My Guru & His Disciple

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Book: My Guru & His Disciple Read Free
Author: Christopher Isherwood
Tags: Literary, Biography & Autobiography
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of him if he had presented himself as a grave infallible oracle. My own nature responded to his theatricality and found it reassuring, for I was a playactor, too.
    What made his company so stimulating was that he seemed to be so intensely aware. Awareness was his watchword. According to him, you had to maintain continual awareness of the real situation, which is that “this thing” exists and that we are therefore all essentially united. Whenever your awareness weakened, you slipped back into acceptance of the unreal situation, which is experienced as space-time and which imposes disbelief in “this thing” and belief in individual separateness. Gerald would quote Jesus admonishing the apostle Simon Peter: “Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat.” Gerald uttered the word “desired” with a kind of snarl, baring the teeth on one side of his mouth. Then, quite uncannily, he would mime Satan himself, separating the mortal ego-husk from the immortal wheat grain and blowing it to perdition with a gleeful puff of his breath. “Satan,” in Gerald’s interpretation, was the distracting, disintegrating, alienating power of space-time, operating through its agencies—the radio, the movies, the press. “It’s the very devil! ” Gerald would exclaim in a whisper, his pale blue eyes wild, like those of a man in a haunted house, beset by terrors. (He had developed the theme in a book published that year, Pain, Sex and Time. )
    *   *   *
    Lao-tze’s Tao Te Ching was Gerald’s favorite gospel of pacifism. He often repeated a sentence from its sixty-seventh chapter: “Heaven arms with pity those whom it would not see destroyed”—meaning that to feel concern for others is the only realistic attitude, because it is a recognition of the real situation, our oneness with each other. Feelings of love and compassion are not merely “good” and “right,” they are ultimately self-protective; feelings of hatred are ultimately self-destructive.
    Lao-tze says that we should be like the water, because fluidity always overcomes rigidity; rocks and prejudices get washed away in the end. To illustrate this, Gerald used to say that Man, who has survived the dinosaurs and managed to evolve without growing wings or gills or poison glands, is descended from a small, weak, but adaptable tree shrew. (A famous biologist later assured me that Gerald’s sense of poetic truth had carried him too far; Man is more probably descended from a large and aggressive ape.)
    Gerald agreed with Lao-tze that one should never put the other party in the wrong if that can possibly be avoided. Martyrdom may be heroic if it is unavoidable, but you must be very sure that you have done everything permissible to save your persecutors from the spiritually self-destructive act of killing you. Otherwise, your death will be an act of passive aggression for which you will be partly to blame. Gerald would say with a sigh: “I’m afraid that that exceedingly odd individual, Jesus of Nazareth, deliberately got himself lynched.”
    But Gerald disapproved of Jesus far less than of his Church. Gerald said that he could never become a Christian as long as the Church claimed for itself a monopoly of divine inspiration—which Hindus and Buddhists do not—and as long as it represented the crucifixion as the supreme and crowning triumph of Christ’s career. Here, Gerald was joining Bernard Shaw in his condemnation of “crosstianity.” Which I found amusing, because Gerald’s meditative bearded beauty, high temples, and long red nose seemed to present the composite image of a Shavian Christ.
    *   *   *
    Gerald referred to the life he was trying to lead as “intentional living.” Its purpose was, as he put it, to “reduce” the “strangulated” ego; he was fond of using

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