COUNSEL: So it would be true to say that the Accused’s stratagem fails because it’s wildly unrealistic, founded on the wish-fulfilling dream that he is the wonderful fellow he isn’t?
WITNESS: Precisely.
COUNSEL, to Jury: Can you doubt the Witness’s sincerity, or her expertise built up and tested over fifteen years’ work with many hundreds of patients? Few of whom were, I’ll wager, as unconscious of their body-knots as Mr Nokes is. Or else as dishonest about them.
Defence: Knots
MYSELF, to Witness: So far as I understand it, I go along with your story about bodily imbalances and knots and protective armour, and the way they build up. What beats me is how you can be so sure that yours is the only way of loosening and shedding them. How do you know I haven’t stumbled on an alternative? And one that’s more radical and more effective than yours - to say the least? Short of getting your hands on me and giving me a thorough going-over, you must admit that your remarks about my screwed-up condition are uncalled-for and pure guesswork, founded on no evidence at all.
WITNESS: Founded on long experience.
MYSELF: But not, I think, on experience of people like me, who are six thousand miles away, and who make the claims I do, and don’t so much live up to them as get down to them.
WITNESS: Well, I think I have to concede that point. On the other hand, I’ll stake my professional reputation that you aren’t the exception you say you are.
MYSELF: And I’ll stake my life that I AM that exception absolutely. In fact, I don’t know what uniqueness is till I come round to being MYSELF, this First Person Oh-so-Singular.
Anyway, thank you. No more questions. [Witness is switched off...]
I’ve no doubt the Witness knows her job and does it very well. I’m in no position, and have no wish, to challenge her methods or results. But I have to tell her that my job - and the material I work with - is very, very different from hers. She deals with one species and order and genus - kingdom, rather - I with another. We aren’t in the same line of business at all.
Briefly, here are the differences:
(1) The bodies the Witness treats are skin-encapsulated, closed and self-contained systems. Each is a sharply defined thing, contained within the familiar world of sharply defined things. My body, on the contrary, is open-ended. At the World’s End which is its Bottom Line, this body gives on to and merges with another world altogether, a Nowhere-and-Nowhen-and-Nohow world of infinite mystery in which there are no things at all. It draws upon this Other World as a tree draws on its roots and its roots draw on the soil.
(2) This open end of mine is no small and constricted aperture, like the neck of an uncorked bottle, or the mouth of a lidless jug, or the sphincter muscle of an alimentary canal. It’s more like the Amazon that widens till it’s the Atlantic.
(3) This busted-wide-open body of mine is absolutely unique. I’ve never come across another remotely like it. The bodies the Witness handles are many, and remarkably similar. Therefore she knows where she is with them.
(4) They are all the same way up - head above, feet below. Mine is the other way up. I stand on my head.
(5) Or rather, on my no-head, on my shoulders. The Witness’s clients are each stoppered and topped off with a topknot - an apt name for what amounts to a tangle of hitches and reefs and splices, of impossible-to-untie knots of every kind. It’s a tangle I’m absolutely free of, thank the Lord, as soon as I care to look. There are no knots in a no-topknot. Here’s nothing to pick at and fumble with and attribute to traumatic episodes in my history, and generally to fuss and fret about.
(6) Both in shape and size the rest of my body is very different from those the Witness works with. A normal person’s height (as Pliny the Elder noticed) equals the span of his extended arms: but this person - this First Person - is the great exception. I’ve got arms and legs all right, and a trunk - of a sort. A unique sort. My arms, when extended sideways, I see are long enough to embrace the world. My trunk and my legs, by way of contrast, are drastically foreshortened, and my trunk is backless. As for my shoulders, they are very broad as well as fuzzy, and in the middle is a great Gap. This means that my left arm and my right arm are unconnected. Or rather, that they are connected to No-thing. How different from the little arms of John a-Nokes there behind glass, and from those of the Witness’s clients! All of which stick out of human bodies.
(7) What I’m describing is my real physique, so solid above, so airy below - the one that’s given right here - and I’ll be damned if I’ll turn down such a mind-blowing gift! Damned, and crazy. It’s the one I see and see with, the one I hear and hear with, the one that feels pains and pleasures, and eats food that actually tastes, and smells stinks that actually pong. Of course I’m also fixed up with a pseudo-physique which is incapable of all these things - a normally-headed and regular-way-up but unfeeling apology for a body - which hangs out a yard or so away. ‘Hangs out’ is right: it’s no more than a distant framed-and-glazed picture, paper-thin, suspended alongside framed-and-glazed pictures of family and friends. It’s no more for living in than those photos are. It’s as dead as the wall it’s hanging on, and the fact that Jack-in-the-glass somewhat resembles the Witness’s well-fleshed clients does nothing to bring that Thin Man to life.
These assorted differences between my physique and that of the Witness’s clients by no means exhaust the list. But they are quite sufficient to confirm that what works for them is most unlikely to work for me, and vice versa. This unique patient requires unique therapy.
Yes, strikingly different though this body is from those, it too needs treatment. All too easily it can get out of order. When overlooked and unattended to, it develops tightnesses, rigidities, stiffnesses, blocks, knots of a sort. What do I do about them? How effective is the treatment? That’s the question I want to tackle next.
COUNSEL, very loudly: It’s not the question! You aren’t accused of being screwed up but of being puffed up. Puffed up to divine proportions - in your own eyes. But now you’re as good as confessing that you can’t be divine after all, and that you’ve been having us on all the while. For you’ve just admitted to being a tangle of bodily knots, at least some of the time. Knots which the Being you claim to be is certainly free of, absolutely and forever. So you aren’t divine after all! Come on - admit it now, late in the day though it is.
MYSELF: Learned Counsel’s theology is simplistic. We will more easily see this if we turn to Diagram No. 19.
Diagram No. 19
As I understand the Christian tradition, Divinity comes in three very, very different packages - Every-thing, Some-thing, and No-thing. The first, the infinite or jumbo size, embraces, along with all things, their knots. By containing them It frees Itself of them, and is unknotted - the way the ocean, though holding all those fish, is itself unfishy; and the way the cobra, though incorporating its venom, is unpoisoned by it. The third Divinity package - the infinitesimal or single-portion size - is guaranteed pure and thing-free and therefore knot-free. Not so the second or regular size. Finite, betwixt and between, it has its share of knots which need unravelling. It’s this aspect of the Divine - the headless, long-armed, feet-up sort - that I’ve been describing. And - yes! - that I’m claiming to be. This is the Cosmic Christ. This is God incarnate in the Son, who is always taking on the form of a limited and mortal Some-thing, in sharp contradistinction to the Father who is All-things, and the Spirit who is No-thing.
It’s right here, and only here, that I find the Son whose unique body is indeed my very own. Here is the Majesty that comes down and humbles Itself to take on - me and my knots! And that, I tell you, is humility! That’s a comedown which only the God Who is Love Itself is capable of.
COUNSEL thunders: Jury - did you hear that? John a-Nokes is again telling us that he’s nothing less than the Second Person of the Holy Trinity! Don’t forget this. Remember it when you retire to consider your verdict.
MYSELF: Wrong, as usual! John a-Nokes is the image in that glaze
d-and-framed picture hanging on the wall. He’s an appearance, not substantial or real - let alone divine. As for the unglazed-and-unframed person who’s so real and so substantial here, I swear to you that the given facts have forced me to come back - reluctantly, in spite of myself - to something very like the indwelling Christ of my childhood. Amazing grace has brought me to my senses, at last!
My story now - along with that of Paul and countless other devout souls - is of the Christ who lives in me, who is the life of my life and the soul of my soul. How fortunate for them that they can’t be arrested on a charge of blasphemy, and tried along with me under the Act of 2002 CE!
COUNSEL: I doubt whether you are in the same league as the great Apostle.
MYSELF: He called himself the chief of sinners. I’m in that league, all right.
But now, with (or without) your permission, I resume my response to the testimony of the Witness you were pleased to call to testify against me.
The question I must now address is this: what is the effective treatment for the knots that are indeed apt to form in this unique and true body of mine? What is the appropriate and practical cure - which has to be as unlike the Witness’s as the material she works with is different from mine? The cure which, in my firsthand experience, really works? The remedy which, when persisted in, thaws out my freeze-ups, strips me of my armour, and unravels the knots which inevitably come with incarnation?
Truly speaking, the treatment isn’t a treatment or a doing at all, but a waking. It’s attention, humility in the face of inescapable evidence, sustained looking to see, thankfulness for the given - for the God who gives Himself.
And the crucial and primary sight is the Absence of that knot of knots which is my topknot (in truth my bottomknot). Untying that head-knot would take infinite time and trouble; and even if it were to succeed, I would be left with an agglomeration of loose ends. Abolishing the whole thing in a flash is immeasurably more effective.
This is the head start (no-head start) that can and should lead to the undoing of knots in the now-decapitated body. It reaches the parts that no other medicines can reach, and works wonders there. Taking this medicine consists of adding my body in along with my head, so that it, too, is voided, absented, and thoroughly cleaned up. To do this, I simply take time off from looking down to check that I’m headless, and look out to check that I’m also bodiless. Normally, in fact, my trunk and legs are out of view, and replaced by the scene ahead; thus the knots in those parts are instantly dissolved. Not once and for all, of course. But when this treatment is applied consciously enough and repeated often enough, no knots can survive it.
The consciousness is essential. Freedom from knots requires that I really do wake up to what I see, instead of dreaming what I’m told to dream. This isn’t quite so easy as I’m apt to suppose. The final vision - the sustained attention which completes the job - is the up-ending of this headless body. When you have a jug of dirty water, you don’t empty it by just removing the stopper. Nor do you empty it by tilting the jug with the stopper firmly in position. No, you have to do both things - take out the stopper and up-end the jug. Then the dirty water is at once discharged. (The chart which I produced in my response to the last Witness - the map of the 8 X 8-fold Plebeian Path - illustrates the process in some detail.1) In plain language, the full treatment has three parts: it requires that I lose my head, and find my inverted body, and very frequently lose that as well - consciously. What could be simpler?
Simple doesn’t mean easy. This treatment for knots (which is also treatment for blasphemy) isn’t once and for all. It has to be kept up. My attention flagging, the topknot creeps back on, the trunk does a somersault to match those around me, and it solidifies. The knots re-knot themselves. Jack’s back in, and Christ’s out there in the cold again. And then God help me! (I’ve never known Him not to. When asked.)
Here, finally, are a Christian, a Muslim, a Taoist, a Buddhist, a Jew and a Hindu who had the secret of untying that knot of knots which is Man:
The outward and the inward man are as different as earth from heaven.
Eckhart
‘Behold,’ they said, ‘we are men, and they are men; both we and they are in bondage to sleep and food.’ In their blindness they did not perceive that there is an infinite difference between them.
Rumi
While keeping my physical frame, I lost sight of my real self. Gazing at muddy water, I lost sight of the clear abyss.
Chuang-tzu
Where others dwell, I do not dwell. Where others go, I do not go. This doesn’t mean that I refuse to associate with other people, but that black and white must be distinguished.
Pai-Yun
I call Heaven and Earth to witness that one day I sat down and wrote a Kabbalistic secret: suddenly I saw the shape of myself standing before me and myself disengaged from me.
School of Abulafia
As rivers lose name and shape in the sea, wise men lose name and shape in God, glittering beyond all distance. He who has found Spirit is Spirit... The knots of his heart are unloosed.
Mundaka Upanishad
* * *
1 See Appendix.
Prosecution Witness No. 21
THE EX-SANYASSIN
COUNSEL, to Jury: The Accused often calls his teaching and practice ‘The Headless Way’. What is this Way? In his own blasphemous jargon (I quote from one of his books) it is ‘seeing on one’s shoulders, instead of the man-head that isn’t here, the God-head that is here, and being healed’. Well, our next witness will tell us about his adventures on the Headless Way, and the sort of healing it led to.
WITNESS: It all began years before I had even heard of John a-Nokes. I was twenty, an orange-robed sanyassin and a member of a very large pseudo-religious community in Oregon. The things we got up to! Some I now see were quite beneficial, most were harmless, a few were very harmful. Among them all, the one that fascinated me, and in the end practically drove me mad, was called ‘The Guillotine Meditation’. Our guru praised it highly, describing it as very ancient, very deep and very liberating. It was a most beautiful Tantric meditation, he said.
COUNSEL: Meditation on what?
WITNESS: On having no head.
COUNSEL: Go on.
WITNESS: I’ve no idea why, but this meditation so got a hold on me that I lost all interest in the other things that my fellow sanyassins were into. I practised headlessness for hours every day, and felt guilty about the times when I got diverted from it, or when it slipped away from me. I became more and more unsociable, more and more lonely in that crowd of thousands.
Then came the showdown, the revelations of corruption and violence, leading to the swift breakup of that community. Angry and disillusioned, I only wanted to get as far away as possible. I burned my orange outfit and my mala, and moved back to New York. I got a job and settled down to normal life. Increasingly, it was as if that nightmare in Oregon had never happened - except for one hangover. The Guillotine Meditation went on bugging me. I still practised it daily, as far as my work allowed. And still I missed out on the promised healing. If anything, my anxiety and stress got worse. Yet it never occurred to me to cut my losses and stop, just call a halt. I was that stupid, that sick!
COUNSEL: And then you met the Accused?
WITNESS: No, I never met him. I came across his book on Headlessness in a second-hand bookstore. With great excitement I read and reread it, hoping against hope that Guillotine Meditation Mark II, Nokes’s Style, would at last sort me out. Not content with the printed word, I tried to make contact with the author. I carved out of beechwood a figurine of the Headless One and sent it to him. No reply. I followed it up with pictures of headless figures, mostly Buddhas, that I’d come across. Still no reply. Not even an acknowledgement. I felt so hurt, so frustrated. But still I read the man’s books, and went on practising. And I grew sicker than ever.
COUNSEL: How did it all end?
WITNESS: Well, as a result of my obsession, I was fired from my
job as an accountant. I became unemployable, incapable of concentrating on the easiest work for more than a few minutes. And, naturally, very depressed. There were times when I thought of suicide. I only just managed to stay out of mental hospital.
COUNSEL: But you recovered. What actually happened?
WITNESS: Honestly, I don’t know for sure. I think that what saved me was that I fell in love with my psychotherapist. As luck would have it, her name was Hedda. ‘Hedda, my Header,’ I called her. The formula became a private joke of ours, the slogan and watchword of our relationship. ‘The man I want,” she said, ‘has a man’s head on his man’s shoulders. Lips for kissing, eyes for looking at me, not thin air. You poor idiot, can’t you see you’ve been made a fool of by a pair of con men? First, that smarmy, slick, watery-eyed guru, and then this mad paradox-pusher - tricksters who, between them, really did come within an ace of sending you off your rocker.’
Perhaps it was also that my deepening despair bottomed out, so that the only way left was upwards into the broad daylight of common sense. Anyway, almost overnight it happened. I got my head back for sure, and quite soon had it firmly screwed in place.
A month’s vacation with Hedda in the Allegheny Mountains and I returned to the city in one piece and all there, present and correct. Since then I’ve lived a pretty normal life. The memory of that traumatic and embarrassing interlude, I’m happy to say, is fading steadily. More and more I have the feeling it happened to someone else... This enforced reminder here today that it didn’t is far from welcome, I assure you.
COUNSEL: What about the religious side of that interlude? How did you and how do you view the God-head which the Accused promised you in place of your man-head?
WITNESS: At the time, I was more mystified than shocked. Now that I’ve been going to the synagogue regularly and reconnecting with my Jewish roots, I’ve come to see John a-Nokes and that guru as a pair of devils who tempted me to commit the most abominable sin against God: the sin of the ultimate Swollen Head. It makes my stomach turn over just to look at that man in the dock and think of the harm he did to me, and to so many others.
The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God Page 22
