Jacob Atabet (24 page)

I signaled to Kazi. Together we watched Corvin appear on the street below and walk out of sight down the alley. Corinne and Jacob came out to see what was happening.

I told them what he had said and we went over the rumors about Vladimir Kirov. The Russian scientist might be a double agent, I said, working for both the Russian government and an organization based in Europe that was trying to develop a form of psychic control at a distance. The letters from Magyar, a man I trusted, and the suspicions about Kirov among Americans who knew him had led me to think that at least part of the rumors were true. It was plausible that all sorts of people were tinkering with these forces.

Jacob sat down by the hearth.

“I know him,” Kazi said. “Somewhere I know him. And he definitely wanted to look the place over.”

“I felt it the moment I saw him,” Jacob frowned. “There’s something bad around him. It reminds me of six years ago. It sounds crazy,” he looked over at me, “but someone or something tried to kill me then. Both psychically and physically.” He described a week-long series of dreams in which an entity had attacked him every night. On the final night someone had come up to rob his apartment and had fired a pistol at him as he got away. The two events were connected, he felt, though no one could prove it. “Remember your dreams these last two weeks?” he said. “It’s one reason to look out. Not only are there dangers from our lack of knowledge in these uncharted waters, but there are sharks out there. Like Vladimir Kirov maybe.”

“Or
that
man.” Kazi nodded toward the deck. “He was not telling the truth.”

“Could he be working for Kirov?” I asked. “Would they try to establish a physical connection like they do with hexing? What do you think of all this, Corinne?”

“I’ve never had these attacks,” she said softly. “And I always work with my clients as if everything involved is a form of projection. But I really don’t know.”

“Isn’t that the best way to look at this,” I said. “To see it mainly as projection?”

“If you’re not sticking your head in the sand,” he murmured. “You always have to check your paranoia first, but this thing is more than projection. Let’s take it as a warning. And I think you should find out why your people at the Press gave him our address . . . But why would Kirov want to experiment on you?”

“It could be Magyar’s paranoia. But still . . . those dreams I’ve had feel like something deliberate is working, against me maybe or just trying to reach me. I don’t know. In Russia I never met Kirov himself. The only connection he would have is my friendship with Magyar and my publishing the Russian reports on suggestion at a distance. I don’t know why he’d experiment on me. If it weren’t for these dreams I’d think Magyar was nuts.”

“Well, maybe he is. And maybe those dreams were entirely your own productions. Maybe this is all coincidence. But let’s take it as a warning. You’re absolutely sure there are people working on suggestion at a distance?”

I said that I was and named people in Russia and Europe following up on Vasiliev’s work.

“Let’s stay alert then. This venture of ours could be a political problem.” He shook his head. “With all our seclusion we can’t escape it. All right?”

“Things connect,” said Kazi. “Like attracts like.”

No one replied, for this aspect of nature’s working was something we had often discussed. There was a force of attraction, it seemed, which drew similar people and interests together. If someone was working in a malevolent way to oppose us, it was conceivable there would be others to join them, consciously or unconsciously, either here in our ordinary world or “on the other side.”

O
CTOBER 7

Twilight.
Augoeides, astroeides, koshas, ka
. Astral body, soul-sheath, subtle body,
eidolon. Imago,
radiant and luminous body.
Soma pneumatikon,
etheric double, the Buddhist Great Body,
phantastikon pneuma
. . .

And now: the bio-plasma, bio-electric field phenomena, bio-fields, auras, Kirlian photographs, energy dimensions, bio-gravity, Kirovian-matrices.

“. . . from one point of view matter is the grossest form of spirit. From another, spirit is the subtlest form of matter.”—Sri Aurobindo

“. . . everything is governed by psychokinetic fields.”—Vladimir Kirov. (God as the Secret Police? The mystic as authoritarian personality?)

Casey let Corvin have Atabet’s address because she thought there was “something ominous about him.” Thought he might be from the CIA! We went over Magyar’s correspondence together, and looked at translations of Kirov’s papers on bio-gravity. I told her about the rumors concerning Kirov’s work and defection. I wish I could think of a way to track down these stories. No one is sure about him: not J.H., S.K., T.M., BO., EM. or the people at Berkeley. We can only take this as a warning.

Weird, hovering fogbank this evening over Alcatraz. Blue above, then layers of mist both black and white. The water below was a spectrum of grays and blues, the prison a perfect silhouette.

7:00. Still a layer of blue in the night sky, and lights on Alcatraz. Looked at Bucky Fuller’s Intuition. Such a glimmer he is—the benign side of Kirov. J., paraphrasing a passage in Intuition: “Every homeward transformation helps. Ecology and spiritual practice, good design, good politics, good economics, each helpful deed.”

October 8

“The end of the method of the Pythagoreans was that they should become furnished with wings to soar to the reception of the divine blessings, in order that, when the day of death comes, Athletes in the Games of Philosophy, leaving the mortal body on earth, may be unencumbered for the heavenly journey.” Hierocles commentary on The Golden Verses in G. R. S. Mead,
The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition.

Athletes in the Games of Philosophy! Tonight I will circle round that night visitor, join him, know him.

October 9

Bad night. Couldn’t sleep. All doors closed. Thought of F. W. H. Myers’ “phantasmogenetic centres.”

“For as the soul is a being of the cosmic order, it is absolutely necessary that it should have an estate or portion of the cosmos in which to keep house.

“. . . For these reasons, therefore, they say it forever keeps its radiant body, which is of an everlasting nature.” Philoponus in G.R.S. Mead. “But . . . even as the human soul, when it gains mastery over the physical body, has this body following it . . . so when the body of the [world] is free from all mortal disturbance and is moved solely by the will of the world-soul, no disturbance results to the world-soul from it. “—from Mead,
The Doctrine of the Subtle Body.

We must end the war in Viet Nam!

“. . . resolute imagination is the beginning of all magical operations. “—Paracelsus.

This is true for both Jacob Atabet and Vladimir Kirov. But they are both controlled by the world’s cybernetic system. Imagination requires reinforcement to proceed. At every level there must be working agreements. In a body that functions, atoms and cells love each other. Life depends at every level upon a moral harmony.

October 20

J. coming out of this period of rest. Gained ten pounds. “Conscious will still feeding on the unconscious will,” he says. “Reinforcement still coming. Some of the changes are permanent.”

We are giving birth. Creating a new body to inhabit.

Putting on another body: this universe at the big bang; the evolution of species; mankind settling another planet (or satellite); and now this venture. Putting on another body is the First One’s way.

Images today in waking vision: walking through a labyrinth and looking back to see my former shape (like J.’s experience, or the scene in Kubrick’s
2001
); Mardi Gras; a mask floating across the room and landing on my bookshelf (different books as different bodies?).

Mental forms (ideas, conceptual systems, number systems, geometries) are bodies, and we can join with them. But the body he glimpses comes from a depth beyond anything he has seen before. His imaginings have created a propitious field and sent a signal. A signaling and docking operation with it. Twenty-four years of willing are having their result (and/or the result became 24 years of willing in the “closed time-like world line”). His daemon has beckoned and led him this far.

Obedience is a
siddhi
, as in this surrender to the body that waits for our decisive rebirth.

October 22

Says that his paintings now are like the ones he did at the California School of Fine Arts in the ’50s—part Chinese landscape, part Turner, part sheer naivete. There is no hint in them of the
animan siddhi
. Still they are resting. Still interested in my midnight visitor. But my body is unruly. The world unruly. This level of cells and molecules unruly.

New molecules have gone out with the body’s tide. Now we wait for a larger incursion.

October 24

A body of sound. Every sound carries the original chord.
Sink into it.

Through a foghorn sounding, through the tiniest or most discordant note. . . Concerto for foghorns and silence.

The Bay a Chinese seascape. Slate gray near the Golden Gate, then streaks of turquoise, green and blue on the horizon. An oyster sky and banks of tumbling clouds above the Berkeley hills. At dusk, the cities turning into a latticework of reflected light.

I want to join every cell. Is this the eve of All Cell’s Day?

Gleaming prows emerging from the shadows of Alcatraz. Running with the wind, their sails brightening as they come into sunlight. A sea of boats turning toward home.

Beating homeward, prows glistening in the late sun. Will they make it before dark?

Ecstasy everywhere, whether the run is completed or not.

November 1

Rumors at the Press and the church about Atabet’s death. They remind me of rumors of Salinger’s insanity or Castaneda’s suicide. Some people are threatened by this kind of adventure and want to erase or debunk it. It is hard, even for me, to believe the changes I see in him. I find myself resisting the perception.

We are all wounded by the first fall into matter. That is the original trauma of birth. Every event in the universe has the seal of forgetfulness upon it. (The
mudra
of the Dragon holding fast.)

That is why so many of the traditions begin with some form of recollection, in
zazen, vipassana, Samkhya
practice, the prayer of the Dark Night. The first stage of our return is to practice remembering.

Mu. Mystery. Mum’s the word. Half our light went out.

His pattern is so clear: first, a new opening like the summer of 1947; then a return to earth precipitated by collisions with internal or external barriers; then a period of rest and assimilation during which—at an unconscious or half-conscious level—a new integration occurs. And then a new opening to something beyond. It is as if he cannot stop the process.

The next step will begin, I think, within the next few days
.

November 5

First day of the second attempt.

Carlos Echeverria couldn’t hear it, but the rest of us could. A birthsong when I let it. Something not quite heard by Bach.

“This music,” he said, “has a mantric power to recreate cellular patterns.” Showed us Hans Jenny’s
Cymatics
and its chapter on sound effects in space. But where does this “music” come from?

Tonight I am filled with new pleasure. It is easier now to be in this body. Every cell, it seems, is filled with light and hints of that music.

November 6

He drew colored sketches of the forms he is seeing. Not like the electron micrographs at all.

One is of a city like an emerald grid. (Shades of Frank Baum!) Another is a vista of crystal, lit from within, rolling over hills into the distance. There is a golden spire in it. (Revelation, 21?) Are human cities replicas of something we already touch?

Another seems to be an alien planet. An enormous red filament rises from it. Is it Jupiter? Or is he passing through curvatures of space to more remote regions of the universe? Another looks like a close-up of the sun, an enormous river of fire.

Meanwhile, everyone is in good spirits. Corinne incredible—sweet-tempered, unflappable. Kazi a pillar of light. And J. looks better so far. Not so pale and shrunken. Even Carlos looks in, and Mrs. E. How they reconcile all this in their minds is a mystery to me.

November 7

Morning. More sketches last night. One was of concentric circles. He said that he can finally “touch the atomic patterns directly.”

These statements—there is no use trying to analyze them now. But I suspend disbelief with difficulty.

Eventually a science of these states will have to emerge. How much of the things he sees are simple projections of his preconditioned perception? Are we like scientists in the 17th century, staring at fantastic forms through our new microscopes and projecting all sorts of fancies into the things we see? To answer that question, we need more fellow explorers to compare our experience with. And for that we need a more compelling rationale and more widespread support for this kind of endeavor.

Noon. A huge flash of light while I watched. Kazi took his shoulders. Then he fell into something that was, he said, a glimpse of the “first physical light.”

This afternoon I am badly shaken
.

Evening. Everyone gathered. Simon Horowitz came at eight. Not my idea to call him, but Kazi decided. Will conduct tests tomorrow. By ten, A. seemed better. Corinne shaken—the first time I have seen her like that. Apparently, the Echeverrias’ building had some of its fuses blown again.

Midnight. What really happened? No one knows yet. He lost consciousness in the final stages of it. The danger now is that his touching these things might bring them into earthplay. How clear it is that this is just an exploration. There are no more certain directions.