So, in the end, His world didn’t come to grief. Nothing was wasted. Without the intervention of psychological man and all his man-centred delusions, post-psychological man - which is to say God-filled and God-centred man - would never have made the grade.
The fact is that, if it were not for psychological man - the blasphemer who for a time seems to succeed in making God peripheral and man central in his universe - we in this courtroom would be a bunch of savages. Maybe naked, maybe half-decent in grass skirts, maybe dressed up to the nines in full tribal splendour - I don’t know. But I do know that l wouldn’t now be joyfully entertaining the dear Lord right here, if John a-Nokes hadn’t first given Him the bum’s rush and lowered his own trousered backside on to the royal throne.
COUNSEL: End of seminar - blaspheming seminar - I trust...
Well, the Prosecution won’t waste the court’s time further by refuting a hypothesis (it’s no more than that) whose relevance to the charge is so marginal. One point, however, has to be made. It’s as if the Accused were pretending that more is less. I say, he can hardly cure himself of projection (which even he apparently accepts is a disease) by unloading all his thoughts and feelings on to a long-suffering world. He simply ensures that he’s got the most virulent form of the disease.
MYSELF: As usual, Counsel turns a true story into a lie by omitting its conclusion. What’s wrong and unhealthy about the partial and second-stage projection the Witness described isn’t the projection itself, but its misuse to evade responsibility. What’s right and healthy about the total and third-stage ‘projection’ I’m advocating - in fact, it’s not projection but releasing - is that it accepts total responsibility for what it finds ‘out there’. Not only do I see off from here my thoughts and feelings, but what they are thoughts and feelings about, the world they alight on. Who I really, really am produces and is responsible for the lot, washes His hands of none of His creatures, however bad or miserable. These headless shoulders are visibly broad enough to shoulder the blame for all that’s blameworthy, as well as the praise for all that’s praiseworthy. Hence the tradition that God saves His world by taking on all its sin and suffering.
The long and the short of it is that your ‘projection’ is fine when it’s total, when it cleans you right out. Then its other name is creation, and it proceeds from Who you really, really are into a world that’s seen for what it really, really is. Namely, Yourself. Then You are unspeakably lovely, within and without.
It’s half-measures that are the very devil. Here are some who went the whole hog:
The shining of the mere object, as though with a voidness of one’s own nature, is samadhi.
Patanjali
As long as I am this or that I am not all things.
Eckhart
To sit in the Throne of God is to inhabit Eternity. To reign there is to be pleased with all things in Heaven and Earth.
The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine.
Traheme
For one of superior intellect, the best thing is thoroughly to comprehend the inseparableness of the knower, the object known, and the act of knowing.
The Precepts of the Kargyutpa Gurus
Prosecution Witness No. I0
THE SOCIAL WORKER
Counsel introduces the Witness as a Social Worker of long experience. The Witness isn’t so keen on the label. He doesn’t see himself as any sort of specialist. Really he’s no more than a plain, common-sensible fellow who happens to be fascinated by the human mind in all its astonishing variety. His life interest - as much hobby as profession - is people. Not excluding the Accused. Years ago, Witness attended a couple of his classes, and does know something of his views.
COUNSEL: Are you aware that he says he has no mind? And that, for him at least, being empty of mind is being full of God, and being full of God is being God? Just like that!
WITNESS: That’s more or less the message I get.
COUNSEL: In the light of your experience, what have you to say about this extraordinary claim?
WITNESS: Two things. The first is more of a question than a comment. I should want to know what effect his unusual opinions have on his relationships with people, his lifestyle, his contribution to the world, his energy, his happiness. Since I haven’t seen him for some years, I just don’t know what he’s like now. For all I know to the contrary, his opinions - however bizarre or outrageous - could make for a better life, and so pass at least the pragmatic test.
COUNSEL: And what’s your second point?
WITNESS: It concerns the status of the mind. To me it’s obvious that tradition is right here, and that man is tripartite, compounded of Body, Mind and Spirit. And that the middle term is vastly important, here to stay, impossible to reallocate to either or both of the end terms. It can’t be unloaded on to Spirit. Clean of everything but itself, Spirit is pure and unchanging Awareness, Subject without objective content; and in no way can it take on Mind, that most kaleidoscopic of thingamies. Even more certain is the fact that Mind can’t be moved in the opposite direction and somehow grafted on to the Body. If it could, what would be the difference between surveying a bruise on your knee and feeling the ouch; or between cupping your head in your hand while staring into the far distance, and contemplating the sweet (or horrible) mystery of life? No doubt about it, the Accused has and is a Mind all right, a Mind of his own, with unique pluses and unique minuses. It’s what makes him a distinct individual, a person. He can’t get out of it, or get it out of him. He’s stuck with the darn thing.
COUNSEL: One’s own mind, then, is clearly distinguishable and separate from all other minds? Autant de têtes, autant d’avis?
WITNESS: There’s a good deal of overlapping, and blurring and merging at the edges; nevertheless, an inviolable core remains. Take some examples. Mercifully the taste of the marmalade you’re having at breakfast doesn’t spread to my kipper. Much as you might like to, you can’t pass the pain in your back on to me. You have no clue to my feelings about the latest edition of King Charles’s Guidelines for Architects; or about Lord Scargill’s TV protest, in full fig, against the abolition of the Upper House; or about the appointment of the first Lady Archbishop of York. (Or you hadn’t, till now!) And so on, endlessly… In fact, I know of no sillier idea than this - that you and I and the Accused don’t have minds of our own - unless it’s the idea that we don’t have any minds at all.
COUNSEL: Why, then, do you suppose the Accused fastens on to this crackpot notion?
WITNESS: I should have thought the answer was obvious. Having made up his mind (a revealing phrase), in the teeth of all the evidence to the contrary, that he’s divine, he hunts around for any old reason to support that conclusion. Not wishful thinking but wishful refusal to think - wishful self-deception - is his trouble. l could be wrong. I hope I am wrong. But that’s the impression I get.
COUNSEL, to jury: About the Witness’s first point - what he calls the pragmatic test - the Prosecution will be calling other witnesses to testify that the Accused is, in his personal morals and behaviour, no better than the rest of us. Worse, some will say. Either way, his pretensions to divinity will be made to look absurd. Meanwhile, let’s continue to address ourselves to the Witness’s second point, to Nokes’s disingenuous dismissal of the mind. We await with bated breath his account of how he rids himself of - and gets along so nicely without - this thing that the rest of us are encumbered with. I almost said: that the rest of us are.
I have no questions for the Witness. He stands down.
Defence: Think-bubbles
MYSELF: lt’s wrong, I say, to dismiss any well-established and sincerely held opinion as wrong, just like that. But it’s right to ask: from what point of view, in what context, for whom and at what time and for what purpose is it wrong? Conversely, of course, it�
�s right to ask, not whether, but at what level, such an opinion is right and true.
This rule of thumb applies to the question of whether I have or am a mind. Very much so. And by mind, of course, I don’t mean brain, which is a thing you can weigh and put in a jar and pickle.
Take the level of common sense, which - viewed from other levels - is really common nonsense. Nevertheless, manspeak goes with manhood, and it’s not merely permissible but necessary to talk common-sensibly as if I had a mind. Just as it’s necessary to talk as if I move around the world (on foot, by car, by plane), and look at it through two eyes (one lazy, the other busy), and am here what I look like to you over there (headed, your size, your way up), and so on and on. To refuse to fall in with these ‘as if’ conventions would be tiresome and pedantic and indeed unworkable. On the other hand, to fall for them (as almost all of us do, almost all of our lives) is far worse. lt’s to miss the whole point of our lives.
For these reasons my response to this Witness’s testimony will be two-pronged. I shall show in what sense l’m mindless here, and then show how I neglect that sense at my peril.
JUDGE: Hold on! Not so fast! Surely your Defence rests on the difference between what you call the third person and what you call the First Person? And surely what makes all the difference is the First Person’s mind? These persons look much the same, but the latter’s certainly, and by definition, fixed up - spooked up, some would say - with this invisible presence, while the former isn’t. It’s possible to doubt others’ minds, not your own.
MYSELF: With respect, Your Honour, they couldn’t look more different. The visible and real differences between the third person and the First - inversion, decapitation, 180° turn-around, and so on - are striking and many-sided enough, without dragging in dubious invisible ones. In fact the silliest thing in the world is myself as this First Person persuading myself that I’m the spitting image of that third person over there - except that a think-bubble or balloon (as in a strip cartoon) arises from the top of my head! A wild fantasy, which common sense nevertheless builds its world on.
No, a thousand times No! The only mind or think-bubble I need, or can find the slightest evidence for, is the Super-bubble that rises from my No-head - from my Bottom Line - and it’s none other than the concentric system of cosmic bubbles featuring in nearly all our diagrams, and in Diagram No. 10 in particular. If I’m to use the word ‘mind’ at all, here is the Mind-Body or Body-Mind of God Himself, His marvellously filled-out and iridescent Think-bubble, His richly sculpted and gilded Frame of Mind. And mine!
I find myself permanently stationed at the mid-point of this divine nest of hemispheres. Let me remind you of the pattern. Looking up from here, I find the outermost layers to be tenanted by heavenly bodies. Looking out from here, I find the middle layers to be tenanted by earthly bodies, including humans of all sorts and conditions, and notably the one behind glass who I identify as John a-Nokes. There he is, out there alongside the others, the same way up as they are, and like them furnished with two eyes in a head, and nary a hint of a think-balloon arising from it. Looking down from here, I find these feet, and foreshortened legs, and most of my foreshortened trunk, in that order.
Diagram No. 10
And I find the whole hemispherical bubble-system terminating in and resting on my Bottom Line, on this fuzzy but perfectly visible boundary drawn across my chest, well short of the neck and the head I was told I had right here. When in every sense I have the humility to bow before the evidence, before what’s given up there and out there and down there - given to the headless one here at the World’s End - this is what I get. I’d better take it. I don’t intend to turn down God’s kind invitation to bubble over with Him so joyfully and so imaginatively. [Counsel’s bouncing about on his feet, vainly trying to get a word in edgeways.] Come to think of it, God’s Think-bubble - or Nest of Think-bubbles - is just what His world amounts to. All those seemingly solid creations of His, including Messrs Wilberforce and Nokes, are phenomena, surfaces not even skin-deep, airy nothings that go pop as you approach them. No matter how showy, the only substantial thing about them is the divine Bubble Blower or Afflatus at their core.
COUNSEL, at last: Following on that Peeing God, we now have - if you please! - a Bubbly God, a God crooning that old pop song, ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air.’ All bubble and squeak, if you ask me - [Some hooting and clapping in the public gallery.]
MYSELF: Your Honour, do I have to endure this nuisance?
JUDGE: Just carry on, regardless.
MYSELF: Of the many intriguing features of this concentric world-system, the one which concerns me just now is the assortment of senses which reveal it. In fact, it’s not so much a think-bubble as a see-touch-hear-taste-smell-bubble. I see stars and clouds and mountain tops. I see and touch rocks and trees and houses. I see and touch and hear people and animals and machinery. I see and touch and hear and taste and smell crunchy slices of toast. I feel an aching muscle and a collywobbly stomach... In short, accompanying and disclosing the cosmic hierarchy of objects, and inseparable from them, is this cosmic (repeat, cosmic) hierarchy of senses. Also, of course, over and above these localized sense-objects, there are more general ones. Thus I sometimes take on the joy of the world, at other times its sadness; sometimes its beauty, at other times its dreariness. Quite often, with Jakob Boehme, all Creation has for me a delicious smell. And then, of course, it is continually displaying all sorts of interconnections, all sorts of meanings and values which knit the parts into one tremendous Whole.
This is the way the world comes. This is the form it takes, the richness of it. In this and no other fashion is the universe - which is my Body - served up to me: as a sensible universe, a minded cosmos, a living organism, complete and strictly indivisible. To split it into a mindless body there and a bodiless mind here - a machine and a ghost - is to wreck the body and unhinge the mind. Violence that’s as absurd as it is unnecessary. No, I’m not Body and Mind, and Spirit. Not a troika but a pair: Body-Mind, and Spirit.
Which means that murder’s afoot, murder’s called for. I’m God’s hit man, under contract to kill the mind as a separate something or other. The great medieval English philosopher William of Occam (in Surrey) furnishes the weapon. Occam’s Razor is the famous principle of parsimony: if you can do without a notion or an entity (he says) do without it, do it in. Shrewd advice! Accordingly, I dispatch the mind as an existent, real, useful entity. It isn’t. Most definitely it isn’t. On the contrary, it’s de trop and a confounded nuisance.
COUNSEL wades in with: This is lunacy. I have, with great reluctance, to share the same Universe Body with Mr John a-Nokes, whether I like it or not. But not - thank heaven! - the same mind. People’s minds, differing hugely - and, providentially, insulated from each other - can’t be decanted into a blender and reduced to some kind of psychic purée. As the Witness testified, each is a little world. It’s this privacy which makes the Accused’s life and mine, thrown together in the same cosmos, just about bearable.
MYSELF: It’s not that the mind selects its little private world out of the big public world, but rather that the big world is self-selective and grudging by nature, and discloses itself piecemeal, in dribs and drabs and never as a whole. So much so that knowledge of the world is often described by the sages as a kind of ignorance. Put it like this: you and I, as Spirit, are at once absolutely empty of the world and absolutely full of it. But as Mind-Body, we are never seized of more than minor excerpts from it. It’s a limitation on the side of the object, not the Subject.
And so, members of the Jury, the stage is cleared of that bastard and shady mountebank which I call my mind - cleared to make way for Spirit. Bright Spirit which is none other than Awareness, Awareness which is none other than the indwelling God. Mind, that would-be usurper of God’s throne, that Old Pretender, has had his swollen and spooked-up head sliced clean off, with that keenest of razors, which is Occam’s.
COUNSEL: I’m afr
aid the philosophers won’t help you much in this court. They prove anything and agree on nothing. To rely on them is to lose your case. To rely on just one of them is to fail to find any case at all. I advise you - seeing that the mind’s status is the matter at issue just now - to forget about philosophy and stick to psychology. Or do I hear you telling the court that the immense body of theory and practice which is modern psychology is superfluous, a load of old rubbish?
MYSELF: Of course not. It came out, in my reply to the previous Witness, that the way from the Eden of pre-psychological man to the Promised Land of post-psychological man (I mean him in whom God is enthroned) lies through the howling Wilderness of psychological man. Certainly a region that can’t be bypassed. But just as certainly one that’s best not lingered in over-long.
I’m much helped in this passage from psychological man to post-psychological man - in this seeing the mind out and God in - by the behaviour of the stuff of the mind itself. Obligingly, my so-called mental contents are outward-facing and centrifugal, raring to go and make room here for Him whose place it is. They have objective intent. They are as unimpressed by that ballet of bloodless abstractions which is the mind-in-itself as they are impressed by that rumbustious, blood-distended, go-getting, blazing commotion which is the world - the scene they can’t wait to join. Thus I try in vain to think a thought that belongs to my mind and not to my world, one which is my own private property, which is altogether unthinged and mentalized. Thus I find that my love doesn’t exist till it belongs to my loved one: it’s not that I adore but that she’s adorable. That my thoughts and feelings are about her, not about myself-in-quite-a-state-about-the-lady. That my hate isn’t hate till it alights on what’s hateful. That I taste jam, not a tongue. That I smell a rose, and neither a nose nor an olfactory experience. That I fear spiders, not arachnophobia. In fact, it’s the rose that gives me the smell, the spider that gives me the creeps. The mind is phoney. And, in so far as I am a mind, I’m ‘mental’, meaning barmy. As a separate, inward-facing, self-contained entity, the mind doesn’t exist. And, in so far as it does exist on its lonesome, it’s a thief and a sick thief at that. So plague-stricken that it plants the kiss of death upon everything it pulls away from the world and bear-hugs. ‘He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy.’ I’m a real person in a real world to the degree that I have no mind of my own aside from my world.
The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God Page 10