Douglas Harding and the Headless Way
Often readers of spiritual texts are left confused as to what the author is trying to convey when they say from the highest view point in reality you are really Consciousness, No Mind, Being, All that is, The I Am, Presence, The Higher Self, Oneness etc. While a reader may develop an intellectual concept of what an author is speaking about from such texts, a true experiential experience is often lacking. The Headless Way Way offers you a practical, pract ical, user-friendly way to see Who you really r eally are. This method was developed by the philosopher Douglas Harding. At At the heart of this approach are the Experiments - awareness exercises that guide your attention directly to your deepest identity. identity.
Who Are You? Religion’s Answer The world’s great mystics have a common message: "There is a Reality which is Indivisible, One, Alone, the Source and Being of all; not a thing, nor even a mind, but pure Spirit or clear Consciousness; and we are That and nothing but That, for That is our true Nature; and the only way to find It is to look steadily within, where are to be found utmost peace, unfading joy, and eternal life itself." (From Religions of the World by Douglas Harding) Science’s Answer What you are depends on the range of the observer. observer. At several metres, more or less, you are human, but at closer ranges you are cells, molecules, atoms, particles… Viewed from further away your body becomes absorbed into the rest of society, life, the planet, the star, the galaxy… Science’s objective view of you – z ooming towards and away from you - reveals a hierarchically organized system of layers that is alive, intelligent and beautiful. Thus you have many layers, like an onion. You You need every one of these la yers to exist. Your Your human identity, identity, vital and important as it is, is just one of these layers. You You are also a lso sub-human and supra-human. What are you at the Centre of your many layers? The scientist cannot say because she can only observe you from a distance. However close she gets to you, she remains
outside you. What or Who you really are, the Ground of your Being, remains a mystery. Other People’s Answer Other people are like the scientist because they cannot see what you are at Centre either, only what you are peripherall y. Reflecting back to you what they make of you, their feedback is about you as a person. Your Answer You are not distant from yourself, not outside yourself. You – and you alone - are therefore perfectly placed to see what you are at Centre. All you have to do is look. How do you look into your Centre? The Headless way experiments direct your attention inwards to your centre. They reveal the One you really are, the One at the heart of your life. Take some time now to explore them. Over the past [sixty] years a truly contemporary and Western way of 'seeing into one's Nature' or 'Enlightenment' has been developing. Though in essence the same as Zen, Sufism, and other spiritual disciplines, this way proceeds in an unusually down-toearth fashion. It claims that modern man is more likely to see Who he really is in a minute of active experimentation than in years of reading, lecture-attending, thinking, ritual observances, and passive meditation of the traditional sort. Instead of these, it uses a variety of simple, non-verbal, fact-finding tests, all of them asking: how do I look to myself? They direct my attention to my blind spot - to the space I occupy, to what's given right here at the Centre of my universe, to what it's like being 1st-person singular, present tense.
Douglas Harding was born in 1909 in Suffolk, England. He grew up in a strict fundamentalist Christian sect, the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren. The ‘Brethren’ believed they were the ‘saved’ ones, that they had the one true path to God and that everyone else was bound for Hell. When Harding was 21 he left. He could not accept their view of the world. What guarantee was there that they were right? What about all the other spiritual groups who also claimed that they alone had the Truth? Everyone couldn’t be right. In London in the early 1930s Harding was studying and then practising architecture. In his spare time, however, he devoted his energies to philosophy - to trying to understand the nature of the world, and the nature of himself. Into philosophy at this time were filtering the ideas of Relativity. Influenced by these ideas, Harding realized that his identity depended on the range of the observer – from several metres he was human, but at closer ranges he was cells, molecules, atoms, particles… and from further away he was absorbed into the rest of society, life, the planet, the star, the galaxy… Like an onion he had many layers. Clearly he needed every one of these layers to exist.
But what was at the centre of all these layers? Who was he really? In the mid-1930s Harding moved to India with his family to work there as an architect. When the Second World War broke out, Harding’s quest to uncover his identity at centre - his True Identity - took on a degree of urgency. Aware of the obvious dangers of war, he wanted to find out who he really was before he died. One day Harding stumbled upon a drawing by the Austrian philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach. It was a self-portrait – but a self-portrait with a difference. Most self portraits are what the artist looks like from several feet – she looks in a mirror and draws what she sees there. But Mach had drawn himself without using a mirror – he had drawn what he looked like from his own point of view, from zero distance.
When Harding saw this self-portrait the penny dropped. Until this moment he had been investigating his identity from various distances. He was trying to get to his centre by peeling away the layers. Here however was a self-portrait from the point of view of the centre itself. The obvious thing about this portrait is that you don’t see the artist’s head. For most people this fact is interesting or amusing, but nothing more. For Harding this was the key that opened the door to seeing his innermost identity, for he noticed he was in a similar condition – his own head was missing too. At the centre of his world was no head, no appearance - nothing at all. And this ‘nothing’ was a very special ‘nothing’ for it was both awake to itself and full of the whole world. Many years later Harding wrote about the first time he saw his headlessness: “I don’t think there was a ‘first time’. Or, if there was, it was simply a becoming more aware of what one had all along been dimly aware of. How could there be a ‘firsttime’ seeing into the Timeless, anyway? One occasion I do remember most distinctly – of very clear in-seeing. It had 3 parts. (1) I discovered in Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science, a copy of Ernst Mach’s drawing of himself as a headless figure lying on his bed. (2) I noted that he – and I – were looking out at that body and the world, from the Core of the onion of our appearances. (3) It was clear that the Hierarchy, which I was then in the early stages of, had to begin with headlessness, and that this had to be the thread on which the whole of it had to be hung.” However, Harding did describe his discovery more dramatica lly in On Having No Head. Following this discovery, Harding spent eight more years working on The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. Prefaced by CS Lewis who called it “a work of the highest genius”, The Hierarchy was published by Faber and Faber in 1952. In this book Harding explores, tests and makes sense of his discovery in the broadest and deepest terms. It is not a book for a popular audience, but it is a book that will surely, in time, be recognized as a truly great work of philosophy. In 1961 the Buddhist Society published On Having No Head – written for a popular audience. In the late 1960s and 1970s Harding developed the experiments – awareness exercises designed to make it easy to see one’s headlessness and to explore its mea ning and implications in everyday life. He died in January 2007, shortly before his 98th birthday.
Downloadable Audio and Video files An excellent talk explaining the headless process by Douglas Harding in London 03/03/02 http://www.audiodharma.org/talks/DouglasHarding.html Interview with Catherine Harding on "Urban Guru"
http://urbangurucafe.com/wordpress/wpcontent/uploads/2008/11/catherine_harding.mp3 http://urbangurucafe.com/wordpress/wpcontent/uploads/2008/11/catherine_harding_part2.mp3 http://urbangurucafe.com/wordpress/wpcontent/uploads/2008/12/catherine_harding_part3.mp3 Interview with Richard Lang at EnlightenNext. http://www.enlightennext.org/membership/index.php?q=node/2277 Two video interviews with Richard Lang http://www.viddler.com/explore/ClearSightTV/videos/51/ http://www.viddler.com/explore/ClearSightTV/videos/55/ The website for The Headless Way http://www.headless.org
