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

by Douglas E. Harding

that was there all along. It is actually looking at the “meanest” stone and fallen leaf, at the “nastiest” piece of garbage, at “irrelevant” things like the shape and colour of shadows and the reflection of coloured city lights in wet roads at night (which we’ve ceased to see because we don’t drive round them). 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 the revitalizing and extension of our childhood astonishment. 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 beings,” because there’s nothing here to cloud their light.