The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (39 page)

Diagram No. 25

In my right hand I hold this mirror, in my left this copy of my birth certificate. For me to read the certificate it must be a foot or so away, where I also find, staring fixedly at me through his oval window, the person the certificate refers to. There they are, goods and label, in the region where the Great Universal Store displays that perishable Nokes package - with its distinctive label indicating brand name, serial number and approximate shelf-life. It will presently be withdrawn from the human display stand, and disposed of.

JUDGE: In plain terms, you’ll die one day, and be buried or cremated. Is that what you mean?

MYSELF: Of course, Your Honour. But also - and more particularly - I’m speaking of dying today. Tomorrow’s too late to bite the dust. Please look! Watch me carefully. Simultaneously I bring goods and label up to my Eye, noting how they merge... blur... become indecipherable and unrecognizable - and are altogether obliterated just before contact. Here, certificate and certified are no more. But I remain. The lesson is that the One I really, really am is absolutely unaffected by this summary disposal of that John a-Nokes package.

In fact, I can find no way of taking that package and bringing it here without losing it
en route.
It doesn’t belong here. This place just won’t take it. Here, no perishables are admitted, and Death is forever held at bay. To St Paul’s somewhat rhetorical questions - ‘O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?’ - my mundane reply is: ‘Not many millimetres off, Paul dear, but quite far enough to draw its sting, and turn its victory into defeat. Right here, that mortal does, as you say, put on immortality. Right here, I’m forever grounded in the Timeless.'

COUNSEL: Am I allowed to butt in here and put a question?

MYSELF: Try me.

COUNSEL: How long have you been in court this session, following the luncheon recess?

MYSELF: About an hour.

COUNSEL: Members of the Jury, we have been patiently watching the Accused amuse himself with a piece of glass and a scrap of paper. The purpose of this child’s game was to prove he’s timeless. Well, it was all an absurd waste of time. He has just told us that he – this self-styled timeless one - has been in court for about an hour!

MYSELF: And I meant what I said, because – naturally and out of politeness – I was going by your Greenwich time out there, and not by my Paradise time right here. Am I being difficult? I can best explain by asking His Honour and the Jury to join me in another little test (it’s beneath the dignity of a King’s Counsellor, of course); the least of all our experiments, leading – if only we’re simple enough - to the greatest of all our discoveries in the course of this Trial.

You are wearing wrist-watches. Look and see what the time is now by them... Somewhen around 4 p.m., I think.

Time varies with place. Evidently the time now on the Jury benches is around 4 p.m. I see it’s the same here in the dock. Telephone calls would reveal that the time in New York is around 11 a.m. and in Los Angeles around 8 a.m. And so on. Along with space, time’s essentially
zoned.
That’s why, when you travel to different places, you check what the local time is by referring to the local clocks. It’s important, whenever you are, to keep abreast of and go by the time there. But there’s just one place in the universe where it’s a matter of life and death to tell the right time – if any.
And that’s its Centre.

So the big question is: what’s the time right where you are, at the very mid-point of all those zones? Unfortunately, it’s a place that’s not on the phone and where they don’t have any local timepieces, so you’ll have to go along and take your own timepiece with you. And keep an open mind, and see for yourself.

Which you do now by slowly, slowly bringing together your watch and your eye, attending throughout to what’s on show, what’s actually given...

Go on now. Don’t be shy, and don’t look at me but at your watch, bringing it right up till it will come no nearer...

Right... What happened? Didn’t those hands and figures blur and fade and finally vanish? In fact, didn’t the timepiece itself (and all pieces are timepieces) vanish too, in the Place where there are no bits and pieces at all?

So the Place you’re at is timeless, absolutely and always free of time and of the things of time. Here at Home, you’re not troubled by so much as a shadow or a sniff of time. In fact, you never were anywhere else than in Eternity, where it’s always 0 o’clock. Your ordinary wrist-watch, which tells you the time out there, has just been re-engineered into God’s extraordinary wrist-watch which tells You the no-time here, for ever and for ever. The former has a price tag, is never quite accurate, can be lost or stolen, requires periodical renewal. Not so the latter. God’s no-timepiece is infinitely superior to anything that even the Swiss can turn out. Praise be to the Holiest for His total victory over time and death, for the unspeakably sure safety of His presence, and for this unspeakably vivid and handy unveiling of it! Dear Lord, help us smart alicks to your artlessness!
O Sancta simplicitas!

COUNSEL: Really, Your Honour! For the umpteenth time, this is a court of law, not a kindergarten. Do the Jury have to play this infantile game?

JUDGE: The question hardly arises, I think, since the conscientious jury members have already done so. Myself also. With what result? That’s the question.

MYSELF: I’m grateful to Your Honour. It was St Paul, again, who said that the foolishness of God is wiser than men. And medieval theologians who went on to say that only God can be perfectly known because only God is perfectly simple.

To help us now to be as unsophisticated as God, let’s turn to Diagram No. 26. Self-explanatory, it displays at a glance our Endings, so far, about time’s whereabouts and whenabouts.

Diagram No. 26

Every way I look at it, these findings about the timeless First Person, superficially so strange, in practice make wonderfully good sense. Thus:

(1) What I find here - and what others find when they come here to see whether I'm telling the truth - is no thing at all. And where there’s no thing, there’s no change, and where there’s no change, there’s no way to register time, and where there’s no way to register time, there’s no time to register. QED.

(2) Here I don’t
feel
a second older than when I was brought up into the court from my cell in the basement, or when this Trial started. Or, for that matter, when as a small child I used to look in the mirror and find a staring stranger there. My world there - including him - has aged a lot, but not the No-stranger here who is in receipt of it and him. No, not by a split second. In fact, I can’t imagine what it would be like to feel my age (as they say), or any age, right here. An old Emptiness, a decrepit Void, a hoary No-head - what sort of monstrosity is that?

(3) This Awareness which I am here has no awareness of beginning - whether at John a-Nokes’s awaking this morning, or at his recovery from anaesthesia in hospital, or at his birth, or at his conception, or whenever. Awareness never catches itself popping up out of unawareness, or suffering interruption, or popping back in again. Since here is the only place it’s ever found in, there's no appeal to another place against what’s found here, no higher court to take it to. Accordingly it announces itself as timeproof, with all the assurance of silence announcing itself as soundproof, and stillness as shockproof.

(4) As First Person here, I find myself to be
in all respects
the diametric opposite of what I appear to be there, as third person. Always it’s asymmetry, total contrast. No face here facing that face there, no colour here facing those colours there, transparency here facing opacity there, stillness here facing motion there, simplicity here facing complexity there - and, by the same token, eternity here facing time there. Of course.

(5) When I cease letting language hoodwink me, all comes clear. I make the momentous discovery that to switch the subject of a sentence from second or third person to First Person is to reverse the predicate. Thus when he dances
he dances
while the world - miserable wallflower - sits it out; whereas when
I dance
it’s the world that dances with abandon while I take a nice rest. Thus when he eats
he eats,
and I watch apple pie with Devonshire cream going tasteless and cold into that toothed slot in a face; whereas when I eat
I fast,
and watch apple pie with Devonshire cream vanish into thin air, on its way to this place where, instead of a toothed slot in a face, there arises this warm apple-pie-and-cream-type deliciousness. Thus when he’s born
he's born;
whereas when
I'm born
it’s not I but my world that’s born. Thus when he dies he dies; whereas when I die it’s not I but my world that dies. Time dies. No flowers, by request.

(6) What does it mean in practice - consciously to live from the Deathless? From the Timeless Moment at the Centre of the Time-world, out into that world? It means never being at a loss about how to pass the time, seeing there’s none to pass. It means finding your limbs dancing in time with the music of the God in whose bosom you lie forever. Well may Pere de Caussade promise that, provided you live where you must live anyhow - in the Now - you can trust it to come up with ‘all your heart could desire’. It’s not a case of returning again and again to your Source till you settle down there and reap these benefits, but of seeing that you can’t escape it by a split second, try as you may. Consciousness Eternal, which is what you are, is nowhere and nowhen else.

When these six evidences of the First Person - as the One who’s forever clean of time and all time’s dust and debris - are totted up, the result is surely enough to convince any reasonable juryperson that here is the sober truth. And that to say ‘Here I’m this timeless One' is no more blasphemous than saying ‘There I’m that time-ridden one.’ In fact the latter implies the former. Only the Timeless is awake to the passage of time.

COUNSEL: All this is more ingenious than reassuring. It’s a word-game, a whistling in the dark to keep up your spirits. I can hear the normal Jury-member reflecting: ‘There was a time when the world bore no trace of me. There’s a time coming when the world will lose all trace of me. And I’m scared.’ So would you be, Mr Nokes, if you consulted your feelings no less than your tortuous intellect, and weren’t so impressed with your own rhetoric. Your cleverness won’t come to your aid on your deathbed - if it is a bed. I think you would, if you were quite honest with yourself; be rather less chirpy about the forthcoming write-off of`John a-Nokes, whether from accident, sickness, old age - or judicial process. Total write-off, I mean.

MYSELF: Yes, the prospect is bleak. Truly I live in fear of death - just so long as I go on letting that death’s head (and all heads are death’s heads) out of its glass-fronted cage over there to invade and parasitize me here. This is terrifying - and ludicrous, because it can happen only in imagination. The cure of death - this disease of diseases - is quite simply to see it off.

For Heaven’s sake, and for justice’s sake - and out of sheer self-interest - listen to my ‘witnesses’, and don’t let that ghastly outsider gatecrash you!

God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life.

First Epistle of St John

Jesus said: Blessed is he who was before he came into being.

Gospel of Thomas

Liberation is knowing you were not born.

Ramana Maharshi

The monk Yung-shih committed one of the gravest crimes, but when he had an enlightened insight into No-Birth he instantly attained Buddhahood.

Yung-chia Hsuan-chueh

Thou canst not by going reach that place wherein there is no birth, no ageing, no decaying, no falling away, no rising up elsewhere in re-birth.

Buddha

When you abide in the Unborn you abide at the source of all Buddhas, so it’s something wonderfully precious. There’s no question of perishing here, so when you abide in the Unborn it’s superfluous to speak about the Imperishable... What isn’t created can’t be destroyed.