The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (42 page)

Diagram No. 30

At right angle to this vertical revolution, there’s a horizontal revolution.
The right hand of that little one there in the mirror corresponds to the left hand of this Big One, your own left hand. Similarly, his left hand corresponds to your right hand. Now if taking your cue from tradition and from language itself, you envisage the left, or sinister, hand as holding sinister or negative values, and the right, or dexter, hand as holding right or positive values, then at a glance you get the message that your identity-shift from that second/third person to this First Person involves an equally drastic value-shift. Actually, not so much a shift as a complete turn-around. Your values as First Person
reverse
your values as second/third person. And the hallmark of the former is a perfection of which the latter falls infinitely short.

It’s rather as if the photographic negative of the third person’s world were the photographic positive of the First Person’s world, black and white changing places. And as if the picture were being viewed upside down and back to front. All making for an interesting life, you could say. But tricky, none too easy.

COUNSEL: These unsupported
ex cathedra
pronouncements are of little interest to the court, and in any case their connection with the Witness’s testimony about your two unfortunate disciples is far from clear... May she leave the box, or have you further questions to put to her?

MYSELF: I’ve only one more. It’s this: did those two clients of yours give the impression that they had gone deeply into my teaching? Were they clear or were they vague and confused about it?

WITNESS: I’m pretty sure they weren’t aware of the contrasts you’re now talking about. Of these turn-arounds.

MYSELF: Which means they didn’t get my message at all. (People often don’t, you know.) It follows that their psychological problems can’t in fairness be laid at my door, and are irrelevant to this Trial... I’ve no further questions. Thank you. You may stand down...

As for those
ex cathedra
pronouncements of mine on the reversal or transvaluation of values - here comes the support that Counsel asks for. It has more legs to stand on than a centipede. Let’s just take a small sample of them:

(1) Love, for a start. The love of that little one is conditional. It makes demands, seeks some return, is in part a trade-off. Also, it’s nothing if not choosy. There just isn’t enough of the stuff to spread around. If it happens to alight on two or three people equally and at the same time, expect trouble. In any case expect variableness. The course of human love never did and never will run smooth. Never, never... In contrast, the divine love of this Big One is unconditional. It makes no demands, looks for no return, is equally bestowed on all, doesn’t vary in the slightest, always runs smooth. Why? Because the Big One lies at the Source of all, and to be here is to love all beings as Oneself, regardless of how lovable or unlovable they may seem.

(2) That little one, always seeking power over others, turns out to be powerless... By contrast, this Big One, altogether non-interfering, turns out to be the Only Power, not operating from outside
on
creatures but from inside as them.

(3) That little one, poor fellow, has to live with two conflicting pieces of knowledge - the deep conviction that all the world is his in reality, and the superficial certainty that almost none of it is his in practice. Result: greed. He’s driven to amass around himself all manner of possessions - tokens of his infinite wealth - regardless of how trivial and superfluous and plain cock-eyed they may be. (Example - I’m not making this up - a machine for slicing the top off a boiled egg; no breakfast table is complete without our new electrified model. And no kitchen table without our five-speed egg-whisk.) Regardless of the fact that these possessions, taken together, make such demands on him that they come to possess him. Regardless of the fact that only the moment of getting is pleasure: before that is the pain of not having, after that the pain of having... The Big One is relieved of both pains. He’s so Big there’s nothing left to get and have. He doesn’t own a thing. You name it, he is it. As No-thing whatever he’s capacious of all things, and is satisfied. In fact, to own so much as a wooden nickel is to wound the world to the marrow, cleaving it asunder into an owning bit and an owned bit. Conversely, to own absolutely Nothing is to be the Master Physician who heals that wound.

(4) The little one’s knowledge is the ending of wonder. The Big One’s knowledge is the beginning of wonder. The little one is heady and knowing and smart. He’ll buy knowledge at the expense of mystery every time, and sooner or later it gives him a splitting headache. The Big One buys mystery at the expense of knowledge till all that’s left is the Mystery itself, the Perfectly-known-as-unknowable Source that is the cure of all the headaches it gives rise to.

(5) The little one prizes success at others’ expense, and fails. The Big One doesn’t, and wins. His is the success story of all time, the story of the One who has the useful knack of Being, of Self-origination, without any help and without the slightest idea how he comes by that knack.

(6) For the little one, humiliation is hell. Life keeps putting him down, and he keeps bouncing back again by every possible means, till the irreversible put-down of Death stops play. For the Big One, humiliation is the key to heaven. It opens the trapdoor to the stable and well-founded Self-esteem of the Deathless.

(7) For the little one, birth is a happy event, death a tragic event. For the Big One, it’s the other way round: ‘Man is born into sorrow, as the sparks fly upward’ and ‘Blessed are they who die in the Lord.’ My birth is the forgetting of Myself, my death (now rather than in the future) is the remembering of Myself.

(8) As for hate, anger, fear and craving in all their fifty-seven varieties, what sense they seem to make out there in that little one, and what nonsense they really make here in this Big One! Candidly, but with some tenderness and amusement, the First Person perceives the third person as
warped
and
screwy,
his values as
twisted.
No wonder that, traditionally, the satanic
reverses
the divine - recites the Lord’s Prayer backwards, for example. No wonder that, when the previous Witness, Sister Marie-Louise, looks in her mirror, what she sees is something like Diagram No. 31 of your booklet. This derangement should be (but alas isn’t) a warning to her to go by and trust what’s her side of the glass, the Big One, the Great Untwisted.

Diagram No. 31

(9) As the Defence Map won’t let us forget, the little one is the arch-escapist who, not content with framing and glazing his front against an intrusive world,
turns his back on it.
His motto ‘I’m all right, Jack’ ensures all goes wrong. Intent on self-preservation, he’ll soon be a goner - the world will see to that. Meanwhile he has the glassy look and feel of the opt-outer and almost-goner. How unlike the Big One who, tender and stark naked to the world he
faces,
taking it in and taking it on, is wholly involved and wholly vulnerable! Giving place to all, he’s as he was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. He is the world without end, amen.

COUNSEL, with a deep sigh: And, it goes without saying,
You
are this Jackpot of jackpots! Amen!

MYSELF: Why, of course! So are you. So are we all, at Centre. When St John of the Cross says ‘The Centre of the soul is God’, he makes no exceptions. And each of us is furnished, off-Centre, with an all-too-human little one. Ever distinct and in every way contrasting, this Big One and that little one comprise unequal halves of a whole, a keen edge and a coarse whetstone - as distinguishable as up from down and left from right, and as inseparable. Together they set up the dynamic, the polarity, the unceasing interplay between the Divinity and the humanity that together make up our life. Blasphemy, I say, is claiming to be one and not the other - either claiming to be a man who can do very nicely without God, thank you very much, or else claiming to be the God who can do very nicely without man, good riddance. In either case the medicine for blasphemy is consciously to embrace both - each in its proper place - and the ceaseless two-way traffic that plies between them.

COUNSEL: Without concrete illustration - let alone hard evidence - this is so much wordplay and no Defence at all.

MYSELF: At the risk of some embarrassment, let me take an example from my own personal life. Counsel will probably suggest to the court that I’ve cooked it up specially for this occasion. So, by way of confirmation, I’ll throw in afterwards a couple of observations by men who are widely recognized as sages - as people who have got the balance right, the balance between their humanness and their divineness.

I’m deeply committed to and quietly in love with a woman, just one. Occasionally I fall for another, but not deeply or for long. We fight with remarkable regularity, and get hurt. One explanation is that I’m too dashed preoccupied with my own plans and ideas, which I impose on the lady without respite. No doubt there’s something in this, though I suspect the deeper cause is less specific, and more like a need on both sides to disturb creeping complacency and bring drama into our lives, a vigorous ding-dong. Anyway, that’s all speculation and little-one stuff... Beneath the sometimes choppy surface, the Big One’s love goes on all the while, steady and unchanging as the deepest ocean. As the Big One, I love the lady absolutely, for she is the Self of myself. Let those winds blow and waves rage as they please, they are God’s winds and waves. His weather - at the level where He keeps His weather.

Some three centuries before Christ, the Chinese Taoist Chuang-tzu wrote: ‘It’s not that the sage lacks bad feelings, but that he doesn’t let them inside where they will do him harm.’ He doesn’t wash his hands of those very human susceptibilities. He deals with them skilfully. Accepting full responsibility for them, he’s careful to place them where they belong. Ramana Maharshi, Indian sage of the twentieth century, said: ‘The ego of the sage arises again and again. But he recognizes it for what it is, therefore it’s not dangerous.’ Firmly assured of his central perfection as Being-Consciousness-Bliss, he can afford to accept undismayed the inexhaustible variety and messiness of the imperfections It comes up with.

Coming back to my own case, I don’t deny or deplore my all-too-human humanness. On the contrary, I lay claim to and insist on it out there, every bit as much as I lay claim to and insist on my divineness right here. My admission of - no, my emphasis on - this essential bipolarity should clear me, surely, of the crime I’m charged with.

COUNSEL, like a shot: It does nothing of the sort! Either you make out you are the Almighty or you don’t. Yes or no? It’s no excuse that you have a mood or an aspect or an alter ego which is a lot less ambitious. So what? If you claimed to be the rightful heir to the throne of Great Britain, and were caught plotting to usurp that throne, it would be no defence at your trial for high treason that you were an assistant garbage collector. Rather the reverse.

MYSELF: But it might do my defence a power of good if I sincerely claimed that all the assistant and master garbage collectors in the world were rightful heirs along with me.

COUNSEL: It would wonderfully demonstrate your unfitness to plead, by reason of mental deficiency or disturbance. Is this your -

JUDGE, very firmly: This
badinage
has gone on long enough.

MYSELF: I was about to conclude on a more serious and more practical note, Your Honour. And a rather happy one, too. To the extent that I stay centred in the perfection of the New Man, of my True Nature as First Person Singular, the manifold imperfections of the old man are mitigated. To the extent that I live from the values of this New Man - unconditional love, no power over others, no turning one’s back on them, the acceptance of humiliation, and so forth - to that extent the contrasting values of that old man become less and less heavy and humourless and troublesome, and more and more amenable and realistic and healthy. In a word, more natural. To tell the truth, the very best I can do for Jack is to come off him and be Myself. Then he stops playing games and is no longer phoney. The ultimate encouragement and relief is that Jack - the old man - is short on reality, not ME but a picture, just as if he were appearing on that witness-box telescreen. He and his naughtiness are measurably off-Centre. He isn’t normal, isn’t himself till he gives up on himself and takes refuge in God. Man isn’t man till he’s God.