On Having No Head

[Pierre]

Ok folks, I'm going to share with you something very explosive.

What if you could see, right now, WHO you really are? Wouldn't it be nice? In fact there's nothing easier. Very few people will acknowledge the value of that, because we want to remain humble seekers.

Douglas Harding is one of the most strikingly original spiritual teachers of all times. He really made a discovery. Which is quite rare in the field of spirituality. To say the least.

Here it goes:

Right now, just were you are, can you see your head? There's a screen, a table, walls, a cat, lots of stuff, arms and hands, even shoulders, but there's no bloody head anywhere. 

Do this : with your finger, point to where you think there's a head. What does your finger point to? If you see a head, you're suffering from hallucinations. You might as well see the ass of a camel, and you should run to a psychiatrist.

So what is there? EMPTY SPACE. Filled with all there is to see. And you ARE that space.

It seems too simple and too obvious to be true . But it's an enlightenment experience. Of course, as always, it will take years of practice to really sort it out. 

Now, this will raise a HUGE battery of questions and objections, such as :

- It relies only to sight. What about the other senses?

- I can still see my nose, there in the middle.

- What if I close my eyes?

- I can see my head in the mirror, you moron.

- It doesn't change the way I feel, or quiet down my thoughts, so what's the point?

- If it's so wonderful, why isn't everybody talking about it on the marketplace?

- etc, etc.

 

This is not the place to answer all that. If you're interested, read Harding's major books:

- "On Having No Head"

- "Look for Yourself, The Science and Art of Self-Realization"

[Neo]

I take it the idea is to provoke an experience that creates understanding? I can tell you are onto something, there some feeling, a little, but no where near powerful enough for me at this time.

[Pierre]

 It's too huge and obvious. That's the beauty of it, it's like a treasure hidden in the open...

[Naviy]

I've read these books. There is also a website, devoted to Douglas Harding's "teaching". The "experiments" section is particularly interesting. Also, Richard Lang (Harding's student) makes videos for youtube sometimes.

http://www.headless.org/experiments.htm

 

[Ramu]

And......that empty space that is YOU that sees everything is consciousness.  You don't exist in consciousness however, YOU ARE CONSCIOUSNESS.  To summarize a passage in Chris Grosso's Indie Spiritualist, "you are the Universe looking at itself".

[Walter B]

4 hours ago, Naviy said:

I've read these books. There is also a website, devoted to Douglas Harding's "teaching". The "experiments" section is particularly interesting. Also, Richard Lang (Harding's student) makes videos for youtube sometimes.

http://www.headless.org/experiments.htm

 

Wow! Right on!  That makes it very clear very quickly!   How many "things" does one see when they look at oneself! And of course they are familiar.

[Galyna]

Interesting . I love it...

[step1]

7 hours ago, Pierre said:

Ok folks, I'm going to share with you something very explosive.

What if you could see, right now, WHO you really are? Wouldn't it be nice? In fact there's nothing easier. Very few people will acknowledge the value of that, because we want to remain humble seekers.

Douglas Harding is one of the most strikingly original spiritual teachers of all times. He really made a discovery. Which is quite rare in the field of spirituality. To say the least.

Here it goes:

Right now, just were you are, can you see your head? There's a screen, a table, walls, a cat, lots of stuff, arms and hands, even shoulders, but there's no bloody head anywhere. 

Do this : with your finger, point to where you think there's a head. What does your finger point to? If you see a head, you're suffering from hallucinations. You might as well see the ass of a camel, and you should run to a psychiatrist.

So what is there? EMPTY SPACE. Filled with all there is to see. And you ARE that space.

It seems too simple and too obvious to be true . But it's an enlightenment experience. Of course, as always, it will take years of practice to really sort it out. 

Now, this will raise a HUGE battery of questions and objections, such as :

- It relies only to sight. What about the other senses?

- I can still see my nose, there in the middle.

- What if I close my eyes?

- I can see my head in the mirror, you moron.

- It doesn't change the way I feel, or quiet down my thoughts, so what's the point?

- If it's so wonderful, why isn't everybody talking about it on the marketplace?

- etc, etc.

 

This is not the place to answer all that. If you're interested, read Harding's major books:

- "On Having No Head"

- "Look for Yourself, The Science and Art of Self-Realization"

Hi Pierre,

 

When you say 'years of practice to sort it out' , what do you mean?

 

 

[Pierre]

Essentially, stabilizing the seeing through the practice of "headlessness". 

"Now the "hard" part begins, which is the repetition of this seeing-into-Nothingness till the seeing becomes quite natural and nothing special at all ; till, whatever one is doing, it's clear that nobody's here doing it. In other words, till one's whole life is structured round the double-barbed arrow of attention, simultaneously pointing in at the Void and out at what fills it. Such is the essential meditation of this Way."

On Having No Head, p.50

[step1]

11 minutes ago, Pierre said:

Essentially, stabilizing the seeing through the practice of "headlessness". 

"Now the "hard" part begins, which is the repetition of this seeing-into-Nothingness till the seeing becomes quite natural and nothing special at all ; till, whatever one is doing, it's clear that nobody's here doing it. In other words, till one's whole life is structured round the double-barbed arrow of attention, simultaneously pointing in at the Void and out at what fills it. Such is the essential meditation of this Way."

On Having No Head, p.50

ok I understand.  Are you at this solidifying stage  yet?  If so did you find it hard/scary?  I've had the realization/awakening a few days ago...  Whilst I know this will benefit me in terms of finally being happy, im also scared shitless of not being able to relate to people anymore...  The last few days has been the weirdest of my entire life 

[Neo]

Any tips if you are hyper-analysing it. I'm over thinking whether what you are doing is just a metaphor for something like the "no-ego" rather than "no-self" or thinking you are just giving an illustration of perspective.

[Natura Sonoris]

Funny thing is i just opened topic here 5 mins ago

 

I was typing and while i was typing, i was doing the stuff that i was  typing.When i finished the last word, it hit me ahahahaha. It is so fucking obvious.

 

Edited February 19, 2016 by Natura Sonoris

[Pierre]

@step1 Hello step1, yes it's very scary! You were quite comfortable with the familiar solid entity, and now there's this big Void right in the middle of your universe...

I've been practicing for about 15 years, and it has become natural. For me the most difficult was that I tried to "force" the seeing, and to maintain it, which drove me crazy. It became a major preoccupation, but it's really not the aim. I'd say, let it come when it wants, be quite "light" about it. 

@Neo Hi Neo, it's not a metaphor or an illustration of something. Point your finger toward your head. What it shows is the background of all your experiences, the pure awareness in which everything happens. It is no less than the Bloody Holy Brahman in Person. Or whatever you want to call him/her/it. It's the silence upon which sounds appear, the absence of sensations that makes you feel things, the perfect calmness underlying all emotions and thoughts. But it's easier to get it through sight. Give it a try!

Ps: and try to find "Look for Yourself", where Harding gives 30 different perspectives on this. At least one or two should convince you!

 

"Behead yourself!...Dissolve your whole body into Vision :  become seeing, seeing, seeing!" 

Rumi

[Neo]

Thanks Pierre I started seeing something, but so slight, it still made me laugh for some reason. I'm at work though so I have to try later. As I said in some other threads I'm completely hooked, but not able to put in the real work at the moment and when I do I tend to exhaust quite quickly.

[Pierre]

@Neo Sure, the finger experiment makes you feel like a complete fool !

[Guczo]

I don't know how many of you heard this story of D.E Harding, but let me just quote the author (source: http://www.headless.org/on-having-no-head.htm)

Harding’s assertion that he has no head must be read in the first-person sense; the man was not claiming to have been literally decapitated. From a first-person point of view, his emphasis on headlessness is a stroke of genius that offers an unusually clear description of what it’s like to
glimpse the nonduality of consciousness.

"The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head.

It was eighteen years ago, when I was thirty-three, that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent enquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I? The fact that I happened to be walking in the Himalayas at the time probably had little to do with it; though in that country unusual states of mind are said to come more easily. However that may be, a very still clear day, and a view from the ridge where I stood, over misty blue valleys to the highest mountain range in the world, with Kangchenjunga and Everest unprominent among its snow-peaks, made a setting worthy of the grandest vision.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of "me", unstained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.
 

Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused life-history. It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too clever to see. It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face - my utter facelessness. In short, it was all perfectly simple and plain and straightforward, beyond argument, thought, and words. There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden."

Criticism: 

“We have here been presented with a charmingly childish and solipsistic view of the human condition. It is something that, at
an intellectual level, offends and appalls us: can anyone sincerely entertain such notions without embarrassment? Yet to some primitive level in us it speaks clearly. That is the level at which we cannot accept the notion of our own death.”

How many of you think that this is example of sudden realization and enlightenment? 

Who thinks this is, as pointed out in criticism, childish death-denial?

Personally, I think this is brilliant description. I also experienced many times this silent awe: losing feeling of my inner self, but gaining peaceful state.

But from strictly materialistic point of view, this is solipsism/escapism/reality denying. On rational and critical level, we can't just say that consciousness/awareness is independent of physical body. In fact, every single conscious experience that happened in my lifetime was actually in awareness. But I can't simply disregard and neglect the consequences of tight relation between awareness and physical body (classically, subjective/objective, two sides of the same coin).

 

 

 

[Guczo]

ILLUSTRATION of HARDINGS FPP (First Person Perspective)

[Leo Gura]

It's not childish. It's reality. The people calling it childish are themselves the children.

Of course reality offends and appalls the ego.

[Guczo]

@Leo Gura You're talking about experiential side. There is actually non-dual freedom, however tricky and hard "place" it is to get there. The same thing I can say about making experience of no self based on one of your videos. It was valid. It works. 

But what about material, physical body? As a sentient being, each individual is inevitably bound up with his/her body. 

Of course, one could say that there is nothing but awareness, but again: Does anyone claims that physical world isn't real? That it's just appearance in consciousness? 

I suppose that this speculation doesn't get me any step closer to Enlightenment, but this conceptual issue just comes back again and again to my head [or should I rather say: to my awareness ]. It bothers me.

Edited February 23, 2016 by Guczo

[Leo Gura]

3 hours ago, Guczo said:

Does anyone claims that physical world isn't real? That it's just appearance in consciousness? 

Of course it isn't real! That's what non-duality is.

Non-duality is basically idealism or solipsism in practice. There is no evidence whatsoever of an external reality. That's a fiction rendered by the mind.

This is a RADICAL paradigm shift.

This is not something you should believe. But actually realize for yourself.