The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (21 page)

COUNSEL, to me: If you think that this demonstration has proved that your technique isn’t hypnotic - isn’t hypnosis pressed into the service of blasphemy - you’d better think again. What else has it proved?

MYSELF: Let me explain my position vis-à-vis hypnosis. My aim in that demonstration, as always, was to appeal to the given facts, and a plague on all distortions and denials of them. My life’s work is hunting down and destroying the illusions society runs on. In fact I’m a resolute anti-hypnotist, who always warns people not to believe what I tell them (let alone what others tell them) but to check up on it.
Dare to be your own authority!
That’s my theme song, my watchword.

COUNSEL: But when the subject is as suggestible as the Witness obviously is, what price this boasted appeal to the bare data?

MYSELF: Of course you have a point there. It does sometimes happen - in spite of my intentions to the contrary - that my way of putting questions involves a mild trance. About this I’m unrepentant. In fact I’m happy to deploy a benign and temporary kind of hypnosis to counter the malign and chronic kind from which all human adults suffer until they learn to snap out of it. It’s a case of a hair of the dog that bit you, of a homoeopathy that really does work. As indeed you have just seen.

I can’t say it too often or too emphatically: the ‘normal’ human condition is one of deep hypnosis. Instead of seeing what we see, we live out our lives seeing what we’re told to see. And the difference between the two seeings is total. Take just one example out of hundreds, the one which happens to be very much to the point just now. From early childhood the Witness’s parents and relations, her friends and acquaintances, the English language itself, have been drumming into her that she is face-to-face with everyone she meets. So of course, hallucinating to order along with the rest of us, she ‘constructs’ a fictitious head on her shoulders to keep those real ones out with, and ‘sees’ her face
in the one place it’s absent from!
The consequences for living are in a score of ways unfortunate, and ultimately disastrous.

Let me remind you, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, of the spectacular things that a stage hypnotist can get his subjects to do. He may suggest to a prim and proper middle-aged middle-class lady that, as soon as he wakes her from her trance, she will unconcernedly stroll to centre stage, and hoist her skirt, and dance the cancan. And lo! stroll to centre stage and hoist her skirt and dance the cancan she does with great conviction and aplomb, and without at all knowing why. Well, that’s a meek and mild and comparatively harmless example of what can happen when under the influence. Immeasurably more serious is what does happen to us all. We humans are so bound by the spell of the Master Mesmerist - Society is the polite name for him - that we will believe and do practically anything to gain admittance to the club he runs and that we’re dying to belong to. Talk about my occasional and one-minute use of hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion! Human life is
all
hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion - except that it’s not so much ‘post’ as ever-present! Almost all adults are to some degree the Mesmerist’s zombies. My job is to prod to wakefulness and freedom those who are beginning to suspect that he’s reduced them to that state. If this means a little counter-hypnosis, why on earth not? What a wonderful tribute to the treatment
against
hallucination which we have just witnessed, that five minutes of it should be so effective against five decades of the Master Mesmerist’s treatment for hallucination!

COUNSEL: I repeat: you aren’t on trial for witchcraft, or for the abuse of hypnosis to brainwash people and get them into your power. The Jury aren’t going to be put off the blasphemy trail so easily.

MYSELF: Not a whiff of a red herring here, I promise you. I am far hotter on the blasphemy trail than you are. For too long society and language hypnotized me into hallucinating here, bang at the world’s Centre, that congealed lump of personal stuff which is the seal and substance of John a-Nokes’s separate identity. This was the chip on his shoulder. This was his blasphemy. This was his brainfouling. But now he’s indeed in the brainwashing business. Simply looking-to-see is the fragrant, economy-size, industrial-strength, all-stain-removing, mildly hypnotic Tide that washes Jack’s brain and brain-box clean away.

And all that’s left, when the Tide runs out, is God.

Is God...

This time I’m leaving it to the true Meister, to Eckhart, to complete the story:

When all things are reduced to naught in you, then you shall see God.

Into any man who is brought low, God pours His whole Self with all His might.

It (the soul) is intrinsically receptive of nothing but the Divine Essence, without means. Here God enters the Soul with His all, not merely with a part. God enters the ground of the Soul. None can touch the ground of the Soul but God only. No creature is admitted.

God has ordained to every thing its place. To fish the water, to birds the air, to beasts the earth, to the Soul the Godhead.

Prosecution Witness No. 14

THE PSYCHIATRIST

COUNSEL, to Witness: The Accused maintains that, though in appearance a man, in reality he is God. The court wishes to know whether, in your practice over the past twenty years, you have come across this sort of madness... All right, Your Honour... Let’s say, this sort of thing.

WITNESS: From time to time I have.

COUNSEL: How would you describe his condition? And how would you treat it?

WITNESS: For me to say that he’s suffering from delusions of grandeur is merely to stick a handy label on him, and explains nothing. To say that the condition is a reverting to infant omnipotence explains very little. It may well be true, but doesn’t tell me why the client reverts. I can think of a dozen reasons. Our work together would, if at all possible, be to bring to light the deep and hidden causes in his case, to ventilate them. Once exposed, there’s a good chance of a cure. Probably, but not necessarily, the root cause of the trouble lies way back in early childhood, now conveniently forgotten and covered up. In which case a long and difficult task lies ahead, but not a hopeless one. The important thing, I find, is for me to keep an open mind, gain the client’s confidence as he discovers I really care, and get him talking. I have to listen, listen, listen - and look. And wait. The less I say the better. We both have to be patient. More haste less healing.

COUNSEL: I’m told that you have never, till today, met the Accused in the flesh. However, I gather that you have made a rather careful study of his various books, articles, and audio and video tapes.

WITNESS: That’s right.

COUNSEL: Well, would you say he’s sane but rather sick? Or downright insane? Mad, with lucid intervals?

WITNESS: Mad is not a word I have a lot of use for. But if anybody’s sick, he’s sick all right. Just how sick will depend largely on how serious he is, how far he really means what he’s saying. If he were a client of mine, I would give special attention to his behaviour, his style, his voice, his body language, his whole personality and state of health. This general picture should tell me more about him than any understanding of his ideas could do. It should furnish the clue to the depth of his delusions, and show whether he’s altogether taken in by them and out of touch with reality, or is playing some sort of game.

COUNSEL: Briefly, what have you concluded from your study of his published material?

WITNESS: My strong impression is that he’s far from being what you would call mad. On the other hand, his delusions of grandeur are not superficial, not a pose. I suspect they are deeper rooted than any I’ve met hitherto. He’s no Baron Münchhausen, or ordinary Berneian gamesman. If he were my client, I think I would find the chances of remission to be rather slender. I need hardly add that, of course, he’s just the sort who would never come to me for treatment in a million years. Or, if he did turn up on my doorstep, it would be to leave a card offering
me
therapy! Free treatment, at that! The sure sign of a fanatic with some almighty axe to grind.

COUNSEL: One last question. What reason have you to describe the Accused as
deluded?
Please explain to the court why you are so positive he isn’t Who he says he is?

WITNESS: That’s an easy one. I’m an agnostic myself but I accept that any God worthy of the name is omnipotent and omniscient and omnipresent. Well, if the gentleman over there in the dock is even one of these three, and that one only at rare intervals, all I’ve said so far is irrelevant. And I’ll eat all the hats at Ascot!

COUNSEL: Thank you. I think you may have dented the Accused’s insufferable smugness, and he'll want to have a word with you.

Defence:
The Three Omnies

MYSELF: No, the Witness may stand down. I have no questions to fire at him, no bones to pick with him. On the contrary, I have to thank him for showing me, at the conclusion of his testimony, what till then I had no idea of: namely, how to counter the rest of it. Yet once more in this Trial, it seems to me that I have lost the day and then - praise be! - it turns out that all I have to do is to develop the Prosecution’s case against me till it becomes the case for me. Or rather, to clear the decks and let it develop itself, and proceed to do a somersault dive overboard without any pushing.

Omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence - these three, and the greatest of these is omnipotence. If, members of the Jury, I can somehow convey to you the sense in which I’m enjoying all three of them, putting them into practice right now in court, then you will have to turn in a verdict of Not Guilty. For I will have proved to you that I am Who I say I am. But let me at once add that you won’t in a millennium of Sundays cotton on to my Identity - and the powers that go with it - until you work up some interest in yours, and the powers you wield. You won’t understand a word I say until you dare to look and see whether or not What I’m claiming to be and to do has all along been What you manifestly are, and are doing all the time. The fact - I can’t repeat it too often - is that
you
are on trial here, and before you can reach a true verdict on me you must reach a true verdict on you. Justice begins at home. So, alas, do injustice, bigotry, embattled prejudice, the closed and padlocked mind.

And a favourite way of putting up the shutters of the mind is to fall fast asleep. Which two members of the Jury have evidently done, Your Honour, before we start.

[The Judge gives deafening applications of his gavel. One of the sleepers starts violently, as if jabbed with an ice-pick. The other goggles at the court as if he can't decide whether it’s part of his dream.]

JUDGE, to me: Well, who’s to blame for this? It’s up to you to hold their interest. I warned you of the risks of conducting your own Defence... As for the Jury, don’t let me catch any of you dozing again! From now on, each of you is responsible for keeping his neighbour awake, as well as himself. When in doubt, prod. Vigorously.

MYSELF: Fear of the truth is a more powerful soporific than boredom. Half the time, I’ve noticed, at least one juror is nodding off. Not because I’m failing to get to him or her but because I’m succeeding! Once, in a workshop here in London, the lady next to me slept from near the beginning to the very end, some of the time with her head on my shoulder - thus warding off the terrible danger of Self-realization. ‘What a nice workshop!’ she commented when we said goodbye.

JUDGE: Fascinated though we all are by these reminiscences, I’m afraid we’ll have to wait till we can read them in your memoirs. Just now, let me bring something to your notice. There's a Trial going on.

MYSELF: A Trial, Your Honour, about who’s gifted with divine powers, and who isn’t. Back, then, to our divine trio, starting with omnipresence - which happens to be the most immediately demonstrable.

Look! I aim to show you that, lying low somewhere in this courtroom, is its Creator, the Heart and Soul of all things. He’s the Importunate One who stands at every door and knocks. ‘Let’s get together!’ he propositions. To track Him down should be easy. ‘For God,’ says Eckhart, ‘nothing is far.’ He’s the Distance Swallower, the Coincider. Centripetal, He’s the Attraction, the Great Draw. It’s as if an elastic band were stretched so tight between Him in the middle and all those things around Him that something has to give, and - whoosh! - in they hurtle. He’s the only one in the whole world who, by pulling in everywhere, is everywhere, while the rest stay somewhere or other, are local, mutually standoffish, snobby, all elbows, careful to keep their precious distances, insisting on a room of their own. All but the Omnipresent one are exclusive brethren, which is to say unbrotherly. He alone is the Friend, the Includer, the Intimate of all, the Magnet, the Lodestone. That’s one of the reasons why His name is Love.

Never mind about me for the moment. Never mind about the other people in court. Take a little time off to look into your own condition, personally. First-personally. Which of these two species are you now, Excluder or Includer, Pusher-off or Puller-in - going by your own firsthand experience? I must admit that you look like an Excluder; but we can’t always go by looks, can we? How I wish that His Honour would let me stretch a string between you and me, eye to eye, so that you could check whether, pulled taut, it reduces to a point; or else would let me unroll a tape-measure for similarly viewing end-on and checking whether our mutual distance reads as ten, twenty, thirty feet - or as zero. Alas, hardly practicable: the courtroom would soon resemble a gigantic spider-web with one Spider and many flies. But really you’ve only to look now to see whether you are the Spider at the Centre or one of the many flies caught out there in its web. A mere fly, destined to refresh some voracious arachnid before long.