Making Sense - Richard Lang - The Illusory Self.md

The fact that 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, is 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. We have some purified version of it and that we find ourselves at a kind of intellectual stalemate when debate in it philosophically or scientifically.

Now, of course there have been people in the podcast who have agreed with me, people like Robert Sopolsky 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 said 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.

There's 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.

All right, so in seeing the blind spot, you're actually seeing something subjectively. As a matter of direct experience, it 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? Well, 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 have 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 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 as situations where the person I'm speaking with seems less than interested. The podcast 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. 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 ones 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 context, 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 Harden, 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's some liabilities with this way of teaching and practicing, and I discuss 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. But introducing Richard in this context seems especially apropos because Douglas Harding and his teaching were at one 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 considered 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 Douglas 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 and 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 Hofstetter and Dennett excerpted in their book and then criticized just give you a sense of the intellectual impasse here, so this is the quotation from Douglas Harding, then I'll give you halfsteaders 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 and 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.

And 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, the superb scene brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void.

And this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight, utterly free of me, unstained by any observer, it's total presence was my total absence, body and soul, lighter than air, clearer than glass, all together 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.

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 big or even here as distinct from there."

Okay, so that's the end of hardens 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 Hoffsteder's "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".

Okay, so back to me: "Having expressed his pity for bad old Harding, Hofsteder proceeds to explain away his insights as a solipsistic denial of mortality, a perpetuation of the childish illusion that <>. However Harding's point was that "I" is not even an ingredient, necessary or otherwise, of his own mind. What Hoffstader fails to realize is that Harding's account contains a precisely 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.

Ok, 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 and studied with him for thirty 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 gonna 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 now I'm bringing Richard Lang.

I am here with Richard Lang.

• Richard, thanks for joining me.

• A pleasure to be here, Sam.

• So how do you describe what it is you do?

• 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 to 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 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 non-verbal 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, that we've got a different view out and different responses to it. So well, how's that for a starter?

• <!>, I want to get into the experiential component of this but we could talk about how you got into this position of teaching people about the nature of awareness and we'll talk about your teacher Douglas Hardin 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 I had, when I was about 10, the headmaster at my school told a story which was story from someone called "the venerable bead" who was this holy man in the north of England in I don't know ninth century or something and be tells this story of a king and having a kind of feast in winter in the big hall and there's a big fire and in through a window flies a bird cross the room and out the other window and bead said this is what our life is and who knows where we came from and who knows where we're going and headmaster of high school told his 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. <!>, 15 16, and then I read a book on Zen by Christmas Humphreys (https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Buddhism-Christmas-Humphreys/dp/0788155113) and there was a note about the Buddhist society, a school that is in England and so I decided to go with my brother and we went from the north of England down to near London and we went to this on the school that 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, come and visit", he lived in Suffolk in this sort of east of England. So when I got back home with my brother, my mom looked as she was worried we're gonna join a cult or something, but 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 ten, fifteen 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, he was always just common come and be with us, <!>, 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 for 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 and 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 I want to be involved in sharing this so even while I was in 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 and, <!>, as I said, I used to go down to Douglas's house all the time and made many friends and well 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 always wast was very kind of strong on that so I sort of, looking back, I kind of grew up in a mini-community where "seeing who you are" as we call it was normal. All my friends were headless.

• So yes, the people who have heard me speak about Douglas well will know that it's been in the context of his really his central empirical injunction, which is to look for your head and notice that you you fail to find it and we'll go over that a bit. But what's so interesting about Douglas is he came up with truly novel practices and analogies and framings and 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 which will get into, and it touches this point you made about there being no hierarchy and no no way of doing it wrong or no way of, <!>, 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 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 Nograkote, but from reading your... you've you've published a graphic biography "the man with no head" and it seemed that that he had this insight into headlessness earlier, so maybe you can just give us a brief tour of Douglas's spiritual biography.

• Well, he grew up in a 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 while you might be right, 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, well the bonds 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, <!>, the peripherals of the religion but he was affected by this deep faith somehow and this sense of importance of meaning, of yes, 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 it's not inquiring into what he was, and I think he often used to say is "the basic thing that amazes me is that I am. <!>, 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 it already rejected what the Plymouth brethren was saying so at this point he wasn't going to take on another dogma, he was gonna look for himself and he started really by recognizing that he was made of layers depending on where the observer was so, <!>, from six feet it was human but closer he was 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 and he began developing this feeling that he was this view that he was like an onion with layers and of course when you realize that you must ask what's at the centre and in 1937, he he'd already written a book by then, and he went to India with his wife and and they they had two children there and the war broke out and although he was a successful architect there his main interest was a inquiry into what am I. I got books of notes from those years, drawings and maps, and <!>, mandala kind of things with these layers. Anyway, he, 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 is a fairly well-known picture, he drew a self-portrait not a 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, <!> about ten feet tall, cause if he closed one eye, <!>, your nose goes from this celing 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". You see now, in "on having no head" as you quite rightly say, he talks about walking in Himalayas and seeing it there and he used to say "oh well, <!>, I did walk in the himalayas and I did see it there" but that was just a sort of way of starting the book. Recently, I was going through all his books and he's got a whole load of books by Suzuki. And I was read I was looking through a little section on satori, on the wow experience and just underneath it, Douglas has written "dodge healing(?)" exclamation mark and so I think, <!>, after seeing it down in Calcutta, he did go up several times up to that part, <!>, walk in the hills, and he must have had a, <!>, understandably a powerful experience of being space for the mountains. So, I think it's all true in a way.

• 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 fifties?

• Well, what happened was he was very much on his own In India, he wasn't he didn't go around any gurus. He was totally working on his own, doing research, <!>, and when he saw this he realized it 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 had already returned up, "I'm going to take a year off to write 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 and all that time and the book is a hierarchy of heaven and earth, it is huge, 600 pages, and then he condensed it because in you cannot really publish that and C. S. Lewis read it and that's how it took off. So, C.S. Lewis wrote back saying "I've never been so drunk with a book since I've read books on 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 fifties - got back into architecture because he hadn't been earning any money. He became very successful, continued to write a bit here and there but at the end of the fifties 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 and for the first time he came across people, the old Zen masters, who were talking about their original face, <!>, the face you had before. They were speaking his language and at the same time, he was came across Ramana Maharshi, who influenced him and affected him with his total dedication. So at the end of the fifth is because of this discovery of Zen, he then got in touch with the Buddhist society for "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 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, <!>, the best year 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 his secretary in his architectural practice and it blew her mind and it blew his mind that it blew her mind and he thought "I could die now. I've shared it with one person, <!>". And then the next year "I've been 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 he built his second house, just over the road from his first house, and that became <!> a potential meeting place for people interested in this and he was teaching comparative religion and here 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 sixties that he began to invent his experiments and he always wanted to share. The experiments were always there in a way because the experience of your headless nature is so direct, <!>, but, he got the idea of the experiments and in 1972, he produced a toolkit with all the experiments and I was around there and we were making them up and I helped him make the toolkit used to go down for a week and <!> work on it, and he was very creative, he was always trying, 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, <!>, 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 Hardy's friends are, because they laugh a lot. So he just followed his instinct - he knew wanted to share it, he knew it got something really powerful. I mean, he just believed in it, "this is a breakthrough", we've been talking about the true nature for centuries, now you can see it, you see, now I can point at it, now you can see your face to no face, it's not abstract, this is concrete, there's no face with others, you're looking out of the single eye, so he wrote a book in the 70s called "the science of the first person". Now, this is the science of objects, you look at them, the science of the subject and he said this, <!>, "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". 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.

[not transcribed, not important], it seems like with Watts he had a media of the minds and with capital he didn't totally so it was an odd encounter is that is there is there more to that story well with capital the first meeting was good.

And capital first came and visited Douglas at his house and and it was a warmer occasion and he came all the way into the country was on it passing through England and he with a monk, <!>, they made the trip and he said this is the spiritual center of England that's was his common and invited Douglas to Rochester and but the second time like in my book, they capital sort of did this end testing thing, <!>, and Douglas didn't go for that he said I've just come to share.

Something I'm come to be tested but I've there's a letter I've got all Douglas and 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 stick to yeah you use paradox and and weird tests to demonstrate the nature of mind, but it can certainly miss fire and that is famous story of cholera potatoes a great.

Tibetan meditation master meeting. I think it was on. Key roshi I forget which zen master I think it was socky and at one point the Roshi held up an orange and said what is it and Carlo turned his translator and said don't they have oranges in Japan so yeah, let's cut the culture so to miss each other there yeah, okay, so let's let's jump into the the experience and and and to our best to introduce people to it hmm. [/not transcribed, not important]

**- I guess we should say that unfortunately many of the experiments that Douglas 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 a subtler thing to recognize so I guess with that limitation, 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 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 through a little process the includes closed eyes and <!> being aware that we're just audio here, okay well, as you say it, 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 the 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 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 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, i don't see my eyes, I don't see any shape or movement or anything so I'm pointing up my "no face", at this space here, this stillness, this silence even, and this is 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, you can't see your face, the inward pointing arrow of attention is pointing at no things space - now this is a non-verbal experience so I'm putting words on it, I'm absolutely convinced everyone is aware of this, you can't see your head, instead you see the world. But you may choose different words from me, so that we've accepted thayt 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 most in focus and when you get to the edge it fades out, then you can see nothing around it and I take that seriously it's sort of hanging in nowhere, the view, there is 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 - three: 1. it's single, the view out, I might hear about your view but I don't experience it, my own experience is 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. So you've got a kind of darkness which again, it's kind of lit up, 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. 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 the same kind of words, the field of sound, like the field of vision, feels 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 can 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 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. I can't see how big it is. And is it inside anything? I can't say how big the field is 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. So I think of a number, there's a thought you see, and think of the face of a friend, and the affection you feel, feelings, anything - problem and anxiety that comes up, challenge you've got. 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 or 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, 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. So now when we open our eyes, well what really changes - the space is full of colors and shapes - magic - but one is still this single space that contains everything. So that's kind of pointing out the obvious.

**- Yeah, that was a great tour. So, let's start with the place we started with, the open-eyed consideration, the pointing at one's own face and noticing that there's nothing to see. I want to just try to channel the skepticism that some listeners may feel and this might 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, so what's the significance of this? You seem to be suggesting that there's something profound about the I not being able to see itself, but I know I have a head. I know I have a face. I know have eyes in the middle of it. What's the point of this?

**- Yes. I think there are different ways of the 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'd 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. But what I am depends on the range of <!>, 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 a 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 you see 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, without anything, is valid here. And when I touch my head, you said "well, look, I can touch it", I say well for you I'm touching my head, but for me my head's disappeared and there's 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.

• This gets to what are really the unique strengths and liabilities of this way of pointing because <!>, I've been convinced for a long time that what Douglas was getting at here, it really is the the fundamental insight into self. Lessness that is provoked. So 10 point out instruction or is sought by really every method of meditation certainly in the East is what the invite to teachers are talking about people like Romana Marsha and the thing that the headlessness insight gets at almost uniquely well is how how available the glimpse of this quality of consciousness is how it's right on the surface how this really there's no such thing as depth there's no 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 you don't want an algebra uses is seeing the optic blind spot.

I mean what once you you 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 someplace on the surface of consciousness that you didn't realize existed until you saw this this particular effect yes and another example I use is the difference between looking through window at the scene outside or inside and seeing your face reflected on the surface of the glass yes and that's if the goal were to see your face and someone is looking through their face out at the 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 they just have to change their plane of focus and they'll see their face instantly yes and that does get at a Raw these analogies are imperfect but gets had 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 there's really no distance to go but the flip side of that is that people who haven't spent a lot of time meditating and haven't deeply ingrained this search for insight into selflessness may glimpse this thing, <!>, very briefly and not see it as the answer to their search because they really haven't had a search they're haven't become connoisseurs of their.

Their unlikement 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 from wrong but I thought that he once said in some context that the voice of the devil says so what and if I have that right notice this is a problem where people would glimpse this and then say well well, so what and then it was hard to get them past that point well, yes.

I mean, you show them that you're nature and they go oh okay, well what's on TV tonight, <!>, it's astonishing look as well as astonish that you could show this and people would not value it. But he took that with a pinch of salt and <!> he in the end he shared it with so many people and I think I probably have the same approach you 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 and some acceptance some don't and it's really mysterious and really interesting for that reason.

I mean fascinating and we have regular online video meetings, <!>, quite a few weeks and I've started asking people why do you value this well, <!> what 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 and that their response whatever it is, even if it's so what is valid and as you go round 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 great party going there's no need to advertise it will speak for itself and it does and so yes.

I mean, I'm, 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 so what's the map that's on to it a more traditional way of thinking about this which exists in many places but I would say zogchen 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's on that account you have people from <!>, that there's end tradition and and the advisor tradition sometimes speaking as though practice doesn't make any sense because this thing is already true but the other side of that is it glimpse of this.

Isn't sufficient that's actually the beginning of someone's practice and what your job is there after is not to seek this as ballistically as though this were some goal that had to be attained but to get used to this and more used to this yes and grow in into it so that you're living from that place more and more and it becomes more and more obvious such that 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 yes 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 you see 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 is faced in their face and I want you to sit for two minutes and I just want your own quietly and notice your single eye and thirdly I want you when you're walking down the street at least once in the day to notice you're still in the scenery moves, <!>, it's both you've got it, you can't lose it you.

Were home but you have to practice it you have to draw on it you have to to yes let it into your life, yes you and and it's important to recognize that doing this in the presence of other people makes it especially vivid because our our sense of separateness is not only visually anchored more than in any other sense domain but it it really is is ramified socially, right so we feel this this contraction of self very much in relationship to others and it's what <!>, is it that this self other dichotomy yes one could argue is it's two sides of the single coin that gets from.

Forge at some point in in our development and 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 sit in 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, so they said moment of eye contact those 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 yeah for most of us that heightens this feeling it's not an accident that we call it, <!>, self-consciousness we.

Get aware that with others are looking at us we sort of project our eyes outward and <!> objectify ourselves by the direction of their gaze and if in moments like that, <!>, whether you're looking at a stranger or with a more appropriate social cues actually talking to someone who has invited the the relationship to be talking to a friend or or whoever if you look for yourself if you look for your head in those moments and fail to find it clearly if there's really just this openness where you thought yourself to be a moment before in which the other person has appearing that can make this non-dual awareness, especially vivid.

Absolutely it may be. Helpful just to bring. Fully describe what I think of as the four stages of development because it includes discovering the self So let's just do that Yeah they're great Okay so today's one is a baby and I'm using my own language here but the baby is first person headless at large.

You've no idea of what you look like. You look at another person who don't feel under inspection the eyes don't have that power yet. So that stage one the stage two is the child where you're learning language and through language you're learning the others can see you and you're developing the capacity to sort of 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.

Diseases to be a train or a bird there's a little boy or girl And all of these stages are infectious that with you with a baby it in my language is giving you permission to be honest <!> just open And if you're with a child it's giving you permission to be flexible and playful and get down for your train.

See because now you keep going up and the feedback from true 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 you can't but trust us. And so you learn to see yourself as others see you and profoundly identified with that act as if you behind a face and act as if they are behind a face there.

So now when someone looks at when you look at someone and they look at you as you're saying you feel looked at as a kind of learn 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 you feel looked at.

So that's a third stage which is infectious. You walk into room and everybody's doing it. <!> say 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 is you said his headless.

And you are space for the world and when you look at someone else now is a little experiment to do they turn their gaze to you normally you feel, <!>, put on this. Spot and looked at and singed Now you can look at that gaze and see it's directed into nothing like you're saying And so what sort of put you in the box someone else's gaze is now an opportunity to see you 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 the whispace for each other. And I own that this is <!>, I've got, <!>, many friends I share this with them.

It's wonderful to finally bring into the public domain awareness about your nature and many people find that <!>, Friendly and who's the guitarist and he said as soon as he saw this he went and performed He suddenly wasn't on stage he was faced with the audience Yeah and <!> it's very healing and lots of kinds of ways.

It's healing and precisely the way that mindfulness is healing because it is a kind of mindfulness of the the centerlessness of awareness. I mean, basically you're taking that as your object of mindfulness rather than any other object of consciousness. Yes, so it has the effect of for those moments where your you're aware of this your not identified with thought you're not clinging to the pleasantness of experience or pushing unpleasant experience away.

You're simple. This openness in which whatever's appearing is appearing And so it's it's got its own intrinsic economy and serenity to it. You're recognizing this quality of consciousness. So when when you yes teach people about this do you talk about being lost and thought as the obstacle to see in this in the next moment of how much of your 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'll take many dovetail perfectly. 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 end here in the mind in ahead But when you are mindful they just objects like you 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 this is this the might look very freeing to see your mind is the world is big. The thoughts and feelings don't affect <!> mind but they don't affect this space but you're not in denial and you experience the whole range of things a wonderful, but they're there and not here if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah the way I've put that before is that the the world you see with your open eyes is the same place where you're Thinking and feeling exactly we can you actually see that at least visually you can see that in a superimposing of visual image onto the physical world you're looking at right.

So, 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, right? So something there's different than when I say, <!> imagine elephant on it and that's super imposition of something shows you that your your visual mind is in some basic sense before your eyes and will just know as a matter of yeah underlying neurology, this is all happening in the same place.

And I mean not that really opens up some profound things because I mean how on earth you actually imagine an elephant I mean just pops up out of nowhere right I mean it's just extraordinary But it pops up in the same place as a table. And so I say well, <!>, the whole thing is popping up out of the great void.

And now this is magical. It is yes one page 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 add it on demand, <!> in a way that you can necessarily get someone to make sustained eye contact with you on demand.

What practice would you recommend there very similar? As you do on your app I would say okay I mean we always do this workshop I take mirrors <!> and you get people to hold the mirror out in that <!> arms and their hand and you just simply say to them well on present evidence where's your face you see.

Well is there in the mirror and there isn't one at the near end of your arms, so to speak. And so just as your space for another person face to know 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 mean the minister telling you what you look like, <!> 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 changes. They've got to keep the dom's lens to see it No Well then I might say well <!> imagine we had a big long mirror and I held it on the other side when we could see your body that Now imagine one on the moon What would you see It's your planetary face So the mirror is showing you where you keep your appearances, <!>, I've got plenty phase out of that range.

I've got a my human individual face at about three feet. <!>, no phase of centre and <!> when you're growing up you're taught to sort of reach into the mirror. I take people through this as I say so imagine, <!> looking in the mirror. Now imagine reaching it and getting hold of that face pulling it out towards you flipping at the other way around because it's facing the wrong way enlarging it this is 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 <!> 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 got that going and 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 so but privately now is my faces 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 and 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 or you're being taught to become more and more aware of the the micro changes in physiology in maybe most people start with the breath and become very aware of your body and ultimately the appearance is in mind thoughts and feelings intentions 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 become more aware of your own kind of neurotic entanglement in each moment and it can lead to a stage in your practice where you actually you're not you don't feel being benefited by doing so much meditation, in fact you're becoming somebody who is less functional in some way because you're <!>, you walk up to the cashier and a store and <!>, you've just got so much attention on yourself and yes, it's in some way less freeing than just being <!> bluntly unaware that is possible to live an exam in life in the first place and so what this approach does.

Is anchor mindfulness to simply openness and free attention in particularly in those moments of social interaction where it's like you have you have no attention on yourself because you can't find yourself you're simply the space yes a free attention in which this other person is appearing moment, yes, yes.

I I don't think that just went bypasses any of these challenges by the way, <!>. I 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 headless wave for <!>, third, Five years I suddenly began getting kind of attacks and overall the shocking and I don't know if you ever had a panic attack but it's rather you're up disturbing it's out of your control and what I realized this panic attack was about was fear of others, there's been separately it went right, <!>, finally I suppose looking back this deep sense of separation that I'd sort of managed in the space, <!> erupted and and I really know what to do, but I said, I didn't know what to do this remain open enquire and pay attention and trust and all that but <!>, I tried very strategies, <!>, there are no others they're wrong or others, they're wrong, there's no self.

Work <!> you only go so far and then you <!> and what it in the end what it came what way I find myself through this was I can't get rid of this sense of others itself. I've been trying I can't do it and I accepted it and of course I could see that accepting the 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 he resists and the sooner.

I began to accept it actually something wonderful came out of it, which was a profound valuing of the otherness of people and other. Myself 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 <!> 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 seemed to be such difficult strange things, <!>.

God why is there something to me, they they teach on something about the world that nothing else could teach and this sense of <!>, 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, <!>. It to a point of heat and tree it seems in the end but but I think the distinction is is important which is the difference between asserting the oneness of what remains when you're no longer taken in by the subject object perception and not asserting <!>, anything really essentially the notion of emptiness so it's not it's not even one it's not one it's not many there is simply this unity of cognition and and appearances right it's and so there's no many of us experience this at various points in practice and certainly met people who seem to be stuck in this place of kind of reifying an experience of oneness and There's a guy subtle under current of conceptualization continually happening that they're that's going on recognized yes you have to so do those things into the inner 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 that I don't get that my job at that point is to say you've got it you're just having a different experience and it will change and <!>, they're in in effect don't get stuck in anything really and so sometimes I will say, <!>, if you wake up tomorrow morning, Often you think what an earth was all that about all those experiments <!> don't try and remember look again now don't try and hold on to any feeling of wonderful whatever it was just be clueless like right now for me pay attention and see what's happening yeah and this is life unfolding this is living this is glorious this is spontaneous and unpredicting your internet yeah yeah, so I'm Richard anything that we haven't covered here you think would be useful for people to to recognize what we're talking about and and work with it well and I I'm with <!>, we just got audio it's like, <!> 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 while I say it is that I don't talk about that as well on the phone now come from that for that <!> my comfort successions because they suffering breathe mentoral 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 he was mine in the one consciousness and obviously I know my voice is this 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 whether the the client 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 it's 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 yeah that's interesting with a 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 are going to say next but the truth is I'm in the same position with respect to my own thoughts, yes, right? I don't know what I'm going to think until the thought itself. Appears and what I'm speaking like this unless I've been <!> thinking yes and preparing what I was going to say and got waiting for you to stop talking so that could insert what I'd already thought out the normal experience is to simply be thinking out loud to be hearing my utterance precisely when you hear it so it's time I stand in the same relationship to yes both of our utterances, which is to merely hear them for the first time one spoken and it's magic it's magical they're just coming out of no mind or the silence or consciousness whatever you want to call it and coming back in.

I mean, how does that happen? I mean, it's just yeah, yes yes and it's so into it, doesn't it? One consciousness yeah. Yeah well it's it's a pleasure to bring your voice to this conversation but people want to reach out or find one of your workshops or get your books, where would you direct them online well website is headless.org and if people are interested in 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 to the website as well yes and and thank you.

Sam, <!> often I get people, <!>, many times people say, oh I heard about you. All right 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 and and so I just want to appreciate how you have well, thank you for that yeah well get ready well well, thank you very much.

I'm a delight to be like,

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, they can become quite clear it can be very brief in the beginning and then it can be expanded and elaborated through practice as you see what I mean about him being the nicest guy on earth what a voice actually invited him to record guided meditations for the wake-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 and waking up.