The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God by Douglas Harding

I’m doing now) the rest of my human body’s missing; if I were to climb on to the roof of this court and gaze up at the sky, my Earth-body would be missing; if I did so at night my Star-body — nearly all my Solar-System body — would be missing; and finally, if I were to close my eyes, my Universe-body would be missing. What’s constant throughout is the missing head. The essential feature of this topknot of mine is that it’s featureless. And not only featureless but a nonsense, an absurdity. I’m shoulder-high, or rather shoulder-low. There I stop.
    Or put it this way: the reason for picking on my no-head, rather than (say) my no-torso, is that it’s central to me throughout — whereas my no-torso often isn’t. Do I have to explain further? Be serious! If This that’s forever where I’m coming from, This that’s the Root of the root of my life and the Being of my being and the indispensable Core of the Mystery of Me — if This isn’t worth fastening on to and looking into hard and long, tell me what is. To be wrong about This — and what could be more perverse than bunging it up with that peripheral and hugely complicated bag of tricks which is our agreed definition of a human head? — to be wrong about This is to be wrong about everything else. If there’s anything more sure to sink me than a millstone around my neck, it is this fictitious millstone on my neck.
    No, it’s not my man’s head that I pick on and make such a fuss about. It’s the absence of it here, and the presence of... Well, of something very, very different. Which brings me to the question of what, exactly, I’m touching when I finger the thing (or no-thing) that I’m living from here, that I’m looking out of. How far is it like, and how far is it unlike, the intangible thing that those other ten fingers are simultaneously exploring in my mirror? The question is: what, when I attend, does touch disclose about what’s right here at the hub of my world? Not about what’s there, in the realm of light-switches and cups etc., but here, in the realm of their user?
    Over there, touch tests and complements sight, and vice versa. They fit nicely. And so they do here (as we shall presently see) but combine to tell a vastly different story. Here they come together most beautifully to reveal What I really am, in sharp contrast to what I appear to be, what I look like to you now.
    But what’s the good of just talking about this contrast? I must ask you, all you Jury members and Your Honour as well, to conduct along with me a little experiment. It’s so easy to do, so revolutionary in what it comes up with, so destructive of the lies we live by, that we all ought to do it daily along with our physical jerks and hair-combing and teeth-brushing. If you are too embarrassed, or too lazy, or too prejudiced to do what I’m now doing, or to take seriously what you find when you do so, you’ll be turning this place into a court of injustice, a kangaroo court. To say nothing of the entertainment and the revelation you’ll be missing out on, personally. So please… Yes, you, Sir Gerald, too! And your Junior, Mr Atkinson… Well, have it your own way. No surprise that the Crown denies it crowns thin air.
    The rest of you all set? I’ll tell you what I’m doing and what I’m finding, so that you can then do the same, and check whether you get the same results as I get. Don’t believe me. Look for yourself.
    You see me now stopping my ears, pressing a finger into each ear-hole…
    Well, that’s your story. Mine isn’t a bit like that.
    What I’m finding here is a mélange of sensation of touch, of sustained sound, of pressure, of discomfort and a little pain – with no things, no solid, opaque, coloured objects whatever to attach these sensations to. Attending carefully, I sort this mélange out into two parts, with a space intervening.
    How wide is this gap between the ears I don’t have here? On present evidence, how distant are these two