The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (15 page)

COUNSEL: Why, then, do you suppose the Accused fastens on to this crackpot notion?

WITNESS: I should have thought the answer was obvious. Having made up his mind (a revealing phrase), in the teeth of all the evidence to the contrary, that he’s divine, he hunts around for any old reason to support that conclusion. Not wishful thinking but wishful refusal to think - wishful self-deception - is his trouble. l could be wrong. I hope I am wrong. But that’s the impression I get.

COUNSEL, to jury: About the Witness’s first point - what he calls the pragmatic test - the Prosecution will be calling other witnesses to testify that the Accused is, in his personal morals and behaviour, no better than the rest of us. Worse, some will say. Either way, his pretensions to divinity will be made to look absurd. Meanwhile, let’s continue to address ourselves to the Witness’s second point, to Nokes’s disingenuous dismissal of the mind. We await with bated breath his account of how he rids himself of - and gets along so nicely without - this thing that the rest of us are encumbered with. I almost said: that the rest of us are.

I have no questions for the Witness. He stands down.

Defence:
Think-bubbles

MYSELF: lt’s wrong, I say, to dismiss any well-established and sincerely held opinion as wrong, just like that. But it’s right to ask: from what point of view, in what context, for whom and at what time and for what purpose is it wrong? Conversely, of course, it’s right to ask, not
whether,
but at
what level,
such an opinion is right and true.

This rule of thumb applies to the question of whether I have or am a mind. Very much so. And by
mind,
of course, I don’t mean
brain,
which is a thing you can weigh and put in a jar and pickle.

Take the level of common sense, which - viewed from other levels - is really common nonsense. Nevertheless, manspeak goes with manhood, and it’s not merely permissible but necessary to talk common-sensibly
as if
I had a mind. Just as it’s necessary to talk
as if
I move around the world (on foot, by car, by plane), and look at it through two eyes (one lazy, the other busy), and am here what I look like to you over there (headed, your size, your way up), and so on and on. To refuse to
fall in with
these ‘as if’ conventions would be tiresome and pedantic and indeed unworkable. On the other hand, to
fall for
them (as almost all of us do, almost all of our lives) is far worse. lt’s to miss the whole point of our lives.

For these reasons my response to this Witness’s testimony will be two-pronged. I shall show in what sense l’m mindless here, and then show how I neglect that sense at my peril.

JUDGE: Hold on! Not so fast! Surely your Defence rests on the difference between what you call the third person and what you call the First Person? And surely what makes all the difference is the First Person’s
mind?
These persons look much the same, but the latter’s certainly, and by definition, fixed up - spooked up, some would say - with this invisible presence, while the former isn’t. It’s possible to doubt others’ minds, not your own.

MYSELF: With respect, Your Honour, they couldn’t look more
different.
The visible and real differences between the third person and the First - inversion, decapitation, 180° turn-around, and so on - are striking and many-sided enough, without dragging in dubious invisible ones. In fact the silliest thing in the world is myself as this First Person persuading myself that I’m the spitting image of that third person over there - except that a think-bubble or balloon (as in a strip cartoon) arises from the top of my head! A wild fantasy, which common sense nevertheless builds its world on.

No, a thousand times No! The only mind or think-bubble I need, or can find the slightest evidence for, is the Super-bubble that rises from my No-head - from my Bottom Line - and it’s none other than the concentric system of cosmic bubbles featuring in nearly all our diagrams, and in Diagram No. 10 in particular. If I’m to use the word ‘mind’ at all, here is the Mind-Body or Body-Mind of God Himself, His marvellously filled-out and iridescent Think-bubble, His richly sculpted and gilded Frame of Mind. And mine!

I find myself permanently stationed at the mid-point of this divine nest of hemispheres. Let me remind you of the pattern. Looking
up
from here, I find the outermost layers to be tenanted by heavenly bodies. Looking
out
from here, I find the middle layers to be tenanted by earthly bodies, including humans of all sorts and conditions, and notably the one behind glass who I identify as John a-Nokes. There he is, out there alongside the others, the same way up as they are, and like them furnished with two eyes in a head, and nary a hint of a think-balloon arising from it. Looking
down
from here, I find these feet, and foreshortened legs, and most of my foreshortened trunk, in that order.

Diagram No. 10

And I find the whole hemispherical bubble-system terminating in and resting on my Bottom Line, on this fuzzy but perfectly visible boundary drawn across my chest, well short of the neck and the head I was told I had right here. When in every sense I have the humility to
bow
before the evidence, before what’s given up there and out there and down there - given to the headless one here at the World’s End - this is what I get. I’d better take it. I don’t intend to turn down God’s kind invitation to bubble over with Him so joyfully and so imaginatively. [Counsel’s bouncing about on his feet, vainly trying to get a word in edgeways.] Come to think of it, God’s Think-bubble - or Nest of Think-bubbles - is just what His world amounts to. All those seemingly solid creations of His, including Messrs Wilberforce and Nokes, are phenomena, surfaces not even skin-deep, airy nothings that go pop as you approach them. No matter how showy, the only substantial thing about them is the divine Bubble Blower or Afflatus at their core.

COUNSEL, at last: Following on that Peeing God, we now have - if you please! - a Bubbly God, a God crooning that old pop song, ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air.’ All bubble and squeak, if you ask me - [Some hooting and clapping in the public gallery.]

MYSELF: Your Honour, do I have to endure this nuisance?

JUDGE: Just carry on, regardless.

MYSELF: Of the many intriguing features of this concentric world-system, the one which concerns me just now is the assortment of senses which reveal it. In fact, it’s not so much a think-bubble as a see-touch-hear-taste-smell-bubble. I
see
stars and clouds and mountain tops. I
see and touch
rocks and trees and houses. I
see and touch and hear
people and animals and machinery. I
see and touch and hear and taste and smell
crunchy slices of toast. I
feel
an aching muscle and a collywobbly stomach... In short, accompanying and disclosing the cosmic hierarchy of objects, and inseparable from them, is this cosmic (repeat, cosmic) hierarchy of senses. Also, of course, over and above these localized sense-objects, there are more general ones. Thus I sometimes take on the joy of the world, at other times its sadness; sometimes its beauty, at other times its dreariness. Quite often, with Jakob Boehme, all Creation has for me a delicious
smell.
And then, of course, it is continually displaying all sorts of interconnections, all sorts of meanings and values which knit the parts into one tremendous Whole.

This is the way the world comes. This is the form it takes, the richness of it. In this and no other fashion is the universe - which is my Body - served up to me: as a
sensible
universe, a
minded
cosmos, a
living
organism, complete and strictly indivisible. To split it into a mindless body there and a bodiless mind here - a machine and a ghost - is to wreck the body and unhinge the mind. Violence that’s as absurd as it is unnecessary. No, I’m not Body
and
Mind, and Spirit. Not a troika but a pair: Body-Mind,
and
Spirit.

Which means that murder’s afoot, murder’s called for. I’m God’s hit man, under contract to kill the mind as a separate something or other. The great medieval English philosopher William of Occam (in Surrey) furnishes the weapon. Occam’s Razor is the famous principle of parsimony: if you can do without a notion or an entity (he says) do without it, do it in. Shrewd advice! Accordingly, I dispatch the mind as an existent, real, useful entity. It isn’t. Most definitely it isn’t. On the contrary, it’s
de trop
and a confounded nuisance.

COUNSEL wades in with: This is lunacy. I have, with great reluctance, to share the same Universe Body with Mr John a-Nokes, whether I like it or not. But not - thank heaven! - the same mind. People’s minds, differing hugely - and, providentially, insulated from each other - can’t be decanted into a blender and reduced to some kind of psychic purée. As the Witness testified, each is a little world. It’s this privacy which makes the Accused’s life and mine, thrown together in the same cosmos, just about bearable.

MYSELF: It’s not that the mind selects its little private world out of the big public world, but rather that the big world is self-selective and grudging by nature, and discloses itself piecemeal, in dribs and drabs and never as a whole. So much so that knowledge of the world is often described by the sages as a kind of ignorance. Put it like this: you and I, as Spirit, are at once absolutely empty of the world and absolutely full of it. But as Mind-Body, we are never seized of more than minor excerpts from it. It’s a limitation on the side of the object, not the Subject.

And so, members of the Jury, the stage is cleared of that bastard and shady mountebank which I call my mind - cleared to make way for Spirit. Bright Spirit which is none other than Awareness, Awareness which is none other than the indwelling God. Mind, that would-be usurper of God’s throne, that Old Pretender, has had his swollen and spooked-up head sliced clean off, with that keenest of razors, which is Occam’s.

COUNSEL: I’m afraid the philosophers won’t help you much in this court. They prove anything and agree on nothing. To rely on them is to lose your case. To rely on just one of them is to fail to find any case at all. I advise you - seeing that the mind’s status is the matter at issue just now - to forget about philosophy and stick to psychology. Or do I hear you telling the court that the immense body of theory and practice which is modern psychology is superfluous, a load of old rubbish?

MYSELF: Of course not. It came out, in my reply to the previous Witness, that the way from the Eden of pre-psychological man to the Promised Land of post-psychological man (I mean him in whom God is enthroned) lies through the howling Wilderness of psychological man. Certainly a region that can’t be bypassed. But just as certainly one that’s best not lingered in over-long.

I’m much helped in this passage from psychological man to post-psychological man - in this seeing the mind out and God in - by the behaviour of the stuff of the mind itself. Obligingly, my so-called mental contents are outward-facing and centrifugal, raring to go and make room here for Him whose place it is. They have objective intent. They are as unimpressed by that ballet of bloodless abstractions which is the mind-in-itself as they are impressed by that rumbustious, blood-distended, go-getting, blazing commotion which is the world - the scene they can’t wait to join. Thus I try in vain to think a thought that belongs to my mind and not to my world, one which is my own private property, which is altogether unthinged and mentalized. Thus I find that my love doesn’t exist till it belongs to my loved one: it’s not that I adore but that she’s adorable. That my thoughts and feelings are about her, not about myself-in-quite-a-state-about-the-lady. That my hate isn’t hate till it alights on what’s hateful. That I taste jam, not a tongue. That I smell a rose, and neither a nose nor an olfactory experience. That I fear spiders, not arachnophobia. In fact, it’s the rose that gives me the smell, the spider that gives me the creeps.
The mind is phoney.
And, in so far as I am a mind, I’m ‘mental’, meaning barmy. As a separate, inward-facing, self-contained entity, the mind doesn’t exist. And, in so far as it does exist on its lonesome, it’s a thief and a sick thief at that. So plague-stricken that it plants the kiss of death upon everything it pulls away from the world and bear-hugs. ‘He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy.’
I’m a real person in a real world to the degree that I have no mind of my own aside from my world.