The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God by Douglas Harding Read Free Book Online Page A

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 generously 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