Defence: The Guillotine Meditation
MYSELF, to Witness: My aim in questioning you isn’t to challenge your testimony - as far as it went. You described what you experienced, all right. Now I want to go into some of the underlying detail. Let’s examine together the actual teaching of these two confidence tricksters (as you now call us), and how you put it into practice. First, then, your guru and his Guillotine Meditation. Please tell the court what his instructions were, and just how you followed them.
WITNESS: I had to think my head off. Imagine it gone clean away. Walking, sitting, whatever I was doing, I had to visualize myself doing it without a head. That was all there was to it.
MYSELF: Didn’t he give you any techniques or reminders, any tips for boosting your imagination?
WITNESS: Yes, he did. I was told to lower the mirror in my bathroom so that I couldn’t see my head in it. Also to hang pictures around the house of myself minus a head. In two ways these tricks were supposed to help: they reminded me to do the meditation, and showed me what it was about.
MYSELF: What were the likely benefits, according to your guru?
WITNESS: After a few days, he promised, I would experience a marvellous weightlessness and a silence, and begin to be centred in my heart.
MYSELF: Did these things happen to you?
WITNESS: I imagined they did. I persuaded myself I was happier and more relaxed and less heady. But in the long run - even in the short run - the effect was negative. I got more tense and worried.
MYSELF: Were instructions in the Guillotine Meditation given privately to small, selected groups? Or publicly?
WITNESS: They were published, for all the world to read, in the guru’s Orange Book of Meditations. There was nothing secret about them.
MYSELF: Let’s go on now to what you call Guillotine Meditation Mark II, to my sort of headlessness - the practice and techniques which you picked up from my books. How, if at all, did they differ from those of your guru? Did you hear him and me saying much the same thing, each in his own style and tone of voice?
WITNESS: I can’t remember any important differences.
MYSELF: That headless figurine you carved and sent me, and those photos of decapitated Buddhas - I take it they represented your idea of the headless state as described in my books, which you say you read repeatedly?
WITNESS: Yes.
MYSELF: You’ll remember, then, the experiments? Every book of mine contains full descriptions of them, with precise instructions for carrying them out.
WITNESS: I read those books a long time ago. But I don’t remember doing any experiments. What sort of experiments?
MYSELF: Pointing at your face and seeing you aren’t pointing at your face. Putting on your glasses and seeing they aren’t glasses in the plural. Driving your car and seeing you aren’t driving your car but the countryside. And so on. A dozen of them.
WITNESS: I’m sure I didn‘t do any of those things.
MYSELF: Let’s get this quite clear for the Jury to note. Your guru advised you to use your imagination, to visualize. You complied. He made suggestions for boosting your imagination, such as lowering your mirrors. You complied. You carried them out meticulously, and imagined for long periods each day what you were required to imagine. A model of obedience you were. So much for Guillotine Meditation Mark I... Now for Guillotine Meditation Mark II, as you call it. I told you that imagination was your trouble. I told you to stop imagining things, and just look. You refused. I gave you meticulous instructions about the experiments you had to do if my teaching were to mean anything to you. You refused to do any of them. Again and again and again I warned you that my books would muddle you - could even harm you - if you merely read about those simple experiments or tests. You merely read about them. The result wasn’t just that you failed to get my message, but that you inverted it. Inverted and perverted it till it coincided with your guru’s message, and had the same damaging effect on you.
Not that I single you out for blame. Nearly all of us are so deeply convinced that looking within is the fate worse than death that we’ll do almost anything to avoid looking. My guess is that one in three of my readers takes me seriously when I insist that reading about What I’m pointing at is light-years from seeing it. With great respect, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, l get the impression that the one-in-three-or-more proportion applies to you too. Watching how you handle the experiments I ask you to do from time to time, it’s obvious to me that most of you are (at best) just pretending to do them, are carefully missing the point and making damn sure you overlook the Looker - or, rather, his absence. Forgive me for saying that this wilful blindness to the crux of the Defence threatens to do me a far greater disservice than the Witness has been doing. It threatens to do me in. The truth is you just can’t ignore the experiments and get my meaning, and you just can’t do the experiments and miss my meaning. Witness, you may leave the box.
Will Jury-members now please turn to Diagram No. 20.
20a The Observation that places your head
20b The Meditation that displaces your head
Diagram No. 20
No. 20a is the diagram we’re becoming quite familiar with. It’s the ground-plan of my Defence. No. 20b is very similar - with one all-important difference. The mirror has been lowered to cut off the head of the man in it. It represents the Witness’s View of himself when, in obedience to his guru’s instruction, he lowered his bathroom mirror. It also represents those pictures of decapitated Buddhas, and that decapitated wood-carving he sent me. In a word, it represents violence. To slice a person’s head off is the most summary, irreversible and bloody mischief you can do him or her. If that person happens to be you, it is suicide; if another, murder; if a lot of others, genocide in the style of Caligula, who wished that the Romans had a single neck so that he could behead them in one blow. To be accurate, attempted murder, attempted suicide, attempted genocide. And for sure that’s hell.
Along the top of my bathroom mirror is a cutting edge as sharp as any guillotine. Lowering it to slice the head off those shoulders is the easiest thing in the world - but it’s asking for trouble. Poor wretched thing, it has to go somewhere. The plugholes of the bath and the wash-basin are far too small to take it, and alas it won’t flush down the WC. Nor is it the sort of thing you can leave lying around - on the bathroom window-sill, for instance. No, the only place that will take the bloody thing is right here, it seems, on these shoulders. So here it settles down - in the one place where it can never be! How’s that for nonsense?
It’s precisely this nonsense which the Witness’s guru put him up to.
COUNSEL: If you think that this Nokes-through-the-Looking-Glass drollery will divert the Jury from the matter in hand, you’d better think again.
MYSELF: I’m talking sense. No fairy tale, it’s my very serious response to your Witness. And it addresses, as cogently as I know how, the great issue before us.
Hell is having a head here. HHHH, if I want a mnemonic. Heaven is seeing it off. It’s letting my mirror show me where this God-damned thing is magically transformed into that God-blessed thing, over there where it belongs.
Why is taking it on here so hellish? Because being shut in that tiny and dark and tightly packed sphere is being shut out of this immense sphere, where I’m lit up by the light of God and blown away by the wind of God. Because it sets little me up against my world, reducing me to a frightened stranger in it. Because it finally polishes off the stranger. And because it’s a load of codswallop, the most implausible of lies. No wonder, then, that the Guillotine Meditation gave the Witness such a hard time. Instead of decapitating him, it capitated him, good and proper! As never before. The surprising thing is that he managed to stay out of the loony-bin.
Heading myself here is suicide. Beheading the others there is murder. Such violence against the person (whether behind glass or not) and against the truth, is a real capital offence. The burden of all my teaching (I call it unteaching), and now of my Defen
ce against the charge of blasphemy, is that all those second and third persons - Jack included - are necessarily and delightfully headed, and not for beheading on any pretext; and that this unique First Person is necessarily and delightfully headless and not for heading on any pretext. Just let both sorts be the way they are (say I) and all will be well, all is well. Muck about with them, and all is worse than mucky. Just let God’s magic mirror get on with its healing work of placing that topknot. Let it charm away this central malignancy and parasite and set it up over there, where it belongs, as the most harmless and devoted of pets. Let it cure me forever of chronic blasphemy - of the diabolical pride which superimposes that man-head on this God-head.
Members of the Jury, God has given you the best and brightest of His garden tools - His spade for rooting out blasphemy. Once more, I beg you: hold out your mirrors at arm’s length, and take a good look at the weed you’ve dug up.
Look! There you have Belladonna the beautiful temptress. You are now keeping that fascinating but potentially lethal lady at a safe distance. Make sure she stays there. Embrace and take her, and she takes you. Here, chez vous, Belladonna’s deadly poison.
The way to head her off is not - emphatically not - the way advocated by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in his Orange Book:
One of the most beautiful tantra meditations: walk and think that the head is no more there, just the body. Continuously remember that the head is not there. Visualize yourself without the head. Have a picture of yourself enlarged without the head, look at it, let your mirror be lowered in the bathroom so when you see you cannot see your head, just the body... A few days of rememberance (sic) and you will feel such weightlessness happening to you, such tremendous silence, because it is the head that is the problem. If you can conceive of yourself as headless - and that can be conceived, there is no trouble in it - then more and more you will be centred in the heart... Just at this moment you can visualize yourself headless. Then you will understand what I am saying immediately.
I say that the absence of my head is no more for ‘conceiving’, ‘visualizing, ‘remembering’, ‘thinking’ (verbs that Rajneesh uses) than the presence of your head is. Both are for seeing. It’s precisely this mentation, this mucking about with the evidence, which is the trouble with the Guillotine Meditation as so disastrously practised by the Witness.
A footnote: I take issue with nothing else of Rajneesh’s that I've read - which isn’t much, I admit. And even this he got so nearly right. Also let me add that I have a lot of ex-sanyassin friends who assure me that their involvement with Rajneesh somehow prepared them for the essential In-seeing they now enjoy. I don’t suppose he ever came across that saying of Rabbi Izaac of Acre, a thirteenth-century Spanish Kabbalist: ‘You should know that these philosophers whose wisdom you so much extol have their heads where we place our feet.’ It just might have helped.
Prosecution Witness No. 22
THE ZOOLOGIST
Prompted by Counsel, the Witness introduces himself. He’s a lecturer in the Department of Biology at Cambridge, specializing in comparative anatomy. Yes, he has read a couple of the Accused’s books and is aware of the assertions he makes about his true identity, his exalted status in the scheme of things.
COUNSEL: What, in the light of your special knowledge, do you make of his divine pretensions?
WITNESS: I don’t quite know whether to say the whole idea is so far above my head that I don’t get a word of it, or so far below it there’s nothing to get anyway. Only a load of wish-wash. Let’s say I’m bewildered. Here’s a man who’s obviously no fool, yet as crazy as they come. Here’s a man who’s obviously not stuck-up, with an ego a mile high. Here’s a man who’s obviously sincere, and is playing an elaborate game. I suppose it takes a very complicated as well as a very clever fellow to take and defend a position as untenable as his.
COUNSEL: What makes it untenable?
WITNESS: In the dock there we have a biological specimen. (I mean no disrespect: here’s another in the witness-box.) Let me spell out, in picturesque non-scientific terms, some facts about the specimen which the court should know. What my description loses in technical precision it will more than gain, I trust, in impact and in relevance to this Trial.
I study living organisms, ranging from the simplest to the most complex. Two contrary things strike me about them - their inexhaustible variety, and their overall sameness. Their differentiation and their unity. Life is indivisible, and what we call the highest forms of it are of a piece with what we call its lowest forms. Take that housefly flinging itself at the window over there. I’d like to draw the Accused’s special attention to this long-lost relative of his. If John a-Nokes feels he’s a cut above that fly, let me assure him that it’s an archangel compared with himself not so very long ago. When he was young, he was of course an infant, a small apology for a human being and a mammal, on display for all to see and hear and fondle and smell. But before that, when he was younger still, he was an embarrassment and firmly hushed up - a series of skeletons in the cupboard of the womb. There, briefly, he was a small apology for a reptile, and before that a small apology for a fish, and before that a small apology for a worm. And when he was very young indeed, at the start of his present career, he was next to nothing at all, a small apology for a speck. Quite a complicated speck as specks go, but a far humbler entry in life’s social register than any creature he sets eyes on nowadays, in the zoo, in his garden, anywhere. True, he was a yuppie speck, destined to rise in the world. But he hasn’t for a moment ceased to be the same sort of thing, a speck that found it convenient to keep the speck-family together... And now this jumped-up speck emerges to inform a startled universe that it is its Origin and Proprietor, that it is the universe! How’s that for cheek, for arrogance, for social climbing?
COUNSEL: Please take the court still further back in the Nokes-ian Saga, and tell us something about the origin of the speck or spicule.
WITNESS: Once upon a time there was a little sea, and in this sea there lived a fat and lazy globular speck, a female party putting out lashings of sex appeal in all directions. Picture her as a Mae West among specks. Picture also, racing towards her in passionate frenzy, hosts of admirers, in shape and behaviour resembling precociously lascivious polliwogs, but in status much more lowly. They were like a fleet of speedboats with outboard motors, all making for the one safe harbour. The winning craft, having made it there (all the rest perishing at sea), became the male half of the sketch we now call John a-Nokes, while the harbour became the female half. Now the chances against that particular suitor outstripping all his rivals, and winning the race and the lady, were millions to one. Jack be nimble, Jack be quick! - as the nursery rhyme says. Yes, the specimen in the dock over there had better face the fact that he’s the most accidental of accidents, the outsider among outside chances, a fluke if ever there was a fluke.
The coming-to-be of John a-Nokes was less likely then than his winning the pools is now. And this fluke of a speck - propped up there on its newly acquired hind legs - is busy informing the world that it’s the King of the world. There’s nerve for you! There’s impudence!
COUNSEL: What if he explained that he outgrew those dicey and humble beginnings years ago, and has since become a very different order of being? After all, kings don’t start off crowned and sceptred and perched on thrones.
WITNESS: He has outgrown nothing. In a sense John a-Nokes is a front, or optical illusion, rather like a mirage or a rainbow: when you go up to him the man vanishes, and you find only specks which are the descendants of that original pair. The stuff of him, his life and his functioning, is their stuff and their life and their functioning, writ large and acting in concert.
COUNSEL: Nevertheless the whole, I guess you would say, transcends the sum of its parts.
WITNESS: Yes, of course. And no. For example, the whole lives by stuffing foreign matter into one end of itself and pushing foreign matter out the other end. Which is essentially the way each of its myriad parts
lives.
Even more eloquent of the fact that he’s grown out of nothing are his sexual antics. The man’s up to the same game on the big dry land as the ‘tadpole’ was up to forty-five years ago in that little sea. There’s built-in lechery, there’s lifelong addiction for you! He can’t keep off it! What’s more, his whole life is spent in a marvellous bawdy-house in which his relations great and small are playing every variety of sex game, most of them bizarre enough to raise the eyebrows of a Havelock Ellis or a Krafft-Ebing, if not to bring a blush to his cheek. For a splendidly uninhibited example, take those flowering plants flashing their sex organs, male stamens rampant and lined up around the female pistil, all tarted up and set off by that gorgeous and seductive lingerie of petals. Or the beetles having it off there among the frillies by the hour. Surrounded as he is by such countless pointers to his own primeval physique and drives, what does our Nokes specimen do? Does he salute and bow to and settle down among these less-inhibited relations, inspired by family loyalty and family feeling? Not on your life! He raises his eyes heavenwards and informs the universe that he’s its Alpha and Omega, its Substance and Sustainer, the spotless Pure Spirit back of it all! Whiter than the whitest snow! Purer than Purity! Can you beat that for swank, for insolence, for hypocrisy?
COUNSEL: And the Purity is forever, if you please! From eternity to eternity, secula seculorum, the specimen in the dock is the One Imperishable Reality - it casually informs us!
WITNESS: You would think (wouldn’t you?) that with all those flowers and insects and other not-so-poor relations going the way of all flesh - dying like flies, as we say - all around him, he would take the hint that he’s no exception, and is due soon to follow suit. How can he - in origin and in present constitution and functioning sticking so close to the standard pattern - how can he begin to persuade himself that he alone is permanent? At what auspicious juncture in his progress from that copulating tadpole to this copulating gentleman did the miracle of imperishability supervene? How, and why, did it do so? Stupid questions! What did supervene was megalomegalomania!
The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God Page 23
