The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (25 page)

One who looks down upon his humanity from superhuman heights isn’t subject to ordinary human norms, let alone the much more exacting norms and obligations of the religious life.

COUNSEL: Suppose he countered by asking you what’s the tremendous harm in this moral shortfall? And what’s so unusual about it? Suppose he argued that if our private failure to live up to our ideals were a public offence, we should all find ourselves in court trying one another in turn.

WITNESS: Aside from the personal harm and lack of integrity, the social harm is very great when it comes to matters spiritual. The history of religion is full of warnings about what happens when spirituality breaks loose and goes haywire. ‘Lilies that fester,’ says Shakespeare, ‘smell far worse than weeds.’ There’s no evil like the corruption of the good. It’s the pâtés of the spiritual life, not its bread and marge, which get infected by this variety of salmonella poisoning. The second half of the twentieth century was littered with its casualties - super-evangelists and gurus and bhagwans and rishis and siddhas and rinpoches who, though astonishingly successful for a time, succumbed along with their followers to the bug. In one way or another the behaviour of master and disciples fell scandalously short of that of the unsaved and unenlightened common man. Be warned! Let your back hair down, do what the devil you like, don’t give a damn for public opinion, aspire to divinity on the cheap - making for Godhood by this or that fast and easy route - and sooner rather than later you will find yourself sinking beneath all decent humanhood into well-deserved disgrace and eventual oblivion.

COUNSEL: Presumably well aware of all this, the Accused never tires of telling us that he’s no one’s guru, is an un-teacher with no ashram and no organization. And, of course, no Ten Commandments. All he does is run a do-it-yourself store stocked with cheap gadgetry for setting the customer up as his own pocket bhagwan, rishi, what have you.

WITNESS: Yes, of course. He’s no fool. The smartest way of becoming a super-guru is to pour contempt on the whole idea of guruship. And the smartest way of propagating blasphemy is cuckoo-fashion, by laying your eggs in others’ nests without their noticing. It saves you so much bother. But the social damage is great. It threatens to send a large proportion of the population cuckoo.

Defence:
The Apple and the Apple Tree

MYSELF: For three reasons I have no questions to put to the Witness. First, because Counsel has kindly put them for me. Second, because I agree with so many of the Bishop’s answers. Third, because he and I are nevertheless in such different lines of business that cross-questioning is bound to find us at cross-purposes over the remaining answers.

He’s a fruit merchant. I’m an arboriculturist. He wants to know about the apples, whether they are sound and sweet and abundant. I want to know about the tree. Is it a Cox’s Orange, or a Bramley, or an ungrafted crab, or perhaps not an apple tree at all? I say, first things first: it’s premature to judge before you know what you’re judging. This should be the most obvious thing in the world, but generally it’s the least obvious. The medieval courts that tried animals for immorality were abominable and absurd. But were they much more so than the court that’s trying me now? Justice and good sense say that, before you decide what reactions are fitting, you ask: ‘Reactions by whom, to what?’ Facts come before judgements upon them, what’s so before what ought to be so. The crucial question my life poses isn’t ‘How shall I behave?’ but ‘Who’s behaving?’ Get the latter right, and the former will come right of itself. Try to settle the former without reference to the latter, and all will go wrong. The trouble with this court isn’t its case against me but the unexamined presuppositions on which its case rests. Assumptions it refuses to go into, and that I insist on going into. This Trial is about the true identity of the Accused - and therefore of his accusers, who alas regard the whole question of identity as closed and padlocked. Not for admitting, let alone examining.

JUDGE, at work with his gavel: I’m sick and tired of this contempt for the court and its justice. Besides, what are all these witnesses for but to establish your identity - as all too human?

MYSELF: Your Honour, if a thousand witnesses were called, not one of them would be in a position to establish anything of the sort. I estimate the distance between the witness-box over there and the dock here at twenty feet. That box is a perfect place for going into
what I look like from there,
but no good at all for going into
what I am here.
There, the Witness picks up one of my countless regional appearances. Here, I am the Central Reality they are appearances of. And the difference between these two views of me is in all respects immense. With the greatest possible respect, Your Honour, I say that you and I are similarly placed
vis-à-vis
each other. Here, rather more than twenty feet from your bench, I’m perfectly placed for telling you how the Judge is doing; right there, on that bench at no distance from yourself, you are perfectly placed for telling me Who is putting on this Judge-impersonation. Only you can say, because only you, coinciding with yourself, have the requisite inside information.

COUNSEL: Lecturing the court is bad enough, lecturing the Judge is too much. And does you no good. Certainly it doesn’t hide the fact that you are sidestepping the point of the Witness’s testimony, to the effect that you don’t live up to your pretensions. Not by a million miles you don’t! His contention is that what you do reveals who you are, namely John a-Nokes. We know Mr John a-Nokes by his fruits. A somewhat sparse and blighted crop - to say the least.

MYSELF: Precisely. I couldn’t have put it better myself. By his fruits - a fairly poor crop - shall you and I know that Nokes fellow. What other sort could we expect from him?

Like the Bishop, I draw a sharp line between the false mystic - I hate the word mystic, but can’t find a better - the false mystic, whose fruits, though showy, turn out to be indigestible if not nauseous, and the true mystic, whose fruits, though often disclaimed and hardly visible at all, turn out to be wholesome. Well, what is the deciding factor between these two? How can we guard against spirituality going to the devil? I’ll tell you how. In effect, the false mystic says, ‘Never mind the facts, never mind what I am, let’s see what I get up to.’ In effect, the true mystic says, ‘First let me see what I am, then see what I get up to.’ I say: counter bedevilment by telling the truth. Truth is the key, the watchword, the safeguard, the only insurance policy against spiritual disaster. The given truth, the brutal truth, always the truth.

JUDGE: That sounds very fine, but
what is truth?

An incoherent shouting - something about a Judaean Governor - from the public gallery, but not coming from the friends of the New Apocalyptic. An attempt to locate the offender, with a view to ejecting him from the court, fails... Order is restored...

MYSELF: The truth is God’s truth. Telling God’s truth gets us into trouble - and sets us free. God’s truth is what each of us is as First Person Singular, present tense. God’s truth is what each of us sees when he dares to look down and in at himself, and take seriously what he finds. God’s truth is the vision of the One at the Centre of things, the One who has flung wide his arms and blown his top and been bowled clean over, heels over no-head. God’s truth, the saving truth, is the behaviour that flows from that blessed vision.

Will Your Honour, and the ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, please turn again to Diagram No. 15 [see Witness 15 The New Apocalyptic].

Let me remind you: at the bottom of the picture I have drawn what you are as First Person; and, further up the picture, what you look like as second/third person over there in the mirror, and in the experience of your observers. Notice how, when that little one spreads his little arms, they take in his little world. And how when you, the Big One, spread your great arms, they take in the great world... Please spread your arms now and, looking straight ahead, see how they really do embrace the wide, wide world. Please... [Two jury members comply. The others look embarrassed or stare stonily ahead... ] You want to grant me a fair Trial, surely? To give me the consideration you would give to a Defending Counsel if I had one. I know you are rather close together for this experiment, but some overlapping of arms won’t obscure my point - which is that,
on present evidence,
your left hand is as far from your right as East is from West. That you really are embracing the world... [With some more coaxing the remaining ten Jurypersons comply - more or less reluctantly.]

Those false mystics we were talking about are a proud lot. They refuse to lower their sights, refuse to
bow deeply
before the evidence. They are uppity, so darned uppish that they never make the downward shift from the human owner of those little arms to the Divine Owner of these great arms - the arms of the God Who embraces and loves His world. Or, if they do find themselves on the Bottom Line, there’s no question of their bottoming out. They make very sure it’s the launching pad from which they take off upwards to dominate the scene, and not sideways to enfold it.

JUDGE: All this is - what shall I call it? - so very
physical.
The Witness was speaking about morality.

MYSELF: I grant, Your Honour, that seeing oneself as embracing the world, and feeling the love behind that gesture and going on to act accordingly, aren’t at all the same thing. Nevertheless,
given half a chance, the first grows into the second and the third.
This takes time and proceeds invisibly. But it isn’t any kind of achievement. It’s awaking to the infinite merits of the Big One, not cultivating the paltry or non-existent merits of the little one. In fact, the little one seems, in the ever brighter light shed by the Big One, to get worse as time goes on! I know! I promise the Bishop that Jack’s an even more deplorable piece of work than he - the Bishop - imagines. I have inside information to that effect. All his righteousnesses are as filthy rags.

Quite the most specious rag is the banner with the strange device
Excelsior!
Lofty-minded and aspiring, the false mystic takes the way of gain and not loss, of living it up spiritually, of vainly trying to attain to the peak where he’s topping and the tops, where at last he tops in and is as far as possible from the valley where he bottoms out. The true mystic, on the other hand, submits to the fact that on the Bottom Line (so brilliantly visible as the place where his shirt fades into the Void) he finds, if only he will bow low enough, his Reality, his Source, his only Resource, his Root. Staying with that Root, caring for that Root, he enjoys in due course its fruits - fruits that are real, large, deliciously sweet, and abundant. In stark contrast to Excelsior - up and away, with head bloody but unbowed, and craning ever upwards - mounting to ever more precarious and barren heights. Fruitless, to say the least, is his attempt to cultivate personal virtue by distancing himself from the Root of all virtue, his refusal to bow before the evidence of his Essential Nature and Source.

Only let me bow low enough and I will come upon all I need. Here, at the very bottom of the world picture, lurks the One who suddenly appears where and when I as suddenly disappear. The One who is I - yet not I, but the One who lives in me. The Eternal Pantocrator whose fruits aren’t just the juiciest in the world, but are the world itself .

COUNSEL: It doesn’t say much for your blasphemous doctrine that it’s a farrago of inconsistencies. Half the time you’re claiming a bumper fruit crop, the other half a rotten one. Or is it none at all?

MYSELF: I’ll let Julian of Norwich answer for me: ‘God is all that is good, and the goodness that all things have is He.’ I’m no saint, but ask any saint how righteous he is, and it’s sinnerhood and not sainthood that he’ll claim. Even his Master wouldn’t let people call him good. As I keep telling you.

It’s you, Sir Gerald, who are confused. The truth is so simple. Look and
see.
‘We abide in darkness,’ says St Bernard, ‘so long as we walk in belief and not in beholding. The righteous, living in belief, live in shadow.’ What you are - in and for yourself, in your First-Person capacity - is, precisely, Capacity. Visibly lacking all fruit of your own, you provide unlimited shelving for others’ fruit. Accordingly it’s no secret that, if you want to know what to think of someone, ask him what he thinks of the folk around him. He’s good to the extent that he finds them good. And this makes perfect sense. As for Who he really, really is, he’s the Root, and roots as such are barren. God as His world is orchard on orchard, ripe with every conceivable sort of choice and delicious fruit. But God as Himself, intrinsically - God as the Abyss - is shot of everything He gives rise to. To be its Origin is to be its Absence. None is so poor as He. Only He is low enough and humble enough and simple enough and nothing enough to come up with
everything.

Members of the jury, one picture, according to an ancient Chinese proverb, is worth a thousand words. I beg you to do two things. Look yet again at our Diagram No. 15. Look
out
at its message. And then, to bring that message home, look
down
at yourself, at your own Bottom Line or Ground, and you’ll see with unmatched clarity the Place where what you look like flips over into What you really, really are. And where You as Root start to quicken and burgeon and blossom and bear fruit as the world itself, eternally.