On Having No Head

Product Information

It felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused life-history. It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too clever or too scared to see. It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face – my utter facelessness.” Nevertheless Harding uses persuasive words to describe this mystical vision, from a scientific, experiential, experimentation point of view. In terms of our Western tradition, our breakthrough is our unconditional and ever-renewed surrender to God’s will as perfectly revealed in our circumstances – to God’s will clearly on show all around us and within us, in the shape of all that’s going on right now. Insofar as his will becomes ours, we see his world as it is; and, insofar as we see it as it is, our will becomes his and from our hearts we welcome all that world is bringing to us. Here, in short, our seeing and our willing merge– not once-and-for-all of course, but moment by moment, so long as life lasts.”

Prominent among them all is a realization – a many-sided spiritual development appropriate to our Stage (6) but certainly not confined to it – which insists on special attention at this point. It is the experience of unknowing, of one’s profound and all-inclusive ignorance. In fact, it follows from ‘I am nothing’ that ‘I know nothing’, for obviously an informed nothing is not a nothing but a something, form and not void.” Budding yeast also keep a history which influences their future behavior – a memory of past events. They avoid pheromone-induced cessation of cell cycle after a deceptive mating attempt (failure to reach a putative partner cell within a specific time period). The mechanisms of this are beginning to be unraveled (driven by the dynamics of the maternally segregating G1/S inhibitor Whi3), and the authors term the macromolecular assemblies that mediate this memory “mnemons”, cellular structures that encode previous environmental conditions ( Caudron and Barral, 2013). With respect to the search for the molecular substrate of specific memories, this yeast work may be ahead of similar efforts in the brain ( Ungar, 1972, 1974a, b). 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 snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.”Classic work explored the extensive parallels between chemical gradients during development and signal processing in the visual system ( Grossberg, 1978), and indeed early quantitative models of patterning (explaining self-regulatory features like proportion regulation) were based on visual system function ( Hartline et al., 1956; Gierer and Meinhardt, 1972). More recent efforts include the notion of memory for position during regeneration ( Chang et al., 2002; Kragl et al., 2009; Wang et al., 2009) and development ( Beloussov, 1997) and for signaling hysteresis during development ( Balaskas et al., 2012), excitable cortex memory models of pseudopod dynamics ( Cooper et al., 2012), and neural network models of chemical signaling ( Ling et al., 2013) (which showed formal isomorphisms between gene regulation networks and Hebbian learning in neural nets) ( Watson et al., 2010; Ling et al., 2013). In addition to classical neuroscience concepts, more exotic group cognition models have been applied to patterning ( Gunji and Ono, 2012), while a few recent studies investigated the decision-making and formal computational capabilities of RD systems – a chemical signaling modality often used to model morphogenesis ( Adamatzky et al., 2003, 2008; Costello et al., 2009; Dale and Husbands, 2010, which is now known to be Turing-complete ( Scarle, 2009) and support semantic interpretations ( Schumann and Adamatzky, 2009). Despite these fascinating efforts to identify elements of cognitive-like processing in well-known elements of pattern formation, developmental biology is still firmly centered in a mechanistic perspective, seeking explanations in terms of pathways and not information (systems that know things and make decisions based on that understanding). However, it is crucial to note that attributing true knowledge and memory to biological systems is not mystical thinking – computational neuroscience shows us a clear proof of concept that information-level, cognitive approaches to cellular networks are viable, and in fact necessary, strategy for understanding a system at all of its salient levels. Your face is itching? Great, that's a nice thing to notice. You want it to stop? Boom, lost in thought. You've taken your mind off of the itch, and you're now anticipating the next itch you'll feel. you're in your head again, ignoring external input, looping away. Harding taught several techniques to help readers attain this experience. The first one is a pointing exercise: "Point to your feet, legs, belly, chest, then to what's above that. Go on looking at what your finger's now pointing to. Looking at what?" [5] Other work [ edit ] Sam Harris, in his book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, interprets Harding's assertion that he has no head by stating that Harding's words "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 nonduality of consciousness". [4]

This seeing goes deep. The clearest and most distant of views out is found to be shallow – a view down a cul-de-sac – compared with the view in, to the headlessness which plainly goes on and on forever.” It was eighteen years ago, when I was thirty-three, that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent enquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I? The fact that I happened to be walking in the Himalayas at the time probably had little to do with it; though in that country unusual states of mind are said to come more easily. However that may be, a very still clear day, and a view from the ridge where I stood, over misty blue valleys to the highest mountain range in the world, with Kangchenjunga and Everest unprominent among its snow-peaks, made a setting worthy of the grandest vision.had drawn himself without using a mirror – he had drawn what he looked like from his own point of view, from zero distance. So I didn’t read the actual book, though as soon as I began watching I seemed to recall that Harding was one of those sixties folks who kind of bridge the beatniks and hippies who were leaning toward Eastern religions and mysticism. Like me, Harding was raised in a conservative Christian environment, so I knew others then who were drifting from Christianity to (maybe particularly at the time Zen) Buddhism who read him. And folks such as Alan Watts, Ram Dass, gurus of and to the West. Yet perhaps that’s overkill - for Roshi Kapleau in New York in the awakening sixties, it is a sudden ecstatic glimpse into groundlessness, which many of us experienced firsthand in those heady days. But it’s still only the Tail of the Elephant! Buddhism, as any religious system of insight, requires a lifetime total commitment from us. Though down the centuries this in-seeing has been made out to be the most difficult thing in the world, the joke is that it is really the easiest.”

You can’t understand what your life really means in the big picture by evading responsibility. And that’s the attitude this book could inculcate in you if you’re not careful! These experiements lead to a personal "First Person" reality of what is really here. He tells the story of walking in the Himalayas. Looking at the mountains, he realised that sitting on his shoulders, where he thought his head was, was in fact a panoramic view of the mountain! In 1961 the Buddhist Society published On Having No Head – written for a popular audience. (Also available in the bookshop.) By the end of the book, I was nodding my head a little and felt like I could understand something of what he was saying. But now that I'm trying to write a portion of it down, it just sounds like nonsense. But many kids - as callow as I was - won’t listen. As Eliot says, Youth “smiles at situations which it cannot see.” Didn’t we all? (We can be such smarmy dozes!)Harding travelled widely, sharing the concepts of “Seeing” and “Headlessness”, as described in his most popular book, “On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious”. In 1996, Richard Lang and Harding founded the Sholland Trust, a charity created to help share Harding's vision of “The Headless Way”. In the 1990s and early 2000s Harding travelled and gave workshops with his second wife, Catherine. Having a head", and feeling like it's silly to say that you don't, reveals you to be so obsessed with the abstraction-world that you can't recognize how much preprocessing is going on; or even that there's any preprocessing at all. If you don't think there's any pre-processing, then of course you can't imagine a world where it's turned off, even for the sake of discussion.