(10) And if, instead of this mirror, a friend’s camera makes the same journey, it comes up with the same pictures. Out there it registers that face. On the way here, parts of it. Here, none of it.
Ten reasons why that face is not my face. How many would you like, Sir Gerald? There are lots more, but perhaps ten’s enough to be getting on with.
COUNSEL: Whose face is it then, for God’s sake?
MYSELF: John a-Nokes’s, of course. The face of a fairly close pal of mine. One whose charm is that he’s about as different from me as he could be. It’s often that way with friends, you know.
COUNSEL: Specious stuff, members of the Jury! But what does it boil down to? To this: we adults are wrong, the children are wrong, and only infants and Mr Nokes are right. So let’s all go infantile. Back to the cradle! This isn’t the way to be taken seriously in a lawcourt, which of all places on earth is reserved for grown-ups.
MYSELF: I’m not saying ‘back to infancy’ but ‘forward to sanity, to true adulthood, to sagehood, to the wisdom of God which is foolishness with men’ — in a word, to Godhood.
COUNSEL, flourishing his brief wildly, shouts: To blasphemy!
MYSELF: To truthfulness! It’s all so very simple and sensible. To find out who you are — whether you are George or Henry or Marmaduke or Lady Godiva or whoever—I look at your face. To find out who lam - whether I’m Jack or Jill or the Elephant Man or whoever — I look at my face. How else, for goodness’ sake? I look at my true and present and naked Original Face, instead of at that acquired face over there in its glass case, with its tenfold disclaimer, its tenfold denial that it’s mine. I look at the bright and charming Face of the One I really, really, really am.
However did I come to trade This for that, to disfigure myself so? Wasn’t my Original Face attractive enough, its complexion clear enough? Was it losing the bloom of youth? Did looking myself in the Face suddenly become — absurd, wicked, impossible?
Between Dick’s age and Mary’s, I learned the art of self-dodging, of deliberately looking for myself in the wrong direction - as if were now to seek myself on the Judge’s bench instead of in the dock! I looked there in the glass – in that glass case – to see myself here in God’s fresh air! But now I look in it to see my buddy, my mate, my opposite number. I used to say to myself, ‘That’s me!’ Now I say, ‘Hello there! I like you because I’m unlike you!’ The very same gadget which tricked me into hallucinating a small, coloured, opaque, tightly packed, complex, dying LUMP of a fellow at the Centre of my world now relieves me of him. Taking him clean off me, I’m left free here to be - Myself. And the fellow who was my enemy here is now my faithful companion there, at home in his stuffy glass-fronted house, my good neighbour. A relentlessly inquisitive and housebound insomniac he is, nevertheless nice to have around.
So this hugely underrated gadget called a mirror turns out to be more eloquent of my Nature, infinitely more direct and convincing, than all the scriptures in the world. It began with a good name: mirror derives from mirari, which is Latin for to wonder at. I gave it a bad name - toy, illusionist, trickster - but it was I who played tricks with it, turning a blind eye to its tenfold illusion-shattering Revelation. And now, every time I compare that tiny and flawed and ageing man-face behind the glass with this immense and immaculate and immortal God-face in front of it, I’m Myself again.
‘God hath given you one face,’ says Hamlet, ‘and you make yourselves another.’ By robbing mirrors, I add. Put it like this: there’s a Face, and there are faces. The difference between them is total. It’s essential to find out which of them God has given you. He gave you ten ways of finding out, no less. Get the answer wrong, and you’re not only in every sort of trouble - you’re a blasphemer.
Here are some who got the answer right:
Each thing has two faces: a face of its own, and the Face of its Lord. In respect of its own face it is nothingness, in respect of the Face of God it is Being.
Al-Ghazali
Everyone likes a mirror, while not knowing the nature of his Face… After all, how long does a reflection remain in view? Make a practice of contemplating the origin of the reflection... That cheek and mole come back to their Source.
Rumi
This is not a task for one whose True Face is not clean.
Attar
[Lycomedes had a portrait painted of the Apostle John.] And John, who had never at any time seen his own face, said to him, ‘You are mocking me, child. Am I like that?
Acts of John
The seventeen hundred koan or themes to which Zen students devote themselves are only for making them see their Original Face. The World-honoured One sat in meditation in the snowy mountains for six years, then saw the morning star and was enlightened, and this was seeing his Original Face. When it is said of others of the ancients that they had a great realization, or a great breaking through, it means they saw their Original Face.
Daito Kokushi
Prosecution Witness No. 4
THE LAVATORY ATTENDANT
Having carefully explained to the Witness the nature of the charge against me and said a little about my Defence position, Counsel asks him what light he can throw on the matter.
In reply the Witness testifies that he knows me well by sight. I’m one of his regulars. Also by reputation - evil reputation.
The Judge warns the Witness that he’s in the box to answer questions about facts, not to moralize unbidden. And certainly not to tell the court about what other people think of me. The Jury are directed to ignore the words ‘evil reputation’.
WITNESS: All this bull about not really bein’ a man only shows that Nokes is plain bonkers. What incredible swank, what a nerve he’s got! I can’t believe my ears. If he’s not human, why does he visit my Convenience? And what the hell’s he doin’ when he stands there facin’ the wall lookin’ down? I’d like to know what’s divine about that, about what’s goin’ on down there.
Don’t tell me [banging the witness-box with both fists] don’t tell me the Almighty pees! And farts!
The Judge calls the court to order, and warns the Witness to moderate his language. Drastically.
WITNESS: Sorry, guv! But I know all about this perisher in the dock, and I’ve had as much as I can take. It’s him, not me, who’s using insultin’ language about the Almighty. Who does he think he is? I’m tellin’ the bugger he’s just like me and you…
His Honour warns the Witness that he’s within a whisker of being committed for contempt of court.
Disappointed with the Judge, he appeals to the Jury.
WITNESS: What’s more, ladies and gents, I remember this bloke rushin’ in - like he’s got all the devils in hell at his tail - and makin’ for one of my toilets, lockin’ himself in and comin’ out after five minutes and a flush. I bet you each a tenner what he did in there was what they all do. Was it the Almighty who - ?
This time, Judge and Counsel together succeed in silencing the Witness. I have no questions to put him. He stands down, muttering.
Defence: Gravity and Levity
MYSELF: Members of the Jury, hostile though this Witness appears, he plays wonderfully into my hands. In spite of himself he prepares the way for striking new evidence in my favour, evidence which, but for him, I might so easily have missed.
Let me explain:
When I’m interested enough – and honest and observant enough – to look at myself for myself, I find I’m duplex. I come in two designs, two quite distinct models, Mark 1 and Mark 2/3. They are very different, more so than black and white. They stay apart, keeping their distance like poles of a magnet. They stand facing each other, as Nelson’s Column faces Whitehall. And they are opposites, as sweet is the opposite of bitter. Mark 1 is the real and central and divine Me, while Mark 2/3 is the apparent and peripheral and all-too-human me. Mark 1 is what I am, while Mark 2/3 is what I look like. Mark 1 is what I find myself to be here as the seeing Subject or First Person, while Mark 2/3 is what I find myself to be over there a
s the seen object, or second/third person. In short, it’s as impossible to exaggerate the contrast between these two models of me as it is to exaggerate their connection.
Nowhere is this contrast more startling than in what the Witness calls his Convenience. His customers are of two sorts. All pee downwards, human fashion. All except one, who pees upwards, divine fashion. Every time –
No, no, Your Honour: no need to ply your gravel. I assure you I’m not being irreverent or flippant, and certainly not needlessly scatological. Here are inescapable facts which support my case. Nor am I holding this court in contempt. (I can’t afford to, when I’m on trial for my life.) If I’m indulging in levity it’s because God Almighty does so with a vengeance and a tra-la-la, in both senses of the word levity. I can’t help it if people find His Self-revelation in the humble workplace of the Witness as disgusting as I find it entertaining, and charming, and immensely significant.
The Prosecution’s God is a respectable character, stiff and solemn, a model of middle-class good manners and predictability, with no shocks up the divine sleeve. Well, my God isn’t a bit like that. Kings have their jesters, but the King of the World is His jester. He’s all surprises. He’s the Funny One, the Shocker! Downright vulgar He is! Take what happens in the Witness’s WCs... All right, Your Honour: no need to elaborate. Only let me point out that in all those locked cubicles underwear goes down and then up again. In all except one, where it goes up and then down again.
COUNSEL, resolutely horror-struck: Your Honour, I really must butt in here to draw the Jury’s attention to the almost unbelievable goings-on in this lawcourt. This lawcourt! The Romans revered Cloacina, the goddess of the sewer. Going a whole lot better (better’s hardly the word), John a-Nokes reveres himself as at once the God of Heaven and the God of Public Lavatories, sparing us no lavatorial detail. Not only does he convict himself out of his own mouth, of the crime of blasphemy, but does so in the most repugnant fashion imaginable. One nicely calculated to stir up devout people of all sects and persuasions. Members of the Jury, don’t let his sophistry — of which you are, I’m sure, about to be served another large helping — obscure these perfectly obvious facts, these disgustingly obvious facts.
MYSELF: This is rich! This is too much! Who broached this now-so-filthy subject by calling the Lavatory Attendant, confident that his testimony would demolish my case? It was the gentleman over there in fancy dress, the one who, now the facts turn out to support my case, suddenly finds the whole business ‘unbelievable’ in its nastiness! Nokes is wicked: when attacked he defends himself! Nokes is disgusting: when shat on he returns the compliment, and has the last laugh! Nokes says: nasty be to him who nasty thinks.
God is no more prim and proper than a child of four. His truth is funnier than our fiction. He’s arranged that waking to our Identity with Him is wonderfully light-hearted. Now I call that really decent of Him. Here’s the Almighty, intent on Self-discovery and Self-revelation and Self-giving-with-a-smile, leaning over backwards to demonstrate that everyone who says ‘I’ is none other than Himself. Leaning over backwards is right. If you don’t get it, look at Diagram No. 4. If you do get it, look at Diagram No. 4, and join in the divine merriment!
Members of the Jury, the court will presently go into recess. You will then have the opportunity to test what I’m telling you: to check whether, in the lavatories of this court, a wonderful kind of peeing is going on. Not the common sort which obeys the Law of Gravity, but the unique sort which throws that Law into reverse.
Now, Who can break Nature’s laws but the One who makes them? And not this Law alone but many others, as we shall see during the count of these proceedings. Meantime, how delightful, how worthy of our notice, that this fun-loving and fun-poking Deity should find the latrines of this court as suitable a place as the court itself in which to disclose His presence among us at this time! Or even more suitable!
Again, this is too much for Counsel for the Prosecution. He shoots to his feet. Writhing and spluttering, he implores the Judge to put a stop to this indecency, this outrage, this barefaced profanity, this calculated insult to the Divine Being, this — words fail him!
JUDGE, addressing me: Urinating upwards, forsooth! Have you taken leave of your senses? This court is no place for facetiousness, let alone profanity, and I must warn you not to try its patience too far.
MYSELF: No, Your Honour, I’ve come to my senses — a hard but necessary thing to do. Diagram No. 4 makes it so much easier. Spare those arrows a second glance, and tumble to the truth. As for profanity, the rest of my argument will be as tactful as I can make it. His Majesty wears no fig-leaf, but I’ll try to bear in mind the conventional image of Him which is practically all fig-leaf. Mine is an uncouth God, but I’ll do my best to remember how couth Sir Gerald’s is. How frightfully genteel.
Diagram No. 4
Exactly what (I ask myself) is this shocking He, this shameless She, this unbowdlerized It, in reality? Its essence is Awareness, the One Light of Consciousness that lights up the world and every creature the world comes into. I locate this Light Indivisible right where I am, plumb in the Centre of this world as I find it, nearer than near, at the heart of the heart of me. Here is no spark of that Fire, but the blazing Furnace itself. It brooks no rival consciousnesses. Awareness comes whole and single, or not at all: never in pieces — one piece looking after this, another piece looking after that phenomenon. Which means that, whatever part or function of my body — cosmic or human — is being attended to, it’s not a man as such who’s attending. What I provisionally called my awareness is in the last resort my God’s, inside as well as outside the Witness’s Convenience. Awareness is His quirk, His trade, His speciality, His monopoly. It includes awareness of His Universe Body, of which all particular bodies are organs.
The Prosecution — so sure that what goes on in that lavatory is obnoxious to God and man — leaves me with no choice but to enlarge briefly on the subject of this Universe Body as it presents itself to me. I refer to the many-layered onion-like thing I see that I am as First Person, not to the uniform potato-like thing I imagine I’m in as a third person. To be precise, this almost-half-an-onion-like thing that figures in nearly all our diagrams.
Encouraged by the great tradition of the Inner Light at my core, and inspired by my direct vision of it, I submit with reverence to what it lights up. Here I am at once this central Awareness or Consciousness and what it’s conscious of which is none other than its own region-by-region embodiment, its cosmic constitution. The view out from here embraces the One-centred but many-levelled physique that is the expression and instrument and object of the Consciousness that I AM, and I take it as I find it.
Diagram No. 5
In Diagram No. 5 I’ve drawn the general shape of my findings. No longer so damned cocksure I know what it’s like being me, I dare to start all over again and bow before the evidence — actually as well as metaphorically. I bend and bow so deeply that I come to the very edge of me and my world, to the Bottom Line it all arises from. A frontier that doesn’t prevent me from gazing past it and in to the infinite Source of All, brilliantly on display yet awesomely mysterious. Next, slowly straightening up, I gaze down at this headless trunk and these foreshortened legs and tiny feet. Then out at all those people and their gear, among them that special fellow who stares at me fixedly from behind his window. There he is, that Jack-in-the-mirror third person who’s as human as the rest, inasmuch as he’s the same way up as they are, and topped with the same sort of headpiece, and pees the way they pee. And then I look up at the teeming countryside, the forest covered hills, low clouds and high mountains (I leave you to picture these in my picture); and finally at the wide sky with its Moon and planets and Sun and solar systems and galaxies.
Such is the magnificent shape of the First Person Singular. Its crucial feature is its Bottom Line — the Fringe of this shirt, of this true cutty sark. Here, where man’s extremity visibly lines up with God’s opportunity, where what’s so ge
nerously given is so rarely taken, I come to the World’s End (completing the down-sweep of my bow before the evidence), the World’s Beginning (the launching pad that gives rise to the many-levelled scene as I straighten up again) and, back of both, the World’s Source (the below-Line World without end, amen). Here is my Triune Home, the fringe benefits of which are endless.
COUNSEL, in a stage whisper that threatens to shatter the court’s light-bulbs: Lunatic fringe!
MYSELF, ignoring the jibe: I come to sweeter-than-sweet Home God’s Home, in fact, where all that the Light lights up gives place to the Light itself. Home, where the One Light, bodying forth its own magnificent Embodiment, is all it shines on. The 360⁰ wraparound Home of the Divine Humorist, whose smile is so broad it meets at the back.
Such, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, is my cosmic constitution. This is me when I’m interested enough to look, and honest and unhurried enough to take myself as I find myself. This is what I naturally am, before rushing to twist and trim and denature it into what I’m told I am. Such is my Body, my marvellous Incarnation. And yours too, I guess, just as soon as you care to glance up, and out, and down, and in at the Unique Glancer, and What lies back of Him.
And every time I look down and pee I’m reminded of His condescension, His delicious sense of humour, His mystery. Long live micturition!
JUDGE: Do you have to go on and on about micturition, as you call it? This muckraking is provocative and does your case no good.
MYSELF: I’ve no choice, Your Honour. The topic’s forced on me by the Prosecution. But also, more importantly and persistently, by the Highest Authority, who has deliberately chosen the low things of the world to confound its Pecksniffs, its moral prigs and spiritual snobs.
Of course for purposes of inspection and description this great Body has to be dismembered notionally, differentiated into a hierarchy of organs. But in fact it is always an organic whole. Or rather, it’s the one and only Organic Whole, the only true Organism that includes all it needs to be itself, the only true Individual that’s independent and strictly indivisible. Every layer and every member of it (whether honoured or neglected or despised, whether overlooked or looked at or underlooked, whether labelled ‘decent’ or ‘common and unclean’ or ‘foul’) - every least itsy-bitsy fragment of it is holy: by which I mean wholly cleansed and made good and sanctified in the Whole. Not on the whole and partially, but as the Whole and absolutely. Rightly viewed by its Proprietor, no part is a mere part. Or even a hologram of the Whole. It is godly. It is God.
The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God Page 4
