The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God

by Douglas Harding

Defence: Hypnosis and Counter-hypnosis

  MYSELF: Yes indeed. I‘ve a whole bunch of questions to put to you. But first I’d like to remind you of what really happened on that plane. I know you’ll be as truthful as your memory allows, and that I don’t need to stress that you are under oath. It’s a fact, isn’t it, that I wasn’t the one who started our serious conversation? We just talked casually, and then you happened to notice that the book I was reading had the intriguing title of On Having No Head - Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, and you wanted to know what it was all about. I replied (you’ll recollect) that it would be too difficult and take too long to explain the book’s message, but I could very quickly and easily show you - if you were sure you wanted me to. ‘Yes please!’ you said, eagerly. So I did just that. I did indeed show you. Am I right, so far?

  WITNESS: I remember asking about the book, so I guess I let myself in for what followed. The business about not having a head, I mean.

  MYSELF: It’s vital that we get this straight. I didn’t tell you you were headless. Quite the contrary. Remember, I made you get out your hand mirror and find your head in there. Also I proved to you that I was in possession of your head. How else could I describe in endless detail all sorts of things about it that were currently hidden from you? You’ll recollect we agreed that, so far from your being headless, you had innumerable heads lurking inside the polished objects and the people and their cameras all around you. And we shared the joke that the only place in that Boeing 787 which was quite free of that topknot of yours was the beautifully clear region on top of your shoulders! Your merry laughter had our neighbours staring. Oh, yes, and about that book: we agreed that the silly old author had got the title all wrong. He should have called his book On Having Millions and Millions of Heads!

  WITNESS: I didn’t agree with you about anything. Not at first I didn’t - until you went into your Svengali routine. Your gazing into my eyes, and passing your hand in front of my face, and talking in that monotonous voice were what did the trick, what sent me off my rocker.

  MYSELF: Svengali routine my left foot! This really won’t do! You must try to remember what did happen and forget what your brother said happened... I tell you what: I’ll quickly run through the business again with you now, to jog your memory. Never mind about the court and all those people eavesdropping. Let’s go into this together again, the two of us, just as we did in the plane. [A small rumpus in the gallery. The Witness waving, as if to assure whoever was making it that she was all right.]

  WITNESS: Good heavens, No! Why should I agree to such a thing?

  MYSELF: Because I’m on trial for my life and your refusal could be the death of me. And because His Honour is allowing me to conduct my Defence in my own way.

  WITNESS, clearly very embarrassed: Well, I don’t like this at all, but if the Judge thinks I should -

  MYSELF: You see, he graciously nods. All right, then. Look now at this face of mine. Take in this balding dome and greying beard, these greenish-darkish, slightly squinting eyes, this very busy mouth, and all the rest. Unlike me, you’re registering the lot (aren’t you?), down to the last pock-mark and scar and wrinkle. Now on present evidence is there anything, anything at all where you are, to get in its way? Any remnant of a face or a head of your own with which to keep mine out? Aren’t these moving hands of mine no more than a distant broom, helping you to brush away all that imagined clutter of yours? To wipe your mirror clean of its imaginary grime? In fact, with no help from me, aren’t you busted wide open now, wide open for all these other faces as well, for absolutely everything that’s on show? And yourself as clear as clear? Gone with the wind once more? [Witness, convulsed with laughter, doesn’t - or can’t – answer...] Tell me now, have I just been hypnotizing you, or de-hypnotizing you? Have I been talking you out of your senses, or bringing you to your senses? Getting you to hallucinate, or to stop hallucinating? To deny, or to admit, the blazingly obvious? To lie, or to tell the simple truth?

  WITNESS, pulling herself together: Well, I must admit… Oh, my God, you’ve done it again! [She breaks into new peals of laughter, growing rather hysterical...]

  COUNSEL, intervening: You two are having quite a ball. And trying the court’s patience. The demonstration we’ve just witnessed is pretty marginal to what this Trial is all about. You aren’t charged with witchcraft, or fraud, or misusing hypnotism to take advantage of a suggestible subject. Such misbehaviour - though shocking and perhaps actionable - is relevant here only in so far as it involves blasphemy. This is exactly what, we gather, it did involve on that plane. The Witness testified how you induced her to exchange her human head for her God-head - as you have the nerve to put it. Blaspheming yourself, you got this lady to follow suit. Now that is relevant to the charge against you. Jury, please note.

  MYSELF: My answer to that one - about misusing hypnotism - will come out later. Meantime allow me to conclude this interchange between the Witness and myself, by addressing the all-important question of just where God’s dwelling-place is. [I turn to the Witness.] Please attend very carefully. Isn’t it a fact that, right now, cradled on your shoulders - instead of just one particular human topknot, blonde and female and fifty and Canadian - is Room for all the other topknots in court? A Proper Place for them to happen in? Just Aware Capacity, perfectly simple and clear and changeless, for this hugely complex and ever-changing scene? And perfectly conscious of Itself as Empty for that filling. Yes?

  WITNESS: Yes!

  MYSELF: Now tell me, would it make sense to call this marvellous Alertness - this widest and brightest of Cloudless Skies - Mrs Ingrid Mary Stevenson? (I hope I’ve got the name right.) Or would it be nonsense and blasphemy?

  WITNESS: Nonsense, for sure.

  MYSELF: But instead to call it that Pure Awareness that some of us recognize as God - would that be nonsense and blasphemy?

  WITNESS: Well... No, I don’t think so.

  MYSELF: I see that Counsel is doing his writhing act. If he can suggest a more fitting name for this Incredible One Who is Awareness itself, or can think of a more roomy and comfortable Palace for His Majesty to hold court in, we’d all love to know about it. So would His Majesty, I bet you.

  COUNSEL, to Witness: I’m wondering how long you’ll have to spend with your relations (who I believe are in this court) before you recover from this new attack on your integrity and common sense. Do you seriously believe that this time the treatment will stick? [Witness, now in tears, is unable (or unwilling) to reply. She’s allowed to stand down...]

  COUNSEL, to me: If you think that this demonstration has proved that your technique isn’t hypnotic - isn’t hypnosis pressed into the service of blasphemy - you’d better think again. What else has it proved?

  MYSELF: Let me explain my position vis-à-vis hypnosis. My aim in that demonstration, as always, was to appeal to the given facts, and a plague on all distortions and denials of them. My life’s work is hunting down and destroying the illusions society runs on. In fact I’m a resolute anti-hypnotist, who always warns people not to believe what I tell them (let alone what others tell them) but to check up on it. Dare to be your own authority! That’s my theme song, my watchword.

  COUNSEL: But when the subject is as suggestible as the Witness obviously is, what price this boasted appeal to the bare data?

  MYSELF: Of course you have a point there. It does sometimes happen - in spite of my intentions to the contrary - that my way of putting questions involves a mild trance. About this I’m unrepentant. In fact I’m happy to deploy a benign and temporary kind of hypnosis to counter the malign and chronic kind from which all human adults suffer until they learn to snap out of it. It’s a case of a hair of the dog that bit you, of a homoeopathy that really does work. As indeed you have just seen.

  I can’t say it too often or too emphatically: the ‘normal’ human condition is one of deep hypnosis. Instead of seeing what we see, we live out our lives seeing what we’re told to see. And the difference between the two seeings is
total. Take just one example out of hundreds, the one which happens to be very much to the point just now. From early childhood the Witness’s parents and relations, her friends and acquaintances, the English language itself, have been drumming into her that she is face-to-face with everyone she meets. So of course, hallucinating to order along with the rest of us, she ‘constructs’ a fictitious head on her shoulders to keep those real ones out with, and ‘sees’ her face in the one place it’s absent from! The consequences for living are in a score of ways unfortunate, and ultimately disastrous.

  Let me remind you, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, of the spectacular things that a stage hypnotist can get his subjects to do. He may suggest to a prim and proper middle-aged middle-class lady that, as soon as he wakes her from her trance, she will unconcernedly stroll to centre stage, and hoist her skirt, and dance the cancan. And lo! stroll to centre stage and hoist her skirt and dance the cancan she does with great conviction and aplomb, and without at all knowing why. Well, that’s a meek and mild and comparatively harmless example of what can happen when under the influence. Immeasurably more serious is what does happen to us all. We humans are so bound by the spell of the Master Mesmerist - Society is the polite name for him - that we will believe and do practically anything to gain admittance to the club he runs and that we’re dying to belong to. Talk about my occasional and one-minute use of hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion! Human life is all hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion - except that it’s not so much ‘post’ as ever-present! Almost all adults are to some degree the Mesmerist’s zombies. My job is to prod to wakefulness and freedom those who are beginning to suspect that he’s reduced them to that state. If this means a little counter-hypnosis, why on earth not? What a wonderful tribute to the treatment against hallucination which we have just witnessed, that five minutes of it should be so effective against five decades of the Master Mesmerist’s treatment for hallucination!

  COUNSEL: I repeat: you aren’t on trial for witchcraft, or for the abuse of hypnosis to brainwash people and get them into your power. The Jury aren’t going to be put off the blasphemy trail so easily.

  MYSELF: Not a whiff of a red herring here, I promise you. I am far hotter on the blasphemy trail than you are. For too long society and language hypnotized me into hallucinating here, bang at the world’s Centre, that congealed lump of personal stuff which is the seal and substance of John a-Nokes’s separate identity. This was the chip on his shoulder. This was his blasphemy. This was his brainfouling. But now he’s indeed in the brainwashing business. Simply looking-to-see is the fragrant, economy-size, industrial-strength, all-stain-removing, mildly hypnotic Tide that washes Jack’s brain and brain-box clean away.

  And all that’s left, when the Tide runs out, is God.

  Is God...

  This time I’m leaving it to the true Meister, to Eckhart, to complete the story:

  When all things are reduced to naught in you, then you shall see God.

  Into any man who is brought low, God pours His whole Self with all His might.

  It (the soul) is intrinsically receptive of nothing but the Divine Essence, without means. Here God enters the Soul with His all, not merely with a part. God enters the ground of the Soul. None can touch the ground of the Soul but God only. No creature is admitted.

  God has ordained to every thing its place. To fish the water, to birds the air, to beasts the earth, to the Soul the Godhead.

  Prosecution Witness No. 14

  THE PSYCHIATRIST

  COUNSEL, to Witness: The Accused maintains that, though in appearance a man, in reality he is God. The court wishes to know whether, in your practice over the past twenty years, you have come across this sort of madness... All right, Your Honour... Let’s say, this sort of thing.

  WITNESS: From time to time I have.

  COUNSEL: How would you describe his condition? And how would you treat it?

  WITNESS: For me to say that he’s suffering from delusions of grandeur is merely to stick a handy label on him, and explains nothing. To say that the condition is a reverting to infant omnipotence explains very little. It may well be true, but doesn’t tell me why the client reverts. I can think of a dozen reasons. Our work together would, if at all possible, be to bring to light the deep and hidden causes in his case, to ventilate them. Once exposed, there’s a good chance of a cure. Probably, but not necessarily, the root cause of the trouble lies way back in early childhood, now conveniently forgotten and covered up. In which case a long and difficult task lies ahead, but not a hopeless one. The important thing, I find, is for me to keep an open mind, gain the client’s confidence as he discovers I really care, and get him talking. I have to listen, listen, listen - and look. And wait. The less I say the better. We both have to be patient. More haste less healing.

  COUNSEL: I’m told that you have never, till today, met the Accused in the flesh. However, I gather that you have made a rather careful study of his various books, articles, and audio and video tapes.

  WITNESS: That’s right.

  COUNSEL: Well, would you say he’s sane but rather sick? Or downright insane? Mad, with lucid intervals?

  WITNESS: Mad is not a word I have a lot of use for. But if anybody’s sick, he’s sick all right. Just how sick will depend largely on how serious he is, how far he really means what he’s saying. If he were a client of mine, I would give special attention to his behaviour, his style, his voice, his body language, his whole personality and state of health. This general picture should tell me more about him than any understanding of his ideas could do. It should furnish the clue to the depth of his delusions, and show whether he’s altogether taken in by them and out of touch with reality, or is playing some sort of game.

  COUNSEL: Briefly, what have you concluded from your study of his published material?

  WITNESS: My strong impression is that he’s far from being what you would call mad. On the other hand, his delusions of grandeur are not superficial, not a pose. I suspect they are deeper rooted than any I’ve met hitherto. He’s no Baron Münchhausen, or ordinary Berneian gamesman. If he were my client, I think I would find the chances of remission to be rather slender. I need hardly add that, of course, he’s just the sort who would never come to me for treatment in a million years. Or, if he did turn up on my doorstep, it would be to leave a card offering me therapy! Free treatment, at that! The sure sign of a fanatic with some almighty axe to grind.

  COUNSEL: One last question. What reason have you to describe the Accused as deluded? Please explain to the court why you are so positive he isn’t Who he says he is?

  WITNESS: That’s an easy one. I’m an agnostic myself but I accept that any God worthy of the name is omnipotent and omniscient and omnipresent. Well, if the gentleman over there in the dock is even one of these three, and that one only at rare intervals, all I’ve said so far is irrelevant. And I’ll eat all the hats at Ascot!

  COUNSEL: Thank you. I think you may have dented the Accused’s insufferable smugness, and he'll want to have a word with you.

  Defence: The Three Omnies

  MYSELF: No, the Witness may stand down. I have no questions to fire at him, no bones to pick with him. On the contrary, I have to thank him for showing me, at the conclusion of his testimony, what till then I had no idea of: namely, how to counter the rest of it. Yet once more in this Trial, it seems to me that I have lost the day and then - praise be! - it turns out that all I have to do is to develop the Prosecution’s case against me till it becomes the case for me. Or rather, to clear the decks and let it develop itself, and proceed to do a somersault dive overboard without any pushing.

  Omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence - these three, and the greatest of these is omnipotence. If, members of the Jury, I can somehow convey to you the sense in which I’m enjoying all three of them, putting them into practice right now in court, then you will have to turn in a verdict of Not Guilty. For I will have proved to you that I am Who I say I am. But let me at once add that you won’t in a
millennium of Sundays cotton on to my Identity - and the powers that go with it - until you work up some interest in yours, and the powers you wield. You won’t understand a word I say until you dare to look and see whether or not What I’m claiming to be and to do has all along been What you manifestly are, and are doing all the time. The fact - I can’t repeat it too often - is that you are on trial here, and before you can reach a true verdict on me you must reach a true verdict on you. Justice begins at home. So, alas, do injustice, bigotry, embattled prejudice, the closed and padlocked mind.

  And a favourite way of putting up the shutters of the mind is to fall fast asleep. Which two members of the Jury have evidently done, Your Honour, before we start.

  [The Judge gives deafening applications of his gavel. One of the sleepers starts violently, as if jabbed with an ice-pick. The other goggles at the court as if he can't decide whether it’s part of his dream.]

  JUDGE, to me: Well, who’s to blame for this? It’s up to you to hold their interest. I warned you of the risks of conducting your own Defence... As for the Jury, don’t let me catch any of you dozing again! From now on, each of you is responsible for keeping his neighbour awake, as well as himself. When in doubt, prod. Vigorously.

  MYSELF: Fear of the truth is a more powerful soporific than boredom. Half the time, I’ve noticed, at least one juror is nodding off. Not because I’m failing to get to him or her but because I’m succeeding! Once, in a workshop here in London, the lady next to me slept from near the beginning to the very end, some of the time with her head on my shoulder - thus warding off the terrible danger of Self-realization. ‘What a nice workshop!’ she commented when we said goodbye.

  JUDGE: Fascinated though we all are by these reminiscences, I’m afraid we’ll have to wait till we can read them in your memoirs. Just now, let me bring something to your notice. There's a Trial going on.

  MYSELF: A Trial, Your Honour, about who’s gifted with divine powers, and who isn’t. Back, then, to our divine trio, starting with omnipresence - which happens to be the most immediately demonstrable.