My Guru & His Disciple by Christopher Isherwood Page A

was also an assortment of men and women whom I will call “Seekers,” because many of them would have so described themselves. I met them through Gerald, who had now become a central figure in their circles, not only in Los Angeles, but throughout the country. Chris Wood protected him from the Seekers’ phone calls by refusing to take messages for him, but his mail was enormous and urgent. “It’s funny,” I once said to him, “how these people invariably write to you airmail special delivery, when all their questions are about eternity.”
    Some of the Seekers had unquestionable integrity and courage—even perhaps saintliness: a man who had become a clergyman because he had had a vision of Christ when he was fighting in World War I, a Japanese who had been persecuted by his countrymen for his pacifism, an ex-burglar who had practiced mental non-violence while being beaten up by prison guards. As for the rest, many might have been called cranks but almost none of them fakes. I couldn’t imagine any of them as disciples of Prabhavananda—some because they were too exclusively Christian, others because they put the need for social action before spiritual training, others because they were entangled in the occult, others because they were trying to use what they called religion to heal sickness, promote longevity, ensure success in business and joy in marriage—all this with perfect confidence in the purity of their motives.
    What was I looking for, amidst these people? What made me sit through their lectures and join them in hours of earnest discussion? I might have answered truthfully that I was interested in some of them as practitioners of pacifism. I could have claimed that the rest were at least teaching me tolerance: during my pre-California life I wouldn’t have been seen dead with them. Their earnest air of dedication, their gently persuasive voices, and their pious vocabulary would have turned my atheistic stomach.
    But I had to admit to a deeper motive. I was associating with the Seekers in order to find weaknesses in their faith and contradictions in their creeds; to, prove to myself, if possible, that they were seeking a nonexistent treasure. If their treasure was non-existent, then Prabhavananda’s might be, too.
    Thus I kept rediscovering in myself an active underground force of opposition to Prabhavananda’s way of life—insofar as it threatened to influence mine. In my diary, I called this force my ego—what I actually meant was my self-will. “Nothing burns in Hell except self-will” was a favorite quotation of Gerald’s, from the Theologia Germanica, XXXIV.
    Speaking of hell, I am thankful that I at least had the good sense not to personify my self-will as the Devil and imagine myself to be the prey of an awesomely malign superpower, whose strength I couldn’t be expected to resist. What I was struggling with was something quite intimate and unalarming, something that had an animal, not a superhuman nature; something that was partly a monkey, partly a dog, partly a peacock, partly a pig. One must be firm with it, one must keep an eye on it always, but there was no reason to hate it or be afraid of it. Its plans for my future weren’t devilish, they weren’t even clever. It merely wanted to maintain the usual messy aimless impulse-driven way of life to which it was accustomed. It would actually rather wallow in “lazy black misery” than be interfered with by Prabhavananda.

Five
    By August 1940, the war had long since ceased to be called “phony,” even in California. It was a solid presence which cast its shadow all over the United States. The Nazis had occupied France and threatened to invade England. Americans had begun to tell each other fatalistically, “We’ll be in it soon.”
    The future promised us bureaucratic discipline, denial of comfort, frustration of self-will. So my