In the coming weeks, I’m going to explore On Having No Head by Douglas Harding. Chapter by chapter. This little book deserves more attention that it has gotten…ever. And it’s the first piece of writing that induced any kind of “spiritual” experience for me.
If you have read this work, feel free to join along. Send me a message about it. Comment on this post. But if you haven’t, read these articles with an open mind. The concepts are simple. Deceptively so. Which can be frustrating for those looking for the point of the work. The foundation of On Having No Head can be traced back to the non-dual teachings of Zen, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta. So, without further ado…
And if I could thank God
That I am here, and that I am alive
And everyday I wake
I tell myself a little harmless lie
The whole wide world is mine-Tom DeLonge (“Rite of Spring”)
To say that I have no head sounds like an invitation to provocation. But it’s not. It’s literally true. In fact, there could be nothing more true. And it was a great day for me when I realized this. Inside of a Biggby Coffee in East Lansing, Michigan.
For a few moments, all distinctions fell away. I was not here. And there was no out there. Everything just was. Concepts had no meaning. Chair. Table. Coffee. Barista. Window. Car. None of it. It was all a flowing whole.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Words failed me. Ironically, this peculiar event happened while reading Douglas Harding’s On Having No Head.
The book begins like this:
The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head.
-Douglas Harding
Harding describes how the realization of having no head was “absurdly simple and unspectacular.” There was no secret knowledge. No moral code. No dogmas. It was simpler than that.
“[J]ust for the moment I stopped thinking,” Harding writes.
To stop thinking runs counter to Western values. In school, we are expected to think, think, think. Take tests. Complete homework. Pass exams. The same goes for our careers. The same goes for religion. The same goes for politics. We must think. At all times. Always. Without fail.
But Harding writes that his spiritual breakthrough happened when he stopped doing all the thinking he was so used to doing. “Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down,” he writes.
Thinking is our default setting. Thinking is what most of us do. All day. Every day.
As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now... The past is a memory. It’s a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated. It is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment. And this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth. Repudiating it. Fleeing it. Overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there, because we’re continually hoping to become happy in the future. And the future never arrives.
-Sam Harris
But in Harding’s case, thinking failed him.
“For once, words really failed me. I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine,” Harding writes. In those moments, the only thing that existed was the “Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it.”
It wasn’t just an pure observation of the present moment. It was also the moment when he realized that there was no head on his shoulders. And all he needed to do to understand this was to look around.
Behead yourself! … Dissolve your whole body into Vision: become seeing, seeing, seeing!
-Rumi
And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.
-Douglas Harding
From the first-person perspective, Harding discovered that he was headless. Where his head was supposed to be was a vast emptiness. But not an emptiness that offered nothing to observe. It was an emptiness that contained everything in the universe.
This is not philosophy. This is simply observation. And I experienced this same thing while sitting in a coffee shop. Instead of a head on my shoulders, there was everything else. Chair. Table. Coffee. Barista. Window. Car. None of it. It was all an interconnected, flowing whole.
Whatever or wherever my head was, it was not where I thought it was.
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 snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.
-Douglas Harding
The most profound part of Harding’s testimony is that he lost any sense of “I” or “me” in the few moments that he lost his head. There was no barrier between me and the rest of the world that wasn’t me. It was just a comprehensive whole. Pure, agentless experience. The moment the self exposed itself as an illusion.
“It’s total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around,” Harding writes. Beside this passage, I scribbled: “The paradox of the self. You are no-thing and every-thing.”
Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13:12 make sense in light of this realization. Claiming that we are “looking through a glass darkly.” All of us, everyday, are looking through a glass darkly. But in realizing our headlessness, we get clarity on the nature of reality.
If not for illusions, there would be nothing to compare things to.
-Lankavatara Sutra
Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: 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.
-Douglas Harding
One result of non-dual meditation is to experience this “vast emptiness.” It is why I started meditating some time ago. To see my true self. Again and again. And it doesn’t always happen the same way. And it doesn’t last for long. But every now and again, I step into the vast emptiness. Where every thought falls away.
The discovery of my headlessness was not brought on by attaining some knowledge. Or some state of mind. It was the opposite. It happened when I stopped putting effort in to induce the experience.
Headlessness is always just a glimpse away.
When I gazed at myself I saw myself no more.
-Rumi
Till we see our nothing we cannot understand the value of our Being.
-Traherne
It had the biggest head you ever saw. A great enormous thing,—like nothing. A huge big—well, like a—I don't know—like an enormous big nothing.
-A.A. Milne Winnie the Pooh
Your duty is to Be, and not be this or that.
-Ramana Maharshi
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