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

abusive fellow’s really stupid, too. Only someone as clever-clever as the Accused could be so unintelligent. His basic delusion, underlying his many particular ones, is that the human mind is a freak and a cheat at odds with Reality. This is a sick and impious view. Its cure is to regard the rational mind as that higher function which, so far from contradicting Nature, completes it. ‘The art itself,’ as Polixenes says in The Winter’s Tale, ‘is Nature.’ What John a-Nokes calls playing God, I call being man. Man who has been entrusted with the job of building a cosmos out of loose and apparently incompatible sensory clues. Man to whom God gave this gigantic jigsaw puzzle for his birthday. The astounding success of his science proves that the resulting universe-picture is no fiction . . . So keep your respect, Jury, for common sense and the human intellect, and the familiar objective world they pains-takingly piece together, to the great benefit of us all, and you are safe from the Accused’s wiles. You won’t be taken in by his far-too-ingenious defence of idiocy. And you’ll continue to drive to the barber’s through unagitated streets, and keep your head on when you get there.
    MYSELF: I’m told that there are edible beans which, until they are well boiled, are mildly poisonous. Counsel is offering us a half-baked concoction (to be fair, two-thirds baked) that’s deadly poisonous because it stops short at the second and man-centred and blasphemous stage. The three stages are the perceived world of the animal and the very young child, the conceived world of the older child and the adult, and the union of these in the perceived — conceived world of the Seer. Of the Seer who doesn’t lose sight of the world as given — of God’s natural world — and doesn’t cease to value and trust it; and who, with reservations, values and trusts also the artificial world of the adult, as a quite brilliant fiction for handling the natural world efficiently. Certainly the Seer sees the city dance all the way to the hairdresser’s, where he sees his head safely stowed behind glass. But of course he’s well aware that for the traffic cop his car’s on the move, and for the hairdresser his head’s on his shoulders. Thus he sees God’s world, conjures up man’s world, and inhabits both. This is his three-stage, Practical Design for Practical Living. The other design — that of the two-stage non-Seer — isn’t all there, and so doesn’t work out. It should not surprise you, members of the Jury, that play-God blasphemers — the sort that dismiss God’s world unexamined, in their anxiety to redesign it to their own specification — botch the job in the long run. After many a short-term gain, their effrontery proves a dead loss, in the end fatal. And no wonder. It’s not that their world’s unlike His, but the opposite of His. How could such unrealism, such self-deception, such wilful blindness to the given, fail to prove increasingly counter-productive and in every way ineffectual? Cumulatively so. Day by day it’s resulting in more and more personal misery, more and more social strife, more and more irreversible damage to the environment. And now it threatens man’s very survival. Having made his bed he must lie on it. And die on it — if he doesn’t wake up pretty soon from his nightmare world into the real world. Into God’s world, the dear world he gives us in His mercy and loving-kindness, the world that’s woven of blessings.
    Into the world where I let things be themselves in their proper places. Where I let man be man on the far side of the glass, and God be God on the near side. Into this wide-awake world where Jack is hairy Jack over there being barbered, while God is God here just Being — Being that’s balder and smoother and brighter than a china egg. Here, where the many man-heads come back to the One God-head, forever trim and speckless and radiant like the midday Sun.
    It’s by this