12
SIMON HOROWITZ WAS a researcher in hematology at the University of California Medical Center, and had known Atabet, Corinne and Kazi Dama since 1967. His research, like mine, had led him into a study of the body’s transformations in relation to spiritual practice. One day in August I found him with Atabet at Telegraph Place, studying pictures of blood cells projected onto the wall. Red light from the slide filled the room, giving the place an eerie atmosphere.
“These are Jacob’s red cells,” Horowitz murmured, his dark aquiline face leaning forward to study a thing on the slide. “They’re from a sample I took this June.” The projector hummed on the table beside him. Quietly I pulled up a chair. The scenes in this apartment, I thought, grew stranger and stranger. “Now these are completely healthy,” he said. “But these others I’ve never seen before. And no one in our lab has either. The question is, ‘How did you do it?’ Are they there for a reason? They look a little like things I’ve seen in your paintings.”
In the red light, Atabet seemed strangely remote. “The animan siddhi.” He glanced in my direction. “This is the microscope’s version of it. But they’ve never looked like this to me. That’s not what I see from the inside. And nothing I’ve drawn looks like those things on the slide. Could there be a principle of complementarity here? Could they look different from these two points of view?—from the microscope and inner sight? Or is there resistance in me to seeing them clearly? What do you think, Darwin?”
I said that the whole thing was beyond me. No one spoke for several seconds, and Horowitz projected another slide on the wall. It was a slightly different version of the sample that preceded it, with a slightly larger proportion of normal erythrocytes. “This is the last sample I took before your attack,” he said. “You can see it’s more normal by ordinary standards . . .”
“And more boring,” Atabet interrupted. “The other one appeals to me more as a work of art.”
Horowitz switched back to the first slide. Some of the cells looked grotesque. “It’s definitely more interesting,” Atabet murmured. “The feeling of it’s familiar, yes, the feeling but not the shapes themselves.”
“You think it’s more beautiful!” Horowitz exclaimed. “And yet you felt badly when I took that sample. You said you felt worse than you had in years.”
“Changes like these always hurt. Those stigmata almost killed me. You know what tantra means? The Sanskrit word tantra? It means to spread out. Like capillaries in a healthy body. But that attack was the last stage of a process in the opposite direction, a constriction I was going through because my system couldn’t handle these powers. It had been coming on for a long time, of course, then Darwin’s book pushed me all the way in. Up at Sonoma going over his manuscript I was in a state for two days straight. A kind of cellular samadhi. Images of these cells filled most of the space I moved through. But then a circuit breaker blew. Even the marrow of my bones was affected, if we can believe these photographs. Those cells are lost. Some of them look like fright wigs!”
All of us laughed. Indeed, several of them looked startled and angry. One in particular seemed to be striking out in several directions. Horowitz switched to a slide that showed a single red cell. You could imagine it dancing with tortured ecstasy, as if it were caught between contradictory instructions. “It doesn’t know where to go,” he said. “Whether to laugh or cry. Taken as a whole, this sample looks like a behavioral sink, with some of the members acting out. This one especially. It’s typical in certain blood diseases. It’s called an acanthocyte.” The wildly twisted form reminded me of a Walt Disney cartoon depicting a monstrous tree with grasping hands. It was awful to think that cells like it would fill an entire bloodstream.
“Tantra,” Atabet murmured. “Our system needs to spread out. That was one of the things that attack was saying. That’s why the animan siddhi has been retired.”
“Retired!” I said. “You don’t mean forever.”
“At least for a while. That attack was a warning against forcing my way to these levels. Neither of you know what it’s like. For a couple of days there, forms like this engulfed me. It was like being trapped in a gigantic aquarium. Finally I had to stuff it all back in the bottle.”
“Rest can’t hurt you.” Horowitz switched off the projector. “Your white cell count was far too high.” Atabet’s statement had shaken him.
There was silence while he put the slides away. Atabet looked amused. “Simon,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Is the slide show over?”
“That was the last one,” said the doctor, fumbling with the projector. “It’s time to get back to the lab.”
“But it was just getting interesting.” Atabet winked at me. “You always get nervous when I tell you what happened.”
“Oh fuck! I’ve broken this latch.” Horowitz held up a wire he had pulled from the machine. “How the hell did I do that?”
“Those jerky movements, Simon,” Atabet said with a deadpan look. “When we talk about these things you get these jerky movements. But you don’t have to go so soon. Let’s have a glass of wine.”
We went into the kitchen and he poured us each a glass. Horowitz drank his down, then seemed to have an inspiration. “Jacob!” he said. “How do these changes in your red cells relate to the changes we saw in the Echeverrias’ daughter? You remember those slides I showed you? Remember the changes in her blood?” He looked at me. “He healed her of cancer by suggestion. It was a miracle. Remember those pictures, Jacob? Didn’t they look like yours? Now tell me, what’s the connection?”
“I don’t know.” Atabet shrugged. “What do you think?”
“That red cells can change their shape much faster than I thought before.” His dark eyes were filled with excitement. “I’ve never seen samples change as fast as this.”
“How many red cells do we make each second?” Atabet asked. “About 2 1/2 million? That’s nine billion every hour. Maybe these changes can happen best wherever our bodies are transforming fastest. Like our skin cells. Like those marks on my chest.”
“At least for structural changes.” The doctor nodded. “That’s where we’re most capable of quick regeneration. But something else is happening here—I’m sure of it! These changes in your blood are happening faster than any example I’ve heard of. That’s what’s got me excited. And those changes are like the ones in the Echeverria girl! Whatever you can do to yourself, you can do to others.”
“Not very often.” Atabet held up his hand. “Not very often. That’s why I’m afraid to try it out on many people. Only when it’s someone close like Jean, someone in the family. And then only when they’re very sick. No, I’m not a healing shaman. You said it right. Whatever I do to myself, I can help others do—but what I do to myself! You see the unpredictable results. I learned a long time ago that it’s not my calling. I’m too unpredictable, Simon. I even frighten you. I can’t be a healer until this daemon is finished with me.”
Horowitz looked disappointed. There was silence as we finished our wine.
He might not be a healer, I thought, but his presence and example had set me on the road to health. And there was no telling how many others there were whom he had helped indirectly. A life like his had to be contagious.
But then he made another declaration. No longer would he try to recreate the body on canvas. Those paintings of sealife and human organs were exerting a spell he didn’t like. It might be superstition, but there was reason to think that some of them had taken on a life of their own. So he would “surrender to Being itself for a while.” In these last few years he had begun to create an artistic monstrosity, and the only way to undo it was through blissful neglect. His program in the foreseeable future would consist of contemplation and our seminars on history.
August 24
A breathtaking day on his roof. He was in a kind of ecstasy watching the city. Sat with him a while, caught in the presence that helps me pass through restlessness and pain. There is a tangible field around h
im, something that wraps itself around me like a cloak.
Then I felt myself stiffening against it. An image of a woman appeared, as if the first challenge of sex were an anticipation of this state. Remembered the thrill of fear at the possibility of sleeping with a girl one summer night in high school. We had both wanted to, but the fear held us back. The first call of sex is frightening and thrilling like this, a premonition and challenge.
Asked him if I might have shed some rotten cells—my joints have felt so elastic. He said it was possible. Soon I will have to start running! It will help me “learn how to breathe.”
Corinne more beautiful every day. But there is no way we can ever be lovers. In a way I don’t understand, she is wedded to him.
August 25
Today we talked about his life. He showed me some of his first paintings, sketches from his days at the San Francisco School of Fine Arts. They looked like Chinese landscapes— fresh, open, naive. And more experiments with the textures of flesh. Showed me Maroger’s The Secret Formulas and Techniques of the Masters and Burckhardt’s Alchemy. From the beginning he has been fascinated with the surfaces and structures of the body.
His work has developed in stages, he says, like his life. From the time he was 19 until he was 28 or 29 he learned how to draw, studied anatomy and the body’s “geometrical” structures. (He showed me a collection of Lennart Nilsson’s photographs.) In this period he practiced “seeing the Brahman everywhere,” developed the “molecular pantomime” and worked at Sts. Peter and Paul’s teaching art in the church’s grammar school. Sold his first paintings then. “Lost his shyness in groups!” Ran a mile in 4:51. Spent his summers in the Sierras until he was thirty.
During this period he apparently developed a power to heal. Cured one of the Echeverrias’ daughters from a cancer of the uterus! I asked Carlos about the story and he said it was true. “Jacob has cured most of the family of something,” he said. But it isn’t his dharma to be a healer. The power comes and goes. Apparently it is reserved for the Echeverrias, his family and closest friends. There is a hierarchy of siddhis, he thinks, leading him from station to station on his Mt. Analogue.
When he was 29 he began to study astronomy, read “dozens of books” about the solar system. Then a series of paintings of the sun in its various seasons. Only one of them is left in his studio.
He marks the end of that period with his “second awakening” in 1962. Then his fascination with bodily structures began, leading eventually to his “cellular samadhi” this June.
He says there have been three distinct periods in his life, each ending with a crisis: 1947 and his first egowhelming realization of the Brahman-nature; 1962 and his first significant access to the animan siddhi, and this one. It is still hard to tell where the next leg of the journey will lead him. But the perspectives we are getting about the whole story will help. My book is enormously important to him.
The events of June were profounder than I thought. We are putting something together that is larger than I have been willing to admit.
13
BY THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER I had established a practice that was part psychotherapy, part physical training, part meditation. But on some days I came close to quitting. It was for that reason that Atabet and Corinne gave me a copy of Dante’s Purgatorio on my 33rd birthday, inscribed with their signatures under a photograph of us all in front of Sts. Peter and Paul’s. The book, they said, would be a travel guide for the next stage of my journey.
September 17
Listened to plainsong from the Abbey of Encalcat, a record Corinne gave me. How much pain have these Gregorian chants relieved through the centuries?
An image of souls in Dante’s Purgatory has haunted me all through the day. Like me, they heard this music and felt the distant light. There is new life within these afflicted emotions, a paradise waiting. An epic like Dante’s could be written on the purgatory of the coming age.
September 18
Fear and relief I am built from their rhythm. In spite of all their reassurances, I find new worries: about the Press (which Casey is running surprisingly well), about my heart (which Simon Horowitz says is all right), about Armen’s belief that Atabet is “paranoid.”
Today a strange sight on the Bay. A tanker at the edge of a fogbank, then a tunnel in the mist running all the way to Sausalito. A tunnel I could see through. It felt like some kind of message.
Atabet still resting.
Simon Horowitz a good man. I trust him. He has known Atabet and Corinne for several years, knows about A’s life in detail. But would not let me draw him out. I want to know more about what he thinks of Atabet’s physical and mental state.
Still practicing this choiceless awareness. Atabet says I don’t have to choose between contradictory courses of action now. Just observe them without shifting from place to place.
This apartment is my monk’s cell, my base camp in Purgatory.
Evening. Corinne agrees that my meeting with Armen helped me find a new set of limits. Maybe that was the reason I felt compelled to see him.
A new set of limits. And a practice. Read the Purgatorio for the second time.
September 20
Corinne gave me a massage, and the pain in my chest broke into ripples of laughter. For ten minutes I was laughing out of control as I saw that part of my body is always dying. What is there to fear? Life and death are simultaneous. 2,500,000 red cells are being born and consumed every second! We are living flames, burning at the edge of this incredible joy.
Then I was dizzy and she made me lay back on the bed.
To see her was to look through peyote eyes. She was a huge Indian squaw, then a Japanese geisha, then a boyhood chum, Billy Daniels! the toughest kid on the block with his freckled cheeks and chin tilted back when he grinned. And a Rubens nude. A swift, wicked, exalting bisexual encounter.
Evening. All day I have been in this state of mild shock and bliss, with insight after insight pouring through me. Joys are laid up for us. This is my truest life.
September 21
A dream of ancient caves last night. And a valley. And a sun like a heart at the edge of the hills, throbbing gently, dancing down ladders in front of my half-closed eyes. Then its rays were speeding west toward the caves with their figures of the sun and the moon. A hundred suns and a hundred moons, animals wavering in torchlight, sliding through shadows as they reached out to take me.
Was it a dream or a memory? An image of this valley had beckoned for thousands of years, it seemed, through all the turns of weather and forgetting. To the north, the glacier had risen and the wind had smelled of ice, but now the hills were bare and brown and the curving river turned to mud. Its smooth surface, like the fields around it, was perfectly still. And where the shaman’s cry had echoed through the valley there was this sonorous chanting, almost as ancient, counting out the names of God . . . .
She tried to help me remember. Subtle spasms while she held me. There is something in it that is too much to bear.
Where did she learn these ways of helping? Each day she grows more beautiful.
Atabet says to begin sitting each morning, noon and late afternoon, forty minutes each time. And hatha yoga exercises with Lilias on KQED! I can’t believe it. He says that “all America is our ashram” and that my apartment is a kyiphug, my “happy cave.”
14
THE WAYS OF ENLIGHTENMENT, I thought, had to have more dignity than this. It had never been my idea to take my guidance from a lady on television who looked and sounded like someone who taught at a fat farm for women. “Now stretch,” the soothing voice said. “Stretch as far as you can.”
I lifted my head toward the ceiling and tried to arch my back. “That’s good,” said the voice. “You see how easy it is?”
But as she said it something cracked. I came down on my chest and rolled over. “All right,” she said, arching upward until her pigtails fell on her rump. “If it hurts, don’t force it.” She gave us an ingenuous smile, her he
ad turned to see the camera. “But if you practice you can do it like this.” She held the arched position, then swung around to the lotus position.
Watching her supple body I felt the spasm relax. It was as if she were sitting just a few feet away. “Now class, you’ve been so good,” she winked. “Today you get a treat. All right?”
I nodded back at the screen.
“Now lay on the floor like this.” She stretched out on the platform and turned her head to guide us. “Today we’re going to breathe. Not the usual way though. We’re going to really breathe. Way down low. Now feel it going up and down.” I lay back on the rug and exhaled. “Are you really breathing?” she whispered. “If you aren’t, let the breath come down. Don’t hold it up in your chest. Now there. That’s good!”
I felt the slow delicious pleasure. Each day that week we had learned to take each breath through our stomach and thighs. “Now down through your toes,,” she said. “From the top of your head to your toes. Can you feel the prana?” At the beginning of the program she had told us something about it. “Can you feel it spreading?” And indeed I could, through my legs and the soles of my feet.
”Do you feel it?” she breathed.
A piano was playing, and I looked up to see her. “Lilias,” her name, was slowly moving through the screen. “Do you feel the pleasure?” she murmured as the letters moved past. It was nearing the end of the half-hour session and I hated to see her go. “Do you feel it spreading around you? The breath and the pleasure and the feeling of health?” She fell into silhouette and the credits came past. While I simmered in this first form of bliss, the list of directors and sponsors passed through me. I and the set were one. Then the letters KQED came blazing onto the screen, and a resonant voice told us how to order the Lilias Yoga Book. Then there was a pitch for the non-profit station.
I sat up and stretched. For a moment she reappeared in the lotus position, absorbed in a concentration we all could practice. Her figure in leotards was a thing of perfection.
Jacob Atabet Page 9