End to Ordinary History

by Michael Murphy

  Footsteps on the balcony interrupted Kirov’s thought. “Sergei,” Umarov shouted, honoring Kirov’s alias. “Sergei Mironovich!” On the stairs above appeared a tall, athletic figure dressed in a yellow shirt and jeans. Kirov stood as he came down the stairs, and the two men embraced with gusto.

  Umarov’s dark face looked Spanish to Fall. In this first instant of greeting, the man resembled a Mexican rancher he had known in Arizona. The impression was strengthened by the almost identical scar that ran along the edge of his jaw.

  Umarov gestured for his visitors to sit down on the benches beside him. Then he turned to Kirov, his dark, handsome face filled with irony. “Isn’t it good,” he said in heavily accented English, “that an American brings us together? In spite of our friends in uniform.”

  “Do they still watch?” Kirov asked, nodding toward the wall.

  “Nyet,” Umarov smiled. “They have given up. But still we must be careful. A new General for Uzbekistan is trying to win promotion by finding Islamic subversives. You will have to watch him from your window in Moscow. But what about these Americans? I have their catalogue.”

  Fall glanced nervously toward the garden wall. The others smiled. “You think they are listening?” asked Umarov, his dark eyes filled with energy. “Please! They are not that good. Police microphones here do not work. You can ask our friend.” He nodded toward the young Uzbek, who sat on the ground near his feet. “He used to work for them.”

  The young man smiled shyly. Umarov lifted his arm in a gesture of nonchalance. “We seem harmless to them. I am a retired hero teaching meaningless philosophy to unemployed boys. And Volodya comes here because he owns these houses.”

  “Officially, one leases the ground from the State,” Kirov explained. “My grandfather built this compound, then gave it to Misha and me. Friends gather here to learn about the Earth of Hurqalya.”

  “The State will not reclaim it unless they want to build another boulevard,” Umarov sighed. “By the grace of Allah and our friends in Moscow, we are protected. Protected from what, I am not sure. Our bosses grow more confused—about Islam, economics, and progress. You must have seen that.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Fall answered. “When I was here in 1969, the people I met only talked about parapsychology.”

  “You shall see,” said Umarov wickedly. “They all have ten thumbs. Take a look at the plumbing in your guest house. It is an Intourist place, so you will be lucky to have hot water. But enough about them. This is more disturbing!” From a shelf behind him he pulled out the Greenwich Press catalogue. “Sergei has told you about our mosque near Samarkand and its famous mosaic. How did your Atabet paint it? Does he work for your CIA?”

  Fall smiled. “He is clairvoyant. He has been watching you.”

  “I thought so!” Umarov slapped his thigh. “The police are everywhere. But this painting is remarkable.”

  “It is pure coincidence. He told me so by phone this week.”

  Umarov studied Fall’s face as if to appraise his depth. “You are a conscientious fellow,” he said at last. “A real bulldog! Sergei tells me you have collected an encyclopedia about the mysteries of the body. Why in the name of Allah have you done that?”

  “It keeps me busy. It was a hobby, and now it’s an obsession. It gets more interesting all the time.”

  “Is he always so modest?” Umarov asked Kirov with mock surprise. “And your Atabet?” he asked Fall. “It would be hard to believe Sergei’s stories about him if we had not experienced these mysteries ourselves. Sergei, I think, has told you something about us.”

  During their flight from Moscow the night before, Fall and Kirov had compared the similarities between Atabet’s bodily changes and the traditional marks of a seer who entered the Earth of Hurqalya. “But there are differences in our understandings,” Fall said. “We have no tradition like yours to guide us.”

  “Sergei told me on the phone today about your conversations. His account was so fantastic that I want to hear it from you. Please do not be modest. This is an extravagant subject.”

  Seeing that Fall was reluctant to discuss his friend with a stranger, Kirov turned to Umarov. “Atabet was only sixteen,” he said, “when his mind was swept into God. They put him in a mental institution.” Umarov closed his eyes and nodded, and their voices hushed. “Since then,” Kirov went on, “the vision has never left him. He says it sustains all his work. What is his saying, Darwin? ‘The One is our base for all further adventure.’ ”

  Fall nodded, but did not answer. The Russian’s feeling for Atabet was more powerful than he had guessed.

  “And this painting?” Umarov asked, placing the catalogue before him. “Does it come from his visions too?”

  “Yes,” Fall said. “Nearly all his paintings do. He says they’re a place to practice the body’s transformations at a distance.”

  “But he did not choose the path,” Kirov said. “He did not start with an abstract idea. I say this, Darwin, because Umarov distrusts philosophers.”

  “From this painting,” Umarov said, “I can see that the man does not live in abstractions. You can feel his closeness to the Light.”

  “And you should know about Atabet’s visions,” Kirov said. “From his boyhood, Misha, Atabet has had an interior sight with which he can see the structures of the body, down to its cells and atoms.”

  Umarov and his Uzbek attendant listened carefully. “Yes,” Fall said. “He’s always had this gift—or affliction—in which images of bodily organs flood his consciousness. He couldn’t control it at first. It’s obsessed him for twenty years.”

  “And it leads to this painting?” Umarov slapped the catalogue. “There is more to his vision than bodily organs!”

  “I think it is best,” Kirov said to Fall, “for you to tell us step by step how Atabet reached his present understanding. I will try to keep Misha from interrupting.”

  Umarov leaned forward to catch every word.

  “It’s a complex story,” Fall said. “From the beginning his visions have led him in two directions. His first realizations were of the timeless One, of the Godhead in its essence unlimited by time and space. But then, a few months later, his visions of the body started. At first they were a torment, driving him to find out ‘Why? What is it they’re trying to tell me?’ When he found in the yoga sutras that there was a power called the animan siddhi that could focus the mind at will on the smallest thing in the universe, he saw that his hallucinations might be powers in disguise. Maybe it was his destiny to use them. So he started to welcome them. When he was twenty-one he started painting. He tried to turn them into art, practicing his inner sight in a way that seemed less frightening. Then, spontaneously, he started to paint luminous flesh, portraits of new living tissue. That led him to his vision of the body’s secret destiny, because the transformations he was painting began to appear in him. More and more it seemed that his body was incorporating the luminous states he put in his art.

  “But he had nothing to support him in this, no spiritual tradition, no textbooks, no guide. That’s where his friends were important. There’s a Tibetan lama, a rimpoche, who’s helped him. And a friend from his teens, Corinne Wilde, who’s been with him through all his changes. And then my book. My scholarly work gave him the conceptual framework he needed. Our friendship’s an incredible thing, giving me his discipline and inspiration and bringing him my intellectual support. Our work together—along with the rimpoche’s knowledge of Tibetan yoga—finally led to an experiment I told Sergei about. Atabet called it a ‘descent into matter.’ It alarmed the rest of us; in fact we tried to stop it. But he said ‘the Lord’ was forcing him to it.”

  “Forcing him to what?” Kirov asked.

  “Something was forcing him deeper into his cells and molecules, into his atoms it seemed, until he got control of the body’s most fundamental energies. The moments of luminosity he had felt for so many years could become more stable that way, he thought. Then he could master the process more d
eeply. To do it, though, he would have to go back layer by layer into the past. In trance he would contact his cells directly. Because the molecular and atomic patterns in our body are like the ones that existed in our primordial history, he called his adventure a ‘return to the First Day.’ It was a little fanciful, we thought, but he kept calling it that: ‘A descent to the First Day when matter first rises from Mind!’

  “So his adventure began. He didn’t leave his apartment for weeks, and there were some unmistakable changes in him. But after three months, he simply burned out—came close to death, I think. For the last year he’s been recuperating and assimilating the changes he passed through.”

  As Fall detailed this strange account, Umarov grew more troubled. There was silence when he finished, broken only by the rustling of leaves in the garden.

  “Who saw these changes?” Umarov finally asked. “How many of you were with him?”

  “Five or six of us, off and on, through the whole three months. But we can’t agree about what happened! It seems you have to change yourself to perceive those transformations.”

  “Well, then, how confident are you about the things you saw? You are still new to disciplines like these.”

  “I’m not certain. The experiment lasted through the autumn—morning, noon and night—and for most of that time he was focused intensely, often in a trance that charged his place in San Francisco with amazing energy. As time went on, I found myself changing my mind about the things I saw, because sometimes his presence made me feel drunk. Twice, for example, he seemed to disappear, and I thought, well, he’s changing the spin of his molecules, or the quantum action of his quarks! Maybe my eyeballs were failing. Yet the impression was overwhelming. He seemed to vanish for a minute or more. I was alone with him both times it happened. But there were more certain things. He took on a subtle luminescence that we all saw. After a while his skin looked softer, more alive, yet its boundaries seemed less definite . . .”

  “As if it were disappearing?” Umarov asked.

  “Yes. It gave that impression. But certain parts of his body seemed more volatile than others, more prone to change—his eyes and face, for example. It seemed to me at times that parts of him were moving to another world or vibrancy, while the rest would not go along. But you could sense his survival instincts stuggling to maintain balance, holding onto the body’s ordinary structure. Twice marks appeared on his chest like religious stigmata. We thought they might be a kind of circuit breaker to keep him from burning up, but that was pure speculation. Toward the end of the experiment, sometime in late November, the atmosphere around him became too intense for me. Twice I felt he was pulling me into another world completely. Once, in fact, I thought I’d landed on another planet!”

  “When these things happened,” Umarov asked, “what happened to the building? Did he break any doors or windows?”

  “How did you know? Yes—some fuses blew and there were rattlings like poltergeists. But his apartment doesn’t seem the worse for wear. If anything, it seems well preserved. That comes from his other moods. Usually it feels like this garden—still and ordered and peaceful. I felt the similarity as soon as I got here.”

  Umarov sent his student for tea, then leaned back against the wall. “Let me understand this better,” he said. “You say he could see his own insides by a direct interior sight, down to his cells and atoms. But how do you know he really saw them? We don’t have that in our tradition.”

  “He saw them first in his adolescence. Then he began to paint them. We have a friend, a hematologist, who’s taken pictures of Atabet’s blood cells under an electron microscope. Atabet says the photographs are identical to some of the images he’s seen in trance. And in medical books there are dozens of pictures like the ones he sees. He’s taken to calling some of his trances cellular or molecular or atomic samadhis, states of oneness with these various structures. But his perceptions are still more complex. Not only can he see different levels, he can see every structure of the body through different lenses of the mind—that’s how he puts it—not just the way they look under the microscope. Sometimes his seeing takes symbolic forms. Organs might look like fish, cells like cities, atoms like dancing lights.”

  “This is strange to us,” Umarov murmured. “But there is a saying in our school that this jasad, the body of ordinary elements, is ‘an earth and an ocean and a light.’ Is that like his descent into matter, in which he perceives his organs, then the ‘sea of cells’ you describe, then the brilliance of atomic patterns?”

  “If it is our destiny,” Fall said, “to uncover what is unconscious in us, then a descent like his makes sense. You can see it as a kind of remembering, or anamnesis in the Platonic sense, of the patterns and ideas in the body. If this ‘earth and ocean and light’ reflect the ancient layers of the universe, then a developing perception of them might bring a more intimate knowledge of our past. And since awareness aids self-mastery, insight like this could help us win new powers in the body. You might see it as an extension of our modern project of self-discovery, making the unconscious conscious, down to the oldest and most basic levels. That idea is a powerful guide for Atabet. He has even taken to saying that the body’s resistance to change, its homeostasis, its very stubbornness, makes it a marvelous prison from which to win new freedoms in the universe.”

  Umarov sat cross-legged on the bench, his dark features almost invisible in the growing shadows. “Sergei,” he said, using Kirov’s alias, “they have not heard about the Earth of Hurqalya, and yet they enter it step by step, telling themselves all the while that they are voyaging into the past. What a strange interpretation they give it!” He traced a line in the soil at his feet. “If this is ordinary time, or the line of biological evolution, our way to God runs like this.” He drew another line perpendicular to the first. “The resurrection of the human form will happen in a larger Earth than the one we ordinarily inhabit, in the ‘eighth climate’ of the Persian mystics, in the Earth of Hurqalya. For us, history is not before or after. History is under our feet. In our practice we don’t go back, down to the cells and atoms. We grow out of this limited space, this prison of the senses, this heavy atmosphere, so that the power and love and light we contain can expand to their rightful stature.”

  History is under our feet—Kirov silently repeated the sentence. His grandfather had often used it in disagreeing with his father. The schism that divided his family, the wound that separated his father from the wonders of Shirazi’s school, had begun with a difference in vision like the one that was unfolding now . . .

  “I do not know your teaching,” Fall said. “But maybe we are talking about completely different things. Atabet knows we can realize God without changing our worldly lives at all. He and I know that from the vantage point of spirit all history can look like samsara, a wheel of death and rebirth. But we think there must be more to the universe than that. This stupendous evolution is an unfolding of God. Part of our present crisis on earth comes from our failure to see it. But to see it the body must become a more conscious vehicle.”

  “Ah, yes!” Umarov’s dark eyes were shining. “The body will become the luminous face of the soul. It will be immortal. That is our school’s ancient witness. But for that do we need this psychic hemorrhaging? These eruptions of cells and organs that torment your Atabet? Perhaps he is blind to his gifts. Maybe the body he seeks could develop more easily if he entered Hurqalya directly.”

  “And how would he do that?”

  “Tomorrow Sergei will take you to the Well of Light. That is the best answer I can give you. Have you heard about the ‘black light’ of God’s abyss? It is an illumination that blinds our earthly eyes so that the soul may inhabit this body without causing the difficulties your Atabet suffers from. When the mind of the aspirant is lost in this holy darkness, there is a transformation from above—that is the phrase in our school—a transfiguration in which his flesh and bones are flooded with God’s baraka, His highest alchemy. Then this jasad, this bod
y of ordinary elements, can fuse with its highest light, its original person, the jism-al-asli. Here it can last for a moment, but only in the Earth of Hurqalya can it be completed. Only there can the light of this union be held with certainty. Only Hurqalya is large and free enough.” Umarov paused. “Perhaps it is the world you felt during Atabet’s trances, that opening you called another planet.”

  Fall paused before answering, turning to Kirov for guidance.

  “Misha,” Kirov smiled. “You are swift tonight. Perhaps they have another way to the body’s resurrection.”

  Umarov cocked his head to the side, forming a wicked smile. “You like this American, Sergei,” he said. “What has he done to you? I am testing his understanding.”

  Kirov answered with a disbelieving look. “Darwin,” he said, “do not be intimidated.”

  “Aha!” Umarov slapped his thigh. “Sergei, Sergei, always reconciling. Will you deny us the pleasures of combat? In spite of Sergei, Fall, I think you should ask if your friend misperceives his gifts. Perhaps it isn’t necessary to take his body apart. Maybe these cellular, these atomic samadhis are nothing but circuses—blocking the soul’s ascent.”

  “Atabet would say he hasn’t had a choice,” Fall said. “These images and trances—these samadhis—began when he was only sixteen. He had to face them or go crazy. His genes, his destiny, his soul, or God aimed him in that direction. We are all explorers, with an opportunity to follow many leadings. But some paths are peculiar to our temperaments. Ali Shirazi, it seems, found a powerful way. Atabet has one that few will choose. But the changes he has gone through are unmistakable. If you knew him, you would recognize its baraka.”

  “Ah, yes!” Umarov threw up his hands with mock disgust. “Each soul is unique. We have that too. There is a saying of the Persian sheiks that each soul is a world in itself. And each jasad, when joined to its soul, becomes a galaxy! Maybe your Atabet is a god of the sea or of the underworld! Maybe he is Poseidon or Hades!”