Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Author:Jeffrey J. Kripal [Kripal, Jeffrey J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2007-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

[13]

Jacob Atabet and the Tantra of Physics

Science itself is in its own way an occultism . . . a vast system of physical magic. . . . All insistence on the sole or the fundamental validity of the objective real takes its stand on the sense of the basic reality of Matter. But it is now evident that Matter is by no means fundamentally real; it is a structure of Energy; it is becoming even a little doubtful whether the acts and creations of this Energy itself are explicable except as the motions of power of a secret Mind or Consciousness of which its processes and steps of structure are the formulas.

SRI AUROBINDO, The Life Divine

Michael Murphy published his second occult novel in 1977, five years after Golf in the Kingdom. Although Jacob Atabet would never match the literary success of its predecessor, the book is in many ways a very similar production. Like the first, it focuses on the siddhis or supernormal powers of a mystically and athletically gifted teacher, in this case a metaphysical painter who also happens to be an extraordinary amateur marathon runner.

Jacob Atabet is a more philosophically developed text than Golf in the Kingdom. In his second novel, Murphy further theorizes his own occult experiences and begins to dream of a kind of magnum opus, a book to end all books on both the reality and evolutionary encoding of supernormal phenomena throughout human history. Consequently, there are at least two magical centers of Jacob Atabet: the morphing body of Jacob Atabet, and Darwin Fall’s 1,723 page manuscript that keeps appearing in the story as a guide to Jacob and as the obsessive goal of all of Darwin’s reading, meditative experiences, and discussions. A body and a book, then, or, if we like, two bodies, for as Darwin sees in a dream and notes in his secret diaries, even a book may be thought of as a kind of subtle body—the text again as corpus mysticum.1

What’s in a Name?

Darwin Fall, the narrator, is working on an immense manuscript on the evolutionary relationships between mind and body. Jacob Atabet, a metaphysical painter living in North Beach, San Francisco, who has physically suffered through a series of three major mystical events in his life, is now turning to Darwin and his masterwork for help on how to best understand and so further his occult life. A cast of supporting characters round out this basic plot, including: Corinne Wilde, Jacob’s supportive companion and spiritual lover (loosely based, I gather, on Dulce Murphy); Kazi Dama, a Tibetan lama and close friend of Jacob’s who helps guide Jacob’s unprecedented spiritual gifts with the meditative wisdom of the Vajrayana or Tibetan Tantric Buddhism; Casey Stills, chief editor at Greenwich Press, which Fall partly owns and through which he plans to publish his big book; and Armen Cross, a local writer who had once tried to write an essay on Jacob and now is a bitter skeptic.

Having once met a character named Shivas

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