Look! I aim to show you that, lying low somewhere in this courtroom, is its Creator, the Heart and Soul of all things. He’s the Importunate One who stands at every door and knocks. ‘Let’s get together!’ he propositions. To track Him down should be easy. ‘For God,’ says Eckhart, ‘nothing is far.’ He’s the Distance Swallower, the Coincider. Centripetal, He’s the Attraction, the Great Draw. It’s as if an elastic band were stretched so tight between Him in the middle and all those things around Him that something has to give, and - whoosh! - in they hurtle. He’s the only one in the whole world who, by pulling in everywhere, is everywhere, while the rest stay somewhere or other, are local, mutually standoffish, snobby, all elbows, careful to keep their precious distances, insisting on a room of their own. All but the Omnipresent one are exclusive brethren, which is to say unbrotherly. He alone is the Friend, the Includer, the Intimate of all, the Magnet, the Lodestone. That’s one of the reasons why His name is Love.
Never mind about me for the moment. Never mind about the other people in court. Take a little time off to look into your own condition, personally. First-personally. Which of these two species are you now, Excluder or Includer, Pusher-off or Puller-in - going by your own firsthand experience? I must admit that you look like an Excluder; but we can’t always go by looks, can we? How I wish that His Honour would let me stretch a string between you and me, eye to eye, so that you could check whether, pulled taut, it reduces to a point; or else would let me unroll a tape-measure for similarly viewing end-on and checking whether our mutual distance reads as ten, twenty, thirty feet - or as zero. Alas, hardly practicable: the courtroom would soon resemble a gigantic spider-web with one Spider and many flies. But really you’ve only to look now to see whether you are the Spider at the Centre or one of the many flies caught out there in its web. A mere fly, destined to refresh some voracious arachnid before long.
Well, as always, I’m in no position to speak for you. So back to me. I’m telling you now that I can’t find so much as an angstrom between you and me. I’m taking you all in absolutely, all of you twelve members of the Jury, His Honour, learned Counsel and his learned junior, the Court Usher, you crowd in the gallery, and the rest. Like it or lump it, you rush in. Behold I am with you, even to the end of the world. We are Oned.
Ladies and gentlemen, will you please now turn to Diagram No. 14. I ask each of you: ‘Are you the Spider x, or one of those flies a, b, c…? It’s so easy to tell. From x, the Spider’s point of view, a-x, b-x, c-x, etc. = 0. And a-a', b-b', c-c', etc. = > 0. That’s to say: however distant things are from one another, none’s distant from you.
Diagram No. 14
All you have to do is look, as straightforwardly as when in infancy you clutched at the Moon. Astonishingly, that’s all it takes for you to be sure Who you really, really are. Now if you were saying that a man (d) - proud man - is seeing this and saying this, you would indeed be blaspheming. Only God at (x) is in a position to abolish distance. Only God at (x) is observant enough and great enough and humorous enough and humble enough to allow His omnipresence to demonstrate His divinity.
And if, tonight, your stars come out, you’ll be able to compare the distances that hold them apart with the no-distance that joins them to you. And their isolation and poverty with your riches. But don’t wait till then. Relax your guard and let all things rush in, now. The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof -
COUNSEL, crescendo: A Urinating God, an Idiot God, a Bubble-blowing God, a Bottom-wiping God - and now a Spider God! What next? I must say that, in falsely claiming to be Him, you truly throw floods of light on yourself!
Members of the Jury, this is a good moment to remind you of what, at the start of this Trial, I called the Four Criteria for proving the Accused guilty as charged. And to draw your attention to how thoroughly this renegade, in the last quarter of an hour, has met all four of them. First, the blasphemy. He insults the Almighty by taking upon himself the Almighty’s omnipresence. Second, its extreme form. He claims he is the Almighty. Third, its dissemination. He makes that claim now, in court proceedings that millions of TV viewers are picking up. Fourth, the reaction. Along with those viewers, you are - I can feel it - so disgusted, so outraged, that you would get your hands on him if you could. At least to stop his blaspheming mouth -
THE JUDGE, half standing, banging his gavel with all his might: No, no! I won’t have this! This is outrageous! The Jury are here to take as cool and unbiased a view of the evidence as they can, not to be worked up to a frenzy. Your rabble-rousing outburst brings the Crown you represent into disrepute. I’m shocked that so distinguished a Member of the Bar should so far forget himself.
Counsel, turning almost as white as his brief, collapses on to his bench as if coshed... Collecting the remains, he holds a whispered conversation with his Junior... The court is kept waiting...
Atkinson nods, expands visibly, and rises like a rubicund balloon to his feet and the occasion. Sir Gerald, shrunken and frozen-faced, sits there staring straight ahead.
JUNIOR COUNSEL: Well then, to lower the temperature, back to the details of this gentleman’s pretensions to omnipresence. Let Mr John a-dash-Nokes condescend to ask any astronomer, and he’ll be told that a hundred light-years lie between him and that star.
MYSELF: Quite so. And then let me ask him where the star is that he actually sees and photographs. He’ll concede that it’s not a hundred light-years off, or a hundred yards off, but present where it presents itself in the observatory and the observer himself, and on his camera film. Questioned further, he’ll explain that what’s up there in the sky is nothing like a star at all, if by that word we mean the dear little twinkler people write poems about; instead, it’s an unapproachable and lethal world of superheated gas, which in any case may well have blown up any time during the past century, without any of us being the wiser. And if I were to doubt the astronomer, any physiologist would confirm that what I see I see here where I am, not over there where I naïvely suppose the object to be. Why, even common sense must give in here.
The truth, so staggering and beautiful yet so simple and obvious, is that there’s One in this courtroom who is omnipresent, while all the rest are omniabsent. One Spider, many flies. Ave Arachnid!
What, you don’t understand this? Excellent! Nor do I! But you see it, don’t you? See that it applies to you, absolutely? In that case you are starting to do justice to yourself. And it must follow, as bright day follows darkest night, starting to do justice to me.
JUNIOR COUNSEL: Specious stuff, which the Jury won’t fall for - if only because it’s invalidated by your admission that you’ve no idea what’s been happening to that star up there, in the course of the hundred years its light has taken to reach you. You, wretched ignoramus, don’t know. He, the Omniscient One, does know.
MYSELF: And so, Mr Atkinson, to the second of the three items on our agenda.
What is divine omniscience? What does this marvellous all-knowledge, this perfection of wisdom, this full enlightenment, amount to? On no subject is there more loose thinking, more confusion worse confounded. Somewhere at the back of our minds is a picture of the Almighty keeping abreast of the behaviour of every sand grain in the Sahara, anxiously refereeing the entire atomic and subatomic ball game, privy to the stirring of every dust grain on the floor of this court and the disposition of every fibrilla in the wig of His Honour. Don’t be ridiculous! Is this any sort of God? Or, for that matter, any sort of Devil worthy of the name? A mad apparatchik perhaps, a nit-picking myopic obsessional monster, the world’s Peeping Tom and Fusspot-in-Chief, with what full hands and furrowed brow! One who (as Bunyan says) can look no way but downwards with a muck-rake in his hand, a know-all in the worst sense of the word, an object of pity and contempt fit for worship only by fellow morons.
Knowledge of things - as things - is relative knowledge. Such information is always partial, one-sided, flawed, at best useful make-believe and at worst misinformation. Imagine the Eternal Wisdom goi
ng in for all that obfuscation! He is of purer eyes than to behold evil, says the Old Testament prophet. As if taking His cue from those three Hindu monkeys (See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil), He knows what He wants to know, which is what things really and truly are. He’s not a superficial God. His knowledge of His creatures, running deeper than deep, is of their Essence. Knowledge of their accidents He has too, but in and as and through themselves. His expertise and His joy is the Self-knowledge which - so far from being selfishly introverted or snobbishly Olympian - is necessarily knowledge of what all creatures of every rank, from subatomic through human to super-galactic, intrinsically are. To wit, none other than the Awareness that is Himself.
This, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, is the omniscience I claim. It’s the only sort that’s worth a second glance, or worth taking seriously for a moment. I say this for three reasons. First, because it alone yields information that’s true, final, stable, for resting in. Second, because it alone works out in my life: in my dealings with others I need above all to be sure that, at heart, they are not others. Third, because, looking in at this very moment, I see and know myself as I really, really am: namely, as this central Awareness where there’s no possibility of error because there’s nothing to err about; as this boundless Clarity which carries no such labels as ‘me’ or ‘you’ or ‘him’ or ‘her’, or ‘Accused’ or ‘Juryman’, or whatever, but is the one inside story of all beings in all worlds through all time. This I see with the utmost brilliance, and know with the utmost certainty, and it is none other than the divine omniscience which reconciles and unites each with each and each with all. And this is the second reason why His name is Love.
There are sextillions of questions, one Answer. This divine knowledge is so comforting and comfortable! I rest in it. The other and secular sort offers me no lodging for the night. It turns me out into the cold dark to seek more and more and more information forever... To what end?
JUNIOR COUNSEL butts in: The proof of the knowing is in the doing. What, for heaven’s sake, is the use of all that inside information if you can’t even bring off a Yuri Geller trick with it? Or perhaps, kind sir, you would care to treat the court to a little demonstration of your omnipotence? What about shifting any object you like in this courtroom - from my tie-wig here to His Honour’s full-bottomed over there - moving it, let’s say, an inch to the right or the left? Shifting it, I mean, without budging from the dock. If you are all-powerful, a spot of telekinesis should be well within your capability.
JUDGE, putting his hand to his head: I’d rather you interfered with this pen here than my wig.
MYSELF: I shall see that Your Honour isn’t incommoded at all...
I swear to you that I’m performing this wig-shifting, pen-shifting miracle right now, as requested by Junior Counsel. Oh, I know what he’s saying: ‘All that the silly ass is doing is swaying a little from side to side!’ So be it. That’s Atkinson’s story. Mine, just now, is that it’s the court that’s swaying, as in an earthquake magnitude 9 on the Richter scale.
But that’s peanuts! I can be much more drastic if you wish…
I can and I have destroyed this court...!
And now, three seconds later, I choose to re-build and re-furnish and re-man and re-cockalorum - yes (rather decent of me, don’t you think?), re-Atkinson it - all intact and in running order.
You will never, never, never find a normal-way-up and headed creature capable of doing such a tremendous thing. Blasphemy it is to suppose that he or she could thus usurp divine power. All humans can do is raise and lower tiny flip-flaps in their precious heads. The most uneventful of events, the most trivial of trivialities, leaving the world untouched. Only the Upside-down and Headless One, only the Maker of the world can and does, very often indeed, make and remake it instantly at His own good pleasure. Who else? Man blinking is blinking man. Atkinson blinking is blinking Atkinson. God blinking is the birth and death of worlds. You could call this the Blinking Path to Enlightenment, or Endarkenment on the Blink. To each of you I say, ‘Blink! And for once don’t lie to yourself about what happens. And about Who makes it happen.’
JUNIOR COUNSEL, wearily, after a whispered conversation with Sir Gerald: Here’s Nokes putting on his idiot-boy act - Wynken, Blynken and Nod - and high-wire star turn - The Three Omnies - in his crazy-gang circus. But I’ll wager the Jury is as unimpressed by this clowning as I am. Earlier on, Mr Nokes, you took upon yourself to liken the divine experience to that of a trio of monkeys. Well, I say that these boasted miracles of yours are indeed no more than monkey tricks performed by a creature who criminally attributes them to the Creator. I’ll tell you why they are monkey tricks. Because they don’t matter a damn, don’t make a ha’p’orth of difference. Now what would impress the court would be the changing of this sad world just a little for the better - happiness breaking out in Surbiton, Death Valley in bloom, the Aids virus beaten at last, the clean generation of energy from wind and tide and sunlight...
MYSELF: All of which, and infinitely more, is in the process of accomplishment by the Almighty, whose only tools, whose only limbs (I wave my arms) are such as these...
But we go too fast. Let’s take a look at power, at who has it, and how much. Now a man who is a little thing has a little power, or so at any rate he believes. But a God who is No-thing has no power at all, and a God who is All-things has all power. And the Seer, the one who has seen off his humanhood and seen in his Godhood, takes on with it this seeming paradox, this same union of opposites. He is all-powerless and all-powerful, willing nothing and willing everything. What this means in his everyday life is that he so concurs in all God’s arrangements for him that he intends them. His will merges with God’s, and all happens as he wants it to happen. Not as he superficially desires, of course, but as he deeply desires, in his heart. His real joy and his real peace are to do the will of the One he really is. There they are, the saints and saviours of the world, living what they are preaching - a truly double life - desiring nothing and everything, all-powerless and all-powerful. Theirs is the life that works. A merely human life, in so far as it’s possible, isn’t practical. I must be God surrendered to God, or a mess. He’s fixed it that I must be Him. That’s the third reason why His name is Love.
Nor is this double life, this divine union of weakness and strength, a lovey-dovey milk-and-water acceptance of the world’s evils, a creeping-Jesus-meek-and-mild cop-out and evasion of responsibility, in the name of detachment and unworldliness. On the contrary, those saints who say the loudest Yes! to God’s good will say the loudest No! to man’s bad will, and undertake astonishing labours for His suffering world. St Catherine of Genoa is, for me, the outstanding example. Her ‘My Me is God’, and her recurrent theme that Hell is self-will, go along with her toughness and superhuman energy and efficiency in the founding and running of a huge hospital in her native city. She, along with her namesake of Siena, and many, many other God-filled ones, made and are making a vast difference in the world - overground for all to see, and even more powerfully underground, where none can see. Without them I don’t like to think what the world -
JUNIOR COUNSEL, bobbing up and down and positively incandescent with excitement: Well, you certainly find yourself in congenial company. Just like you, quite the most infamous character of the last century described the world as inside-out, with himself at its centre, and the stars painted on the inside of the firmament. And, like you, claimed omnipotence. A claim debunked conclusively - in a bunker, oddly enough.
MYSELF: Extremes converge. Satan was the top angel. The unusual wickedness of Hitler had something in common with the unusual goodness of the most saintly of his victims. Who I really am is -
JUNIOR COUNSEL, again cutting me short, splutters: This is hard to believe! Are you - words fail me! - do you have the effrontery to stand there, seriously claiming to be a saint? A great saint?
MYSELF: Don’t be absurd! Quite apart from the fact that every saint is sure he’s a louse, the truth is
that to be human and to be good are contraries. Only God is good. (You’ll remember who said that.) A saint is one who sees his bad humanhood off to the place where it should be and sees his good Godhood in to the place where it must be, the place it never left - and goes on to live this disposition. But to see it at all is at least to have made a start on the God-filled life -
JUDGE: I think you have gone on quite long enough in your response to the psychiatrist’s testimony.
MYSELF: All right, Your Honour. Just let me sum up.
Along with Catherine, I say my real Me is God. I’ve proved it in triplicate. Three Omnies are enough for Him and should be enough for you or me. This is not blasphemy. It is not a delusion of grandeur. It is not a fantasy. It is not one of life’s optional extras. It is not a highly-desirable but rare ornament of grace, or a bright three-ringed halo reserved for a few great souls. It is not an attainment of the pious that you and I can get along very nicely without, thank you very much.
No. It’s a must. It’s the only sensible lifestyle, the only one (I repeat) that works, that’s practical. Again and again the saints have demonstrated as much. But it doesn’t take all that time and attention and practice for us ordinary folk to prove on our pulses how right they were.
However, the ultimate reason why this is the only satisfactory way of life isn’t that it’s the only satisfying one, but that it’s the only one. The only way life can be lived, in any case. It’s not for attaining but for submitting to. It’s not for thinking or feeling or realizing one day. It’s for seeing now.
I have sorted my Witnesses into three companies, each testifying to one of our Three Omnies -
JUDGE: Just a moment. You keep on referring to these dead folk as witnesses. It was agreed from the start that they are nothing of the sort. They aren’t under oath, and can’t be examined or cross-examined. Nor can their reported sayings be relied on absolutely. At best they illustrate your case, clarifying it without proving it.
The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God Page 15