I'm taking a break from this blog

Work is too new and overwhelming still. But there is much to read before this post. Enjoy!

Closed Eyed Experiment

 

Commentary by Richard Lang

Explore what it is to be First Person singular, present tense, with eyes closed. Practically speaking, probably the best way to do this would be to read a question, then close your eyes and investigate your experience. Then open your eyes, read another question, and so on…

With EYES CLOSED … consider the following:

Going by your own, present experience, not by memory, hearsay or imagination, how big are you?

What shape are you?

Could you be any size or shape?

Do you have boundaries?

Is there a place where you stop and the world begins? Or is there nothing dividing you from the world?

You can probably hear a range of sounds, from distant to near ones. Do you hear any sound right where you are? Don't sounds come and go in silence where you are?

You experience sensations such as warmth, discomfort, pleasure, breathing and so on. Do these make you into 'something' at centre, solid and limited – a thing separate from the world around you? Is there anything solid and unchanging at your centre? Or do these sensations come and go in aware no-thingness?

Isn’t this aware no-thingness like a TV screen in the sense that events happen on the screen but leave the screen itself unaffected and undefined? Don’t sounds and sensations come and go but leave awareness unmarked?

Whatever has happened in your past, are you not now empty and clear - capacity for whatever is happening now? The past does not solidify you at centre.

How big is a sensation? Does it define or limit you?

Attend to your right foot. Think of what it looks like. Isn’t the image a memory, since you cannot see your foot at the moment?

But what about the actual sensation of your foot, your experience of it in this present moment, putting aside memory? What colour is that sensation, what shape, what size?

How far away is it? (From where?)

Where exactly are its boundaries – does it have a clear edge?

Is this sensation where your being stops? Are you limited to it, somehow imprisoned inside it?

Isn’t that sensation happening in boundless awareness?

Are you not this awareness, this edgeless being, in which this rather-hard-to-describe, hard-to-pin-down changing sensation is happening?

Just as when you have your eyes open it is face there to space here, isn’t it now, with eyes closed, sensation there to space here? Your being has no boundaries. You are the edgeless space in which body sensations happen.

Pay attention to mental activity – to your thoughts and feelings.

Where are they?

Are they inside something? Or are they inside awareness?

Are they central to you, or are they peripheral?

Do they leave any trace when they have gone? Don’t they come and go on the screen of awareness, just as sounds and sensations come and go, leaving no trace?

We identify with our minds, believing we are our thoughts and feelings. Is your mind contained within anything? Are you contained within anything?

Think of the name of a city.

Did you know what that name was going to be before you thought it? Where did it come from? Where did it happen? Where did it go?

Think of a planet. A friend. A country. Are these thoughts happening inside any kind of container, or are they happening in the boundless space of awareness?

I find no origin, no container, no destination. For me they emerge out of nowhere – out of my undefinable being – without preview, without effort, and they dissolve back into this ‘nothingness’, leaving no mark on this ‘nothingness’.

Imagine the colour blue. Now the colour orange. Now the shape of a triangle. How do you do that?

I have no idea how I do it. These things appear as if by magic.

How creative this no-thingness is, this no-mind as some Zen Buddhists call it. Without effort thoughts and images emerge from nowhere, without preview, without my knowing how I do it.

Be aware of what you are feeling.

Remember how you were feeling earlier in the day. Or yesterday. The flow of feeling is changing all the time.

Are your feelings central to you? Do your feelings leave any marks on awareness? Do difficult experiences traumatise space?

Not in my experience. Where are my feelings? I find no container here. My mind is at large in the universe.

Quotations from Douglas Harding

The trouble with the mind is its supposed abstraction from the world, its supposed imprisonment, its supposed condensation into a nuclear thing here. The mind goes wrong by misapprehending where it is and to whom it belongs. (1977 Interview)

I am truly broad-minded to the degree that my mind, let go of, alights on and merges with and irradiates the whole scene. There it comes into its own. To be opinionated, narrow-minded, under pressure, depressed, repressed – all such diseases of the mind arise from its displacement and resulting compression. Given back to the world, returned to where it came from, it expands and recovers. At large again, it is infinitely large and generous. (Look For Yourself)

All the complexes and problems of the mind arise from its overcrowding and congestion. The cure isn't to reform it but just let it go where it wants to go. We are now letting it go where it belongs. A tremendous relief! It is not perfecting the mind, because the mind is imperfect in every way. Still one experiences sadness and confusion and anxiety, pain, as well as positive feelings. But they are seen as characterising the world and not as personal hang-ups. This relocation helps a lot, but is no recipe for continuous happiness or any kind of perfection where happiness and perfection don't belong. Only at Centre are you All Right! (1977 Interview)

Continue with another experiment

Quotations

God is the Hearer, and it is by attributing this faculty unto thyself that thou art deaf. Thou hast become blind through attributing sight unto thyself. When He is thy hearing and thy sight, then wilt thou hear only Him and see only Him. Ibn Ashir

To prove your mind is the Buddha mind, notice how all I say here goes into you without your missing a single thing, even though I don't try to push it into you. The Buddha mind is ten thousand times clearer than a mirror, and more inexpressibly marvelous. Bankei

This brightness is so great that the loving contemplative, in the ground wherein he rests, sees and feels nothing but an incomprehensible Light; and through that Simple Nudity which enfolds all things, he finds himself, and feels himself, to be that same Light by which he sees, and nothing else. Ruysbroeck

Of inconceivable power am I; without eyes I see; without ears I hear. Kaivalya Upanishad

How can there be perception when we are confronted by nothing at all? The nature of perception being eternal, we go on perceiving whether objects are present or not. Thereby we come to understand that, whereas objects naturally appear and disappear, the nature of seeing does neither of these things; and it is the same with your other senses. The nature of hearing being eternal, we continue to hear whether sounds are present or not. If that is so, who or what is the hearer? It is your own Nature which hears. Hui-hai

Perception that there is nothing to perceive - that is Nirvana, also known as deliverance. Surangama Sutra

You are like a mirage in the desert, which the thirsty man thinks is water; but when he comes up to it he finds it is nothing. And where he thought it was, there he finds God. Similarly, if you were to examine yourself, you would find it to be nothing, and instead you would find God. That is to say, you would find God instead of yourself, and there would be nothing left of you but a name without a form. Al-Alawi

As rivers lose name and shape in the sea, wise men lose name and shape in God, glittering beyond all distance. Mundaka Upanishad

The notion that a man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by… melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. Blake

The outward and the inward man are as different as earth and heaven. Eckhart

Jesus said: What I now seem to be, that am I not… And so speak I, separating off the manhood. Acts of John

Not to know is profound; to know is shallow. Not to know is internal; to know is external. Chuang-tzu

Rejoicing in nothing and knowing nothing are the true rejoicing and the true knowledge. Lao-tzu

Only have no mind of any kind, and this is known as undefiled knowledge. Huang-po

If he had any discriminating mind, do you think he could discriminate anything? Shen-hui

The understanding, the memory and the will are in a fearful void, in nothingness. Love this immense void. Love this nothingness since the infinitude of God is in it. De Caussade

That thou mayest have pleasure in everything, seek pleasure in nothing. That thou mayest know everything, seek to know nothing. That thou mayest possess all things, seek to possess nothing. St. John of the Cross

Those who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly that He is perfectly incomprehensible. St. John of the Cross

Nothing can be more simple than God, either in reality or in our way of understanding. St. Thomas Aquinas

When the Self is seen, heard, thought of, known, everything is known. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

All-knowledge is what constitutes the essence of Buddhahood. It does not mean that the Buddha knows every individual thing, but that he has grasped the fundamental principle of existence and that he has penetrated deep down into the centre of his own bring. D.T. Suzuki

If I knew myself as intimately as I ought, I should have perfect knowledge of all creatures. Eckhart

If you pass beyond form, O friends, it is Paradise and rose-gardens within rose-gardens.
When thou hast broken and destroyed thine own form, thou hast learned to break the form of everything. Rumi

in spite of not posting

Pageviews by Countries Entry Pageviews Russia 84 Ukraine 22 Netherlands 12 United States 4 France 1

Pageviews by Browsers Entry Pageviews Internet Explorer 106 (86%) Firefox 12 (9%) Chrome 4 (3%) Safari 1 (<1%) Pageviews by Operating Systems Entry Pageviews Windows 119 (96%) Macintosh 3 (2%) iPhone 1 (<1%)

The No-Head Cirle

To experience first hand who/what we really are; transparent capacity, we need to DO the experiments that were designed by Douglas Harding and are taught by Richard Lang now. These experiments are very simple and work for many people. This is Experiment 10.

I am posting them one by one.

They come straight from the Headless website: www.headless.org

Commentary by Richard Lang

You are the One that includes the Many.

Let’s test this claim. See if the following description is true for you.

Stand in a circle with some friends - between say 3 and 10 of you.

Put your arms round each other so that you are close, and look down.

You are looking down into a circle of bodies. Obviously the people there are distinct from one another, each occupying their own space. They do not merge into ‘one’. Each person has their own background and history, name, age, nationality and so on. There we are separate and different from one another. There we are many.

Look at your own body - it disappears above your chest. You are headless. Your body emerges from being, from spacious awareness. There are two sides to you – your individual humanity down there, and this spacious awareness at the top of the circle.

Notice that the other bodies also fade out above their waists or chests - into the same spacious awareness that your body fades into.

Here at the top of the circle there are not many spaces - just one. Here in this edgeless awareness are no dividing lines.

This one awareness belongs to you. It is you – the innermost You. As this consciousness, you include everyone present. All these bodies disappear into and emerge out of your innermost being. They are within you. There we are many, here we are one.

Each of us has our own special point of view, our own thoughts and feelings. Most of this is hidden from others. I don't know what you are thinking, nor what your past is. I might not even know your name. Nor do you know what I’m thinking, and so on. We are distinct and different. To a large extent we are mysteries to one another.

But at the top of the circle you are not different from me, are not hidden from me. Here I see not only Who I really am but Who you really are too, for here nothing divides us, here nothing is held back or concealed. Here I see that you are, like me, open, clear, still, boundless…

Here at the top of the circle, in the silence of being, in this clear vastness, this simplicity, all our differences dissolve, all separation is overcome - without denying or destroying those precious differences revealed down there. The One at the top has room for every point of view, room for every being.

Being The One, The Alone

Looking at the Looker I come home to the One, to the Alone, to Who I really am. Down there in the circle I am one amongst many - others stand either side of me, apart from me, with me, perhaps even against me. But here, above the line of our chests, there are no others. Here all divisions are healed, all separation overcome, all otherness dissolved.

Here, including us all, is the One within all beings. You are that One.

Implications

When I assume I am only what I look like, overlooking my spacious inner being, then I consider all others to be outside me, distant, not me, other – and potentially threatening. I confront them with my own face, appearance, body, nationality, age… Confrontation so often leads to conflict. It is a “me and you” situation, an “us and them” scenario.

What difference does it make when I awaken to my spacious being? I am still aware of being a separate individual – I see my body is separate from yours, I know my experiences are different from yours. But I am also aware of being no one and everyone, of being the One that includes all beings. Now I realize you are not simply “other”, you are also myself. Your body is in my being, just as my body is in my being – I am capacity for us both. Now I don’t confront you face to face but include you, space to face. I am you.

To the extent I take this fact seriously, this awareness will change the way I relate to “others” – for now I see that “others” are also myself. Once you have awoken to this deep truth, once you have seen this deep truth, then keep seeing it, keep returning to it, keep being it consciously, keep living from it and exploring what it means. See how it affects the way you respond to others. Enjoy the wonderful, incredible discovery that others are also yourself!

In a crowded railway station, in a café, at a party, at the office, at home, in the supermarket – wherever I am I can choose to be aware that I include and contain everyone and everything. How intimate. How deep. How beautiful. How life changing. How true.

Awaken to and enjoy your inner oneness with all beings!

Continue with another experiment

Quotations

Comments on this experiment

Quotations

We are all more or less ill till we find by Self-enquiry our Oneness with everyone else. D.E. Harding

One is the Alone not by way of exclusion but by way of inclusion. D.E. Harding

Here we sink out differences – or rather, we sink and leave our differences floating. D.E. Harding

When he awakens and sees nobody in the house but himself, then he says, ‘I am, and there is nobody other than I.’ Rumi

Turn thy face towards thine own Face: thou hast no kinsman but thyself. Rumi

I am alone. I am the supreme Brahman. I am the Lord of the Universe. Such is the settled conviction of the Mukta. All other experience leads to bondage. Devikalottara

Fear comes when there is a second. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

top

Touching

1. Touching My "Head"

To experience first hand who/what we really are; transparent capacity, we need to DO the experiments that were designed by Douglas Harding and are taught by Richard Lang now. These experiments are very simple and work for many people. This is Experiment 9.

I am posting them one by one.

They come straight from the Headless website: www.headless.org

text by Richard Lang

A common objection to headlessness is:

“I can’t see my head, it’s true, but I can touch it, so I do have a head here!”

Let’s explore this not through debate but through direct experience.

When I touch my 'head' I see my fingers disappearing, followed by the experience of touch sensations.

Touch your 'head' now. What do you experience?

Are those sensations happening on the surface of your head – heads are solid, coloured, shaped things – or in spacious awareness?

For me they’re happening in spacious awareness.

Here’s Douglas Harding on this subject:

“And if it occurs to me that all this is very visual, and that I can actually feel this solid thing here, filling up the seeming void at the centre of my world, why then I start stroking and pinching and pummelling this thing. Only to find it still isn’t any thing at all, let alone a pink and white and hairy and opaque and all-together-in-one-piece thing. Instead, I find a succession of touch sensations that are no more substantial than the sounds and smells and tastes and so on, which also come and go in the same space.” (from On Having No Head)

Of course I’ve learned that a particular sensation manifests to others (or to myself when I look in the mirror) as the appearance of my mouth, say, or my ear, and so on. And of course it’s vital to know this. It means I understand there’s a direct correlation between what I feel here and my appearance over there. Without this understanding I couldn’t function in society. But this understanding, as much as it is vital for living in the world, doesn't make me into a thing here at centre, separate from every other thing.

Quotation

If sense-data are literally inside the brain we are committed to the conclusion that they are always smaller than the things to which they belong, (or else) that our own head is very much larger than it appears to be from touch. H.H. Price

2. Touching Things

Steve Munroe

Not only do we 'take on' the appearance of what we see and hear but we also take on the texture of whatever we touch - as we can now see by doing this quick experiment:

Extend your index finger and touch any object or surface that's close at hand. It can be anything - the chair, the carpet, your clothes, anything.

What is it that can be sensed here?

Is it a case of feeling the tip of your finger and the object being touched? Or rather, is there only one sensation present, that of the object at hand? The texture of the cloth, the smoothness of the wood. In fact isn't it true to say that the tip of your finger has magically transformed itself into the object you are touching? Your finger tip is that object! Your finger tip has to be empty of itself so that it can take on the texture of the object. In fact the same is true of all your skin over all your body, and of course, of all your senses.

Here is another way of showing ourselves our real and true nature, that is, emptiness for the world to happen in.

Continue with another experiment

Quotations

Comments on this experiment

Quotations

To know a thing is to become it. Erigena

The whole great Earth is nothing but you. Hsueh-feng

All knowledge is, in the strict sense, assimilation. St. Bonaventure

The proper consideration for one of highest spiritual capacity is the absolute unity of knower, knowing, and known. Gampopa

A sudden perception that Subject and object are one will lead you to a deeply mysterious wordless understanding - you will waken to the truth of Zen. Huang-po

Bodhisattvas are able to expand their bodies to the ends of the universe. Gandavyuha Sutra

For a Self-realised being the body does not exist. Anandamayi Ma

Unform thyself. Tauler

Spinning the world

To experience first hand who/what we really are; transparent capacity, we need to DO the experiments that were designed by Douglas Harding and are taught by Richard Lang now. These experiments are very simple and work for many people. This is Experiment 8.

I am posting them one by one.

They come straight from the Headless website: www.headless.org

Commentary by Richard Lang

See a video presentation of this experiment

If you point at your face and turn round on the spot, other people will see you moving whilst the world around you stays still.

Is your own experience the same, or different? Could it be that the world is moving whilst you remain still?

If so, this would indicate that your deepest identity is divine rather than human.

Let’s test this. Stand up, point back at your no-face – where others see your face - and for a few moments slowly and carefully turn round. (Stop if you feel dizzy!)

You can see the room moving beyond your finger. Do you see any movement your side of your finger?









I don’t. Over there I see the room moving by, but here I find stillness. I am at the still centre of the turning world – I AM the still centre.




You can choose to be aware of your inner stillness – your inner divinity – anywhere: walking down the street (the houses are moving), cycling, driving…

At the heart of all the movement in your life is stillness, and being aware of this stillness is relaxing. This still, awake capacity is free of stress. There is nothing here that can become tense – even in the midst of the most difficult situations. (How could capacity be stressed by anything?) You can rest here – it’s more stable than the Earth here.

Consciously include this stillness in your life. Enjoy this inner peace wherever you are.

View video

First Person Video Game extract


Continue with another experiment


Quotations
Douglas Harding:
When you get in your car, just look and see what is moving. Be truthful. See that what you are in fact driving is not the car but the world. You are driving the universe. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, defined God as the unmoved mover of the world. Well, by grace, this is what you are. Gosh! The awesome truth of this. This is meditation. Meditation for me is meditation for life, for the marketplace. Highly practical. You say, is it practical? Yes it is. If you do a lot of driving I recommend this to you. If you want to drive well and without tension and with pleasure, and without tiring yourself very much or at all, drive England, drive France. Much better than driving your Clio. This is so practical, you see. I do recommend it. It's childlike, it's obvious, it's fun too. You see this thing is so amusing, entertaining. If you want to be entertained, if you want to discover that God Almighty has a terrific sense of humour, then come home and enjoy the humour. Do it! Test it! Don't believe a word I put out. Don't believe any of it. Just is it true? Am I mad, am I talking rubbish, or is it true? And if it's true, try it, give it a whirl. As Eckhart said, what have you got to lose by giving it a whirl? I think you will find that it is intensely, 100% practical.
From an interview with Douglas Harding.

Other Quotations

The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge. Eckhart

Whoever says that the Tathagata goes or comes, sits or lies down, he does not understand the meaning of my teaching. Diamond Sutra

The Qutb (Pole) is he who turns round himself; round him is the revolution of the heavenly spheres. Rumi

When I cross the bridge, it is the bridge that flows, not the water. Zen Saying

For a long time I used to walk round the Kaaba. When I attained God, I saw the Kaaba walking round me. Abu Yazid Al-Bistami, circa 870 A.D.

Why do you think that you are active? Take the example of your arrival here. You left home in a cart, took a train, alighted at the railway station here, got into a cart there and found yourself in this Ashram. When asked, you say you travelled all the way here from your town. Is it true? Is it not a fact that you remained as you were and there was movement… all along the way? Just as those motions are confounded with your own, so also are all other activities. They are not your own. Ramana Maharshi

As we rush, as we rush in the Train,
The trees and the houses go wheeling back,
But the starry heavens above the plain
Come flying on our track. James Thomson

At the centre, where no-one abides, there this light is quenched… for this Ground is the indivisible stillness, motionless in itself, and by this Immobility all things are moved. Eckhart

And every Space that a man views around his dwelling-place
Standing on his own roof or in his garden on a mount
Of twenty-five cubits in height, such space is his Universe:
And on its verge the Sun rises and sets, the Clouds bow
To meet the flat Earth and the Sea in such an order'd Space:
The Starry heavens reach no further, but here bend and set
On all sides, and the two Poles turn on their valves of gold;
And if he move his dwelling-place; his heavens also move
Where'er he goes, and all his neighbourhood bewail his loss.
Such are the Spaces called Earth and such its dimension.
William Blake

If they ask you, 'What is the sign of your Father in you?', say to them, 'It is a movement and a rest'. The Gospel of Thomas.

top

Comments Several years ago Douglas Harding was giving a workshop in Ireland. A friend was talking with him during a break.

“Douglas, you are in your eighties now, and you travel the world so much of the time, yet you don’t seem to get tired!”

Douglas replied: “That’s because I don’t go anywhere!”
R.L. UK

In the workshop there was a man on my right who several times said how important being still whilst the scenery moves was to him. I was very touched by him… I got the participants to do the spinning experiment - and let them do it for ten or fifteen minutes. It was a strong experience for many of them. How simple and accessible, how shareable, this headlessness is. One of the participants went home after the Friday evening and showed his wife. R.L. UK.

I was one of those participants that did the "spinning experiment - for ten or fifteen minutes. It was a strong experience for many of them, including myself. I was struck my the fact that after spinning in a circle for such a long time I had no experience of dizziness whatsoever! The body/mind lost its domination over where I look out of. This happened several times, during several experiments which brought me back home. G. USA

I’m living in Amsterdam. I came across the headless way about 3 years ago when I attended a two-day seminar Douglas gave near Nice, in the South of France. The finger-pointing exercise literally blew my head away, and the closed-eye one finished me off. I hadn’t expected anything from the seminar. The name Douglas Harding was familiar: I had read something about him in a book by Colin Wilson called Beyond the Occult. Wilson quotes the famous passage from the beginning of On Having No Head and then goes on to say that that’s all very well but its probably the kind of emptiness and simplicity experienced by cows in a field! Well, I thought perhaps I was in for an entertaining lecture on Zen Buddhism. I was in no way expecting to be literally decapitated. It was difficult not to burst out in peels of laughter during the rest of the seminar. That night, and every night for about the next 3 weeks, I found the in-seeing - awareness of oneself - to be so interesting and absorbing, so perfect and complete, that going to sleep seemed an absurdity. I lay awake for hours - just staying with the seeing and the realisation of what this all means.

Since then, seeing has become less intense but has remained constant. It took a little while to ‘get’ the assertion that it is the world and not I that moves. Now its a tremendous thing to cycle around this beautiful city and see, beyond all doubt, that it’s Amsterdam that flies by while ‘I’ am this awake unmoving stillness. The way close objects like the road beneath ones feet flash by and more distant things like buildings and trees float past gracefully is a spectacle I never tire of. This has certainly become my favourite exercise. J.R. Holland

We did the test in which you point at yourself, and spin around your own axis. This reminded me of an experience I have with aikido (a martial art). Two or three times a week, I practice aikido. At some moments, I had two difficulties during my practice: one was that, when I trained with some people, I felt a kind of fear when somebody ‘attacked’ me, so that my body became tense and stiff, which hindered carrying out the technique. Another problem was that I sometimes became dizzy, because there is a lot of tumbling around in aikido. These problems vanished into thin air, when I reminded myself of the Void I am. When somebody attacked me, I felt relaxed, because who was there to attack? When I had to tumble around, I did not feel dizzy anymore, because there was no one here to feel dizzy, and besides, there was only a stillness in which the world turned around, not me. M. Belgium

On the way home, driving the van in and around the town’s streets, aware of the traffic and the road lights, concentrating. Then, down the slip road and onto the quiet of the motorway. No street lights and at this time of the evening not much traffic, just gently cruising along, watching the white lane markers come and go, in and out of the area lit up by the headlights.

Nothing’s coming the opposite way. Or, maybe there is - I’m just concentrating on a patch of darkened road just ahead of the beam of my lights. My mind’s in an ‘automatic pilot’ mode. The gentle green glow of the dash lights soothes my eyes and highlights my hands on the steering wheel leaving the remainder of the van as a backdrop of dark velvet.

Driving along a relatively straight section of the motorway requires little movement and leaves me feeling relaxed, which after a while leaves me with only an awareness of my hands, giving the feeling of being disembodied or disassociated from them. Maybe they’re someone else’s!

This stillness of my self within me contrasts with the mesmerising hurry of the road, coming rushing into the pool of light from the front and blurring, flowing, around the van and past me. I have no awareness of my body, just my hands. There is just ‘me’. Looking out. Like viewing the world through some 3-dimensional window, protected from the environment outside. A third party. Stillness is me, with my awareness looking out.

There you go... that’s an attempt to describe a particular experience I associate with ‘headlessness’. I.K. UK

Swings

Swings are fun,
swings are free,
swings go high,
swings go low,
swings go high,
and never I.

Rosemary, aged 7.

Whilst jogging this morning, I decided to walk a while backwards to watch that beautiful sunrise over the Alpines. And suddenly, surprise, surprise (ok - maybe not for you "long-time seers" but for me!) I realised how the road floated out from here, how the space here gave birth to the hills over there, to the mountains, the sun ....... how creative this space is, how, how...... AMAZING! S.C. Germany.

Seeing your nose

To experience first hand who/what we really are; transparent capacity, we need to DO the experiments that were designed by Douglas Harding and are taught by Richard Lang now. These experiments are very simple and work for many people. This is Experiment 7.

I am posting them one by one.

They come straight from the Headless website: www.headless.org

WHAT IS YOUR NOSE ATTACHED TO?

Commentary by Richard Lang

Sometimes, when people realize that from their own point of view they are faceless – and therefore capacity for the world - they then get worried about being able to see their noses. “I can see my nose – doesn’t this mean that I have a face here after all, that I’m not space for the world?”

Let’s look into this.

Clearly for others your nose is in the middle of your face. This is the objective view of you.

Where is it from your point of view, subjectively? What is it attached to, if anything?

When you look at your nose, instead of a single thing placed in the middle of a face, don't you see a blur, sometimes opaque, sometimes transparent, sometimes on one side of the world, sometimes on the other?

Are any of these attached to a face? Don't they come out of nowhere – suspended there with no support, emerging from the Void!

Notice how big your nose is! Close one eye – doesn’t your nose start somewhere near the ceiling and stretch right down to the floor?

Attend to the region your side of your nose. Here is a place only you can see. Is there anything there?

I find nothing at all, here on the near side of my nose blur. But this is a nothingness that isn’t a mere nothing – it’s an awake nothing filled with my world, including that nose.

My nose is nothing like other people’s noses. Theirs are small and on their faces. That’s the human nose for you. But mine is immense, multiple, and emerges from nowhere! This is not a human nose (just as my single Eye is not a human eye). It is God’s nose! I’ve discovered that God, although faceless, has a nose! (Well, many noses!)









Here is a self-portrait by Ernst Mach, complete with First Person nose (and moustache!). This drawing inspired Douglas Harding to notice his own headlessness in 1942.











So which is true? Are you what you look like to others, nose in the middle of your face? Or are you what you are in your own experience, “noses” emerging from spacious awareness?

I find this is not an “either/or” situation but "both/and". For others I have an appearance - I am a thing amongst things; for myself I am capacity for things – including my nose! I'm aware of both sides of myself.

A Remedy For Stress

So much unnecessary stress has its origin in identifying exclusively with the way others see us. Overlooking and invalidating my own point of view, I make a mistake about my deepest identity and find myself up against the world, separate from others, limited in my resources, vulnerable to all kinds of danger, and in the end, destined to die. It was vital to become self-conscious, to grow out of infancy into adulthood, but this need not be the end of the journey. Each of us can now go on to see Who we really are. This doesn't mean that we regress to infancy - we can be aware of both our True Identity and our human identity. However, becoming aware of our True Identity means we discover a stress-free space at the heart of our sometimes stressed lives. It is up to each of us how much we pay attention to this Resource. If we don't drink from this Well, we will probably find ourselves complaining of thirst, or even dying of thirst. And all the while the Water is so close, and free! Take a drink. Now. What have you got to lose? Your self! What have you got to gain? Everything, including your self!

Asking what your nose is attached to may sound ridiculous or trivial, but it isn’t, when you find that it leads to the Centre and Origin of the world, to the Peace that passes all understanding, to the Well at the World's End.

Douglas Harding:

If I fail to see what I am (and especially what I am not) it’s because I’m too busily imaginative, too “spiritual”, too adult and knowing, too credulous, too intimidated by society and language, too frightened of the obvious to accept the situation exactly as I find it at this moment. Only I am in a position to report on what’s here. A kind of alert naivety is what I need. It takes an innocent eye and an empty head (not to mention a stout heart) to admit their own perfect emptiness. On Having No Head, Douglas Harding

Forgetting what I'm told and imagine, what society with its common sense and the science of the object tell me to believe, and at last daring to look for myself and to take seriously what I find - well, what do I find? I find surprise upon surprise, beyond my wildest dreams. I see that what I had believed to be true of me and of the world is a pack of lies! The Science of the 1st Person, Douglas Harding.

Continue with another experiment

Quotation

Comment on this experiment

Quotation

A monk asked Nan-ch’uan: “Where are one’s nostrils before one is born?” The Master replied, “Where are one’s nostrils after one has been born?”

Comment

We had a mini workshop last night and did a couple of experiments with some success. As usual, I think I got more out of it than those who had come to find out what I was on about. One woman, in her early seventies, has excellent recall of her early childhood and remembers the time she thought she only had a nose on the occasions when it became necessary to wipe it. Her nose somehow manifested to meet the approaching handkerchief. A.M. Australia