My Father's Guru

by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

  P.B. told me he was definitely going to South America. I even gave him a small amount of Peruvian money to facilitate his immediate needs upon arrival there, only to learn that he went in the exact opposite direction when he did leave the United States.

  Now let’s analyze some of his disciples. K. didn’t even confide in him when he got married. W is a superstitious and pitiful fool. D is a complete failure considering the brilliant future he had as an up and coming lawyer in Chicago. E left P.B. at an early stage. G is weak and vacillating. R has shut herself up in an ashram. H, the bearded poet, is a real nut.

  When I was in India to see P.B. I wanted to go and see the Maharishi. P.B. discouraged me and I missed a great experience.

  When I went to Fallbrook I became a servant to P.B., paid for the rent and running the house, cooked his meals and even waited on him and his guest Miss Kirkpatric. I was delegated the smallest room in the house for which I was paying the rent. I remember I had to go sideways in order to get into my bed, the room was so small. The strain of all that caused me the worst attack of ulcers I ever had in my life. Years before you instilled in me a reverence and awe for him as a Demi-God. Nobody could have been more loyal and sincere than I was. I even gave up sex after he told me that by doing so I could awaken the Kundalini.

  I had a very valuable piece of land in the heart of Los Angeles, my tenant being Standard Oil of California. I sacrificed it in blind faith and also sold my other real estate holdings in Los Angeles which would be worth ten times more today, to follow him to South America. I blame myself for being a fool. Luckily with the proceeds of the sale I bought some Tel and Tel which saved me from utter ruin. (I was going to sell my Tel & Tel when I reached South America, but fortunately I waited.)

  All these things I do not remember in bitterness. I believe that P.B. himself is a sincere seeker and an exceptionally fine human being. I believe rather that all his followers, myself included, read into him the role of a genuine Guru which he is not. I am still very fond of him and know my misfortunes are due to my own gullibility and indiscrimination. For a real genuine Guru, one who really can take you and place you into the center of your Being, there is no sacrifice too great. But P.B. himself was never that Guru. Although it is naturally a disillusion to me it was a sharp awakening so that I no longer follow blindly. P.B. himself later repeated again and again that he was a seeker, but we all made him into a Mahatma. He made me expect to get an illumination any minute. He told me about a woman shaking his hand and going into sublime peace. He told me that 90% of his students had mystical experiences (for whatever that is worth). I became a piece of putty. He told me that one meditation with him is enough, yet I meditated with him many many times. Nothing.

  Bernard, you must face life. Bernard, stop and think what you are doing in a small village in Brazil. You followed P.B.’s advice now for over 20 years. You must see things in their proper perspective. You are wasting yourself and your life. You know P.B. always makes contradictory statements and when he makes a big mistake he says “I’m sorry.” Sometimes he even denied the facts.

  You are in a rut escaping life. Get out before it is too late. Father degenerated completely when he retired. He had nothing to absorb his interests or keep him active and slowly life ebbed out of him. You are much too young and intelligent to withdraw completely from the world.

  I am writing you this letter because my heart hurts me when I think of you.

  As you see, we are still in Hong Kong. We are leaving next week for Japan and Los Angeles. If you wish to answer me, you can write to me in Los Angeles and mark it personal. I will be there the whole month of April. Otherwise you can write to the Paris address and Jeff will forward it to me.

  Give my love to Ida. There is a possibility that we might visit you, with Vicki and Avram, toward the end of this year.

  Jack.

  Bernard wrote back a spirited defense of P.B. and sent copies of both letters to P.B. On May 31, 1966, P.B. responded to Bernard by saying that he thought my father had some justification for resentment over the unfulfilled predictions and the unsound financial advice. He hoped Jacques had received something spiritual to compensate, but evidently he had not. He acknowledged that he had made mistakes and would try to compensate Jacques in the only way he knew, and that was to remember him prayerfully during the daily period of coming out from meditation, when the divine presence is very strongly felt. There may be little or no result from it in this incarnation, but in the long term P.B. thought it would not be wasted effort. This was a remarkably mild response to having his entire life called into question. My father was criticizing P.B. not for being a guru, but for not being the right guru. He was still searching. This May 1992 is his eightieth birthday. He is still searching.

  Epilogue

  What about my father, that other subject in the title of this book? After all, it was my father who exposed me to P.B., who encouraged me to see him the way he saw him, as the guru, the master, the sage. Although I have had many talks with him over the last year about P.B., I am still not certain who he thinks P.B. was. Unlike me, my father does not now feel betrayed, he has no sense of having wasted years of his life, no indignation. There is no disillusion for my father. When I gave him the sixteen volumes of P.B.’s posthumously published Notebooks to read, I thought that some of the obvious nonsense P.B. writes there would jolt him awake, would shake some of his reverence for P.B. I was wrong. “I described P.B. to you as a mystic,” he told me when he finished, “but I made a mistake. In fact, he was truly a sage.”

  I don’t think my father ever gave much thought to the risks he was taking in handing me over, spiritually speaking, to P.B. when I was still a small child. Since initially he believed everything P.B. told him, he of course saw me as privileged, not deprived or disadvantaged. It was my good karma that put me in touch with this luminary, this rishi, this mahatma, not bad fortune. In order to have been skeptical about my spending years in the company of P.B., he would have had to have been skeptical about P.B. himself. That was beyond my father’s intellectual means. I cannot really blame him (or my mother, who was following my father, as she had been taught to do). They did the best they knew.

  Bernard, my father, me—all of us—considered ourselves blessed to be involved, even on the periphery, of such extraordinary events as those we thought revolved around P.B. To be at the center of such cataclysmic changes was to be exalted. The world was changing, P.B. was about to take charge, and we were there, as his first lieutenants. To be part of this was a temptation that could not be resisted. To reject this opportunity, we would have had to have been mad, or to have thought that P.B. was mad. For a long time, such thoughts could not even be countenanced.

  I cannot be as benignly resigned as my father (“it was fate”). But now, at fifty-one, I can look back upon the years spent with P.B. with some degree of nostalgia, even melancholy. The world was never again to seem so charged, so filled with mystery. P.B. dominated my childhood imagination with a seemingly never-ending supply of magic fantasies, higher powers, adverse forces, other planets, adepts in remote caves high in the Tibetan mountains, occult abilities, Egyptian magicians, Indian sages, astral travel, memories of ancient incarnations. I wish it were all true. I wish P.B. had been the person we all thought he was. How enchanting it would be to live with such a man, to be part of some master plan for the universe, the author of which shared one’s bathroom. What a marvelous world to inhabit. Everything thereafter seemed drab by comparison. How could Harvard compete with Astral University? How could a train ride through France compete with heavenly journeys to distant galaxies? How could a struggling assistant professor compare with the ancient masters who taught at hidden universities fast in the Himalayas?

  P.B.’s love of animals, his hatred of vivisection, his delight in the physical world around him struck a responsive chord in me as a child and still reverberate now. His love of nature affected me deeply. He had certain sensitivities that were highly developed, even if he
thought they were highly evolved. Ever since I was a small child, he loved to take long walks with me, and I learned the pleasure to be found in an evening stroll. His favorite time of the day was sunset because, he often told us, it gives a hint of life’s tragically passing character He said that it touched his mind with melancholy to think that all of this beauty, which was so intense at that moment, was doomed to vanish very soon. Once when the sun was just about to set, he told me to see how the birds were all heading for their nests, and then he looked at me very intensely and said, “Jeff, this is your chance.” I was not sure I understood, but I felt moved because I sensed that he wanted to provide me with what he had always called “the glimpse of the infinite.” It was not enough for him simply to enjoy the beauty of it. Nevertheless, he did enjoy it, and so did I, and I enjoyed it often in his company. At those moments P.B. felt like a close friend, something I always wanted.

  To some extent, what P.B. offered is offered by every guru. The implicit promises he made are made by all gurus, spiritual, psychoanalytic, or otherwise. P.B. offered wisdom, not knowledge; divine love, not human regard; visions, not insight; access to secret forces, not mediation; magic powers, not persuasion; mystery, secrecy, obfuscation, and paranoia. Every guru claims to know something you cannot know by yourself or through ordinary channels. All gurus promise access to a hidden reality if only you will follow their teaching, accept their authority, hand your life over to them. Every guru offers to read your past, or your future, or a past birth, or your hidden thoughts—and promises that you will develop the same ability. But you must always subordinate yourself to the guru. Certain questions are off limits. There are things you cannot know about the guru and the guru’s personal life. To ask is at best impolite, at worst apostasy. Every doubt about the guru is a reflection of your own unworthiness, or the influence of an external evil force. You are not just expected to accept irrationality, you are to revel in it. The more obscure the action of the guru, the more likely it is to be right, to be cherished. Ultimately, you cannot admire the guru, you must worship him. You must obey him, you must humble yourself, for the greater he is, the less you are—until you too reach the inner circle and can start abusing other people the way your guru abused you. All of this is in the very nature of being a guru.

  Every guru inflicts tyranny upon his disciples, every guru exploits his chelas, every guru dominates the student. Abuse is part of the definition, whether it is financial, emotional, sexual, physical, or intellectual. Once in, there is no escape. The best way out is never to go in.

  To see deep into the structure of one tyranny is to understand something basic about all forms of oppression. It is totalitarian. Like other authoritarian systems, it requires a suspension and suppression of critical questioning; it demands unquestioning submission to a rigid hierarchical structure; it centers on a cult of personality, and it engenders personal intrusion and abuse.

  As for P.B., I can’t find it in my heart to hate him, or even to despise him. I am still left with the mystery of a human being who is more than the sum of his ignorance and his pretense. P.B. was less then he thought, but also more. He knew little, but he had a zest for life that was contagious and worth emulating. It was exciting to be in his presence, and it would have been just as exciting without all the hocus pocus and mumbo-jumbo, though he probably felt he could make no mark in the world without it. He brought solace and joy to many by making claims that were not true. I can fault him. I cannot forget him.

  Afterword

  I can see no evidence, in the evolutionary past of the human species, that gurus are needed. They serve, in my estimation, no useful purpose. But gurus have flourished—in the past, now, and they most likely will in the future as well. In fact, P.B. is thriving in death more successfully than he did in life; this book does not seem to have affected his reputation in any negative way. His books are read, his disciples abound, and a “philosophical foundation” bearing his name has been established.

  My father died in his sleep just short of his eighty-fifth birthday in 1996. He remained fascinated by P.B. to the end. My mother, ninety-four, is now living near me in Auckland, New Zealand, taking enormous delight in Ilan and Manu, her seven-year-old and twenty-month-old grandsons. She is slowly but cheerfully losing her memory (“Think of me as a cat or a dog, absorbed in living in the moment,” she told me a few days ago), but she remembers P.B. well, and often looks through photographs of the three of them, or the five of us. She will sigh wistfully, either indicating “those were the days,” or “were we ever taken in,” or maybe even a combination of both. She bears no ill will toward P.B. for exposing them to the world of Indian spirituality or toward me for having attempted a rather different expose of the same world.

  As for me, I have gone on to write about animals and their emotional world, inspired, perhaps, by the very man I exposed. Moreover—I now live just minutes away from Mission Bay, a beachside resort near downtown Auckland where P.B. lived after we moved to Uruguay. When I mentioned this in a lecture on psychology here in Auckland, some members of the audience began to laugh—not with me, I am afraid. “It was a coincidence,” I insisted, perhaps a bit too forcefully. “In our world, there are no coincidences,” one of them shot back, and I heard P.B.’s voice again, after all these years.

  As for the spiritual world that P.B. tried so unsuccessfully to introduce to me, I remain as skeptical as ever. Of course the word spiritual is used so loosely today that when I talk about the inner lives of cats or other animals, there will always be members of my audience who insist that in honoring the emotional lives of these animals, I am, whether I admit it or even know it or not, taking a spiritual point of view.

  I can accept that. What I cannot accept is that anyone—whether it be P.B. or Aldous Huxley or Rajneesh or Sai Baba, or any other gurulike figure—speaks for anyone but his or her own self. No doubt there are truths out there, but they are not revealed in Tibetan monasteries, marathon therapy sessions, or private audiences with popes or gurus; they are only to be had the old-fashioned way, completely lacking in mystery and glamour—through historical research, critical reflection, and in the raucous give-and-take of ordinary human conversation and storytelling. I always intended the personal experiences in this book as a modest contribution to the eternal human debate of how we should live our lives. My answer remains: Not in subjugation to the will of any other human being, whether that person be wise, ignorant, fraudulent, or completely benign.