The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (14 page)

The consequences of this age-long, immense, many-sided in-gathering of all that’s held valuable are with us at this time in history and not hard to detect. But they are increasingly hard to take. Modern man’s head is swollen and splitting with more meanings than he can cope with, stolen item by item from a cosmos now reduced to a meaningless commotion of inscrutable particles. Certainly the ingathering was necessary and hugely productive in its time: in the course of this long process of introjection man gained the inestimable benefits of` civilization. But the goods suffered damage on the way in; they didn’t travel at all well. Problems mounted. The current result is
mens insana in corpore insano,
a bloody human mind in a bloodless universe body. Psychological man is a mess . . .

JUDGE: I’m trying to grasp the connection between this sorry tale, about the alleged withdrawal down the ages of the world’s meaning into the head of its observer, and the crime you are charged with here today.

MYSELF: Pre-psychological man, Your Honour, is pre-blaspheming man, and psychological man is blaspheming man. It’s not that the former is clearly aware of the indwelling God, but that, like the animals, he lets God be God within and lives from Him in all innocence. And it’s not that the latter announces at the top of his voice that he has usurped God’s throne. The operation is all the more effective for being an undercover one. His newly acquired mind is his secret weapon for driving God from the Centre of his world and setting himself up there, and it owes much of its huge success to its camouflage. Blasphemy looks a treat in academic and priestly robes.

JUDGE: It’s you, not humankind, that’s being tried for blasphemy. Tell the court precisely how you see yourself figuring in this ancestral story.

MYSELF: It’s like this, Your Honour. Each individual condenses and recapitulates in a couple of decades the five-million-year life history of the species. As a baby I am, like primitive man, pre-psychological. My development into full humanhood, so necessary and so remarkable and so swift, is nevertheless achieved at a high price. Growing a virtually empty head on my shoulders, I proceed to follow the ancestral pattern and furnish it by ransacking the universe. And go on to over-furnish and cram the thing till I’m dangerously swollen-headed, and my world is proportionately denuded and fatuous. With the understandable result, perhaps, that I rush off to the shrink in the hope of reducing it to reasonable size and bearable pressure by letting some of the stuff out. By releasing swarms of bees from my bonnet - if I can.

In fact, I don’t rush off to the analyst. Desperate evils need desperate antidotes. I’ve another remedy - quicker, surer, far less pricey, and far, far more drastic than his - for this severe head condition. Cephalectomy - no less! Cutting off the diseased organ. Beheading, to put it crudely. Thus releasing at a blow those captured swarms to go back to their native habitats, to the hives and the flowers from which I’d collected them over the years. Off they buzz - to my great relief They go back to making honey, I go back to relishing it. Life is sweeter now.

COUNSEL: Your Honour, I must strenuously protest. This Trial - the first under the Act of 2002, and therefore sure to establish precedents for further Trials - is taking the most deplorable shape. Here’s the Accused, who’s charged with a carefully defined offence, diverting attention from the charge and wasting time and public funds by delivering a lecture on his own brand of social psychology. Or is it on the care of the bee in sickness and in health? This isn’t Defence. It’s persistent frivolity and contempt of court. I respectfully ask you to shut him up forthwith.

JUDGE: You called the Witness. And if the only way he can counter her testimony annoys or bores or puzzles you, that can’t be helped. On the other hand - yes. To the Accused my advice is: make it snappy. Stick to the point.

MYSELF: I was doing so meticulously, Your Honour, when Counsel (for reasons not hard to guess) deliberately diverted the court’s attention from that point. He pretends not to understand my bees-in-the-bonnet picture, so let me try another. My head is a demolished Bastille, from which hordes of captives are freed to go back to where they belong. No question of projecting them homewards. You try stopping them! The site of the Bastille is cleared, down to the last stone. Cleared for the Liberty that is God’s. I don’t dismiss my imprisoned thoughts and feelings to make room here for Him. I don’t let them go. I simply see that they have always belonged out there, to the object and not the Subject. Diagram No. 9, though it should be in fluorescent colours, will give you the general idea.

Diagram No. 9

So once more that world - ranging from island universes to up-ended feet - springs to life and mind. We are back where we started - but with some huge differences. In many ways the universe for post-psychological man is no longer what it was for pre-psychological man - often as full of threat as of promise, often as much alien as it was homely, and as much other as it was himself. But now the wide and busy world is his very own, the indispensable filling of his empty and still God-head, the brilliant minding of his vacant No-mind, the magnificent bodying forth of his central No-body. It’s a world whose riches have been earning a high rate of compound interest, whose capital has been doubled and redoubled for having been so painstakingly (and so painfully) collected and deposited over millennia in that temporary and packed-solid bank vault called the human brain. Now released and seen back to those roomy cosmic stations (which, to tell the truth, it never really left), that nominal and hoarded wealth is at last actualized. It’s turned into God’s real estate, His paradise.

So, in the end, His world didn’t come to grief. Nothing was wasted. Without the intervention of psychological man and all his man-centred delusions, post-psychological man - which is to say God-filled and God-centred man - would never have made the grade.

The fact is that, if it were not for psychological man - the blasphemer who for a time seems to succeed in making God peripheral and man central in his universe - we in this courtroom would be a bunch of savages. Maybe naked, maybe half-decent in grass skirts, maybe dressed up to the nines in full tribal splendour - I don’t know. But I do know that l wouldn’t now be joyfully entertaining the dear Lord right here, if John a-Nokes hadn’t first given Him the bum’s rush and lowered his own trousered backside on to the royal throne.

COUNSEL: End of seminar - blaspheming seminar - I trust...

Well, the Prosecution won’t waste the court’s time further by refuting a hypothesis (it’s no more than that) whose relevance to the charge is so marginal. One point, however, has to be made. It’s as if the Accused were pretending that more is less. I say, he can hardly cure himself of
projection
(which even he apparently accepts is a disease) by unloading
all
his thoughts and feelings on to a long-suffering world. He simply ensures that he’s got the most virulent form of the disease.

MYSELF: As usual, Counsel turns a true story into a lie by omitting its conclusion. What’s wrong and unhealthy about the partial and second-stage projection the Witness described isn’t the projection itself, but its misuse to evade responsibility. What’s right and healthy about the
total
and third-stage ‘projection’ I’m advocating - in fact, it’s not projection but releasing - is that it accepts
total
responsibility for what it finds ‘out there’. Not only do I see off from here my thoughts and feelings, but what they are thoughts and feelings about, the world they alight on. Who I really, really am produces and is responsible for the lot, washes His hands of none of His creatures, however bad or miserable. These headless shoulders are visibly broad enough to shoulder the blame for all that’s blameworthy, as well as the praise for all that’s praiseworthy. Hence the tradition that God saves His world by taking on
all
its sin and suffering.

The long and the short of it is that your ‘projection’ is fine when it’s total, when it cleans you right out. Then its other name is
creation,
and it proceeds from Who you really, really are into a world that’s seen for what it really, really is. Namely, Yourself. Then You are unspeakably lovely, within and without.

It’s half-measures that are the very devil. Here are some who went the whole hog:

The shining of the mere object, as though with a voidness of one’s own nature, is samadhi.

Patanjali

As long as I am this or that I am not all things.

Eckhart

To sit in the Throne of God is to inhabit Eternity. To reign there is to be pleased with all things in Heaven and Earth.

The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine.

Traheme

For one of superior intellect, the best thing is thoroughly to comprehend the inseparableness of the knower, the object known, and the act of knowing.

The Precepts of the Kargyutpa Gurus

Prosecution Witness No. I0

THE SOCIAL WORKER

Counsel introduces the Witness as a Social Worker of long experience. The Witness isn’t so keen on the label. He doesn’t see himself as any sort of specialist. Really he’s no more than a plain, common-sensible fellow who happens to be fascinated by the human mind in all its astonishing variety. His life interest - as much hobby as profession - is people. Not excluding the Accused. Years ago, Witness attended a couple of his classes, and does know something of his views.

COUNSEL: Are you aware that he says he has no mind? And that, for him at least, being empty of mind is being full of God, and being full of God is being God? Just like that!

WITNESS: That’s more or less the message I get.

COUNSEL: In the light of your experience, what have you to say about this extraordinary claim?

WITNESS: Two things. The first is more of a question than a comment. I should want to know what effect his unusual opinions have on his relationships with people, his lifestyle, his contribution to the world, his energy, his happiness. Since I haven’t seen him for some years, I just don’t know what he’s like now. For all I know to the contrary, his opinions - however bizarre or outrageous - could make for a better life, and so pass at least the pragmatic test.

COUNSEL: And what’s your second point?

WITNESS: It concerns the status of the mind. To me it’s obvious that tradition is right here, and that man is tripartite, compounded of Body, Mind and Spirit. And that the middle term is vastly important, here to stay, impossible to reallocate to either or both of the end terms. It can’t be unloaded on to Spirit. Clean of everything but itself, Spirit is pure and unchanging Awareness, Subject without objective content; and in no way can it take on Mind, that most kaleidoscopic of thingamies. Even more certain is the fact that Mind can’t be moved in the opposite direction and somehow grafted on to the Body. If it could, what would be the difference between surveying a bruise on your knee and feeling the ouch; or between cupping your head in your hand while staring into the far distance, and contemplating the sweet (or horrible) mystery of life? No doubt about it, the Accused has and is a Mind all right, a Mind of his own, with unique pluses and unique minuses. It’s what makes him a distinct individual, a person. He can’t get out of it, or get it out of him. He’s stuck with the darn thing.

COUNSEL: One’s own mind, then, is clearly distinguishable and separate from all other minds?
Autant de têtes, autant d’avis?

WITNESS: There’s a good deal of overlapping, and blurring and merging at the edges; nevertheless, an inviolable core remains. Take some examples. Mercifully the taste of the marmalade you’re having at breakfast doesn’t spread to my kipper. Much as you might like to, you can’t pass the pain in your back on to me. You have no clue to my feelings about the latest edition of King Charles’s
Guidelines for Architects;
or about Lord Scargill’s TV protest, in full fig, against the abolition of the Upper House; or about the appointment of the first Lady Archbishop of York. (Or you hadn’t, till now!) And so on, endlessly… In fact, I know of no sillier idea than this - that you and I and the Accused don’t have minds of our own - unless it’s the idea that we don’t have any minds at all.