Douglas Harding - Look For Yourself - Selected quotes

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"The result of observing only the universe is anxiety. Only observing the Observer of the universe will put a stop to a man's worrying and fussing and scheming. When his interest is diverted inwards he naturally relaxes his hold - his stranglehold - on the outer world. Having withdrawn his capital and paid it into his own Central Bank (where it appreciates to infinity), he has nothing to lose out there and no reason for interfering. He knows how to let things be and work out in their own time. He's in no hurry. Knowing the Self, he can hardly fail to trust its products."
Douglas Harding

Look For Yourself

At first glance Harding's "headless" approach looks more like a gimmick than a spiritual exercise. Pretending that one has no head seems like something for children to do. Harding's methods help one break through the subject/object duality of experience. All experience begins with the "I" thought. With Harding's headless method the "I" is no longer identified with it's customary location in the head but with what one experiences. I admit I had a hard time with some of his language as there seems to be a slight communication gap (for me anyway) between British and American English. It wasn't until I actually has a headless experience that I saw the profundity of his work. With so many spiritual texts sounding like the other this is truly a unique work and perspective. "The result of observing only the universe is anxiety. Only observing the Observer of the universe will put a stop to a man's worrying and fussing and scheming. When his interest is diverted inwards he naturally relaxes his hold - his stranglehold - on the outer world. Having withdrawn his capital and paid it into his own Central Bank (where it appreciates to infinity), he has nothing to lose out there and no reason for interfering. He knows how to let things be and work out in their own time. He's in no hurry. Knowing the Self, he can hardly fail to trust its products." Page 33 "If we wish to find out what its really like to create the world, we have only to desire nothing and pay attention. But total acceptance is very hard. It's precisely the opposite of the lazy indifference that lets things slide. It springs from inner strength and not weakness, from concentration, not slackness. Why is the world so troublesome, so frightful? Is it like that by nature, or because we take the easy way of fighting it instead of the difficult way of fitting in with it?" Page 34 "To render them (our lives) safe and sound we must rebuild them on the bedrock of I am what I see I am here; what you see is just one of my regional appearances." Page 52 "In the beginning was a lot of stuff, and in the course of time it got around to noticing itself! Clever stuff! Wonder of wonders, object gives birth to subject." Page 69

"That things should product awareness of things - and by chance, at that - is, when you think of it, quite weird. It's like supposing that the movie-projector is operated by one of the actors on the screen. Equally odd is the notion that the subject can be examined from outside as if it were some kind of object. How can the subject be discovered except from within, by subjectivity itself?" Page 69 "To understand the primacy of spirit is good. To realize it, to see it, wordlessly to experience it, to be it without thinking about it - this is incomparably better. And incomparably easier: in fact, understanding must always be about its object, hovering round and about it and never gaining admittance." Page 72 "At root, all you perceive is Yourself, heavily disguised as someone else, for your entertainment and refreshment. It would be difficult to overstate the practical importance of this discovery, its consequences for everyday living. All alienation, all separation, the many-sided threat of hostile things and persons and situations - these are no more than bad dreams. All is You. How could you fear Yourself? How could you despise, resent, be bored by Yourself? How could you not love Yourself?" Page 73 "That instead of being a thing among things you are Space for things..."
Page 83

"The price of saying no to what we are getting can be very high. Depression and exaggerated anxieties and irrational fears, along with their bodily counterparts, are danger signals indicating that an enlargement of consciousness is required." Page 87 "Just as our acute symptoms arise from the repression of our second-level and still human desires, so our chronic "existential" symptoms arise from the repression of this truly divine and basic desire. These "existential" symptoms are a global sadness, resentment aimed at nothing in particular; a deep dissatisfaction with life as it is, a wanting that doesn't know what it wants. Our cure is to shine the light of consciousness upon the deepest level of all, upon the ineffable Core itself, our Source and True Nature."
Page 88

"It's not so easy to describe what surrender is, but we all know what it feels like - the sudden cessation of struggle, the end (for the time being) of all our resistance, the special sort of calm that follows the storm of what has become futile effort, the relaxation we enjoy when "something gives" at last after a long period of mounting tension and anxiety and all the fight foes out of us." Page 91 "The solution is ATTENTION, attention instead of intention. Attention to What is, in place of striving for what should be. Attention to how things already are, without any attempt to improve them. The fact is that total attention is surrender; and total surrender is attention. Attention ot precisely what? To what's given right where you are at this moment, regardless of other places and times." Page 93 "Is there any other way to true self-abandonment but falling into the arms of the One who is infinitely more you than you are yourself?" Page 95 "Again, when you read your newspaper's latest story of threats and aggression by Them, you think for and hate for and tremble for Us. You are identified with, you become Us. And Us may be a family, a social class, a nation, a race, a power-bloc, a planet..." Page 101 "When we were very young it was a wide, wide scene. As we grow older, however, we come to take a more restricted view. The angle of our tunnel vision may reduce to something like five degrees, on either side of which those increasingly vague objects are more or less ignored. We become wretchedly exclusive, self-occupied, narrow-minded and narrow-hearted, hemmed in. We become sick." Page 106 "There is no consciousness apart from the First Person who is always Central and Singular and enjoys the God's-Eye view of His universe, His image. Which is also my image." Page 110

"If the vast interval between man and his minutest particles is filled by a series of increasingly subhuman parts, surely the principle of Nature's continuity suggests that the equally vast interval between him and the Whole may well be filled by a series of increasingly superhuman wholes." Page 124 "You will find yourself approaching the unself-consciousness and spontaneity that you enjoyed as a little child. With this difference; then you simply lived from your Home, now you do so with full awareness."
Page 149

"At least it worked so long as I didn't lose myself in that scene. It worked very well so long as I remained centered aware of myself as the Space in which that ever-changing forest-scene was on display, aware of the Absence here of any walker in the forest, aware of the Nothing here that was making nothing of that difficult road surface. For I soon found that when something out there captivated me and I lost touch with my spaciousness here I stumbled about again. It seemed that this central emptiness functioned best when it was keenly alive to itself as empty. It seemed that I had consciously to dissolve those approaching hazards and the feet and legs that had been trying so hard to cope with them. Otherwise they would begin tripping me up." Page 152 "When there is an awareness of nobody walking here in the forest, the walk turns out to be good, easy, untiring, and enjoyable." Page 153 "Till now I had left all that stuff where it belonged - out there in mirrors and cameras, and for people to make what they liked of. But now, mistaking that regional appearance for my central reality, I latched onto it, to have and to hold tight for the rest of my life. And so I became, for myself here, what I looked like over there." Page 174 "Or am I, on the contrary, no-thing here but room for that thing, with no perceptible distance to keep us apart? In other words, can I conjure up anything here to get in the way of that black-and-white pattern? Am I in receipt of news about that pattern, do I infer or distantly detect it? Or am I invaded by it?" Page 184 "The one imagines he's a thing in the world, while the other perceives he's the No-thing that contains the world. The one identifies himself with his appearance as a second/third person, the other with his reality as First Person." Page 193 "Here, then, is the perfect reconciliation between the detachment that witnesses all and the attachment that is involved in all. It was the false notion that you are really a human being that gave rise to the dilemma, the contradiction between the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Talents." Page 195 "To follow oneself, to see how one's thought operates, one has to be extraordinarily alert, so that as one begins to be more and more alert to the intricacies of one's own thinking and responses and feelings, one begins to have a greater awareness, not only of oneself but of another with whom one is in relationship." Everywhere Krisnamurti insists that we must get to know the processes of the mind."
Page 202

"Either you go baldheaded for Who you really are, or else you get to work on all that mental stuff which is alleged to block the vision of that Who." Page 202 "In other words, you have the choice of the short path of Self-enquiry, or the longer path of Devotion, leading to the goal of Self-Realization." Page 203 Click here for Amazon's Look For Yourself page

THE HEADLESS WAY Website

http://www.headless.org/entry_page.html

The Headless Way offers you a practical, user-friendly way to see Who you really are. This method was developed by the philosopher Douglas Harding. At the heart of this approach are the Experiments awareness exercises that guide your attention directly to your deepest identity.

Who Are You? .. Religions Answer

The worlds great mystics have a common message:

"There is a Reality which is Indivisible, One, Alone, the Source and Being of all; not a thing, nor even a mind, but pure Spirit or clear Consciousness; and we are That and nothing but That, for That is our true Nature; and the only way to find It is to look steadily within, where are to be found utmost peace, unfading joy, and eternal life itself." (From Religions of the World by Douglas Harding)
Sciences Answer

What you are depends on the range of the observer. At several meters, more or less, you are human, but at closer ranges you are cells, molecules, atoms, particles Viewed from further away your body becomes absorbed into the rest of society, life, the planet, the star, the galaxy Sciences objective view of you zooming towards and away from you - reveals a hierarchically organized system of layers that is alive, intelligent and beautiful. Thus you have many layers, like an onion. You need every one of these layers to exist. Your human identity, vital and important as it is, is just one of these layers. You are also sub-human and supra-human. (See The Hierarchy of Heaven & Earth.) What are you at the Center of your many layers? The scientist cannot say because she can only observe you from a distance. However close she gets to you, she remains outside you. What or Who you really are, the Ground of your Being, remains a mystery. Other Peoples Answer Other people are like the scientist because they cannot see what you are at Center either, only what you

are peripherally. Reflecting back to you what they make of you, their feedback is about you as a person. Your Answer You are not distant from yourself, not outside yourself. You and you alone - are therefore perfectly placed to see what you are at Center. All you have to do is look.

How do you look into your Center? The Experiments direct your attention inwards to your center. They reveal the One you really are, the One at the heart of your life. Take some time now to explore them. When you have carried out the experiments, explore the rest of the website. You will find articles, short films, quotations, comments, interviews and more You can also listen to the Audio Introduction, subscribe to the e-Course in Seeing, contribute to the Discussion Forum and, if you like, let us know your response to seeing Who you really are. Quotation Over the past [sixty] years a truly contemporary and Western way of 'seeing into one's Nature' or 'Enlightenment' has been developing. Though in essence the same as Zen, Sufism, and other spiritual disciplines, this way proceeds in an unusually down-to-earth fashion. It claims that modern man is more likely to see Who he really is in a minute of active experimentation than in years of reading, lectureattending, thinking, ritual observances, and passive meditation of the traditional sort. Instead of these, it uses a variety of simple, non-verbal, fact-finding tests, all of them asking: how do I look to myself? They direct my attention to my blind spot - to the space I occupy, to what's given right here at the Center of my universe, to what it's like being 1st-person singular, present tense. (From The Headless Way, a leaflet by Douglas Harding.)
Articles: The Results of Seeing Who You Really Are http://www.headless.org/articles/results.htm

Extract from On Having No Head by Douglas Harding

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The best day of my lifemy rebirthday, so to speakwas 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. It was eighteen years ago, when I was thirty-three, that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent enquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I? The fact that I happened to be walking in the Himalayas at the time probably had little to do with it; though in that country unusual states of mind are said to come more easily. However that may be, a very still clear day, and a view from the ridge where I stood, over misty blue valleys to the highest mountain range in the world, with Kangchenjunga and Everest unprominent among its snow-peaks, made a setting worthy of the grandest vision.

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 inabsolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head. It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everythingroom for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world. It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of "me", unstained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around. Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was selfluminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused life-history. It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too clever 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. There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden.
Douglas Harding - The Incredible Hypothesis and the Anthology of Quotations selected for it
This anthology of quotations was selected by D.E. Harding for The Incredible Hypothesis , a Toolkit of practical experiments (now out of print) for investigating our True Identity. This anthology illustrates how this Treasure has been sought and found in different cultures and times throughout the world. http://www.scribd.com/doc/107123705/Douglas-Harding-%E2%80%98The-Incredible-Hypothesis%E2%80%99-and-the-Anthology-ofQuotations-selected-for-it More documents and articles on SELF-ENQUIRY authored by sages from the East and West, on SCRIBD: http://www.scribd.com/jaykjz9124/search?query=Self+inquiry

RAMANA MAHARSHI LINKS:

RAMANA MAHARISHI - Biography: His Life by Gabriele Ebert:

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