Two Way Pointing

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

I am posting them one by one. This is experiment 2

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

TWO-WAY POINTING

Commentary by Richard Lang

Point with one index finger outwards at the world, and with your other index finger point inwards towards your no-face.

The finger pointing outwards points at a scene full of countless shapes and colours. It’s a complicated picture. The more time you spend looking at it, the more there is to see. And most of it is hidden – obscured by other things in one way or another.

The view in is different. Here the space is not hidden at all. You can see it all, all at once. In the photograph I can see only part of the room in the distance, but here I see all of the space. There is nothing more to view here, nothing concealed. Nor is this being that I am here – and that you are here (I suggest) - remote in any way. It is right here, it is what I am. It is the ‘part’ of me that I can never lose. What could be simpler than seeing this – and being this? It is uncomplicated, transparent, open to inspection, nearer than near, given in its entirety…

Is this Who you really are? Are you empty of everything, and at the same time capacity for this endlessly changing view out, room for this amazing world? To find out, just look. Seeing the space here is simpler than simple.

Application in life

Having seen that you are capacity for the world, the next time you are in a complicated or confusing situation, attend to that situation from this capacity, this clearness. Two-way attention: confusing situation there to clarity here. You are not a thing caught up in the situation but are capacity for everything going on. The clarity here is not affected by the confusion there. You can be awake to and rest in the clearness and simplicity that is your innermost being. As you attend to situations from this clarity, the right responses will flow. Gradually, through experience, you come to trust this depth that you are. Appearances are set against other appearances, and are so limited in their resources, but you – Who you really are – are not an appearance. You are not a thing up against other things but the space that takes all things in, the depth from which the world flows.

Begin to develop the habit of being awake to the space you are looking out of, the space you are in fact already living from. In challenging situations, notice you are room for those situations. Give your True Identity the opportunity to come up with a response.

Two-way attention is practical. The solution to challenging situations or problems comes from being consciously open to the One who, after all, invented those challenging situations!

Douglas Harding:

You have actually seen, by carrying out such exercises in basic attention, what it is to be 1st-person singular - the No-thing that is nevertheless keenly aware of Itself as the Container or Ground of the whole display. This seeing is believing. Altogether unmystical (in the popular sense), it is a precise, total, all-or-nothing experience admitting of no degrees - so long as it lasts. Now your task is to go on seeing your Absence/Presence in all situations, till the seeing becomes quite natural and continuous. This is neither to lose yourself in your Emptiness nor in what fills it, but simultaneously to view the thing you are looking at and the No-thing you are looking out of. There will be found no times when this two-way attention is out of place or can safely be dispensed with. The price of sanity is vigilance. The Science of the 1st Person, Douglas Harding