Jacob Atabet (21 page)

A greater mysticism is emerging, a mysticism that reaches into the earth. The intelligence for it is gathering, forming nerveways everywhere. Science and the modern movement in art, literature and philosophy help, by combining criticism of the old order with an exploring sensibility. They prepare the way for this adventure.

August 17

9:00 a.m. Last night it began to reveal itself. At first there was the familiar feeling, the sense of that urgent, needy presence trying to get through to me, and I was able to remain steady while it came into focus. Then, in the center of it, a pinpoint of light appeared and began to emit a steady pulse. I thought my head would burst. When it seemed that the pressure would explode, the pulsing stopped and the entity withdrew. This is the closest it has come. I am sure that it is not a part of my immediate unconscious world.

The most I get from re-enacting this “dream” is the sense that the entity is the
Jiva
, the root of the soul.

The apprentice novel, especially when it deals with teacher and seeker, is an archetype of
jivatman
and ego in their struggle to join.
Mundaka Upanishad
: two birds on a limb. Jacob A. and Darwin F.

Is this presence a messenger from the higher self? But it seems too needy, too far from self-existence. Lower than self-existence, but larger than ordinary life.
And it has a definite intention.

Evening. Third day. Still quiet concentration. Corinne gone much of the day, then back at 4:20. Exercises on the deck. A definite field gathering. More powerful now than I have felt before.

Can see the footings of the Golden Gate bridge tonight, underneath the fog. The Bay is empty and I am free to roam these worlds.

All day the image of Tilopa running through my mind. Kazi’s hero. “When the mind has no place to stop, the mahamudra is present.” There is no place for the mind to stop.

11 p.m. Rapport with brother body grows each day. Images of cells and organelles, mitochondria and ribosomes are my constant companions. In this field of force and knowing around him, my body comes wide open.

Corinne keeping a journal now. Kazi living in J.’s studio. Strange atmosphere tonight—a different kind of field around them. I feel a little outside it, though J. is intent to make me feel included all the way. He looks pale, has been indoors for three days now. All three of them silent, withdrawn.

Again, he says he might be touching another physical world. Could this relate to the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen effect? He is touching a place new even for him. Does the sub-cellular level branch off immediately into worlds populated with human-type entities? Is the “astral plane” a misrepresentation of other physical worlds? Are there actually all these subtle sheaths, five koshas, etc.? He wonders if there is a continuum of energy and form instead, shading off into other realms, many of which are attached to physical places, other solar systems or galaxies.

But there is definitely something like an angelic order, he thinks, “worlds closer to the light.” More advanced civilizations? His discipline is to hold awareness at these levels within the deepest stillness.

All the old maps are incomplete. He and Kazi take nothing on faith. Kazi amazes me, he is so free from Buddhist and occult dogma. J. couldn’t do this without him.

August 18

His openness to questions encourages me to expose my confusions and doubts. Today I asked him to tell me as precisely as he could what he means when he says that “all time is remembered in the body.”

It is a simple idea, he said, an extension of the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—but down to the level of molecules, atoms and fundamental physical forces. There is a memory in the human body, however dim, of the main stages our universe has come through. “I say ‘we’,” he said. “Because this Self, the One, the Sea of Monads, comprehends while It forgets. It/we are the experiencer and the experienced. “

His own remembering began in childhood, at first through images like that tower of spirals—then it would not stop. Siddhis-for-the-descent were constantly pressing to be used, interior microscopes and platforms for landings in the reaches of inner space. It has not been an orderly process though: he has circled and wandered through these levels for 24 years. But this winter and spring he achieved a new opening to the elemental worlds. Now he is trying to descend to the level of the “primordial event, into the light at the day of creation.”

But remembering the First Day!? Would that mean coming in contact with the universal background radiation left over from the big bang?

“That’s only 2.7 degrees Kelvin,” he said. “This is much hotter than that! The One is our basecamp though, or better to say it is our ultimate rheostat, maintaining life in this body as we press closer to the memory of the original sun.”

Then he said that these formulations were less important than the “phenomenology of it, the living experience.” For we have to remember that present cosmologies—whether big bang, steady state or other—are subject to revision. But such revisions would not affect this enterprise. We will remember our world’s story, whatever that story turns out to be.

That’s why we need all the scriptures and therapeutic records and the reason for keeping accounts of this experiment. “The human race,” he said, “has been flirting with this adventure for a long, long time. To accomplish it, we need all the help we can get.”

Noon. This world would have us live at every level. It is the joining place. Survival and meeting demand the dance, and endless refocus.

How apt the phrase, “out of my mind.” Out of one mind. We must live in this forest of symbols with all our wit and senses. Fear reminds us that we have forgotten who the world is. Enlightenment and incarnation/two goals in one.

Today his hands were filled with light. It lasted all morning. Luminous stigmata. We are wounded with this new life.

Amazing we have waited so long for these changes. The old mystics were caught in the hypnosis of their times.

About eleven he moved around the deck, in a kind of slow-motion. Why this light in his hands? In the shade, a blue arc between them, a kind of rainbow.

And walking here at twelve, an old lady with wet blue hair falling over her face. Like a blue veil. And at the top of the hill a boy sending light signals with a mirror to some friend on a rooftop below him. Synchronicities? Was it a reminder of the pulsing light from my night-mind visitor?

Twilight.
Sunset reflected from windows on the Berkeley hills. The Bay shading from silver to blue. This body filled with gentle fire. In emptiness there is nothing but surprise.

I moved today through this body, as if it were a swarming sea. Ribosomes, mitochondria, strands of RNA filled the space I moved through. Gently, I am getting to know them. Someday, perhaps, I will assist in their slight reconstruction. Then, through a gentle nod of the head, the old code will give way to new tidings.

No wonder he has been so intent to have me make peace with the ocean and its underwater life. On days like this I swim in even stranger seas.

All our athletic adventures, conceivably, are preparations for this in one way or another. For one must surely fly, swim, dive and go spelunking in these depths!

7 p.m. Sunset rays on the Bay. Reflected lights of ten cities merging in the water.

I think he is entering a place that only a few have reached before. Kazi called it the
“pradhana,”
a
Samkhya
term for the world’s primary germ of spirit-matter. He also said that J. is “merging with the rainbow” in the ancient shamanistic and Tibetan sense. He is accomplishing
thod-gyal
. I will have to talk to him more about it. Midnight. A walk in the square. Russian Hill a subtle carnival of lights and swirling mist.

God Blossoming.

The skirling of pipes on a cobblestone street, coffee roasting, a piazza in Florence. Pondicherry. Bengal tiger skins and green fields of Somerset. Emerald hills, glowing beneath gray clouds.

Then an aircraft carrier gliding through the night, festooned with lights. A deadly fairy castle headed out to sea. All night the killer boats are headed toward their prey in Viet Nam.

August 19

Fifth day. Distinct thresholds going in, he says, and coming out. Pain at every threshold: “angels with swords of fire, turning the wheels, opening up dead places. The cells know and recognize these possibilities, and are secretly reaching for them.”

Evolution as the cell’s groping for light. All aspiration for a fuller life carries this sense of our glory, even if it comes distorted.

The midnight-one sent a message clearly. In a dream there were scenes from Prague—St. Stephen’s cathedral and the houses of the alchemists. Magyar? Moved into the pulsing light. Scenes of some strange city. Then a terrifying sense of suffocation. A death trap? Quicksand on the other side? Catastrophic gravitational collapse in the psyche? Or simple fear?

We need all our wit and senses. In this voyage through, every demon might dress like an angel. Moksha before siddhi.

Afternoon. Jacob must be careful with these long trances now, says Kazi. Can see how Vivekananda went into maha-samadhi. The death trap is a part of us: we must know what it is. Re-own every stargate.

Subtle membranes at every threshold. In his trance they were torn. He said he could see them flapping like tattered kites! Streamers of subtle stuff all over the room. Such fragile structures we are, still built like the planes of Kitty Hawk. No wonder we can only fly a hundred yards.

He says that maybe a change in the whole world-stuff will be needed before anyone can hold these changes. He has fasted for three days.

Music arising? We all seemed to hear it. I am sure I heard a distant choir like Bach. It lasted for two or three minutes.

August 21

Seventh day. Fasting for five days now. The movements of his cells have become more pronounced.

Corinne:
“A well-organized body is a bellwether for the disorganized world.”

Jacob:
“The body is made for self-exceeding. It is an entrance to a thousand worlds. What a shame to go Cyborg when the genie is about to emerge from the old human bottle!

“We will move through more planes of existence, more orders of reality,” he said. “More cities beyond the horizons of this space. Ramakrishna’s vision of the
jivamukta
ascending and descending the ladder of the worlds.
Genesis
, 28-12-15. Anticipations of this in science fiction, Aurobindo, alchemy, Sufi literature, all 1,700 pages of your book.”

Coming to another time of crossing over, he says: the stage is finally set.

But the time is always near, and there are hundreds of years ahead of us in building the psychic structures to navigate these subtle shores—unless it becomes a great joint venture. A space program for inner space? An idea that dies hard.

Evening. “Our True Form is waiting. At one level the work is done, the transformation achieved.” But still I fall into these old, cold waters. Patience then and nothing special. Wait out every brooding cloud.

August 23

His description of yesterday’s experience.

“Turning sideways and dissolution of hearing. Sliding through a narrow slot. Then silence, like the top of Partington Ridge. No movement. Ordinary life was a thousand feet below. You could not hear the traffic.”

“Waiting a very long time in that stillness. Then the beginning of sunrise, an edge of gold. And emerald islands bursting into view, green shimmering glass in the sea . . .”

“And after a long time, the familiar world again. San Francisco Bay, the faces of friends—all seen from this place in which they truly live. Then laughter, tears and gladness. The modern world’s sense of the absurd is right. These worlds so close and this blindness below. For hours I laughed and cried.”

“Then Jacob Atabet was sitting in his room near a window that looked out on the Bay. He could see me now, amidst his tears and laughter, and he knew that I saw him. He looked up to see me, then began to disappear. Slow dissolution . . . and then there was no more Jacob Atabet.”

That was his description. He looks magnificent. “The handsomest man in the world,” says Corinne.

The kite had gathered up the one who flew it.

No telling exactly how long it lasted according to Greenwich time.

Ten days without leaving his roof. Nothing to eat. His body five pounds lighter. Says his cells “are full of strange molecules.”

August 24

Ended his fast last night. His changes still fragile. “Today’s blood is not yesterday’s,” he said. “The body feels like a fountain of newly created forms.”

Are strange molecules entering his system? Do their templates come from some other localizable place? Is that place rooted in a physical universe, reachable through some kind of stargate? Kazi has seriously entertained that possibility. Kazi also said something about “a jump down time?”

A jump down time?! I grow dizzy thinking. Closed timelike world-lines. Einstein-Rosen bridges. “When we reach the deepest levels,” J. says, “the big bang is
now
.”

Evening. Did I see it? A change in the translucence of his skin? Did I actually see those streets of a fabulous city in the light around him? Is he pulling us closer to them?

August 25

Tonight, he possesses new powers: healed the rash on my legs with a touch; light pulsing in his hands; no hunger; can sense the world news, he says, in one gestalt.

August 26

Magyar’s book (Kazi and Corinne looked at it):

“PK-I ? PK-II. Squaring the circle. Hierarchies of will in the self.” None of us understands it completely. They are interested in it though, because Magyar believes there are passages to other physical worlds, something like “mind-holes” and “Einstein-Rosen bridges.”