Making Sense with Sam Harris - #181 — The Illusory Self

Episode Date: January 13, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with Richard Lang about how to experience the world beyond the illusion of the self. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, some housekeeping today. okay some housekeeping today so i want to clear up a little confusion about the difference between waking up my meditation app and this podcast making sense and also talk about how i see them interacting going forward the podcast as many of you know, was originally called Waking Up. And why that was, I have no idea. I had written a book by that title, and apparently I just felt I had run out of titles. And so for the first hundred episodes or so, that's what the podcast was called. And then I realized I wanted to release a meditation app, which was a direct descendant of the book. And Waking Up was obviously the perfect title for that. And it really had never been the best name for the podcast. So we renamed the podcast Making Sense at that point, which was a much better name for it, given the diversity of topics I touch here. But the net result is that

many people are still confused about what the podcast is called. And when someone refers to the Waking Up app online, many people think they're talking about the podcast. And this confusion is compounded because I've now opened a separate conversation track in the app, which is essentially a new podcast on topics more narrowly focused on meditation and the nature of mind and ethics and generally what it means to live an examined life. And to make matters worse, sometimes one of these conversations seems worth airing both on the app and on the podcast, like the one on psychedelics with Roland Griffiths or on addiction and craving with Judson Brewer. So I occasionally do that, and this is also confusing. And even if the conversation is just on the Waking Up app, Making Sense podcast subscribers get access to those conversations when they're logged into my website. So I understand why some of you don't

know what the hell I'm up to over here. First, Waking Up and Making Sense really are separate endeavors, despite the occasional sharing of content. So the basic picture is, if you want all of my podcast content, plus the podcast-like conversations I have on the Waking Up app, you need to subscribe to the Making Sense podcast through my website, samharris.org. And if you're not subscribed to the podcast, you'll be hearing half episodes and missing other content that's behind the paywall. If you want to use the Waking Up app, which is actually much more than the conversations I've been having there, it's a whole curriculum that I'm continuing to develop. And I'm bringing on other teachers as well. The way to get that

is to subscribe to Waking Up, either through the iOS or Android apps, or you can use the web-based version at wakingup.com. And in either case, if you can't afford a subscription, you can have one for free. For making sense, you just need to send an email to support at samharris.org, and for Waking Up, send one to support at wakingup.com. And I've talked about my reasoning here before. It's very important to me that money not be the reason why someone doesn't get access to my digital content. That's true both for the podcast and for the app. Now, as far as the difference between these two platforms, the Waking Up app is where I'm talking about first-person approaches to understanding the nature of the mind.

And by understanding, I don't mean just conceptual understanding. I mean experiencing the mind in a new way. So this is where I'm focused on things like meditation, and now psychedelics, and ethics, and related topics. The Making Sense podcast is where I'm talking about everything that interests me, from physics to politics. And as I said, from time to time a conversation will appear in both places, because I think it will be of interest to both audiences. But most of what I have to say about meditation and first-person methods of exploring consciousness will be said on the app, not on this podcast. Because it still seems like most people who are listening to this podcast are not really interested in meditation.

I've heard from many people some version of, I really like it when you talk about current events and science and things like AI or the brain and behavior or the conflict between religion and science, but I'm just not interested in the meditation stuff because it's got the stink of religion all over it. And the fact that it's Buddhism and not Christianity or Islam just doesn't matter.

It's still irrational and probably bullshit. And other people say things like, well, I've tried meditation and it did nothing for me. And I think you're probably just fooling yourself, just like people who believe in God. There's no way you can know you're not fooling yourself. You're just imagining that you're having certain experiences in meditation, or you're just imagining that they have any significance. Well, there's only so much pushing I can do on a locked door. And as I said, generally, this podcast will cover topics of a much wider interest than meditation or the nature of consciousness. But in today's podcast, I want to give you skeptics one more

shot at understanding what I'm up to. So I'm going to present a conversation that I recently recorded for the Waking Up app. And I'm doing this for two reasons. The first is that there are specific insights into the nature of mind that I consider to be the most important things I've ever learned. And they're not a matter of simply believing something new. And they're certainly not matters of faith. And the fact that some of these insights have been best described in Eastern traditions like Buddhism doesn't make them Buddhist, no more than the fact that Isaac Newton was Christian makes the laws of motion somehow Christian. And these insights are not merely important for one's

well-being. They're important intellectually. They clear up philosophical and ethical and even scientific confusion. And the truth is, I've been very slow to appreciate this. I've been slow to understand just how much intellectual work is being done for me by the fact that I've had certain experiences in meditation. And these experiences have made certain features of the mind obvious. So there are questions about things like free will, or the hard problem of consciousness, or the nature of morality,

that people continually get hung up on, and I often can't see the basis for their confusion. And more and more I see that this basis is not conceptual, it's that they can't actually notice certain things about their own experience. Take free will, for instance. This is a topic I've covered a lot. People find it endlessly bewildering. The truth is, we have every reason to believe that free will is an incoherent concept. It just doesn't make sense in a deterministic universe, and it doesn't make any sense if you add a dose of randomness to the universe either. And this has been obvious for probably 400 years. And yet I keep running into smart people who think that free will is a real

intellectual problem. That we know we have it in some sense, or we have some purified version of it, and that we find ourselves at a kind of intellectual stalemate when debating it philosophically or scientifically. Now, of course, there have been people on the podcast who have agreed with me, people like Robert Sapolsky and Jerry Coyne, but even in agreement, they are taken in by the illusion of free will. The reality is that if you can pay sufficient attention to your mind, the illusion disappears and it becomes obvious that everything is just arising on its own, including one's thoughts and intentions and other mental precursors to action. There is just no fine-grained experiential correlate

to the common notion of free will. That's why I say in my book on the topic that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will. So being a better observer of the nature of one's own mind isn't just a matter of improving one's well-being, though that is one of the core purposes of meditation. It's also an intellectual project. It's a matter of bringing one's first-person understanding, one's subjective experience, into closer alignment with a third-person understanding, that is, an objective understanding, of how the world is. And meditation is the training that allows you to do this. Consider the analogy that I've sometimes used to the optic blind spot.

You all know you have a blind spot in your visual field, and I'm sure most of you were taught to see it in school. You made two marks on a piece of paper, you closed one eye, you stared at one of those marks, and brought the paper closer until the second mark disappeared. This is a very simple procedure, subjectively, that allows you to see something right on the surface of consciousness that you would otherwise spend your lifetime overlooking. And the blind spot was actually predicted based on our growing understanding of the anatomy of the eye. And then someone developed this simple procedure by which one

can find it. So in seeing the blind spot, you're actually seeing something subjectively, as a matter of direct experience, that reveals a deeper truth about the eye. Well, I can also say that the non-existence of an unchanging self in the middle of experience, an ego, the feeling that we call I, is also predicted by the structure and function of the brain. The feeling of being an ego in your head, a thinker in addition to the next arising thought, can't be one's true point of view.

And in fact, the feeling that such a self exists is the same feeling to which people attach this notion of free will. There is no self who could enjoy the spurious power of free will. And this is directly suggested by what we know is going on in the world, and in the world inside our heads. There's no account of neuroanatomy or neurophysiology that would make sense of an unchanging self freely exercising its will. And meditation ultimately is a very simple procedure that allows one to discover the absence of this fake self directly. And here you can see that reasonable-sounding objections from skeptics aren't reasonable. Consider the one I just mentioned, right? What if you're wrong? What if you're just fooling yourself?

How is this different from believing in God? Right, well, okay, imagine if someone said this to you about the optic blind spot. I mean, you've run this experiment, and you can do it again right now. You can interrogate your conscious perception of the visual field directly, right now, and see that dot on the page disappear and reappear and disappear and reappear. You can do this on demand. You can do it a dozen times in the next 30 seconds. And what if you found yourself talking to an otherwise brilliant person, a professional philosopher or physicist, but this is a person who clearly had not picked up a piece of paper, much less put a mark on it, to do the experiment. And then imagine that when you explain the

procedure to them, they had an argument for why there was no point in doing it. Or they said they had bad experiences with paper in the past. Their mother was really into paper and they just have bad associations with it. Or maybe they claim to have done the experiment, but from everything they say about their experience, you can tell they were holding the paper wrong, or they had failed to close one eye, or they didn't know which dot they should be looking at. Perform the blind spot experiment now or just remember clearly how decisive it is, and take a moment to imagine hearing these kinds of objections from smart people. And then you'll get a sense of what my experience is like in these conversations. And the truth is this analogy isn't sufficient because you also have to imagine that seeing the blind spot directly

is much more valuable than it is. Imagine that seeing the blind spot significantly improved your life. Imagine that it gave you a capacity to let go of negative emotions more or less immediately. And what if it allowed you to understand other things, intellectually and ethically, that you couldn't understand before? If you add that component, you'll get a sense of why I've been banging on about the importance of meditation, even in situations where the person I'm speaking with seems less than interested. The podcasts I did with Adam Grant and Richard Dawkins last year are good examples of this. I'm riding my hobby horse about meditation to the evident frustration of my guest.

The reality is there's not many people in a position to do this. There are not many people who understand the science and the relevant philosophy and are committed to fully coming out from under the shadow of religion, who know down to their toes we have to get out of the religion business, and who yet understand what consciousness is like beyond the illusion of the self. And if you've heard me talk about this before, you'll know I'm not holding myself up as a perfect example of this understanding. I still consider myself a student of it. I'm merely practicing this understanding. And again, the recommendation I make about meditation is not narrowly based on the peripheral scientific claims for it that have been so hyped in the media

as a tool of stress reduction or for improving one's health. It probably does reduce stress and that's probably good for you. But that's not its core purpose. It's of much deeper interest psychologically and intellectually than that. Imagine hearing that someone is playing grandmaster level chess just to reduce stress, right? That's not likely the whole motivation. Whether or not chess can reduce stress in the end. So if I've established any credibility with you as a thinker, as an honest broker of information, and as a critic of religion, please take this for what it's worth. There is something to understand here. More precisely,

there's something to experience here that will change your understanding of many other things. And the fact that traditional efforts to have these insights have tended to occur in religious contexts and in New Age and cultic contexts, the fact that some people who talk about the illusion of the self turn out to be New Age frauds, for instance. That's inconvenient, yes. It's distracting, but it's irrelevant in the end. James Watson's user interface issues as a person and his resulting professional problems have no implications for the actual structure of DNA. So in this episode of the podcast, I want to give you one more look at the kinds of things

I'm talking about, almost entirely in the Waking Up app. And to do that, I want to introduce you to Richard Lang. He was a longtime student of Douglas Harding, who I've mentioned several times. Douglas was an architect by training and then devised his own very creative way of talking about the nature of awareness. He really stepped out of every traditional way of teaching and came up with his own metaphors and procedures. And the core of his teaching surrounds this experience of what he called having no head. And he wrote a book by that title on having no head. And I've long thought that while there are some liabilities with this way of teaching and practicing, and I discussed some of those with Richard here, it is a uniquely accessible way of unmasking this experience of selflessness. Many people get it

who I'm convinced would not get it by being given more traditional instructions. Now, what they make of it is another thing. It's quite possible to not see its significance initially. And again, I talk about that with Richard. point singled out for criticism by some very smart people. In fact, by my friend Dan Dennett and his collaborator Douglas Hofstetter in their book The Mind's Eye. And I wrote about this in my book Waking Up because this was really a crystal clear moment of, again, very smart people who consider it their full-time job to think about the nature of the mind, having no idea what they're talking about when it comes to a first-person method of investigating it. So before I bring Richard into the conversation, I want to read the section from my book Waking Up titled Having No Head. The basic insight is this, that Douglass noticed that from the first

person point of view, when he looked out at the world, he did not see his own face. He did not see his own head. Rather, where he knew his head to be, there was simply the world, right? So when he was looking at another person's face, they were looking back at him and he was feeling implicated by their gaze because he knew what they were staring at they were staring at his face he noticed that as a matter of direct experience there's no face there and he found that he was simply the space in which they were appearing. I'll give you the quotation that Hofstadter and Dennett excerpted in their book and then criticized. Just give you a sense of the intellectual impasse here. So this is a quotation from Douglas Harding. Then I'll give

you Hofstadter's reaction to it. What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular. I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness came over me. 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 can 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 trouser legs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirt front

terminating upwards in absolutely nothing whatsoever, 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, filled, a nothing that found room for everything, room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them, snow peaks, like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void. And, and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight, utterly free of me,

unstained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself. I was nowhere around. 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. I had been blind to the one thing that is always present, and without which I am blind indeed to this marvelous substitute for a head, this unbounded clarity, this luminous and absolutely pure void, which nevertheless is, rather than contains, all things. For however carefully I attend, I fail to find here even so much as a blank screen on which these mountains and sun and sky are projected,

a blank screen on which these mountains and sun and sky are projected, or a clear mirror in which they are reflected, or a transparent lens or aperture through which they are viewed, still less a soul or a mind to which they are presented, or a viewer, however shadowy, who is distinguishable from the view. Nothing whatever intervenes, not even the baffling and elusive obstacle called distance. The huge blue sky, the pink-edged whiteness of the snows, the sparkling green of the grass. How can these be remote when there's nothing to be remote from? The headless void refuses all definition and location. It is not round, or small, or quotation, and then here is my follow-up text. Harding's assertion that he has no head must be read in the first-person sense.

The man was not claiming to have been literally decapitated. From a first-person point of view, his emphasis on headlessness is a stroke of genius that offers an unusually clear description of what it's like to glimpse the non-duality of consciousness. Here are Hofstetter's, quote, reflections on Harding's account. So now I'm quoting Hofstetter in the book he co-authored with my friend Dan Dennett. We have here been presented with a charmingly childish and solipsistic view of the human condition. It is something that, at an intellectual level,

offends and appalls us. Can anyone sincerely entertain such notions without embarrassment? Yet to some primitive level in us it speaks clearly. That is the level at which we cannot accept the notion of our own death. End quote. Okay, so back to me. Having expressed his pity for batty old Harding, Hofstadter proceeds to explain away his insights as a solipsistic denial of mortality, a perpetuation of the childish illusion that, quote, I am a necessary ingredient of the universe, end quote. However, Harding's point was that I is not even an ingredient, necessary or otherwise,

of his own mind. What Hofstadter fails to realize is that Harding's account contains a precise empirical instruction. Look for whatever it is you are calling I, without being distracted by even the subtlest undercurrent of thought, and notice what happens the moment you turn consciousness upon itself. This illustrates a very common phenomenon in scientific and secular circles. We have a contemplative like Harding, who, to the eye of anyone familiar with the experience of self-transcendence, has described it in a manner approaching perfect clarity.

And we have a scholar like Hofstetter, a celebrated contributor to our modern understanding of the mind, who dismisses him as a child. Okay, so that's a very clear illustration of the intellectual impasse. And upon hearing my conversation with Richard Lang, many of you may still be stuck on Hofstetter's side of the impasse. You might just think, what are they talking about? Of course I can't see my head. What are you, crazy? Again, if that's where you're stuck, all I can do is encourage you to keep looking. Richard Lang was a long-time student of Douglas Harding's and studied with him for 30 years or so. He's written several books based on his own experience teaching and also brought together much of Douglas's work. And you

can find more of his material at headless.org. And Richard, while I haven't met him, I think you'll hear sounds like just about the nicest person on earth. If we held a global contest for the nicest person, I think I would nominate Richard just based on his voice alone. In any case, this is not a podcast that you can profit from while multitasking. You shouldn't be working out in the gym. You really have to give this your full attention if you're going to get anything from it. In the first half, we talk about Richard's life and his experience with Douglas, and in the second, we get into the details of the practice. And there's no paywall on this episode. I consider this a public service announcement.

And now I bring you Richard Lang. I consider this a public service announcement. And now I bring you Richard Lang. I am here with Richard Lang. Richard, thanks for joining me. Pleasure to be here, Sam. So how do you describe what it is you do? Ah.

Well, I don't know, really. I describe it as seeing who you really are, and it is paying attention to what it's like to be yourself from your own point of view, as opposed to what you are for others. So if someone was looking at me, they'd see Richard sitting at the desk and obviously see my head and background. But my point of view, the first person point of view, is quite different. I don't see my head. I'm looking out of open space. I am a space for the world, I would say. So it's a very different point of view from the objective one, where I'm a person. And I accept both. I love both. And I would say that this

experience, which is so obvious, I mean, all the listener has to do is look and notice whether they can see their own face. I'm sure they can't, and instead you see the world. But it is essentially a nonverbal experience, and you can't get it wrong. You can't half see your no face or see it a bit blurry. And I would say I'm convinced it's the same for us all. We're all looking out of this single eye, this openness, but we've got a different view out and different responses to it.

So, well, how's that for a starter? Yeah, well, so I want to get into the experiential component of this, but we should talk about how you got into this position of teaching people about the nature of awareness. And we'll talk about your teacher, Douglas Harding, who I've mentioned many times, both in my app and on my podcast. But before we get to Douglas, did you have a background in meditation or any other contemplative tradition before you stumbled upon Douglas? Well, in a way I did. I mean, I met Douglas when I was young. I was 17.

But when I was about 10, the headmaster at my school told a story, which was a story from someone called the Venerable Bede, who was this holy man in the north of England in, I don't know, 9th century or something. And Bede tells this story of a king and having a kind of feast in winter in a big hall. And there's a big fire. And in through a window flies a bird across the room and out the other window. And Bede said, this is what our life is, and who knows where we came from, and who knows where we're going. And the headmaster at my school told this story when I was about 10, and it got my imagination. I thought, what is out that window? And so I got interested in Christianity at the time. That was the context.

And really in the mystical side of it. But at the next school, there was no one sort of really interested in that. And it was the late 60s. So I started reading around and reading about other religions. And I got interested in Hinduism in particular and Buddhism. And I wanted to get enlightened at 15, 16. And then I read a book on Zen by a guy called Christmas Humphreys. And there was a note about the Buddhist Society Summer School.

This is in England. And so I decided to go with my brother. We went from the north of England down to near London. And we went to this summer school. It was very confusing to begin with, all kinds of different approaches. And then one day someone said, oh, you ought to go to the workshop, informal workshop with Douglas Harding this afternoon. And I hadn't heard of him.

But we went. And Douglas got us to point a finger back at our no-face and look, and rather fortuitously, I found what I was looking for. And Douglas was very friendly, and he said, anyone interested, was very friendly and he said anyone interested come and visit he lived in suffolk in the sort of east of england so when i got back home with my brother my mom looked at us she was worried we're gonna join a cult or something realized we were fine and then was interested herself so around christmas time we all went down by train and stayed with Douglas. Well, there was, as usual, about 10, 15 people there. And it was a weekend. He had two houses, and one of them was used solely for people interested in what we called seeing.

And that really was the beginning of a friendship with Douglas and he had many many friends and he never charged a penny it was always just come and come and be with us you know if you're interested in this and for whatever reason I also felt drawn to actually sharing it. Most people don't really, but I did. And I recognized somehow at an early age that this was a fantastically effective, simple way forwards, way in terms of sharing the experience of who one is. And so shortly after that, I went to university,

not far from him, in Cambridge. And I used to go down every other weekend and started to go to his workshops just to help out. And I sort of got used to the experiments and making them up and all of that. So I started, it was just the way it occurred to me to, I want to be involved in sharing this. So even while I was at university, I was running workshops in my college room.

What were you studying at Cambridge? Well, I was studying history, although the main thing I was studying was seeing who you really are. As I say, I used to go down to Douglas' house all the time and made many friends. And one of the things that was true about that community, because he really made friends. His friends were people who were interested in this.

And it was clear that there was no hierarchy at this level, because you can't half see your no face or see it better than someone else. And Douglas All was very kind of strong on that. So I sort of, looking back, I kind of grew up in a minute community where seeing who you are, as we call it, was normal. All my friends were headless.

So people who have heard me speak about Douglass will know that it's been in the context of really his central empirical injunction, which is to look for your head and notice that you fail to find it. And we'll go over that a bit. But what's so interesting about Douglass is that he came up with truly novel practices and analogies and framings and ways of looking into awareness. It's his own methodology, which really is very effective for so many people. I would argue it has at least one pitfall, which we'll get into. And it touches this point you made about there being

no hierarchy and no way of doing it wrong or no way of, you know, once you've seen it, you've seen it. And I think there's definitely some caveat to issue there. But before we get there, let's just talk about Douglas, the man, for a moment. Because I think I was mistaken about a few points of his biography. When I've spoken about his insight, I believe I have this from his book on having no head, that he first noticed this when he was in Nepal, staring out at the Himalayas from this place called Nagarkot. But from reading, you've, essentially a graphic biography, The Man With No Head, and it seemed that he had this insight into headlessness earlier. So maybe you can just give us a brief tour of Douglass's spiritual biography.

Yes. Well, he grew up in an exclusive Plymouth Brethren, which was a very strict Christian group. And his father was very keen, very dedicated, a very small group in the east of England. And they used to have prayers twice a day and four times on Sundays and God knows what. But at 21, he left. And his reason for leaving was that, well, you might be right, but I am not going to accept that you're right just because you say you are. I want to find out for myself. And it hurt his father. His father cut off from him. And anyway, Douglas went his own way, but he had been profoundly affected by his father. During the First World War, the Germans bombed the town where they were.

It was a seaside town. And his father refused to go into the cinema to seek shelter, but got the whole family on their knees praying while the bombs came over or the shells came over. And he said, i'm going to put my faith in god well douglas rejected the sort of kind of you know the peripherals of the religion but he was affected by this deep faith somehow and this sense of the importance of meaning of, yeah, something like that. Anyway, at 21, he left, and then he started inquiring. He was training and then working as an architect in London. And he started inquiring into what he was. And I think he often used to say, the basic

thing that amazes me is that I am. You know, I mean, just how amazing just to be. I mean, I might not be. And while I am, I'd like to find out who I am, what I am. And he'd already rejected what the Plymouth Brethren was saying. So at this point, he wasn't going to take on another dogma. He was going to look for himself. And he started really by recognizing that he was made of layers, depending on where the observer was. So, you know, at six feet he was human, but closer to his cells. And then further away he was a city or a species. And this sort of enabled him to sort of cross the boundary between his skin and the rest of the world. the boundary between his skin and the rest of the world. And he began developing this feeling,

this view that he was like an onion with layers. And of course, when you realize that, you must ask what's at the center. And in 1937, he'd already written a book by then. And he went to India with his wife and they had two children there and the war broke out. And although he was a successful architect there, his main interest was this inquiry into what am I? I've got books of notes from those years, drawings and maps and mandala kind of things with these layers. Anyway, in about 1943 he'd come to the position that he realized he was made of layers and that the nearer you got to the center

the less there was. So it made sense that he was kind of no thing at the center but he couldn't seem to experience that. It was just a guess. And then he was reading a book where there was an article or a section by Ernst Mark, physicist. And Mark, it's a fairly well-known picture, drew a self-portrait, not of what he looked like at six feet, but of what he looked like from his

own point of view, which of course is headless, with his nose, you know, about 10 feet tall. Because if you close one eye, you know, your nose goes from the ceiling to the floor. And when Douglas saw this, and he was probably sitting in the Imperial Library or somewhere in Calcutta, he suddenly thought, that's it. And it was not a big wow, he used to say. It was just like a cool recognition. Ah, that's what I am at zero. That's what I am. Ah, you see. Now, in On Having No Head, as you quite rightly say, he talks about walking in the Himalayas and seeing it there and he used to say oh well you know i did walk in the himalayas and i did see it there but that was just a sort of way

of starting the book but recently i was going through all his books and i was going through he's got a whole load of books by suzuki and um i was read i was looking through because he made notes in all the books and when he read them and when he reread them and so on and there's a little section on Satori on the wow experience and just underneath it

Douglas has written Darjeeling! and so I think after seeing it down in Calcutta, he did go up several times up to that part to walk in the hills. And he must have had, understandably, a powerful experience of being space for the mountains. So I think it's all true in a way. So I think it's all true in a way. Hmm. And what was his connection to other contemplatives and teachers of the time?

So he began teaching, when did he begin teaching in earnest? Was it the 50s? Well, what happened was he was very much on his own in India. He didn't go around any gurus. He was totally working on his own, doing research, you know. And when he saw this, he realized in 43, he realized it hit gold. He came back to England in 1945, just towards the end of the war. And he said to his wife, who'd already returned, I'm going to take a year off to write my book. Well, in the end, a year turned into five years.

my book. Well, in the end, a year turned into five years. And he was on his own. Five years, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, one holiday in all that time. And the first, the book is The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. It is huge. 600 pages, just huge. And then he condensed it because he knew he couldn't really publish that and c.s lewis read it and that's what how it took off c.s lewis wrote back and said i've never been so drunk in a book with a book you know since i read books on in world war one or something and so that began to put him on the map but he wasn't teaching he was a writer he was a thinker and then he got back this was the in the 50s got back into architecture because he hadn't teaching. He was a writer. He was a thinker. And then he got back, this was in the 50s, got back into architecture because he hadn't been earning any money, became very successful, continued to write a bit here and there. But at the end of the 50s, he felt he was in the doldrums and he wasn't getting his message across. And at that time, he came across Zen through Suzuki, really. And for the

first time, he came across people, the old Zen masters, who were talking about their original face, you know, the face you had before they were speaking his language. And at the same time, he also came across Ramana Maharshihe who influenced him and affected him with i think with his just total dedication you know that's what raman was about wasn't it so at the end of the 50s because of this discovery of zen he then got in touch with the buddhist society thought well maybe there are some people there who will understand what I'm talking about. Because he had not shared it really with anyone. He was on his own with it. And they, Christmas Humphreys and Wei Wei Wei,

recognized that Douglas had something here. And they published On Having No Head. And that was his first really popular book, which, of course, he starts with that. you know, the best day of my life. I was walking in the Himalayas, all of that. And so I had no head. But it wasn't until 1964, that book was published in 61, that he really shared it for the first time with someone who was his secretary in his architectural practice. And it blew her mind.

And it blew his mind that it blew her mind. And it blew his mind that it blew her mind. And he thought, oh, I can die now. I've shared it with one person. And then the next year, up in the north, Manchester, he said, my God, things are taking off. I shared it with two more people. So this is early days. Now, around that time, So this is early days. Now, around that time, he built his second house just over the road from his first house. And that became just, you know, I hadn't known why really he was building it. That became a potential meeting place for people interested in this. And he was teaching comparative religion. And in the course, he would share the headless experience. And so people began gradually to meet. And that's where the community started in the mid-60s. And it was towards the

end of the 60s that he began to invent his experiments. And he always wanted to share. experiments. And he always wanted to share. And he was doing before the experiments really, I mean, the experiments were always there in a way, because the experience of your headless nature is so direct, you know. But he got the idea of the experiments. And in the late 60s and early 70s, I mean, in 1972, he produced a toolkit with all the experiments. And I was around then, and we were making them up, and I helped him make the toolkit. We used to go down for a week and, you know, work on it. And he was very creative.

He was always coming up with a new way of kind of sharing it. He was on the job 24-7. So if you went to his house, you couldn't go unless you were interested in seeing. And as soon as you walked in the door, before you walked in the door, you were aware of who you were, you know, because that's what it was all about. And everyone else was. And at the Buddhist Society, they said, you'll always know where Douglas Harding's friends are because they laugh a lot. So he really, he just followed his instinct. He knew he wanted to share it. He knew he'd got something really powerful. I mean, he just believed in it. He thought, This is a breakthrough. We've been talking about

a true nature for centuries. Now you can see it, you see. Now you can point at it. Now you can see your face to no face. It's not abstract. This is concrete. Face to no face with others. You're looking out of a single eye. So he wrote a book in the 70s called The Science of the First Person. So he wrote a book in the 70s called The Science of the First Person. You know, this is a science. The science of objects, you look at them, the science of the subject. And he said, your experience of yourself, which is space for the world, is as valid as other people's experience of you, which is an object in the world.

Yeah, so he never stopped. I mean world. He never stopped. He was always on the job. He developed a model in the 1970s, the Universe Explorer model. He wrote many books, articles, traveled incessantly. In The Man With No Head, you detail at least two of his meetings with prominent Buddhists at the time, one with Alan Watts and one with Philip Kaplow. Yes. It seemed like with Watts, he had a meeting of the minds, and with Kaplow, he and visited Douglass at his house. And it was a warm occasion. He came all the way into the country. He was passing through England with a monk. They made the trip. And he said, this is the spiritual center of England. That was his comment. And invited Douglass to Rochester. But the second time, like in my book, Kaplow sort of did this Zen testing thing,

and Douglas didn't go for that. He said, I've just come to share something. I've come to be tested. But there's letters. I've got all Douglas's letters and stuff, and there's letters afterwards where they're warm between each other, and Douglas didn't hold a grudge at all. That's kind of a Zen shtick to use paradox and weird tests

to demonstrate the nature of mind, but it can certainly misfire. There's a famous story of Kala Rinpoche, who was a great Tibetan meditation master, meeting, I think it was Sasaki Roshi, I forget which Zen master, I think it was Sasaki. And at one point, the Roshi held up an orange and said, what is it? And Kala turned to his translator and said, don't they have oranges in Japan? Yeah, the cultures sort of miss each other there. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's jump into the experience

and do our best to introduce people to it. I guess we should say that, unfortunately, many of the experiments that Douglass devised are highly visual. And we can talk a little bit about the primacy of vision as a context in which to see this experience. And this is the kind of thing that it can be recognized with your eyes closed, too. But many of us have found that that's a subtler thing to recognize. So I guess with that limitation, I mean, just knowing that we can give people instructions that they do with their open eyes that reference vision as the primary sense, but we just have to recognize that this is going out in pure audio form, so it all has to be intelligible. So with that proviso, how would you instruct,

how do you instruct someone who is contemplating this for the first time? Yes. Well, I could just take you and them or whatever through just a little process that includes closed eyes and you know being aware that we're just audio here okay well as you say it is a lot of the experiments are visual and you can just notice you can't see your face now. But a very simple, direct thing to do, which I think is worth doing, is to actually point. So if the listener is willing to play a bit, I would ask you just to get your index finger of your right hand or something and point out.

So you've actually got to do it because it's just making clear the arrow of attention is out. So you might be pointing at the table or a vase or a window and you're looking along your finger and there's a thing. Now what I want you to do is just turn your finger 180 degrees around to point back at the place you're looking out of and notice what you see there or what you don't see because i don't see anything right now i don't see my face don't see my eyes don't see any shape or movement or anything so i'm pointing i would say i'm pointing at my no face at this space here this stillness this silence even. And this outward and inward is a two-way pointing

thing. So that's a kind of useful gesture to bear in mind. So just starting visually, I said, well, you can't see your face. I'd say the inward pointing arrow of attention is pointing at no thing, space. Now this is a nonverbal experience, so I'm putting words on it. I'm absolutely convinced everyone can see this, because you can't see your head, instead you see the world. But you may choose different words from me, so we accept that. So I'd just like you first to notice several things about the view out from this space. That it's a sort of oval view, the field of view, and it fades out all the way around. So whatever you're looking at is most in focus.

And then when you get to the edge, as it were, it fades out and then you can see nothing around it. And I take that seriously. It's sort of hanging in nowhere. The view, there's nothing above it, nothing below it, nothing this side of it, it's just hanging in space. And it's single. So if you look at any two objects, you say, well, that one's bigger than that. You can compare the size, it's relative. I say now, look at the whole view, how big is it? And there isn't a second one to compare it with. So I can't say how big it is. And so there are two things to notice here. Well, two or three.

One, it's single, the view out. I might hear about your view, but I don't experience it. In my own experience, like you say in the app, it's a matter of experience. There's just one view. It fades out into nothing. It's just one view. It fades out into nothing. It's not inside anything. I can't say how big it is.

Now, close your eyes. See? Now, so you've got a kind of darkness, which, again, is in your app. As you say, it's kind of lit up. It's not just nothing. There's something there. Let's call it darkness. It's not just nothing. There's something there. Let's call it darkness.

It's not uniform darkness. Now, how big is that darkness? Well, there isn't a second one to compare it with. It's single. So I can't say. And is it inside anything? Well, just like the visual view, no. No, I could say it's in space or awareness

or consciousness. Now I move my attention to sounds and I hear this voice coming and going and other sounds. So if I use the same kind of words. The field of sound, like the field of vision, that's all the sounds. How big is it? Well, there isn't a second one to compare it with. And is it inside anything? No.

Or I could say it's in silence. So these sounds are coming out of the silence, going back in. And I think you see here, developing the first person language. I am the space in which the darkness is happening. I am the silence in which the sounds are happening. Now I move my attention to body sensations. And if I put aside my memory, my sort of map, and just go by the sensation. See, lots of different sensations. Now, how big is the

whole field of sensation? Well, there isn't a second one to compare it with. It's single. See, I can't see how big it is. And is it inside everything? Mm-mm. In this awareness. Now, I identify with my body sensation is often enough. So if I say that I can't say how big the field of sensation is, I can say, I can't say how big I am. I'm not inside anything. Yes, I'm single, I'm alone. And then finally, we can move our attention to thoughts and feelings. and then finally we can move our attention to thoughts and feelings so think of a number there's a thought you see and think of the face of a friend and the affection you feel feelings see or anything problem and anxiety that comes up challenge you've got now Now, how big is this very complicated field of mind?

Well, I don't experience a second one to compare it with. And where is it? Well, I think as the Zen people say, it's in no mind. My thoughts, like my voice, are coming out of nowhere and disappearing again. And this is who I am, this open space, and this is who we all are, you see. So I don't know what you're thinking, Sam, or what you're feeling, but I'm convinced you're the same indivisible space containing your particular view, you see. So now when we open our eyes well what really changes the space is full

of colors and shapes magic but one is one is still this single space that contains everything so that's a kind that's that's pointing out the obvious. Yeah, well, that was a great tour. So let's start with the place we started with the open-eyed considerations of pointing at one's own face and noticing that there's nothing to see. And I want to just try to channel the skepticism that some listeners may feel. And this may be the kind of thing you've heard a lot, but if you can think of other challenges that don't occur to me, feel free to raise them. But I can imagine someone saying, well, of course I can't see my face, I can't see my own eyes, but I know they're there, right? And so what's the significance of this? You seem to be suggesting that there's something profound about the eye not being able to see

itself, but I know I have a head, I know I have a face, I know I have eyes in the middle of it. What's the point of this? Yes, I think there are different ways of approaching this. And I'm really not in the business of trying to persuade or convince anyone for a start. I'm just happy to be this. And if people are interested, I'll respond. But if they are interested, I say, well, you say that my head is here, you see my eyes, and I know you can see it from, say, three feet or six feet away. And I know you can see it from, say, three feet or six feet away. But what I am depends on the range, you know, on where you are looking from. And if you come up to me, then you'll see my face.

But come closer, you'll see a patch of skin. And come even closer, if you've got the right instruments, and you'll find cells, molecules, atoms, particles, almost nothing. And I'm right at zero and I say, well, absolutely nothing here, but I'm aware and full of everything. So I say, well, of course I've got a head, I've got eyes, but it's a matter of where I keep them. And I keep them out there in the mirror, and I keep them in other people at a range there. I need them, but they're not central. Now, obviously, this is a very different way of appreciating what one is. But it does actually fit with what science says. And what we've done, is accept what everyone tells us about who we are from their point of view and say, well, you must know more about what I am than I do. And what I'm suggesting is my point of view, which is headless, eyeless, tongueless, you know, without anything here,

is valid here. And when I touch my head, you say, well, look, you can touch your head. I say, well, for you, I'm touching my head. But for me, my hands disappear. And there are sensations in awareness. And this is taking it as it's given. And if someone doesn't go along with that, well, there's nothing I can do, really. And this does make sense. But whether someone says yes, no, or maybe to it is rather mysterious to me. Because I've been convinced for a long time that what Douglas was getting at here really is the fundamental insight into selflessness that is provoked in Dzogchen pointing out instruction or is sought by really every method of meditation, certainly in the East. And it's what the Advaita teachers are talking about, people like Ramana Maharshi. And the thing that the headlessness insight gets at almost uniquely well is how available the glimpse of this quality of consciousness is, how it's right on the surface, how there's no such thing as depth. There's no place to go deep within through a practice of meditation to see this.

And there are many analogies that I've used to indicate how on the surface this is. And so one analogy I've used is seeing the optic blind spot. I mean, once you are taught how to do that, well, then that thing you're seeing isn't far away. It's not deep within. It's in some place on the surface of consciousness that you didn't realize existed until you saw this particular effect. And another example I use is the difference between looking through a window at the scene

outside or inside and seeing your face reflected on the surface of the glass. side or inside and seeing your face reflected on the surface of the glass. Yes. And if the goal were to see your face and someone is looking through their face out at the scene, how do you tell them to recognize their face? Just how long should it take? How deep must they go? And really the answer there is that they just have to change their plane of focus and they'll see their face instantly.

And that does get at, again, these analogies are imperfect, but it gets at something that this method, when it works, reveals really well, which is that there really is no distance here. And what's being pointed out is already true of the nature of awareness. It just has to be recognized and there's really no distance to go. for insight into selflessness may glimpse this thing, you know, very briefly and not see it as the answer to their search, because they really haven't had a search, and they haven't become connoisseurs of their unenlightenment. And so they don't see that this glimpse of openness and centerlessness immediately balances the equation they've been struggling to solve. Yes. And I believe Douglas, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that he once said in some context that the voice of the devil says, so what?

And do I have that right? Did he notice this as a problem where people would glimpse this and then say, well, so what? And do I have that right? Did he notice this as a problem where people would glimpse this and then say, well, so what? And then it was hard to kind of get them past that point. Well, yes. I mean, you show them their true nature and they go, oh, okay, what's on TV tonight? You know, it's astonishing. Douglas was astonished that you could show this and people would not value it. But he took that with a pinch of salt. And, you know, in the end, he shared it with so many people. And I think I probably have the same approach.

You go around sharing it as widely as you can and affirming everyone's got it. And then you stand back and see what happens. And some accept it and some don't. And it's really mysterious and really interesting for that reason. I mean, fascinating. And we have regular online video meetings, you know, quite a few a week. And I've started asking people, why do you value this? You know, so quite a few a week. And I've started asking people,

why do you value this? And everyone's story is different and sort of unpredictable, really. And my feeling is that one just goes and shares it and affirms everyone's got it everyone's got it and that their response whatever it is even if it's so what is valid and as you go around gradually it seems to me more and more people say yes to it and value it and that is infectious and it's a long-term project. But I am part of a community where I can see how powerful that is and how wonderful and how much fun it is. And I just think, well, we've got a great party going. There's no need to advertise it. It will speak for itself, and it does.

And so, yes. And so, yes. I mean, I really don't think one can judge whether someone is ready for it or not. I say everyone is ready, and here you are, do what you like with it. exists in many places, but I would say Dzogchen has been the most systematic in talking about both sides of this, the seeming paradox of this already being true of the nature of mind. And on that account, you have people from the Zen tradition and the Advaita tradition sometimes speaking as though practice doesn't make any sense because this thing is already true. But the other side of that is a glimpse of this isn't sufficient. That's actually the beginning of someone's practice. And what your job is thereafter is not to seek this as dualistically as though this were some goal that had to be attained, but to get used to this and more used to this and grow into it so that you're living from that place more and more. And it becomes more and more obvious such that at a certain point it can't be overlooked.

obvious such that at a certain point it can't be overlooked. So how do you think about or speak about the difference between an initial glimpse of headlessness and a stabilizing of this glimpse, or a living from that place more and more? Well, I think it's both ends of the spectrum. I did a workshop just a couple of days ago, and at the end of it, about 40 people, someone said, but how do I keep this going? I said, well, it's like anything you've got to practice. And here's something that you can do if you're serious about wanting to get it going. I said, I want you each day to commit yourself to noticing three times when you're with people that it's face to no face.

And I want you to sit for two minutes and just on your own quietly and notice your single eye. And thirdly, I want you when you you're walking down the street, at least once in the day to notice you're still and the scenery moves. You've got it, you can't lose it, you're home, but you have to practice it. You have to draw on it. You have to, yes, let it into your life. Yes. Yeah, and I think it's important to recognize that doing this in the presence of other people makes it especially vivid because our sense of separateness is not only visually anchored more than in any other sense domain, but it really is ramified socially, right? So we feel this contraction of self very much in relationship to others. And it's what, you know, this self-other

dichotomy, one could argue, is two sides of a single coin that gets forged at some point in our development. And if you can just imagine the difference between you're looking across, let's say you're sitting in a cafe and you're looking across at somebody else sitting at another table, a stranger, and they're reading a book, say, and they're not aware of you. And then in the next moment, the person looks up and is looking directly into your eyes. And so there's that moment of eye contact with a stranger. And that transition from merely observing someone in the world to feeling in a very visceral way that you are now an object in the world for them. They're aware of you. For most of us, the world for them. They're aware of you. For most of us, that heightens this feeling.

It's not an accident that we call it self-consciousness. We become aware that others are looking at us. We project our eyes outward and objectify ourselves by the direction of their gaze. If in moments like that,, you know, whether you're, you know, looking at a stranger or with more appropriate social cues, actually talking to someone who has invited the relationship, so you could be talking to a friend or whoever, if you look for yourself, if you look for your head in those moments and fail to find it clearly, if there really is just this openness where you thought yourself to be a moment before, in which the other person is appearing, that can make this non-dual awareness especially vivid. Absolutely. It may be helpful just to briefly describe what I think of as the four stages of development,

because it includes discovering the self. So shall I just do that? Yeah, that'd be great. Okay, so stage one is the baby, and I'm using my own language here, but the baby is first person, headless, at large. You have no idea of what you look like. You look at another person. You don't feel under inspection. The eyes don't have that power yet. So that's stage one. Stage two is the child where you're learning language. And through language, you're learning that others can see you. And you're developing the capacity to sort of, in imagination, go out and look back at yourself through their eyes as a thing.

And as a child, you're not yet really sure what kind of box you're in. So it's as easy to be a train or a bird as a little boy or girl. And all of these stages are infectious. If you're with a baby, in my language, it's just giving you permission to be headless. You know, it's just open. And if you're with a child, it just giving you permission to be headless. It's just open. And if you're with a child, it's giving you permission to be flexible and playful and get down on the floor and be a train. Because now you keep growing up and the feedback from through language from society is that 24-7 you are what you look like. You are the one in the

mirror. Look, there's your face. That's what you are at center. We can see it. You can't, but trust us. And so you learn to see yourself as others see you and profoundly identify with that and act as if you're behind a face and act as if they are behind a face there. So now when you look at someone and they look at you, as you're saying, you feel looked at. That's a kind of learned thing. And you're doing the same. So you're communicating, I'm in a body, you're in a body. I can see you, you can see me.

And you feel looked at. So that's the third stage, which is infectious. You walk into a room and everybody's doing it. You know, someone looks at you, you feel looked at. You're a thing. Now, potentially, the fourth stage is when you reawaken to your own point of view, which, as you said, is headless. And you are space for the world. And when you look at someone else, now here's the little experiment to do. They turn their gaze to you and normally you feel, you know, put on the spot and looked at and thinged. Now you can look at that gaze and see it's directed into nothing, like you were saying. And so what sort

of put you in the box, someone else's gaze, is now an opportunity to see that you're not in the box. And this fourth stage is as infectious as all the others. And so when you're with friends who are enjoying being headless, of course, we're still feeling looked at, but at the same time, we're aware that we're space for each other. And I hope that this is, you know, I've got, you know, I have many friends I share this with, and it's wonderful to finally bring into the public domain awareness of our true nature. And many people find that, you know, a friend who's a guitarist, and he said as soon as he saw this and he went and performed, he suddenly wasn't on stage. He was space for the audience.

Yeah. And, you know, it's very healing in lots of kinds of ways. It's healing in precisely the way that mindfulness is healing because it is a kind of mindfulness of the centralistness of awareness. I mean, basically, you're taking that as your object of mindfulness rather than any other object of consciousness. So it has the effect of, for those moments where you're aware of this, you're not identified with thought, you're not clinging to the pleasantness of experience or pushing unpleasant experience away. You're not clinging to the pleasantness of experience or pushing unpleasant experience away.

You're simply this openness in which whatever is appearing is appearing. And so it's got its own intrinsic equanimity and serenity to it. You're just recognizing this quality of consciousness. So when you teach people about this, do you talk about being lost in thought as the obstacle to seeing this in the next moment? How much of your discussion of this has a similar character to the way in which we tend to talk about practice of mindfulness or meditation generally? I think they dovetail perfectly, really. generally? I think they dovetail perfectly, really. I suppose one slightly different angle, maybe, is that I talk about placing your mind, placing your thoughts. So normally we think of thoughts somehow at the center here in the mind, in our head. But when you are mindful, they're

just objects, like you're saying, really. And they're out there with the table and with everything else. So your mind is at large, and there's no mind here. And the mind loves it. It's very freeing to see your mind is the world, is big. The thoughts and feelings don't affect your no-mind. They don't affect this space. But you're not in denial, and you experience the whole range of things. They're wonderful, but they're there and not here, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the way I have put that before is that the world you see with your open eyes is the same place where you're thinking and feeling. Exactly. I mean, you can actually see that, at least visually, you can see that in just superimposing a visual image onto the physical world you're looking at, right? Yes. People can do that with a greater or lesser degree of vividness, but something happens there. If you're staring at your table and you imagine a very small horse and carriage on it, something there is different than when I say imagine an elephant on it. And that superimposition of something shows you that your visual mind is, in some basic sense, before your eyes. And we just know as a matter of the underlying neurology, this is all happening in the same

place. And I mean, that really opens up some profound things, because I mean, how on earth do you actually imagine an elephant? I mean, it just pops up out of nowhere, right? I mean, it's just extraordinary. But it pops up in the same place as the table. And so I say, well, you know, the whole thing is popping up out of the great void. Now, this is magical.

It is, yes. One pays attention because it's so interesting. Do you have any specific instructions for people when they look at their face in a mirror? That seems like a very good, you can do that on demand in a way that you can't necessarily get someone to make sustained eye contact with you on demand. What practice would you recommend there? Well, very similar to as you do on your app, I would say, okay, I mean, we always do this in a workshop. I take mirrors, you know, and you get people to hold the mirror out in their, you know, arm's length in their hand.

And you just simply say to them, well, on present evidence, where's your face? You see, well, it's there in the mirror and there isn't one at the near end of your arm so to speak and so just as your space for another person face to no face so you are with your image in the mirror with yourself which is rather compassionate thing to do actually and you can say to people all right well i, the mirror's telling you what you look like, you know, this evening, but it's also telling you where your face is, and so I get people to bring it up towards them and see how it changes, and you've got to keep it at arm's length to see it, you know. Well, then I might say, well, you know, imagine we had a big long mirror, and I held it on

the other side of the room, where you could see your whole body that now imagine one on the moon what would you see you'd see your planetary face so the mirror is showing you where you keep your appearances you know my I've got planetary face out at that range I've got a my human individual face at about three feet you know and no face at center and you know when you're growing up you're taught to sort of reach into the mirror. I take people through this. I say, so imagine looking in the mirror. Now imagine reaching in and getting hold of that face, pulling it out towards you, flipping it the other way around because it's facing the wrong way, enlarging it because it's too small, and imagine putting it on. enlarging it because it's too small and imagine putting it on now that's what you those are the tricks you learn to do as you grow up in order to get this idea you're behind a face you know

that's where you get it from plus what others say and but you don't actually do it it's imagination and when you actually look i mean you've that going, and that enables you to function as a separate individual, which I think is terribly important. I'm not at all in favor of denying that. There's room for both. So you've got that going, but now that's your sort of public self. But privately, now you say, oh, my face is over there in the mirror. See, I'm not like that here. And that face is growing older, but the space here doesn't grow older. Now, this is a fantastic meditation. One of the things I love about this emphasis in practice is that it seems to bypass a pitfall that many of us have noticed in ordinary mindfulness, because ordinarily with mindfulness, you're being taught to become more and more aware of the micro changes in physiology.

physiology, and most people start with the breath and become very aware of your body and ultimately appearances in mind, thoughts, and feelings, and tensions. And until you can do that in a non-dualistic way, there can be this kind of uncanny valley effect where what you're becoming is more and more self-conscious in many circumstances, right? So you, you, you become more aware of your own kind of neurotic entanglement in each moment, and it can lead to a, you know, a stage in your practice where you actually, you're not, you don't feel that you're being benefited by doing so much meditation. In fact, you're becoming somebody who is less functional in some way, because you walk up to the cashier in a store, and you've just got so much attention on yourself, and it's in some way less freeing than just being blithely unaware that it's possible to live an examined life in the first place.

And so what this approach does is anchor mindfulness to simply openness and free attention, particularly in those moments of social interaction, where you have no attention on yourself because you can't find yourself. You're simply the space of free attention in which this other person is appearing moment to moment. Yes, yes. I don't think that the headless way bypasses any of these challenges, by the way. I think that one still has to work through all kinds of things but yes but this is life isn't it life is full of challenges I mean about 15 years ago after being with the headless way for

you know 35 years I suddenly began getting panic attacks and I that was rather shocking. And I don't know if you've ever had a panic attack, but it's rather disturbing. It's out of your control. And what I realized this panic attack was about was fear of others, you know. Finally, I suppose, looking back, this deep sense of separation that I'd sort of managed in the space, you know, erupted. And I didn't really know what to do. But I said I did know what to do, just remain open, inquire and pay attention and trust and all that. But, you know, I tried various strategies.

You know, there are no others. There are no others. There are no others, there are no self. It doesn't work, you know, you only go so far and then you, you know. So, and what it, in the end, what it came, what, the way I found myself through this was, I can't get rid of this sense of others and self. I've been trying. I can't do it. And I accepted it. And of course, I could see that accepting this sense of separation didn't disturb the space. It was in the openness. It was yet another thing arising. And I'd been trying to get rid of it. Well, of course, what you resist persists. And as soon as I began to accept it, actually something wonderful came out of it, which was a profound valuing of the otherness of people and of the self within the one. The one was many, and the many were one. I didn't have to try and cancel out the many in

order to be the one. So I'm saying this that, you know, I think that even when you're seeing who you are, I mean, perhaps even more so, it shines a light everywhere in the end, and it doesn't let you off anything. But these, what seem to be such difficult, strange things. You know, God, why is this happening to me? They teach one something about the world that nothing else could teach. And this sense of, you know, the world is me, profoundly me, yet it is profoundly other, is glorious. Yeah, that's interesting because it does get at a distinction that the Buddhists really emphasize to a point of pedantry, it seems, in the end. of what remains when you're no longer taken in by the subject-object perception and not asserting anything, really, essentially, is the notion of emptiness. So it's not even one,

it's not one, it's not many. There is simply this unity of cognition and appearances, right? And so there's no... Many of us have experienced this at various points in practice, and certainly met people who seem to be stuck in this place of reifying an experience of oneness, and there's a subtle undercurrent of conceptualization continually happening there that's going unrecognized. Yes, you have to sort of work through those things, don't you? In a workshop, one of the good things about doing a workshop is that there are lots of people there and they can see that people react in different ways. And so you'll get someone who is going, wow, everything's in me.

There's only one. And someone else goes, well, I can't see my head, but I don't get that. And my job at that point is to say, you've got it. You're just having a different experience and it will change. And in effect, you don't get stuck in anything really. And sometimes I will say, if you wake up tomorrow morning after the workshop and you think, what on earth was all that about, all those experiments, you know, don't try and remember. Look again now. Don't try and hold on to any feeling of oneness or whatever it was. Just be clueless. Like right now, for me, pay attention and see what's happening.

And this is life unfolding. This is living. This is glorious. This is spontaneous and unpredictable, isn't it? Yeah. So, Richard, is there anything that we haven't covered here that you think would be useful for people to recognize what we're talking about and work with it? Well, I'm aware we've just got audio. It's like a speaker on the phone. And one of my jobs in my life has been a psychotherapist. I've done a lot of counseling and a lot of it on the phone. And why I say it is that, I mean, I don't talk about the headless way on the phone. They haven't come for that. You know, they might come for six sessions because they're suffering bereavement or health, whatever.

Anyway, what I do is I just be the silence. And I listen to their voice and my voice. And so what I'm paying attention to is two voices like now yours and mine in the one consciousness and obviously I know my voice is you know this is my voice and that's your voice but from the point of view my true nature they're both mine now this means in a certain sense that I position myself right where you are or where the the the is, and I'm looking out of the same space and trying to feel my way into their world. Now I find that people sort of recognize that instinctively because you're on their side.

And so I'm saying this, that in my experience, this has so many applications in everyday life, and it's exciting and interesting. That's an interesting way to frame it, because when you put it like that, it can become obvious that when I'm hearing you speak, I'm hearing your thoughts for the first time. I don't know what you're going to say next, but the truth is I'm in the same position with respect to my own thoughts. I don't know what I'm going to think until the thought itself appears. And when I'm speaking like this, unless I've been thinking and preparing what I was going to say and kind of waiting for you to stop talking so that I could insert what I had already thought out.

The normal experience is to simply be thinking out loud, I mean, to be hearing my utterance precisely when you hear it. So I stand in the same relationship to both of our utterances, which is to merely hear them for the first time when spoken. And it's magical. Yeah. It's magical. They're just coming out of the no-mind or the silence or consciousness, whatever you want to call it, and going back in.

I mean, how does that happen? I mean, it's just, yes, yes. And it's so intimate, isn't it? Two voices in one consciousness. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a pleasure to bring your voice to this conversation. If people want to reach out or find one of your workshops or get your books, where would you direct them online? Well, our website is headless.org. And if people are interested in joining any of our online video meetings, they can just contact me through the website

and all our books are on the website and information about workshops. So feel very welcome to get in touch with me through the website, I suppose. Nice, nice. And thank you sam you know uh often i get people you know many times people saying oh i heard about you through sam harris oh great yeah so really lots of friends come to workshops or contact me online and it's through reading your book or your excellent app or the podcast. So I just want to appreciate how you have...

Well, thank you for that. Yeah, well, get ready. You're about to get a few more. Oh, good. Oh, good. Well, thank you very much, Sam. A delight to be you. Likewise. Likewise. Okay, well, I hope you found that useful. Again, if you were left wondering what the hell are those guys talking about, there is an experience there that can become quite clear.

It can be very brief in the beginning and then it can be expanded and elaborated through practice and did you see what I mean about him being the nicest guy on earth? What a voice actually I've invited him to record guided meditations for the Waking Up app and he has accepted so hopefully those will be coming soon and if you want more information about that,

you can find it at AwakenUp.com. And with that, I leave you. Until next time. Thank you.