.B. had new and more vital information that he had decided not to share with anybody, even his oldest disciples? To the disciples, it had the feel of a gang leader who tells the rest of his gang where to meet in order to split up the gold, then runs off in a different direction with the gold, never to be seen again. In this case, the gold was the information on the war. Everybody was convinced the war was imminent and that P.B. had privileged access to vital information. He would know before anybody else when D-day was. But now suddenly he was not sharing this crucial information. For the disciples, it was a deep abandonment, a permanent and transformative disappointment. Nothing would ever be quite the same again It never seemed to occur to them that the real disappointment was that there was no “information” to share. Maybe P.B. felt he had gotten in over his head, with all these people changing their lives to follow his words.
P.B.’s disappearance was much less of a blow to my parents than it was to the other disciples. For one thing, they were wealthier, and although my father had liquidated his business in America, he had enough cash to make new investments. My family was not immensely rich, but we were certainly not poor. Life in Montevideo was fairly sophisticated. My parents made friends rather easily, especially my mother, and Linda and I were happy in a new and Spanish-speaking country. My parents took up golf, I started attending the Universidad de Montevideo, and Linda finished high school. We all seemed less and less worried about the world ending. I think each of us was beginning to believe in P.B.’s vision less and less.
*
Before Linda and I had left Switzerland, my parents decided to make a tour of the major South American countries that were considered suitable for migration: Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Argentina. They had been considering settling in Chile because the climate and food most resembled California’s. The ship my parents took from Italy to South America stopped first in Uruguay; my parents took a tour of the capital city of Mont
evideo and found a suburb, Carrasco, that reminded them of Southern California. Uruguay was known as the Switzerland of South America. They were favorably impressed. The next day the ship docked in Buenos Aires, a few hours away from Montevideo.
In Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, walking along the fashionable main shopping street, Calle Florida, my parents saw an interesting and elegant-looking store, Joyeria Guthman. They walked in and were wandering about, when a very tall man with an extraordinarily large nose approached and asked in heavily accented Spanish if he could help. It was clear he was French, and so my father answered him in French. Within minutes he asked them to come into the back room. He was Freddi Guthman; this was his jewelry shop. “I hate it,” he told them “But what can I do; it is my Jewish heritage.”
“I know what you mean,” said my father. “I am Jewish, and I too am in jewelry. The thing I like about it, though, is that I get to go to India often. Have you ever been?”
“India?” said Freddi. “You go to India?”
“Oh yes. In fact, my son Jeffrey and I were in India last year.”
“Where were you?” he asked, slowly.
“Oh, lots of places—Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, Trivandrum.”
There was a stunned silence. Freddi called in a French-Russian Jewish woman whom he introduced as his wife Natascha. “Natascha, listen. I think something important is about to happen. Tell Natascha where you were again in India.”
We repeated the list. They looked at each other. “Trivandrum?” said Natascha. “What were you doing there?”
“We went to visit an Indian sage by the name of Krishnamenon or Gurunathan.”
Freddi jumped up, came over to my parents, stooped from his almost seven-foot height, put his arms around my small father, and wept. “Come,” he said, “I am closing the store. We have to go to our house. There is much we must talk about.”
It turned out that Freddi and Natascha were the leading figures in a group of about twenty Argentine disciples of Krishnamenon, all of whom had spent considerable time in India in Trivandrum. This day began a long and intense friendship between my parents and many of these disciples, especially with Freddi and Natascha, who to this day remain my parents’ closest friends.
Freddi had also been on a quest in India. He had read P.B.’s books and visited the Maharshi. Then he had gone to Almora, in the Himalayas, meditating and talking with the Ramakrishna monks there. When he met Krishnamenon, he knew he had found his guru. Freddi was a talented writer, a poet, and an extraordinary conversationalist. He and Natascha were to become like a second family to us.
Montevideo is just across the river from Buenos Aires, where Krishnamenon’s disciples lived. My parents spent one week with “the disciples,” as we came to call them, staying up all night and talking about matters spiritual. When Linda and I arrived in Montevideo in March 1959, one of the first things we did was take a trip to Buenos Aires to meet my parents’ friends. We loved one another on sight and began to visit frequently. The discussion was always about India, spirituality, mysticism, P.B., and Gurunathan. The disciples ridiculed the idea of a world war. They also began to ask us probing questions about P.B. My parents recognized that much of what they had been taught sounded absurd when repeated to a group of skeptical but sympathetic intellectuals who were nonetheless committed to spiritual values.
*
A close disciple of Krishnamenon, John Levy, came to Buenos Aires in 1959, and everybody was much taken with him, especially me and my mother. (She was eventually to become his “disciple,” but My Mother’s Guru is another book.) He was an enormously wealthy, irascible, upper-class Englishman who was sometimes unbearably rude and sometimes extraordinarily sweet. I was fascinated with him and wrote P.B. in Australia an obnoxious letter on December 14, 1959:
Dear P.B.:
This letter shall affect to a very large extent my destiny and therefore I consider it of the utmost importance.
We have just returned from Buenos Aires where we went in order to attend the talks on Vedanta given by John Levy. I had several very long private conversations with him through which I have come to the opinion that he is a realized being.
The results of these talks are that I am to go to England, probably in early March of 1960 for a 2 fold reason. One is that John Levy claims to be able to give me the Truth, and of course this comes before all, and is always the first consideration in my life. The second reason is to enter a Tutorial college in or around London in order to prepare myself for the entrance examination to either London University or Oxford and for the General Certification of Education Examination. John Levy feels that in my case a first-class education is as necessary as my spiritual development. Mom and Dad are at a loss as to what they should do. They also feel that a good worldly education is absolutely necessary, which I cannot get here, and yet they fear the coming war and don’t want us to be separated. I feel that in case of war I would manage to get back in time. Besides I cannot go on neglecting both my spiritual and normal education for the fear of a possible war.
This is an urgent and very important matter, and it is to you, P.B., that we turn for advice. Your answer shall have much to do with our decision.
Please, please, write us with the least possible delay, for my future may depend on your letter.
With faith and devotion,
Jeff
I don’t know what P.B. responded. Clearly I was almost ready to abandon his idea that a Third World War was imminent. But I wasn’t quite brave enough to do so just yet.
The Buenos Aires disciples considered that P.B. was on a rather low level, philosophically speaking, and tried to convince my father that he should return to India to see Krishnamenon. My father agreed, and poor P.B. received yet another letter from the apostasy-prone Masson family, this one from my father on January 15, 1959:
Dear P.B.
I have a very important question to ask you and would very much appreciate an answer so my mind can be at peace. Would you consider it disloyal if I went to Trivandrum to hear Krishnamenon’s talks? As you must know I have always been very devoted and loyal to you and shall always continue to be so. Still this will probably be my last chance to hear him as first he is getting old, and second because of travel restrictions for the very near future I am hungry for Truth and will be dissatisfied until I become Aware. What is the stumbling block? I would have to take Diana and Jeff with me, as Di insists on going and Jeff told me if I went to India without him, he would resort to any measures and meet me there, so he’s really serious. Poor little Linda, though she would like a trip to India, this one would be no fun—to sit in Trivandrum and listen to lectures on Advaita—so this is a big problem.
Contrary to everybody’s expectations, P.B. was not crushed and seemingly had little problem with my father’s defection. He responded with a reasonable and friendly telegram saying that my father was completely free to attend the lectures and even to become a disciple of Krishnamenon. P.B. did not mention that the question of World War III was beginning to be quietly dropped. Nobody appeared to believe in it very strongly any longer—including, it would seem, P.B. himself.
My father was also, like Bernard, building up a certain resentment against P.B., as is clear from a letter he wrote to him while visiting Lima, Peru, on February 22, 1959:
Dear P.B.
Your letter of January 30th, 1959 sent to Peru was forwarded to me in Chile and waiting there upon our arrival. I will now try to answer your letter of January 30th.
1. Although it is true that a number of years ago you wrote and told everyone to feel free of any obligation towards you, you never told me that personally, and I always took it for granted that you were my guru, as you had officially accepted me as such in December of 1945 in Mysore. Although I visited India a number of times I don’t think I was consciously seeking for another teacher.
2. I am very glad to see that you endorse Krishna Menon’s teaching. I am writing him for permission to attend his lectures. The
four of us intend to go there. Since it’s impossible to make the March 15th sessions, I was told by the disciples that the next session will be sometime either in July or September. I know it is a bad month to visit India, but we can’t help it. Shall let you know further when I hear from him.
3 The question of disloyalty came up because I did think you were my guru and this has been clarified by your letter and telegram about which I will talk later.
4. I will keep in mind the limitations of Krishna Menon’s teaching and try to balance it with the philosophical path that I have learned from you.
5. I was quite surprised to read in your letter “I’m not even making plans about South America. If however I do so, it will be on the new basis mentioned in earlier letters.” Do you mean to say that it is possible you may not come here at all? In which case, does this mean you may choose another country or remain in the U.S.A., or do you mean that you have great hopes for the “Peace Work” and that it will be safe to stay in America?
I think this is as far as my father could go toward criticizing P.B., who clearly still functioned, at least in his mind and heart, as his guru. My father was clearly aghast at what he regarded as P.B.’s abandonment of all his devoted pupils. He had for years now encouraged all of them to move to South America. It was implicit that he would join them in one or another of the countries, perhaps even float among all of them, visiting. In the event, he let everybody depart, and then he went his own way, disregarding his earlier advice and more or less refusing to explain his choice to anyone. Nobody entirely understood it, but everybody felt let down. Maybe P.B. had had enough of being a guru.
My Father's Guru Page 17