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

by Douglas E. Harding

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 ...

St. John of the Cross: “They who know God most perfectly perceive most clearly that he is perfectly incomprehensible.”