Tommy K:
I was watching the recent [url=]Sam Harris/Dan Harris video interview about Sam's "Waking Up" book, and during it Sam gave a version of Douglas Harding's "no head" instructions. I'd already read the instructions in Sam's book, but for some reason watching and listening to him made the instructions easier to follow. And, amazingly, they appeared to work. Or at least, they may have; I'd be interested in opinions.
All I did was as Sam suggested: I attempted to observe myself observing the scene around me. And just for a flash their was something like the winking out of my sense of "I". It was very subtle but pronounced, and then faded as soon as I tried to latch onto it. But then I tried it again, a few times, and each time there was the same effect. I simply can't describe what it felt like other than acknowledging, yes there was something "headless" about it.
Of course, it may all just be wishful thinking on my part. Maybe I felt what I hoped I'd feel, based on Sam's description. But I can't be sure of that either. I'm open to the possibility that I was indeed stumbling onto the phenomenon originally described by Harding.
Anyone else done this?
What did you do to develop the experience further?
Yep. Would have dismissed it as trivial a few years back, but recently rediscovered it as a simple, direct and fun way of restoring the innocence of first person perspective, the one that predominated before we learned to play the "face game". What you
actually experience where your head ought to be is an open aware space encompassing a world. It's the literal truth of our immediate experience, but so easily overlooked and/or dismissed as trivial.
To develop it further: get further sensitised to the difference between being "at large", being a "built open" space of awareness in which things happen, versus imagining oneself as an object-unto-others peering out from inside a 'meatball'. As well as restoring perceptual innocence and immediacy, it's a really simple, literal and direct way of loosening the grip of the "
face game".
