COUNSEL: Witness, I would like to ask you a question now about yourself. Underneath your professional skin does there lurk a religious man?
WITNESS: If so, he’s never peeped out.
COUNSEL: The Accused’s incredible self-conceit doesn’t upset you in the slightest?
WITNESS: I’m amused and amazed, that’s all. Even the amazement wears off. Ultimately I have to contemplate this interesting specimen with cool objectivity. Here’s a variation or mutation from the norm all right, but no less a natural phenomenon than the norm is. It’s a scientific fact that a few of these human organisms make peculiar high-pitched God-noises, just as it’s a scientific fact that some cats squeak and don’t mew.
COUNSEL: Well, that’s all for the present... I see the Accused signals he has no questions to put to you. But please stay in court. I may want you in the box again...
Members of the Jury, let me remind you that the Prosecution has two broad aims. First, to produce evidence that the Accused is causing serious and unnecessary offence to religious people by publicly ridiculing or denigrating what they hold sacred. This includes scandalizing them to the limit by claiming to be the One whom they revere above all others. Second, to produce evidence that this claim of his is false anyway. According to some witnesses the Accused is guilty on both counts, according to others he’s guilty on one or other count. Our present Witness belongs to the latter group. True, he’s more astonished than shocked by the Accused’s pretence that he’s the Origin of the world. But what his testimony does do very thoroughly (I think you will agree) is to show up this pretence for the raving madness it is. The Witness has surely blown to smithereens the main Defence position, which is that - in asserting that he’s none other than the Being that others worship - John a-Nokes is only stating the sober truth about his identity. Which (he says) he has an inalienable right to do.
Well, he would have a hard job pitching his identity - his cosmic status - any higher. And the Witness would have a hard job pitching it any lower. His qualifications for putting the Accused in his place - for taking him down more pegs than you can count - could, I submit, scarcely be bettered. And the facts on which he bases his testimony are among the most well-researched and universally accepted of all the scientific discoveries of the past four hundred years. Before Leeuwenhoek and his microscope, the Accused just might have got away with self-deification. Afterwards, what a hope!
Defence: The Jumped-up Polliwog
MYSELF: It’s not every embryologist who can make such fun of his specimens, and not every specimen who can enjoy being made such fun of. Not only do I accept the Witness’s testimony, but welcome with surprised enthusiasm the refreshingly unpretentious language in which he couched it. Labspeak may be a necessity in the lab, but it’s dope outside. The story of my rise from extreme primitiveness - that most thrilling of all thrillers - when recited in the technical jargon we’ve got so case-hardened to (all that guff, I mean, about Mendelism, and spermatozoa and ova, and genes and chromosomes and DNA, and nuclei and vacuoles and flagella and the rest) falls flat on its face. The language knocks out the story, which is then killed outright by shifting it from oneself, the present Subject, on to objects remote and impersonal, from poignant autobiography to take-it-or-leave-it biography, from red-blooded particulars to anaemic generalities and abstractions. Even if ‘human’ embryos and foetuses were one day (following the example of caterpillars and tadpoles - real tadpoles this time) to become large and at large in the home instead of remaining tiny and hidden in utero, I bet you that labspeak would find a way of disconnecting these human larvae and pupae from their mums and dads, a way of pretending they were mere pets along with pedigree Pekes and Siamese cats - or intruders, along with mice and cockroaches - and by no means people in the making. Man’s prime illusion is that he’s only man. When will he wake to the fact that, in developmental time as distinct from clock time, his humanness is an appendix and an afterthought, belonging to the last few seconds of the eleventh hour of his little day?
I’m obliged to the Witness for reminding me so vividly of these forbidden but indispensable truths, and to Counsel for egging him on so effectively. Together, they have furnished all the clues I need for my Defence at this juncture.
If His Honour and the Jury will now turn to Diagram No. 21 and keep referring to it, they will easily grasp the substance of that Defence. This picture’s worth all the words in the dictionary. I do believe that, if we were all honest and attentive enough, it would take over my Defence without need of another syllable from me. Also, it would save me repeating (as I must very briefly now do) some things I’ve said earlier in this Trial.
To be specific, our diagram sets out:
(1) What I look like to others,
(2) What I look like to myself,
(3) What I feel like,
(4) What I need,
(5) What I am,
(6) What others are.
Diagram No. 21
Or, in a little more detail:
(1) The diagram indicates the view in to this spot - what the outsider makes of me as he approaches me from afar. His story is of no thing at all but a question mark, followed by a galaxy and a solar system and a planet, a continent and a country and a town and a family home (these four not shown), a man (not this time behind glass), a cell, a molecule, an atom, a particle, and finally no thing at all but another question mark.
(2) My view out from this spot agrees in essentials with this same pattern, with my travelling observer’s view in. It’s the same no thing, then things, then no thing, read from the other end. A fixture myself, I look up at the cosmic question-mark, at my unbounded space and my astronomical embodiments, out at my terrestrial and geographical and human embodiments (the man’s behind glass this time), down at my bits and pieces, and in at my disembodiment - the question mark right here.
(3) What I feel like varies according to the same pattern. For my narrowly human purposes I identify with that separate human. For my larger purposes, with my family, or my country, or my species, or my planet. At my most expansive, I feel all-inclusive: I identify with my universe-body, and contain all space and time. Conversely, at my least expansive, I shrink into and identify with one or another organ of my human body, or even - not infrequently - with nothing at all. Nothing but a great big central question-mark. Elasticity is my middle name.
(4) In fact, all these embodiments of mine hang together in that strictly indivisible Whole which is my many-levelled universe; to be itself, each needs the others. For example, what is John a-Nokes without his cells and molecules and atoms, or without his plants and animals, his planet and his sun - not to mention his bottle-green corduroy trousers? What is Earth without her Mahler and Das Lied von der Erde? What are the galaxies without their Hubble? Or the World without its amazement at itself?
(5) These regional things, then, are what I need, and feel like, and look like to myself and look like to others. This Central No-thing, on the other hand, this Awakeness that’s awake to those things - this Capacity that takes them in and unites itself with them - is what I am. That little one in the mirror over there is only one of my countless disguises. At two metres he’s my favourite appearance, that second/third person who says ‘I’m John a-Nokes’. At zero metres I’m this First Person who says ‘I AM’. The difference between this Nucleus and those outlying objects is as total as their indivisibility.
(6) I find nothing here to link this Central Reality with John a-Nokes specially, to make it his private real-estate. This whiter-than-white and stain-proof I AM will take nobody’s laundry-marks. It’s no more (and, of course, no less) Jack’s Reality or Essence or Inside Story than it is his galaxy’s, or his star’s, or his planet’s, or his cells’ or his molecules’ - down to the least of his particles. If I want to know (and I do, I do!) what the Subjectivity of any and all of these embodiments of mine is, I have only to look right here, where it’s brilliantly on display. Strictly speaking, there’s only one Subject, only one
First Person, only one I AM at the core of all these so different and seemingly separate embodiments. And that’s the one I’m simultaneously looking in at and out of right here and right now.
A diagram so simple that you can draw it in ten seconds and comprehend it in one second - that can yet take such good care of all six of these essential aspects of oneself, wordlessly if allowed to do so - isn’t to be sniffed at. I say to each member of the Jury individually: open yourself now to its message by looking to make sure it’s a true map of yourself as First Person, as Awareness and what it’s aware of. (Emphatically not of me, not a map of Nokes, who for you is a third person.) Then, instead of your habitual ‘God’s out, I’m in’, you will find yourself saying ‘Hurray, God’s in, I’m out!’ Accordingly you will find Nokes Not Guilty of blasphemy because you find yourself Not Guilty of blasphemy.
JUDGE: I think you should leave these wonderfully generous tributes to your design till you’ve made its relevance to the Witness’s testimony just a little bit clearer.
MYSELF: It’s not that strictly one-level John a-Nokes (the extra who only just manages to make it into the picture) but the picture’s all-level yet central Subject and Star who’s responsible for this Self portrait. Some design! Some Designer! God does indeed geometrize. Your Honour will recollect that it was Plato who told us that.
Seeing Eye-to-Eye with the seers and mystics of all the great traditions, Kabir says: ‘Behold but One in all beings!’ The inside story of all, no matter what their grade, is identical. Looking in, I am what all are intrinsically. So when the Witness informs me that in my lifetime I have been a far humbler form of life than the fly on the window, my withers are unwrung. ‘Why, of course!’ I exclaim. And I go much further: Not only am I subhuman and subcellular and submolecular and subatomic, but sub-the-lot. I’m No-thing whatever, and I can’t get lower than that, can I? And therefore I’m All things whatever, and I can’t get higher than that, can I? I’m not talking about believing this but about seeing it. I have only to look here, right now, to enjoy the spectacle of this No-thing - which is the inside story of all things - exploding into the outside story of all things. I speak with wonder and reverence. ‘It is indeed,’ as Dante observes in the Inferno, ‘not a matter to be taken lightly - describing the lowest point of the universe.’
To every being, accordingly, I say - not lightly but with all my heart: Here in the depths of me, as Who I really, really am, I am the One you really, really are. Though we may belong to vastly different regions and eras, wear vastly different faces, enjoy vastly different experiences of the world, all these are peripheral matters, matters of accident and time and content, and are transcended in the one central, timeless Container and Essence in which I’m aware of myself as you, and you, and you, ad infinitum. The barriers are down, our wounds are healed, and we are well again because we are One again.
COUNSEL, shoving his wig back and wiping imaginary sweat from his forehead, recalls the Witness and asks him: You’ve heard the Accused’s reply to your testimony. What do you make of all this - this hocus, if not pocus?
WITNESS: As the rude man said of Shakespeare, ‘Sounds wonderful, doesn’t mean a thing!’ I’ll allow it’s a sort of poetry, beautiful in spots, ingenious, fantastical. I’m not sorry that Mr Nokes should feel that my testimony does more to support than to undermine his case. I only wish I could make sense of it myself. I happen to be fond of music - of Bach in particular - but it’s quite irrelevant to my work. Well, the ideas of the Accused are rather like that. They have little bearing that I can see on the biological facts I brought to the court’s notice - in language that’s going to do me no good professionally, I’ll bet. But here and there they give me a frisson.
MYSELF: Damn frissons! A grain of fact is worth a ton of the things. I’ve two or three straight and unvarnished questions for you. Do you agree that what I’m perceived to be depends on the distance of the observer?
WITNESS: Yes.
MYSELF: Good. You said as much during your examination in chief. Do you also agree that the only observer who can get all the way up to me here, not an angstrom intervening, is myself?
WITNESS: Well, yes -
MYSELF: And that my story of what’s given right here (namely, No-thing) very neatly completes the scientist’s story of the progressively featureless things (cells, molecules, atoms, particles...) that are given on the way here?
WITNESS: I suppose you could put it like that. Provisionally, I’ll agree with you.
MYSELF: Listen carefully then, if you please. This jumped-up polliwog or tadpole in the dock is standing on its newly acquired hind legs, and opening its big mouth, and telling you that, at a range of zero angstroms from itself, it’s wider awake than wide-awake, wider than the wide world, clearer than the clear and empty sky - yet full to overflowing with all the furniture of heaven and earth. And that this isn’t the inside story of a ‘tadpole’ only or a human being only, but equally of all the orders of being that go to their making. And that, like it or lump it, these are hard and readily verifiable facts, to neglect which is to be deplorably unscientific.
WITNESS: Well, I hold down my job all right, but am none too sure what it is to be scientific, or how good a scientist I am. But I’ll say this much: the more I find out, the more there is to find out. Every question answered spawns two new questions. I’m scarcely scratching the surface of things.
MYSELF: Scratch them hard till you draw blood, and you’ll never expose their Secret. Scratch yourself easy, and at once you’ll see and you’ll be their Secret. I don’t care how primitive or how advanced your specimen, look out and you have its appearance, look in and you are its Reality.
And here, finally, are six prestigious Defence witnesses (excuse me - testifiers) who, between them, sum up the points I’ve been making:
Man is like a mirage in the desert that the thirsty man takes to be water, until he comes up to it and finds it to be nothing, and where he thought it to be, there he finds God.
The Koran
When the Self is seen, heard, thought of known, everything is known.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
If I knew myself as intimately as I ought, I should have perfect knowledge of all creatures.
Eckhart
Every creature is an appearance of God.
Erigena
He who sees the supreme Lord dwelling alike in all beings, and never perishing when they perish, he sees indeed.
Bhagavad Gita
Man is the one in whom all creatures end, in whom all multitudinous things have been reduced to one in Christ: man is then one in God with Christ’s humanity. Thus all creatures are one man and that man is God in Christ’s Person.
Eckhart
When you have broken and destroyed your own form, you have learned to break the form of everything.
Rumi
Prosecution Witness No. 23
THE MULLAH
COUNSEL, to Jury: Our next Witness is a distinguished member of the large Muslim community in this country. As such, his interest in the effectiveness of the Blasphemy Act is as keen as that of any Christian or Jewish leader. Or keener. You might suppose, however, that his concern with this particular Trial must be marginal, since the Accused isn’t a Muslim. Not so. He’s thoroughly involved. The Prosecution have called him to testify today - and he’s eager to do so - for three excellent reasons. The first is to warn nascent or would-be Muslim blasphemers (and he assures me there are some around) of their criminal folly and the danger they’re in. The second reason is that the Accused trespasses deep into Muslim territory when he invokes the support - as he often does - of such Islamic mystics as Rumi, and of the Holy Koran itself. Trespassers expose themselves to prosecution. The third reason for the Reverend Mullah’s presence in the witness-box is that he may show us how close is the parallel between the blasphemy committed by John a-Nokes and that committed by certain Muslim heretics. In this way - by demonstrating that his offence isn’t only anti-Judaeo-Christian but a
nti-religious in the general Western sense - the Crown’s case against him is established on a still broader base.
I think it would be helpful if the Witness began by telling the court about the most notorious blasphemer in the history of Islam.
WITNESS: Mansur, also known as Al Hallaj, was a Persian mystic of the third century of the Islamic era. He publicly declared, and persisted in declaring, ‘In my cloak is none but God.’ He called himself Al Haq, which means ‘the Truth that is Allah’ - sacred be His Name. There was a great scandal and uproar among the Faithful of his time.
COUNSEL: What happened to him?
WITNESS: He was condemned and executed.
COUNSEL: How?
WITNESS: He was flayed, then crucified.
COUNSEL: Earlier in this Trial the Accused quoted that well-known text from the Holy Koran about Allah being nearer to a man than his own neck-vein. Was Mansur relying on this and similar teachings of the Prophet? If so, please explain to the Jury why his contemporaries were nevertheless so shocked that they treated him the way they did.
WITNESS: The substance - the heart and soul - of Islam is the transcendence and majesty and power of God, His absolute uniqueness and otherness. These attributes call for the absolute submission of the Faithful. Given this submission, to recognize that God is in all His creation - and not least in men and women - is in order. Indeed it follows from His greatness that He is present everywhere. The sin of Mansur, and of all so-called mystics of his stamp, was that he sacrificed the transcendence of God to His immanence. He dragged God down to his own level, shrank the Almighty to his own dimensions, took possession of Him.
The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God Page 24