On Having No Head by Douglas Harding (Deep Book Summary)

This is a book summary of On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious by Douglas Harding (Amazon).

🔒 Premium members also have access to the companion post: How to See Clearly with the Headless Way Experiments (+ Visuals & Videos)

For a video intro to Douglas Harding, check out this mini-documentary from Richard Lang:

Or, if you want Douglas Harding’s own words:

Quick Housekeeping:

All content in quotation marks is from the author unless otherwise stated.
All content is organized into my own themes (not the author’s chapters).
Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.

Book Summary Contents: Click a link here to jump to a section below

Douglas Harding’s Personal Experience

Spirituality + Science

The Headless Way

The Headless Way Stages:

The Headless Infant
The Child
The Headed Grown-up
The Headless Seer
Practicing Headlessness
Working It Out
The Barrier
The Breakthrough

**Rediscovery of the Obvious: On Having No Head by Douglas Harding (Book Summary)**

Douglas Harding’s Personal Experience

“The best day of my life – my rebirthday, so to speak – was when I found I had no head.”

“It was when I was thirty-three that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent inquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I?”
“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.”
“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 – 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.”
“It felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused life-history. It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too clever or too scared to see. It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face – my utter facelessness.”
“To try to set down the first-hand, immediate experience in these or any other terms, however, is to misrepresent it by complicating what is simplicity itself: indeed the longer the postmortem examination drags on the further it gets from the living original.”

Spirituality + Science

“At last, after more than a decade of largely fruitless searching everywhere else, I found in the words of the Zen masters many echoes of the central experience of my life: they talked my language, spoke to my condition. Many of these masters, I found, had not only lost their heads (as we all have) but were vividly aware of their condition and its immense significance, and used every device to bring their disciples to the same realization.”

“Hui-neng’s Original Face (No-face, No-thing at all) is the best known and for many the most helpful of all Zen koan-anecdotes: over the centuries in China it is said to have proved an uniquely effective pointer to enlightenment. In fact, according to Daito Kokushi (1281-1337), all the seventeen hundred koans of Zen are simply pointers to our Original and Featureless Face.”
“Our thoughts and feelings appear only on the blank screen here which Zen calls No-mind, and leave no trace on it as they disappear.”
“Modern science itself agrees that we don’t really see with our eyes. They are merely links in a long chain stretching from the sun, through sunlight and atmosphere and illuminated objects, through eye lenses and retinae and optic nerves, right down to particle/wavicle-haunted space in a region of the brain, where at last (it’s said) seeing really occurs. In fact, the deeper the physiologist probes into the object, the nearer he gets to the Emptiness which is the Subject’s direct experience of himself – the Emptiness which is the only Seer and Hearer, the sole Experiencer. (Not that he can ever, no matter how refined his instruments and techniques, get to the Subject by probing into the object: to do that he has simply to turn his attention round 180°.)”

The Headless Way

“This Way puts headlessness – alias seeing into Nothingness – at the very start of the spiritual life … Our overriding purpose is seeing into and living from Nothingness.”

“There exist, then, two sorts – two widely different species – of human being. The first, of which I note countless specimens, evidently carries a head on its shoulders (and by ‘head’ I mean an opaque and coloured and hairy eight-inch ball with various holes in it) while the second, of which I note only one specimen, evidently carries no such thing on its shoulders.”
“The Headless Way – in contrast to those that combine Eastern spirituality with Western psychotherapy – is not concerned with deliberately watching the processes of the mind, or with psychological probing as such, or with meditation aimed at raising repressed mental material to the surface: or (for that matter) with stilling the mind. Rather it takes the line of Ramana Maharshi, who taught: ‘To inhere in the Self is the thing. Never mind the mind.'”
“The way really to live is to look in and see Who is doing so, that only you are in a position to see this ‘Who’, that this in-seeing establishes You as the authority on what matters supremely, and that accordingly your path will not conform to some set pattern laid down from above, by this or any other book or person or system.”
“Present experience, whatever sense is employed, occurs only in an empty and absent head.”
“How much the Void currently includes, and excludes, is unimportant: for I see that it remains infinitely empty and infinitely big regardless of the scope or importance of the finite objects it’s taking care of. It makes no real difference whether it’s dissolving my head (as when I look down), or my human body (as when I look out), or my Earth-body (as when, out-of-doors, I look up), or my Universe body (as when I close my eyes). Everything there, no matter how tiny or vast, is equally soluble here, equally capable of coming and showing me that I am no-thing here.”
“This very spot, this observation-post of mine, this particular ‘hole where a head should have been’ – this is the Ground and Receptacle of all existence, the one Source of all that appears (when projected ‘over there’) as the physical or phenomenal world, the one infinitely fertile Womb from which all creatures are born and into which they all return. It is absolutely Nothing, yet all things; the only Reality, yet an absentee. It is my Self. There is nothing else whatever. I am everyone and no-one, and Alone.”
“All twoness – all duality of subject and object – has vanished: it is no longer read into a situation which has no room for it.”

The Headless Way Stages

“The experience has of itself opened out into a Path (the Headless Way is as good a name for it as any), and much has been learned about this Path – its twists and turns and traffic flow and traffic blocks, its general practicability. A map of it all, from the very beginning is long overdue.”

1. The Headless Infant:

“As the animal and infant of Stage (1), you were unselfconscious: all your arrows of attention were aimed outwards: you overlooked your presence.”

“As an infant you were like any animal: in that you were for yourself headless and faceless and eyeless, immense, at large, unseparate from your world – without being aware of your blessed condition. Unconsciously, you lived without obstruction from What you are Where you are, from your Source, and relied simply on the Given.”

2. The Child:

“As the child of Stage (2), you probably were from time to time truly Self-conscious; on those occasions an arrow of attention was turned inward also, and it hit the mark: you saw your Absence – accidentally as it were. But more and more your inward-pointing arrows fell far short of that mark: instead of getting through to the central Absence-of-any-body they got stuck in the peripheral presence of a very human somebody.”

“Gradually you learned the fateful and essential art of going out and looking back at yourself, as if from a few feet away and through others’ eyes, and ‘seeing’ yourself from their point of view as a human being like them, with a normal head on your shoulders. Normal yet unique. You came to identify with that particular face in your mirror, and answer to its name.”
“At this stage you come near to making the best of both worlds – the unlimited non-human world you are coming from and the limited human world you are entering. All-too-briefly, you have in effect two identities going, two versions of yourself.”

3. The Headed Grown-up:

“As the adult of Stage (3), and falsely self-conscious, you went on aiming your arrows of attention at that insubstantial some-body, at that human appearance of yours which daily became more substantial for you, and soon was your identity card, your identity itself. (Forged card, mistaken identity!)”

“It seems that, from a very early age, our learned view of ourselves from outside begins to overshadow, to superimpose itself upon, and eventually to blot out, our original view of ourselves from inside. We have grown down, not up. Instead of being present and together with the stars – and all things under the stars – we have shrunk away and withdrawn from them. Instead of containing our world, it now contains us – what’s left of us. And so, reduced from being the whole scene into being this tiny part, is it any wonder that you and I find ourselves in all sorts of trouble – if we grow greedy, resentful, alienated, frightened, defeated, tired, stiff, imitative instead of creative, unloving, plain crazy?”

The Big Question:

“Is Stage (3) – this stretch of road so paved with delusion-based suffering – just a great mistake, an unnecessary loop which can and should be by-passed? Is it possible to leap – helped on by enlightened parents and teachers – from the childhood of Stage (2) to the true adulthood or seership of later stages, thus avoiding the worst of the troubles we have just listed? In other words, can one become a full member of this club called Human Society, and enjoy its inestimable privileges and facilities, yet without ever subscribing to the lie on which it is founded, without ever joining in the club’s non-stop Face Game, without ever becoming like them?”

The Answer:

“There’s no route from the Paradise of childhood to the Heaven of the blessed that doesn’t lie through the Far Country, through some kind of Hell or at least Purgatory. Really to turn away from our wilfulness, to abandon our personal and separative ego (and so come to the later stages of our journey) we must at this stage be paid-up members of the society which is dedicated to their cultivation: as small children our egocentricity is as yet too shallow, too ineffectual and variable and candid, too little ours, for us to give up. Really to lose our heads, we must first have them firmly in place. Really to appreciate What we are, with clarity and impact, we must first be identified with what we are not. Really to value the perfectly obvious, we must first acquire the habit of overlooking and denying it. The Universe is such that true liberation doesn’t happen in vacuo; it is liberation from what’s false – without which it isn’t liberation at all.”

4. The Headless Seer:

“All one has to do to enter this Fourth Stage of the journey is – however briefly – to turn round the arrow of one’s attention.”

Three means of turning around the arrow of attention:

“What you are now looking at is this printing; what you are now looking out of is empty Space for this printing. Trading your head for it, you put nothing in its way: you vanish in its favour.”
“What you are now looking out of isn’t two small and tightly fastened ‘windows’ called eyes but one immense and wide open ‘Window’ without any edges; in fact you are this frameless, glassless ‘Window’.”
“To make quite sure of this, you have only to point to the ‘Window’ and notice what that finger is pointing at – if anything. Please do just that, now…”

Five inestimable virtues of this simple in-seeing:

“Though down the centuries this in-seeing has been made out to be the most difficult thing in the world, the joke is that it is really the easiest.”
“This alone is real seeing. It can’t be done wrong, and is quite foolproof.”
“This seeing goes deep. The clearest and most distant of views out is found to be shallow – a view down a cul-de-sac – compared with the view in, to the headlessness which plainly goes on and on forever.”
“This experience is uniquely communicable, because it is exactly the same for all – for the Buddha, for Jesus, for Shen-hui, for Al-Alawi, for you and me.”
“This seeing into one’s Nothingness is always on tap, whatever one’s mood, whatever one is up to, however agitated or calm one happens to be at the moment – in fact, just whenever one needs it.”

5. Practicing Headlessness:

“And now, as the seer of Stages (4) and (5), you are again truly Self-conscious: but this time you penetrate that ring of appearances more deliberately and consistently, and begin to rest in What they are appearances of, in your Reality, which is your true Identity, your Presence-Absence, your Core and Source. More and more often your arrows of attention, simultaneously aimed inwards and outwards, hit their mark. You are becoming adept at two-way looking – at once looking in at No-thing and out at every-thing.”

“Now the ‘hard’ part begins, which is the repetition of this headless seeing-into-Nothingness till the seeing becomes quite natural and nothing special at all; till, whatever one is doing, it’s clear that nobody’s here doing it. In other words, till one’s whole life is structured round the double-barbed arrow of attention, simultaneously pointing in at the Void and out at what fills it. Such is the essential meditation of this Way.”
“The method is quite simple and the same throughout. It consists of ceasing to overlook the looker – or rather, the absence of the looker.”
“You are turning out to be one of those mutants in our species – seers sporadically cropping up throughout the past few thousand years – who hopefully herald the next evolutionary leap forward: who, in fact, point the way to the species’ best chance of survival itself.”

6. Working It Out:

“We have to go on to discover much more about the meaning of headlessness, its value for living, its drastic implications for our thinking, our behaviour and relationships, our role in society. This stage, even less clear-cut than the others, is bound to overlap them to a large extent, and in fact is never finished with. There is no standard pattern.”

“Much will depend upon the individual’s gifts and temperament, and the extent to which he or she is able to link up with – and get support from – others. Certainly it’s much pleasanter and easier to progress along this Way, and to make the discoveries that belong to this stage of it, in the company of friends rather than alone. All the same, neither loneliness nor any other difficulty will hold anyone back, and everything – just the right books, teachers, circumstances – will leap to his assistance, if he’s determined to press on.”
“It’s not for nothing that the enlightened are called seers and not hearers or smellers or touchers – and certainly not thinkers.”
“Prominent among them all is a realization – a many-sided spiritual development appropriate to our Stage (6) but certainly not confined to it – which insists on special attention at this point. It is the experience of unknowing, of one’s profound and all-inclusive ignorance. In fact, it follows from ‘I am nothing’ that ‘I know nothing’, for obviously an informed nothing is not a nothing but a something, form and not void.”
“No matter how revolutionary the discoveries made along Stages (5) and (6) of the Way, or how valuable for living they are beginning to prove, in the end they leave the wayfarer profoundly unsatisfied. There remains an ache, an undefined longing. In spite of all this quite genuine spiritual ‘progress’, an all-important region remains untravelled, or at least insufficiently explored. It’s a dark and dangerous country inhabited by monsters, and it cannot be by-passed. It is the area of the will. Here, beyond and beneath all these luminous goings-on, the unregenerate ego is still at work, possibly beavering away more vigorously than ever.”

7. The Barrier:

“We come to Stage (7) of our Way, which looks much more like a dead end or impassable obstruction than what it is in fact – the really testing stage of the journey, painful but obligatory.”

“A dreadful thought haunts one: was all that spiritual ‘progress’, all that effort leading up to this Barrier, a waste of time, even fraudulent?”
“The true route lies straight into and eventually through the Barrier, which our Western tradition calls the Dark Night of the Soul.”
“In a certain sense, this is the real start of the Way, of the true spiritual life, which is nothing else than self-surrender, self-abandonment, actually underwriting whatever happens to one, dying as the separate and illusory ego (I am a somebody) and being reborn as the one and truly egoless Ego (I AM).”
“The barrier is none other than the culminating defense-effort of our wilfulness or ego, its most formidable but desperate stand against sustained attack by the inescapable facts; and what overcomes it is more and more of the same realism, the same thankful reverence for What’s So – for the Plainly Given, the Blatantly Obvious – that brought us all the way up to the barrier.”
“It could be said that all spiritual ‘progress’ up to this point was merely preparation for this, the essential and by far the hardest stage of the Way, leading eventually to the Breakthrough.”

8. The Breakthrough:

“This amounts to a profound declaration of intent. It is the realization at gut level (so to say) that one’s deepest desire is that all shall be as it is – seeing that it all flows from one’s true Nature, the Aware Space here.”

“It’s not a doing, but an undoing, a giving up, an abandonment of the false belief that there’s anyone here to abandon. What else is there to do? After all, one’s initial in-seeing – no matter how ‘brief’ and ‘shallow’ – was already total self-surrender: everything here went: or rather, it was clear there’s nothing here to go. It was the essential quantum leap from the fiction of egocentricity to the fact of zerocentricity.”
“Whenever we have the grace to say YES! to our circumstances, and actively to will (rather than passively to acquiesce in) whatever happens, why then there springs up that real and lasting joy which Eastern tradition calls ananda.”
“In terms of our Western tradition, our breakthrough is our unconditional and ever-renewed surrender to God’s will as perfectly revealed in our circumstances – to God’s will clearly on show all around us and within us, in the shape of all that’s going on right now. Insofar as his will becomes ours, we see his world as it is; and, insofar as we see it as it is, our will becomes his and from our hearts we welcome all that world is bringing to us. Here, in short, our seeing and our willing merge – not once-and-for-all of course, but moment by moment, so long as life lasts.”
“Where do we go now? The answer is: nowhere. Let us resolutely stay right here, seeing and being This which is Obviousness itself, and take the consequences. They will be all right.”
“What a long way we travel to find the treasure of treasures we carry with us all the time!”