Catherine Harding - ‘On having No Head’ - Urban Guru Cafe
Catherine Harding is the wife of the late Douglas Harding, pioneer of the Headless Way. She talks about her husband of 18 years who died 23 months ago, aged 98.
Douglas Harding was an English advaitist philosopher who started a system of self-enquiry involving a series a experiments, the most basic of which involves one of your fingers pointing to various things in the objective world and then finally to the place most people think they have a head. Click the top of my links and do the experiments if interested. You find out that subjectively one has no head. Objectively, of course, I have a head. I look in a mirror and voila, a head. But who observes the universe? A brain? Objectively, yes, but subjectively, a glassy essence in which the world moves in and through. You are infinite awareness that swallows the world in a gulp. Zen's original face, the One you are, the One that is neither born nor dies, is this, the One taking this all in.
My only objection to the Headless Way is "what one looks like at zero centimetres". The ancients are correct in saying One isn't a number, a quantity, something you measure. One is a quality, the beginning of all. One is not a thing like one computer screen. One is the eternal infinite quality containing everything. Instead of asking "What do you look like at zero point?" I propose "What do you look like at One?"
