On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious

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Well. So what? The key to the whole thing is, as I'll discuss below, noticing the effortless remapping of these strange-seeming signals onto a coherent body-map that makes it "feel" like I am a thing of the same shape, size and dimension as other people I see walking around.

Your forehead itches? How do you know? What does an itch feel like? What's really happening is that you notice some... warmth? heat? Tingling? And you: For Harding - like other Dharma Bums (no slight intended - that’s only Kerouac’s humorous moniker for them) appears to have made a living from this, and numerous other Sunyata Redux titles! irresistibly pin the tingle onto an internal mental model of your body, as if you were a camera viewing yourself from the third personthe 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 and finally, realizing that you can ignore most of the layers... but what you can't ignore is that there's some sort of big theater where all of the thought bubbles and messages are playing out. the star, the galaxy… Like an onion he had many layers. Clearly he needed every one of these layers to exist. The fundamental insight – if I am understanding him correctly – is that by paying attention to your raw experience as carefully as possible, you can find that it’s nothing at all like what you believe it is 24/7. Most people are aware that our experience is mediated by our expectations (google the Gorilla Illusion), but fewer still are aware that our experience is itself shaped by the most basic concepts such as space, time, distance, and distinctness. What’s being delivered from your eyes to your visual cortex is a stream of electrical impulses that map out the double 2D retina images (upside-down). That information is decoded, combined, and filtered to generate the 3D world out of two 2D images. An information transformation has taken place. It is possible through careful meditation to interrupt those filters and algorithms. The end result is a state of ‘headlessness’, where the mental subroutines that delineate ‘you’ from ‘all else’ go offline and the subject/object distinction collapses. Spatial sense is like the emotion of getting pissed at the car ahead of you. What really happened? The car moved in front of you — some tingling warmth happened "somewhere". Then what? The lightning-fast invisible interpretation, and suddenly the other driver is an asshole, and your forehead itches.

I would suggest people seek out these things before reading something like this, which needs a lot of work before taking seriously. But I appreciate and respect the effort nevertheless. The problem too I have with readings like this and its thinking and interpretations of Buddhism and eastern philosophy is that they profess that the 'true' way of seeing is that anything can happen and that anything is possible and we can be eternally happy if we just allow the moment and any desire and thing to come to pass. It is overly and chaotically passive and too overly culturally and civilly critical to the point of being dangerous. It comes across as cultural subversion in a nefarious way. Or maybe chaotically good way. If you can turn it off and break through level two, then you're forced to admit that, without your pre-processing to help you, there's no "head" of your own on evidence. At level two, you still are detecting objects and seeing spatial relationships... but you're not thinking about what the objects and relationships imply.What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: just for the moment I stopped thinking. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine. Past and future dropped away. 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.” He does mention the method, if not repeated, has no effect whatsoever, and that a student of the method may first find that here is nothing painted in bright colors; all is grey and extremely unobtrusive and unattractive.. That and the whole business of ‘seeing the face of the Void’ reminds of the dangerous fit of depersonalization, which is rather common for depression and schizophrenia. Especially this part - 'I come to realize that my seeing into the Absence here isn't seeing into my Absence, but everyone's. I see that the Void here is void enough and big enough for all, that it is the Void. Intrinsically, we all are one and the same, and there are no others.' reminds me very vividly of depression and, for the likes of me, I cannot see how does ‘what I do to anyone I do to myself’ follow from the aforementioned. Surely in the Void there’s no appetite to ‘do’. Okay. I had trouble with this book at first, and I predict that you'll find it as hokey on a first reading as I did. But there is something special here. I'm going to try and describe what it was that I found so fascinating about the Headless insight, and why you should care about, and spend some time recreating, this insight for yourself. Being Present 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 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

The key message here is: The author’s reflections were sparked by a life-changing experience in his early adulthood. To break through the first level, you've got to notice that these feelings, thoughts, anxieties are just suggestions that float up from somewhere, and that will float away if you make room for the next bubbles and don't obsess. Watch and enjoy. Level Two The result is this book- a discussion of not only what happened to him, but an examination of consciousness itself. Where does consciousness reside? Where is the 'me' of our constant thoughts and emotions? Classic work explored the extensive parallels between chemical gradients during development and signal processing in the visual system ( Grossberg, 1978), and indeed early quantitative models of patterning (explaining self-regulatory features like proportion regulation) were based on visual system function ( Hartline et al., 1956; Gierer and Meinhardt, 1972). More recent efforts include the notion of memory for position during regeneration ( Chang et al., 2002; Kragl et al., 2009; Wang et al., 2009) and development ( Beloussov, 1997) and for signaling hysteresis during development ( Balaskas et al., 2012), excitable cortex memory models of pseudopod dynamics ( Cooper et al., 2012), and neural network models of chemical signaling ( Ling et al., 2013) (which showed formal isomorphisms between gene regulation networks and Hebbian learning in neural nets) ( Watson et al., 2010; Ling et al., 2013). In addition to classical neuroscience concepts, more exotic group cognition models have been applied to patterning ( Gunji and Ono, 2012), while a few recent studies investigated the decision-making and formal computational capabilities of RD systems – a chemical signaling modality often used to model morphogenesis ( Adamatzky et al., 2003, 2008; Costello et al., 2009; Dale and Husbands, 2010, which is now known to be Turing-complete ( Scarle, 2009) and support semantic interpretations ( Schumann and Adamatzky, 2009). Despite these fascinating efforts to identify elements of cognitive-like processing in well-known elements of pattern formation, developmental biology is still firmly centered in a mechanistic perspective, seeking explanations in terms of pathways and not information (systems that know things and make decisions based on that understanding). However, it is crucial to note that attributing true knowledge and memory to biological systems is not mystical thinking – computational neuroscience shows us a clear proof of concept that information-level, cognitive approaches to cellular networks are viable, and in fact necessary, strategy for understanding a system at all of its salient levels. I look down. I see hands and arms coming up toward... well, out toward the edges of some big field of vision, the movie screen on which everything is playing. Is there a head there? (Whoops, I'm not present anymore!)It was 1961 and, returning from university lectures in Australia, 1 had scheduled a stop in Bangkok to discuss with John Blofeld his recently published translations. That theater is consciousness — that theater is "you", and "being present" is all about identifying with the theater itself, and not with the layer of autobiographical thought bubbles. Levels of Consciousness 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 Importantly, many cell types communicate electrically, not just excitable nerve and muscle ( McCaig et al., 2005; Levin, 2007a, b, 2012a; Bates, 2015). Recent molecular data show that developmental bioelectricity is an important modality by which cell networks process information that instructs patterning during regeneration, development, and cancer suppression ( Levin, 2014a, b, c). Thus, one obvious candidate for cognition outside the brain is via the same mechanism used in the brain – bioelectrical networks ( Levin and Stevenson, 2012; Mustard and Levin, 2014). Indeed it is likely that the processing in the brain is a direct extension (and speed optimization) of far older mechanisms used originally for morphogenesis ( Buznikov and Shmukler, 1981; Levin et al., 2006). Developmental bioelectricity in animal systems features slowly-changing, continuous voltage changes as opposed to millisecond discrete (binary) spiking usually studied in the brain. However, the brain also includes non-spiking neurons ( Victor, 1999) that have computational compartments similar to the membrane voltage domains observed in embryonic and other non-neural cells ( Levin, 2007b; Adams and Levin, 2012). It has recently been proposed ( Levin, 2012b, 2013; Mustard and Levin, 2014) that non-neural tissues support the same two types of plasticity as seen in the brain: changes of connectivity via electrical synapses (gap junctions) which corresponds to synaptic plasticity, and changes of ion channel function which corresponds to intrinsic plasticity ( Marder et al., 1996; Turrigiano et al., 1996; Daoudal and Debanne, 2003). In addition to computation via changes in resting potential, which is a primary regulator of pattern memory in embryogenesis and regeneration ( Adams, 2008; Funk, 2013; Levin, 2014b), as well as of processing in the brain ( Sachidhanandam et al., 2013; Yamashita et al., 2013), ion pumps such as the ubiquitous sodium-potassium ATPase, have been suggested as computational elements ( Forrest, 2014). One way of attempting to trigger the experience is to play with concepts. Think about sitting in a car while it’s moving. You can either conceptualise it as you are in the car, and you and the car are moving through space passing the scenery and other objects as you drive. Or you can conceptualise it as you are sitting perfectly still and the scenery in your experience is the thing that is moving, zipping to the edges of your visual field then passing away into the void. Like wearing VR goggle, the scenery changes depending on the direction you’re looking in. Some view this perceptual shift as a transcendent insight. Others view it as an appeal to solipsism; the dreaded ‘so what?’ response to the sublime from the uninitiated. We are talking about epistemology, not ontology (though Harding does make some metaphysical leaps of logic that I can’t follow him on: more on that shortly).