The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (33 page)

Pai-Yun

I call Heaven and Earth to witness that one day I sat down and wrote a Kabbalistic secret: suddenly I saw the shape of myself standing before me and myself disengaged from me.

School of Abulafia

As rivers lose name and shape in the sea, wise men lose name and shape in God, glittering beyond all distance. He who has found Spirit is Spirit... The knots of his heart are unloosed.

Mundaka Upanishad

1
See Appendix.

Prosecution Witness No. 21

THE EX-SANYASSIN

COUNSEL, to Jury: The Accused often calls his teaching and practice ‘The Headless Way’. What is this Way? In his own blasphemous jargon (I quote from one of his books) it is ‘seeing on one’s shoulders, instead of the man-head that isn’t here, the God-head that is here, and being healed’. Well, our next witness will tell us about his adventures on the Headless Way, and the sort of healing it led to.

WITNESS: It all began years before I had even heard of John a-Nokes. I was twenty, an orange-robed sanyassin and a member of a very large pseudo-religious community in Oregon. The things we got up to! Some I now see were quite beneficial, most were harmless, a few were very harmful. Among them all, the one that fascinated me, and in the end practically drove me mad, was called ‘The Guillotine Meditation’. Our guru praised it highly, describing it as very ancient, very deep and very liberating. It was a most beautiful Tantric meditation, he said.

COUNSEL: Meditation on what?

WITNESS: On having no head.

COUNSEL: Go on.

WITNESS: I’ve no idea why, but this meditation so got a hold on me that I lost all interest in the other things that my fellow sanyassins were into. I practised headlessness for hours every day, and felt guilty about the times when I got diverted from it, or when it slipped away from me. I became more and more unsociable, more and more lonely in that crowd of thousands.

Then came the showdown, the revelations of corruption and violence, leading to the swift breakup of that community. Angry and disillusioned, I only wanted to get as far away as possible. I burned my orange outfit and my mala, and moved back to New York. I got a job and settled down to normal life. Increasingly, it was as if that nightmare in Oregon had never happened - except for one hangover. The Guillotine Meditation went on bugging me. I still practised it daily, as far as my work allowed. And still I missed out on the promised healing. If anything, my anxiety and stress got worse. Yet it never occurred to me to cut my losses and stop, just call a halt. I was that stupid, that sick!

COUNSEL: And then you met the Accused?

WITNESS: No, I never met him. I came across his book on Headlessness in a second-hand bookstore. With great excitement I read and reread it, hoping against hope that Guillotine Meditation Mark II, Nokes’s Style, would at last sort me out. Not content with the printed word, I tried to make contact with the author. I carved out of beechwood a figurine of the Headless One and sent it to him. No reply. I followed it up with pictures of headless figures, mostly Buddhas, that I’d come across. Still no reply. Not even an acknowledgement. I felt so hurt, so frustrated. But still I read the man’s books, and went on practising. And I grew sicker than ever.

COUNSEL: How did it all end?

WITNESS: Well, as a result of my obsession, I was fired from my job as an accountant. I became unemployable, incapable of concentrating on the easiest work for more than a few minutes. And, naturally, very depressed. There were times when I thought of suicide. I only just managed to stay out of mental hospital.

COUNSEL: But you recovered. What actually happened?

WITNESS: Honestly, I don’t know for sure. I think that what saved me was that I fell in love with my psychotherapist. As luck would have it, her name was Hedda. ‘Hedda, my Header,’ I called her. The formula became a private joke of ours, the slogan and watchword of our relationship. ‘The man I want,” she said, ‘has a man’s head on his man’s shoulders. Lips for kissing, eyes for looking at me, not thin air. You poor idiot, can’t you see you’ve been made a fool of by a pair of con men? First, that smarmy, slick, watery-eyed guru, and then this mad paradox-pusher - tricksters who, between them, really did come within an ace of sending you off your rocker.’

Perhaps it was also that my deepening despair bottomed out, so that the only way left was upwards into the broad daylight of common sense. Anyway, almost overnight it happened. I got my head back for sure, and quite soon had it firmly screwed in place.

A month’s vacation with Hedda in the Allegheny Mountains and I returned to the city in one piece and all there, present and correct. Since then I’ve lived a pretty normal life. The memory of that traumatic and embarrassing interlude, I’m happy to say, is fading steadily. More and more I have the feeling it happened to someone else... This enforced reminder here today that it didn’t is far from welcome, I assure you.

COUNSEL: What about the religious side of that interlude? How did you and how do you view the God-head which the Accused promised you in place of your man-head?

WITNESS: At the time, I was more mystified than shocked. Now that I’ve been going to the synagogue regularly and reconnecting with my Jewish roots, I’ve come to see John a-Nokes and that guru as a pair of devils who tempted me to commit the most abominable sin against God: the sin of the ultimate Swollen Head. It makes my stomach turn over just to look at that man in the dock and think of the harm he did to me, and to so many others.

Defence:
The Guillotine Meditation

MYSELF, to Witness: My aim in questioning you isn’t to challenge your testimony - as far as it went. You described what you experienced, all right. Now I want to go into some of the underlying detail. Let’s examine together the actual teaching of these two confidence tricksters (as you now call us), and how you put it into practice. First, then, your guru and his Guillotine Meditation. Please tell the court what his instructions were, and just how you followed them.

WITNESS: I had to think my head off. Imagine it gone clean away. Walking, sitting, whatever I was doing, I had to visualize myself doing it without a head. That was all there was to it.

MYSELF: Didn’t he give you any techniques or reminders, any tips for boosting your imagination?

WITNESS: Yes, he did. I was told to lower the mirror in my bathroom so that I couldn’t see my head in it. Also to hang pictures around the house of myself minus a head. In two ways these tricks were supposed to help: they reminded me to do the meditation, and showed me what it was about.

MYSELF: What were the likely benefits, according to your guru?

WITNESS: After a few days, he promised, I would experience a marvellous weightlessness and a silence, and begin to be centred in my heart.

MYSELF: Did these things happen to you?

WITNESS: I imagined they did. I persuaded myself I was happier and more relaxed and less heady. But in the long run - even in the short run - the effect was negative. I got
more
tense and worried.

MYSELF: Were instructions in the Guillotine Meditation given privately to small, selected groups? Or publicly?

WITNESS: They were published, for all the world to read, in the guru’s
Orange Book of Meditations.
There was nothing secret about them.

MYSELF: Let’s go on now to what you call Guillotine Meditation Mark II, to my sort of headlessness - the practice and techniques which you picked up from my books. How, if at all, did they differ from those of your guru? Did you hear him and me saying much the same thing, each in his own style and tone of voice?

WITNESS: I can’t remember any important differences.

MYSELF: That headless figurine you carved and sent me, and those photos of decapitated Buddhas - I take it they represented your idea of the headless state as described in my books, which you say you read repeatedly?

WITNESS: Yes.

MYSELF: You’ll remember, then, the experiments? Every book of mine contains full descriptions of them, with precise instructions for carrying them out.

WITNESS: I read those books a long time ago. But I don’t remember doing any experiments. What sort of experiments?

MYSELF: Pointing at your face and seeing you
aren’t
pointing at your face. Putting on your glasses and seeing they aren’t glasses in the plural. Driving your car and seeing you aren’t driving your car but the countryside. And so on. A dozen of them.

WITNESS: I’m sure I didn‘t do any of those things.

MYSELF: Let’s get this quite clear for the Jury to note. Your guru advised you to use your imagination, to visualize. You complied. He made suggestions for boosting your imagination, such as lowering your mirrors. You complied. You carried them out meticulously, and imagined for long periods each day what you were required to imagine. A model of obedience you were. So much for Guillotine Meditation Mark I... Now for Guillotine Meditation Mark II, as you call it. I told you that imagination was your trouble. I told you to
stop
imagining things, and just look. You refused. I gave you meticulous instructions about the experiments you had to do if my teaching were to mean anything to you. You refused to do any of them. Again and again and again I warned you that my books would muddle you - could even harm you - if you merely read about those simple experiments or tests. You merely read about them. The result wasn’t just that you failed to get my message, but that you inverted it. Inverted and perverted it till it coincided with your guru’s message, and had the same damaging effect on you.

Not that I single you out for blame. Nearly all of us are so deeply convinced that looking within is the fate worse than death that we’ll do almost anything to avoid looking. My guess is that one in three of my readers takes me seriously when I insist that reading about What I’m pointing at is light-years from seeing it. With great respect, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, l get the impression that the one-in-three-or-more proportion applies to you too. Watching how you handle the experiments I ask you to do from time to time, it’s obvious to me that most of you are (at best) just pretending to do them, are carefully missing the point and making damn sure you overlook the Looker - or, rather, his absence. Forgive me for saying that this wilful blindness to the crux of the Defence threatens to do me a far greater disservice than the Witness has been doing. It threatens to do me in.
The truth is you just can’t ignore the experiments and get my meaning, and you just can’t do the experiments and miss my meaning.
Witness, you may leave the box.

Will Jury-members now please turn to Diagram No. 20.

20a The Observation that places your head

20b The Meditation that displaces your head

Diagram No. 20

No. 20a is the diagram we’re becoming quite familiar with. It’s the ground-plan of my Defence. No. 20b is very similar - with one all-important difference. The mirror has been lowered to cut off the head of the man in it. It represents the Witness’s View of himself when, in obedience to his guru’s instruction, he lowered his bathroom mirror. It also represents those pictures of decapitated Buddhas, and that decapitated wood-carving he sent me. In a word, it represents
violence.
To slice a person’s head off is the most summary, irreversible and bloody mischief you can do him or her. If that person happens to be you, it is suicide; if another, murder; if a lot of others, genocide in the style of Caligula, who wished that the Romans had a single neck so that he could behead them in one blow. To be accurate, attempted murder, attempted suicide, attempted genocide. And for sure that’s hell.