Jacob Atabet

by Michael Murphy

  J. on painting:

  Picasso drew the sukshma sharira, the body inside and around us. The artist’s body changes as his canvas changes. Organize a piece of matter and it organizes something else: the process is contagious. Marcel Duchamp had a clue.

  Images in the mind and then on canvas, waiting to trigger new life. He says Van Gogh was a medium for an aspect of the sun. But painting could go the next step, become conscious of another possibility. Painters could be conscious agents of these changes we are exploring.

  Every artwork is transactional, a passageway for forms and energies high or low.

  In a painting he plans, he sees a multi-leveled structure: (1) a geometric form, a geomancy of North Beach from Telegraph Hill; (2) a picture of the place; (3) a psychic sociogram of N.B.; (4) an energy body to move with a viewer who can open to it; (5) a stargate to the subtle worlds. His most complex work. It sounds a little crazy.

  Edward Weston’s Daybooks. His seeing was the power in his photographs. But he saw with more than his eyes. To paint with body, mind and heart. To think that he could do so much with a camera’s glass eye! His intentionality passed into film.

  Reveries of Big Sur, a mass of gray splendor . . . Partington Ridge suspended above the fog and every sound, just the peaks of the Coast Range visible, rising through the sea of mist and stretching for a hundred miles to Morro Bay. Edward Weston leaves his vistas for us. A person can open a land, or a region of the mind.

  Reminisced today about those talks around Henry’s fireplace on fogged-in days like this. Harry Dick Ross, Emil, Nick Roosevelt, Brett, Eve. Such days to fire the heart. We are led by a network of friends.

  No supermind without friends and such conversations.

  Playboy’s book on Henry a handsome tribute. Looked at Henry’s letters to Durrell today. Links to Justine and Balthazaar? Durrell some kind of medium? Kirov in Merlin’s? The Devil as the Great Connector?

  November 18

  Alcatraz floated away! The sea and the sky joined in a plane of gray and the island was suspended. Then it rose from the water like a giant castle.

  “When the mind has no place where it can rest, the maha-mudra is present.” Ships sail through the mind and disappear in the Golden Gate. Belvedere Island upside down, Coit Tower into ground. Let the earthquake come: it is in the mind already.

  4:30. A rainbow rising steeply from the Richmond refineries. The sky clearing and a powder blue sea. The tallest rainbow I have ever seen.

  No more mind tacked down with thoughts. It is all pulled loose.

  Evening. The field broke open. An unexpected presence here in my apartment. It always seems strongest as they start a new descent.

  November 19

  Jacob is a natural dehasiddha. He was born with these powers: his inescapable interior sight, his ability to see through the eye of the cell. And this prodigious command of his organism, half-conscious for so many years, but growing into the powers we have seen these last six weeks.

  Pradhana is a term from the Samkhya system that approximates the thing they are trying to fathom, where matter arises from mind, bringing back hints of the First Day, in this body where all time is remembered.

  Evening. Something tremendous is happening. Tonight I couldn’t watch him. They say that every person who saw him in this state would see something different, because their filters vary. Like Malacandra and Perelandra in the C.S. Lewis trilogy, this archon must find a way to meet us.

  There was a sense that a new power and light came down for a moment into the world around us.

  November 20

  By necessity, this account is only shorthand, for my state resists all verbal focus. And a miserable shorthand it is, for how can I possibly describe what has happened? Today, our adventure took a radical turn.

  It began this morning when I went to his place. He was completely withdrawn, sitting erect in a chair in the space they have cleared in his studio. Corinne had left for the morning, and the apartment had an eerie silence. Kazi asked me to sit in the studio, said he would go out for a walk to get some distance from the intensity of the night before.

  J. seemed unaware of anything around him. The skin of his face was pulled taut, as if some inner vacuum were sucking him toward it, and there was a look in his face like portraits of Ramakrishna in samadhi. It was hard for me to watch him. Sat in a chair in the corner instead, then slipped into unawareness of externals. Sat there for almost two hours with thoughts a hundred miles away. An effortless samadhi— wider, more lucid than any I have ever felt. No hint of agony or struggle at all, just an ever-widening grace and silence.

  Then I opened my eyes to find him staring at me! I couldn’t tell whether he saw me or not, and sensed that he might be in trouble. Remembering it now is still hard, for it seemed that the body in that chair did not belong to Jacob Atabet. It had been replaced by a lifeless automaton. His eyes almost blank, he gestured stiffly to indicate I should pull my chair closer. Obeyed him as if I were in hypnotic trance, sat down about four feet in front of him. Then I felt the beginnings of an awful transition. He was drawing me into his state.

  I closed my eyes and found a stillness at the center of it. Could I follow him to the places he was trying to enter? A vortex and a tumbling sea. Several moments passed until the spinning stopped, then I opened my eyes to see a single bar of silver light before me, hovering vertically where his body had been.

  A single pulsing bar of silver light.

  Slowly it turned to a horizontal position and in its place there appeared a vista I could see with my eyes open, stretching for miles, a ravishing sight that stabbed through me like a sword of ecstasy.

  Then nausea. The vision collapsed and Jacob sat there dumbly, like a corpse. “There will be no shortcuts into this,” he whispered. “You have seen what the world might look like.” For a moment we stared at each other and I had the thought that his body might be a ventriloquist’s dummy! Then he fell forward toward me and I helped him sink down to the floor. He gestured vaguely toward the bedroom. Did he want me to carry him there? Almost overcome by fear, I tried to help him up, but I couldn’t move him. To my enormous relief Kazi came into the room and together we carried him into the bedroom. J. sat on the bed with a weak smile and said he was all right, tried to reassure me. He had been operating his body from a distance! he murmured. It was obvious he was totally spent.

  Kazi asked me to go into the kitchen and make J. something warm to drink, which I did, shaking now and in a state of shock. While I was standing by the stove, Corinne appeared and went into the bedroom. Reinforcements had arrived just in time.

  And then—strangeness upon strangeness—I felt drunk, the bar of silver light was coming in and out of focus. It wanted to break open, and if it did I would be swept into a state I might not manage. I went out to the deck trying to shake it off, and Corinne came out to see me. “Jacob wants us to go out and walk it off,” she said, and together we went down the stairs. I stumbled along in a daze. A moment later—I cannot remember exactly how we got there—we found a table at the North Beach Restaurant. Had a beer and got completely drunk. Started seeing dancing forms in every movement: a man smiled and dazzling forms rose in the air; when he frowned they plunged to earth like comets. Corinne winked and two worlds split apart with a flood of happiness. Whatever J. had touched had taken possession of my brain and nervous system.

  She helped me through it with her even humor. Without her I could have panicked. “This curly fork,” I said. “When I lift it the walls come apart.” And indeed with every flick of the thing I would see cascading streams of silver light running through the restaurant. Each face had worlds behind it. Each movement triggered images of archetypal forms, an unimaginable beauty and passion stretching through aeons to come. I was seeing two worlds at once, this one and another Jacob had drawn me into.

  Gradually it passed. Balancing between second sight, nausea, and the effect of the beer I slowly came back to normal. But what an afterglow it left me! All day
I have walked around as if I were weightless. A gentle ecstasy wells up from every move I make.

  Then, about seven o’clock, Corinne called to say that the Descent had ended! Jacob said his voyage to the First Day had turned into a vision of the planet’s possible future! The things I saw this noon were my own filtered version of it. For the next few days he will try to see as much of it as he can. They want me to do the same. She said I shouldn’t leave the apartment until tomorrow. I should simply sit here in silence and let all impressions register fully.

  It is 11:00 p.m. now. The quicksilver visitations of this noon have vanished and there are only fleeting memories of those marvelous quasi-human forms surrounding every face and gesture. Do I have a truer intuition of what our future might look like? Will it be easier now to see these possibilities emerging in the world around me?

  If that’s the case, if this opening is a valid glimpse of things to come, it is made possible by the state of grace around it, the beatitude from which those forms I saw all take their life.

  Midnight. Corinne called again. J. is flooded by his vision, wants to know what I am seeing. Told them I have lost the specifics of it, though there is still this all-sustaining grace. Corinne is quietly excited. J. says the whole world and everybody in it will enjoy the things we are seeing. Kazi says we have seen a way “to finish the rainbow.”

  2:00 a.m. What this all means grows uncertain. On the one hand I know that I see some portion, some thin cross-section of the world’s future—or at least this human body’s future. But I also know how we can project our fancies into these floods of unexpected inspiration.

  But this much is certain: every face and every human gesture is connected with a larger possibility. That I saw clearly today. Everything is coiled, waiting to spring to richer life.

  That this kind of vision would happen now, at this point in our enterprise, makes sense to me. With every reclamation of the past there is new freedom to open the future. We have seen it in all the natural sciences and psychotherapies. Is this what the Tibetan shamans meant by “completing the rainbow”?

  I know I will be able to comprehend the world’s drama of unfoldment with more certainty and confidence now. A whole level of striving has dropped away, for I know more deeply than before that the world is completed. Vision has suddenly become aristocratic.

  November 21

  Morning. Slept soundly. But yesterday’s events seem strangely distant. I feel numb all over. Reading what I wrote here last night I give thanks that I am keeping these records. A journal is one good antidote to our genius for repression and forgetting.

  Called J.’s apartment. He is still surrounded by visions of the future, said Corinne. The animan siddhi has become the mahiman siddhi, the microscope the macroscope. But she sounded worried. Was she keeping something from me? This morning I will go out for a run. It might keep this numbness from getting worse.

  Evening. My hand is shaking as I write this. At 10 a.m. a man from Stanford Research Institute called the Press, said he was inquiring about someone named Corvin for “people in the Department of Defense.” Sounded strangely remote and metallic. Said there are rumors of psychic weapons being developed in the USSR, scoffed at them, then said there was a rumor that Corvin had been to Russia and knew all about it. Told him I didn’t know anyone named Corvin.

  Then that call from Corinne. Jacob had almost strangled!

  Horowitz there when I arrived, shaken and drawn. Jacob was distant and vacant; said that “something almost blew him apart.” I told them about my own midnight visitor, Kazi had me act it out, getting into my sense of what the dream would have been like if I had been able to sleep. Got hold of something that seemed to connect with that phone call from SRI. Is there an opposition working at many levels? Is Kirov linked to DOD to entities in Mind-at-large and the sub-cellular level? How far-reaching will this opposition be? How much of it is conscious? The Pradhana is inertia, a sleeping dragon, protecting its secret as long as it can.

  Jacob lay on the deck in the sun for the rest of the day, Kazi chanting near him. Horowitz calls it “general fatigue,” is turning out to be an extraordinary friend. I am sure he believes Jacob, though it is stretching him hard.

  Then, Kazi said that Jacob’s subtle body was “half ripped apart.” Says physical symptoms will start appearing tomorrow. “One half of his head is flapping in the wind.” He claims it is almost impossible to recover from such an accident. He has enormous coherence in the “Dharmakaya” though, a subtle body that is nearly indestructible. I brought them something to eat tonight. Corinne can’t leave when J. is in this state. The Echeverrias are coming back from Elko tomorrow, just in time.

  Then, as I left, Corinne said Jacob’s physical body might die.

  November 22

  Noon. Horowitz, Kazi and Corinne with Jacob. He looks terrible now. Kazi was right. Half of his face is deeply bruised. Horowitz says it is a hemorrhage in the cheek, says he has never seen anything like it. Kazi says Jacob’s body is picking up the impression now from the damage in the subtle body. Wonders if Jacob will ever be able to try this again.

  Then at eleven a second call from the man from SRI. Wanted to know if I knew a “Vladmir Kirov.” Someone knows about all of this! Asked him to come up to see me tomorrow. I must see what he looks like. Should I tell them what I know? If opposition is connected, it certainly can’t be conscious.

  Evening. Kazi and Corinne are steadily holding him in stillness, while he lies there in some kind of trance: Turned toward “the gentlest light” they can summon. Suddenly I was filled with fear. When Kazi saw it he asked me to leave. Echeverrias are back and helping out. How they put up with all this I will never know.

  Called at eight. Corinne was reassuring. Jacob had swallowed some milk.

  November 23

  Jacob the same. The man from SRI came at eleven. Looks bland and unimaginative, some kind of “systems planner.” Says he once studied Scientology. I told him about my correspondence with Russia. Didn’t mention Prague—who knows how far the Kirov network stretches. Everything now is possible.

  Did I make a mistake in telling him? Didn’t mention Magyar. Said that I had heard of Kirov and that people think he is some kind of double agent, a hero maybe or a pathetic figure or the very devil himself. I said that he seems to be working for the Russian government, in spite of his defection. The man seemed to believe me. I was perfectly composed with him, in spite of my state. There was nothing around him to evoke my midnight visitor or anything else. Maybe the man is simply following some random lead for people in the DOD. God knows they have to check up on these rumors of psychic warfare.

  Evening. Kept quiet all day in the office. Casey Sills wants to know about J. I told her nothing. By three o’clock I felt better, remembered St. Teresa’s statement (or St. Ignatius’?) that a half hour in orison would relieve any failure. Read the Four Quartets. Called Telegraph Place to find that Jacob is a little better. Kazi says his psychic head is back in one piece. We are like the first planes of Kitty Hawk, with our tattered streamers of mindstuff flapping in the psychic breeze. Told them about the man from SRI. Both Corinne and Kazi say they will not tell Jacob anything until tomorrow. I too should “lean into the gentlest light.”

  November 24

  Morning. A dream: of moments alone in a wood-paneled room in London, a shaft of sunlight with motes of dust. The line from The Dry Salvages, “the future is a faded song” kept running through the scene. When I woke this morning I turned to the passage: “You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure, that time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.”

  Relax from this impossible future. I am in their hands now. I will help in any way I can.

  But Jacob relaxed from his impossible future again and again, and still keeps plunging on.

  “Love is most nearly itself

  When here and now cease to matter.

  Old men ought to be explorers

  Here and there does not matter


  We must be still and still moving

  Into another intensity

  For a further union, a deeper communion

  . . . .

  In my end is my beginning.”

  I remember these assimilated wisdoms and earlier intensities: St. John of the Cross, Ramana Maharshi, Brother Lawrence, the Cloud of Unknowing—and come out here at the edge of the First Day. In my end is my beginning.

  Noon. He continues to improve. Kazi told him about my visitor. J. said he had a dream about “a nation’s hotel,” a place looking out on a huge garden with children playing soldier, and parapets with flags. Was I there? He wanted Kazi or Corinne to ask if any of it made sense. It doesn’t.

  Evening. He looks better. Sat on deck in the sunlight. Says the “expedition” is over for a while. Then I flashed on his dream: “the nation’s hotel” as the National Hotel, the garden as Red Square, the flags and parapets of the Kremlin! He was reaching out toward Russia and Kirov. Both of us are scanning the horizon for danger signals and lost connections. For a moment we tried to fathom it, but he didn’t have the strength.

  Does force create counter-force, cutting off a part of the self? Is the drain he feels a sign of isolation and secret violence? Is Kirov a sign of our willfulness? I will talk to him about this when he feels better. But he has always said that something is taking him, that the future is here already (though full of surprises), and that our destination is a place where opposition is no longer. The Dragon will have yielded its secret.

  November 25

  Afternoon. He looked like Ramana Maharshi, sorely wounded. Then I could see him changing. Boundaries blurring, for a moment we merged. Isn’t this transformation enough? It is a day to remember, impossible ever to forget. Like Porphyry watching Plotinus, I saw him return to the One. His attempt is not to seize a foreign body. It is rather to become the thing we already are.