My Father's Guru by Jeffrey Moussaieff

My Father's Guru by Jeffrey Moussaieff

Author:Jeffrey Moussaieff [Moussaieff, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter Six

A Spiritual Boy in a Swiss Village

In 1955, when I was fifteen and my sister Linda was twelve, my parents decided we should go to school in French-speaking Switzerland. This was partly so that we could learn French and partly because they felt life in Los Angeles was too provincial. The year before, P.B. had told my father, “You have a rare soul in Jeffrey. He will go far. He is well beloved all around. He can easily become a leader.” My parents were trying to find the right environment that would help me “further my destiny.” They could not believe that anything happened by chance or was done for reasons of less than cosmic significance. They believed P.B. when he told them that I was destined to become a spiritual leader.

So our whole family left in June for New York; from there we would sail to London, spend the summer touring Europe by car, and in late August my parents would leave my sister and me in Switzerland. As ever, preoccupied with the spiritual life, I was concerned that I found it difficult to meditate in New York, as well as on the ship and in London. I wrote to P.B. to tell him this. He wrote back saying that I should get used to the fact that “the results of meditation are changeable and that often there are no apparent results at all. At an advanced stage these changes disappear and it will be possible to go quickly and directly to the blessed state of beautiful peace within. Wouldn’t you like that?” he asked. Indeed, I longed for these “advanced” stages of meditation. I did not want to be a beginner forever.

P.B. also told me that he hoped I would be able to become friends with “one or two nice Hindu youngsters of the vegetarian, spiritually minded kind.” I was fortunate in my good karma and ought to make the most and best of it. I was destined to help many other people, P.B explained.

We enrolled in a school called La Villan in a tiny village near Villars, about a two-hour train ride from Montreux on the eastern tip of Lake Geneva, not that far from the French and Italian borders and across the mountain from Gstaad. I felt as if we were entering a bewildering fairy land as Linda and I rode the little red Swiss mountain train from the plains up to the village. This was really our first time away from home, and a very close and somewhat insular home at that. To be leaving the United States, leaving our parents, climbing these alpine mountains for the first time was a strange and disconcerting experience. I wondered if Linda felt the same.

The village was very small (so small it did not have a name), quiet, and rural, especially compared with the larger and more cosmopolitan Villars. My parents chose La Villan because it was coeducational and Linda and I could be together. Also, it



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