Okay, this post is the last thrust in our trip down the proverbial rabbit-hole, which so far has looked at what the ego is, and how the late Douglas Harding can help us answer that big, big question — who are you, really? This is part one of a two-part post.

I had no idea what I was getting into. Back in October, I arrived at an island retreat called Hollyhock, to take what I thought was a five-day course on Buddhism. I didn’t know we would spend those days in uninterrupted mindfulness, without speaking, and that we’d spend about six to eight hours a day in formal meditation.

After the initial welcome at the main hall, our teacher led my group up the path to our meditation hut in the forest. On the way there, he stopped us and told us to look up. It was a still and clear night, much darker than we city dwelling visitors were accustomed to. I had never seen stars like that.

“Please be aware,” he said, as we all stared silently, “that you are seeing.”

He repeated himself. I was transfixed on the stars, but I remember thinking, “Well, duh,” when his comment registered. Of course I’m aware I’m seeing. How can you see without being aware of it?

His comment echoed again in my head a moment later, and I realized what he meant. For the first time, I recognized that I was normally only aware of what I was seeing, and had taken for granted that I was seeing at all. My awareness had become preoccupied with the content of existence, not the fact of existence itself. Suddenly, it struck me as so peculiar that there was stuff out there to see at all, and especially peculiar that there was something present — me, evidently — to see it. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me there was anything odd, or at least curious, about this arrangement.

In that instant, the stars became more real, more imposing, though I can’t say their appearance changed. It was something like admiring a photograph of a tree, and then realizing you were looking at a real tree. This experience definitely had an effect on me, but I didn’t grasp its relevance right away.

Sitting lessons

A day later I would. Our group was sitting in a warm, circular hut in the woods, in total silence, the evening of the second day.

Sitting for hours is tough work. The idea is to simply watch what’s happening, and there is quite a bit going on. Without the regular distractions of music or traffic or television, you can’t help but notice how much the body and the mind are really up to.

Your awareness fills with the chaos of dozens of sensations happening at once: the aching of your knees, the pressure of your bum on the cushion, the rising and falling of the breath, itches, tingles, weird digestive processes you never paid much attention to.

And thoughts! They come out in full force. They’re loud and pushy, and they just won’t stop coming.

There’s so much going on it’s hard to stay aware of it. You easily lose yourself in the stuff that’s happening. Suddenly you find you’re in the midst of an imaginary argument loosely based on a real argument you had a week ago with your friend. Your mind is saying what it wishes it said then.

Then you snap out of it. Whoops. Stay aware. You return your attention to the breath. For a moment or two, you’re fully with it.

Then your knee-ache gets more demanding, so you direct your attention to the feeling to try and observe it. You’ve been sitting too long on a hard surface, and the knee is tightening up. You know it will throb later, like it did after last session. You notice the intention to adjust your position, and flinch as you almost do it automatically. But you know you should stay put. You think about getting a good meditation cushion when you get home. You also make a mental note to remember to keep the thermostat down, it’s getting hot in here…

…and like that, you’re lost again. You return the attention to the breath, vowing again to stay aware.

After not too much of this you can’t help but notice all these feelings and thoughts are constantly coming and going, and it never stops. Whatever arises seems to come into your awareness from nowhere, and it changes a bit in its texture in intensity as you watch it. Then it eventually recedes, or gets crowded out by something else, until you can’t detect it anymore. It leaves no trace, and by then there’s a new thought or a new feeling, or many, and you forget about it.

During an hour-long meditation session, a whole load of weird stuff parades across your awareness. It’s just a big, maddening show with no plot, and this insidious tendency to keep changing its form.

From my week of meditating in Hollyhock, I learned two major realities about life:

#1: Your whole experience in life is a only a constantly changing arrangement of thoughts and sensations. There are unlimited forms it can take and all forms are constantly giving way to new ones. Whatever it is at any given time is just a combination of the five senses and thought.

#2: It is incredibly easy to get lost in the details of all those things, which makes you forget #1.

All of life seems to be just a constant turnover of “stuff,” in this way. As Winston Churchill said, “Life is just one damn thing after another.”

When you sit with your eyes closed, this is very apparent. It’s like you’re watching all sorts of things happening on a blank screen: thoughts, bodily feelings, sounds, emotions, and it’s so busy you forget you’re watching it. There is so much chatter, particularly from the mind, that it’s really hard to sit and watch it at all. It really makes you want to get up and read a magazine, or grab a beer.

But now and then, you catch a space between the thoughts and sensations, even if it’s really brief. You actually see (or sense, somehow) the blank “screen” on which all of this stuff is projected. It doesn’t take too many meditation sessions to get a glimpse of it. So you know it’s there.

And it makes sense. You can’t watch a movie without a screen. You can’t have “things” without some space for them to happen in.

What is the screen?

It’s pretty clear that this combination of sense perceptions and thoughts is constantly rotating, constantly turning over, constantly giving way to other things, throughout your entire 70- or 80-year existence in life. It’s just one big moving scene, not unlike a movie, only that it’s three dimensional and it includes tastes, smells, feelings and thoughts, in addition to sights and sounds.

But the space in which all the action happens — and the fact that there is a space in which all those things happen — does not change. It’s always there. It is the only constant in life. It is the only part of your experience that is present all the way through from birth to death.

Think about it… there is no thing that stays the same throughout your life. Even if you look down at your body, can you honestly say it is really the same body you had 10, 20 or 30 years ago? We all know that the cells that make up the body are renewing themselves constantly, and you have to admit you don’t look like you did ten years ago. Sorry.

Clearly your body is a thing too, coming and going throughout your life. You can call it yours, and you are in charge of it, but it isn’t exactly you. Which is a good thing, because clearly it’s just passing by, and going downhill for most of the ride. In this sense it’s no different in any fundamental way than a car that drives by you on the street, or a loud sound that comes out of nowhere, and fades. The only real difference between them is how fast they come and go.

Thoughts are things too. They have no mass or visible features, but they arise just like other sensations. They have a form. They have details, therefore they are things. If you sit and pay attention to them, they arise in very much the same way as aches, tingles, sounds and tactile sensations do.

All things — all forms — whether we’re talking about thoughts, sensations in your body, the bark of your neighbor’s dog, or a bird flying by the window, all arise in awareness, in a boundless space. There has to be space for these things to exist. This space has no form of its own.

Think for a moment about the stars out in space again. The stars have form: they have color, they emit heat, they have size and shape and mass. They do stuff, and eventually they change into other forms, red giants, black holes, supernovas. They are contained by space, which is empty.

It seems like a paradox. Space isn’t a thing, it’s an absence of things. It’s no thing at all. But it is there. It is real. You can perceive it; you can be aware of it. But your mind can understand it only in terms of what it is not. The stars occur within that space. If there was no space for them to happen in, they could not exist.

But the space itself has no features at all. Yet it persists, and its presence is 100% necessary for the existence of all things.

Life is full of things, but it is more than things. It’s space too. Space permeates every corner of life, because no things can exist where there is no space. That means it permeates your body. As we talked about previously, if you could keep zooming in on your body, you would see cells, then molecules, then atoms, and eventually empty space.

Who you really are

So if life is just impermanent things arising and fleeting in space, what are you?

The conventional way of thinking of yourself is as a body, with a mind attached to it somehow. But experience shows us that both the body and the mind change completely, many times over throughout life.

The only constant in life is the space in which all those things happen. It’s the same emptiness from which thoughts emerge, the emptiness in which stars sit and burn, the emptiness that accommodates everything you’ve ever seen, heard, or touched. Every sensation, every perception, every thought, comes and goes. The space in which they happen is featureless, boundless, has no taste, smell, or texture of its own. It looks like nothing. Like space. It is timeless and imperishable, which you could describe (if you happen to like the word) as immortal.

So who are you, in the Big Picture?

You are the screen.

You are the empty, 3-dimensional screen on which this greatest of all shows is projected. You are the space in which all of this happens.

When you consult spiritual or religious sources about what you are, the answers are remarkably consistent. Ancient and contemporary sages seem to agree, and the answer to that question is always something like, “You are awareness,” or “You are consciousness,” or “You are emptiness.”

My experiences, both in and out of meditation, lead me to the same conclusion. Sitting there watching what happens, I can’t help but notice that only the background to all that “stuff” — the space in which that stuff exists — is constant throughout my life, so what else could I be? How could I be any of the fleeting, changing, arbitrary things I have been aware of?

It is clear to me now what is meant by “You are awareness,” though it was once just a cool-sounding concept. I’m not trying to convince you of this, only suggest that you might discover the same thing (perhaps you already have) and in the mean time you might want to look into it for yourself.

Douglas Harding’s headless method excites me so much because it is a very simple way to actually perceive and live from the empty space the sages had always talked about in such evasive, mystical terms. I know that still sounds like gibberish to a lot of people, but those who have found meaning in Harding’s method know that it shows you plainly how to keep track of that eternal, motionless, aware space that is who you really, really are. It shows you how to access it at all times, whenever you realize you’ve become lost in things again.

Not that it’s the only way. As you’ll see in the conclusion of this post, people have known this for a very, very long time.

This post is part one of a two-part article. The second part will be posted later this week.

Photo by bryangeek

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The first few times I heard about God, I was already suspicious. My earliest clear memory of it was when I was five, leaning against the screen door of our small town home with my older sister, watching a midsummer thunderstorm unfold.

We were in awe, like I have been at every thunderstorm since. I don’t remember if I asked, but my sister said it was God who made the lightning and thunder. Not that she was ever religious, that’s just what her eight-year old mind told me that day. I took note.

At that point, nearly all of my ideas about God had come from Family Circus comics. The kids each prayed every night before bed, depicted casually as if it’s something every normal person does. In one comic, Dolly prays for her father to make it home safely from his trip to New York. The opposite panel shows a rainy street scene in which a six-foot translucent hand stops her Dad from stepping in front of a speeding taxi.

Seriously?

Later on, in my teenage years, I would recognize the Family Circus to be a conservative, unapologetically fundamentalist cartoon, but at the time I wasn’t aware of the play of politics in the things I read and watched. I just knew that the God they depicted didn’t make a whole lot of sense. This was the idea of God I had, and I rejected it, because it made sense to do so.

Sometime in junior high, when I was becoming more politically aware, I remember being shocked one day when I realized that ordinary adults — too old for the likes of the Family Circus — actually still believed in this God thing. Not just the crazies on televangelist shows either, but real, respectable adults who could be found in church on any given Sunday, singing hymns while looking upward with their eyes closed, really believing that they were in contact with this big translucent man, presumably when he’s not busy casting lightning bolts over my hometown, or saving Bil Keane from the natural consequences of wandering into traffic without looking both ways.

Before then I thought God was meant to be something like Santa Claus. As you grow into an adult, reason and knowledge would eventually descend on your world, like it or not, and you’d have to leave certain ideas behind, along with whatever comfort they brought you.

Whenever I questioned adults about the sense in believing in this God, I got a lot of wayward explanations but the gist of them was that this was an area where reason didn’t really apply. God was so powerful that he was off limits to the kind of deductive reasoning or doubt you’d eventually develop about the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

By eight, Santa Claus was dead to me, and so was God.

The The God Delusion Delusion

As a teenager I learned about religion’s violent track record throughout history, the inquisitions and crusades, sexual abuse and repression of science, and developed a vicious disdain for it altogether.

Had I known about him, Richard Dawkins might have been my hero. Dawkins is a brilliant Oxford-taught scientist, known for his work on genetic evolution, but perhaps moreso as one of the world’s most prominent advocates for atheism.

Last week I borrowed the audio version of his anti-religious book, The God Delusion. In it he attacks any and all arguments for the existence of God and the practice of religion.

Pausing briefly at the outset to exclude Taoism and Buddhism from his criticism, on the grounds that they are philosophies rather than religions, he goes on to dismiss any style of theism, of belief in any interpretation of any God for any reason, as irrational and delusional. Agnosticism, too, he brushes aside, as less logical than de facto atheism.

On that level — logic — he’s right on. His arguments are thoroughly rational, laid out in hard words, inviting inspection by the reader, impervious to all the traditional arguments.

And that’s the problem. He seems to take for granted that rational thinking is the only way to come to dependable understanding of the universe. For this too, he gives his reasons, and I can’t really argue with them.

He made the same mistake I did as a teen. He associated a certain idea with God, the contemporary one: a contrived, wishful idea of an unstoppable Big Brother who will ultimately keep us from harm — and blasted every mention of the G-word to pieces, under the rigid belief that there can’t be anything real or meaningful behind it.

Listening to the audiobook (read by an openly scornful Dawkins, with his wife for backup) I got a strong sense of baby-with-the-bathwater carelessness. He found a mental position he liked, fortified it with logic, plugged all the holes, and started shooting. I returned it after a few CDs.

A letter to my fellow skeptics

What if, Dr Dawkins (or any fellow skeptic), you had an experience of a particular kind that you can’t really explain?

You catch a fleeting glimpse of, well, you can’t really say. Words fail you, but you try anyway: “I’ve witnessed, uh, something… some distinct experience in which I’ve seen the perfection and limitless beauty of the world. I believe, no… I know that I was seeing with utter clarity, and that it was not the way I normally see the world. I saw clearly that I was one with the universe, that unconditional love is its basis, and that I am an eternal being and not a hapless, mortal creature.” Already you sound nuts, even to yourself.

You search for the terms to explain the quality of it, and cringe when the only word you can summon is “divine.” Every stab you take at conveying your experience only amounts to a disappointing, evasive-sounding cliché:

• There is something more to us

• Everything is in its right place, we just can’t see that

• There is a higher intelligence behind all this

Whatever it is, you have a very strong sense that its cultivation is immeasurably valuable, not just as a means of achieving peace and ease in your life, but for others to do the same. It is, clearly, exactly what humanity needs in order to overcome — no, transcend — its current palette of troubles. For this reason you feel it is important for others to have this experience too.

But nothing you can say about it, no anecdote or soliloquy can help you describe it without sounding (to yourself and undoubtedly to others) as a quack, a nutcase — or worse — religious.

Nor can you find any evidence for what you’ve experienced, and you know that there is none, because it is something that happened to you, and not to the material world in front of you. There is no objective, physical evidence for you and a fellow person to examine and share your conclusions about it. No peer reviews, no replication, no leg to stand on in a debate.

What would you do with these feelings?

Would you toss them out, on the grounds that they are unprovable, incommunicable, unscientific? Would you attempt to quantify them somehow, do a study on it? With nothing to measure, nothing objective to observe, you know this is impossible.

When you discover the sheer impossibility of conveying your discovery in conventional, rational terms, you find yourself talking in spiritual-sounding “pointers” — vague, cryptic clues that make you sound like a pretentious Zenster wanna-be.

It’s not something you can let go of though. And that’s because, even though you’d never say it out loud, you know beyond all argument that it is the Alpha and the Omega, it is the peace that passeth all understanding, the sound of one hand clapping, the noise of the tree that falls in the forest with no one around, and all that.

It’s unmentionable, unmanifested, the opposite of “things” and “stuff”, beyond thought — all sorts of other descriptors that are perfectly meaningless and hokey to the staunchly scientific, rational thinker.

Skeptics will always reject your “pointers” as mumbo jumbo, because they don’t provide the skeptic’s only demand: evidence. Your personal experience is wholly subjective, so no matter how profound it is to you, it leaves nothing with which to convince others.

And convincing people isn’t possible anyway, because your discovery isn’t a belief. It is knowledge, but it isn’t a fact. It isn’t a story, or a version of something or other. You could call it a “truth”, maybe adorn it with a capital T, but then you sound like a flake again.

Perhaps you’re stuck with this private understanding — which you don’t really understand, at least not in the same way you might understand, say, the rules of Major League Baseball — and you can’t just pass it along to somebody else like any other knowledge. You can either talk about it in vague, roundabout terms, confusing people all along the way, or just keep it to yourself.

Yet, other people throughout history and today’s society seem to have discovered the same thing, and not all of them strike you as nutjobs. In fact, most of them appear to be unusually sane.

Faithful Skepticism

About five hundred years ago, skepticism became the dominant attitude among the scholars of Europe. They had discovered, quite rightly, that human knowledge is more dependable when you require it to be supported by evidence. Simple enough. What was called “Natural Philosophy” came to be called science, and human understanding of the universe quickly mushroomed.

The advances were so great and so beneficial, that the attitude evolved from a helpful rule of thumb, to what can only be called a dogma. To most scientifically-minded people, including the world’s most brilliant minds, knowledge can’t be knowledge without evidence.

That means claims of anything that happens only to an individual, with no external indicators to confirm it to others, gets rejected categorically, often with ridicule.

Not everyone was on board with this. Michel de Montaigne, a French essayist, showed that skepticism could undermine itself. Just as it can be used to refute claims without evidence, it can cast doubt on human reasoning and evidence as well. Evidence, too, must be taken on faith, and therefore the skeptic is better off embracing faith as his guide.

He advocated faith as the basis for one’s entire life, avoiding rigorous attempts to accumulate worldly knowledge, because by regarding empirical knowledge as categorically more certain than faith, it becomes dogma.

“God is Dead.”

~Nietzsche

I’m not saying I’ve come to believe in God. I mean, I could say that, but it would be misleading. The common conception of God is still some version of the Family Circus one: an omnipotent, impossibly convenient (and sometimes horrifying) creature, intervening in the material world in the most arbitrary and incomprehensible ways, helping the New Orleans Saints win the Super Bowl after nearly obliterating their hometown. And he loves you.

It makes no more sense to me than it ever did. That materialistic idea of God suffers from the exact same affliction as Dawkins’ over-reaching rejection of the whole thing: it defines God in objective terms, makes a mental picture of it — I won’t say “Him” — which is bound by words, defended with argument (as if winning such an argument could matter!), clenched desperately with emotions and ego, fought over like it’s anything but a personal revelation.

God is misunderstood, I think most of us can agree on that.

But as I get older, as I explore more philosophies and traditions, I’m seeing rather clearly what God was meant to be, before being mangled by religion, before being argued into meaninglessness and conceptualized to death.

I’ll talk more about what the word God means to me in a future post. I think it may make sense to you.

I am still an advocate of skepticism as a mindset, but I don’t think of it the same way anymore. I know now that you can know something without evidence, without the approval of others. And I know that all of us, Dawkins included, are incurable believers.

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Well it turns out there’s been much more interest in Douglas Harding’s Headless Way than I initially thought. I’ve had quite a few lengthy comments and a lot more emails than normal. Evidently Headlessness has struck a chord with a lot of you, and people have a lot of questions.

I can’t explain everything about it here though, for three reasons. First of all, I don’t want to write about the same topic for too long because I know not everyone is interested. Secondly, I can’t do nearly as good a job describing headlessness as Douglas Harding can and already has. And finally, this is a method of self-enquiry, which means you’ll have to do most of the exploring and experimenting yourself to get the most out of it.

So here are five excellent resources on headlessness, all available from your computer chair.

1) www.headless.org

Most of you have been here already. The center of the Headless community on the web, it’s run by Richard Lang, Harding’s good friend and the co-ordinator of the Sholland Trust, a charitable organization formed to help educate people about the Headless Way. www.headless.org has loads of information about headlessness, including videos, interviews, articles and stories.

The experiments section (which you’ve probably already visited) is the key to understanding headlessness. Each one demonstrates a different aspect of headlessness. There are about a dozen experiments in all. “Seeing Who You Are” is a particularly good one.

None of them are useful unless you do them though.

2) On Having No Head

If you’ve found something intriguing in Headlessness but could use some clarification, there is no better resource than Harding’s first book, On Having No Head. He’s a sharp writer, engaging and hilarious. The book covers the initial seeing, making sense of it, and the progression of incorporating headlessness in your life. He deals with the common “so what?” response (he had it himself), the practical application of headlessness, and the formation and dissolution of the ego. It’s really quite entertaining and he does a much better job at describing it than I do here.

It’s available on Amazon for about ten dollars, and you can preview the book there as well. You can also buy it through www.headless.org’s bookshop if you prefer to support the Shollond Trust. Neither are affiliate links. On Having No Head has had a bigger influence on my quality of life than just about any book I’ve read.

3) People’s accounts of headlessness

I love this section of Headless.org. It’s a collection of comments and anecdotes about ordinary people’s experiences with headlessness. It really helped me reconcile my own experiences with what I was “supposed” to see. I learned that a lot of the people had similar experiences to what I had, and to the experiences many of you described in the comments here on Raptitude.

These are so useful because different people tend to describe headlessness in different ways, with different words. It gives you a lot of angles from which to think about it.

The comments are divided into dozens of categories, including experiences with mirrors, first experiences, how headlessness clarified scriptures to people, and more.

I draw your attention to the “First seeing” category. For many people, the first try was quite disappointing, but it didn’t remain like that.

4) Catharine Harding’s Podcast

This is a three-part podcast of a talk by Douglas Harding’s wife Catharine. Each part is about 30 minutes long. Much of the podcast is guided experiments administered by Catharine to an Australian interviewer, but the first ten minutes is an excellent introduction to headlessness, as she talks about what led Douglas to his discoveries. If you’ve only got ten minutes check that part out.

Here is part one.

She’s quite well-spoken and likable. Thanks to Jeremy Ramsay for finding this.

5) Reflections: A free course in seeing

Richard Lang puts out a great Newsletter, which is a series of instructional articles followed by short reflections on headlessness, mostly poignant excerpts from Harding’s writings. It begins with a welcome from Richard, in which he explains where to start and where to go from there.

Occasionally he sends out news about headlessness, such as where there are workshops being held and where you can find new publications on Douglas Harding. In the last edition, there was a link to “A good article on Douglas Harding” and when I clicked it I was surprised to find it was mine.

***

I’ll publish one more post related to Headlessness on Monday and then it will be back to your regularly scheduled programming. But this topic is so widely applicable it is bound to make more appearances on Raptitude in the future.

Have fun exploring.

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This is the fourth article in a series about Douglas Harding’s method of self-inquiry, called headlessness. The others are here: [Post one] [Post two] [Post three]

In the previous article, I described Harding’s discovery that he, in his first-person, singular, present-tense experience, did not have a head. He insists that anyone who gives it an honest, unbiased look, will find the same thing.

Obviously it’s a preposterous claim, and it raises some questions. Here are the most common sticking points.

What is the point of this?

The point is to experience your true nature instead of just experiencing your thoughts about your true nature.

We tend to see ourselves as what our thoughts tell us we are: separate, finite bodies, tiny compared to the world we inhabit.

Nearly all of your ideas about who you are have been derived from views of you at a distance, either from other people’s accounts, or from mirrors and cameras.

From a distance of a few meters, you do appear to be a finite thing in the midst of other finite things. From zero distance, your appearance is very different, but we tend to disregard what we see ourselves to be, in favor of what we’ve learned ourselves to be from non-first-hand sources. This collection of learnings is called the ego, and most people will never suspect that it isn’t who they are. All of it is second-hand, past-tense, misleading information about who you are, observed from angles that cannot possibly see what you see.

All the major spiritual teachings inevitably point to nonduality — that there is no real separation between you and the universe around you. Many people suspect this is true, believe it is true, or want it to be true, yet it remains only an interesting concept for most.

What the Headless Way (or “headlessness”) allows you to do is to see nonduality plainly. You can physically see the seamlessness between you and the universe that contains you. This has huge implications for our relationships with others, the ego’s negative effects on our lives, human evolution and a lot more.

I don’t get it.

That’s ok. Nobody will get it just by reading what I write here. In most of my articles, I explain a concept that is hopefully useful for the people who understand it and apply it to their lives. Normally the article is all anyone needs (I hope) to understand the concept.

This series is different from the rest of my articles. What I’m describing isn’t a concept, it’s an experience that you either have or don’t have. Once you have it (and I stress again that it is neither difficult nor exclusive), many of the peripherally-related concepts will suddenly make sense. But nobody will make sense of this just by reading my posts (or books by Douglas Harding for that matter.)

This series of posts is only meant to intrigue people enough to do Harding’s self-inquiry experiments for themselves. Reaching an understanding of headlessness through thought alone is impossible, and isn’t the point anyway.

The experiments are all available here, on the excellent website about Harding’s work, called The Headless Way.

But I know I have a head.

I know I have a head too, but that does not mean I see one from where I am, or that I could possibly conclude that I have a head like others do if I am honestly working from present evidence only. What I do see is an enormous space, without bounds, containing everything — including the rest of my body — which is centered on top of my shoulders. It is clarity itself.

I’m not you, so I don’t know what you see when you look at yourself, but I suspect that you will not see a head either, unless you are confusing your thoughts and memories with your sensory perceptions.

It’s not relevant that you know you have a head. Oddly, knowing you have a head doesn’t actually contradict your experience of not having a head, and once you experience it you will understand why that is.

Remember, your apparent form changes as the distance from the observer changes. At nanometers you appear to be molecules. At two meters you appear to be a headed human. At zero distance you appear to be headless. It makes no sense to pick one of these forms and say it is the truth and the others are wrong.

But two things are certain: 1) you can only ever experience yourself first-hand, from zero distance, and 2) since nobody else can experience you from a first-hand perspective, you should value your own direct observations above what outside observers tell you you are.

The headless part is only the beginning. Don’t get hung up on the debate about whether you have a head or not. Once you’ve seen what you are looking out of, there is no debate. It’s not a battle of beliefs — there’s no uncertainty here.

But I can feel my face and my head, and I can see my nose.

This is where we cross the line between observations and conclusions without realizing it. It seems that our non-visual senses — particularly touch — reveal that we do indeed have a head even if we can’t see it.

Experienced meditators know the value of observing a sensation without giving it a name. The body is constantly broadcasting little aches, throbs, gurgles, flushes and tingles, and with a bit of conscious attention it is possible to observe only what they feel like, without linking them to mental images — without picturing them, without trying to figure out what body part is hurting and why. When you do that, you recognize them only as sensations that arise in your awareness, perhaps change a little bit moment to moment, then eventually wink out.

The feeling of your hand touching your face is not itself a thing, it’s a sensation, and sensations are all we ever experience. They become “things” when we interpret and label them. Deal only with the raw materials of perception: sensations. Sensations are your actual observations, while things are conclusions about what those sensations are. With me?

When you move your hand closer to the clear space you are looking out of, at a certain distance the hand will begin to blur, and then at some point you’ll feel tactile sensations. With your eyes open, it is very difficult not to picture your own face (with your hand stuck to it) even though you cannot see your face. If you close your eyes and just observe the sensations by themselves, you will notice that you cannot pin down the boundaries of the involved body parts. You can’t tell where one ends and the other begins, they are just sensations floating somewhere in spacious awareness. Nor can you even tell that the sensations there are those of a hand contacting a face. Only your thoughts will tell you that.

If you try this, you’ll notice that there are undoubtedly a lot of sensations happening, but they do not amount to a head (or a hand for that matter) unless you ignore your direct observations in favor of your existing beliefs: “I already know what’s happening here. My hand is touching my head.”

Defer to your observations; do not let your memories and imagination tell you what those observations are. To live by what you see rather than what you think about what you see, is lucidity itself. Do this as if for the first time. Do this as if you know nothing.

All of the typical objections are addressed in Harding’s easy-to-do experiments.

“Probably there is only one way of converting the skeptic who still says I have a head here, and that is to invite him to come here and take a look for himself. But he must be an honest reporter, describing what he observes and nothing else.” ~ D. Harding

Why are you trying to convince me I have no head?

I’m not. I don’t believe I could do that.

To convince somebody is to change their thoughts about something. I’m not interested in doing that, at least not here. You can’t see who you really are just by thinking.

Headlessness will always be confusing and suspicious if you are trying to comprehend it with thought, because it isn’t a concept. It’s a physical method of seeing yourself. Thoughts will only get in the way, by misinterpreting your observations to match your beliefs.

There is no hope of comprehension without doing at least one of Harding’s experiments. I stumbled upon the “Pointing Here” experiment, and I knew I had found something powerful. I did some of the other experiments on that page, and life was never the same.

After that I watched the eight video experiments which helped me make sense of what I had seen, and clear up some of the apparent contradictions.

As I’ve said, nobody will get this by reading what I’ve written here. You will only see it if you actually do the experiments.

What are the benefits of headlessness?

Most of the benefits of living from headlessness aren’t easy to articulate. It’s an experience that’s yours entirely, so it’s difficult for anyone else to say how it will affect you. But here are a few benefits you can expect:

• You get to experience nonduality first-hand, so you no longer need to believe in it, or deny it. This comes with a flood of insights about compassion, emptiness, interdependence and evolution.

• It is a simple and easy way of disidentifying with the ego, because you can distinguish easily between emptiness and the world of content that fills it. If it’s content, it’s not you.

• It gives you a completely different perspective from which to solve problems in your life. Encountering familiar problems is almost fun, because you have a much less reactive standpoint from which to deal with them. What was once troublesome might strike you as hilarious.

• Suddenly a lot of cryptic passages and quotes about “emptiness”, “inner space,” unity and nonduality will make a lot more sense. Ancient wisdom won’t seem so ancient. It will give you a starting point from which to interpret a lot of religious or philosophical ideas that once seemed completely out to lunch. The words of Confucius, Lao Tsu, Jesus, the Buddha, and Zen masters will probably take on a clearer meaning to you, particularly if you are not religious.

• Perhaps the most immediately useful effect is that it keeps you in the moment better than any other method I’ve tried. Your attention defaults to your senses, rather than the usual default to thoughts. You will be better able to observe each moment freely, and be less preoccupied with what’s in it for you or not in it for you. This means much less stress and fear. Gratitude comes more naturally and almost nothing seems to be of absolute importance. It is a perpetual, moving state of Dying on Purpose.

***

I have to say I’m baffled with the virtually non-existent response to the last post. My many regular commenters, the ones I would think would be most interested in nonduality, are conspicuously silent. I think this is the most important and most useful topic I’ve ever written about, but from the tiny amount of feedback I received I can only guess that I’ve presented this idea very poorly, and I’m probably turning people away from it by confusing things and inciting skepticism.

No amount of explanation will suffice anyway. Like any of the other angles from which spiritual teachings can be approached, thinking and explanation will not take you all the way, they can only lead you to personal experiences that show it to you. I was hoping I would be able to lead at least a few people to see (not understand, but see) what I’m talking about. Maybe I have, but nobody’s quite said so.

My mistake was trying to describe this experience before presenting the experiments. The best way is to see your own headlessness, and then make sense of it, not the other way around. I fell into the biggest spiritual pitfall of all — trying to convey “the Peace that passeth all understanding” with words and thoughts.

I was going to go on to talk about the implications of headlessness for the ego, and how it relates to God and religious ideas, but without feedback I have no idea how this is going over among you readers, and I may just be confusing people. I would like to know what you’re all making of this. Is it interesting? Confusing? Troublesome? Boring? Irrelevant?

Unless I get a lot of requests to continue on in this vein, for now I’ll give it a rest and talk about other things. So if something about headlessness intrigues you, do the experiments, and explore www.headless.org. Those who are interested will figure this out rather easily, with a little initiative.

Do the experiments here.

Feel free to ask me any questions, through the comments or the contact page.

Photo by lordcolus

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Douglas Harding was a modern-day English philosopher who made a remarkable discovery about human nature, and developed a simple and ingenious method for guiding others to see it for themselves. This post is the third post in a series about his method. [Post one] [Post two]

Though an architect by trade, Douglas Harding was strongly drawn to philosophy, and his primary interest was answering the simple question of who he really was.

Was he a really only a six-foot bag of meat, animated by some mysterious biological energy? Or was he what the religious and spiritual masters said he was: pure, empty consciousness, undivided from the rest of the universe?

He wasn’t about to take anyone’s word for it.

While thinking about the principle of relativity, he realized that his identity depended on his distance from the observer. Looked at from a distance of a few meters, he appeared to be what could only be described as a man. But from a distance of an inch or so, “patch of skin” would be a more honest descriptor of his appearance. Zoom in further, and he became cells. At closer ranges still he became molecules, atoms, and particles.

He recognized that it worked the other way too. Observe from far enough away, and his close-range appearance as a man gives way to that of a city, then a continent, a planet, and so on.

Careful to avoid assumptions and going only off of objective observations, it was clear that what he was at three meters was nothing like what he was at three nanometers, or three billion meters.

He couldn’t deny that he had many layers of appearances, quite inseparable from one another, and all of them dependent on the distance from which he was observed.

It was also undeniable that he needed all of those layers to survive. Clearly he needed the surrounding planet to breathe and sustain himself, which in turn needed the surrounding solar system to keep it in its life-sustaining position, which in turn needed the surrounding universe to put it where it was, and so on. Looking in the other direction, he knew he also needed his constituent body parts and cells, which in turn needed their constituent molecules and atoms.

This led him to the idea of nondualism, as fabled in religious and spiritual teachings. There was no perceivable separation between the six-foot human he always figured himself to be, and the universe that surrounded it and comprised it. The only separation between Douglas the person and the remainder of the universe was an arbitrary, imagined one: the common, generally unquestioned thought that a human being ends strictly at the limits of its skin.

Of course, this “skin boundary” is hopelessly fuzzy by its very nature. We already know our bodies are made of the surrounding environment, constantly exchanging matter with it seamlessly during the acts of breathing, eating, shedding and regrowing skin, and eventually, dying and rotting. Any separation between a body and what surrounds it (or what it surrounds) is a made-up distinction, useful for categorizing and labeling, but ultimately misleading.

Who Douglas really was could not possibly be bounded by something as arbitrary and indistinct as skin.

Yet because he’d spent most of his time interacting with others at ranges of a few meters, Douglas had naturally identified most strongly (if not wholly) with his appearance at that casual, across-the-dining-room distance.

It still left him with a burning question: what would he look like from even closer than particle-range? Would he find himself to be nothing at all? In any case, he wasn’t content settling with the status quo — that his appearance at the few-meters-away range trumped the others, and that it was the appearance he should consider to be “himself.”

A Self-Portrait Like No Other

Harding’s answer came in the form of an extraordinary self-portrait by the physicist/philosopher Ernst Mach.

Most self-portraits are created using a mirror, and so the artist appears as he would from a distance of a few meters, like this one by Roger Fry:

Roger Fry's self-portrait

This is a typical self-portrait because it is the view of ourselves we are most familiar with, from looking in the mirror, from looking at photos of ourselves, and listening to what other people say about our looks. Most of our dealings with other people occur at distances of a few meters, as do our encounters with mirrors and cameras. So almost all of the information we have about our appearance is based on observations from some distance away from us. It’s no wonder we’ve grown to believe that the few-meters-away appearance illustrates what humans truly are, and that our appearances from all other distances don’t count: they’re too far or too close to see, or are somehow inaccurate in comparison.

Mach took an unconventional view of himself. Here is his self-portrait:

Ernst Mach's self-portrait

Evidently, Ernst Mach didn’t see himself the same way Roger Fry did. He drew himself in the first person. At first it appears to be just an amusing trick, the sort of mind-bending but merely entertaining cheekiness you might find in an M.C. Escher drawing.

But Harding saw something much more profound here, and I do too. Mach has drawn a portrait of himself as he appears to himself, as opposed to drawing it from the conventional viewpoint of a few meters away.

This self-portrait is completely unusual. It should shock us that it’s so unusual, because it is the perspective from which each of us lives every single moment of our lives. This is the “home” view of our lives, in fact it is inescapable, yet we think of ourselves in the third person nearly all the time.

More strikingly: though this is a picture Mach drew of himself, the artist’s head isn’t present. This is because from where he is looking — from where he always is looking  — there is no head to be seen.

It had never occurred to Harding that a human being’s most intimate, most central view, the one he is witnessing every moment of his life, was completely headless.

Years later, while he was walking in (of all places) the Himalayas, he had an experience that made Mach’s curious self-portrait take on a world-shattering new meaning for him.

In his own words:

The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head.

[...] What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. 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.

~From Harding’s book On Having No Head. A full account of his initial experience is available online here.

Finally, he had seen himself from closer than nanometers. He had seen, precisely, what he looked like from zero distance, and it was nothing like he looked to others. Other people sported heads, out there at a distance, but here, at zero distance, there was no head to be seen.

When he turned his attention inwards — at the empty space he was looking out of — he saw absolutely no evidence of a head. He saw boundless clarity, a cavernous, horizon-wide space, which did not protrude from his body like a head, but plainly contained his body.

Emptiness was not some far-off Zen concept, it was plain as day, all the time.

Harding was stunned at how incredibly obvious and ordinary all this was, yet it was a major revelation. He had lived his entire life from this same physical perspective, and in that perspective he clearly had no head.

Think about it: in every moment you experience, your head is never part of the scenery. Of course, you’d think you’d have one there, but except for in your imagination and memories, it is conspicuously absent. Even when you look in the mirror or at a photograph of yourself, that mirror and that photograph are contained within a boundless empty space that sits where you normally imagine to be a head, as are the rest of the scene around them, which includes your body.

In other words, what you look like to yourself does not feature a head. Why should we tend to our identity as seen by others, in preference to, and at the expense of, our identity as seen by ourselves?

Somehow or other I had vaguely thought of myself as inhabiting this house which is my body, and looking out through its two little round windows at the world. Now I find it isn’t like that at all. As I gaze into the distance, what is there at this moment to tell me how many eyes I have here — two, three, or hundreds, or none? In fact, only one window appears on this side of my facade, and that one is wide open and frameless and immense, with nobody looking out of it. It is always the other fellow who has eyes and a face to frame them; never this one.

~On Having No Head

It was only memory and imagination and the words of others that could suggest that he had a head. This he couldn’t deny, and it had disturbing implications. It meant that his entire life, what he was actually seeing had been superseded at nearly all times by his opinions about what he was seeing, namely that he wasn’t looking at the world from a vast, empty space, but from “two tiny holes in an eight-inch meatball” atop his shoulders.

See, you can’t ever see yourself from a distance, as others see you. But our most common way to experience ourselves is in the third person, through thought. We nearly always ignore what we actually see of ourselves in deference to what we think of ourselves — how we imagine others see us.

No wonder we have ego issues. In the previous post I said the ego is simply what you think you are. That collection of thoughts is what you normally regard yourself to be. Looking at yourself as you really appear to yourself allows you to see who you are outside thought. This is a rare state for most people, but it is always right there. There is nothing abstract about it.

Behead yourself! Dissolve your whole body into Vision: become seeing, seeing, seeing!

~Rumi

I know to some this all sounds like a cheeky, naive revelation with no real meaning. After all, we all know we have heads. We’ve seen them in mirrors, we’ve touched them, we can even see a blurry patch in the corner of our vision most of us would take for granted is a nose. And above all, of what use is this revelation?

Harding certainly had all those objections too, and with an investigative spirit like his, he wasn’t about to ignore them. On Monday I’ll show you why they didn’t change a thing.

In the mean time, rather that taking my word for it, why not introduce yourself to your own headlessness by doing an experiment to investigate what you actually see of yourself. This is the first of a half-dozen or so exercises Harding developed to help people investigate who they are outside thought. Harding’s friend Richard Lang will guide you in the video below.

It is crucial that you actually do the experiment, and not just watch the video of the experiment. Hearsay and conceptual understandings won’t get you anywhere here.

There is a text-and-graphic version of this experiment too, which some people might prefer, here.

***

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 to see. It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face – my utter facelessness. In short, it was all perfectly simple and plain and straightforward, beyond argument, thought, and words.

Maybe the red pill isn’t as bitter as we thought.

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Over the next few posts, I’m taking you down the rabbit hole as far as you’re willing to go. Before we go on, though, it’s time to tackle a topic that is essential to understanding humanity and ourselves. I refer to the ego frequently here on Raptitude, and that’s because it has an immense role to play in determining our quality of life. But I’ve never fully explained what it is.

“The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.” ~Carl Jung

Imagine just having been born.

You don’t know anything. You’ve never experienced anything.

But suddenly there is light, and chaos. You’re exposed, and cold. Blurry shapes are moving all around you. Sounds strike you with an edge much sharper they ever had in the womb. The whole scene is bright and loud, and the shapes move so quickly.

There is so much happening. It is all completely alien and extremely intense. It’s upsetting. You cry.

Among other things, you are seeing what you will later learn to call faces. But they are not faces yet. They are shapes, with a pattern that will soon become familiar to you.

You are hearing what you will later be told are voices. One of them is already very familiar to you. You will be told to call it “Mommy.”

The one thing you are certainly not aware of, is you. You are aware of all these shapes and sounds and feelings, but you aren’t perceiving them as happening to you or to anyone else. You are only aware that they are happening.

How will you ever make sense of it all?

Luckily, you are human (though you’re not aware of that yet) and human minds have the power of association. Without even trying, you begin to associate certain shapes and sounds with certain thoughts. You associate your mother’s voice with comfort. Your mother’s voice becomes comfort. You might associate the dark with sleepiness, maybe loneliness too. You might associate bathtime with fun, or horror, depending on how what you associate bathtime with.

Associations like this accumulate. From experience, X makes you expect Y. Then X begins to symbolize Y. Eventually X may become indistinguishable from Y. You’ll keep adding them over time.

This is handy for sorting out the chaos around you. You can tell, for example, that the thing with the warm hands and soothing voice is usually good news for you. It’s a simple association. This is the primary tool you’ll use to make sense of the whirling scenes around you.

You are still only looking outwards, and it has not yet occurred to you to inquire as to what is doing the looking. After all, the entirety of existence — every shape, sound, character and story — appears to be there, somewhere outwards. You don’t yet have a reason to contemplate what is at the center of all this action.

Over the first few years of your life, you will be taught that certain shapes and thoughts and sensations are you. When you look down, you’ll notice several appendages extending away from your point of view, which you will be taught are your body and your arms and your legs.

At this point, there is still nothing to suggest that there is any boundary between you and the world around you. The feet you see when you look down are just things “out there”, no more you or yours than the floor beneath them.

But those words the adults use: “you” and “yours,” for which you learn to substitute “me” and “mine”, will eventually trigger you to assign a special status to certain things.

They tell you the red book is yours, and the blue book is not yours.

The things you’ve vested with this special status begin to carry extra weight, emotionally speaking. To lose the red book is much worse than losing the blue book, because the red book was “yours.”

Through all your interactions with other people, you begin to build a concept at what is at the center of all of this stuff happening: a person, kind of like the people you’ve come to know in your life. They don’t look like you though; from your point of view they are arranged quite differently. You wouldn’t suspect, for example, that you have, hidden from your immediate view, a face like the ones you’ve seen on others.

The worst association of all

The most devastating turn of events happens nearly the same way for almost everyone. You are looking in a mirror, marveling at the child on the other side of the glass, when your parent says, “That’s you.”

At first it makes no sense, because they are pointing at the toddler in the mirror, not at you. And that familiar toddler, the occasional friend of yours… where is he when you’re not in front of the mirror? He never seems to make an appearance anywhere else.

Your parents are quite stubborn about calling him “you,” even though that’s your nickname, and eventually you do take their word for it. Above all else you’ve already learned that your parents know better than you, and you gradually digest this unlikely-sounding claim like any other.

As you get older, you will associate more and more worldly things with you. Your clothes. Your toys. Your friends. Your room. Your house. A bit of you seems to be invested everywhere. There is a lot to worry about, because your fate seems to depend, at least a little, on the fate of each of these objects too.

But it gets heavier. Along with those, you begin to identify with intangible things which also carry this special, extra-sensitive status.

Your turn. Your idea. Your way. Your problem. Your fault.

By this time, you will have no doubts whatsoever that the image in the mirror is you. Now the collection of thoughts and objects with that special status has a clear appearance and a compelling storyline, and you become hopelessly preoccupied with tending to it.

That figure in the mirror, disappointingly tiny compared to the 360-degree world you were preoccupied with before, becomes the most important part of the scenery to deal with. You begin to associate your history and your traits with it: how smart it is, what it is good at and bad at, what it deserves, what it fears, what it hopes for, where it has been and where it is going.

It’s all you really have. God forbid anything will happen to it.

By this time you are completely convinced that this image and its story comprise the entirety of who you are. There is nothing outside of it.

Steering the story

And ever after, anything that happens to that image, and the story that goes with it, is happening to you. When the story goes how you want, the image gains something. It looks better. When it disappoints, the image loses something, and you don’t like it as much.

Because this face and this story allegedly comprise the entirety of who you are, the importance of steering this storyline and its vulnerable little hero grips you with the most dire seriousness.

Even though most of what happens to it is beyond your control, you find it absolutely imperative that the image and its story become something you like. At this, you mustn’t fail.

But the story always seems to be deviating from its ideal path, and it will always feel like something is wrong, or at least in danger of going wrong. Something that is supposed to happen hasn’t happened yet, or something has happened that wasn’t supposed to.

For all our skill in manipulating the story, deep down we know circumstances could crush us at any time. But we do our best to steer it towards a storyline we can accept.  We feel a constant need to make adjustments, to secure a future that will fulfill this most important of all needs.

This is the game we learn to play, and it’s very, very hard to win.

You are never what you think you are

The face in the mirror, and the haphazard story we associate with it, is the ego.

In other words, the ego is what you think you are.

The ego is often defined as “a false sense of self,” but I think that’s misleading. It implies that there is an accurate way of thinking of who you are, and an inaccurate way. Bad self-esteem and good self-esteem. But who’s to say if your image is right or not? Self-esteem is ego, whether your self-thoughts comfort you or horrify you.

How could our thoughts even possibly pin down who we are? How could our notoriously fickle, free-associating monkey minds ever come up with an meaningful estimation of what the combination our jobs, faces, body-types, relationships, capabilities, experiences, fears and desires actually mean? All that stuff is the content of your life; it’s the style, the flavor, but do all those details really add up to a person?

Of course not, because what we think of ourselves is constantly changing, not just day to day, but moment to moment, and mood to mood. At different times, I have thought of myself as anything from an insufferable loser, to a freaking genius, to a guy who can never quite get his shit together, to a guy who’s never had a serious problem in his life. What I think I am is so fickle and so dependent on moods and circumstances, that it can’t possibly be right — ever!

The ego is always just a big, seething grab-bag of thoughts that could be different at any time. But usually we don’t recognize that. Generally, in the colloquial way we talk about people, as in you and me, we’re referring to our egos — our acquired identities, based on the forms in our life.

That is to say, it’s completely normal in our society to confuse your ego for yourself. It has never even occurred to most people that they are not what they think they are.

This has enormous implications for the quality of our lives and our societies, too enormous to cover in the scope of this article. For now, suffice it to say that the worst of human behavior stems from this brutal mistake.

Clearly you can’t be your thoughts. After all, who would you be when you’re not thinking?

So what are you then? What’s left over? You know you’re not who you think you are, or at least who you think you are is only an undependable, highly circumstantial part of the whole story.

Remember, we didn’t have an ego when we were born. We accumulated it through making associations. So who — what– was doing that thinking and perceiving, before it was even aware of itself?

If you recall:

You are aware of all these shapes and sounds and feelings, but you aren’t perceiving them as happening to you or to anyone else. You are only aware that they are happening.

How do we get back there? Is it possible, after all the self-ascribing opinions we’ve taken on over the years? We need a way to see clearly what we were before the ego came along and said “Hey, I’m you.”

We can’t untangle this mess of thoughts with more thinking any better than we could clean a dirty floor with more dirt.

That’s where Douglas Harding’s work becomes particularly useful. Stay tuned.

Photo by jessicafm and milla.deet

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I want to introduce you to someone.

His name is Douglas Harding. He was a kindly, well-spoken Englishman, born in 1909 and died in 2007, but for reasons you’ll soon understand, that doesn’t really matter.

I have wanted to write about Douglas Harding for a long time, but I hadn’t yet because I think his ideas are so important to my life and to humankind that I wanted to make sure I had the time to do them justice.

Most readers of Raptitude have a pointed interest in learning simple ways to improve their quality of life. That’s what this blog is all about. Harding’s teaching is so profound, that once you really get it (and it’s not hard!), you will experience, to say the least, some of the greatest improvements to your quality of life that you’ve ever had. It will tie up loose ends you didn’t know existed.

I left some cryptic hints about this teaching in the comment discussion that followed my April 12 post, Die on Purpose. Those of you who were at all intrigued by that post should not miss this.

In this post I just want to introduce you to Douglas, and I’ll really get into the teaching in subsequent posts. For now all I will say is that I will be writing a lot about Douglas Harding in the future. Those of you who are intrigued enough to look into him will understand why.

The video below is an excerpt from a talk given by Douglas in 1991 in Melbourne, Australia. I won’t explain any more about it today, but I urge you to invest 12 undistracted minutes watching this.

Many of you might not know what to make of it at first. Some will find it moderately interesting, but won’t find anything really compelling in it, and will soon forget about it entirely. Some of you will hit your boredom threshold sometime before the twelve minutes video is through, click it closed and go busy yourself with something.

But a minority of you will catch a hint of something extremely profound here, something markedly more concrete and less ambiguous than most “spiritual” talks. Those few will follow this up, investigate Douglas’s work, and discover something incredible about themselves — something they never suspected yet, paradoxically, always knew.

I’m sounding a bit mystical here, I know, so don’t worry if you don’t see what I’m getting at yet. In upcoming posts, I will explain.

I’m not talking about something that’s hard to ‘get.’ In fact, it’s so unutterably simple, that it’s at tremendous risk of being overlooked. It’s so obvious that most people will try to find the metaphor behind it — a poetic analogy of the sort behind all Zen sayings and Bible verses — but there isn’t one. It’s a plain, obvious-in-hindsight realization, with colossal implications.

Harding’s teachings center around a deceptively simple method for identifying and overcoming the misunderstanding of all misunderstandings — the fundamental cognitive mistake that causes every human being all of their troubles. Here’s a clue: he describes that mistake precisely at 7:12.

I am so intrigued by Douglas because he completely nails what so many other spiritual teachers seem to only graze. I’ve had many breakthroughs over the years, but no other discovery has brought more richness and meaning to my life than this one.

Some of you will be baffled, uninterested, or unsure at what I’m talking about and why I’m so excited about this, at least right now, and that’s okay. There is a lot to talk about here, and we have the time.

If you cannot see the video, watch it here.

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It was a scorching afternoon and both of us had given up on doing any serious work for the rest of the day. We’d surveyed most of a disused section of railroad tracks past the suburbs, when across the field I saw Mark pause, look at his watch, and begin packing up the equipment.

“F this. Time for Slurpees,” he announced over the radio. “We’ll finish up Monday.”

We loaded the trunk and jumped into his tiny, sweltering Honda. Already beading up with sweat, I grew impatient as he took his time fiddling with his CDs before starting the car. I needed A/C, or at least power windows. Fast.

He noticed my sense of urgency, and smiled at me as he slowly, mockingly, brought the keys up to the ignition.

Finally he started it. “Let’s see who’s the tougher man,” he said ominously, tapping off the A/C button, and cranking the heater. “First one to open the door buys the Slurpees.”

Friday-giddy and possibly already delirious, it sounded like a fun idea to me.

The car was already at sauna temperature, the sun was cooking our bluejeaned legs through the windshield, and there was hot air blowing in our faces.

Now that I was playing this game on purpose, I knew I would beat him. A few years earlier when I worked as a hotel housekeeper at a ski resort, I had learned a powerful life skill which would come in very handy here.

Sink Lessons

Housekeepers clean up after people who take their messes for granted. I cleaned luxury suites with complete kitchens and dining rooms. The clientele was high-end and high-maintenance, with strong evidence of entitlement issues. Quite often an affluent family of five or six would leave all of their breakfast dishes sitting on the table — and quite often most of their breakfast — as if they’d fled the suite mid-meal to escape a gas leak or something.

When I started the job, few things were more disgusting to me than the remains on somebody else’s plate. I held back my own breakfast as I gathered sticky plates glowing with egg yolk, smeared with drying baked beans. Looking away, I scraped it all off, cringing as I heard the rejected food slop into the bin, not unlike so much vomit.

My queasiness was moral as much as physical, as I pictured richie-rich kids being told by their turtlenecked lawyer-dad to go suit up for the slopes and forget their plates, because the maids would take care of it.

Much worse, though, was when they rinsed the food off directly into the sink, apparently unaccustomed to sinks without built-in garbage disposals. By the time we arrived on the scene, there would be bloated toast crusts, noodles, and egg whites slithering around in the drain well.

I couldn’t stomach it. Even with dish gloves, the thought of reaching into the soggy pile of organic matter to scoop it out with my fingers was enough to make me gag.

The members of our housekeeping teams rotated between cleaning different parts of the suite: kitchen, bedrooms, living room, bathrooms. I volunteered to be a bathroom specialist (regarded as the least desirable room to clean) so I could avoid ever having to confront the horrendous aftermath of a failed garburator session.

Of course, eventually I ended up on a squad with somebody else who had the same aversion, and I had to put in my time on kitchen detail. To my horror, most sinks had some pale, bloated food in them, usually too much to stab down into the little holes with a fork handle. This was a problem that wasn’t going away, and I had to approach it differently or spend the whole ski season dreading this awfulest part of my awful job.

Most of my equally squeamish co-workers employed the classic grit-your-teeth, roll-up-your-sleeves approach. It usually involved holding your breath and averting your eyes as you scoop out the food-slime and hurriedly direct it toward the garbage bin, bracing yourself throughout, as if you’re jumping into icy water.

It’s the same strategy a wide-eyed Fear Factor contestant uses as he chomps frantically on the June bug in his mouth — he doesn’t want to confront it, he wants to escape it.

That method didn’t work for me, it just made me more aware of how awful it was. As soon as I tackled one sink, I began dreading the next room.

I don’t remember when it clicked, but after not too many kitchens, I learned the secret:

Let it feel like whatever it feels like.

Just do it and let it have its way with you. Turn toward it, not away.

Whenever I came to a gunked-up drain, I just scooped it out without rushing. I reached into the drain with no more reluctance than I would have reaching into a cookie jar. I looked at the mess with a stoic curiosity, allowing the swollen noodles and bread-mush to rest freely in my fingers for the two or three unhurried seconds it took to transfer them to the garbage can.

As long as I wasn’t rushing or trying not to touch it, it was painless. It wasn’t worth trying to escape.

I’ve already written about my naked bathroom epiphany from a few years before that, in which I learned that it was resentment — as opposed to the thing I resented — that caused suffering, but I hadn’t yet found a practical technique for bringing that philosophy to bear on everyday moments.

This was it. A mantra that always works. Let it feel like whatever it feels like.

It has so many applications. Every single day presents dozens of opportunities for that mantra to transform the quality of moments that would otherwise be awful or uncomfortable.

• When the room is too hot or too cold

• When you’re carrying something awkwardly and you can’t wait to put it down

• When you’re exercising

• When your underwear tag is scratchy but you don’t have a chance to tear it off quite yet

• When there’s caraway seeds in the bread, and you hate caraway

Any time there is a physical sensation you feel like you want to escape, that is the perfect time to practice doing the opposite. Feel it fully, with a calm, stoic curiosity. Don’t hide from it.

To “let it feel like whatever it feels like” sounds kind of meaningless. It already feels like whatever it feels like, doesn’t it?

Technically yes, but by default we don’t give the moment permission to be itself — to do what it wants to us. We deny it. So what we actually experience is the acute stress of attempting to escape something, rather than the physical reality of the thing we’re trying to escape. This stress, that “I hate this, get me outta here” feeling, is almost always the worst part.

Of course, we don’t have the authority to deny the caraway seed its acrid taste, the air its stifling heat, or the wind its obnoxious will to mess up your hair, but we still try. Once something is already happening, giving these sensations permission to feel like what they feel like is actually liberating yourself from their worst effects.

Disagreement by Default

Normally we automatically enter a state of disagreement with any unpreferable aspects of the moment that arise, and this gives it power over us. This is reaction.

Most of our reactions are to phenomena that are so mild that we’re much better off voluntarily taking on the full brunt of their unpleasantness than to put ourselves through the stress of escape mode.

But to do this, you have to recognize the “escape mode” habit as it arises and know what you’re going to do instead of going along with it.

Luckily there are opportunities to practice everywhere. Next time you feel too hot, instead of turning on the A/C or fanning yourself, see if you can just look right at the feeling of being that warm for a few minutes. Dive into it. Observe the feeling of a flushed face, of beads of sweat forming. Sit in it and let it feel like whatever it feels like.

When you are actually doing this successfully, you’ll recognize the incredible potential in nonreaction. With a bit of practice, you can put up with almost anything of a physical nature that you might run into on a regular day. Once you’re used to letting physical feelings come over you freely, then you can extend the same technique to deal with more abstract things: emotions and situations.

You’ll notice much less aversion in your life — to harsh weather, to difficult chores, to inclement conditions of any kind.

You won’t need to fear contingencies, because you know that whatever arises, you’ll just let it feel like whatever it feels like, without the dreadful emotional strain of needing to escape.

You’ll feel much less of a need to control outcomes, which — in a brilliant instance of irony — frees your capacity to control your response, and create an outcome you like. If there is some action you want to take, you can take it with grace and cool-headedness instead of frustration and desperation.

I’ve mentioned many times that evolution has left us with minds that create a state of constant disagreement with our surroundings, to keep us on our toes, to keep us making adjustments. It keeps us alive, but at the expense of our ability to enjoy life.

We can turn the tables on our trouble-making minds by embracing adverse feelings and sensations, taking them on board as if we had chosen them. Only then do circumstances lose their power over us. Compulsions become mere preferences.

I cannot overstate the usefulness of this skill. Life becomes so much more agreeable when you stop disagreeing with it.

Soaking it In

The temperature continued to rise. Sweat ran down the backs of my calves inside my jeans. I could feel my face redden. I let it.

Mark began to squirm. He took a few deep breaths and tried to fan himself with his hand.

I reclined my seat and put my hands behind my head, soaking in the heat as if I was unwinding on a Mexican beach. I was pouring sweat, but in no rush to go anywhere. I could tell that my relaxed face was bothering my opponent.

As the heat reached ludicrous levels, we laughed at each other again. Mark hit the A/C and rolled down the windows, and we both sighed aloud as the breeze washed over us.

“You win, you psycho.”

Photo by Paul Otavio

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At playtime in the early grades, teachers always told us we were supposed to share our toys.

We always did it grudgingly. None of us actually wanted to share them. But we figured there would be consequences if we didn’t, just as there were for not doing anything else they told us we should do.

“It’s not nice not to share,” they would say. And why should I find it preferable to be “nice?” Nobody ever explained that.

Whenever I inquired, I’d hear things like:

“Because it’s important.”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“It’s the right thing to do.”

I always knew what I was supposed to say, but inside I knew would rather have the firetruck to myself than take turns with some other kid, and nobody ever gave me a meaningful reason why there was something wrong with that.

We grow up with this rigid idea that we should behave ethically, as if the word “should” itself is all the reason we need. Few of us were ever given a genuine reason for why we should want to do “the right thing”, without the implicit threat of being punished or ostracized for not doing it.

The widespread acceptance of downloading music and movies, for example, suggests that human adherence to moral codes has much more to do with the perceived consequences of violating that code than some natural inclination towards fairness. If you think about it, even “obeying your conscience” seems to be nothing other than the desire to avoid unpleasant guilty feelings.

Starting from infancy, “shoulds” pile up in our heads, and it isn’t always clear where they came from. Any given should is most likely just a memory of a memory of something an imposing adult said to you when you were a child.

As a kid, if you press an adult for a reason why you should do the prescribed “right thing,” you probably won’t get anything more convincing than “Well, you just have to,” or “It’s the right thing to do,” or the ever-unreasonable “Just because.”

Did they themselves even know? In hindsight, it seems like all they knew is how they wanted us to behave. A young kid doesn’t stand a chance in a toe-to-toe debate with an adult, not because the adult’s argument is any more sound than the child’s, but only because they’re older and more powerful, and they’re much better at giving you the runaround. They imposed a whole list of unexplained “shoulds” on us because they wanted certain behaviors from us.

Over the years I’ve gradually become more generous, more accommodating, more helpful to other people. I’m less judgmental, and more likely to be fair to others when nobody’s watching. But I don’t think this makes me a better person than I was before, or that this change is because life has been gradually schooling me on what’s officially right and what’s officially wrong.

All I’ve been schooled on is how to best improve my own quality of life. As life went on, I gravitated toward whatever served me to that end, and away from what didn’t. Sharing with my peers, apologizing when I’ve hurt someone, helping people out, being “nice” — these things have been rewarding to me, and that’s why I do them. What other motivation could a person use?

So it seems to me that there is no reason to do “the right thing,” beyond what it does for you to do so. The only reason to behave ethically is to discover its real value to the quality of your life. If you cannot find that value, if it does not add something real and positive to your life, perhaps you should not do those things you always thought you should.

At the end of the day, we behave ethically to serve ourselves. If you are helping someone only because you feel you should, and not because it’s rewarding to you, then how helpful are you being, really?

I’d love to hear what you think. Why should we behave ethically?

Photo by FurryScaly

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Well I’m in the working world again. I’ve found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it’s returning to normal after my nine months of traveling.

Because I had been living quite a different lifestyle while I was away, this sudden transition to 9-to-5 existence has exposed something about it that I overlooked before.

Since the moment I was offered the job, I’ve been markedly more careless with my money. Not stupid, just a little quick to pull out my wallet. As a small example, I’m buying expensive coffees again, even though they aren’t nearly as good as New Zealand’s exceptional flat whites, and I don’t get to savor the experience of drinking them on a sunny café patio. When I was away these purchases were less off-handed, and I enjoyed them more.

I’m not talking about big, extravagant purchases. I’m talking about small-scale, casual, promiscuous spending on stuff that doesn’t really add a whole lot to my life. And I won’t actually get paid for another two weeks.

In hindsight I think I’ve always done this when I’ve been well-employed — spending happily during the “flush times.” Having spent nine months living a no-income backpacking lifestyle, I can’t help but be a little more aware of this phenomenon as it happens.

I suppose I do it because I feel I’ve regained a certain stature, now that I am again an amply-paid professional, which seems to entitle me to a certain level of wastefulness. There is a curious feeling of power you get when you drop a couple of twenties without a trace of critical thinking. It feels good to exercise that power of the dollar when you know it will “grow back” pretty quickly anyway.

What I’m doing isn’t unusual at all. Everyone else seems to do this. In fact, I think I’ve only returned to the normal consumer mentality after having spent some time away from it.

One of the most surprising discoveries I made during my trip was that I spent much less per month traveling foreign counties (including countries more expensive than Canada) than I did as a regular working joe back home. I had much more free time, I was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world, I was meeting new people left and right, I was calm and peaceful and otherwise having an unforgettable time, and somehow it cost me much less than my humble 9-5 lifestyle here in one of Canada’s least expensive cities.

It seems I got much more for my dollar when I was traveling. Why?

A Culture of Unnecessaries

Here in the West, a lifestyle of unnecessary spending has been deliberately cultivated and nurtured in the public by big business. Companies in all kinds of industries have a huge stake in the public’s penchant to be careless with their money. They will seek to encourage the public’s habit of casual or non-essential spending whenever they can.

In the documentary The Corporation, a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toys would not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used these studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.

This marketing campaign alone represents many millions of dollars that were spent because of demand that was completely manufactured.

“You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying, your products. It’s a game.” ~ Lucy Hughes, co-creator of “The Nag Factor”

This is only one small example of something that has been going on for a very long time. Big companies didn’t make their millions by earnestly promoting the virtues of their products, they made it by creating a culture of hundreds of millions of people that buy way more than they need and try to chase away dissatisfaction with money.

We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is. How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven’t used in the past year?

The real reason for the forty-hour workweek

The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce.

I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing.

The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time.

Suddenly I have a lot more money and a lot less time, which means I have a lot more in common with the typical working North American than I did a few months ago. While I was abroad I wouldn’t have thought twice about spending the day wandering through a national park or reading my book on the beach for a few hours. Now that kind of stuff feels like it’s out of the question. Doing either one would take most of one of my precious weekend days!

The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise. It’s also the last thing I want to do after dinner or before bed or as soon as I wake, and that’s really all the time I have on a weekday.

This seems like a problem with a simple answer: work less so I’d have more free time. I’ve already proven to myself that I can live a fulfilling lifestyle with less than I make right now. Unfortunately, this is close to impossible in my industry, and most others. You work 40-plus hours or you work zero. My clients and contractors are all firmly entrenched in the standard-workday culture, so it isn’t practical to ask them not to ask anything of me after 1pm, even if I could convince my employer not to.

The eight-hour workday developed during the industrial revolution in Britain in the 19th century, as a respite for factory workers who were being exploited with 14- or 16-hour workdays.

As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom.

Can you imagine what would happen if all of America stopped buying so much unnecessary fluff that doesn’t add a lot of lasting value to our lives?

The economy would collapse and never recover.

All of America’s well-publicized problems, including obesity, depression, pollution and corruption are what it costs to create and sustain a trillion-dollar economy. For the economy to be “healthy”, America has to remain unhealthy. Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have, and that means they don’t buy a lot of junk, don’t need to be entertained as much, and they don’t end up watching a lot of commercials.

The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business’ most powerful tool for keeping people in this same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.

You may have heard of Parkinson’s Law. It is often used in reference to time usage: the more time you’ve been given to do something, the more time it will take you to do it. It’s amazing how much you can get done in twenty minutes if twenty minutes is all you have. But if you have all afternoon, it would probably take way longer.

Most of us treat our money this way. The more we make, the more we spend. It’s not that we suddenly need to buy more just because we make more, only that we can, so we do. In fact, it’s quite difficult for us to avoid increasing our standard of living (or at least our rate of spending) every time we get a raise.

I don’t think it’s necessary to shun the whole ugly system and go live in the woods, pretending to be a deaf-mute, as Holden Caulfield often fantasized. But we could certainly do well to understand what big commerce really wants us to be. They’ve been working for decades to create millions of ideal consumers, and they have succeeded. Unless you’re a real anomaly, your lifestyle has already been designed.

The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.

Is this you?

Two weeks ago I would have said hell no, that’s not me, but if all my weeks were like this one has been, that might be wishful thinking.

Photo by joelogon

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