Jacob Atabet

by Michael Murphy

  “Hell. At least it went off.” He was rubbing himself hard with a towel. “Some of them don’t.”

  “Mine certainly did. Don’t you think?”

  “Well, did it?”

  “Well, I think so.”

  “You’re the one to tell,” he said.

  We drove along in silence. There was a pattern to all of these symptoms once you saw where they wanted to go. “Did I ever tell you about my driving?” I asked when we stopped for a light. “I nearly always feel better when the car is moving.”

  “You feel better when?”—he sounded distracted.

  “Whenever the car’s moving. I guess it makes me feel like I’m going somewhere.”

  “Yes, I’d say so,” he said. But I could tell his attention had wandered. We stopped for another light. Maybe this was the reason so many people needed cars, I thought—to give them a sense they were headed somewhere, or anywhere, in this age without bearings.

  He put his hands on the dashboard. “Whew! they’re still coming,” he whispered. “It’s hard to slow down.”

  “Do you want me to stop?” I asked, masking my alarm.

  “It’s all right,” he said weakly. “There’s always this second wave.”

  The cars coming past caught the sunlight in a startling quick river of metal and glass. I turned off Columbus Avenue and drove up the hill toward his place. When I parked he ran toward the stairs. “I’ll leave the gates open,” he shouted back. “Lock them behind you.”

  When I got to the roof he was singing in the shower. I could hear an old Spanish song. “Hey, heat up that soup,” he yelled. “I’m gonna stay in here until all the hot water is gone.”

  I looked in the refrigerator and found a jar of minestrone. The singing and shower must help him come back to normal, I thought.

  “Let’s eat!” he said, wrapping a towel around his waist as he came into the kitchen. “Serve it up! I’m starving!” I sliced a loaf of French bread and ladled the soup into bowls. He was rubbing his hands with anticipation. “Hah!” he breathed out. “What a day! What a glorious day!” It was warm now, well over 80 degrees, and the room was filled with sunlight. “And get down that wine. Let’s celebrate!” If the world seemed precarious, he didn’t show it. He drank the first bowl down and poured himself another. Then he pounded the table. “The ocean is good!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got to get you out there. Don’t you like to swim?”

  “I like to swim. But it’s a little rough for me out there. And cold.”

  “But you said you were a good swimmer.”

  “Not with all those sharks.”

  “They don’t bother you if you’re careful.” He waved the fear away. “And our bodies love the sea. I think it cures diseases. The guys at the Dolphin Southend Club think so. You’ve seen them swimming at Aquatic Park. Some of them are about a hundred years old.”

  “Well, maybe,” I said. “But I’ve never liked it. There’s something about tidepools and seaweed and stuff.”

  “Yeah, you told me. I thought it was something like that. But I tell you what. We’ll go out to Bolinas and learn how to walk on the water!”

  He had been urging me to make a trip to Stinson Beach so that we could swim across the Bolinas Lagoon. From his insistence it seemed that this particular feat held a clue to the mysteries. I asked if there were any other trials he wanted to put me through.

  “A few,” he said with a deadpan expression. “A few. But we’ll take them one at a time.”

  What a coward I was to shrink from these health-giving adventures. If he was willing to try them with his unpredictable physiology, what was I afraid of? “All right,” I said. “I’ll swim the goddamned Bolinas Lagoon.”

  “That’s the spirit,” he grinned. “But isn’t this a day?” He unwrapped his towel and walked stark naked onto the deck. The sunlight seemed to fill him with strength.

  For several minutes he walked back and forth surveying the city, oblivious to peeping toms on other roofs. His experience in the water seemed forgotten. What courage he had, I thought, to plunge into life like this with a nervous system so full of surprises. What courage and what trust. In these three days there had been little to support Armen Cross’s evaluation of him.

  11

  AUGUST 3

  Today he asked me if I would tutor him in the philosophy and history I outline in my book. He wants to meet five days a week at his place, in the afternoons, and go through my arguments systematically. In return, he will help me with a practice. In fact, all three of them will help, he said! Apparently they have decided to take me into their cabal.

  The prospect fills me with excitement and apprehension. Am I capable of the discipline they will expect?

  August 7

  Our fourth meeting today. He wanted me to outline Hegel’s system for them. Talked about the Third Age of the Spirit until five o’clock, with comparisons to Aurobindo and Henry James, Sr.! He is fascinated that Greatgrandfather Fall knew the elder James. Gave me lessons on how to face the psychic hemorrhaging of Fall genes. Kazi gave me a collection of diagrams to meditate on. He says they are like Tibetan ghost traps to catch my demons with. Am meditating now each morning and night.

  August 14

  Our seminar has lasted two weeks now. More and more we are relating the great ideas of metaphysics to our own lives. Kazi is a wonder of learning. Today he compared the teachings of Tilopa with some things I read from Heraclitus. Each great world-view, he says, springs from one of the Brahmasiddhis—is a reification of one great experience. Agrees with me completely that Being and Becoming, nirvana and evolution, are compatible truths. Says that Part Three of my book is the most interesting section.

  Atabet is taking me into his confidence more and more. Am learning about his life in detail. Today he described a turning point in his experience which I will attempt to write out in his own words.

  “It was another death,” he said. “And another life. It came on so fast and was so overwhelming. And it came with no real warning, the whole world yawning open as if someone had shot me full of LSD. Of course later I could see there had been signs—a kind of nausea the two days before and trouble sleeping and a tremendous brightness everywhere. But I hadn’t seen it coming. I thought the brightness was part of my fascination with light.

  “For two years then—this was the summer of ’62—I’d been reading everything I could find about the sun and Van Gogh and the old esoteric idea of the sun within the sun. But then it broke open all at once, and for a couple of hours I was totally split. The witness here,” he held his palm above his head, “while the world around was in chaos. I could switch my consciousness to either place at will, which was something new. Something totally new. The first time things had come open like that, in ’47, there had been no witness, no consciousness intact. Now there was. I could even bring peace and light down into my brain. But only for a couple of hours, and finally it didn’t work. The light show kept roaring along and I simply had to let it happen.

  “That’s the way Carlos found me, completely zonked out, absorbed in trance by the stove here. I’d been sitting like that for almost 24 hours.” He shook his head with wonder. “And the world wouldn’t slow down for another three days. Kazi and Corinne and the Echeverrias were watching over me the whole time, just like last month, until I got my landlegs back. And then it took another month to get everything under control.

  “That’s why this section on the danger of the siddhis is important. They’re no laughing matter.” He took the manuscript onto his lap. “Because that’s what was happening then. Whatever had triggered that opening was leading me toward places and powers that were impossible to handle, even though I’d practiced those disciplines for fifteen years. Every new influx like that is dynamite to the system.

  “Take your list of the siddhis. Anima, shrinking to the size of an atom? That had started back in ’47 but now it came on with a rush—like someone had turned my binoculars around and sent me hurtling down this tunnel. Then I
went in the opposite direction. Like the mahima siddhi, I felt as wide as the city.

  “And laghima, as light as a feather? I felt I could levitate.” He stretched an imaginary filament in front of his face. “If I could stretch it a little bit further, just a little bit, I would lift right off of the ground. And garima? I tell you at times I felt like a rock. No one could move me. That’s a secret, you know, among some catatonics. They get so heavy that none of the doctors or nurses can lift them. And prapti? There were all sorts of moons I could touch. It’s amazing how suggestive this list is, though you could add a lot more. But when it comes on like that—with that force—it’s impossible to control at first. There’s too much energy for the filters of the brain to handle. Here I was, fifteen years into a balanced practice, and still I came apart. Of course these genes of mine are kind of heroic. That part runs in the family.” We had talked about his family’s schizophrenia. Once three of his relatives had been in Agnews State Hospital at the same time. “I suspect all of the siddhis are genetically based to some degree, like your psychic hemorrhaging. But they have to be held in a powerful field—ultimately in the Brahman-nature itself. That’s the reason I think you should put a skull and crossbones on this chapter. Readers should proceed at their own risk.” He smiled, as if he felt a surge of strength. “But anyway that’s how the next leg of the journey began. With help from the Tibetan doctor, I learned to navigate some of these waters. Not very much after that first flood, but a little. And after another year or so I was ready to paint again. That’s when I started doing the kind of things you’ve seen. Things like that view of the city through the eye of a cell.”

  He could see the story had shaken me. “But it’s not the same the second time around, if you’re rooted in a practice. The more firmly the self is established, the less chance you will be swept away. You’ve seen that already these last few weeks. The One is our base camp for all further adventure.”

  “But when do you finally direct the thing yourself? I mean, it sounds like your body was completely in charge.”

  “My body? What do you mean by my body?”

  “Just that. The physical body.”

  “But where is it?” he asked. “Where does it end or begin? For me it’s not that simple. Once you’ve passed through a cell, once you pass through these ordinary boundaries, it’s hard to say where the body leaves off. At the tip of my finger or the edge of a cell? Or somewhere in the DNA? Then the whole world looks like one body. Even the solar system and the galaxy and the view through the animan siddhi. All of it still developing, parts dying and being reborn . . . no, I don’t know where this body ends.”

  He paused and a shudder passed through him. “No, it’s not frightening when that . . . when the One is your central perception. No, it’s better by far than ordinary health as we know it. I would never trade them. But get me right. I’m not saying the whole thing’s entirely programmed. Back in ’62 I had a choice. I could’ve gone a number of ways. Take running. That energy would’ve carried me to some great marathons if I’d practiced, or to something like a four-minute mile. Or in pantomime? I could’ve started a theater to explore the stuff coming up from those states. There’s a strange and beautiful catatonic dance, and with the way I’m wired, well . . .” He shook his head. “There were several ways to go. I could’ve been a roaring drunk. Half the artists I know control their outburst of siddhis with booze. Though it is a form of spirit the body is an idiot savant, a stupid god that can coordinate a billion separate functions while it blunders along toward destruction. It resists each improvement it invites. It complains about every incoming power and struggles like mad for the status quo. And yet. And yet it opens into mind everywhere, and into the deeper intention. Yes, something outside ‘me’ gave the opening, and I had to surrender and go with it. But then I could build and improvise with the incoming riches.” He looked at me gravely, then smiled. “The world’s contingent, all right—you’ve said it clearly in your book. But it’s also merciful. And the mercy is deeper.”

  His confidence and strength were contagious, and I could feel my questions abating. Yet there was still a fear locked in my stomach. Would I have to follow him into these dangerous places?

  “But maybe you don’t have to do a thing,” he seemed to read my thoughts. “Except live this joy day by day, and enjoy a good practice, and spread a little light. I would say that’s enough, wouldn’t you?” There was silence, then he looked at me with a wicked expression. “Unless, of course, you want to try on the body you describe in your book.”

  August 18

  We talked today about that summer of 1962, his “second awakening,” as he calls it.

  “Unused evolutionary energy is the matrix of pain (and/or transformation).”

  Too much of it would have broken him apart, he says, while a little would strengthen his entire system. He says we are as strong as our weakest part, that is the reason for a discipline. Mind, emotions, body, all must develop to handle it. The kind of energy that erupted then, bringing rudiments of the siddhis with it, would shatter most nervous systems. For this life you have to be balanced, yet open. The right combination of stability and instability. Cells like movable shutters, and “an enveloping presence as strong as the sky.”

  He says he can help train me for it.

  Grace builds on nature, or, to use another language, nature emerging builds upon the nature that has gone before. The energy, capacities and structures for this, he thinks, gather in something he calls the “evolutionary margin,” a reservoir at the borders of control and awareness. In it, our new life moves toward expression, appearing at times to be symptoms of illness—like my visions this summer. Energy freed by leisure or a monastic regimen or adolescence or some new self-mastery might contribute to it. Like the Freudian pre-conscious it is accessible at certain times through certain conscious or half conscious maneuvers. When the self expands to embrace it, symptoms turn to grace and there is a sense of rebirth.

  If Charles Fall had had this kind of guidance, he might have written my book a hundred years ago.

  Atabet is fascinated with paleolithic shamanism. Read him a passage from Rasmussen, the Arctic explorer: “Though no shaman can explain to himself how and why, he can, by the power his brain derives from the supernatural, as it were by thought alone, divest his body of its flesh and blood, so that nothing remains but his bones. And he must then name all the parts of his body, mentioning every single bone by name; and in so doing, he must not use ordinary speech, but only the special and sacred shaman’s language which he has learned from his instructor. By thus seeing himself naked, altogether freed from the perishable and transient flesh and blood, he consecrates himself, in the sacred tongue of the shamans, to his great task, through that part of his body which will longest withstand the action of the sun, wind and weather after he is dead.” (From Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.)

  And from the same book by Rasmussen: a description of the shaman’s angakoq or quamaneq, “the mysterious light which the shaman feels in his body, within the brain, an inexplicable searchlight, a luminous fire, which enables him to see in the dark, both literally and metaphorically . . .”

  “Both literally and metaphorically”—we have talked about that for hours. How far had stone-age shamans gone? Talked about the theory that some of the ancient North Americans came over the Arctic from Europe.

  It is striking to him, as it is to me, that there was this urge then for a transformation of the flesh. Could the otherworldly religions be exceptions to the larger tradition?—the tradition stretching back to the caves of Lascaux?

  A passage from Eliade’s Shamanism (about initiatory rites in Tierra del Fuego): “The old skin must disappear and make room for a new translucent and delicate layer . . .” And the stories of initiatory dismemberment. Everywhere the urge to take the body apart and rebuild it. He is fascinated. There is no doubt that these rites and beliefs were largely symbolic of a spiritual rebirth, but there seems to be an
anticipation of the body’s eventual transfiguration. The stone-age shamans had more sense of it perhaps than the contemplatives of later ages.

  Another footnote from Eliade’s book: “The motif of doors that open only for the initiated and remain open only a short time is quite frequent in shamanic and other legends . . .” An image of stargates in the brain?

  August 19

  More talk about his experience in 1962, and the animan siddhi. For years he had passed through “this familiar point” in meditation (he showed me a place some two or three inches in front of his nose)—a “porthole into inner space.” But it had usually seemed to be a curiosity. In 1962, however, it opened into a place that seemed to branch into “spaces inside the body.” Forms like the DNA appeared and pictures of organs and cells.

  We compared his experience to mine, and to ones I have collected, and to passages from the psychiatric literature describing catatonic states. One such described an experience of “the body turning inside out, with the organs and cells on the outside.” Said he had had the same experience. Another told about a fantastic voyage through the entire body: the patient, a girl of eighteen, felt as if she were being shown “every cell from her head to her feet.” He said that something like that experience had started in him then, but that it has taken him these seven or eight years since to complete. The events of June brought it to an end, however, at least for a while.

  We talked about the dangers of reification, how a particular state gets turned into a fixed practice (or world philosophy!). “Life should be more like an acute psychotic episode!” he said. Talked about Buddhism as a reaction to the reification of the self in some of the Indian schools—anatta, no soul, in response to atman as thing. Showed him Aurobindo’s line, “never try to have the same experience twice.”

  “Spiritual growth is economical,” he said. “It takes more and more energy to keep the psyche’s structures fixed.”