On Having No Head — Alex Priest

Highlights

…just for the moment I stopped thinking… 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.

Like a psychedelic trip, or an “ego death.”

…it felt like the sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming… There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden.

Love that—“dropping the burden” with presence.

There exist, then, two sorts—two widely different species—of human being.

Harding breaks down two different kinds of humans, the one that “evidently carries a head on its shoulders” (everyone else) and the “only one specimen” (the self) which has no head.

All twoness—all duality of subject and object—has vanished: it is no longer read into a situation which has no room for it.

Finally starting to get “non-duality.”

Present experience, whatever sense is employed, occurs only in an empty and absent head… A kind of alert naïvety is what I need.

Love “alert naïvety” — the essence of curiosity.

[re: mirrors]… these loose heads can never amount to more than impermanent and unprivileged accidents of that “outer” or phenomenal world… So unprivileged, indeed, is my head in the mirror, that I don’t necessarily take it to be mine: as a very young child I didn’t recognize myself in the glass, and neither do I now, when for a moment I regain my lost innocence.

So much of presence seems to be about reclaiming lost innocence, approaching the world with curiosity and abandoning what we adults consider “fact” or “obvious.”

I neither see nor hear nor smell nor taste nor feel anything at all until the converging stimuli actually arrive, after the most drastic changes and delays, at this centre. It is only at this terminus, this moment and place of all arrivals at the Grand Central Station of my Here-Now, that the whole traffic system—what I call my Universe—springs into existence. For me, this is the time and place of all creation.

Big one.

It is what it’s observed to be, no more and no less, and it’s the explosion of this centre—this terminal spot where “I” or “my consciousness” is supposed to be located—an explosion powerful enough to fill out and become this boundless scene that’s no before me, that is me.

This is helping it click in for me.

In other words, so that I shall identify myself with the actor, his head is got out of the way: he must be my kind of person. For a picture of me-with-a-head is no likeness at all: it is a portrait of someone else, a case of mistaken identity.

Reveals some of the genius in first person video games… the player loses themself in the character they are playing, becomes present in the game. The universe shrinks into the fiction.

I saw that on two counts this new vision must transform my attitude to other men, and indeed to all creatures. Firstly, because it abolishes confrontation. Meeting you, there is for me only one face—yours—and I can never get face-to-face with you. In fact, we trade faces, and this is a most precious and intimate exchange of appearances. Secondly, because it gives me perfect insight into the Reality that lies behind your appearance, into you as you are for yourself, I have every reason to think the world of you. For I must believe that what is true for me is true for everyone, that we are all in the same condition—reduced to headless voids, to nothing, so that we may contain and become everything.

Harding goes on to say, “In fact, he (or she) is myself.” The oneness.

…this little body is so united functionally to all other things, so dependent on its environment, that is is non-existent and unthinkable by itself… How much of this total Body I take on depends on the occasion, but automatically I feel my way into as much as I need. Thus I may with perfect ease identify myself in turn with my head, my six-foot body, my family, my country, my planet and solar system…

Love this: “feel my way into as much as I need.”

This very spot, this observation-post of mine, this particular “hole where a head should have been”—this is the Ground and Receptacle of all existence, the one Source of all that appears (when projected “over there”) as the physical or phenomenal world, the one infinitely fertile Womb from which all creatures are born and into which they all return. It is absolutely Nothing, yet all things; the only Reality, yet an absentee. It is my Self. There is nothing else whatever. I am everyone and no-one, and Alone.

Whoosh.

When people start seeing things others can’t see, eyebrows are raised, doctors sent for… This is how a real madman must feel (I thought)— cut off, unable to communicate.

Jalalu’l-Din Rumi, Persia’s foremost mystical poet (1207–1273): “Behead yourself!” “Dissolve your whole body into Vision: become seeing, seeing, seeing!”

Need to explore more Rumi.

Still earlier, the Taoist sage Chuang-tzu (c. 300 B.C.) draws a delightful picture of this featureless Face or empty head of mine. He calls it “Chaos, the Sovereign of the Centre…”

How much the Void currently includes, and excludes, is unimportant: for I see that it remains infinitely empty and infinitely big regardless of the scope or importance of the finite objects it’s taking care of. It makes no real difference whether it’s dissolving my head (as when I look down), or my human body (as when I look out), or my Earth-body (as when, out-of-doors, I look up), or my Universe body (as when I close my eyes). Everything there, no matter how tiny or vast, is equally soluble here, equally capable of coming and showing me that I am no-thing here.

Yet again pulls me back to Stephen King’s “Gunslinger” and the blade of grass. So good.

Let your body and mind be turned into an inanimate object of nature like a stone or a piece of wood; when a state of perfect motionlessness and unawareness is obtained all the signs of life will depart and also every trace of limitation will vanish.