Douglas Harding
Douglas is a gentle scholar who many years ago noticed that he could see whatever he looked at, except his own head. In time he began to see only that absence, and to rest therein. Douglas died on Jan. 11, 2007. He will be sorely missed.
On Having a Head
I have a tale to tell against myself. A somewhat embarrassing - if not shaming - confession to make. It happened quite recently, this sudden realization that threatened to undermine the very basis of the work I had been doing and the life I had been living for half a century. Most of this time I had been going round cheerfully pointing out to everybody who would listen that, in one’s own first-hand experience of oneself, one lacks a head, and converting not a few to that unusual opinion.Of course I had quickly added that, in place of the missing head, is a parade of sensations - felt roughnesses and smoothnesses and tickles and tensions and aches, as well as a great variety of sounds and tastes and smells. Not to mention a maelstrom of thoughts and feelings. Nevertheless, (I insisted) the contrast between the loose and ever-changing parade of events strung out in time that belong on these shoulders and the tight and stable pattern of coloured shapes all packed together in space that belong on those shoulders couldn’t be more striking. So much so that I got into the habit of looking in my mirror to see what I was not like, and asking myself whether what I was looking out of had anything in common with what I was looking at.Accordingly I concluded that, whatever it is that lurks here at the centre of my world, it is certainly not a head - if that word is to mean anything at all - and I’m indeed headless.This self-portrait will indicate what I mean by headlessness.
It aims to show how, when I try to get hold of my lost head, I lose my hands as well. How what I’m looking out of isn’t so much a thing as an anti-thing, a searching and universal solvent, a flame that, while it lights up everything that keeps its distance, burns up everything that ventures too near. And my purpose, throughout this past half-century, has been to tend this flame and spread its light.
Well, there you have it - the background of the story I have to tell.
That was how matters stood as recently as three months ago. And then, for no reason I know of, it suddenly occurred to me that a man born blind, fingering one of his hands and then his head, has as much reason for believing in the latter as in the former.
Please check this for yourself right now. Go blind (that’s to say, close your eyes), handle your left hand with your right, then your left arm and shoulder, your neck, and finally your head - back, sides, and front, all over Isn’t the present evidence for your head just as convincing as for your hand? for a head, moreover, which is as firmly attached to your trunk as your hand is to your arm.
Now let’s admit it, a fundamental truth that’s untrue for a blind man isn’t a fundamental truth at all. It doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. And certainly it’s no foundation for building a life on.
So I found myself asking myself some awkward questions. What if, all through those years of dedicated endeavour, I had been mistaken? Or worse, had more or less unconsciously suppressed vital evidence, cooking the books in favour of a cherished theory, not to say obsession? Could it be that - more hidden from me than from others - my stratagem for reversing my feelings of inferiority and getting noticed at any price, for hoisting myself head and shoulders above the masses, had been to pretend I lacked head and shoulders? How’s that for irony?
I tell you I was shocked. Not tumbled, but shaken.
The shock was somewhat cushioned by three considerations. The first was that, many times in my life, a serious setback or looming disaster has issued in something new and wonderful, a valuable realization, an opening out of new vistas. This man’s extremity, as they say, has so often turned out to be God’s opportunity that my hope was that history would obligingly repeat itself yet once more. The second consideration was that, over many years, the experience and practice of headlessness has made a profound difference for the better in many lives no less than in my own. and what works so well and for so long and for so many is unlikely to be the nonsense or the lie it might appear to be. The third consideration was (or rather is) that right now as I type these words on this sheet of A4 I can find nothing here on my shoulders to keep it out with, absolutely nothing in its way. Everything I see decapitates me.
All the same, here was a real challenge, a hiatus, an important piece missing from the jigsaw of my life and work. Clearly I had a duty to myself and others to find, if I could, the missing piece and put it on display- better late than never.
Obviously my first job was to investigate yet again what exactly it is that I’m fingering here in the place I’m looking out of. I decided to examine, more carefully than ever before, this home-base of mine, and, coming to my senses afresh, to rely throughout on what they might reveal, on the clearly given. This meant abandoning my most cherished convictions about headlessness and all that, and starting all over again, aided by whatever new experiments seemed promising.
At once a bunch of indubitable facts came to light. I do - yes, I do after all - have a something here on my shoulders, a topknot or finial, and the only fitting name for the thing is a head of some sort. Of what sort? Well, it’s the head (furnished with all the normal protuberances and hollows and apertures) of a living creature. And not just any living creature but a human one. and not just any human, but a special one: all sorts of peculiarities identify it as Douglas Harding’s alone. And it’s of a piece with the rest of his body. Though manifesting itself to me after its own fashion and on is own terms, it’s just as real as any other part of my body. And though for me the head I’m looking out of is as transparent as the window I happen also to be looking out of at this moment, it’s as solid and as actual-factual as the glass in that window. To deny this would be to descend to the intellectual level of the bluebottle hurling itself again and again against the glass.
“All quite obvious and normal,” I can hear you commenting drily, “and surprising only to no-head addicts.” So be it - thus far. But here’s where the abnormalities and surprises take off, and there emerges a whole series of startling facts about this real head of mine, and just how wildly different it is from all the other heads I’ve come across: including, of course, the head in my mirror.
For a start I notice that, though the same way up as those heads over there, it’s attached to a body that’s the other way up. This means that just below shoulder level I FOLD, as this page you are reading folds with the page opposite. Fold, I find, to breaking point. Is the same true for you? Please make sure by holding up your forearm like this,
and bringing it slowly down from (a) at the top of the scene where the sky (or the ceiling if you are indoors) fades away downwards. Notice how the rest of your body, in contrast to that of the little man in the distance, is upside-down. His feet - like the feet of the person in your mirror - are underneath him, yours are on top.
But your head is the same way up as his. It isn’t upside-down. Please make sure of this by repeating the experiment with your forearm held closer, so that your forefinger just grazes your truly huge profile - your forehead at (a), then your nose and chin, and finally your neck at (b).
To have a head that’s as clear as glass is wonderful. To have a head that folds with its body is wonderful. To have a head that also has room for the world is wonderful indeed. For in fact this real head of mine, though tangibly featuring my merely human and merely personal hair, forehead, eyebrows, nose, mouth, and so on, is sky-high and world-wide and world-deep, and it features the cosmos itself. Between your ears a coiffure, between mine a coiffure and the clear light of the morning! What a miraculous coming-to-a-head is here, this most intimate conjunction of the cosmic and the human and the personal and the glasslike impersonal, and in the very place where I insisted I was headless!
I’m not asking you to believe me but to check whether you, too, are built to the same grand and astonishing design. This you do - right now, if you please - by outlining your head with your forefinger, touching in turn your hair, ear, cheek, and chin, all round and back again to where you started. If you are conducting this experiment (or, should I say, going on this world tour?) in the open, so much the better. In any case notice how your real head as so outlined is even larger than the scene. With ease it accommodates whatever happens to be on display, whether it’s a sky full of stars, or the dream you are dreaming, or the room you are now sitting in, or the tea-leaves in your teacup. And all this without ceasing to be as human and as personal as they come.
To clinch the matter beyond doubt, notice that it’s not just your head but the upper part of your body that’s so magnificently capacious. Along with those little heads over there go little arms, along with your immense head here go immense arms. Here’s how you check this. While looking straight ahead spread wide your outstretched arms till they almost disappear from view. Actually do this, and you will see that they embrace the world that your head is already taking in and taking on.
What false modesty it is, to deny these undeniable and heartening facts! What a nonsense it is, this prime delusion of man, this belittling and indeed self- mutilating conviction that he is what he looks like to other men! It’s as if the Atlantic were to persuade itself that it’s the puddle it looks like from the Moon, or the drop it looks like from beyond the Moon, and neither deep nor wide nor wet nor windswept!
Actually there’s no end to the differences between the head that’s here and the head that’s there - whether it’s in my mirror, or on other people’s shoulders, or in their cameras. Differences is far too mild a word. Glaring discrepancies is nearer the mark. What makes the continual discovery and rediscovery of these discrepancies so crucial is our fatal determination, from childhood onwards, to identify ourselves with that apparent and peripheral head and to dis-identify ourselves with the real and central head it stems from. In a word, our ingrained wrong-headedness.
Let’s look, briefly, at a sample seven of these discrepancies, these instances of wrong-headedness. If, like me, you have noticed them before, take a fresh look, and discover that here every time is the first time.
(1) This real but mistaken-for-unreal head is constantly and without effort wiping out one collection of things - it may be a constellation, it may be a range of mountain peaks or a stand of trees or a terrace of houses, it may be the furniture in one corner of the room you are sitting in - and replacing it by another collection. At will it transmutes anything into something else. But that mistaken-for-real head can’t even transmute its little self. It merely turns to the right or the left, poor thing!
(2) This real but mistaken-for-unreal head decorates and redecorates the world, suddenly painting it rose-coloured, blue, grey, practically any colour, at will. But that mistaken-for-real head merely decorates and redecorates its eyeballs with discs of coloured glass, poor thing!
(3) This real but mistaken-for-unreal head peoples the universe with extraordinary characters, some hilarious, some admirable, many so-so, a few quite horrible. It brings to pass monsters and marvels of very kind, caught up in all sorts of remarkable happenings, in scenery to match. That mistaken-for-real head merely stations itself in front of a wad of paper covered with black marks, fiddling with and staring fixedly at it for hours on end. Or laboriously covers reams of snow-white paper with similar black marks.
(4) This real but mistaken-for-unreal head changes the world’s disposition from sad to happy to sad, from stormy to calm and back again, from just about any mood to any other mood. That mistaken-for-real head merely inserts foreign substances - uppers, downer, pep-pills, what-have-you - into a toothed slit near its base, or bends upwards and downwards the curved margins of that slit or slot,
or produces pious noises from that slit or slot. Rarely, it must be added, with complete success.
The Grail Legend, with its tale of a parade of sacred objects in the Waste Land, is very much to the point here. These objects include a severed head. If the knight who witnesses the parade isn’t interested enough to ask questions about this head the Waste Land stays waste and its Wounded King stays wounded. The lesson for me is clear. Go deeply into the meaning and truth of this central head of mine and be sure that this research, seemingly so private and ineffectual, has universal repercussions. My true head not only contains the world, but really does determine its state of health. What I see depends on what I am.
(5) This real but mistaken-for-unreal head is all the time moving mountains, hills, houses, trees, you name it, shifting them around effortlessly. Don’t believe me. Try it out for yourself. Exercising this miraculous faculty of cosmic telekinesis, you can increase or decrease the distance between that house opposite and the tree in its garden, or shift that chair nearer to or further away from the door. And so on and on. Whereas that mistaken-for-real head, swaying from side to side, shifts only itself.
(6) Most impressive and neglected of all, this real but mistaken-for-unreal head regularly creates and destroys the world. Whereas that mistaken-for-real head merely raises and lowers a couple of hair-fringed flaps attached to its surface. As for the poor little head in my mirror, why it can’t even do that!
(7) Strangely enough, the exercise of the six foregoing powers - and by God they are not to be sniffed at - leaves one’s real head anything but big-headed in the pejorative sense of that term. You could say it’s the acme of modesty and unobtrusiveness, humbler than humble. Why so? Because it’s continually abolishing itself, vanishing without trace in favour of other heads. Its proper business, its very nature is to make way for and give place to all comers, however troublesome or dull they happen to be. Essentially self-effacing, this original face of mine is faceless, this original head is headless. Conversely, that acquired and mistaken-for-real head is nothing if not heady, and it is manifestly closed to all comers. Its proper business is to insist on itself. It has no room for anything else.
For the purpose of our enquiry this seventh discrepancy is the crucial one. It’s time to take stock.
In a sense I have to admit that headless is precisely what I’m not, and that in promoting headlessness for the past half century I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Securely mounted on these broadest of shoulders, larger than life and twice as natural, is my only real, indispensable, living head, my very own superhuman and human and personal head.
But in another and far truer sense I wasn’t wrong after all, and every moment of that long dedication to headlessness was time well spent. Exercising the last and surely most wonderful of the powers we have just been sampling, this truly headed one here is truly headless. Its crowning power and glory is that it surrenders all power and glory, gives itself away leaving no residue, gives all it has and is to the world that sorely needs just that. Helen’s face, they say, launched a thousand ships. My face, when I let go of it, launches a thousand worlds.
So it turns out that none of these discoveries about my true or superhead subtract one iota from my long experience of headlessness, or invalidate it for a moment. Quite the contrary, they confirm and enrich and enliven that experience, which I can now describe as a headlessness that is born unceasingly of headfulness. No risk now of this central emptiness reading as a dead and dreary emptiness, a mere void, a nothing, a static absence. It’s a verb rather than a noun, an ever-renewed absenting. And after all this makes good sense: only what’s full can empty itself, only what lives can give its life so that others may live.
Much of this has a familiar ring for me, and maybe for you. What s ever new, what I shall never get used to is the inescapable fact that this wonderfully four-tier topknot is mine. It’s what I put my Panama hat on! It’s none other than the head I shampoo!
What about the blind man whose hand and head seemed to threaten my life’s work?
Our discoveries remove that threat. It’s true that some of the realizations and powers I have listed - and obviously this includes the folding of the visible part of one’s body with the tangible part - aren’t available to him. Nevertheless a sufficient number remain, and there are others. The one thing (or rather, no- thing) he can clearly see - and there’s no other way to see it - is the limitless being that he really, really is. And that is why, all along, I have had no more difficulty sharing this vision with blind people than with sighted people.
As for my suspicion - voiced at the beginning of this essay - that the threat posed by the blind man concealed a promise, that promise has been fulfilled far more generously than I had imagined possible. Once more the dear Lord has seized the opportunity of this man’s extremity to shower him with blessings, blessings superhuman and human and personal and subpersonal - sub everything. Blessings poured upon his head of course - where else? - in accordance with tradition.
Now it would be strange if this good news had up to now passed unnoticed, had never dawned upon the sages and seers whose business throughout three millennia has been radical self-knowledge. And of course there it was, scattered very thinly but very widely over the great spiritual traditions and often expressed obliquely, but plain enough as soon as one knew what to look for.
Jelaluddin Rumi could be called the Apostle of Headlessness, and sure enough it was among the voluminous utterances of this greatest of Sufis that I found the following:
“You have two heads. That head of clay is from earth, this pure head is from heaven. That derived head is manifest, this original head is hidden”.
It is my business to lose my head, the business of my King to give me a new one.
Or take Plotinus, the 3rd-century neo-platonist philosopher:
“To real Being we go back, all that we have and are. To This we return as from This we came When we look outside of This on which we depend, we ignore our unity. Looking outward we see many faces, look inward and all is the One Head. If a man could but be turned about - by his own motion or by the happy pull of Athene - he would at once see god, and himself, and the All”.
According to Zen Buddhism I’m enlightened when I see and consciously live from my “Original Face”. The implications are threefold. First, that I have an Original Head, for a face without a head is no more real than a Cheshire cat’s smile without a Cheshire cat. Second, that I also have an acquired face and head, for an original face and head without an acquired one to contrast itself with is a misnomer. And, third, that to superimpose that acquired face and head over there in my mirror upon this original one right here is endarkening and unhealthy, if not plain silly. I conclude that what the realized Zen man lives from is what the realized Sufi lives from. And it is none other than what we have been calling here our real and true and truly blessed head.
Isn’t it also what the realized Christian lives from when, following St Paul, he experiences Christ as “the head of the body”? Or perhaps, following St Augustine, he speaks mysteriously of “the flesh of Christ which is the head of man”? Of course neither saint is referring to the historical Jesus who was born and lived and died long ago in that distant land, but to the eternal and cosmic Christ who from the beginning was God and was with God, and by whom all things are created and sustained. The Christ in me that is more me than me, the heavenly man, the new man, the Word that is forever being made flesh, forever being spoken. Spoken (please note) with a voice that is at once divine, and human, and personal - so fleshly-personal that, though I speak for Him and from Him, I must do so in tones and accents that are instantly recognizable as those of Douglas Harding alone. Even his “Hello” on the ‘phone, last heard years ago, is like no other’s. There’s personhood for you!
Every creature is a unique divine incarnation. I have long felt that here, in the mystery of the Word made flesh, of the Ultimate forever becoming the Intimate - superbly pictured in the Christmas star-to-manger story - is the master key to true religion, deep healing, lasting joy. I have been sure of it, without being at all clear about the mode of its operation. But now, arriving under the improbable guise of a challenge to my life’s mission, what should have been obvious from the start discloses itself. Though the mystery and the wonder of this incarnation remain more and not less mysterious and wonderful, a bright light shines on how it actually comes to pass in my own case, and by extension in all others. It’s a perfectly extraordinary four-level descent, and it’s going on in the place where I imagined I had a perfectly ordinary one-level head doing its perfectly ordinary level-headed thing.
Where does this divine descent end? Exactly where does it bottom out? Let’s go for the answer to the very first of our discoveries, the one in which we found our real and immense head folding to breaking point with our other-way-up little body. The divine descent is completed just below these outstretched arms that embrace the world, in the region of the heart. Not - repeat not - in the region of the cool head but of the warm heart. And the broken heart, at that. Nothing short of that extremity of emptying and self-naughting where I fold and go broke, will, by completing the circle, join the Nothing to the All which is its other aspect. Thank Heaven there’s nothing vague or airy-fairy about this lowest but most awesome of places.
It’s for pinpointing precisely: in fact, it’s the spot I naturally point to when indicating myself. It’s the nadir where exhalation ends and inhalation begins, and where incarnation becomes excarnation. In Pauline language, it’s the place where I am crucified and resurrected with Christ.
Here at last is the true Sacred Heart, the broken heart that heals all heartbreak. Also warning for those whose hearts are still intact: in particular for anyone who imagines that “losing one’s head” is enough, thank you very much. I say that, till the loss of one’s head issues in the finding of one’s heart - a heart so tender that it is mortally wounded by the world’s appalling suffering - till then one falls far short of the goal which is the love that transmutes all suffering.
And here a near miss, just because it can so easily be mistaken for a bull’s eye, can be worse than a mile off-target.
No, headlessness is not enough, for the simple reason that it can, by itself, be quite loveless. I have some evidence from others’ lives, and plenty from my own, that this is a solemn fact.
Finally, by way of summary and conclusion, I would like to look a little more closely at what “having a head here” amounts to.
(1) This real head of mine is divine. I can find no other adjective that does justice to its boundlessness, its speckless clarity and no-thingness in one direction and its fullness and everythingness in the opposite direction, its ability not just to set in motion and transform the world overall and in detail but to make and unmake it at will - and all of it wide-awake to itself. Now to arrogate all or any of these powers to myself as a human being, and to a particular human being at that, would be as ridiculous as it would be conceited.
In my essential functioning I am divine, whether I admit it or not. It is by the way, so to speak, according to the particular form that functioning takes, that I am human and this particular human.
But it’s not as if this real head of mine were divine in part and human in part and personal in part and absent in part, or some explosive mixture of all four ingredients. No, at its own level the divinity is absolute and by no means blurred or diminished by its descent into humanness and personhood and nothingness. Only my uncontaminated Godhood is capable of those primary functions which we have sampled, and which I had either falsely attributed to my manhood or else completely overlooked. Not even the dimmest or foggiest head runs short of divine prowess. To lack divinity is to lack being.
(2) This real head of mine is human: in fact, animal-human. Amazingly, all these divine functions are going on in a container which, though infinitely capacious, is revealed by touch to be animal-human beyond all doubt. This hair- do, these lobed ears, these hairless cheeks, these oval eyes and peculiar nose and mouth, though distinguishable from those of a gorilla or chimpanzee, clearly belong to the same genus. They are simian, as distinct from feline, canine, and so on. Never was container so outshone by its contents! And, of course, along with the animal form go countless animal functions such as breathing and eating, and along with the human form go countless human functions - all those modes of feeling and thinking and behaving that characterize Homo sapiens. Nevertheless I can find no evidence that my awareness of my divine nature diminishes my animal-human nature. Rather the reverse. They dovetail neatly. Divinity doesn’t incarnate tentatively or half-heatedly. It calls nothing common or unclean. It is no snob.
(3) This real head of mine is personal and unique. Passing my hands again over its surface, I detect all manner of peculiarities - patches of rough skin, wrinkles, prominences and hollows that belong to Douglas Harding alone. Here, not to be despised, is an unimaginably elaborate system of marks - a data-coding, so to say - that sets him apart from all humans that are or were or shall be