Jacob Atabet
Authors: Michael Murphy
A Speculative Fiction
Michael Murphy
For Sri Aurobindo
and
Frederic Spiegelberg
who introduced me to these possibilities
Editor’s Introduction
I
T IS HARD TO TELL
whether the strangely formed narrative that follows is a record of actual events or an imaginative probe of the future. My inquiries during the past four years have only increased its mystery—first, by confirming Darwin Fall’s description of his own transformation from an intensely tormented man on the verge of a mental breakdown into a figure of exceptional health and well-being, and second, by failing to establish the fact that there was an Atabet or Echeverria family living near Telegraph Place, or a Corinne Wilde or a Kazi Dama. Various minor figures in the story are people I recognize (indeed, I appear for a moment myself), but Fall must have changed the names of the central characters or made them up entirely. To make matters more confusing, Casey Sills, Fall’s closest associate in the publishing business, says she never met a Jacob Atabet, though he had supposedly lived in North Beach for more than twenty-three years. Yet she believes there had to be someone like him, Fall’s story was so vivid and consistent. Why then, did Fall choose such a convoluted way of describing the man? And why did he leave his account of their adventure with me?
In July of 1972, he approached me with his strange request. He was about to take a trip to Russia and Western Europe to investigate research there on “the clairvoyant perception of atomic structure” and wanted to leave his papers in my custody until he returned. It was important they be held in safekeeping, he said, because the experiment they described had “released forces that could be used for good or evil.” The request was surprising, for we had never to my mind established a relationship close enough to warrant such trust. I agreed to keep his papers only because I was certain he would soon come back to claim them. In the days following his visit, however, I began to realize how strange this custody was and tried to contact him through the Greenwich Press—only to find that he had left the city already. I was never to see him again.
When I read his memoirs that summer I sensed at once that they might be a record of something momentous. It is an opinion I still hold. If the story they tell is true, of course, it describes a breakthrough in consciousness that points the way toward new vistas of adventure and discovery. “Jacob Atabet” would have to be one of those
dehasiddhas
of the Yogic tradition that Fall describes is his journals, a master of bodily transformation who was achieving an unprecedented conquest of matter. That such a person actually exists (or existed) seems plausible to me, increasingly so as the discoveries of psychology and physics continue to reveal the intertwinings of mind and the physical world. It is inevitable, I think, that pioneers like this will appear in our midst, that the modern West will produce its own kind of religious genius. And it makes sense that such a person would talk about “cracking the code of matter” as Fall has Atabet doing. Our modern age is in love with the material world and will have to uncover its secret, I think, before turning for salvation to a disembodied Beyond.
Fall’s narrative was taken directly from his diary, it seems, for journal entries carry much of the story. Whether he intended to write a copy a complete and continuous account of his adventure is uncertain. For perhaps, like Michelangelo’s “Slaves,” the book’s incompleteness was meant to suggest the unfinished venture it described, the human spirit struggling forth from its material sleep.
San Francisco
PART ONE
Ishavasyamidam sarvam.
“All this is for habitation by the Lord
. . .”
Isha Upanishad
T
HE EVIDENCE WAS ARRANGED
all around me in the room, stacked in bundles on my desk, indexed in the rows of files that covered two walls. The central hypotheses and their dozens of corollaries had been worked out again and again until my thesis seemed complete. And yet outside this room it all would grow uncertain. Separated from these pictures and reports the whole thing would begin to look like a vast illusion.
I opened the folder in front of me and took out the photographs of Bernardine Neri. This collection, more than any other evidence I possessed, seemed incontrovertible. The changes in her body were clearly visible in this sequence of portraits taken over the three-year period of her religious ecstasy. Analysts of photographic process had vouched for the pictures’ authenticity, dozens of witnesses had sworn that she passed through the transformations they recorded, her changes fit my thesis to perfection. There was no way I could rationally doubt that she had changed from the pinched little woman in picture one to the radiant beauty in picture six. Too many doctors, bishops, family members and friends were there to swear it had happened. Each time I looked at these pictures and remembered the months I had spent in the towns of the Arno Valley searching out this, my most convincing case, I would have to decide once again that this recurring sense of illusion was simply a failure of nerve in the face of the guilt I felt. Like my namesake Charles Darwin, I had begun to feel that by constructing this theory I was committing a murder.
And yet . . . I had never met Bernardine Neri. The changes in her stature and bearing might have happened to anyone who had gone through a training that strengthened will and morale. Such changes took place almost daily in any army boot camp. And the other less explicable changes might have existed only in the eyes of her devoted beholders. Yet those more difficult stories involved witnesses I had to respect. Dozens of people had seen the light that came from her, and that light was recorded in several photographs including two on the table before me. A team of German and Italian doctors had studied the phenomenon for days and had published their reports about it in three European medical journals. I could not doubt that part of her transformation. Nor could I question the mysterious and unaccountable joy she caused in the people around her. Descriptions of that joy by her friends and devotees had done as much as anything to convince me that she was an authentic spiritual force.
I stood and crossed the room. Piled on one of the files was a collection of similar testimony I had gathered from athletes around the world. The story of the Indian runner lay on top of the stack. Though most sportspeople would not believe it, he had run a marathon near Bombay in under two hours, more than ten minutes faster than the world record, and in the act had entered a state which yogis might call the
nirvikalpa samadhi.
He had “disappeared,” he said, in that run and had changed from the dapper, prancing Jack of Spades one could see at the start into the beautiful but much older man at the finish. There were pictures of him talking to spectators afterwards, his face drawn into a look that might have belonged to a saint in rapture, and a series of snapshots showing him doing his crazy routine. To the spectators’ amazement, this man had run for another hour to “confirm the thing he had found,” and a British doctor who was there had told me he had spent some of that time doing sprints. Trackmen I had talked to about the story would claim that most Indians didn’t know how to count. It was impossible that a man with so little training could have done it. And yet there had been witnesses I could trust, and the Indian Federation of Sport had put its reputation behind it. Three stopwatches had given the identical time—one hour and fifty-eight minutes! No one would have believed a single watch. Surveying the photographs now I had to say there was no way I could doubt it: these examples I had collected were irrefutable evidence of the body’s still unknown power to manifest the glories of spirit. No one knew how far that power might go.
I went to the window and gazed down at the street. Each time I looked through this material my doubts subsided. The evidence, the logic, were all in place. And yet I knew that the moment I left this room the sense of illusion would hit me. And the guilt. The fact that this study, this knowledge, would not help me with my own problems—that it even seemed to make them worse—put a shadow over everything I did. There was a fundamental lie, in my life or in my theories.
A decrepit-looking crowd had gathered in front of the coffee shop across the street, and I could recognize some of the familiar North Beach characters. No one looked healthy in the group, and two or three were begging dimes from passers-by. In this summer of 1970, all the hopes for a New Age of Spirit which had filled these streets three years before seemed as illusory as my grandiose theories. On a day like this, Grant Avenue was a living museum of failed saints and yogis.
I went back to the desk and sat down. In moods like this, the pressure I felt in my head would turn to nausea. An image appeared of a storm. These symptoms, I thought, showed a worse trouble brewing. Something malevolent was tossing underneath the throbbing in my brain. Then a second image, the same image I had seen all that morning—of a shadowed refuge near an altar. Through the open window I could hear the twelve o’clock bells. The church would be a good place to go.
The towers of Sts. Peter and Paul’s towered over the grassy square as if they were the axis of the neighborhood. For weeks, it seemed, they had been a symbol for the center I lacked. I crossed the street and went into the nave. People were filing down the center aisle to take communion, and I knelt in a pew at the back. Two priests, one with the bread and the other with the chalice held high, were passing down the line of communicants. “This body is given for you . . .” I could hear the words being whispered as they had been in my dream that night. “The body and blood of Christ is given for you.” I leaned my head on my hands. The tension in my body was passing . . .
The last of the communicants knelt on the sanctuary steps. In a moment the communion would be finished. I glanced down at my watch. In my dream something had happened at exactly 12:30. I glanced around me. In the dream the place had looked like this, now I could remember. A light had erupted from the chalice and a figure hurtled toward the sun. Then the light from the chalice had cut through me like a sword. A cold sweat came out on my face. It was 12:29 . . . .
Then it happened. There was an explosion of light on the sanctuary steps and the priest fell back on the floor. The communicants at the front stood transfixed, while a man knelt alone in front of the over-turned priest. I started back. A light from the kneeling man’s body broke into a rainbow of color, and for an instant it flooded the church.
Suddenly people all around me were standing. Some in front were backing away from the altar railing, while the fallen priest stood up. The kneeling man was walking down the center aisle. He found a pew at the back and knelt with his head in his hands. Though I couldn’t see him distinctly it appeared that his face had been bleeding.
The priests and acolytes began the concluding rite, as if nothing unusual had happened. In a few moments the service was over. There was a last blessing from the priest who had fallen and everyone turned to go out. The man with the wound had disappeared.
“What happened?” someone whispered as I stood. “Did you see that guy push Father Zimbardo?”