Jacob Atabet (25 page)

I am exhausted, and upset. These changes might be contagious.

November 8

In the
Chronicle
, three reports of UFO sightings yesterday. One person described a “great ball of light about the size of a two-story building” (a familiar description!), about the same time the fuses blew at the Echeverrias’. One witness had just come out of a manhole where he was fixing an underground power line. When he looked up he saw a light hovering over
Angel Island
. Is the collective unconscious that corny? Is one corner of God a great saloon where all jokes are permitted?

Noon. Hard to stay at Telegraph Place. H. came for blood sample this morning. J. in bed, looks terrible. Maybe he will call it all off.

Evening. H. called to say that the tests were normal. But will make some more during the next few days. Nothing to say to Jacob but rest. Asked again if there were any stigmata.

Midnight. Woke up with this dream. I was surrounded by friends at a beach, when someone told me there were several members of the CIA or the Mafia waiting to kill me. I became conscious then and saw something hiding behind the dream images. My midnight visitor? It wanted to kill me. Sat up in bed and moved toward the light, but then an awful thing. The light that went off in J.’s place came between me and the light of the Self. A confusion of lights. Had to go outside and run through the streets—the first time since last summer.

November 9

Exhausted today. Should we call it all off?

But J. and K. and Corinne seem cheerful. Jacob all morning on the deck in quiet meditation. No marks on his body. Kazi told me to run at the beach, which I did. Casey Sills in command at the Press now.

What a relief to see them relaxing.

November 10

They are going in again! Jacob has recovered completely, and Horowitz gave him encouragement. But I fear it. He says he is cracking the “secret of time in this body.”

Have collected all his sketches. Now he is beginning to make tape recordings. So far, no tape has picked up the sound that K. and C. and I can hear around him.

Evening. Quiet today. Hardly a word. The silent building seems to be our friend. Does it shut out the street sounds? A tangible zone of silence around the apartment (or is it an intervention in the brain?). Thought of Myers’ “phantasmogenetic centre.”

J. says that a layer of “restructured space” envelops the point through which he passes. There is a kind of docking operation. And a “perfect obedience.” They have named several kinds of psychoenergy: Corinne has the list. But PK-1 7 in the “sub-cellular” bridge?!

Kirov has been studying something like this with his Russian colleagues. Is it time to make all this public? There would be a problem making it believable.

But PK-1 7! I hadn’t heard of that one. Are they circling around events foreshadowed in relativity theory and talk of “superspace”? Is modern cosmology a first premonition of this venture—the sunrise of our remembering?

November 11

Nothing special today. Ran on the beach. J. asked me to sell another painting. Ask for $3,000, he said. Horowitz will bring “interesting” electron micrographs for us to see
.

November 12

Still nothing special. But the thought haunts me: what to do about all the experiments like Kirov’s that must be going on? Are there the “limiting factors” J. believes in to contain them? Could there be weapons of war from this stuff? The world needs something to dramatize the possibilities of it. Evening. The light is slowly building. Kazi and Jacob say it is more solid now, though more difficult. “Something burned out the first time down.”

We talked about my confusion of lights. J. says the world has always been afflicted by a confusion of lights. That is one of the world’s problems.

November 13

Horowitz brought his photographs. J. seemed unimpressed. He talks in a whisper now, is focused inside more deeply than ever. Yet he follows everything we are doing. Says his view of the cells is different. A Principle of Complementarity through the eye of the
animan siddhi
. The instrument determines which aspect of the form will be seen. He says he could perceive those forms, that way, like the microscope. But he would need a different approach.

Horowitz says it is hard to say much from these pictures. It is “mainly aesthetic.” No evidence of pathology, though there are more irregular cells than most samples he has seen. Calls it a “complex sociology” of red cells. Left a magnificent set of pictures by the hematologist Marcel Bessis, taken through a scanning electron microscope. They look like Miro’s paintings.

Evening. J. says he wonders why he sees his cells in such a different aspect from H.’s micrographs. Asked him how much role his imagination and preconceptions play in mediating perception, and he answered that there might be more than he expected! His answer surprised me. How much does his mind-set alter
all
his perceptions to date, down there past PK-17 on the shores of the quarky ocean? He is marvelously open about it all. Says that interior vision is mediated in all sorts of ways.

Could all of it be an artistic production? I asked.

No, he said. Only some of it. We all need to check these regions out, go spelunking together in the body, create a natural history of these realms, a “subjective biology and physiology.” But at this level there are stargates into unexpected places. “Mindholes.” He asked if I thought that some UFO sightings might be artifacts of interventions from an other world—an explorer from Alpha Centauri sticking his inexperienced head through a mindhole in psychospace? Or another civilization making some kind of deliberate contact? Who can tell at this stage? When you start thinking that way, you could say it might have been your own attempt in the future, what with “closed time-like world lines” and the rest.

Midnight. They were quiet tonight, but he seems to have come to the surface. The journey seems to be sputtering out in slightly bemused discussions of PK-17. No wonder the world would have so little sympathy—there is not enough shared experience. Even I have a hard time following them. Corinne surprises me. She has obviously dipped in deeper than I thought. She is occasionally skeptical though. Kazi is genuinely curious about what Jacob has seen. And J. is willing to be questioned, contradicted, challenged, sometimes changing his mind about interpretations.

Talked about the differences between physical instruments to extend our senses (microscopes, telescopes, x-rays) and “interiorscopes.” The former more solid, reliable, consistent. Our interior instruments are more subject to the fluctuations of mind-stuff,
citta-vritti
. I asked them if it would take a culture-wide intentionality to build up interior instruments and passageways sufficiently strong and reliable to make this kind of exploration effective. J. said maybe. We will know better in a couple of months.

November 14

Nothing today. Corinne not there. Kazi moved his bed to another part of the studio. Jacob went running with me for the first time.

Practiced automatic writing. Helps loosen thought when I’m tired.

Heard from J. W. Riley. He asks us to see him in Vermont. None of his experiments near to Jacob’s. Has some interesting observations though, e.g. isomorphy of forms throughout the universe provides entry points for psychic travel. “Sympathy closes distance.”

Evening. Russian Hill a wall of lights, a crystal city, a proscenium for the many-sided human drama. Tonight the voyeur spirit took me. Two seductions, an old man reading, an Italian grandmother cooking dinner, when suddenly I saw someone looking back at me. He stood in a window, probably wondering what I was doing.

The effect was startling. Were others staring back? Then something I had sensed was apparent. All those windows and hills dramatized the world’s secret—our reaching out to know our many selves.

San Francisco was a magic theater: the Hare Krishna at Columbus and Green, the bells of hippies in Washington Square, the Tibetan Buddhists going down ropes on Tamalpais while the worshipers at Sts. Peter and Paul’s recite the Mass. TV antennae like ghost traps. Banners and tattered streamers running to Huckleberry Hill. Eastern bazaars on Grant Avenue during the Christmas season. The sounds of all these lands today, sounds of a culture gathering to form a new Benares or Tibet.

I walked for an hour through the city. Telegraph Hill was swarming with beggars and dirty vagabonds, and I imagined Bon sorcerers cooking their brews in old flats, their pants and serapes stained with wine and Tantric practice. And the wide-eyed young of the Hare Krishna were soliciting in rows from Buchenwald, while old artists watched the passing scene like wise and tired lamas. Alcatraz rose from the water like a holy mountain, ringed with the walls of a ruined retreat.

J. on painting:

Picasso drew the
sukshma sharira
, the body inside and around us. The artist’s body changes as his canvas changes. Organize a piece of matter and it organizes something else: the process is contagious. Marcel Duchamp had a clue.

Images in the mind and then on canvas, waiting to trigger new life. He says Van Gogh was a medium for an aspect of the sun. But painting could go the next step, become conscious of another possibility. Painters could be conscious agents of these changes we are exploring.

Every artwork is transactional, a passageway for forms and energies high or low.

In a painting he plans, he sees a multi-leveled structure: (1) a geometric form, a geomancy of North Beach from Telegraph Hill; (2) a picture of the place; (3) a psychic sociogram of N.B.; (4) an energy body to move with a viewer who can open to it; (5) a stargate to the subtle worlds. His most complex work. It sounds a little crazy.

Edward Weston’s
Daybooks
. His seeing was the power in his photographs. But he saw with more than his eyes. To paint with body, mind and heart. To think that he could do so much with a camera’s glass eye! His intentionality passed into film.

Reveries of Big Sur, a mass of gray splendor . . . Partington Ridge suspended above the fog and every sound, just the peaks of the Coast Range visible, rising through the sea of mist and stretching for a hundred miles to Morro Bay. Edward Weston leaves his vistas for us. A person can open a land, or a region of the mind.

Reminisced today about those talks around Henry’s fireplace on fogged-in days like this. Harry Dick Ross, Emil, Nick Roosevelt, Brett, Eve. Such days to fire the heart.
We are led by a network of friends.

No supermind without friends and such conversations.

Playboy’s
book on Henry a handsome tribute. Looked at Henry’s letters to Durrell today. Links to Justine and Balthazaar? Durrell some kind of medium? Kirov in Merlin’s? The Devil as the Great Connector?

November 18

Alcatraz floated away! The sea and the sky joined in a plane of gray and the island was suspended. Then it rose from the water like a giant castle.

“When the mind has no place where it can rest, the
maha-mudra
is present.” Ships sail through the mind and disappear in the Golden Gate. Belvedere Island upside down, Coit Tower into ground. Let the earthquake come: it is in the mind already.

4:30. A rainbow rising steeply from the Richmond refineries. The sky clearing and a powder blue sea. The tallest rainbow I have ever seen.

No more mind tacked down with thoughts. It is all pulled loose.

Evening. The field broke open. An unexpected presence here in my apartment. It always seems strongest as they start a new descent.

November 19

Jacob is a natural
dehasiddha
. He was born with these powers: his inescapable interior sight, his ability to see through the eye of the cell. And this prodigious command of his organism, half-conscious for so many years, but growing into the powers we have seen these last six weeks.

Pradhana
is a term from the
Samkhya
system that approximates the thing they are trying to fathom, where matter arises from mind, bringing back hints of the First Day, in this body where all time is remembered.

Evening. Something tremendous is happening. Tonight I couldn’t watch him. They say that every person who saw him in this state would see something different, because their filters vary. Like Malacandra and Perelandra in the C.S. Lewis trilogy, this archon must find a way to meet us.

There was a sense that a new power and light came down for a moment into the world around us.

November 20

By necessity, this account is only shorthand, for my state resists all verbal focus. And a miserable shorthand it is, for how can I possibly describe what has happened? Today, our adventure took a radical turn.

It began this morning when I went to his place. He was completely withdrawn, sitting erect in a chair in the space they have cleared in his studio. Corinne had left for the morning, and the apartment had an eerie silence. Kazi asked me to sit in the studio, said he would go out for a walk to get some distance from the intensity of the night before.

J. seemed unaware of anything around him. The skin of his face was pulled taut, as if some inner vacuum were sucking him toward it, and there was a look in his face like portraits of Ramakrishna in
samadhi
. It was hard for me to watch him. Sat in a chair in the corner instead, then slipped into unawareness of externals. Sat there for almost two hours with thoughts a hundred miles away. An effortless
samadhi
— wider, more lucid than any I have ever felt. No hint of agony or struggle at all, just an ever-widening grace and silence.

Then I opened my eyes to find him staring at me! I couldn’t tell whether he saw me or not, and sensed that he might be in trouble. Remembering it now is still hard, for it seemed that the body in that chair did not belong to Jacob Atabet. It had been replaced by a lifeless automaton. His eyes almost blank, he gestured stiffly to indicate I should pull my chair closer. Obeyed him as if I were in hypnotic trance, sat down about four feet in front of him. Then I felt the beginnings of an awful transition. He was drawing me into his state.