My Father's Guru Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  More praise for Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and My Father’s Guru

  My Father’s Guru

  Dedication

  Introduction: On Venus There Are No Cars

  Chapter One: My Father and His Guru

  Chapter Two: Fasting Along the Path

  Chapter Three: Meditating to Illumination

  Chapter Four: Reincarnated from Another Planet

  Chapter Five: Living with a Guru

  Chapter Six: A Spiritual Boy in a Swiss Village

  Chapter Seven: In India in Search of Masters

  Chapter Eight: World War III

  Chapter Nine: Harvard and Disillusion

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  My Father’s Guru

  By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

  Copyright 2013 by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

  Cover Copyright 2013 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1993.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Final Analysis

  Against Therapy

  Raising the Peaceable Kingdom

  The Assault on Truth

  The Cat Who Came in From the Cold

  The Evolution of Fatherhood

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  More praise for Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and My Father’s Guru

  “My Father’s Guru is an interesting account of a warped upbringing made fascinating by the insight it provides into Masson’s adult life. He makes no excuses: in initially revering Freud and other authority figures, Masson realizes he was seeking new and better gurus than Brunton—and was fated to reject them pitilessly when they showed themselves, like Brunton, to be merely human.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Beneath the guru-bashing, the book is Masson’s poignant and loving indictment of his parents, worth reading for his psychological portrait of coming-of-age disillusionment.”

  —Seattle Weekly

  My Father’s Guru

  A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion

  Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

  TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

  Introduction

  On Venus There Are No Cars

  “P.B., why is it that you don’t drive a car?” I asked Paul Brunton, my father’s guru.

  He smiled, somewhat mysteriously, and waited for a rather long time before answering. The smile conveyed to me that he was remembering times long past, that there were things he could not yet tell me, that I was naive yet endearing, that there was a bond between us. Children invest a great deal in certain adults. For me, he was one of those adults. I was perhaps ten, he was about fifty.

  “Jeffrey, on Venus there are no cars.”

  I waited for more of an explanation, but he looked off into a vast distance, and I knew that no further answer would be forthcoming. And how could I ask for more? Had he not just hinted—forget hinting, he had as much as said that he came from Venus. P.B. was from Venus! What unfathomable good fortune had brought him here to Earth, to this very house on Park Oak Drive in the Hollywood Hills, where I lived with my parents, Jacques and Diana Masson, and my sister Linda to bless us with his presence, delight us with his teachings, elevate us to realms of spiritual enlightenment that would otherwise remain completely beyond our reach?

  *

  This is a book about me and Paul Brunton, my father’s guru, a man with human failings. It is also about my father and mother and sister and uncle, but primarily it is about my own relationship to P.B. and to Indian spirituality while I was growing up.

  Who was P.B.? Paul Brunton was an English author of books about mysticism. He was born in London on October 21, 1898, and died in Vevey, Switzerland, on July 27, 1981, at the age of eighty-two. His first book, published in 1934, was entitled A Search in Secret India and tells the story of his travels in India looking for mystics, yogis, and seers. It was one of the first and perhaps the most popular book introducing Indian mysticism to the West. During his life he published eleven books, the last of which, in 1952, was The Spiritual Crisis of Man.

  Paul Brunton was my father’s guru. He lived for many years with our family We called him, as did most of his other friends, P.B. He was inordinately short, just over five feet tall, and very frail, weighing only slightly more than a hundred pounds. He spoke in low, measured tones with a pronounced English accent. His face seemed always in repose, and he had a far-off look. He cultivated the calm, inward-looking gaze of the sage. Much of my childhood was spent in his presence.

  In none of his books did he reveal anything at all about his personal life. Evidently he was born with the name Raphael Hurst, and took, first Brunton Paul, then Paul Brunton as a pen name. Although little is known of his early life, in fact little is known of his later life either. This was by his choice. He insisted on secrecy and mystery. Indeed, if I can think of a single word that is most appropriate to Paul Brunton, his life, his writings, his interests, it would be secret. He liked the word and everything it stood for.

  It is possible that the reason for this has to do with secrets in his own life—that is, facts he did not want others to know about. I am not sure, because these facts have never entirely emerged, though little bits dribble out. He was, for example, half Jewish, he hid this fact. He had cosmetic surgery performed on his nose and encouraged some of his Jewish disciples (including my parents) to do the same. He claimed that his first wife was a hermaphrodite, though I have no idea what he meant by this. Perhaps he was joking. He married a second time, a third, and a fourth. His third and fourth wife was the same person, Evangeline Young, who venerates P.B. to this day as her guru. But he never mentioned his marriages in any of his books. After his death, his only child, a son named Kenneth Hurst, born to his second wife, wrote a biography of his father in 1988. This biography reveals little about the man himself. His son became his “disciple” and the biography is an adoring hagiography

  Most of the books that Paul Brunton wrote were immensely successful. There were a series of them in quick succession: After his first book, A Search in Secret India, came the small and very popular The Secret Path, in 1935, followed the same year by A Search in Secret Egypt, which evidently rivaled in popularity the first book; A Message from Amnachala came out in 1936, followed by A Hermit in the Himalayas in 1937. All of these early books went into many printings, as did some of the later ones. The Quest of the Overself appeared in 1938, and in 1939 came Discover Yourself. The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga came out in 1941, followed by The Wisdom of the Overself in 1942. The tiny (forty-five pages) Indian Philosophy and Modern Culture, P.B.’s “thesis,” was published a few years later. After The Spiritual Crisis of Man was published in 1952, he published no more books during the rest of his life, but he continued to make notes and “do research” about mysticism, especially Indian mysticism. The
results were published after his death, in the sixteen volumes of The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, all of which are currently still in print. Many of his earlier books are also in print, and there has been something of a renewed interest in his philosophy. The Paul Brunton Philosophical Foundation in New York State is dedicated to propagating his books and teachings.

  Attracted by his writings, a number of people in Europe, Asia, and the United States corresponded with Paul Brunton, and many of them came to visit him. Some were accepted as “disciples,” though there is some question how many. My father’s older brother, Bernard, was one of these. My uncle Bernard wrote to P.B. after reading his first book and asked to become his disciple. He stayed in his orbit for the next twenty-five years. One of his first acts was to inform his younger brother, my father, that he had found a guru for both of them. My father wrote P.B. and right after the war went to India to be with him.

  My father was first hooked in through a “vision” of P.B.’s that showed my father at forty having developed “occult powers” and entering into “spiritual consciousness.” And so my father waited impatiently to become forty, and when he complained, at forty-one, that he was still unaware of any occult powers, P.B. reminded him that in the vision he was some forty years of age, which could be broadly interpreted. By fifty, my father had more or less given up hope, though he never entirely abdicated his long and increasingly hopeless and lonely vigil.

  Paul Brunton never owned a home. He stayed instead with various students of his writings, among whom my father and mother figured prominently. His financial situation was always unclear. Presumably he made a modest living from his books, some of which were widely translated into European languages and went into multiple editions. He did not seem to have many possessions. He positively shunned the limelight and almost never made public appearances of any kind. He appears to have had no higher education, though he used the title “Doctor” and claimed to have had a Ph.D. bestowed upon him by an unnamed university in the United States in recognition of his contribution to Oriental studies. He lived for many years in India, then divided his time between the United States and Europe. When he was in Europe, he traveled constantly from one country to another, though the purpose of these trips was never made clear.

  By the time I was ten, I knew that P.B. was uniquely important to my parents, to a band of devoted “disciples,” and especially to my father. He was a living “master,” I was told, a man of spiritual substance who had been reincarnated on earth to help other less fortunate mortals—namely my family, his primary disciples, as I thought we were at the time. Actually, he was a great deal more promiscuous in his affections, practicing a kind of spiritual bigamy, since while presenting his relation to us as unique, he was a resident or quasi-resident guru of several families.

  By the time I was twelve, my information began to grow. I found out that in the 1930s he had almost single-handedly introduced Indian mysticism to the West, through the teachings of Ramanamaharshi, a South Indian teacher whom he had visited in India. Pictures of this Indian sage were everywhere in our house. In a number of these photographs his gaze exhibits a look of astonished innocence and great purity. I was told as a child that, wherever I went, his large dark eyes would follow me. They did, and I experimented with other photos and discovered that the eyes in each did the same thing.

  I tried to read P.B.’s books when I was younger but found them impenetrable. By the age of thirteen, they were my constant companions, providing fantasies of far-off places and mysterious mystic powers. At P.B.’s recommendation, I learned to chant Sanskrit verses, for which I found I had a surprising talent—surprising because I am more or less tone deaf. I was convinced I was “on the Path.” I remember walking along the beach in Kailua, on the island of Oahu, when I was fourteen. My sister, eleven at the time, approached me with a “mundane” question, and I waved her away self-importantly: “Woman, I have just been reading The Mysterious Kundalini and cannot be disturbed in my contemplations.” To her credit, Linda muttered, “What bullshit,” and wandered off to a more companionable playmate. It was a mythological world filled with remote Tibetan monasteries, secret manuscripts, Indian masters with strange powers, and dark forces aligned against the forces of light. P.B. was a general in that spiritual army, and I was his young but valiant aide-de-camp.

  I grew up in the shadow of a man who laid claim to enormous power, although not worldly power. It was quickly made clear to me that his power did not reside in the things of this earth. He did not have the external signs of power; he had little money, no home, few possessions. But wherever he went there were mysterious phone calls, hints in his conversations of immensely important meetings that nobody else was permitted to witness, hastily jotted notes, letters from odd places. All of this led us to believe that P.B. was conducting a secret counterwar, a spiritual campaign of such staggering significance that only the great mythological battles of ancient times could provide an analogy. P.B. was sometimes covertly and sometimes overtly offering our family a role in a vast and important “plan.” The plan had to be kept secret. Enemies were lurking. The forces of evil were listening, waiting for their chance to infiltrate the headquarters of the forces of good. All of the people whom P.B. had chosen, or might choose, as his disciples were singularly favored. They were to be at the center of the salvation of the universe. There could be no greater honor. This was a universe as simply organized as a boy’s adventure story. I found a similar atmosphere when I read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings years later.

  Nobody desires a traumatic environment of any kind, and no child should have to endure one. There is, nonetheless, some satisfaction in discovering, however belatedly, that one has been subjected to such an environment. It helps to explain otherwise puzzling events.

  When I went to university, I studied Sanskrit because I had grown up in a household in which this ancient Indian language was considered sacred. In abandoning my professorship in Sanskrit—psychologically at first, but literally later on—for psychoanalytic training, I thought I was leaving behind my spiritual past and freely choosing my own career, one unrelated to my childhood. But in my subsequent analytic career, I idealized Freud much as I had idealized P.B. and Indian philosophy. I remade my own analyst in the image of P.B.—pretty standard psychoanalytic stuff, but my analyst never even seemed to notice. He may have been too eager to play guru to want to disillusion me.

  I did not find it the least strange (although others did) that I soon felt entitled to approach the formidable Kurt Eissler, doyen of the Freudian world in New York, while I was still a young analyst-in-training. He, too, was like a guru; I desperately wanted to be his spiritual son. Again, I was reenacting my earlier drama with P.B., only on a slightly larger scale. It was inevitable that I would seek to reproduce something of the excitement of my earlier life on this intellectual plane, and perhaps it will appear to others as inevitable that I should turn against my gurus, that I was “destined” to become a debunker. I am, I finally realize, unusually sensitive to pretense, fraudulence, and lack of truthfulness. Growing up with a guru provided me with an opportunity to understand the guru/disciple phenomenon in its various manifestations and permutations. It may seem that I was still unmasking revenants of P.B. But learning the source of an interest, a preoccupation even, does not automatically invalidate the results of the inquiry. If people wear masks, unmasking seems to me a legitimate activity.

  *

  I wish to make it clear that P.B. was certainly no Jim Jones, not even a Bhaktivedanta, the guru of the Hare Krishnas, no Paramahansa Yogananda of the Self-Realization Fellowship, no Rajneesh from Poona or Oregon, no Maharshimaheshyogi, no Muktananda. He is not an egregious example of a false prophet. The story I have to tell about him is not an exposé in the classic sense, although I have nothing against such exposés. Tales by insiders of what really goes on in these cults are not only fascinating gossip, they are instructive of the kind of world this spirituality builds. But P.B. did not have the usual fau
lts of overweening arrogance, sexual predation, murderous activities, ruthless greed, and insatiable appetite for luxury so often found among gurus. A guru cannot exist alone: To be a guru, it is necessary to have disciples. I was able to observe, especially in me and my father and in Paul Brunton, the clash, the romanticism, and the ultimate tragedy of these attempts to escape the imperfections of the human condition. I was a direct participant, and I did not escape its consequences.

  *

  For my sources in writing this book, I have used several hundred letters from P.B. to myself, my father, and my mother, and from us to him. My father has made available to me his diary written in India in 1945, when he first met P.B. I also have several hundred letters between my uncle Bernard and P.B. I have tape recordings of memories of P.B. from my mother, my father, my sister, and my uncle. I have also used P.B.’s published writings, as well as the sixteen volumes of The Notebooks of Paul Brunton published after his death.

  Most of all, however, I have relied on my memory. I have reconstructed conversations based on memory and these other sources because I had no other choice.

  I wish that I had access to tape recordings of the original conversations, or that I possessed the kind of memory that would enable me to remember verbatim things said to me forty years ago. I cannot claim that these are verbatim quotations. On the other hand, anyone who knew P.B. or who reads his books today (readily available in “metaphysical” bookstores and in libraries) will recognize P.B. in them. I have not ascribed to him any opinion for which there is not some external verification. I have not speculated, except when I explicitly say so. These reconstructions are not fictional, they are an attempt to be as accurate and authentic as possible. P.B. did not say or write things memorably. But for an eleven-year-old boy to be told by his father’s guru, “My real home is the star Sirius, and when I die I will return there,” the content of the statement was so astonishing as to be unforgettable. My memory recorded this exactly, with one discrepancy. I actually remember P.B. saying “Venus.” But in his posthumously published writings, Sirius is used in a similar context, and I assume I merely remembered incorrectly. What impressed me as a child was not the name of the star or planet, but the fact that P.B. was saying he came from another planet. Similarly I can remember sitting in our garden on the beach in Kailua in Hawaii, late in the evening with my sister Linda staring up at the illuminated sky. P.B. approached us and warned: