On Being God by Douglas Harding

Author:Douglas Harding [Harding, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Headless Way, Douglas Harding, Shollond Trust, Self-knowledge, indestructible joy
Publisher: Copyright The Shollond Trust
Published: 2023-03-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

Hands

Those Hands Are Man’s: These Are God’s

The human hand, if it is at all alive, invariably adheres to a human body; and it is usually busy at some task of exploration or grasping or manipulation designed to promote the interests of its human user. This is not to say that the human hand is understood in the slightest: it is only familiar.

God’s hand, though no more mysterious, is a less commonplace object. It figures in certain mediaeval paintings, where it looks just like a man’s hand, with wrist and a short length of sleeve, except that it fades away at that point and is attached to no body. Making some appropriate gesture, it is thrust forth from a cloud — or from a pattern of celestial spheres, or from nothing — commonly situated at the top right-hand corner of the picture.

So far from being a mere iconographical curiosity, this pious device is, in fact, a fairly true picture of these hands — of the hand that is now writing these words, and the other that is holding down this sheet of paper. I see that, though they are very much alive, yet they are quite loose and joined to no body, but fade out around the elbows. They proceed from, and die away into, the void that lies just back of them — this Void which is Me. They are God’s hands, the only living hands I have ever seen that belong to no man, to nobody but Him.

Certainly they aren’t Douglas Harding’s, for here is no solid human trunk for them to be directed by or to serve, but only this divinely vacuous Trunk which has no lack, no desires, no future, and therefore no tasks of its own for any hands to undertake. It is true that I am aware of their astonishing behaviour and authorise it all, but I am in every sense detached alike from their action and its results. They live their own life. I am not now laboriously directing this right hand: nimbly, mysteriously, wonderfully, it writes these words about itself as it pleases — and I am neither pleased nor displeased. Moreover, I notice that when I see quite clearly Who I am here, I see also that these two hands aren’t attending to Douglas Harding’s affairs, but display diviner powers, a new selflessness, a surer touch, an unfamiliar spontaneity and freedom.

In the last resort of course, all hands, all limbs whatever, are Mine. Innumerable and ramifying in all directions, they nevertheless all branch out of this slender central Trunk, and handle My business everywhere. The universe is My Body, and the whole of it is ranged region by region, not around any human nucleus, but around the divine Emptiness here, lurking just behind these two five-fingered Mysteries.

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