The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (9 page)

WITNESS: Yes, I remember now. That was the sort of thing you talked about while I was styling your hair. At the time, it didn’t sound crazy, but quite obvious. Weird though, and rather exciting... Now I’m all confused...

I have no more questions. I thank the Witness. She stands down.

MYSELF: Your Honour, members of the Jury, I appear before you accused of blasphemy, a very serious crime. So serious, say I, that it’s the root and stem of all crime and delinquency.

What is it to blaspheme?

It is to insult the Almighty. Among the many ways a man can do this, two stand out. He can try playing God, or being God. Let’s take them in that order.

The playing-God blasphemer doesn’t state, in so many words, that God’s a fool or a liar. He doesn’t need to: he lives it. He stakes his life on the proposition that the Creator and Sustainer of that life doesn’t know His job; that His gifts as given are for rejecting out of hand; that the ground-plan of His design for a habitable universe is ill-conceived and fraudulent; and that he the creature knows better and can do better, thank you very much. So he substitutes for the divine world that he sees the human world that he thinks he sees, but in fact engineers. He doesn’t just strengthen the frame and re-panel the bodywork, as it were, and recondition the engine for better performance, but inverts and reverses the whole contraption, in the belief that he’s making it roadworthy and drivable. And then, to complete and compound the blasphemy, he forgets what he’s done. He takes his de-natured universe for Nature, his fabrication for God’s Fabric. Such is the playing-God variety of blasphemy.

Going on at the same time is the being-God variety. The blasphemer puts himself, the human, in the driving seat of the restructured vehicle. He replaces God at the Centre of God’s universe.

For too much of my life I’ve been as guilty of both varieties of blasphemy as any of you. But no longer. I’ve come to my senses. Now I see that to be honest to God and to Jack is to be Him here and Jack there, and never the twain shall meet.

Nowhere is it easier to come to my senses and stop blaspheming — nowhere is it clearer to me where God’s home is and where man’s home is, and how far apart they lie, and how different their design is — than in the Witness’s hairdressing establishment. All is revealed to that begowned customer (or rather, half-customer) in the adjustable chair, facing that plate-glass mirror — if only he will look, and dare to take seriously what he finds. Here, on display with illusion-shattering brilliance, is the one truth which he desperately needs to acknowledge. Obviously, to be a man at all, he must have eyes for eyeing people with, a mouth for feeding himself with, a scalp for growing hair on, and so forth; and, what’s more, he must have a unique version of these features, distinguishing him from all other specimens. And obviously all that stuff belongs where he finds it and keeps it, on the
far
side of that glass. What’s right here, on the
near
side of the glass, is in every sense the opposite of all that. If there’s a Face here at all it’s one that has no features at all, let alone human ones, let alone distinctive ones. It is absolutely Blank. But — ah! — how keenly awake to itself as Blank: as the speckless Clarity and Awareness that’s taking in that man-head in the mirror, and the other customers, and the hairdressing saloon, and all that happens to be on show! Knowing Itself as the solitary Knower, This is none other than the God-head whose home is at the Centre of His world, at the Mid-point of all those peripheral things — including that blockhead (no mock modesty this, just a fact) behind the glass, having his head of hair tousled and trimmed. This is the One Head, the One No-head, the One truly Unblocked Head of all. Me, not a picture.

To see that blockhead off to its place behind glass, leaving the clear-headed God-head here in front of it — this is natural piety.

It’s sober realism. It’s humility before the evidence. It’s waking and coming to one’s senses after a long and bad dream. It’s
godly.
It’s the sovereign remedy for all ungodliness, and in particular for the fatal disease of self-deification. It puts paid to blasphemy. And it’s all so ridiculously obvious!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the sight I was enjoying in that hairdressing saloon, my description of which puzzled and intrigued the hairdresser. This is the sight I’m enjoying right now in this courtroom. And it’s precisely what my accusers, along with the majority of humankind, are determined to turn a blind eye to, are hell-bent on not enjoying.

It’s you lot who are the blasphemers!

Commotion in court. The Jury go into excited huddles. Counsel’s on his feet, gesticulating like a semaphore gone haywire. The Judge bangs away with his gavel as if he’s bashing me on the head. He threatens to suspend my right to defend myself till I can do so properly, and cease straying from the point to deliver a lecture to the court — a contemptuous and abusive dressing-down, at that.

Apologizing, I promise to try to put my case in more parliamentary language. However, I insist that every word of it so far has been relevant to the crime I’m charged with, and central to my Defence against the charge.

COUNSEL, the semaphore suddenly under control: There’s something I’ve been itching to say to the Jury for what seems an age. This abusive fellow’s really stupid, too. Only someone as clever-clever as the Accused could be so unintelligent. His basic delusion, underlying his many particular ones, is that the human mind is a freak and a cheat at odds with Reality. This is a sick and impious view. Its cure is to regard the rational mind as that higher function which, so far from contradicting Nature, completes it. ‘The art itself,’ as Polixenes says in
The Winter’s Tale,
‘is Nature.’ What John a-Nokes calls
playing God,
I call
being man.
Man who has been entrusted with the job of building a cosmos out of loose and apparently incompatible sensory clues. Man to whom God gave this gigantic jigsaw puzzle for his birthday. The astounding success of his science proves that the resulting universe-picture is no fiction . . . So keep your respect, Jury, for common sense and the human intellect, and the familiar objective world they pains-takingly piece together, to the great benefit of us all, and you are safe from the Accused’s wiles. You won’t be taken in by his far-too-ingenious defence of idiocy. And you’ll continue to drive to the barber’s through unagitated streets, and keep your head on when you get there.

MYSELF: I’m told that there are edible beans which, until they are well boiled, are mildly poisonous. Counsel is offering us a half-baked concoction (to be fair, two-thirds baked) that’s deadly poisonous because it stops short at the second and man-centred and blasphemous stage. The three stages are the perceived world of the animal and the very young child, the conceived world of the older child and the adult, and the union of these in the perceived — conceived world of the Seer. Of the Seer who doesn’t lose sight of the world as given — of God’s natural world — and doesn’t cease to value and trust it;
and
who, with reservations, values and trusts also the artificial world of the adult, as a quite brilliant fiction for handling the natural world efficiently. Certainly the Seer sees the city dance all the way to the hairdresser’s, where he sees his head safely stowed behind glass. But of course he’s well aware that for the traffic cop his car’s on the move, and for the hairdresser his head’s on his shoulders. Thus he sees God’s world, conjures up man’s world, and inhabits both. This is his three-stage, Practical Design for Practical Living. The other design — that of the two-stage non-Seer — isn’t all there, and so doesn’t work out. It should not surprise you, members of the Jury, that play-God blasphemers — the sort that dismiss God’s world unexamined, in their anxiety to redesign it to their own specification — botch the job in the long run. After many a short-term gain, their effrontery proves a dead loss, in the end fatal. And no wonder. It’s not that their world’s unlike His, but the opposite of His. How could such unrealism, such self-deception, such wilful blindness to the given, fail to prove increasingly counter-productive and in every way ineffectual? Cumulatively so. Day by day it’s resulting in more and more personal misery, more and more social strife, more and more irreversible damage to the environment. And now it threatens man’s very survival. Having made his bed he must lie on it. And die on it — if he doesn’t wake up pretty soon from his nightmare world into the real world. Into God’s world, the dear world he gives us in His mercy and loving-kindness, the world that’s woven of blessings.

Into the world where I let things be themselves in their proper places. Where I let man be man on the far side of the glass, and God be God on the near side. Into this wide-awake world where Jack is hairy Jack over there being barbered, while God is God here just Being — Being that’s balder and smoother and brighter than a china egg. Here, where the many man-heads come back to the One God-head, forever trim and speckless and radiant like the midday Sun.

It’s by this simple truthfulness, this ever-renewed submission to the evidence, that I break the disastrous habit of Nokes-deification before it breaks me. It’s not easy, I can tell you. It’s not done overnight. It takes a lot of seeing him off. But in all honesty and with great respect I stand here and tell you I’m no blasphemer.

I wish to God I could say the same of —

All right, Your Honour. I’ve finished. I hand over to one of my most distinguished witnesses — to that sublime pagan Seer, Plotinus, who wrote:

To Real Being we go back, all that we have and are. To This we return as from This we came. Of What is Here we have direct knowledge, not images or even impressions; and to know without image is to be . . When we look outside of This on which we depend, we ignore our unity. Looking outward we see many faces, look inward and all is the One Head. If a man could but be turned about — by his own motion or the happy pull of Athene — he would at once see God, and himself, and the All.

And, for good measure, let me throw in a couple of pieces from that equally distinguished Sufi Seer, Rumi:

If He sever one head from the body, He at once raises hundreds of thousands of heads for the beheaded one...

He that beholds his own Face — his light is greater than the light of creatures. Though he die, his sight is everlasting, because it is the sight of the Creator.

And this from Rabi’a of Basra, the woman saint, and one of the earlier Sufis:

I myself am keeping a guest-house. Whatever is within, I do not allow it to go out; and whatever is without, I do not allow it to come in.

Prosecution Witness No. 7

THE OSTEOPATH

Witness testifies that I went to him with a stiff neck a year ago. I complained that I couldn’t turn my head more than about 50° without some pain. He’s happy to say that his treatment, after a few sessions, was fairly successful.

Counsel asks the Witness whether he’s aware that, because I can’t
see
a head and neck mounted on my body, I maintain they don’t exist.

I intervene to protest that Counsel is grossly misrepresenting my views. He should leave it to me to put them.

The Judge agrees and Counsel rewords his question.

COUNSEL: Are you aware of the Accused’s published claim that losing his head is finding his life?
Finding
it, mark you, not, like King Charles (only the first one, I trust),
losing
it? That, for some reason hidden from us ordinary mortals, this cutting down is adding to, with the result that he’s not less than human but much, much more than human? Superhuman at the very least? In which case why did he need to go to you for treatment? And what do you make of the whole cock-eyed affair?

WITNESS: Yes, I know that he says he’s very special, and (in my view) sincerely believes it. But I’m sure he’s wrong, and the reason he’s wrong is that he’s relying too much on one sense at the expense of the others. On vision alone, ignoring touch — to say nothing of hearing and tasting and smelling. Of course, when I’m working on his neck, I’m the only one of us two who sees it: but I also feel my hands on it. And so does he.
Ouch!
he cries, when I press a tender spot. Obviously — for us both — touching is as much believing as seeing is believing. Or more. Arriving home at night, he fumbles for and presses the light-switch he doesn’t see, and I take it that in his bath he scrubs his back sometimes. In fact, touch is often a surer test of a thing’s presence than sight is. You discover that a hologram of a cup isn’t a cup by trying to take hold of the thing. And then, of course, there’s the truly touching story of Doubting Thomas, who refused to trust his eyes till he had fingered the wounds of his Lord.

COUNSEL, all irony and gloat, turns to the Jury: We can’t wait to hear the Accused’s crushing reply to this testimony, can we? [Addressing the Witness] Would you say that this man is stupidly but genuinely naïve in his obsession with sight alone? Or that the diabolical pride and ambition of the blasphemer drive him to suppress the tangible evidence that proves he’s only human after all? To be blunt, the Jury need to decide whether he’s a fool or a knave. Can you help them to do so?