Brunton Paul - My fathers guru: a journey through spirituality and disillusion

My Fathers 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.

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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 Fathers Guru

My Fathers Guru is an interesting account of a warped upbringing made fascinating by the insight it provides into Massons adult life. He makes no excuses: in initially revering Freud and other authority figures, Masson realizes he was seeking new and better gurus than Bruntonand 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 Massons poignant and loving indictment of his parents, worth reading for his psychological portrait of coming-of-age disillusionment.

Seattle Weekly

My Fathers 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 dont drive a car? I asked Paul Brunton, my fathers 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 hintedforget 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 fathers 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 fathers 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 lifethat 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 fathers 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.