The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (32 page)

WITNESS: Founded on long experience.

MYSELF: But not, I think, on experience of people like me, who are six thousand miles away, and who make the claims I do, and don’t so much live up to them as get down to them.

WITNESS: Well, I think I have to concede that point. On the other hand, I’ll stake my professional reputation that you aren’t the exception you say you are.

MYSELF: And I’ll stake my life that I AM that exception absolutely. In fact, I don’t know what uniqueness is till I come round to being MYSELF, this First Person Oh-so-Singular.

Anyway, thank you. No more questions. [Witness is switched off...]

I’ve no doubt the Witness knows her job and does it very well. I’m in no position, and have no wish, to challenge her methods or results. But I have to tell her that my job - and the material I work with - is very, very different from hers. She deals with one species and order and genus - kingdom, rather - I with another. We aren’t in the same line of business at all.

Briefly, here are the differences:

(1) The bodies the Witness treats are skin-encapsulated, closed and self-contained systems. Each is a sharply defined thing, contained within the familiar world of sharply defined things. My body, on the contrary, is open-ended. At the World’s End which is its Bottom Line, this body gives on to and merges with another world altogether, a Nowhere-and-Nowhen-and-Nohow world of infinite mystery in which there are no things at all. It draws upon this Other World as a tree draws on its roots and its roots draw on the soil.

(2) This open end of mine is no small and constricted aperture, like the neck of an uncorked bottle, or the mouth of a lidless jug, or the sphincter muscle of an alimentary canal. It’s more like the Amazon that widens till it’s the Atlantic.

(3) This busted-wide-open body of mine is absolutely unique. I’ve never come across another remotely like it. The bodies the Witness handles are many, and remarkably similar. Therefore she knows where she is with them.

(4) They are all the same way up - head above, feet below. Mine is the other way up. I stand on my head.

(5) Or rather, on my no-head, on my shoulders. The Witness’s clients are each stoppered and topped off with a
topknot
- an apt name for what amounts to a tangle of hitches and reefs and splices, of impossible-to-untie knots of every kind. It’s a tangle I’m absolutely free of, thank the Lord, as soon as I care to look. There are no knots in a no-topknot. Here’s nothing to pick at and fumble with and attribute to traumatic episodes in my history, and generally to fuss and fret about.

(6) Both in shape and size the rest of my body is very different from those the Witness works with. A normal person’s height (as Pliny the Elder noticed) equals the span of his extended arms: but this person - this First Person - is the great exception. I’ve got arms and legs all right, and a trunk - of a sort. A unique sort. My arms, when extended sideways, I see are long enough to embrace the world. My trunk and my legs, by way of contrast, are drastically foreshortened, and my trunk is backless. As for my shoulders, they are very broad as well as fuzzy, and in the middle is a great Gap. This means that my left arm and my right arm are unconnected. Or rather, that they are connected to No-thing. How different from the little arms of John a-Nokes there behind glass, and from those of the Witness’s clients! All of which stick out of human bodies.

(7) What I’m describing is my real physique, so solid above, so airy below - the one that’s given right here - and I’ll be damned if I’ll turn down such a mind-blowing gift! Damned, and crazy. It’s the one I see and see with, the one I hear and hear with, the one that feels pains and pleasures, and eats food that actually tastes, and smells stinks that actually pong. Of course I’m also fixed up with a pseudo-physique which is incapable of all these things - a normally-headed and regular-way-up but unfeeling apology for a body - which hangs out a yard or so away. ‘Hangs out’ is right: it’s no more than a distant framed-and-glazed picture, paper-thin, suspended alongside framed-and-glazed pictures of family and friends. It’s no more for living in than those photos are. It’s as dead as the wall it’s hanging on, and the fact that Jack-in-the-glass somewhat resembles the Witness’s well-fleshed clients does nothing to bring that Thin Man to life.

These assorted differences between my physique and that of the Witness’s clients by no means exhaust the list. But they are quite sufficient to confirm that what works for them is most unlikely to work for me, and vice versa.
This unique patient requires unique therapy.

Yes, strikingly different though this body is from those, it too needs treatment. All too easily it can get out of order. When overlooked and unattended to, it develops tightnesses, rigidities, stiffnesses, blocks, knots of a sort. What do I do about them? How effective is the treatment? That’s the question I want to tackle next.

COUNSEL, very loudly: It’s
not
the question! You aren’t accused of being screwed up but of being puffed up. Puffed up to divine proportions - in your own eyes. But now you’re as good as confessing that you can’t be divine after all, and that you’ve been having us on all the while. For you’ve just admitted to being a tangle of bodily knots, at least some of the time. Knots which the Being you claim to be is certainly free of, absolutely and forever. So you aren’t divine after all! Come on - admit it now, late in the day though it is.

MYSELF: Learned Counsel’s theology is simplistic. We will more easily see this if we turn to Diagram No. 19.

Diagram No. 19

As I understand the Christian tradition, Divinity comes in three very, very different packages - Every-thing, Some-thing, and No-thing. The
first,
the infinite or jumbo size, embraces, along with all things, their knots. By containing them It frees Itself of them, and is unknotted - the way the ocean, though holding all those fish, is itself unfishy; and the way the cobra, though incorporating its venom, is unpoisoned by it. The
third
Divinity package - the infinitesimal or single-portion size - is guaranteed pure and thing-free and therefore knot-free. Not so the
second
or regular size. Finite, betwixt and between, it has its share of knots which need unravelling. It’s this aspect of the Divine - the headless, long-armed, feet-up sort - that I’ve been describing. And - yes! - that I’m claiming to be. This is the Cosmic Christ. This is God incarnate in the Son, who is always taking on the form of a limited and mortal Some-thing, in sharp contradistinction to the Father who is All-things, and the Spirit who is No-thing.

It’s right here, and only here, that I find the Son whose unique body is indeed my very own. Here is the Majesty that comes down and humbles Itself to take on -
me and my knots!
And that, I tell you, is humility! That’s a comedown which only the God Who is Love Itself is capable of.

COUNSEL thunders: Jury - did you hear that? John a-Nokes is again telling us that he’s nothing less than the Second Person of the Holy Trinity! Don’t forget this. Remember it when you retire to consider your verdict.

MYSELF: Wrong, as usual! John a-Nokes is the image in that glazed-and-framed picture hanging on the wall. He’s an appearance, not substantial or real - let alone divine. As for the unglazed-and-unframed person who’s so real and so substantial here, I swear to you that the given facts have
forced
me to come back - reluctantly, in spite of myself - to something very like the indwelling Christ of my childhood. Amazing grace has brought me to my senses, at last!

My story now - along with that of Paul and countless other devout souls - is of the Christ who lives in me, who is the life of my life and the soul of my soul. How fortunate for them that they can’t be arrested on a charge of blasphemy, and tried along with me under the Act of 2002 CE!

COUNSEL: I doubt whether you are in the same league as the great Apostle.

MYSELF: He called himself the chief of sinners. I’m in that league, all right.

But now, with (or without) your permission, I resume my response to the testimony of the Witness you were pleased to call to testify against me.

The question I must now address is this: what is the effective treatment for the knots that are indeed apt to form in this unique and true body of mine? What is the appropriate and practical cure - which has to be as unlike the Witness’s as the material she works with is different from mine? The cure which, in my firsthand experience, really works? The remedy which, when persisted in, thaws out my freeze-ups, strips me of my armour, and unravels the knots which inevitably come with incarnation?

Truly speaking, the treatment isn’t a treatment or a doing at all, but a waking. It’s
attention, humility
in the face of inescapable evidence, sustained looking to see,
thankfulness
for the given - for the God who gives Himself.

And the crucial and primary sight is the Absence of that knot of knots which is my topknot (in truth my bottomknot).
Untying
that head-knot would take infinite time and trouble; and even if it were to succeed, I would be left with an agglomeration of loose ends.
Abolishing
the whole thing in a flash is immeasurably more effective.

This is the head start (no-head start) that can and should lead to the undoing of knots in the now-decapitated body. It reaches the parts that no other medicines can reach, and works wonders there. Taking this medicine consists of adding my body in along with my head, so that it, too, is voided, absented, and thoroughly
cleaned up.
To do this, I simply take time off from looking
down
to check that I’m headless, and look
out
to check that I’m also bodiless. Normally, in fact, my trunk and legs are out of view, and replaced by the scene ahead; thus the knots in those parts are instantly dissolved. Not once and for all, of course. But when this treatment is applied consciously enough and repeated often enough, no knots can survive it.

The consciousness is essential. Freedom from knots requires that I really do wake up to what I see, instead of dreaming what I’m told to dream. This isn’t quite so easy as I’m apt to suppose. The final vision - the sustained attention which completes the job - is the up-ending of this headless body. When you have a jug of dirty water, you don’t empty it by just removing the stopper. Nor do you empty it by tilting the jug with the stopper firmly in position. No, you have to do both things - take out the stopper and up-end the jug. Then the dirty water is at once discharged. (The chart which I produced in my response to the last Witness - the map of the 8 X 8-fold Plebeian Path - illustrates the process in some detail.
¹
) In plain language, the full treatment has three parts: it requires that I lose my head, and find my inverted body, and very frequently lose that as well - consciously. What could be simpler?

Simple doesn’t mean easy. This treatment for knots (which is also treatment for blasphemy) isn’t once and for all. It has to be kept up. My attention flagging, the topknot creeps back on, the trunk does a somersault to match those around me, and it solidifies. The knots re-knot themselves. Jack’s back in, and Christ’s out there in the cold again. And then God help me! (I’ve never known Him not to. When asked.)

Here, finally, are a Christian, a Muslim, a Taoist, a Buddhist, a Jew and a Hindu who had the secret of untying that knot of knots which is Man:

The outward and the inward man are as different as earth from heaven.

Eckhart

‘Behold,’ they said, ‘we are men, and they are men; both we and they are in bondage to sleep and food.’ In their blindness they did not perceive that there is an infinite difference between them.

Rumi

While keeping my physical frame, I lost sight of my real self. Gazing at muddy water, I lost sight of the clear abyss.

Chuang-tzu

Where others dwell, I do not dwell. Where others go, I do not go. This doesn’t mean that I refuse to associate with other people, but that black and white must be distinguished.