On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious

by Douglas E. Harding

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: just for the moment I stopped thinking. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine. Past and future dropped away. 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.

I had lost a head and gained a world.

Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul.

Total presence (awareness) is total absence of the self.

This is not a matter of argument, or of philosophical acumen, or of working oneself up into a state, but of simple sight - of LOOK-WHO’S-HERE instead of IMAGINE-WHO’S-HERE, instead of TAKE-EVERYBODY-ELSE’S-WORD-FOR-WHO’S-HERE.

But there is one place where no head of mine can ever turn up, and that is here on my shoulders, where it would blot out this Central Void which is my very life-source: fortunately nothing is able to do that.

In my saner moments I see the man over there, the too-familiar fellow who lives in that other bathroom behind the looking-glass and seemingly spends all his time staring into this bathroom - that small, dull, circumscribed, particularized, aging, and oh-so-vulnerable gazer - as the opposite in every way of my real Self here. I have never been anything but this ageless, measureless, lucid and altogether immaculate Void: it is unthinkable that I could ever have confused that staring wraith over there with what I plainly perceive myself to be here and now and always!

There neither is nor can be any evidence for two parallel worlds (an unknown outer or physical world there, plus a known inner or mental world here which mysteriously duplicates it) but only for this one world which is always before me, and in which I can find no division into mind and matter, inside and outside, soul and body. It is what it’s observed to be, no more and no less, and it’s the explosion of this centre - this terminal spot where “I” or “my consciousness” is supposed to be located - an explosion powerful enough to fill out and become this boundless scene that’s now before me, that is me.

I must believe that what is true for me is true for everyone, that we all are in the same condition - reduced to headless voids, to nothing, so that we may contain and become everything. That small, headed, solid-looking person I pass in the street - that one is the apparition which never stands up to close inspection, the heavily disguised one, the walking opposite and contradiction of the real one whose extent and content are infinite: and my respect for that person, as for every living thing, should be infinite too. His value and splendour cannot be overrated. Now I know exactly who he is and how to treat him.

The reality behind all appearances is lucid, open, and altogether accessible. I know my way in and out of the secret inmost heart of every creature, however remote or repulsive it might seem to the outsider, because we all are one Body, and that Body is one Void. And that Void is this void, complete and indivisible, not shared out or split up into mine and yours and theirs, but all of it present here and now. This very spot, this observation-post of mine, this particular “hole where a head should have been” - this is the Ground and Receptacle of all existence, the one Source of all that appears (when projected “over there”) as the physical or phenomenal world, the one infinitely fertile Womb from which all creatures are born and into which they all return. It is absolutely Nothing, yet all things; the only Reality, yet an absentee. It is my Self. There is nothing else whatever. I am everyone and no-one, and Alone.

At last, after more than a decade of largely fruitless searching everywhere else, I found in the words of the Zen masters many echoes of the central experience of my life: they talked my language, spoke to my condition.

the essential vision must transcend the accidents of history and geography.

St. Bernard (1091-1153): “It is no merely human joy to lose oneself like this, so to be emptied of oneself as though one almost ceased to be at all; it is the bliss of heaven ... How otherwise could God be ‘all in all’, if anything of man remained in man?”

The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see ... Observe things as they are and don’t pay attention to other people. HUANG-PO (9th C.)

As an infant you were like any animal: in that you were for yourself headless and faceless and eyeless, immense, at large, unseparate from your world - without being aware of your blessed condition. Unconsciously, you lived without obstruction from What you are Where you are, from your Source, and relied simply on the Given. What was presented to you really was present - the Moon was no bigger or further off than the hand that clutched at it. Your world really was your world - distance, that most plausible and rapacious of sneak-thieves, hadn’t begun to filch it from you. The obvious really was obvious - the rattle that fell out of sight no longer existed: disappearance meant annihilation. You made no claim to that face in your mirror. It stayed there: it was that baby’s, not yours.

Gradually you learned the fateful and essential art of going out and looking back at yourself, as if from a few feet away and through others’ eyes, and “seeing” yourself from their point of view as a human being like them, with a normal head on your shoulders. Normal yet unique. You came to identify with that particular face in your mirror, and answer to its name. Yet you remained for yourself at large, headless, boundless Space for your world to happen in. In fact it’s likely that at times you became well aware of that Space.

At this stage you come near to making the best of both worlds - the unlimited non-human world you are coming from and the limited human world you are entering. All-too-briefly, you have in effect two identities going, two versions of yourself. For private purposes you are still no-thing, spaced out, vast, extending even to the stars (though now far away, you are quite capable of including them: they are still your stars): while for social purposes you are increasingly the opposite of all this.

Instead of containing our world, it now contains us - what’s left of us. And so, reduced from being the whole scene into being this tiny part, is it any wonder that you and I find ourselves in all sorts of trouble - if we grow greedy, resentful, alienated, frightened, defeated, tired, stiff, imitative instead of creative, unloving, plain crazy?

Greedy - as we try to regain and accumulate at any cost as much as possible of our lost empire,

Resentful or aggressive - as we seek revenge on a social order that has cruelly cut us down to size,

Alienated, lonely, suspicious - because we morbidly imagine that people, and even animals and inanimate objects, keep their distance from us, are aloof and stand-off-ish: and we refuse to see how that distance folds to nothing, so that in reality they are right...

Defeated - because working for this individual something is making sure of failure: the probable end of even our most “successful” enterprises is disillusion, the certain end is death,

Tired - because the building and maintenance and constant adjustment of this imaginary box for living in, right here, uses up so much energy,

Uncreative - because we cut ourselves off from our Source and Centre and see ourselves as mere regional effect,

Unloving - because we shut all others out from the volume we imagine we occupy, pretending we are not built open, not built for loving,

Really to appreciate What we are, with clarity and impact, we must first be identified with what we are not. Really to value the perfectly obvious, we must first acquire the habit of overlooking and denying it. The Universe is such that true liberation doesn’t happen in vacuo; it is liberation from what’s false - without which it isn’t liberation at all. So it comes about that our list of troubles - that alas-far-from-complete tale of woe - isn’t all woe. It is the precondition of a freedom that can be had no other way.

Here are three of many means of making the turnabout, for the attentive and honest reader instantly to try out: (i) What you are now looking at is this printing; what you are now looking out of is empty Space for this printing. Trading your head for it, you put nothing in its way: you vanish in its favour. (ii) What you are now looking out of isn’t two small and tightly fastened “windows” called eyes but one immense and wide open “Window” without any edges; in fact you are this frameless, glassless “Window”. (iii) To make quite sure of this, you have only to point to the “Window” and notice what that finger is pointing at - if anything. Please do just that, now ...

No wonder, then, that seeing It (which is not other than consciously being It) is such a bare and austere and even sombre experience. The fact that it comes across as “non-religious” and “devoid of emotion,” as “cold scientific evidence or matter-of-factness,” as “prosaic and non-glorious,” is evidence of its authenticity.

Nevertheless the method is quite simple and the same throughout. It consists of ceasing to overlook the looker - or rather, the absence of the looker.

As the animal and infant of Stage (1), you were unselfconscious: all your arrows of attention were aimed outwards: you overlooked your presence. As the child of Stage (2), you probably were from time to time truly Self-conscious; on those occasions an arrow of attention was turned inward also, and it hit the mark: you saw your Absence - accidentally as it were. But more and more your inward-pointing arrows fell far short of that mark: instead of getting through to the central Absence-of-any-body they got stuck in the peripheral presence of a very human somebody. As the adult of Stage (3), and falsely self-conscious, you went on aiming your arrows of attention at that insubstantial some-body, at that human appearance of yours which daily became more substantial for you, and soon was your identity card, your identity itself. (Forged card, mistaken identity!) And now, as the seer of Stages (4) and (5), you are again truly Self-conscious: but this time you penetrate that ring of appearances more deliberately and consistently, and begin to rest in What they are appearances of, in your Reality, which is your true Identity, your Presence-Absence, your Core and Source.

Chang Chen Chi, who (in his valuable guide The Practice of Zen) points out that Zen isn’t interested in the many aspects and strata of the mind but in penetrating to its core, “for it holds that once this core is grasped, all else will become relatively insignificant and crystal clear.”

Our own position is this: of course it’s crucial that our psychological problems - in fact whatever thoughts and feelings happen to arise - should be clearly seen for what they are, but always along with What they are coming from; along with Who is supposed to have them. Their Seer must not be lost sight of.

Our two-way meditation, then, is truly radical psychotherapy - psychotherapy so deep that overt and particular results may be very slow indeed to surface. Nevertheless, when sufficiently persisted in, it is sure to yield - more as a bonus than an expected reward - quite specific improvements in that “outer” scene, in the problem-ridden realm of our everyday lives. Typically, these will include an enlivening of the senses (raising the screen which muffles the plangency of sounds, dims the glow of colours, blurs forms, and filters out the loveliness shining in the “ugliest” places) and (to go with the sensory awakening) a complex of inter-related psychophysical changes - including a sustained “whole-body” alertness in place of the “heady” intermittent sort (as if one were poised through-and-through to run the race of one’s life), a reduction of stress, particularly in the region of the eyes and mouth and neck (as if one were at last letting them go), a progressive lowering of one’s centre of gravity (as if losing one’s head were finding one’s heart, and guts, and feet, which are now rooted in the Earth), a striking downward shift of one’s breathing (as if it were a belly-function), and in fact a general come-down (as if all the good things one had vainly strained after in the heights were awaiting one in the depths). And, balancing this descent, a general uplift, including a sense of exaltation (as if one were perfectly straight-backed and as tall as the sky), an upsurge of ...

As a rule, however - particularly after the initial thrill and novelty of Self-realization have worn off, and the enjoyment of one’s true Nature is dimmed by expectation of benefits for one’s human nature - those benefits are experienced as modest, patchy and variable. The outward fruits of in-seeing aren’t nearly so abundant as one would naturally wish, are slow to ripen, and even then are probably more apparent to others than to oneself. Often there is no sense of improvement whatever. There may well be growing disappointment, a sense of something more needed, additional to the bare seeing. Which brings us to the next stage of our journey.

Never mind: headlessness is for living always, for sharing occasionally, for arguing about never.

“Go blind,” and “see” if you are headless, or not. Will you, the reader, kindly do just that? Shut your eyes, and for ten seconds check whether you now have the slightest evidence of a headpiece occupying the centre of your world, of a some-thing here that has any discernable boundaries or shape or size or colour or opacity - let alone eyes or nose or ears or mouth. (Aches and tickles and tastes and so on don’t begin to make up a head, aren’t like that at all.) Or, for that matter, have you the slightest evidence right now of a body? To make sure, how many toes can you count, when with closed eyes you drop memory and imagination and go by what’s given at this moment?

Similarly our thoughts and feelings appear only on the blank screen here which Zen calls No-mind, and leave no trace on it as they disappear.

As something I am merely that thing, as no-thing I am all things.

For as this tiny and solid (and quite fictional) something here I shut out all other things from the volume I occupy and so am the poorest of the poor; while as this immense and vacant (and real) No-thing or Space I let them in, I take delivery of the Universe, I have and hold the lot.

When as a person I aim directly to be out in front and involved in life and truly with it, I am in fact alienated from life, up against it, ultimately its victim. Whereas when my aim is indirect - via the perceived Absence here of that person seeking involvement - why then I’m not just out in the world, not just with it: I’m relishing the experience of being it. I’m at large, world-asserting, enlightened (as Zen master Dogen so delightfully puts it) by all beings.

I come to realize that my seeing into the Absence here isn’t seeing into my Absence, but everyone’s. I see that the Void here is void enough and big enough for all, that it is the Void. Intrinsically, we all are one and the same, and there are no others. It follows that what I do to anyone I do to myself, and what happens to them happens to me. It’s a fact that I must take very seriously.

It is consciously being what we really are - Capacity for things - the Space in which each of them is allowed to arrive at its peculiar kind of perfection.

It is consciously viewing everything from its Source, reuniting it with the Infinity that lies this side of it. It is hearing, seeing, smelling, touching things as if for the first time, relieved of the crushing load of time past.

It is being present at Creation’s morning, before Adam named the creatures and got bored with them. It is seeing them with their Creator’s eye, as very good. In Zen terms, again, it is “being enlightened by all be...

whenever we have the grace to say YES! to our circumstances, and actively to will (rather than passively to acquiesce in) whatever happens, why then there springs up that real and lasting joy which Eastern tradition calls ananda.

In terms of our Western tradition, our breakthrough is our unconditional and ever-renewed surrender to God’s will as perfectly revealed in our circumstances - to God’s will clearly on show all around us and within us, in the shape of all that’s going on right now. Insofar as his will becomes ours, we see his world as it is; and, insofar as we see it as it is, our will becomes his and from our hearts we welcome all that world is bringing to us.

That great Christian authority on surrender - Jean-Pierre de Caussade - writes: “If you abandon all restraint, carry your wishes to their fullest limits, open your heart boundlessly, there is not a single moment when you will not find all you could possibly desire. The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams.”

What we can say of this fugitive revelation is that (though capable of misuse) it never of itself did anybody any harm, that it does open a brief window on Eternity, and that (the hinge now loosened) the window is liable at any moment to swing wide open in God’s wind and eventually to stay wide open. What we are can be trusted to reveal Itself in all its noonday freshness and warmth and brilliance, its blazing obviousness, exactly when It should.