Jacob Atabet: A Speculative Fiction

by Michael Murphy

  There is no doubt about it: the dominant contemplative traditions during the last 2,500 years, embedded as they were in world-views that emphasized a release from the world of the flesh, had to subordinate all other psychological outcomes to the highest brahmasiddhis. If the goal is release from our first bondage in the ordinary ego, then moksha or shunyam or nirvana above everything else. The other siddhis are potential distractions. But if the goal is the earth’s fullest flowering, those neglected powers and openings assume new importance. For the transformation we see, they may be crucial.

  A. said today that the ancient ascetic disciplines fashioned the crown of illumination (crown = sahasradala), and that we are putting the jewels in it (jewels = the siddhis). Unitive consciousness is the context of our manifestation.

  He thinks that a culture-wide practice is coming, joining the ancient and modern paths. There will be a natural attraction among disciplines, he thinks, as in Patanjali’s sutras. But the frontiers are open as never before. We are more alert to the foreclosures of dogma and true belief. The mind has been freed from some of its subservient habits.

  Certain lines of the emerging synthesis inevitably resemble the old. Our concordance begins to show that. But there is this great difference about the body’s reclamation. The possibility has been there in the sutras, but as hints and glimpses only. And the new therapies and body disciplines are only scratching the surface of this possibility.

  Today he said we need to “crack the code of time and matter.” For the contemplative disciplines of the Vedanta, Buddhism, Neo-Platonism and Christianity were preoccupied with the Timeless, this age with the secrets of this evolving universe. In the traditional scriptures there is a great consensus about the return of consciousness to the Source, but no consensus at all about the world’s fate. This seems more apparent now as I read into the Upanishads. There is no doubt about Atman-Brahman or Purusha-Prakriti, but all sorts of leadings when you come to the body on earth. But Nirvana and evolution are compatible truths.

  He is above all a great dehasiddha, a master of bodily changes. Thank God he outsmarted the doctors.

  October 14

  A dream last night filled with contradictory emotion, John F. Kennedy standing on steps in front of a ruin, something like the Parthenon. Or was the ruin something still building? In the half-light I couldn’t tell. Are these times of ours a ruin?

  Every week, it seems, some new guru or therapy comes to town. The congregation wanders from one tent revival to the next. At times I think all this interest in “consciousness” is nothing but diversion and band-aids.

  Five new books came into the Press this week describing programs for enlightenment. One is an attempt to restore psychoanalysis as the definitive spiritual discipline, claiming that free association is close to Buddhist forms of meditation. The author is a lay analyst, an intense little man with bulging eyes and prissy manners. He says the book could make us a fortune. He also said that no true spiritual experience is possible until we have “worked through all our quirks and fears.” When I asked him about the enormous contemplative literature down through the ages and how it showed the way to be more complex than that, he said with total conviction that all of it came from “a more superstitious age.” And then a book on “Mind Dynamics” which is part Scientology, part Napoleon Hill, part black magic. It tells how to influence people at a distance, influence your boss through meditation, etc.—a bland, slick form of hexing. Reminds me of talks with Magyar in Prague, and rumors of Kirov’s recent work. In this Age of Consciousness there will be more stuff like this—more stupidity and psychic mischief, along with some truly malevolent forces. And then a book showing how physique and posture reveal character, in which the author represents the ideal body to be a symmetrical mannequin devoid of idiosyncrasy or character and then goes on to show a collection of “aberrant” types. It is a throwback to Lombroso in the name of “humanistic psychology,” a vicious thing really. Books like these are blind to larger perspectives. They idolize some partial insight or technique and usually put a lid on further adventure. Most of them make me want to weep.

  But Atabet says these things are preparing the field. We are only pioneers, he says, tilling the ground and casting seeds for a larger culture of the spirit.

  Is there in fact a group that has come through these initiations together? A group that has been through the disillusionment of hopes for immediate radical change? Has this group in fact been vaccinated against flashy claims and some of the obvious wrong turns? Atabet thinks there is, that it will mature in hundreds of ways to form a base for further exploration. Songs of innocence and songs of experience in the quest. Like the League in Hesse’s Journey to the East, it will give support to further discovery.

  Maybe he is right. For all the failed movements there are promising beginnings everywhere. One opening leads to another. Corinne’s gestalt therapy helps me break into a field of memory that months of meditation might never have opened. The work of Reich connects to Buddhist practice, connects to biofeedback, molecular biology, etc., etc. There is an effervescent vulgarity about this interest in consciousness and human potential that is the yeast of new discovery. A joint venture of interior practice and the physical sciences is coming. In spite of my skepticism, I know that something important is happening in the culture at large.

  October 19

  More silly proposals today for books at the Press, two of them spiritual equivalents of “total fitness in three minutes a week.” What junk. It is amazing how few have a practice.

  It is only in the light of a larger knowledge that most openings into spirit have a meaning. Until there is a solid practice, such openings are merely harbingers of a possibility, appearing today, disappearing tomorrow, reappearing as symptoms of illness the day after that. Only in a life like Atabet’s do these powers find their place.

  I can see now that underneath this spirit of holiday, the drums of the march are still beating. His entire life is aimed and cocked.

  19

  OCTOBER 20

  Though some of the initiations are difficult, this discipline is more Epicurean than heroic now. Yet the thing is fully joined, and in spite of my protests, I can not turn back. His discipline is a gentle one too. Like his crises of ’47 and ’62, the events of June will take time to recover from. It will take years for me, he says, “to get my genie into a larger bottle.”

  It seems that the Greenwich Press will turn a profit for the first time this year. I take that as a sign this life is right. Now mark the day: on November 15, I will turn the management of it over to Casey Sills. From then on my days will be free for whatever this adventure brings. With my expenses down to $800 a month and with Casey in charge at the office, I can handle the publishing business working one day a week. [Editor’s note: This letter from Fall to a friend in Vermont was inserted in the manuscript at this point.]

  October 22

  Dear________

  Thanks for your patience and forgiveness. Letters like my last one would confirm the suspicions of other old friends that California is a dangerous place for religious types, and I’m sure that some of them would have written me off by now as another casualty. For that reason you must keep these stories to yourself. My enlightenment is not to the point where I could handle the notoriety which news of this new life would bring me. Do you promise secrecy?

  As an example, Atabet says he will try to “touch” those cities he has seen through the eye of the cell. Can you hear Lyndon Porter’s response? Or Wendell Bracketts’? They might propose a nationwide committee for the preservation of minds in California. There would certainly be references in one of their columns, maybe a remark that Darwin Fall is involved in a project to launch a pyschokinetically constructed UFO! So we must preserve silence about this, as we have about your project in Vermont.

  But projects like the one named above will have to wait a while, for Atabet is laying back from the adventures of the months just past. He did damage that will take time
to heal. We have a good doctor here, a real friend, who watches over Atabet as if he were the Chief of State, and he has advised a year of recuperation. He is a research man in hematology by the way and has been studying Atabet’s physiology! I consider it Nature’s Way that he would appear on the scene. Everyone in Atabet’s orbit, in fact, seems to be there for a reason: Horowitz, the doctor, to study and protect his health, Kazi Dama for guidance in the further reaches, Corinne Wilde and the Echeverrias for friendship and the fort they provide, and me for the book and the historical perspective it gives him. It is enough to make me believe in Providence.

  Providence dictates a long holiday of spirit for him and this sometimes joyous purgatory for me. They are teaching me yoga and distance running(!) and conducting their own psychotherapy on the neurosis. Meanwhile I tutor him in the philosophy, anthropology and history my book has inspired. We meet four or five days a week now, using the manuscript for our seminar notes. It is clear that my theories and collection of evidence have helped him. For his is a strange kind of genius, in any age or place. I am now convinced he is one of those dehasiddhas the Indian books describe, a master of bodily transformation. But where do you find support for such leadings? Not in psychoanalysis, God knows. Or in the traditional yogas. Or in any church. Even the new experiments are beating around the bush in this regard. It is as if Ramakrishna or Ramana Maharshi had turned in their teens toward the body, using their purchase on spirit to plunge beyond the traditional limits of the contemplative life. For this reason, my map has been an enormous help to him.

  And I don’t have to tell you what this friendship means to me. You know the doubts I’ve had these last few years, the eruptions of imagery and increasing neurosis. We don’t have to go over that. But now my work makes sense. Our meeting has opened up a prospect that stretches as far as the eye can see.

  You ask me to describe that prospect, but I’m afraid it would take a book or two—in both prose and poetry. A few letters are just not enough. But let me make another try. To repeat what I said before, we are certain that a surprising transformation of the human form is possible through the agency of spirit and that in some sense evolution intends this. It is clear to us, however, that the great contemplative disciplines have generally missed the mark in this regard because the traditions in which they were embedded aimed at a release from embodiment, at a liberation from the wheel of death and rebirth or the world of the flesh and the devil. My book, as you know, tries to show that. Yet there is much evidence that the body can manifest the glories of spirit— evidence from myths and legends all over the world, from hypnosis and psychical research, from the lore of spiritual healing, from the stigmatic prodigies described in the religious and psychiatric literatures, from sport and Tantra, from the physical phenomena of mysticism generally, etc., etc. There is no denying the constant witness to it once you perceive the main pattern. The problem of course is in forming the discipline to give it birth.

  I would have to write another tome about the requirements of such a practice, if I knew enough. For I am a neophyte in this, a nursery school student in fact. Even Atabet and his friends are exploring. Last week, however, we wrote out a working summary of the elements such a discipline must have, and since you asked about it I will pass it along. But before I do, let me say that we are also working on a deeper structural analysis of the transformational process. In this we are trying to isolate the most basic and universal elements of practice as they exist in everything from yoga to hypnosis to modern sport. (A friend, Frank Barron, suggested that we are trying to make a table of the yogic elements.) One of these is rapport: rapport with another person, with the atman-consciousness, with the body, with the world-at-large. Another is interior vision. Another is hearing, in the sense of the Indian sravana. Our present scheme has 15 or 20 of them. We feel that once they are discerned more clearly they can form a more effective practice, because most of the disciplines we have now are like alchemy in their attempts to turn our psychic lead to gold. All of them misperceive the psychic elements to some degree. Their methods are fumbling. Part of the reason for this is that the great transformational disciplines were constructed in and for another time and place. They were embedded in another culture. But another reason is that our knowledge is still advancing. No one, we think, has the final word yet.

  But though our search for the transformative elements continues, I can offer this summary of our discipline now. In simplified form it goes something like this:

  • A first healing of the mind and heart to remove the blocks and fears, the splits and repressions that cause so much noise in our system. A modern synthesis of method and insight is emerging for this, one that combines the therapeutic approaches developed in the West since Mesmer with traditional methods like yogic meditation.

  • Right livelihood and a generous heart. You can’t explore these things when you’re running around like I was last winter and spring. Seek out the brotherhood. Make peace in your family. Do your part to help those in need. Many contemplative communities have set a beautiful example for us in their balance of interior practice and service to others.

  • A sophisticated physical training, one that leads toward the conditioned and flexible body we need for this descent into matter. Here we can draw from methods in every tradition, from the hatha yogas, martial arts, and modern approaches to bodily awareness. (My version of this includes Lilias and running a six-minute mile!)

  • The many forms of meditation, ranging from the classical observation of mental contents as in the Buddhist vipassana to Patanjali’s samyama to the further reaches of the animan siddhi. Atabet says that “the One is our basecamp for all further adventure.” In other words, we have to grow in the unitive consciousness (unitive with both the immanent and transcendent One) to know the joys and secrets of life—of this or any life, let alone the transformation we seek. Another phrasing he uses, drawing on the Samkhya tradition, is “the range of prakriti we can know is proportional to the depth of purusha.” Purusha in that sense is our truest “ego-strength,” and our first enlightenment. For the dangers to liberation grow stronger in these further reaches, there are more sources of a false enchantment. Paraphrasing St. John of the Cross, we can turn our angels into demons everywhere. A growing union with the Source keeps this new abundance in perspective.

  • The right cultivation of the siddhis or vibhutis, the powers that emerge in any practice like this. Because our aim is incarnation, not release, and because the self is a sea of lights and powers, we regard the “seedless samadhi” of the ascetic traditions as a stage but not the goal of our journey. The siddhis and vibhutis, in our view, are meant to manifest. They are facets of our future nature, our spiritual limbs and organs. We understand of course that they can be distractions or seductions from the path—that is why the scriptures warn us so often about them—but their suppression can cause problems too. Here as everywhere else you can have a return of the repressed. Atabet’s vision of a luminous figure is an example of this: until he lets that genie find its proper place, until he incorporates its truth in his life, it will beckon and torment him. Here again my book hit the mark. Its inventory of yogic powers has been put to good use by us all in recent weeks.

  • The body’s transfiguration. The appropriation by the flesh of the glories. This we know little about. As I said before, most physical transformations of this kind have been fleeting (or merely good stories). They are “like wheels on the toys of primitive men . . .” and point the way toward the future. The central question is “how?” For where you have relative certainty and wealth of method in the foundation work of transformational practice, you have almost nothing here. Is there some essential secret? Aurobindo, for example, believed that only something which he called the “Supermind” could effect the decisive change. But though his authority is great, we must take his assertion on faith. With all his experience of the further reaches Atabet doesn’t know what the Supermind is. In his experience so far, there has been no deci
sive line to cross, no definite principle or level of spirit like the one Aurobindo describes. He feels instead that we must explore into both living matter and spirit at once, effecting their marriage step by step. This makes sense to me. If there is a Supermind in Aurobindo’s sense, we will eventually come across it this way.

  The body transfigured. What would its boundaries be? Or can the process be held to one person? Atabet’s suggestibility, I think, is an aspect of his union with the world. Instability in the bodies of saints comes in part from their empathy with suffering and discord. (That is why the ancient disciplines cultivated equality of spirit, samata, the solid unity and strength of mystical practice.) Ultimately this transformation is both a social and individual enterprise. For however gifted a person may be, he is lifted up or brought down by the world around him. It is an ecological and political as well as a neurological opportunity.

  Our way forward can be stated simply though: the progressive extension of awareness and control to the organs, cells, molecules and fundamental forces. This has been Atabet’s journey since his teens, his descent into matter which our meeting has helped to illumine. Our body, he says, is a tower of mirrored doors to the world at large. Revealing and reowning its immense hierarchical structure is possible because our deepest self made it in the first place. Part of the game is dismembering. Part is remembering—in both senses of the word. For with the knowledge and control we have won we can begin to recreate this human form so that it may house and express a fuller consciousness and capacity. Being an artist, Atabet loves this metaphor. He is still going to school, you might say, to master the elements of his body’s re-creation. His paintings are a place to practice the art at a distance.

  This increase of awareness and control can be seen as an extension of the entire therapeutic enterprise to date, a making the unconscious conscious right down to the original Quantum. As in all good therapy, insight is in the service of freedom. For if the world’s birth is our first and ultimate trauma (our cosmic parents’ Big Bang?), then remembering that first Primal Scene could make way for our ultimate healing. If we could finally remember how our bodies were made—all the way back to that Instant in which these billion galaxies burst forth from a seed the size of a planet or proton—we would win a new freedom and mastery in this form of spirit we call matter. Cosmically speaking, we would come of age.