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

sensation-groups, one on my far right and the other on my far left?
    Now it’s your turn to repeat the experiment, asking the same questions... Please!...
    Instead of sticking his forefingers in his ears, Counsel applies them to his forehead, twisting them screwdriver fashion. His Junior nods and winks at the Jury, most of whom are following my instructions, hesitatingly.
    MYSELF: What I find here never ceases to astound and delight me. I don’t know about you, but this between-ears gap of mine is Universe-wide at the very least! I’m hugely tickled (should I say the World’s hugely tickled?) to find I’ve come to the World’s End, where I’m simultaneously fondling its quite rough extremities and seeing how vast is the interval between them. Yes, seeing it: I’m no more imagining or thinking that gap than I’m smelling it or tasting it. I’m taking the world by the ears. It’s a kindly and gentle taking, the way one handles a pet rabbit, and the contrary of setting the world by the ears.
    And what is it that fills to capacity this huge between-ears gap right now? Why, the whole scene, the world as it’s presenting itself. Yes, it’s you — you the Judge and Jury, and the Prosecution Lawyers, and the Clerk to the Court, and the Court Usher, and all the rest of you in the setting of this courtroom — who are currently tenanting this immense Accommodation that I have to let. You lot, plus all sorts of thoughts and feelings about you, plus all those sensations I’ve just described and many more, plus God knows what. And all that between-ear filling is changing continually. What never changes is this Aware Accommodation for it all, for you all. THIS I AM. The pot that looked so narrow can take the world-joint, and its ears are poles apart.
    In one of his more lucid moments Bertie Wooster says of some character, ‘Between the collar and the hair-parting nothing stirred.’ They say of a fool that there’s nothing between his ears. I say, bully for him. For me, too, that’s a good half of the truth. The other is that there’s everything. Nothing and Everything. I ask you, what could be more unlike that dead-to-the-world head-thing, that man-head as we have defined it, than this wide-awake Emptiness—Fullness? What could be more like the God-head — as, precisely, Nothing-and-Everything, alive to Itself as just that? Yes, the awesome, blissful, glorious fact is that what we are now exploring, this between-ears Immensity we tried so hard to bung up with our man-head, is our God-head. Blasphemy it was and blasphemy it is to desecrate this Holy of Holies with any human thing, any thing at all. Blasphemy and damnation.
    Counsel startles the court by suddenly pulling a face, sticking his thumbs in his ears, and waggling his fingers. Has his lunch been a rather convivial one? His Honour seems too taken aback to comment...
    ‘Is this a court of law?’ Sir Gerald wants to know. ‘Anyone peeping in would think it’s a circus, or a nursery, or a loony-bin... Let’s all play Ring a ring o’roses! Better still, Johnny shall have a new bonnet! Ha, ha, ha!’
    MYSELF: The joke’s on the joker who can’t tell the childlike from the childish...
    I want now seriously to address the Witness’s question about why the King should so demean Himself as to occupy such poky and unregal premises as the human body, setting up His throne in the coal cellar.
    Poky and unregal? Nonsense! Just look and see: could this throne-room, into which you and I tried so hard to smuggle a human head — could it be any wider, any deeper or loftier, any grander than it now so obviously is? Let’s not fool ourselves that, if we searched the universe of galaxies and stars for an age of ages, we would ever alight on a more palatial residence for Him — one more heavenly yet more homely, more empty yet more gloriously filled, more lived-in yet more bright and fresh and dust-free — than this home He’s being provided with right here. Or, for