Recently I watched a DVD I ordered from http://www.headless.org/ which is a 108 minute long film called “Douglas Harding; Lecture and Workshop, in Melbourne Australia”. I was inspired to purchase several videos from the site after having recently read about Douglas and his work and insights, and doing the experiments on the site conducted by Richard Lang.
Douglas delivers his message like no other I have seen before and that message is the most impacting of any I have ever received to date. (And I am a very weary traveller.)
He was 82 when this was filmed in 1982, and his extraordinarily insightful, witty and unique manner of demonstrating the truth of which we really are just has to be seen to be experienced.
Two Worlds .....AS If and AS IS ?
In the workshop DVD Douglas speaks of how we each can ONLY be our own authority on how we view the world, and yet how all our lives, since babies, we have been told by others HOW we should view it, essentially completely overriding our own natural authority and ensuing ability to see reality AS IS.
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He speaks of two worlds that we live in. The world of ‘AS IS’ (The world of truth) and the world of ‘AS IF’. (Which he refers to as the conventional world).
The world of ‘AS IF,’ is the one we have come to believe is real, and through our lack of belief in our own innate authority to decide for ourselves, we have bought the story others have told us on how the world is. This world is the one we primarily reside in and suffer through.
Conversely the world of ‘AS IS’, is the world of pure awareness where we are completely and wholly ONE with our source and the primal energy that animates us. In this world blessings abound, struggle is absent and love is the cohesive force. There is no duality, no gender, no race, and no body, no judgement, no anything; only a complete sense of being at home and in total peace with all that is.
“When you realize you are the All, you will want nothing, because The All has everything , therefore the all needs nothing"
Provable Headless Experiments
Douglas takes the audience through several little very simple exercises that remarkably bring about a shift in perspective from the world of AS IF we now live in, to experience the world of AS IS we are meant to be living in.
In one exercise he asks the viewer to form a pair of glasses with both hands and to peer through them to observe their view of the world from that range. He asks them “NOW WHAT DO YOU SEE? “
What occurred in my experience was how small the world appeared viewed through the limited location of my two small eyes.
Then he asked the viewers to remove their hand-made spectacles and again said “NOW WHAT DO YOU SEE”?
Suddenly an awareness of an infinite expansive view of my surroundings was sensed, described by Douglas as a frameless window.
Through the experience of the two contrasting views, what occurred in me was a shift in perspective which was immediately impacting. I was now ‘seeing’ with awareness.
I have had a cold for a week or so now, and started coughing while this was occurring, and all that was experienced was a loud noise coming out of impersonal awareness. It did not feel like the noise was in anyway associated with me as there actually now was no personal ME now sensed at all.
The Faces In the Mirror
We go through life believing we are the third person, those faces in the mirror, which when observed from generally two feet or so away, form our reality. Who we really are though, he says, when viewed from the locale of first person singular, is directly opposite to that third person view.
And because we go through life thinking we are what we look like, our life pans out as a shallow, meaningless existence of continual suffering, when it is lived at our periphery.
The meatball has eyes
He says when we let go of falsely identifying with the pink hairy meatball with two small eyes staring back from the other side of the mirror, an immensely spacious awake interior that has the capacity to hold the entire world naturally emerges. (Douglas humorously and aptly describes our head and eyes as two tiny holes looking out of a meatball)
In the journey back to your centre, your true self, he says, that false identity you had believed yourself to be gets left behind. And effectively, to do so, we have to fully vacate our little shallow third person imagined selves.
Zen is Faceless
The most famous Zen Koan, (said to have bought about instant enlightenment in several cases when first heard), tells how a Zen master Hui-Neng, had once given a now piece of advice to his brother monk Ming, who was struggling to grasp a specific Zen teaching concerning attachment.
"See what at this very moment your own face looks like -the face you had before you (and indeed your parents) were born"
It is recorded Ming in that moment discovered the source of all things he had previously sought outside hmself were in fact within.
Douglas Harding’s concept of “Headless-ness” fits perfectly into the context of Zen.
On Having No Head
I have also just completed reading his book written when he was in his early thirties called “On Having No Head - Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious”
This book is a highly provocative and challenging, yet strangely easily grasped exploration of living Headlessly, and most definitely a life changing read.
Our Faces Change while our Centre remains unchanged
That we all have had a myriad of different faces from babyhood to old age, asks us to examine how we could possibly have ever believed we are that what we look like. Yet our reality is virtually based on this ‘nonsense and rubbish’ as he calls it, or as he puts more succinctly ‘multiple hallucinations’. Our true nature obviously emanates from another place, a place that has no faces and is the centre and the source of all life. The purpose of life Douglas says, is a conscious union with that Source.
The Path
In the DVD Douglas also talks about “The Path’ spiritual seekers often refer to in describing their journeys.
Douglas in his own journey was not content to travel down a nebulous path going nowhere in particular. He wanted results and he wanted to know when he would get them, and fortunately for us through his own insights he developed a method that could do that for us. Experiencing his work can get us off the ‘garden path’ and directly home to ourselves; where he says the direct truth of who we are is located.
Coming Home
Douglas does not claim a monopoly on the route back to SELF and succinctly expresses” Any valid ticket will get you there, any valid ticket will take you home”
He says the only requirement to experience our own inner truth is in having the courage to ‘come home’ to ourselves so we can experience who we really are.
Take it for checking
To be open and receptive to Douglas Harding’s teachings, and experientially prove then to yourself, through practicing his quirky little experiments, is this seeker’s (who has read far too many books and words to date on the matter ) highly recommended fast track path back to your true self.
