Jacob Atabet

by Michael Murphy

  Corinne: “A well-organized body is a bellwether for the disorganized world.”

  Jacob: “The body is made for self-exceeding. It is an entrance to a thousand worlds. What a shame to go Cyborg when the genie is about to emerge from the old human bottle!

  “We will move through more planes of existence, more orders of reality,” he said. “More cities beyond the horizons of this space. Ramakrishna’s vision of the jivamukta ascending and descending the ladder of the worlds. Genesis, 28-12-15. Anticipations of this in science fiction, Aurobindo, alchemy, Sufi literature, all 1,700 pages of your book.”

  Coming to another time of crossing over, he says: the stage is finally set.

  But the time is always near, and there are hundreds of years ahead of us in building the psychic structures to navigate these subtle shores—unless it becomes a great joint venture. A space program for inner space? An idea that dies hard.

  Evening. “Our True Form is waiting. At one level the work is done, the transformation achieved.” But still I fall into these old, cold waters. Patience then and nothing special. Wait out every brooding cloud.

  August 23

  His description of yesterday’s experience.

  “Turning sideways and dissolution of hearing. Sliding through a narrow slot. Then silence, like the top of Partington Ridge. No movement. Ordinary life was a thousand feet below. You could not hear the traffic.”

  “Waiting a very long time in that stillness. Then the beginning of sunrise, an edge of gold. And emerald islands bursting into view, green shimmering glass in the sea . . .”

  “And after a long time, the familiar world again. San Francisco Bay, the faces of friends—all seen from this place in which they truly live. Then laughter, tears and gladness. The modern world’s sense of the absurd is right. These worlds so close and this blindness below. For hours I laughed and cried.”

  “Then Jacob Atabet was sitting in his room near a window that looked out on the Bay. He could see me now, amidst his tears and laughter, and he knew that I saw him. He looked up to see me, then began to disappear. Slow dissolution . . . and then there was no more Jacob Atabet.”

  That was his description. He looks magnificent. “The handsomest man in the world,” says Corinne.

  The kite had gathered up the one who flew it.

  No telling exactly how long it lasted according to Greenwich time.

  Ten days without leaving his roof. Nothing to eat. His body five pounds lighter. Says his cells “are full of strange molecules.”

  August 24

  Ended his fast last night. His changes still fragile. “Today’s blood is not yesterday’s,” he said. “The body feels like a fountain of newly created forms.”

  Are strange molecules entering his system? Do their templates come from some other localizable place? Is that place rooted in a physical universe, reachable through some kind of stargate? Kazi has seriously entertained that possibility. Kazi also said something about “a jump down time?”

  A jump down time?! I grow dizzy thinking. Closed timelike world-lines. Einstein-Rosen bridges. “When we reach the deepest levels,” J. says, “the big bang is now.”

  Evening. Did I see it? A change in the translucence of his skin? Did I actually see those streets of a fabulous city in the light around him? Is he pulling us closer to them?

  August 25

  Tonight, he possesses new powers: healed the rash on my legs with a touch; light pulsing in his hands; no hunger; can sense the world news, he says, in one gestalt.

  August 26

  Magyar’s book (Kazi and Corinne looked at it):

  “PK-I ? PK-II. Squaring the circle. Hierarchies of will in the self.” None of us understands it completely. They are interested in it though, because Magyar believes there are passages to other physical worlds, something like “mind-holes” and “Einstein-Rosen bridges.”

  11 a.m. Light breaking through the overcast. The Bay starting to sparkle like cells. The vista reminded me that there are one hundred trillion of them in the human body’s Pythagorean brotherhood. Fluid crystals tending toward a new order. Atoms and cells love one another.

  We are haunted by the memory of God. It is our secret reward, our subtle reinforcer, the central contingency of our entire life. The world is haunted by its homecoming.

  J.: “We must compare photographs of the DNA with images of the Caduceus and Kundalini, the Plumed Serpent of Queztacoatl. All bodies are like games: if you break their rules, the game will end. How to tell the difference between breaking a body and transforming it? How do we change the rules of the body-game?”

  Is something like molecular transplantation happening to him? Are we redesigning our own DNA? We have proven we can do it, he said. These last eight weeks should have convinced me once and for all.

  Proven it? He seemed too eager to convince me. And yet I have gone through those towering lattices six or seven times now, and each time, it seems, something has changed in my body. But which structures were involved? Is there any similarity between this and the molecular engineering that biologists are talking about? Could I alter my genes this way? Did Ramakrishna’s parents, who prayed all their adult lives that a child of theirs might be a saint, unconsciously alter their genes to produce their son’s prodigious genius? Did Mozart’s parents do the same? Is this ability to rebuild our cells involved in Atabet’s subtle change of appearance? His is not the same face I remember from last summer.

  11 p.m. It is not the same face exactly, of that I am sure. Nor is this the same body. Today I moved through a landscape of human cells in ecstasy. There might have been a million of them as I watched—they were speeding past so swiftly—then I went into those towers of the DNA. And into something new: a glimpse of pulsing light from which those lattices were made. It was terrifying. Had I glimpsed their atomic pattern? Is he pulling me after him into these depths? There was a freedom I have never felt before when the experience was over. It was not a trick of seeing. The gatekeeper had let me cross the bridge, just long enough to see the other side without doing damage.

  I see now that all those psychic hemorrhages of years past, my genetic karma shared with Charles Fall, were openings to this. The journey through cells, molecules and atoms, the control of it all that is coming, has been my birthright from the start.

  August 27

  He is ending this phase of his descent. His body will take time to assimilate the changes of these last twelve days.

  I have never seen him looking more splendid and strange. Today he quoted Chesterton: “We have come to the wrong planet,” and said that the world has never looked wilder or more beautiful.

  24

  ON SEPTEMBER 3, he came down from his apartment for the first time since our experiment had begun. Corinne and I went with him to Baker beach and enjoyed an hour of sunshine sitting on the sand in our streetclothes. The silence around him, that gathered field of force, had subsided and for a while he was our familiar companion. We talked about the fishing boats sailing out of the Bay past Bonita Point, about some of his parents’ friends who fished the north coast for albacore and sea bass in the spring. Our good-natured friend had reappeared, come out from the invisible worlds of these last two weeks. But with this relaxation there was still a distance between us. Though we joked all that hour and traded stories about our experiences as we had in the past, I could not shake my sense of awe about the changes I saw in his face and physique. In some subtle way he had been taken into a world apart, into a world more beautiful and terrible than this one. No amount of camaraderie could change that.

  When our communion with the ocean was over we drove back to North Beach and went into the church of Sts. Peter and Paul. He asked us to leave him alone while he went down the left side aisle gazing up at the nave’s gothic arches. I guessed that he was inspecting something in the building’s structure that expressed a thing he had seen in trance. Corinne shook her head. God knew what prodigies he might be contemplating, she said. He was always a little
unpredictable after a foray like the one he had just passed through.

  In the soft light of the church she seemed more beautiful than ever. During these two weeks, a slow sensuous mood of well-being had enveloped her, a contagious feeling of physical pleasure. It had seemed, as the days went by, that her presence gave balance to the intense inward focus he was making.

  “Do you think he sees something up there?” I nodded towards the gothic arches. “Remember his saying that great architecture resembles structures in our bodies?”

  “Maybe he can finally read the Latin inscriptions,” she whispered. “He’s always wanted to do that.” She seemed to share little of the awe I felt about him.

  About fifteen minutes passed and in the stillness of the church I felt something familiar and settled. In the images spread all around us, in the arches and altars and dark colored glass, there was an abiding structure. No matter what surprises lay in wait for us—even explosions of light in the mass—this form of things would always be there to come home to. I looked up at the saints in the windows. Each of them seemed a witness to it, a long chorus of testimony to this essentially reliable set of truths.

  Finally he came down the aisle, and we followed him out to Washington Square. The seedy streets of North Beach shimmered in the afternoon sunlight. “Another world,” he said, nodding back at the church. “They never could’ve conceived what we’re doing, let alone try it.”

  We walked down the sloping grass toward Union Street, waiting for his next pronouncement. For a moment there was silence.

  “What do you mean?” I finally asked. “They couldn’t’ve conceived what?”

  “This. This thing we’re doing. Just look at the shape of the thing!” He pointed at the towering spires. “Everything points away from the center, up to heaven, to a life beyond earth.” With his eyes squinting into the sunlight and his chin tilted back, he looked like a sea captain peering into an unfriendly sky. “They never could’ve seen it,” he said. “The resistance is built in at every level. In their dogmas, their buildings, everything.”

  “But there’s something there we need,” I ventured, remembering the mood I had felt. “Something . . . I don’t know. Something old and reliable. Something like home.”

  He sighed and nodded, then turned abruptly and walked back toward the church. We turned obediently with him, Corinne rolling her eyes with mock exasperation. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I wanted to go in there. Yes, it is a place like home.”

  He stopped in front of a bench and we sat down to watch the scene on the grass below us. Children were playing softball and a priest had come out of the church to referee their game. “There’s Father Zimbardo,” he said as the priest picked up the ball and threw it back to the pitcher.

  A circle of older men had gathered to watch the game, many of them familiar characters in the square. One of them turned and nodded toward us. “That’s Nello,” Jacob said. “He’s out here every day. And Battista there, he’s one of Carlos’s old Basque friends. I’ve known them both for years.”

  “Hey Atabet!” one of them yelled. “Come help Zimbardo. He can’t throw the ball!” Others in the group were laughing at the priest’s attempts to run the game. Jacob grinned and waved the suggestion away. The priest made a helpless gesture, then yelled to ask where Jake had been hiding.

  “Sick,” he yelled back. “I’ve had the flu.”

  The priest turned back to the game. “He’s always trying to enlist me,” he said. “He always says I should’ve been a priest.”

  I could see the pleasure he took in this sense of old friends. It was amazing, I thought, that he had been able to deviate so far from conventional life and yet retain this sense of roots.

  “How long’ve you known him?” I asked.

  “Ever since he got here—about ten or twelve years I guess. But isn’t this marvelous.” He nodded around at the square. “What am I doing with all this other stuff? I must be cracked.”

  “Hey, come on down here, Jake!” one of the old men yelled. “Zimbardo’s going to break his neck!” The priest had tripped and lay sprawled on the grass while the boys came running toward him.

  “Go play!” said Corinne. “You need some exercise.”

  He stood abruptly and jogged down to the game. There were cheers from some of the boys as he came onto the field, caught the ball, and threw it with one jumping motion to the pitcher. “Let Jake bat!” someone cried. “Let’s see him hit it!”

  It was a game of rotation and a boy had just gone round to second base. Jacob grabbed the bat amid yells from the players. The first pitch crossed the plate and he missed it. But on the second pitch he hit the ball high in the air, far over the fielders’ heads, onto Union Street two hundred feet away. Jumping and waving his arms, he rounded the bases.

  “He missed the base!” someone yelled and Father Zimbardo gave a vehement out sign. Jacob waved in disgust. “I couldn’t see it!” he yelled, running toward the priest to protest. For a moment they stood jaw to jaw simulating an argument over the call.

  “The umpire’s blind!” someone yelled.

  “He was out!” screamed the boy from second base.

  He finally moved to the field, making way for the next batter, and the game went on for ten minutes more. When it was over he came up sweating and breathless. “Did you see Zimbardo?” he grinned. “He has it in for me, don’t you think?”

  We started back to his place while he unbuttoned his shirt to dry off. “What a day!” he exclaimed. “Darwin, let’s go running tomorrow. It feels good to get the body moving.” For half a block he jogged ahead as if he couldn’t wait. “God! it’s so simple,” he said, waiting for us both to catch up. “What do you think I’m doing with all this other stuff? On days like this I think I must be crazy.”

  “The spirit passes into many conditions,” I said, repeating a remark he often made.

  “Many conditions . . .” He sighed. “Yes, but isn’t all this enough?”

  “Well, wait until tomorrow,” said Corinne. “See how you feel then.” As she said it, a sad-looking drunk came angling toward us down the street. As he passed we fell silent and headed up the last steep incline to Telegraph Place. No one spoke as we climbed the stairs to his apartment.

  He stood by the railing for a while. “Darwin,” he said. “How long do you think it’ll take to make this apparent? Do you think we’ll live to see it?” There had been a shift in his mood, a sudden upwelling of sadness. “God, what opposite levels,” he whispered. “What contradictions!”

  For a while there was silence as we looked down at the streets. “But we’ll do it,” he said. “We’re going to show them. It’s meant to be a paradise. All of it. That’s the reason we’re here. We’re going to help make it plain for everyone.” I sensed he was reaffirming a vow he must have made a hundred times before. “The time is coming,” he whispered. “It’s time at last for the world to see.”

  25

  SEPTEMBER 15

  Sunset. Two ships moored below. A brilliant evening helped the pain. A dark night now, however. No overgeneralizing. Wait out this reshuffling of cells. Am certain my midnight visitor will appear tonight. (Is this the eve of All Cell’s Day?)

  Is Kirov tinkering? Do we need him? Is he a catalyst like Mephisto?

  Wait out this depression. Do not plan anything. No schemes to substitute for the pain, no projects, no phone calls. Just a few sentences in this notebook.

  Can see the old patterns arising. Is this a worthy venture with the world suffering? How will it help the poor and the sick? Has the world time left before the final depletion?

  Behind the old questions, the answer: this is what I have been given to do.

  Was St. John of the Cross too self-willed because his mother church was? (The church as Jewish mother?—and Roman Father?) He was bound to die young. We are only allowed to will ourselves so far through the stargate: it must be opened from the other side. He knew it, and he didn’t know it. He h
ad the distinction between will and grace, “discursive meditation” and “suffused contemplation,” but still he drove the body through. Brother body, forgive us.

  J.: “I sense the direction toward the bridge; the keeper of the tollgate lets me through. It is a cooperative venture all the way.”

  September 25

  The slings and arrows of this outrageous nature! Every old demon came rushing in last night: guilts, resentments, vanities, fears of what others will think, impossible naked bodies. And then a flood of the old imagery. A hemorrhage like last summer’s. This time though I didn’t run from it. At last I am letting it deliver its gifts.

  No wonder there is such a literature of our bad habits. Freud, Reich, Proust, games people play, Huysmans, Gurdjieff Baudelaire, C. S. Lewis, the patterns that emerge in gestalt therapy: a contemporary literature of yama-niyama. The first steps of the modern world’s yoga?

  Psychoanalysis is a move toward liberation, but every destructive impulse carries something of the inner self. We must turn the fires of hell into the fires of heaven, let our symptoms turn to grace.

  J.: “Take a stand against the old habits, especially when they take on the aspect of angels. Take another look at every proposal for a new project or a new work of art. Give the world this new life instead.” Relief may come, he said, all at once. There are sudden openings after these dark nights—quantum jumps to wider orbits. Our nature keeps finding its second and third wind.

  But I can feel the depression closing in again. It is time for me to rest now. Wait out every brooding cloud, see the beauty in it. Every season has its beauty. And, after long periods of seemingly fruitless practice, a change comes all-at-once, as if a paradigm shift were silently prepared in our bones.

  September 28

  Letter today from Prague. It was unsigned, but must be from one of Magyar’s groups. He needs money. Someone arranging his arrest. Is it Kirov?

  September 29

  J. this morning: “The world is a conspiracy against any foreclosure on the human spirit. The double helix is a form that is said to unzip easily. This body flickers at the edge of the sensible world.” Big dream last night of running from Kirov. That letter yesterday from Prague, with its hints of Magyar’s arrest and new discoveries, must have triggered it. Magyar is a pathetic, marvelous man. Could boil merrily in the vats of hell. Why does he risk so much by staying there? I suppose it is his mad scheme to dig under the cathedral for the alchemical secrets.