The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (6 page)

‘God hath given you one face,’ says Hamlet, ‘and you make yourselves another.’ By robbing mirrors, I add. Put it like this: there’s a Face, and there are faces. The difference between them is total. It’s essential to find out which of them God has given you. He gave you ten ways of finding out, no less. Get the answer wrong, and you’re not only in every sort of trouble - you’re a blasphemer.

Here are some who got the answer right:

Each thing has two faces: a face of its own, and the Face of its Lord. In respect of its own face it is nothingness, in respect of the Face of God it is Being.

Al-Ghazali

Everyone likes a mirror, while not knowing the nature of his Face… After all, how long does a reflection remain in view? Make a practice of contemplating the origin of the reflection... That cheek and mole come back to their Source.

Rumi

This is not a task for one whose True Face is not clean.

Attar

[Lycomedes had a portrait painted of the Apostle John.] And John, who had never at any time seen his own face, said to him, ‘You are mocking me, child. Am I like that?

Acts of John

The seventeen hundred koan or themes to which Zen students devote themselves are only for making them see their Original Face. The World-honoured One sat in meditation in the snowy mountains for six years, then saw the morning star and was enlightened, and this was seeing his Original Face. When it is said of others of the ancients that they had a great realization, or a great breaking through, it means they saw their Original Face.

Daito Kokushi

Prosecution Witness No. 4

THE LAVATORY ATTENDANT

Having carefully explained to the Witness the nature of the charge against me and said a little about my Defence position, Counsel asks him what light he can throw on the matter.

In reply the Witness testifies that he knows me well by sight. I’m one of his regulars. Also by reputation - evil reputation.

The Judge warns the Witness that he’s in the box to answer questions about facts, not to moralize unbidden. And certainly not to tell the court about what other people think of me. The Jury are directed to ignore the words ‘evil reputation’.

WITNESS: All this bull about not really bein’ a man only shows that Nokes is plain bonkers. What incredible swank, what a nerve he’s got! I can’t believe my ears. If he’s not human, why does he visit my Convenience? And what the hell’s he doin’ when he stands there facin’ the wall lookin’ down? I’d like to know what’s divine about that, about what’s goin’ on down there.

Don’t tell me [banging the witness-box with both fists] don’t tell me the Almighty
pees!
And
farts!

The Judge calls the court to order, and warns the Witness to moderate his language. Drastically.

WITNESS: Sorry, guv! But I know all about this perisher in the dock, and I’ve had as much as I can take. It’s him, not me, who’s using insultin’ language about the Almighty. Who does he think he is? I’m tellin’ the bugger he’s just like me and you…

His Honour warns the Witness that he’s within a whisker of being committed for contempt of court.

Disappointed with the Judge, he appeals to the Jury.

WITNESS: What’s more, ladies and gents, I remember this bloke rushin’ in - like he’s got all the devils in hell at his tail - and makin’ for one of my toilets, lockin’ himself in and comin’ out after five minutes and a flush. I bet you each a tenner what he did in there was what they all do. Was it the Almighty who - ?

This time, Judge and Counsel together succeed in silencing the Witness. I have no questions to put him. He stands down, muttering.

Defence:
Gravity and Levity

MYSELF: Members of the Jury, hostile though this Witness appears, he plays wonderfully into my hands. In spite of himself he prepares the way for striking new evidence in my favour, evidence which, but for him, I might so easily have missed.

Let me explain:

When I’m interested enough – and honest and observant enough – to look at myself for myself, I find I’m duplex. I come in two designs, two quite distinct models, Mark 1 and Mark 2/3. They are very
different,
more so than black and white. They stay
apart,
keeping their distance like poles of a magnet. They stand
facing
each other, as Nelson’s Column faces Whitehall. And they are
opposites,
as sweet is the opposite of bitter. Mark 1 is the real and central and divine Me, while Mark 2/3 is the apparent and peripheral and all-too-human me. Mark 1 is what I am, while Mark 2/3 is what I look like. Mark 1 is what I find myself to be here as the seeing Subject or First Person, while Mark 2/3 is what I find myself to be over there as the seen object, or second/third person. In short, it’s as impossible to exaggerate the contrast between these two models of me as it is to exaggerate their connection.

Nowhere is this contrast more startling than in what the Witness calls his Convenience. His customers are of two sorts. All pee downwards, human fashion. All except one, who pees upwards, divine fashion. Every time –

No, no, Your Honour: no need to ply your gravel. I assure you I’m not being irreverent or flippant, and certainly not needlessly scatological. Here are inescapable facts which support my case. Nor am I holding this court in contempt. (I can’t afford to, when I’m on trial for my life.) If I’m indulging in levity it’s because God Almighty does so with a vengeance and a tra-la-la, in both senses of the word levity. I can’t help it if people find His Self-revelation in the humble workplace of the Witness as disgusting as I find it entertaining, and charming, and immensely significant.

The Prosecution’s God is a respectable character, stiff and solemn, a model of middle-class good manners and predictability, with no shocks up the divine sleeve. Well, my God isn’t a bit like that. Kings
have
their jesters, but the King of the World is His jester. He’s all surprises. He’s the Funny One, the Shocker! Downright vulgar He is! Take what happens in the Witness’s WCs... All right, Your Honour: no need to elaborate. Only let me point out that in all those locked cubicles underwear goes down and then up again. In all except one, where it goes up and then down again.

COUNSEL, resolutely horror-struck: Your Honour, I really must butt in here to draw the Jury’s attention to the almost unbelievable goings-on in this lawcourt. This
lawcourt!
The Romans revered Cloacina, the goddess of the sewer. Going a whole lot better (better’s hardly the word), John a-Nokes reveres himself as at once the God of Heaven and the God of Public Lavatories, sparing us no lavatorial detail. Not only does he convict himself out of his own mouth, of the crime of blasphemy, but does so in the most repugnant fashion imaginable. One nicely calculated to stir up devout people of all sects and persuasions. Members of the Jury, don’t let his sophistry — of which you are, I’m sure, about to be served another large helping — obscure these perfectly obvious facts, these disgustingly obvious facts.

MYSELF: This is rich! This is too much!
Who
broached this now-so-filthy subject by calling the Lavatory Attendant, confident that his testimony would demolish my case? It was the gentleman over there in fancy dress, the one who, now the facts turn out to
support
my case, suddenly finds the whole business ‘unbelievable’ in its nastiness! Nokes is wicked: when attacked he defends himself! Nokes is disgusting: when shat on he returns the compliment, and has the last laugh! Nokes says: nasty be to him who nasty thinks.

God is no more prim and proper than a child of four. His truth is funnier than our fiction. He’s arranged that waking to our Identity with Him is wonderfully light-hearted. Now I call that really
decent
of Him. Here’s the Almighty, intent on Self-discovery and Self-revelation and Self-giving-with-a-smile, leaning over backwards to demonstrate that everyone who says ‘I’ is none other than Himself. Leaning over backwards is right. If you don’t get it, look at Diagram No. 4. If you
do
get it, look at Diagram No. 4, and join in the divine merriment!

Members of the Jury, the court will presently go into recess. You will then have the opportunity to test what I’m telling you: to check whether, in the lavatories of this court, a wonderful kind of peeing is going on. Not the common sort which obeys the Law of Gravity, but the unique sort which throws that Law into reverse.

Now, Who can break Nature’s laws but the One who makes them? And not this Law alone but many others, as we shall see during the count of these proceedings. Meantime, how delightful, how worthy of our notice, that this fun-loving and fun-poking Deity should find the latrines of this court as suitable a place as the court itself in which to disclose His presence among us at this time! Or even more suitable!

Again, this is too much for Counsel for the Prosecution. He shoots to his feet. Writhing and spluttering, he implores the Judge to put a stop to this indecency, this outrage, this barefaced profanity, this calculated insult to the Divine Being, this — words fail him!

JUDGE, addressing me: Urinating
upwards,
forsooth! Have you taken leave of your senses? This court is no place for facetiousness, let alone profanity, and I must warn you not to try its patience too far.

MYSELF: No, Your Honour, I’ve
come to
my senses — a hard but necessary thing to do. Diagram No. 4 makes it so much easier. Spare those arrows a second glance, and tumble to the truth. As for profanity, the rest of my argument will be as tactful as I can make it. His Majesty wears no fig-leaf, but I’ll try to bear in mind the conventional image of Him which is practically all fig-leaf. Mine is an uncouth God, but I’ll do my best to remember how couth Sir Gerald’s is. How frightfully genteel.

Diagram No. 4

Exactly what (I ask myself) is this shocking He, this shameless She, this unbowdlerized It, in reality? Its essence is Awareness, the One Light of Consciousness that lights up the world and every creature the world comes into. I locate this Light Indivisible right where I am, plumb in the Centre of this world as I find it, nearer than near, at the heart of the heart of me. Here is no spark of that Fire, but the blazing Furnace itself. It brooks no rival consciousnesses. Awareness comes whole and single, or not at all: never in pieces — one piece looking after this, another piece looking after that phenomenon. Which means that, whatever part or function of my body — cosmic or human — is being attended to, it’s not a man as such who’s attending. What I provisionally called my awareness is in the last resort my God’s, inside as well as outside the Witness’s Convenience. Awareness is His quirk, His trade, His speciality, His monopoly. It includes awareness of His Universe Body, of which all particular bodies are organs.

The Prosecution — so sure that what goes on in that lavatory is obnoxious to God and man — leaves me with no choice but to enlarge briefly on the subject of this Universe Body as it presents itself to me. I refer to the many-layered onion-like thing I see that I am as First Person, not to the uniform potato-like thing I imagine I’m in as a third person. To be precise, this almost-half-an-onion-like thing that figures in nearly all our diagrams.

Encouraged by the great tradition of the Inner Light at my core, and inspired by my direct vision of it, I submit with reverence to what it lights up. Here I am at once this central Awareness or Consciousness and what it’s conscious of which is none other than its own region-by-region embodiment, its cosmic constitution. The view out from here embraces the One-centred but many-levelled physique that is the expression and instrument and object of the Consciousness that I AM, and I take it as I find it.