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

My doctor wants to put me on high blood pressure medication, which would not be surprising for someone of my age, but I asked for three months time to see what I could do without meds, and so 1) started running in earnest again, 2) bought a Fitbit to obsessively track my stats (see David Sedaris’s latest book where he makes fun of his own Fitbit obsession), 3) began my own (very mild) chemical intervention to see if I could get calmer and to try to sleep more AND 4) began meditation with the help of Sam Harris’s Waking Up app. Early on, Harris, a neuroscientist with another degree in philosophy, recommends Douglas Harding’s intriguingly titled book On Having No Head (1961) which my library didn’t have, though they did have a documentary featuring Harding lecturing on the central tenets of the book. I see that Harding became known for decades as a philosopher and mystic, was the author of twelve books, and I thought heck, Harris is a smart guy, I’ll check it out if he says it is important for getting into meditation and mindfulness.

So I didn’t read the actual book, though as soon as I began watching I seemed to recall that Harding was one of those sixties folks who kind of bridge the beatniks and hippies who were leaning toward Eastern religions and mysticism. Like me, Harding was raised in a conservative Christian environment, so I knew others then who were drifting from Christianity to (maybe particularly at the time Zen) Buddhism who read him. And folks such as Alan Watts, Ram Dass, gurus of and to the West.

So, (full disclosure), I should just say I am not interested now in following Harding to Nirvana (not that there’s anything wrong or un-enticing about that, particularly); I just want lower blood pressure. Though I am a little curious (as David, one Goodreads critic of Harris suggested, too) about the scientific basis for meditation, and I know about Harris’s writings about atheism and spirituality, so am curious, too, if Harding will give me any insight here. I once checked out Transcendental Meditation, which was popular in the seventies. And this Harris-led meditation app IS helping me, but Harris is also talking in his sessions about planes of consciousness, clouds of sensations, breathing, mindfulness, and so on. He’s not just lowering my blood pressure with his focus on my breathing and so on. He’s trying to change the way I view the world. In grad school we all learned from Peter Berger and others about The Social Construction of Reality. What would a neuroscientist say about that?

Anyway, Harding has this sixties (and overall Romantic) Dharma Bum (Kerouac) focus so many of us liked then on the usefulness of heading inward, in order to experience “deep awareness.” When he was in the Himalayas as a young man he had this ah-ha moment:

“What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. 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.

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 everything—room 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.”

Instead of his head, Harding realizes, in his first satori experience, he has the world. So, as I understand it, we make the world with our consciousness. Are you behind your face? No! What is a self? What is consciousness? Where are these things?! Is there a soul, and if so, where does it exist? What I learned in grad school is that there was no essential self, but we were made up of multiple selves. Each of these selves, this consciousness, is made up with the “only tool available to us,” Harris says: Our mind.

In the video Harding’s claim (and Harris agrees) is that we make the world, we are the source of consciousness. Or maybe it's the world that makes us? Or maybe it’s that old song: “We Are the World”? But it is best to experience the world fully and directly. It is possible through careful meditation, he says, to experience “headlessness,” where the subject/object distinction collapses and you are “fully present” in the world, closer to some kind of “pure” consciousness, where one is one-with-the-universe, a boundless openness to the whole world. So what’s not to like?

I have had many thrilling “mountain-top” experiences, usually occurring outside, though sometimes in reading, and I have been in various kinds of love, peak emotional/spiritual/psychic experiences. Still, all I am looking for from Harris and Harding is lower blood pressure. But what if, along the way, I actually achieve the peace that passes all understanding and change my life?! It could happen.