This divine Brain is my real Brain. To be assured of this, I need only to experience this Brain in action, to be awake to the way it runs my life. I swear to you it makes all the difference in my day-to-day existence. It works brilliantly for me when, at long last, I cease relying on that pathetically narrow and remote man’s-head with its minuscule brain, and start relying on this all-inclusive and ever-present God’s-head with its World-Brain. Well, I can answer for nobody here but myself. When I trust that pinhead, God help me! When I trust this Pincushion Head — this Hedgehog of Pins — God helps me!
To rescue these bald pronouncements from all vagueness and highfalutin godspeak, to bring them to life and topicality, let me explain Who’s really conducting my Defence. I assure you that it isn’t that little creature I see in the mirror and that you see in the dock. You may have noticed how seldom throughout this Trial I have relied on him and his ideas (in so far as he could be said to have any) and how often on those of the Prosecution. Counsel and his witnesses aren’t my enemies but my friends, handing me on a plate just the right concoction to get my teeth into.
All I have to do is wait to be served. I’m given what I need just when I need it. The way it all works out is something I’ll never get used to. While Sir Gerald and his priceless gallimaufry of witnesses are telling me how conceited and stupid and gullible I am, I take their point. I couldn’t agree more, I empathize, I’m on their side, their argument is unanswerable. And then — O surprise, O gratitude! — without foreknowledge, clueless, mindless, more idiotic than idiotic, I listen with awe to what comes out of this all-wise God-head, speaking of Itself and for Itself and — yes! — to Itself. What a Brain is here!
It’s all a question of trust. I can be sure that, sooner rather than later, John a-Nokes will let me down. And that, soon and late, now and forever, Who I am will never let me down. But of course! He would be letting Himself down. In traditional language, this means that God’s arrangements for me (by which I mean the universe of things as they are now presenting themselves) are perfect — if only I will say Yes! to them. There, in what’s actually happening, is His World-Brain at work. And coming up with the right answer every time. I’m picking God’s brains when I see that almost headless man off and this Completely Headed God in — this God-head that contains, and is, all creatures great and small, headed and headless, brainy and brainless.
Listen, finally, to a few of the very brainy ones:
How can this one small brain think thoughts, unless God does the thinking?
Herman Melville
The Brain is wider than the Sky
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and you – beside.
Emily Dickinson
And still they gaz’d, and still the wonder grew
That one small head could carry all he knew.
Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village
More brain, O Lord, more brain! Or we shall mar
Utterly this fair garden we might win.
George Meredith
The (self-abandoned) soul forms insensibly a habit of acting always by the instinct, so to speak, of God.
If we are able to envisage each moment as the manifestation of the will of God, we shall find in it all our hearts can desire.
Our understanding wishes to take the first place among the divine methods; it must be reduced to the last.
Jean Pierre de Caussade
To enlighten all beings from the self is delusion; to be enlightened by them is enlightenment.
Dogen
In a brilliantly thought-provoking fantasy entitled ‘Where am I?’, Daniel C. Dennett describes the experiences of a man in radio communication with his own amputated brain, floating in a tank. ‘Here am I,’ says this unfortunate character, ‘sitting on a folding chair, staring through a piece of plate glass at my own brain.’ I, John a-Nokes, could say the same thing right now, given only a window in my forehead and a mirror in my hand.
Prosecution Witness No. 9
THE PSYCHOTHERAPIST
COUNSEL, to Jury: ‘You will have noticed how loath John a-Nokes is to admit that he has a mind of his own, how unwilling to take responsibility for his thoughts and feelings. You can see why. Such an admission would brand him a man, only human after all. For not even he could pretend that his mental chatter and petty worries are the Almighty’s - to say nothing of his fears and hates, his addictions and moods. So what does he do? With a fine show of humility, he declares himself to be the Perfect Idiot, whose mind is so blank it’s no mind at all. He projects all that subjective stuff on to the objective world, clearing the decks. For whom? Why, for the deity he claims to be, of course. ‘God’s in, I’m out!’ - those are his very words. Oh, yes, his false modesty pays off all right! It’s a sprat to catch a whale. A Jack Sprat to catch a Whale of a God.
Well, there’s another way of looking at this convenient and much-used device of projection. It’s a way which, though less complimentary to Jack Sprat, is - you Jury members will agree - more realistic. Our next Witness - a lady of long experience in psychotherapy - will explain how it works.
WITNESS: There are various kinds of projection, all resulting in distortion of reality. Thus you may grossly overvalue and idealize someone, falsely attributing wonderful qualities to him or her. Or you may grossly undervalue and denigrate someone, falsely attributing dreadful qualities to him or her.
For an example of the latter sort, let me tell you about a client I’ve been seeing over the past few weeks. I’ll call her Joan. Joan’s trouble (she explains) is that her relations and friends and neighbours are all of them extremely selfish, content to take advantage of her and indifferent to all she does for them, mean with money, not interested in her at all. Joan feels put upon, exploited, everybody’s stooge. Now it won’t do for me to assume she’s got it all wrong. It may be unlikely, but it’s certainly possible that she is surrounded by a company of loveless and insensitive self-seekers.
Such folk are no rarity. Nevertheless, as I learn more about that company, and go on listening to her story and observing how she tells it, the more apparent it becomes that she’s finding in others the faults she can’t face in herself. And that what she says they are is my best clue to what she is. Anyway, the result is that she’s very worried and miserable, even to the point of threatening suicide. And I guess that Joan’s friends and relations are having a hard time, too... Well, perhaps this case will do to illustrate how projection works. It’s a very simple and transparent manoeuvre, and none of us is innocent of it.
COUNSEL: Briefly, how are you treating your client’s condition? I take it you are getting her to withdraw her projections?
WITNESS: It might look like that to you. But really I don’t seek to interfere in people’s lives and get them to change their ways. I aim, rather, to encourage them to look at what’s actually going on. Gradually, I think, Joan is realizing where all this unkindness, all these deplorable attitudes of the folk around her, are coming from. She’s just beginning to take responsibility for her feelings. If, as I should expect, this awaking to what’s so issues in a change in what’s so, it won’t have come from my helping her to alter anything, but from helping her to become conscious of it. It’s a good working hypothesis that the more one goes for awareness, without straining to change things for the better, the more they are changed for the better. A year from now, it’s conceivable that my client will be surrounded by lovely people!
In short, you could say that my approach to these problems is crabwise, oblique and not head-on.
COUNSEL: How do you see this as applying to the Accused?
WITNESS: I don’t. All I know about him is what you’ve just told us. At a guess, however, I’d say he’s attempting the impossible. Fortunately - repeat, fortunately - nobody can at any one time unload more than a fraction of his or her mind-stuff on to the world. And never, not in a whole lifetime, could anyone unload it all, leaving not a wr
ack behind. One is always coming from a vast mass of unexamined and more or less unconscious material. Let me assure you that the Defendant’s fooling himself when he imagines he has completely cleared the decks for - whatever it is, or whoever it is.
COUNSEL: And if he were your client?
WITNESS: I’d forget all I’ve just said, give him the benefit of the doubt, and start from scratch. I promise you I wouldn’t start by assuming he’s sick.
COUNSEL: That will do very well, thank you.
I, the Accused, have no questions for the Witness. She stands down.
COUNSEL, to Jury: The Witness’s message - coming to us from ripe and compassionate experience of the human condition - is that John a-Nokes is deceiving himself and others when he says he’s moved out to let God in. He hasn’t. And he can’t.
Defence: The Storming of the Bastille
MYSELF: Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, to respond to this Witness’s testimony I shall have to outline the history of projection - and introjection - in the experience of humankind.
JUDGE: Before you get carried away, the court would like to know how long this seminar’s going to be.
MYSELF: Not long, Your Honour. Provided Counsel doesn’t interrupt me.
COUNSEL: Really, Your Honour -
JUDGE: We have to get used to the fact that these proceedings are about as much like a lawsuit in modern London as they are like a Socratic dialogue in ancient Athens. All the same, I shall rein in the Accused when he’s obviously forgotten where he is, and why he’s here.
MYSELF: I shall be grateful for the court’s patience - without which I cannot respond adequately to the Witness. She’s led us right up to the vast and perilous rain forest of the psyche, and I’ve no choice but to weave what path I can through the tanglewood.
To be clear about this crucial subject of projection (which is just a provisional name for it) we have to begin at the beginning and see where we get to. First, as humankind, then as the individual human.
Primitive man is pre-psychological man. His thoughts and feelings aren’t stowed away in his head: they are distributed throughout his world, colouring and structuring and animating the whole scene. Thus it’s not that the mountain top fills him with fear, but rather that a fearful dragon lives there, so it’s a place to be avoided at all costs. Thus it’s not that he invests the grim-faced idol with divinity or mana, but that it comes invested with the stuff; with energies that work magic which can heal or kill. And so on. For primitive man it’s not that qualities and meanings take flight from the Subject to the object, but that they were never anywhere else. The bird in that bush was never in the hand.
But, in the course of ages, a whole flock of birds is netted. As he becomes more and more civilized (as we quaintly put it), more and more of these free-range qualities and meanings and powers are pulled in, are caught and collected from the Great Beheld, and caged in the Beholder. Man becomes psychological man. Along with a head he grows a mind to put in it. And this protuberance goes on enriching itself at the world’s expense till in the end it’s full to bursting and his world is reduced to nuts and bolts - if that. Double trouble. No longer One, his name is Legion. No longer the Possessor, he’s possessed.
Take, for instance, the life history of the Sun. At first he’s seen as tremendously alive, a powerful deity given to stately diurnal procession across the sky, with lesser and lower life in his gift, and his all-seeing Eye - now beaming, now glaring - fastened on man below. But man doesn’t stay docile: he revolts against solar tyranny. The first stage of the Sun’s undoing is the separation of his animating spirit from his body, which is reduced to a mere fire-ball steered daily round the heavens by the Sun angel. Next, the angel-chauffeur is polished off by degrees, till all that’s left of him is a few fossil remains preserved (along with the angels of the spheres and the stars and the planets, and myriads of non-astronomical ones) in stained-glass windows. As for the fire-ball itself, its daily motion across the heavens is offloaded on to Earth and man. Its warmth and its shining and its many colours follow suit - they are now ‘all in the mind’ - till that once-glorious Sun-god is reduced to a lot of superheated gas in the sky and a lot of superheated mathematics on Earth, neatly tucked away in the heads of astrophysicists. How’s that for desecration, for ungodliness? Yes, for blasphemy? And what applies to the Sun applies to everything under the Sun. Objects that were tremendous or significant or lovely or good have lost all these qualities to man the despoiler. To thieving man who, far from being deified or ennobled by his loot, is increasingly bugged by it. His chickens have come home to roost. And most of them have caught fowl pest.
The consequences of this age-long, immense, many-sided in-gathering of all that’s held valuable are with us at this time in history and not hard to detect. But they are increasingly hard to take. Modern man’s head is swollen and splitting with more meanings than he can cope with, stolen item by item from a cosmos now reduced to a meaningless commotion of inscrutable particles. Certainly the ingathering was necessary and hugely productive in its time: in the course of this long process of introjection man gained the inestimable benefits of` civilization. But the goods suffered damage on the way in; they didn’t travel at all well. Problems mounted. The current result is mens insana in corpore insano, a bloody human mind in a bloodless universe body. Psychological man is a mess . . .
JUDGE: I’m trying to grasp the connection between this sorry tale, about the alleged withdrawal down the ages of the world’s meaning into the head of its observer, and the crime you are charged with here today.
MYSELF: Pre-psychological man, Your Honour, is pre-blaspheming man, and psychological man is blaspheming man. It’s not that the former is clearly aware of the indwelling God, but that, like the animals, he lets God be God within and lives from Him in all innocence. And it’s not that the latter announces at the top of his voice that he has usurped God’s throne. The operation is all the more effective for being an undercover one. His newly acquired mind is his secret weapon for driving God from the Centre of his world and setting himself up there, and it owes much of its huge success to its camouflage. Blasphemy looks a treat in academic and priestly robes.
JUDGE: It’s you, not humankind, that’s being tried for blasphemy. Tell the court precisely how you see yourself figuring in this ancestral story.
MYSELF: It’s like this, Your Honour. Each individual condenses and recapitulates in a couple of decades the five-million-year life history of the species. As a baby I am, like primitive man, pre-psychological. My development into full humanhood, so necessary and so remarkable and so swift, is nevertheless achieved at a high price. Growing a virtually empty head on my shoulders, I proceed to follow the ancestral pattern and furnish it by ransacking the universe. And go on to over-furnish and cram the thing till I’m dangerously swollen-headed, and my world is proportionately denuded and fatuous. With the understandable result, perhaps, that I rush off to the shrink in the hope of reducing it to reasonable size and bearable pressure by letting some of the stuff out. By releasing swarms of bees from my bonnet - if I can.
In fact, I don’t rush off to the analyst. Desperate evils need desperate antidotes. I’ve another remedy - quicker, surer, far less pricey, and far, far more drastic than his - for this severe head condition. Cephalectomy - no less! Cutting off the diseased organ. Beheading, to put it crudely. Thus releasing at a blow those captured swarms to go back to their native habitats, to the hives and the flowers from which I’d collected them over the years. Off they buzz - to my great relief They go back to making honey, I go back to relishing it. Life is sweeter now.
COUNSEL: Your Honour, I must strenuously protest. This Trial - the first under the Act of 2002, and therefore sure to establish precedents for further Trials - is taking the most deplorable shape. Here’s the Accused, who’s charged with a carefully defined offence, diverting attention from the charge and wasting time and public funds by delivering a lecture on his own brand of social psychology. Or is it on the
care of the bee in sickness and in health? This isn’t Defence. It’s persistent frivolity and contempt of court. I respectfully ask you to shut him up forthwith.
JUDGE: You called the Witness. And if the only way he can counter her testimony annoys or bores or puzzles you, that can’t be helped. On the other hand - yes. To the Accused my advice is: make it snappy. Stick to the point.
MYSELF: I was doing so meticulously, Your Honour, when Counsel (for reasons not hard to guess) deliberately diverted the court’s attention from that point. He pretends not to understand my bees-in-the-bonnet picture, so let me try another. My head is a demolished Bastille, from which hordes of captives are freed to go back to where they belong. No question of projecting them homewards. You try stopping them! The site of the Bastille is cleared, down to the last stone. Cleared for the Liberty that is God’s. I don’t dismiss my imprisoned thoughts and feelings to make room here for Him. I don’t let them go. I simply see that they have always belonged out there, to the object and not the Subject. Diagram No. 9, though it should be in fluorescent colours, will give you the general idea.
Diagram No. 9
So once more that world - ranging from island universes to up-ended feet - springs to life and mind. We are back where we started - but with some huge differences. In many ways the universe for post-psychological man is no longer what it was for pre-psychological man - often as full of threat as of promise, often as much alien as it was homely, and as much other as it was himself. But now the wide and busy world is his very own, the indispensable filling of his empty and still God-head, the brilliant minding of his vacant No-mind, the magnificent bodying forth of his central No-body. It’s a world whose riches have been earning a high rate of compound interest, whose capital has been doubled and redoubled for having been so painstakingly (and so painfully) collected and deposited over millennia in that temporary and packed-solid bank vault called the human brain. Now released and seen back to those roomy cosmic stations (which, to tell the truth, it never really left), that nominal and hoarded wealth is at last actualized. It’s turned into God’s real estate, His paradise.
The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God Page 9