Douglas Harding and the Headless Way

Often readers of spiritual texts are left confused as to what the author is trying to
convey when they say from the highest view point in reality you are really
Consciousness, No Mind, Being, All that is, The I Am, Presence, The Higher Self,
Oneness etc. While a reader may develop an intellectual concept of what an author is
speaking about from such texts, a true experiential experience is often lacking.

The Headless Way offers you a practical, user-friendly way to see Who you really are.
This method was developed by the philosopher Douglas Harding. At the heart of this
approach are the Experiments - awareness exercises that guide your attention directly
to your deepest identity.

Who Are You?

Religion’s Answer
The world’s great mystics have a common message:

"There is a Reality which is Indivisible, One, Alone, the Source and Being of all; not a
thing, nor even a mind, but pure Spirit or clear Consciousness; and we are That and
nothing but That, for That is our true Nature; and the only way to find It is to look
steadily within, where are to be found utmost peace, unfading joy, and eternal life
itself." (From Religions of the World by Douglas Harding)

Science’s Answer
What you are depends on the range of the observer. At several metres, more or less,
you are human, but at closer ranges you are cells, molecules, atoms, particles…
Viewed from further away your body becomes absorbed into the rest of society, life,
the planet, the star, the galaxy… Science’s objective view of you – zooming towards
and away from you - reveals a hierarchically organized system of layers that is alive,
intelligent and beautiful. Thus you have many layers, like an onion. You need every
one of these layers to exist. Your human identity, vital and important as it is, is just
one of these layers. You are also sub-human and supra-human.

What are you at the Centre of your many layers? The scientist cannot say because she
can only observe you from a distance. However close she gets to you, she remains
outside you. What or Who you really are, the Ground of your Being, remains a
mystery.

Other People’s Answer

Other people are like the scientist because they cannot see what you are at Centre
either, only what you are peripherally. Reflecting back to you what they make of you,
their feedback is about you as a person.

Your Answer
You are not distant from yourself, not outside yourself. You – and you alone - are
therefore perfectly placed to see what you are at Centre. All you have to do is look.

How do you look into your Centre?

The Headless way experiments direct your attention inwards to your centre. They
reveal the One you really are, the One at the heart of your life. Take some time now to
explore them.

Over the past [sixty] years a truly contemporary and Western way of 'seeing into one's
Nature' or 'Enlightenment' has been developing. Though in essence the same as Zen,
Sufism, and other spiritual disciplines, this way proceeds in an unusually down-to-
earth fashion. It claims that modern man is more likely to see Who he really is in a
minute of active experimentation than in years of reading, lecture-attending, thinking,
ritual observances, and passive meditation of the traditional sort. Instead of these, it
uses a variety of simple, non-verbal, fact-finding tests, all of them asking: how do I
look to myself? They direct my attention to my blind spot - to the space I occupy, to
what's given right here at the Centre of my universe, to what it's like being 1st-person
singular, present tense.

Douglas Harding was born in 1909 in Suffolk, England. He grew up in a strict

fundamentalist Christian sect, the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren. The ‘Brethren’
believed they were the ‘saved’ ones, that they had the one true path to God and that
everyone else was bound for Hell. When Harding was 21 he left. He could not accept
their view of the world. What guarantee was there that they were right? What about
all the other spiritual groups who also claimed that they alone had the Truth?
Everyone couldn’t be right.

In London in the early 1930s Harding was studying and then practising architecture.
In his spare time, however, he devoted his energies to philosophy - to trying to
understand the nature of the world, and the nature of himself. Into philosophy at this
time were filtering the ideas of Relativity. Influenced by these ideas, Harding realized
that his identity depended on the range of the observer – from several metres he was
human, but at closer ranges he was cells, molecules, atoms, particles… and from
further away he was absorbed into the rest of society, life, the planet, the star, the
galaxy… Like an onion he had many layers. Clearly he needed every one of these
layers to exist.
But what was at the centre of all these layers? Who was he really?

In the mid-1930s Harding moved to India with his family to work there as an
architect. When the Second World War broke out, Harding’s quest to uncover his
identity at centre - his True Identity - took on a degree of urgency. Aware of the
obvious dangers of war, he wanted to find out who he really was before he died.

One day Harding stumbled upon a drawing by the Austrian philosopher and physicist
Ernst Mach. It was a self-portrait – but a self-portrait with a difference. Most self-
portraits are what the artist looks like from several feet – she looks in a mirror and
draws what she sees there. But Mach had drawn himself without using a mirror – he
had drawn what he looked like from his own point of view, from zero distance.
When Harding saw this self-portrait the penny dropped. Until this moment he had
been investigating his identity from various distances. He was trying to get to his
centre by peeling away the layers. Here however was a self-portrait from the point of
view of the centre itself. The obvious thing about this portrait is that you don’t see the
artist’s head. For most people this fact is interesting or amusing, but nothing more.
For Harding this was the key that opened the door to seeing his innermost identity, for
he noticed he was in a similar condition – his own head was missing too. At the centre
of his world was no head, no appearance - nothing at all. And this ‘nothing’ was a
very special ‘nothing’ for it was both awake to itself and full of the whole world.
Many years later Harding wrote about the first time he saw his headlessness:

“I don’t think there was a ‘first time’. Or, if there was, it was simply a becoming more
aware of what one had all along been dimly aware of. How could there be a ‘first-
time’ seeing into the Timeless, anyway? One occasion I do remember most distinctly
– of very clear in-seeing. It had 3 parts. (1) I discovered in Karl Pearson’s Grammar of
Science, a copy of Ernst Mach’s drawing of himself as a headless figure lying on his
bed. (2) I noted that he – and I – were looking out at that body and the world, from the
Core of the onion of our appearances. (3) It was clear that the Hierarchy, which I was
then in the early stages of, had to begin with headlessness, and that this had to be the
thread on which the whole of it had to be hung.”

However, Harding did describe his discovery more dramatically in On Having No

Head.

Following this discovery, Harding spent eight more years working on The Hierarchy
of Heaven and Earth. Prefaced by CS Lewis who called it “a work of the highest
genius”, The Hierarchy was published by Faber and Faber in 1952. In this book
Harding explores, tests and makes sense of his discovery in the broadest and deepest
terms. It is not a book for a popular audience, but it is a book that will surely, in time,
be recognized as a truly great work of philosophy.

In 1961 the Buddhist Society published On Having No Head – written for a popular
audience.

In the late 1960s and 1970s Harding developed the experiments – awareness exercises
designed to make it easy to see one’s headlessness and to explore its meaning and
implications in everyday life.

He died in January 2007, shortly before his 98th birthday.

Downloadable Audio and Video files

An excellent talk explaining the headless process by Douglas Harding in London

03/03/02
http://www.audiodharma.org/talks/DouglasHarding.html

Interview with Catherine Harding on "Urban Guru"

http://urbangurucafe.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2008/11/catherine_harding.mp3
http://urbangurucafe.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2008/11/catherine_harding_part2.mp3
http://urbangurucafe.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2008/12/catherine_harding_part3.mp3

Interview with Richard Lang at EnlightenNext.

http://www.enlightennext.org/membership/index.php?q=node/2277

Two video interviews with Richard Lang

http://www.viddler.com/explore/ClearSightTV/videos/51/
http://www.viddler.com/explore/ClearSightTV/videos/55/

The website for The Headless Way

http://www.headless.org