Authors: Michael Murphy
I closed my eyes and found a stillness at the center of it. Could I follow him to the places he was trying to enter? A vortex and a tumbling sea. Several moments passed until the spinning stopped, then I opened my eyes to see a single bar of silver light before me, hovering vertically where his body had been.
A single pulsing bar of silver light.
Slowly it turned to a horizontal position and in its place there appeared a vista I could see with my eyes open, stretching for miles, a ravishing sight that stabbed through me like a sword of ecstasy.
Then nausea. The vision collapsed and Jacob sat there dumbly, like a corpse. “There will be no shortcuts into this,” he whispered. “You have seen what the world might look like.” For a moment we stared at each other and I had the thought that his body might be a ventriloquist’s dummy! Then he fell forward toward me and I helped him sink down to the floor. He gestured vaguely toward the bedroom. Did he want me to carry him there? Almost overcome by fear, I tried to help him up, but I couldn’t move him. To my enormous relief Kazi came into the room and together we carried him into the bedroom. J. sat on the bed with a weak smile and said he was all right, tried to reassure me. He had been operating his body from a distance! he murmured. It was obvious he was totally spent.
Kazi asked me to go into the kitchen and make J. something warm to drink, which I did, shaking now and in a state of shock. While I was standing by the stove, Corinne appeared and went into the bedroom. Reinforcements had arrived just in time.
And then—strangeness upon strangeness—I felt drunk, the bar of silver light was coming in and out of focus. It wanted to break open, and if it did I would be swept into a state I might not manage. I went out to the deck trying to shake it off, and Corinne came out to see me. “Jacob wants us to go out and walk it off,” she said, and together we went down the stairs. I stumbled along in a daze. A moment later—I cannot remember exactly how we got there—we found a table at the North Beach Restaurant. Had a beer and got completely drunk. Started seeing dancing forms in every movement: a man smiled and dazzling forms rose in the air; when he frowned they plunged to earth like comets. Corinne winked and two worlds split apart with a flood of happiness. Whatever J. had touched had taken possession of my brain and nervous system.
She helped me through it with her even humor. Without her I could have panicked. “This curly fork,” I said. “When I lift it the walls come apart.” And indeed with every flick of the thing I would see cascading streams of silver light running through the restaurant. Each face had worlds behind it. Each movement triggered images of archetypal forms, an unimaginable beauty and passion stretching through aeons to come. I was seeing two worlds at once, this one and another Jacob had drawn me into.
Gradually it passed. Balancing between second sight, nausea, and the effect of the beer I slowly came back to normal. But what an afterglow it left me! All day I have walked around as if I were weightless. A gentle ecstasy wells up from every move I make.
Then, about seven o’clock, Corinne called to say that the Descent had ended! Jacob said his voyage to the First Day had turned into a vision of the planet’s possible future! The things I saw this noon were my own filtered version of it. For the next few days he will try to see as much of it as he can. They want me to do the same. She said I shouldn’t leave the apartment until tomorrow. I should simply sit here in silence and let all impressions register fully.
It is 11:00 p.m. now. The quicksilver visitations of this noon have vanished and there are only fleeting memories of those marvelous quasi-human forms surrounding every face and gesture. Do I have a truer intuition of what our future might look like? Will it be easier now to see these possibilities emerging in the world around me?
If that’s the case, if this opening is a valid glimpse of things to come, it is made possible by the state of grace around it, the beatitude from which those forms I saw all take their life.
Midnight. Corinne called again. J. is flooded by his vision, wants to know what I am seeing. Told them I have lost the specifics of it, though there is still this all-sustaining grace. Corinne is quietly excited. J. says the whole world and everybody in it will enjoy the things we are seeing. Kazi says we have seen a way “to finish the rainbow.”
2:00 a.m. What this all means grows uncertain. On the one hand I know that I see some portion, some thin cross-section of the world’s future—or at least this human body’s future. But I also know how we can project our fancies into these floods of unexpected inspiration.
But this much is certain:
every face and every human gesture is connected with a larger possibility. That I saw clearly today. Everything is coiled, waiting to spring to richer life.
That this kind of vision would happen now, at this point in our enterprise, makes sense to me. With every reclamation of the past there is new freedom to open the future. We have seen it in all the natural sciences and psychotherapies. Is this what the Tibetan shamans meant by “completing the rainbow”?
I know I will be able to comprehend the world’s drama of unfoldment with more certainty and confidence now. A whole level of striving has dropped away, for I know more deeply than before that the world is completed. Vision has suddenly become aristocratic.
November 21
Morning. Slept soundly. But yesterday’s events seem strangely distant. I feel numb all over. Reading what I wrote here last night I give thanks that I am keeping these records. A journal is one good antidote to our genius for repression and forgetting.
Called J.’s apartment. He is still surrounded by visions of the future, said Corinne. The
animan siddhi
has become the
mahiman siddhi
, the microscope the macroscope. But she sounded worried. Was she keeping something from me? This morning I will go out for a run. It might keep this numbness from getting worse.
Evening. My hand is shaking as I write this. At 10 a.m. a man from Stanford Research Institute called the Press, said he was inquiring about someone named Corvin for “people in the Department of Defense.” Sounded strangely remote and metallic. Said there are rumors of psychic weapons being developed in the USSR, scoffed at them, then said there was a rumor that Corvin had been to Russia and knew all about it. Told him I didn’t know anyone named Corvin.
Then that call from Corinne. Jacob had almost strangled!
Horowitz there when I arrived, shaken and drawn. Jacob was distant and vacant; said that “something almost blew him apart.” I told them about my own midnight visitor, Kazi had me act it out, getting into my sense of what the dream would have been like if I had been able to sleep. Got hold of something that seemed to connect with that phone call from SRI. Is there an opposition working at many levels? Is Kirov linked to DOD to entities in Mind-at-large and the sub-cellular level? How far-reaching will this opposition be? How much of it is conscious? The
Pradhana
is inertia, a sleeping dragon, protecting its secret as long as it can.
Jacob lay on the deck in the sun for the rest of the day, Kazi chanting near him. Horowitz calls it “general fatigue,” is turning out to be an extraordinary friend. I am sure he believes Jacob, though it is stretching him hard.
Then, Kazi said that Jacob’s subtle body was “half ripped apart.” Says physical symptoms will start appearing tomorrow. “One half of his head is flapping in the wind.” He claims it is almost impossible to recover from such an accident. He has enormous coherence in the “
Dharmakaya
” though, a subtle body that is nearly indestructible. I brought them something to eat tonight. Corinne can’t leave when J. is in this state. The Echeverrias are coming back from Elko tomorrow, just in time.
Then, as I left, Corinne said Jacob’s physical body might die.
November 22
Noon. Horowitz, Kazi and Corinne with Jacob. He looks terrible now. Kazi was right. Half of his face is deeply bruised. Horowitz says it is a hemorrhage in the cheek, says he has never seen anything like it. Kazi says Jacob’s body is picking up the impression now from the damage in the subtle body. Wonders if Jacob will ever be able to try this again.
Then at eleven a second call from the man from SRI. Wanted to know if I knew a “Vladmir Kirov.” Someone knows about all of this! Asked him to come up to see me tomorrow. I must see what he looks like. Should I tell them what I know? If opposition is connected, it certainly can’t be conscious.
Evening. Kazi and Corinne are steadily holding him in stillness, while he lies there in some kind of trance: Turned toward “the gentlest light” they can summon. Suddenly I was filled with fear. When Kazi saw it he asked me to leave. Echeverrias are back and helping out. How they put up with all this I will never know.
Called at eight. Corinne was reassuring. Jacob had swallowed some milk.
November 23
Jacob the same. The man from SRI came at eleven. Looks bland and unimaginative, some kind of “systems planner.” Says he once studied Scientology. I told him about my correspondence with Russia. Didn’t mention Prague—who knows how far the Kirov network stretches. Everything now is possible.
Did I make a mistake in telling him? Didn’t mention Magyar. Said that I had heard of Kirov and that people think he is some kind of double agent, a hero maybe or a pathetic figure or the very devil himself. I said that he seems to be working for the Russian government, in spite of his defection. The man seemed to believe me. I was perfectly composed with him, in spite of my state. There was nothing around him to evoke my midnight visitor or anything else. Maybe the man is simply following some random lead for people in the DOD. God knows they have to check up on these rumors of psychic warfare.
Evening. Kept quiet all day in the office. Casey Sills wants to know about J. I told her nothing. By three o’clock I felt better, remembered St. Teresa’s statement (or St. Ignatius’?) that a half hour in orison would relieve any failure. Read the
Four Quartets
. Called Telegraph Place to find that Jacob is a little better. Kazi says his psychic head is back in one piece. We are like the first planes of Kitty Hawk, with our tattered streamers of mindstuff flapping in the psychic breeze. Told them about the man from SRI. Both Corinne and Kazi say they will not tell Jacob anything until tomorrow. I too should “lean into the gentlest light.”
November 24
Morning. A dream: of moments alone in a wood-paneled room in London, a shaft of sunlight with motes of dust. The line from
The Dry Salvages
, “the future is a faded song” kept running through the scene. When I woke this morning I turned to the passage: “You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure, that time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.”
Relax from this impossible future. I am in their hands now. I will help in any way I can.
But Jacob relaxed from his impossible future again and again, and still keeps plunging on.
“Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
. . . .
In my end is my beginning.”
I remember these assimilated wisdoms and earlier intensities: St. John of the Cross, Ramana Maharshi, Brother Lawrence, the Cloud of Unknowing—and come out here at the edge of the First Day. In my end is my beginning.
Noon. He continues to improve. Kazi told him about my visitor. J. said he had a dream about “a nation’s hotel,” a place looking out on a huge garden with children playing soldier, and parapets with flags. Was I there? He wanted Kazi or Corinne to ask if any of it made sense. It doesn’t.
Evening. He looks better. Sat on deck in the sunlight. Says the “expedition” is over for a while. Then I flashed on his dream: “the nation’s hotel” as the National Hotel, the garden as Red Square, the flags and parapets of the Kremlin! He was reaching out toward Russia and Kirov. Both of us are scanning the horizon for danger signals and lost connections. For a moment we tried to fathom it, but he didn’t have the strength.
Does force create counter-force, cutting off a part of the self? Is the drain he feels a sign of isolation and secret violence? Is Kirov a sign of our willfulness? I will talk to him about this when he feels better. But he has always said that something is taking him, that the future is here already (though full of surprises), and that our destination is a place where opposition is no longer. The Dragon will have yielded its secret.
November 25
Afternoon. He looked like Ramana Maharshi, sorely wounded. Then I could see him changing. Boundaries blurring, for a moment we merged. Isn’t this transformation enough? It is a day to remember, impossible ever to forget. Like Porphyry watching Plotinus, I saw him return to the One. His attempt is not to seize a foreign body. It is rather to become the thing we already are.
What then of Kirov? All forgetting reenacts the first self-loss. Is he a symbol of the ancient resistance? Part of the original game?
Night. No
one
can stop us, no entity here below. Opposing forces can only enter a part of us split off from the rest. To explore from a sense of the One, to act out of the Source, is to go from light to further light.
There are risks but go at right speed, bringing all of ourselves along. He is a master of little things, like the way he looked at me this morning. I will never forget it.
Our angel is the atman, both other and the same. One can choose to rest in its lofty reaches, but he has followed its roots into matter.
How strange to talk about my friend Jacob Atabet in ordinary language and realize that he is such a One. Or that we all might be.