The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (34 page)

Along the top of my bathroom mirror is a cutting edge as sharp as any guillotine. Lowering it to slice the head off those shoulders is the easiest thing in the world - but it’s asking for trouble. Poor wretched thing, it has to go somewhere. The plugholes of the bath and the wash-basin are far too small to take it, and alas it won’t flush down the WC. Nor is it the sort of thing you can leave lying around - on the bathroom window-sill, for instance. No, the only place that will take the bloody thing is right here, it seems, on these shoulders. So here it settles down -
in the one place where it can never be!
How’s that for nonsense?

It’s precisely this nonsense which the Witness’s guru put him up to.

COUNSEL: If you think that this Nokes-through-the-Looking-Glass drollery will divert the Jury from the matter in hand, you’d better think again.

MYSELF: I’m talking sense. No fairy tale, it’s my very serious response to your Witness. And it addresses, as cogently as I know how, the great issue before us.

Hell is having a head here. HHHH, if I want a mnemonic. Heaven is seeing it off. It’s letting my mirror show me where this God-damned thing is magically transformed into that God-blessed thing, over there where it belongs.

Why is taking it on here so hellish? Because being shut in that tiny and dark and tightly packed sphere is being shut out of this immense sphere, where I’m lit up by the light of God and blown away by the wind of God. Because it sets little me up against my world, reducing me to a frightened stranger in it. Because it finally polishes off the stranger. And because it’s a load of codswallop, the most implausible of lies. No wonder, then, that the Guillotine Meditation gave the Witness such a hard time.
Instead of decapitating him, it capitated him, good and proper! As never before.
The surprising thing is that he managed to stay out of the loony-bin.

Heading myself here is suicide. Beheading the others there is murder. Such violence against the person (whether behind glass or not) and against the truth, is a real capital offence. The burden of all my teaching (I call it unteaching), and now of my Defence against the charge of blasphemy, is that all those second and third persons - Jack included - are necessarily and delightfully headed, and not for beheading on any pretext; and that this unique First Person is necessarily and delightfully headless and not for heading on any pretext. Just let both sorts be the way they are (say I) and all will be well, all
is
well. Muck about with them, and all is worse than mucky. Just let God’s magic mirror get on with its healing work of
placing
that topknot. Let it charm away this central malignancy and parasite and set it up over there, where it belongs, as the most harmless and devoted of pets. Let it cure me forever of chronic blasphemy - of the diabolical pride which superimposes that man-head on this God-head.

Members of the Jury, God has given you the best and brightest of His garden tools - His spade for rooting out blasphemy. Once more, I beg you: hold out your mirrors at arm’s length, and take a good look at the weed you’ve dug up.

Look! There you have Belladonna the beautiful temptress. You are now keeping that fascinating but potentially lethal lady at a safe distance. Make sure she stays there. Embrace and take her, and she takes you. Here,
chez vous,
Belladonna’s deadly poison.

The way to head her off is not - emphatically not - the way advocated by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in his
Orange Book:

One of the most beautiful tantra meditations: walk and think that the head is no more there, just the body. Continuously remember that the head is not there. Visualize yourself without the head. Have a picture of yourself enlarged without the head, look at it, let your mirror be lowered in the bathroom so when you see you cannot see your head, just the body... A few days of rememberance (sic) and you will feel such weightlessness happening to you, such tremendous silence, because it is the head that is the problem. If you can conceive of yourself as headless - and that can be conceived, there is no trouble in it - then more and more you will be centred in the heart... Just at this moment you can visualize yourself headless. Then you will understand what I am saying immediately.

I say that the
absence of my head
is no more for ‘conceiving’, ‘visualizing, ‘remembering’, ‘thinking’ (verbs that Rajneesh uses) than the
presence of your head is.
Both are for seeing. It’s precisely this mentation, this mucking about with the evidence, which is the trouble with the Guillotine Meditation as so disastrously practised by the Witness.

A footnote: I take issue with nothing else of Rajneesh’s that I've read - which isn’t much, I admit. And even this he got so nearly right. Also let me add that I have a lot of ex-sanyassin friends who assure me that their involvement with Rajneesh somehow prepared them for the essential In-seeing they now enjoy. I don’t suppose he ever came across that saying of Rabbi Izaac of Acre, a thirteenth-century Spanish Kabbalist: ‘You should know that these philosophers whose wisdom you so much extol have their heads where we place our feet.’ It just might have helped.

Prosecution Witness No. 22

THE ZOOLOGIST

Prompted by Counsel, the Witness introduces himself. He’s a lecturer in the Department of Biology at Cambridge, specializing in comparative anatomy. Yes, he has read a couple of the Accused’s books and is aware of the assertions he makes about his true identity, his exalted status in the scheme of things.

COUNSEL: What, in the light of your special knowledge, do you make of his divine pretensions?

WITNESS: I don’t quite know whether to say the whole idea is so far above my head that I don’t get a word of it, or so far below it there’s nothing to get anyway. Only a load of wish-wash. Let’s say I’m bewildered. Here’s a man who’s obviously no fool, yet as crazy as they come. Here’s a man who’s obviously not stuck-up, with an ego a mile high. Here’s a man who’s obviously sincere, and is playing an elaborate game. I suppose it takes a very complicated as well as a very clever fellow to take and defend a position as untenable as his.

COUNSEL: What makes it untenable?

WITNESS: In the dock there we have a biological specimen. (I mean no disrespect: here’s another in the witness-box.) Let me spell out, in picturesque non-scientific terms, some facts about the specimen which the court should know. What my description loses in technical precision it will more than gain, I trust, in impact and in relevance to this Trial.

I study living organisms, ranging from the simplest to the most complex. Two contrary things strike me about them - their inexhaustible variety, and their overall sameness. Their differentiation and their unity. Life is indivisible, and what we call the highest forms of it are of a piece with what we call its lowest forms. Take that housefly flinging itself at the window over there. I’d like to draw the Accused’s special attention to this long-lost relative of his. If John a-Nokes feels he’s a cut above that fly, let me assure him that it’s an archangel compared with himself not so very long ago. When he was young, he was of course an infant, a small apology for a human being and a mammal, on display for all to see and hear and fondle and smell. But before that, when he was younger still, he was an embarrassment and firmly
hushed up
- a series of skeletons in the cupboard of the womb. There, briefly, he was a small apology for a reptile, and before that a small apology for a fish, and before that a small apology for a worm. And when he was very young indeed, at the start of his present career, he was next to nothing at all, a small apology for a speck. Quite a complicated speck as specks go, but a far humbler entry in life’s social register than any creature he sets eyes on nowadays, in the zoo, in his garden, anywhere. True, he was a yuppie speck, destined to rise in the world. But he hasn’t for a moment ceased to be the same sort of thing, a speck that found it convenient to keep the speck-family together... And now this jumped-up speck emerges to inform a startled universe that it is its Origin and Proprietor, that it is the universe! How’s that for cheek, for arrogance, for social climbing?

COUNSEL: Please take the court still further back in the Nokes-ian Saga, and tell us something about the origin of the speck or spicule.

WITNESS: Once upon a time there was a little sea, and in this sea there lived a fat and lazy globular speck, a female party putting out lashings of sex appeal in all directions. Picture her as a Mae West among specks. Picture also, racing towards her in passionate frenzy, hosts of admirers, in shape and behaviour resembling precociously lascivious polliwogs, but in status much more lowly. They were like a fleet of speedboats with outboard motors, all making for the one safe harbour. The winning craft, having made it there (all the rest perishing at sea), became the male half of the sketch we now call John a-Nokes, while the harbour became the female half. Now the chances against that particular suitor outstripping all his rivals, and winning the race and the lady, were millions to one. Jack be nimble, Jack be quick! - as the nursery rhyme says. Yes, the specimen in the dock over there had better face the fact that he’s the most accidental of accidents, the outsider among outside chances, a fluke if ever there was a fluke.

The coming-to-be of John a-Nokes was less likely then than his winning the pools is now. And this fluke of a speck - propped up there on its newly acquired hind legs - is busy informing the world that it’s the King of the world. There’s nerve for you! There’s impudence!

COUNSEL: What if he explained that he outgrew those dicey and humble beginnings years ago, and has since become a very different order of being? After all, kings don’t start off crowned and sceptred and perched on thrones.

WITNESS: He has outgrown nothing. In a sense John a-Nokes is a front, or optical illusion, rather like a mirage or a rainbow: when you go up to him the man vanishes, and you find only specks which are the descendants of that original pair. The stuff of him, his life and his functioning, is their stuff and their life and their functioning, writ large and acting in concert.

COUNSEL: Nevertheless the whole, I guess you would say, transcends the sum of its parts.

WITNESS: Yes, of course. And no. For example, the whole lives by stuffing foreign matter into one end of itself and pushing foreign matter out the other end. Which is essentially the way each of its myriad parts lives.

Even more eloquent of the fact that he’s grown out of nothing are his sexual antics. The man’s up to the same game on the big dry land as the ‘tadpole’ was up to forty-five years ago in that little sea. There’s built-in lechery, there’s lifelong addiction for you! He can’t keep off it! What’s more, his whole life is spent in a marvellous bawdy-house in which his relations great and small are playing every variety of sex game, most of them bizarre enough to raise the eyebrows of a Havelock Ellis or a Krafft-Ebing, if not to bring a blush to his cheek. For a splendidly uninhibited example, take those flowering plants flashing their sex organs, male stamens rampant and lined up around the female pistil, all tarted up and set off by that gorgeous and seductive lingerie of petals. Or the beetles having it off there among the frillies by the hour. Surrounded as he is by such countless pointers to his own primeval physique and drives, what does our Nokes specimen do? Does he salute and bow to and settle down among these less-inhibited relations, inspired by family loyalty and family feeling? Not on your life! He raises his eyes heavenwards and informs the universe that he’s its Alpha and Omega, its Substance and Sustainer, the spotless Pure Spirit back of it all! Whiter than the whitest snow! Purer than Purity! Can you beat that for swank, for insolence, for hypocrisy?

COUNSEL: And the Purity is forever, if you please! From eternity to eternity,
secula seculorum,
the specimen in the dock is the One Imperishable Reality - it casually informs us!

WITNESS: You would think (wouldn’t you?) that with all those flowers and insects and other not-so-poor relations going the way of all flesh - dying like flies, as we say - all around him, he would take the hint that he’s no exception, and is due soon to follow suit. How can he - in origin and in present constitution and functioning sticking so close to the standard pattern - how can he begin to persuade himself that he alone is permanent? At what auspicious juncture in his progress from that copulating tadpole to this copulating gentleman did the miracle of imperishability supervene? How, and why, did it do so? Stupid questions! What did supervene was megalomegalomania!

COUNSEL: Witness, I would like to ask you a question now about yourself. Underneath your professional skin does there lurk a religious man?

WITNESS: If so, he’s never peeped out.

COUNSEL: The Accused’s incredible self-conceit doesn’t upset you in the slightest?

WITNESS: I’m amused and amazed, that’s all. Even the amazement wears off. Ultimately I have to contemplate this interesting specimen with cool objectivity. Here’s a variation or mutation from the norm all right, but no less a natural phenomenon than the norm is. It’s a scientific fact that a few of these human organisms make peculiar high-pitched God-noises, just as it’s a scientific fact that some cats squeak and don’t mew.

COUNSEL: Well, that’s all for the present... I see the Accused signals he has no questions to put to you. But please stay in court. I may want you in the box again...