Well, I’ve mentioned Douglas Harding a couple of times, I think, in another lesson and in a couple of guided meditations. He is the architect and author who wrote the book on having no head, which contains a very useful insight into the practice of meditation. I wrote about him in my book, Waking Up, so I will read that section to you now and then offer some additional commentary.
Having no head.
Douglas Harding was a British architect who later in life became celebrated in New Age circles for having opened a novel doorway into the experience of selflessness. Raised among the exclusive Plymouth Brethren, a highly repressive sect of fundamentalist Christians, Harding apparently expressed his doubts with a fervor sufficient to get him excommunicated for apostasy. He later moved his family to India, where he spent years on a journey of self-discovery that culminated in an insight he described as the state of, quote, having no head. I never met Harding, but after reading his books, I have little doubt that he was attempting to introduce his students to the same understanding that is the basis of Dzogchen practice. Harding later wrote several books about his experience, including a very useful little volume titled On Having No Head. It is both amusing and instructive to note that his teachings were singled out for derision by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstetter in collaboration with my friend Daniel Dennett, a man of wide learning and great intelligence who, it would appear, did not understand what Harding was talking about. Here is the portion of Harding’s text that Hofstetter criticized.
So this is a quote from Harding.
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. Even an 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. The look was enough, and what I found was khaki trouser legs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirt front terminating upwards in absolutely nothing whatsoever, 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, snow peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky.
Now this is me talking off book. I believe I know where he was when he first had this insight. I think he was at a place called Nagarkot, which is outside of Ketmandu, which offers a really vast view of the Himalayas. So that’s what Harding was looking at when he realized that he had no head. I had lost a head and gained a world. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, ysteriously 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. Clearer than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around. 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. I had been blind to the one thing that is always present, and without which I am blind indeed to this marvelous substitute for a head, this unbounded clarity, this luminous an absolutely pure void, which nevertheless is, rather than contains, all things. For however carefully I attend, I fail to find here even so much as a blank screen on which these mountains and sun and sky are projected, or a clear mirror in which they are reflected, or a transparent lens or aperture through which they are viewed, still less a soul or a mind to which they are presented, or viewer, however shadowy, who is distinguishable from the view. Nothing whatever intervenes, not even that baffling and elusive obstacle called distance. The huge blue sky, the pink-edged whiteness of the snows, the sparkling green of the grass, how can these be remote, when there is nothing to be remote from? The headless void refuses all definition and location. It is not round, or small, or big, or even here as distinct from there.
Okay, so that was from Harding’s text. That was as excerpted in Hofstadter’s and Dennett’s book, so this is back to my text now.
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 non-duality of consciousness.
Here are Hofstadter’s, quote, reflections on Harding’s account. And now this is Douglas Hofstadter,
“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 seriously 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.”
This is back to me. Having expressed his pity for baddie old Harding, Hofstadter proceeds to explain away his insights as a solipsistic denial of mortality, a perpetuation of the childish illusion that, “I am a necessary ingredient of the universe.” However, Harding’s point was that I is not even an ingredient, necessary or otherwise, of his own mind. What Hofstadter fails to realize is that Harding’s account contains a precise empirical instruction. Look for whatever it is you are calling eye, without being distracted by even the subtlest undercurrent of thought, and notice what happens the moment you turn consciousness upon itself. This illustrates a very common phenomenon in scientific and secular circles. We have a contemplative like Harding, who, to the eye of anyone familiar with the experience of self-transcendence, has described it in a manner approaching perfect clarity. We also have a scholar like Douglas Hofstadter, a celebrated contributor to our modern understanding of the mind, who dismisses him as a child.
Before rejecting Harding’s account as merely silly, you should investigate this experience for yourself. And so in the book, I include an exercise, similar to ones I presented in some of the guided meditations, and I’ll read that to you now. As you gaze at the world around you, take a moment to look for your head. This may seem like a bizarre instruction. You might think, of course I can’t see my head, what’s so interesting about that? Not so fast.
Simply look at the world, or at other people, and attempt to turn your attention in the direction of where you know your head to be. For instance, if you’re having a conversation with another person, see if you can let your attention travel in the direction of the other person’s gaze. He is looking at your face, and you cannot see your face. The only face present, from your point of view, belongs to the other person. But looking for yourself in this way can precipitate a sudden change in perspective, of the sort that Harding describes. Some people find it easier to trigger this shift in a slightly different way. As you are looking out at the world, simply imagine that you have no head. Whichever method you choose, don’t struggle with this exercise. It’s not a matter of going deep within, or producing some extraordinary experience. The view of headlessness is right on the surface of consciousness, and can be glimpsed the moment you attempt to turn about. Pay attention to how the world appears in the first instant, not after a protracted effort. Either you will see it immediately, or you won’t see it at all. And the resulting glimpse of open awareness will last only a moment or two before thoughts intervene. Simply repeat this glimpse, again and again, in as relaxed a way as possible, as you go about your day. Okay, so that’s the end of the exercise I give there. And now back to the main text. Once again, selflessness is not a deep feature of consciousness. It is right on the surface. And yet people can meditate for years without recognizing it.
After I was introduced to the practice of Dzogchen, I realized that much of my time spent meditating had been a way of actively overlooking the very insight I was seeking.
How can something be right on the surface of experience, and yet be difficult to see?
I’ve already drawn an analogy to the optic blind spot, but other analogies may give a clearer sense of the subtle shift in attention that is required to see what is right before one’s eyes. We’ve all had the experience of looking through a window, and suddenly noticing our own reflection in the glass. At that moment, you have a choice. To use the window as a window, and see the world beyond, or to use it as a mirror. It is extraordinarily easy to shift back and forth between these two views, but impossible to truly focus on both simultaneously. This shift offers a very good analogy, both for what it is like to recognize the illusoriness of the self for the first time, and for why it can take so long to do it. Imagine that you want to show another person how a window can also function like a mirror. As it happens, your friend has never seen this effect, and is quite skeptical of your claims. You direct her attention to the largest window in your house, and although the conditions are perfect for seeing her reflection, she immediately becomes captivated by the world outside. What a beautiful view! Who are your neighbors? Is that a redwood or a douglas fir?
You begin to speak about there being two views, and about the fact that your friend’s reflection stands before her even now, but she notices only that your neighbor’s dog has slipped out of the front door, and is now dashing down the sidewalk. In every moment, it is clear that your friend is staring directly through the image of her face without seeing it. Of course, you could easily direct her attention to the surface of the window by touching the glass with your hand. This would be akin to the quote, pointing out instruction of Dzogchen. However, here the analogy begins to break down. It is very difficult to imagine someone’s not being able to see her reflection in a window even after years of looking, but that is what happens when a person begins most forms of spiritual practice.
These techniques of meditation are, in essence, elaborate ways of looking through the window, in the hope that if one only sees the world in greater detail, an image of one’s true face will eventually appear. Imagine a teaching like this. If you just focus on the trees swaying outside the window without distraction, you will see your true face. Undoubtedly, such an instruction would be an obstacle to seeing what could otherwise be seen directly. Because everything that has been said or written about spiritual practice, even most of the teachings one finds in Buddhism, directs a person’s gaze to the world beyond the glass, thereby confusing matters from the very beginning. But one must start somewhere, and the truth is that most people are simply too distracted by their thoughts to have the selflessness of consciousness pointed out directly. And even if they are ready to glimpse it, they are unlikely to understand its significance. Gordian confessed that many of his students recognized the state of, quote, headlessness only to say, so what? It is, in fact, very difficult to deal with this “so what?”
That is why certain traditions, like Dzogchen, consider teachings about the intrinsic non-duality of consciousness to be secret, reserving them for students who have spent considerable time practicing other forms of meditation. On one level, the requirement that a person have mastered other preliminary practices is purely pragmatic, for unless she has the requisite concentration and mindfulness to actually follow a teacher’s instructions, she is liable to be lost in thought and understand nothing at all. But there’s another purpose for withholding these non-dual teachings. Unless a person has spent some time seeking self-transcendence dualistically, she is unlikely to recognize that the brief glimpse of selflessness is actually the answer to her search. Having then said, so what, in the face of the highest teachings, there is nothing for her to do but persist in her confusion. Okay, so that is my discussion of Harding as it appears in my book, Waking Up. And as I’ve said, I’ve introduced this exercise of looking for your head, looking for yourself, looking for your face, looking for the seat of attention at various places in the guided meditations and we will keep experimenting with that. This notion of glimpsing it and not seeing the point, essentially saying so what, even after a legitimate glimpse of non-dual consciousness, that’s an interesting problem to have. It is a possible problem.
If you haven’t spent enough time meditating, you might not actually see that this jewel is as significant as it is. And it may take some time for you to feel that you have clearly glimpsed the non-duality of consciousness. This notion of headlessness is just one trick to get your attention moving in the right direction, but it’s a very useful one. It really is possible to look for the feeling that you’re calling I and to fail to find it in a way that’s conclusive and to have the center drop out of experience. So it may take years of observing the contents of consciousness or it may take only moments, but it’s possible to recognize that consciousness itself prior to the feeling of self is free no matter what arises to be noticed. And meditation is simply the practice of finding this freedom directly by breaking one’s identification with thought and allowing this continuum of experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, to simply be as it is. In my view, the realistic goal of meditation is not some permanent state of selflessness that admits of no further efforts, but a capacity to be free of self in this moment in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that on demand, you really will have solved many of the problems you will encounter in this life.