The Mirror

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 6.

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

“But I can see my face in the mirror…”

The mirror shows you what you look like – your appearance.

Which of your appearances it contains depends on where you place the mirror.

At arm’s length it contains your face. This is more or less what others make of you at this range. (For others your features are, as in a photograph, left to right compared with what you see in the mirror.)














Bring the mirror closer and you get a slightly different picture. This is again similar to what others see at this closer range.







Bring the mirror right up to you and you get a blur – this is the inward limit of the mirror. Someone else looking at you at this range would also see a blur.

The mirror is a great device for helping you become aware of what you look like at different distances. It confirms that your appearance changes with range.




Place a large mirror further away and you will see your whole body. At this distance others would also see all of you, from head to toe. Only at this range does the whole of your body manifest.

















Notice how your body in the mirror over there has a head and is the normal way up, but your real body – the one you see when you look down – is headless and the opposite way up (and your left is that mirror person’s right…).








If you imagine a large mirror moving away from you in the sky, you would see your human appearance shrinking to a dot and being replaced by the local environment - houses, roads, fields… followed by your country and continent. This is more or less what observers would also see looking at you from a plane or rocket. At close range you see your individual face in the mirror, at greater ranges your urban and then your national face. Each is a valid view of you, an important layer of your identity. Sometimes we identify deeply with our neighbourhood, city, country…







Now imagine a mirror on the moon: what would it contain? The beautiful Earth. Hold a mirror at arms length and you see your human face; imagine a mirror on the moon and you would see your planetary face. You need both faces, both bodies. How could you breathe without either your lungs or your atmosphere? Your life depends on both layers.


At greater ranges what would a mirror reveal? Your solar body, then your galactic body. You cannot exist without these bodies either.

Archetypal images of these layers sometimes emerge into consciousness in our dreams. Deep down we know we are far wider and deeper than just our human self.





Thus the mirror confirms what science reports – your human identity is only one layer in an onion-like system made of many layers.

Who, then, is at the centre of all these layers? Who or what are all these appearances appearances of?

The mirror cannot tell you for you cannot physically bring it all the way home to your centre. The nearest image you can see of yourself, using a mirror, is a blur. And though scientists may get closer, revealing the blur to be cells, molecules, atoms, particles… however close they approach they always remain distant from you, outside you.

Your appearances are on show to others and to yourself in the mirror. How can you uncover what are you at the heart of all these appearances, at no distance?

Look for yourself. It’s as simple as that.

Looking For Yourself

When you look in a mirror, you see your face there.

Do you see a second face on your side of the mirror, or do you see space?

I find no face here confronting the face in the mirror. I am space here for my appearance there. I am capacity for my face in the mirror.

Over there behind the glass is my human appearance; here this side of the glass is my divine reality. I am both. I have that face and I am this reality. My face there is an appearance of the One I really am - here. (One of my many appearances.)



Is this also true for you? Where is your face? Here, or there?






Try this: point back at yourself whilst looking in a mirror.

The person in the mirror is pointing back at their face.

What is your finger - this side of the mirror - pointing at?

A face or space?

What Difference Might This Make In Your Life?

Relief

When you see into your True Nature you see that your appearance belongs out there in the mirror and in others. You take seriously the fact it isn’t given here at centre. Your humanity is peripheral. What a relief. There is nothing to maintain at centre, nothing to worry about, nothing to adjust, change, heal, get rid of, get depressed about, criticize, boast about... You can relax back into this free and healthy space – if you choose to. Here at centre you are supremely well – you’ve never been better!

Your Human Self

You are divine at centre, human in appearance – at a certain range. Seeing Who you really are doesn’t mean you are no longer aware of your appearance, no longer self-conscious – that’s impossible as well as undesirable. So you still respond to your name, still recognize yourself in the mirror, still take responsibility for your actions. Of course. But you are now aware that your humanity is like a disguise, an incarnation you have taken on to be here in this world. Inwardly you are God, outwardly you are a person – a unique person with a special contribution to make. Instead of thinking you are just that person, that appearance, you are awake to the Power behind you, the Safety within you, the Source of inspiration and guidance at the heart of your human life. This enables you to be yourself even more so.

Unconditional Love

This Power at your back, this Safety residing in the very heart of you, is unconditional love in the sense that this head-free space, being no-thing, has no means of rejecting anyone or anything. You are built open - for your own life and for the lives of others.

The discovery of Who you really are is a profound challenge to the way we normally see ourselves and others. As we go on living from the Truth, the way we relate to both ourselves and others changes at the deepest level. Attend to the Truth, and find out how the discovery of unconditional love affects you personally.

Douglas Harding:

One of the greatest instruments of the truth that God is nearer to me than Douglas is the mirror, which takes that Douglas obstruction out of God’s way. My mirror is a marvellous, marvellous teacher, more valuable than all the scriptures of the world. Face to No-Face, Douglas Harding.

My mirror confirms this wide-openness right here where I am. The very thing which long ago put a face on me now relieves me of it. Now I look in the glass to see what I’m not like! Douglas Harding

The whole of my life and what I have to share with people is, Come back from identifying with the guy in the mirror, who is very important but is there. Come back from him there to here, to his Origin, which is exactly where you are. Video Interview with Douglas Harding

See also My Special Friend by Douglas Harding

View video

Continue with another experiment

Quotations

Comments on this experiment

Quotations

His form has passed away, he has become a mirror: naught is there but the image of another's face. Rumi

But we all, with unveiled face, reflecting as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed. St. Paul

Alone, without form or face,
Foothold or prop, one goes on
To love That, beyond all creatures,
Which may be won by happy chance. St. John of the Cross

As a beauty I am not a star -
There are others more handsome by far -
But my face, I don't mind it,
For I am behind it:
It's those in front get the jar. Attributed to Woodrow Wilson

A sleepy-eyed grandmother
Encounters herself in an old mirror.
Clearly she sees a face,
But it doesn't resemble hers at all. Tozan Ryokai

Everyone likes a mirror, while not knowing the true nature of his face. After all, how long does a reflection remain in view? Make a practice of contemplating the origin of the reflection… This cheek and mole go back to the Source thereof. Rumi

And we, spectators always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of anything!…
Who's turned us round like this? Rilke

I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made. Yeats

Loosing and dropping off body and mind, your Original Face is clear before you. Zazen-gi

Not one of the 1700 koans of Zen has any other purpose than to make us see our Original Face. Daito Kokushi

When thought is put down, the Original Face appears. Daito Kokushi

He that beholds his own Face - his light is greater than the light of the creatures. Though he die, his sight is everlasting, because his sight is the sight of the Creator. Rumi

A Brahmin went for help to the Buddha, carrying a gift of flowers in each hand.
"Let go," commanded the Buddha, and the Brahmin dropped the flowers in his right hand.
"Let go," repeated the Buddha, and the Brahmin dropped the flowers in his left hand.
"Let go," said the Buddha again, and the Brahmin stood nonplussed.
"Let go of what is in neither hand, but the middle."
At these words the Brahmin went away satisfied.

When thou seest in the pathway a severed head… of it thou wilt learn our hidden mystery. Rumi

I am free from head. Rumi

You have never beheld the head of Man: you are a tail. Rumi

Behead yourself! Rumi

You must choose one of two things - either have your head cut off or go into exile… He who loves Me, but loves his head better, is no true lover. Attar

He played away his head, laughing and rejoicing. Rumi

A monk said he had the precious sword. Ten-t'ou stretched out his neck, saying: "Well, then, cut off my head." The monk said: "Your head is off!" at which Yen-t'ou laughed loudly. But the monk did not perceive the meaning of that laughter. Blue Cliff Record

The precious Vajra sword is right here and its purpose is to cut off the head. Tai-hui

If He sever one head from the body, He at once raises up thousands of heads for the beheaded one. Rumi

The Single Eye

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 5.

I am posting them one by one.

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

Commentary by Richard Lang

How many eyes are you looking out of? Of course other people see two eyes when they look at you, and you see two in the mirror. But how many do you see from your own point of view? Take a fresh look at yourself. Perhaps you have been overlooking something both obvious and wonderful.

I am looking out of one eye. In fact, it’s not even an eye – it’s an edgeless, undivided space, a frameless, wide-open window. From this clear window I can at this moment see my desk and computer, and beyond these things my garden.

This single Eye is not a human eye. It is God’s Eye, the Eye of the One Self, the Eye of the Buddha…

Are you also looking out of a frameless window, a single Eye – God’s Eye?



To bring your attention home to your single Eye, hold your hands out in front of you as if they were a pair of glasses you are going to put on. If you wear glasses you can take them off and hold them out instead.

You see two holes. There is a different view in each hole.











Now slowly bring them towards you and put them on.



































When you put the ‘glasses’ on, what happens to the dividing line between the two holes? Doesn’t it disappear, leaving one undivided, edgeless space that you are looking out of? One undivided, edgeless space that you are.






Observe the ‘edge’ of your field of vision. Notice that you cannot look directly at it. (Anything you look at moves into the centre of the field of vision.)

Is there really an ‘edge’ to your field of vision, a distinct boundary? Or does it gradually fade off? Into what? Into no-thing? Into your single, edgeless Eye?






Move your hand to this edge. See how it vanishes here. This is the place where things disappear.












How wide is this Eye of yours? Wider than the world?




Every line or boundary in the world has things on either side of it –every object has an environment, is surrounded by other objects. Check this out by looking at the things around you.

But there is one boundary beyond which there are no things - the boundary around your view of the world.

When I pay attention to this ‘boundary’ I find nothing beyond it. It’s a unique ‘boundary’.

Here is the ‘edge of the world’ What is beyond it? An abyss without end? You are this abyss – the abyss in which the world floats. All things are within you.

Relaxation

You can notice your single Eye anywhere, anytime. Discover how relaxing it is to be edgeless. There is no tension at all in this spacious clarity. What a resource in times of stress!

The Many And The One

The view out from this single Eye is unique to each person, and always changing. Looking out I see my living room now - you will see something different. But what about the view in? How could my view in – into this single Eye – be different from yours? There is nothing here to see differently. Here we are One.

From the Video Interview: Douglas Harding, His Life and Philosophy

What about observing what's going on—this transformation of two little windows into one Window which is as wide as the world. In India they talk about the opening of the Third Eye. You have to go to India or Mexico or Japan or somewhere for the opening of the Third Eye. But it's available here and now, wherever you are, isn't it? Did you ever look out of anything but this Window?

You know, six hundred years before Christ they were saying in India that there is one Seer in all beings. One Seer. The Sufis said it, the Buddhists said it. Hui Hai, a great Buddhist Zen master, said, 'Do we see with our eyes? No we see with our Buddha Nature.' We see with a Single Eye say the Sufi masters, later. One Seer. This is the Eye you're looking out of. I find this absolutely extraordinary. See what you're looking out of! And this is a strange thing—this agrees with modern science. Eyes do not see. Eyes condition, are part of the conditioning apparatus of what we see. They help to determine what we see, but the seeing doesn't go on at the eye level. It really has to go back, via the optic nerves and so on, to a region of the brain where the story is taken up. It starts off there with the sun, the light comes down, is filtered through the atmosphere of the Earth, strikes the object and hits your eye, and is then conveyed to a region of the visual cortex in the brain, where the story is taken up by atoms, particles and so on. It's not until that terminus is reached that you say, 'Hi! I see you.' The thing that starts with the galaxy, with the light of the sun out there, ends with the agitation or whatever of particles here. And it's only where the All is reduced to No-thing here that seeing takes place.

That is the scientific story, and it is my story. This is where seeing takes place. In the No-thing that I am here, is the Seer, the great Seer, the one Eye of the One. I find this extraordinary really. Extraordinary. You never looked out of anything but this—what they call in the East the Third Eye. It seems to me that the Almighty in his mercy, undeserved, by pure Grace, is just pouring upon us the invitation to enjoy union with Him. You know, St. Thomas Aquinas—the great intellect of the mediaeval Catholic Church—St Thomas Aquinas wrote great books of theology, of the Catholic faith, and he still is regarded as a great authority. At the end of his not very long life he said, 'It's all straw. All straw. What matters is the Beatific Vision of union with God. That's what matters. That's the meaning of our lives.'

So I say, Go for it. Go for it!

From another interview with Douglas Harding

The words are incidental. All teachers would agree, we learn by doing. What we learn by, what I learn by, what I have to share is a doing thing, active. This is an active thing. Put on your glasses and see the two holes become one — you are looking out of one Eye that is as wide as the world and is not a human eye. Your human eye you see in the mirror. This Eye which is as wide as the world, is not a human eye. It is the Eye of the One Seer in all beings that the Upanishads spoke of. It is the doing thing that is important.

Continue with another experiment

Quotations

Comments on this experiment

Quotations

Just tell me what your eyes are. Genro

It is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire. Jesus

Jesus said to them: When you make the two one… then you will go into the Kingdom. Gospel of Thomas

He became one-eyed. Attar

The Tathagata became the Eye of the universe. Parinirvana Sutra

Thou art not that body: thou art this spiritual Eye. Rumi

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing: I see all. Emerson

Real vision is eyeless. Anandamayi Ma

Become seeing, seeing, seeing! Rumi

Become vision itself. Plotinus

When Chang Ching, after twenty years of meditation, happened to lift the curtain and see the outside world, he lost all his previous understanding of Zen, and cried: "How mistaken I was! How mistaken I was! Raise the screen and see the world."

Anything, however small, adhering to the soul, prevents your seeing me. We cannot see the visible except with the invisible. Meister Eckhart

Thou seest those eyes looking, but they are like pictures in a bath-house: they do not see. The form appears, O worshipper of form, as though its two dead eyes were looking. Rumi

If there were no eye, what? If there were no ear, what? If there were no mouth, what? If there were no mind, what? If one has to face such circumstances and knows how to act then one is in the company of the ancient Patriarchs and Buddhas. Anyone in that company is satisfied. Blue Cliff Record

I look and listen without using eyes and ears. Lieh-tzu

By what means do this body or mind perceive? Can they perceive with the eyes, ears…?
No. Your own Nature, being essentially pure and utterly still, is capable of perception. Hui-hai

There is no seer but Him, no one to hear but him, no one thinking, no one aware but Him. He is the Self, the Ruler within, the One Immortal. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
It is the Unborn which sees and hears, eats and sleeps. Bankei

Only God has seeing, hearing. Al-Arabi

The Bottom Line

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 3.

I am posting them one by one.

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

THE BOTTOM LINE

 

Commentary by Richard Lang

Obviously for others you are not headless! You also stand the normal way up like everybody else - your head at the top, then your torso, followed by your legs and feet at the bottom.







But consider your own point of view – are you different?

I am.

From my point of view my body is headless. It is also upside down, with my feet towards the top of my field of vision, above the rest of my body! Below my feet I see my legs, and then below them my tummy and then my chest - which then fades out. Here at the bottom of my field of vision is my bottom line.

Below this line, what do I find? My chest fades out into nothing! A vast abyss - boundless and empty.


And yet, it’s not simply empty - it’s also full. Of what?

It is full of everything that’s above the bottom line.

Have a look for yourself. Is your body also headless?

Are your feet towards the top of your field of vision and your chest at the bottom – if so, your body is upside down!

Bring your attention down to the region where your body fades out – at the bottom of your field of vision. What is below this bottom line? Anything at all?

And what is above it?



In this map Douglas Harding illustrates that above the bottom line is the whole world. Emerging from the bottom line, in the nearest region, is one’s own headless body. Above and beyond your headless body is the region of other people, including your image in the mirror, and then, above and beyond this layer, is the rest of life and the rest of the planet, then other planets, other stars, other galaxies… The whole universe is above your bottom line.


Being Awake means not overlooking the mystery below your bottom line – this no-thingness. It is seeing and being What you really are - the abyss from which the world uprushes into being like a geyser bursting from the ground. Though the ground of your being is not a thing, it comes up with all things.







From this point of view - the First Person point of view - I am creating this world: without knowing how I do it, without making any effort, without knowing quite what is going to burst forth next from below the bottom line. Look! This moment is exploding into being from within you.








Living The First Person Life
To be aware of what is below your bottom line as well as what is above it, is to live a profoundly different life from the “merely human” life. It is, amazingly, to live God’s life. This is of course an inner life, a secret life - no one else sees your bottom line, no one else sees you conjuring the world out of nothing! You know full well that for others you are not God! You don’t confuse your individual identity, your appearance, with your deepest identity, your innermost reality.

But which of these two lives is your direct experience, and which is hearsay and second-hand? Which is appearance, which is reality? Which is the life you are actually living?

What difference does it make in your life when you are aware of What is below your bottom line? Find out! Discover how you deal with situations when you realize they are emerging from your own being. Your being is not a product of the world but its Origin. In other words, you are not, in your heart of hearts, an appearance, a right-way-up headed person – a product of the world, a thing amongst things, closed and limited, a victim of circumstance… You are the Origin, the Alone, the Source from which all things flow. Awareness of this makes all the difference.

Take self-esteem for example: What greater remedy for low self-esteem than discovering this unlimited power and glory within you? A discovery that is naturally accompanied by humility and self-acceptance, for though your inner power and glory are astonishing, they are not something you as a person can take credit for. They do not increase your human status one iota. You can neither show your divinity to others, nor demonstrate your power outwardly. I remember Douglas Harding relating how he was giving a workshop to a group of young kids. He quoted Meister Eckhart who said, simply, "God's in, I'm out." One young boy, hearing this, commented: "And it doesn't make you proud!"

Douglas Harding:

I end downwards, at the bottom of the scene, in a Blank that’s unoccupied and imageless and unimaginable, in absolutely nothing whatever. Here, completing my submission to the evidence, I come to the most overlooked and underrated spot in the world, the place that’s replaced with No-place, the Terminus of termini, unique, baffling, the Mystery that’s more than worthy of my humblest obeisance. All other places and objects I come across are set on all sides against a background. Somewhere or other they stop and something else begins: however big, they are encompassed within a perimeter – sharp or blurred – where they end and their environment begins. All except this magic shirt I’m wearing. It’s as if some transcendental moth had been at it all along the neckline. Indeed this is the gnawing of no creature but the gnawing mystery of creation itself, of WHERE caught redhanded popping up out of NO-WHERE, of WHAT popping up – a divine Jack-in-the-box – out of NO-WHAT. All things above this Ultimate Bottom Line – those toy shoes up there, those truncated trunks, that pelmet-shirt itself on three of its four sides – all are normal inasmuch as they rest on something. Those are things that I can handle, that I have taped, that lie well within my capacity. But This defeats me. Here I’ve come to something that rests on no support, on a gap. Now this is irregular, abnormal, absurd – terms altogether too weak to do justice to such an Oddity. Here is the Line which underwrites and underscores all things, and is itself underwritten and underscored by a total White-out, by What’s conspicuous by its absence. Above it, the world; below it not so much as a dust-grain – nor (and this is the point here) room for one. (Head Off Stress)

No longer so damned cocksure I know what it's like being me, I dare to start all over again and bow before the evidence - actually as well as metaphorically. I bend and bow so deeply that I come to the very edge of me and my world, to the Bottom Line it all arises from. A frontier that doesn't prevent me from gazing past it and in to the Infinite Source of All, brilliantly on display yet awesomely mysterious. (The Trial of the Man who said he was God)

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

The experiments; 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 will post them one by one.

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

Experiment 1 POINTING

Who are you really? Not who are you in other people’s eyes, or in the mirror, or according to your beliefs and unexamined assumptions, but in your own direct experience.

Great spiritual teachers say you are not your appearance – deep down, secretly, nearer to you than your breathing, you are capacity for the world. They say that to discover this wonderful truth about yourself you must look simply and innocently, as a child looks. Where do you look? Right where you are, at the Looker. When? Now.

To see Who you really are, carry out the following experiment.

When you point anywhere in the world you point at appearances. You are distant from what you are looking at and you see things, you see objects. Observe this – direct your attention at things by pointing at them. (The following images are a guide only -- it's imperative to actually DO the experiment.)



For example, I can see the shapes and colours of this room…

of my foot...

...of my knee

of my chest...

In all these instances attention is directed outwards, at objects.

Now point where others see your face.




What do you see? You are now looking inwards – turning the direction of your attention round 180˚ from the objects out there to you the Subject, to the place you are looking out of. Do you see your face? Do you see anything at all there - any colour or shape, any movement?

Looking in to the place where others see my face, I find no colour or shape here. I find boundless capacity or awareness this side of my pointing finger. This capacity is empty, clear, transparent. It is self-evidently awake, aware.

At the same time this capacity is full of everything happening in it: my finger, my view of the scene beyond, sounds, feelings…

I am now seeing Who I really am – seeing the boundless One at the very heart of myself, the One in whom the world is happening.

What do you find? Are you also looking out of this wide-open, crystal clear, awareness?

Pointing Home Movie (1991 kb)

Douglas Harding by Richard Lang (Headless)

Douglas Harding

 

by Richard Lang

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 ‘first-time’ 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 dramatically in On Having No Head. To read the relevant passage, click here.

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. (The Shollond Trust published copies of the much larger original manuscript in 1998. Visit the bookshop.) 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. (Also available in the bookshop.)

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 meaning and implications in everyday life.

Harding wrote other books - also available via the bookshop. He died in January 2007, shortly before his 98th birthday.

See also the obituary of Douglas Harding from the Independent.

I AM YOU