Jacob Atabet

by Michael Murphy

  Then he showed me a diagram he had made as we talked. A phrase at the bottom is disturbing—“Descent to the First Day attempted.” Is it his way of hinting that something momentous is happening to him? “Bernardine Neri,” he said, “would not have died so young if she had followed her visions into the depths they pointed to. We are only allowed a certain time at every stage of our journey, however blessed that stage might be.”

  June 4

  How did his body change after those openings in 1947 to allow his state of grace? Or after his episode in ’62 to allow his descents to the cells and fine structures? What hierarchical restructurings? Such quantum jumps in state occur at every level, from the orbits of electrons to collapse of the stars, from falling in love to mastering the essentials of algebra. With changes like his, the entire system is involved, from top to bottom it seems. He is intent to know more about the fundamentals of whole-system change, a subject we will have to study. Then the puzzling news: he said that for weeks he has been able to “move closer” to the things he perceives through the eye of the cell. He thinks he could “touch” those molecular cities. But with what results? What transformations in his system allow it?

  Talked to Horowitz this afternoon about it. A.’s “unusual ecology” of erythrocytes persists, but he hasn’t been able to locate anything other than that. Yet A. thinks there has been a subtle reshuffling through his entire body—an “immense experiment sweeping through the cells.”

  For awhile we talked about it. Could he tell me more exactly what was happening?

  “It’s as if some secret code is feeding the bio-computer,” he said. “But I’m not sure where the code is coming from, or how long it will last.” We came up with five separate mechanisms that might be mediating these changes: “psychokinetic influences from mind to body”; “telepathic communication” between the cells; “vibratory form-giving resonance” between cells, organelles, genes, and even the atoms themselves (he showed me Hans Jenny’s Cymatics and Schwenk’s Sensitive Chaos with pictures that suggest the process); “a wildfire intercellular RNA transfer(!)”; and the release of dormant genes. There is an “internal music,” he says, that has a mantric power to bring new shapes to all the cells and elements (Cymatics, Chap. 7); maybe religious chanting, the Jesus prayer of the Philokalia, mantram yoga join with it to tune our brain and body to the cosmic harmonies.

  “But after all samadhis,” he said, “continue practice of a deepening witness and the perception of the One in everything. There must be enough purusha to handle the increasing prakriti.”

  I don’t know what to make of this. He is clearly in the midst of another change he cannot fathom.

  June 6

  Another strange incident today. Met him at Washington Square about eleven a.m. and we walked on the grass for awhile. Then I sat on a bench and watched him while he paced up and down. From a distance of a hundred yards or so he seemed smaller than usual, as if suspended in a pocket or indentation separate from the space around him. It was an impression I could not shake. Suddenly, I felt faint. When I told him, he said to get up and walk beside him to Telegraph Place. He said I was picking up something around him, something that Corinne and Kazi have felt since last Thursday. We sat in silence on the deck for half an hour, letting my discomfort pass, then he took me inside and told me that Wednesday night he had fallen into “the molecular cities.” He doesn’t know who or what they are, but the scene could not have been a figment of his “local” mind. The place was definitely “out there,” in some other locality. And he thinks this new power carries something with it that might be contagious. That’s what I felt in the square.

  We joked about “molecular samadhi.” Is an atomic samadhi possible next? Or a samadhi of the quarks!

  “There is a new vibrancy to everything I see there,” he said, “that an electron microscope could never capture. You would need some kind of movie camera. And then it would be too terrifying for most people to watch!” I reminded him that there are spins and oscillations at the molecular and atomic level at the rate of millions or billions per second, and said that he might be perceiving it directly. He said that was probably true. “I’ve always seen this pulsation and this radiance, but never like this—never so close and vivid, so overwhelming.” He seemed shaken by it. “Maybe these powers are always closer than we think. Maybe that’s why you so easily feel them when I do.”

  Then came the most disturbing part. Perhaps from the shock I felt at this pronouncement or from my old involuntary nystagmus, I couldn’t see him for a moment. It is hard to say how long it lasted. I could see the rest of the room, but he had disappeared completely. Neither of us knows what happened.

  Felt awful when I got back to the apartment. Would every change he went through demand something from me?

  But this reliable body, developed through so many aeons to survive in the midst of a million bombardments, could reorder its environment in the blink of an eye. No matter if the bombardments came at a dozen levels at once, my survival programs would be quick and supple enough to screen them out. I closed my eyes to watch. Something would have to get in, some tiniest hint of his new perception. But there was only a sense of relief, the profound satisfaction of surviving.

  June 8

  Thirteen of his paintings today on the walls of his studio. He has bought my proposal that the Greenwich Press publish an edition of his works.

  What a pageant. It is more disturbing than any collection of paintings I have seen, mainly vistas of sealife and human organs and the edges of cities glimpsed through his “paleoscope.” As we sat there deciding how to arrange them in the portfolio, he said that “the body is all time remembered.”

  He pointed to one with golden tendrils reaching out toward the viewer through layers of flesh, and said that the body is as old as the universe. “The sun is a symbol of the world’s birth.” Started talking about his obsession with the sun, how he studied Van Gogh, the alchemists, Turner . . . . Van Gogh, he says, was unconsciously pressing toward “these memories of the First Day.” He needed a Darwin Fall, though, to understand what was happening. We all need a larger perspective.

  One picture shows an ancient city embedded in hills like muscular flesh. He said that when he painted it he realized what Einstein must have felt in coming to his theories. “It would be easier,” he said, “to put time and space in one mathematical equation if you sensed the utter reality of this history, this resonance we have with all the layers of our past. Because when you enter the body this way, it’s as if time and space are one. No matter where I go it all seems familiar. We remember our history because in some sense it is happening now. The past is somehow present.”

  He pointed to the one painting of his we have from the early 1960s, of a pale sun hovering over Russian Hill—a winter sun, it seems, that blinks with an Op Art effect. He said we couldn’t put it in the book. When I protested that it was the tamest one in the collection, he picked it up and stuck it behind a pile of boxes. The thing is definitely out. There is a perception in it, he said, that is destructive to certain kinds of people. Like so many things he’s said this month, his comments have upset me. Something is going on inside him that he is not telling us about. Kazi and Corinne seem worried too, though neither of them want to talk about it. For the first time, there is a distance between us.

  June 9

  This seeing brings “time into space.” (And other spaces into this space.) Memory becomes direct perception.

  How far away is the Day of Creation? Is it measured in light years or aeons? (“Light-year” measures distance while it connotes time passing.)

  “We remember our history because in some sense it is happening now”: the statement seems so real for him. But he is not resting easy with it. There is that old pressure to go deeper, to test the possibility. Why can’t he let these barriers be?

  June 11

  His curiosity about theoretical physics has grown these last few months. I think his new state has something to
do with it. He is living closer to those inexplicable worlds his interior vision reveals, worlds to which he must attach his own fumbling language. What, for example, are those “molecular cities”? They might be microscopic crystals that exist in the cell, or patterns at the atomic level upon which he can project a hundred images. Speculations derived from general relativity, quantum theory and big-bang cosmology could provide clues to the things he is seeing. There are these connections, among others:

  The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect and Bell’s Theorem. They suggest the synchronicity, the “simultaneous arising,” that seems to rule the universe revealed to unfettered vision. This at every level.

  Extreme curvature in space-time. As he approaches those tantalizing cities revealed by interior vision he has to wonder how he got there. This kind of map, with its unexpected shortcuts into the Absolute Elsewhere, outside the forward or backward light-cone, provides a compelling model for the process. “Einstein-Rosen bridges,” “wormholes,” “extreme warps in space-time” suggest mechanisms for these sudden falls to worlds we have never seen before. “Crazy as it seems,” he said, “they provide some of the most suggestive metaphors I’ve encountered in any tradition to describe the turns I take. Do you think we might touch other populated worlds through these singularities!” One of the eight kayasiddhis is prapti, the yogi’s ability to touch the moon with his finger Closed time-like world lines. The idea that the future can enter the present, curving back so to speak “through light-cones tipped in extremely curved space-time,” seems right in these inside-out upside-down states where there is no telling whether a thing has happened or will happen. Are his molecular cities coming from the future or ruins in some other place? Or do they exist now? Memory becomes direct perception. Are there memories of the future?

  The “zero-point” energy due to quantum-mechanical fluctuations in space has been worked out by David Bohm and others. I read a passage about it to him last night and he said it reminded him of an esoteric idea about the “invisible sun.” Some of the alchemists, he said, were attempting a union with it. The Bohm quote is from his Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. There is also an old American Indian idea about the “sun within the sun.”

  My koan for the group last night. If the curvature of space-time does not exist in space (and it doesn’t), what does it exist in?

  In Mind, J. answered, in Mind that is not brain-limited. He is fascinated with our inability to model our universe on the basis of ordinary experience. That it is finite but unbounded delights him. “When I heard that,” he said, “I knew the physicists were on the right track!”

  [The quote from David Bohm that Fall refers to is given in full on page 213.—Ed.]

  June 13

  Purusha deepening, then receding. Stayed with the simple act of witness. And then the edges of an aura, a distinct sense of something like a phantom body, extending six inches or a foot beyond my arms and chest. Could shift to a center above my head at will. Lasted for several minutes, a vivid sense of a body larger than this physical frame.

  The overall sequence then: seeing his painting; the eruption of that image of my heart and the beginnings of panic; allowing it, with his help, to run its sequence through until the stream of impressions turned to gratitude.

  Depression afterwards, and allowing that. “The highs are like the lows.” Then this phantom body.

  Love your symptoms. Atabet’s painting (a symptom in its own right) started this iatrogenic sickness which led back to the doctor and the opening and the cure. A hologram of the main game. To remember our briefing for this descent into Matter.

  More impressions later that day of memories from another human life: quick scenes of a cave in the light of a torch, of drawings on a rock, of a bullseye and people touching its center. Something that vaguely resembled the caves of Lascaux and Altamira.

  And then a kaleidoscopic run of images: a scene of the Indus River, the grotto at the Bolinas Lagoon, a maze of silken sacs that might have been a human lung, a strand of muscle fiber, capillaries breaking, spurting red cells—then a jump to those DNA-like towers roaring past and cities on a wavering horizon. Then a compression through my body, a flash of light like that day I saw him at the church, and a glimpse of pulsing colored patterns. The animan siddhi was shortening its focal length, it seemed. Was I imagining the descent he intends? Is our whole modern world preparing itself too? Is our physical and biological discovery so far a promise of this power to recall our whole history—the sunrise of our ultimate remembering?

  We have the capacity to move the focus of our seeing at various speeds and in various directions. We can descend through our hierarchical structure, into smaller more remote times, in the blink of an eye it seems. That power was working last night like a movie camera with a giant zoom lens, taking me down to a vision of atomic patterns. Must look at pictures taken through a field ion microscope. Horowitz says there might be similarities to some of the things I saw.

  June 15

  J. in trance all day, until about six o’clock this evening. Came out of it in a merry mood. After dinner we talked.

  All life is “an improvisation,” he said. If the past were as real as I made it out to be, we would be doing a tired old dance. “Surprise rules necessity,” he quoted my book. “The future is wide open.” Then more of his Fernandel expressions and sly hints. Jokes about molecular and atomic samadi. “Is it a bird or a plane? No it’s atom Sam!” What kind of game is he playing? I think Kazi and Corinne are baffled too. Is he shying away from the ordeal his daemon intends?

  June 16

  Again I tried to pin him down. Showed him the chart he had drawn and the phrase “Descent to the First Day attempted.” Would he finally explain what it meant?

  To my surprise, he said that he would. Tomorrow he will talk to us all about it.

  June 18

  My intuitions were correct. He is beginning the descent I have imagined.

  Corinne, Kazi and I were at his place last night, Horowitz came later to hear him describe the experiment. “There’s no completely adequate description of it,” he said. “All our seminars on the history of esoteric disciplines have shown us that. But it does resonate with some of the old endeavors. An alchemist might have called it the crowning stage of the Great Work, a joining with the visible and invisible sun. Aurobindo might call it a stage of the Supramental descent. There are dozens of ideas that approach it, like the reowning of time in the body (where all time is remembered) or making nature transparent to self. Isha vasyam idam sarvam,” he recited the opening lines from the Isha Upanishad. “All this is for habitation by the Lord. The list could go on and on because the process is vast and complex, and because we haven’t built a language for it. An inspired cosmologist might call it a catastrophic space-time collapse into spirit as the birth of the world is brought back to present awareness, or a journey through the Land of the Quarks, or a trip to the original Quantum! Or the opening of the Samkhya’s pradhana, the primordial Spirit-Matter. Part of the venture will be to chart these unnamed places.”

  “But to say it simply,” he said. “I think we can enter the place where matter is rising from mind. I think we can go there and hold onto the body. Everything has built up to it. And all five of us now are involved.”

  Sometime in August, he and Kazi will begin to “make a special atmosphere” at Telegraph Place. The molecular samadhi of recent weeks cannot be supported without it. From it a passageway to the fundamental physical forces will be formed. He called it “a sufficiently extended subtle body to prevent his permanent dismemberment”!

  “There’s an ocean of fire down there,” he said. “And all our experience will be needed. There are winds in those places that can scatter these cells like leaves in an autumn breeze.”

  Then he described some of the possible outcomes. Since the levels he will explore are close to matter’s original bursting from mind, he could in some sense bring the first moments of this cosmos closer to present awareness. That
is what he means by the “First Day. “All of this will happen in stages, as he feels his way gradually and tests the dangers of such a descent for his body and the world around us.

  And with this deeper access to the secrets of matter, it is possible we can assume the powers it holds—powers conceivably that will change our relationship to some of the world’s basic laws. A new control might be won over gravity, entropy, aging and death, over the formation of atomic patterns. None of this is certain, but since our explorations have given us glimpses of these powers already, it is his guess that much or all of it is within our reach. We have discussed this for a year now, and all my scholarship supports it. Seers and shamans have talked about conquests like these for thousands of years, as have certain schools of yoga, alchemy, myths and dreams. If evolution is God waking up, then something like this is intended.

  Mad as it may seem, it is possible. All my research and all his life until now point toward it. And yet it is a crazy, crazy plunge. With the dazzling vistas, there will be dangers everywhere. We are turning away from the serenity and joy of these last months to step out on an unknown continent. Tonight as I write this, it seems that we are wading into spiritual quicksand.

  PART FOUR

  (July 1971–­­December 1971)

  It is difficult to avoid the impression

  that every law of physics is mutable under

  conditions sufficiently extreme . . .

  Physicist John Archibald Wheeler

  23

  JULY 12

  A strange letter today from Prague. Magyar says that Vladimir Kirov may have defected. Hears he is living in Vienna and working with a group to perfect the Russian work with suggestion at a distance. It is conceivable, he says, that Kirov’s people are preparing to sell their services to the highest bidder. They would add psychic weapons to the arsenal of international terrorism. Is Magyar imagining it? He has been under a lot of pressure.