The Science of the 1st Person by Douglas Harding (Book Summary)

This is a book summary of The Science of the 1st Person: Its Principles, Practice and Potential by Douglas Harding (Amazon).

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The Science of the 1st Person book by Douglas Harding

Quick Housekeeping:

All content in “quotation marks” is from the author (otherwise it’s paraphrased).
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:

About the Book
SCIENCE-3 & SCIENCE-1
Test & Discover
Words & Language
Identity & Problems
Seeing & Enlightenment

**The Observer & The Observed: The Science of the 1st Person by Douglas Harding (Book Summary)**

About the Book

“The purpose of this book is to place in an uncompromisingly modern and Western setting the essential teaching and goal of spiritual religion – called Awakening or Enlightenment or Liberation.”

“I shall maintain that Western objective science is only half of real science (the other half being the science of the Subject or 1st Person) and that we are in trouble because we mistake it for the whole.”
“Our aim here is to start correcting this mistake and to present Enlightenment in a form that the science-minded Westerner can make sense of and put into immediate practice.”

SCIENCE-3 & SCIENCE-1

“The way things are, there have to be two kinds of science—to take care of the two kinds of ‘things’ that are. These two kinds are variously named Oneself and others, the Faceless and the faced, Subject and object, Observer and observed, 1st Person and 3rd; and they lie at an angle of 180 degrees to each other and there is no similarity between them at all.”

SCIENCE-3 & SCIENTIST-3:

The science of the observed, of the object or 3rd person.

SCIENCE-3:

“SCIENCE-3 admits to being the science of phenomena and not noumena, of regional appearances and not their central Reality, of the way things look and not the way they are. It is the science of the relative, of how things happen to strike the observer, whose position and motion make all the difference.”
“Science as we know it is concerned with the structure and behaviour of the phenomena that make up the objective universe. Its aim is to find out precisely what goes on at the various observational levels, the ‘horizontal’ links at each level, and the ‘vertical’ links between levels.”

SCIENTIST-3:

“SCIENTIST-3 thinks of himself as a thing among things, an object among objects, a number to be added in at the end of the series if not at the beginning. His world, divided into this observing thing and those observed things, is two worlds. So it happens that, while SCIENTIST-3 sorts out many secondary problems, he aggravates the primary one, which is the problem of duality, the alienation of self from non-self, with all its attendant anxieties.”
“SCIENTIST-3 concerns himself only with the object’s appearances and not with the Reality they are appearances of; second, he concerns himself with only a small selection from the infinity of those appearances and ignores the rest; third, even the selected appearances are upset by his observational techniques and so partially falsified; fourth (and worst of all) he takes account only of the variable and more-or-less inscrutable half of each scientific occasion – the observed – and overlooks the constant half – the observer himself as 1st Person, who as such is real and no appearance, and is indeed the only reliable ingredient in the experimental or observational set-up.”

SCIENCE-1 & SCIENTIST-1:

The science of the observer, of the Subject or 1st Person. The science of the Experiencer and not of experiences.

SCIENCE-1:

“The ideal medium, the only real safeguard against distortion, would be no medium at all, observed and observer coinciding and leaving no room for error in the transmission of information from one to the other. Only SCIENCE-1, where object and Subject unite, conforms to this ideal, or comes anywhere near it.”
“SCIENCE-1 defines as ‘normal’ or ‘sane’ anyone who is consciously both 1st-Person and 3rd, without confusing them.”
“SCIENCE-1 is all along so profoundly religious or spiritual that it could equally well be called the religion or spirituality of the 1st Person.”
“SCIENCE-1 reconciles all its practitioners throughout the cosmos (however many their eyes and antennae and legs, and wherever they grow them!), because What each sees himself to be is exactly What every other sees himself to be, and What they all actually are. SCIENCE-1 is the discovery that, in the last resort, there is only one Scientist, and the ultimate Science is his own in-seeing – his very own, and scot-free.”
“SCIENCE-1 goes deeper still, to the very Heart of things, and uncovers the central Secret itself, which alone is wholly practical and incapable of abuse or misapplication, and is also put into immediate effect.”
“Wide-openness without preconceptions, which plucks ideas, unforeseeable and dewy-fresh, from thin air—this is the specialty, the expertise, the hallmark, the very lifeblood of SCIENCE-1.”
“Inasmuch as SCIENCE-1 concerns itself with the real, the constant, it is wholly realistic and reliable: oddly enough, it is the science of the Subject that is altogether objective, which means altogether scientific … SCIENCE-1 cheerfully recognises and values (and in a sense includes) SCIENCE-3, for it takes into account not only the seer but the seen, not only the central Reality but the nest of all its appearances. To put it another way, the Emptiness it views is marvellously filled and by no means merely empty; Subject finds itself replete with object, Observer with observed, and they are one.”
SCIENCE-1: insists on verification, is ultra analytic, is ultra synthetic, is mathematically precise, is sense-based, discovers the real, is non-interfering, is objective, is the discovery of the knowable, is self-righting, reaches agreement, is gratis, is simple, is unspecialised, has no communication problem, shows how language supports delusion, is never boring, is disinterested, is fertile, establishes my immortality, puts me in touch with the external world, is ultra sceptical, gives the universe meaning, is world-asserting, normalises ‘paranormal’ phenomena, finds the natural world, is the highest religion, restores the sense of mystery, overcomes time, controls the environment, is practical, is spontaneously applied, is basic psychotherapy, diagnoses and treats the specific disease of man.

SCIENTIST-1:

“Whereas SCIENTIST-3 looks out, SCIENTIST-1 looks both in and out simultaneously – in at the near and out at the far, in at Who’s looking and out at what’s being looked at, and only this two-way looking is fully objective.”
“SCIENTIST-1 is at large, world-wide, unbounded, inseparable from the Cosmos itself.”
“SCIENTIST-1 tests the scriptures by experience, not experience by the scriptures.”
“SCIENTIST-1 pushes specialisation to the utmost limit, thereby reversing it. He knows, not – like SCIENTIST-3 – more and more about less and less, but everything about Nothing. He stands no risk of narrow-mindedness, for his Subject-matter is boundless; he cannot concentrate on part of it, for it has no parts. To practise SCIENCE-1 at all is to practise all of it. In short, the answer to the problem of specialisation is to take another look at the specialist – from inside. He can safely and cheerfully restrict his attention to the narrowest of research projects, provided he doesn’t lose touch with himSelf, with the Researcher whose breadth is infinite.”
“Disappearing as one object facing a miscellany of objects, SCIENTIST-1 reappears as the solitary subject who holds together all objects in the perfect synthesis. The 1st Person becomes truly Nothing by handing over everything to the Whole, which thereby becomes truly All, for its vital missing part is now restored.”
“SCIENCE-3 has a very elaborate mathematical toolkit, SCIENCE-1 a very simple one, namely Zero – myself as Nothing or number 0 instead of number one. All that, as SCIENTIST-3, I supposed I had subtracted from the world, I now, as SCIENTIST-1, add back, leaving Zero here and Unity there.”

Polar Opposites:

“It isn’t that the 1st Person and the 3rd are unlike, but that they cannot be compared. They share no common ground. Whatever is true of one is untrue of the other. That is why to confuse them is so damaging.”

“As the 1st Person is to the 3rd so are their respective sciences to each other: in every particular, SCIENCE-1 is the polar opposite of SCIENCE-3. Yet it contradicts nothing, undoes nothing. Instead, it carries to its proper conclusion the immense work already done. In no sense is it anti-scientific; rather it is ultra-scientific or meta-scientific. And its procedure is simply this: by turning his attention through 180 degrees and viewing himself as he is to himself, SCIENTIST-1 is at last in a position to remove the basic anomalies of SCIENCE-3, and simultaneously to solve his own basic problems, the problems of life.”
“Attributing 3rd personhood to this 1st Person as such, and 1st Personhood to those 3rd persons as such … are two sides of a coin. It’s a counterfeit coin.”
“SCIENCE-3 tries to reduce my vast world to something in my head, while SCIENCE-1 goes on to reduce my head to Nothing—a Nothing which explodes into Vastness.”
“This science requires its practitioner to do exactly what SCIENCE-3 forbids – to put himself back in the picture and take his subjectivity seriously.”
“Such is our mandala, or onion-pattern, essentially a nest of concentric circles about a centre: the centre is the 1st Person and the circles are the system of its regional appearances as 3rd person, of its manifestation to observers whose distance determines the status – human or non-human – of what they observe. Such, again, is our pyramid of wholes and parts, with the Whole (or the 1st Person as All) for apex, ‘ultimate matter’ (or the 1st Person as Nothing) for base, and man half way between.”

Test & Discover

“This isn’t a matter of theory but of observation, each for himself … It isn’t for taking on trust but for testing—by the sincere and sustained practice of two-way looking, observing seer and seen simultaneously, and noticing what happens to the seen.”

“The hallmark of a scientific discovery is that it is capable of independent verification; it isn’t for believing on even the most eminent authority’s say-so, but for doubting and testing.”
“SCIENCE-1 is even more radical in its appeal, over the head of all authority, to first-hand experience; it exists for testing and by testing, not otherwise. It has no laurels to rest on. I may never tell you what it’s like to be 1st Person where you are (I’m in no position to say) but only what it’s like where I am – just in case you should happen to get similar readings. Much more than this, I may not even tell you (or myself) what it was like to be 1st Person here yesterday, or an hour or a minute ago. I can’t rely even on my own authority! For if I’m seeing what’s here at the Centre of my world, and not merely thinking it, it is memory-free, a brand new discovery every time. I can verify my past findings, with the rigour this most exacting SCIENCE-1 demands, only by continually bringing them up to date. In fact, the past is obsolete, ruled out. SCIENCE-1 is the science of the 1st Person singular, present tense, because the true 1st Person is only now: the memory and anticipation of 1st-personhood turn it into an object, into 3rd-personhood. Whereas SCIENCE-3 must lean heavily on past experience and take for granted much of its ever-growing stock of knowledge, SCIENCE-1 may take nothing for granted.”
“Not only do I tell you what’s right here, namely No-thing, but I follow it up with an invitation to come here (preferably armed with the proper instruments) and discover for yourself whether I am speaking the truth.”
“All discovery and enjoyment of this perennial and universal Fact is discovery of the same thing by the same Discoverer, and even a syllable of disagreement is impossible.”
“When he turns his attention round and examines himself as 1st Person, when he becomes his own unique sample of whatever-it-is, when he takes seriously that one collection of particles concerning which he has inside information and upon which he is the sole and final authority, then he completes his work of reduction and observes that in the last analysis it is absolutely empty – yet aware of itself as empty: formless – yet well informed on the subject: qualityless – yet tickled to death at the fact. He sees that the Reality behind appearances is No-thing seeing itself as no-thing. Or rather, he sees that the Reality ‘behind’ appearances is in fact in front of them, taking them in, and is none other than himself as 1st Person.”
“The Void here cannot be guessed at or thought about or speculated on or even understood; but only perceived. Thinking about it destroys it by giving it content. Here, then, is the meta-science which, if it is to function at all, can never get away from its sense-basis, its sure foundation of ultra-radical empiricism. It cannot so much as glimpse its material (which is the scientist-in-himself) while it is blinkered by any preconception or theory or philosophy or dogma. All that is needed, all that is permitted, is simple openness, bare attention. As a result, its findings are undistorted, given and not cooked up, self-evident: that is to say, truly scientific.”
“Only this motionless and colourless No-shape, which is the investigator himself as 1st Person, is wholly indubitable and unproblematic. The One who is it knows what to make of it. The only ‘thing’ that can safely be taken at its face value is one’s own faceless Nothingness.”
“Thus this 1st Person is illuminated by every sense, as the unchanging and indispensable foreground of all these ever-changing sensations. In my exploration of others I use what senses are available, as best I can; in my exploration of Myself I use them all – to perfection.”
“Taking my own case as a true sample and my only source of inside information, I recognise that things don’t experience anything, that eyes don’t see and ears don’t hear and tongues don’t taste and brains don’t think, that (in this sense) all seeing is eyeless, and so on.”
“The moment-to-moment discovery of this 1st Person singular—is that there is no eye here to see things with, no ear to hear sounds with, no nose and tongue here to smell and taste with, no brain here to receive messages or to think with.”

Words & Language

Language: ignores the 1st Person; plays the 1st-Person-plural trick, turning the 1st Person into 3rd; contaminates the 1st Person with thoughts and feelings; contaminates the 3rd person also; contaminates non-human objects.

“Language launches a threefold assault upon me – talking me into believing that I am, as 1st Person, superfluous, that I am a mere 3rd-person thing, that this thing is saturated with thoughts and feelings.”
“Misled by the abstractions of language into discounting the 1st Person altogether, SCIENTIST-3 imagines himself to be a tiny, late, accidental, lonely, superfluous thing in an alien universe. Waking from this nightmare, SCIENTIST-1 sees himself to be endless capacity for the universe of things, replete with all its space-time, one with all its inhabitants, and indispensable.”
“One of the main practical functions of SCIENCE-1 is to see through the built-in duplicity of language as we now use it; and to re-deploy it in the interests, no longer of outworn social fictions, but of what is actually given.”
“What a cover-up! Words can talk me into and out of anything, into ‘seeing’ what isn’t seen, and out of ‘seeing’ what is seen. I see only what words – these little marks on paper, these peculiar noises – permit! The fatal gift of language is terribly apt to take the authenticity, the very heart, out of my life. Swallowing this poison, the 1st Person is hell-bent on becoming 3rd, on suicide.”
“Language is structured around the fiction of separate consciousnesses, one per body; separate consciousnesses mean alienation; alienation means despair.”
“When, viewing myself as No-thing filled with that thing, I become it, I see it as it is. When, beguiled by language, I think I am in the world, I am blinded by the world; but when, coming to my senses, I see the world is in me, I really see it.”
“Saying to myself and my two companions ‘I worry’, ‘I think’, ‘I fear’, ‘I sympathise’, ‘I love’, ‘I’m in a state’, etc., I suppose these sentences are complete and must mean something. In fact, they are truncated: this time the Subject is shorn of its object, instead of vice versa. They imply that I’m capable of experiencing worry, thoughts, fear, love, etc., right here in myself, without reference to objects which are worried about, thought about, feared, loved … So I come to believe in a central pool or cesspool of thoughts and feelings, flooding and polluting my interior clarity, a subjective morass, a congested inner world of my very own. But when I attend to this Spot and try to experience, right here, worry, thoughts, fear, love, and so on, I experience Nothing: it’s only as they go out from the 1st Person here into the world of 3rd persons there, and adhere to their objects that they happen at all. Here, the Source of experience remains perfectly cool and lucid, uncontaminated by what comes out of it … I see myself to be free, pure awareness at the Centre, however much language, with its truncated sentences like ‘I worry’, ‘I ache’, ‘I imagine’, would persuade me otherwise.”
“The word ‘I’ is no more the experience of ‘I’ than the word ‘red’ is tinted red. Notoriously, words become substitutes for their meaning. This is tragically true when they are about my 1st-personhood. Talking and reading and writing about Who I am, without seeing Who I am, is a well-worn escape route from Who I am.”
“Source never shines more brightly than when it is being pointed out to another (really it is pointing Itself out to Itself), and then language is at its best.”

Identity & Problems

“All these troubles arise from his basic trouble, his identity-delusion … It all comes back to the crucial question of my true Identity. If I insist on making an object and a thing and a 3rd person of myself here, I am consumed with a thousand fears and better off dead. But if I give up this unrealistic and unrewarding habit and come to Myself, I see that I have never emerged from that marvellous Abyss, that before Abraham was I am, before the first galaxy and the first atom, before time itself.”

“My psychological problems all boil down to the problem of my Identity. They are settled only by attending to the One here, to this 1st Person who is supposed to have them. Here is the only profound analysis, the only therapy which penetrates to the Root of the trouble, the only lasting cure of my disease. Though the results may be slow to manifest (and then be more manifest to others than to me), this way is economical, thorough, foolproof, well-tested over thousands of years, instantly available, and (though in a sense it costs the Earth) quite gratis. Freedom is free.”
“While I’m seeing What I really am as 1st Person I’m clear-headed and clear-minded and clear of body and mind at all levels, with their attendant problems. And while I’m not seeing this I have plenty of problems, all of which are reducible to the problem of this morbid growth called brain/head/mind, this malignancy flourishing right here at the mid-point of my universe.”
“To disperse the mind is to heal it. It is because SCIENCE-1 is so non-psychological (or meta-psychological) that it is so psychologically effective. It cures my mind by curing me of mind. For, basically, the trouble with my mind is the conviction I’ve got one.”
“The 1st Person, as such, has neither a psyche nor a psychology, but is simple Awareness without a shadow of anything to call its own. Here, I let go of everything. All that I tried to clutch to myself is unloaded upon the world. And now that I find myself here at Centre devoid of all qualities and functions and the world there full of them, I cease labelling some of them ‘mental’ or ‘subjective’ or ‘secondary’ and mine, and the rest ‘physical’ or ‘objective’ or ‘primary’ and not mine.”
“The very nature of its material ensures that SCIENCE-1 is wholly disinterested, with no eye on the pay-off—whether that pay-off be material or psychological or spiritual (and notably the last; the most effective barrier to Enlightenment is religion itself, our spiritual acquisitiveness). Nothing is to be gained from Nothing.”
“Though free from any such intention, is it the business of SCIENCE-1 to save the world from the consequences of SCIENCE-3. The current headaches—war, racial conflict, economic greed, the generation gap, crime and violence, mental illness, drug addiction, with all the other symptoms of mankind’s basic anxiety—come from thinking one has a head to ache, that one is what one isn’t, a thing or 3rd person. And everyone who is cured of this insane delusion automatically helps to cure others, and so does far more towards the world’s amelioration than the world could begin to suspect.”
“The 1st Person is a-moral, a-everything. Inevitably, for to prescribe rules to myself is to make a case of myself, to cultivate a face or self-image, to box myself, to become a memory, a 3rd person, a separate thing that is naturally selfish. And, conversely, to be Myself is to be this 1st Person singular who, as consciously identical with all other 1st Persons (not that there are such), is naturally ‘unselfish’, and whose ‘goodness’ owes nothing to rules and is truly creative.”
“How can I help others to this discovery? By giving up any such idea, and attending to the Place where there are no others.”
“The only way I can help profoundly is to mind my own profoundest business, now: to see—and see what happens.”
“My behaviour is never so irresponsible and airy-fairy as when I dismiss the Void that I am right here—this Primary Producer which could hardly be accused of impracticality, seeing that is manufactures and delivers out of its own Emptiness this workable universe (plus, for good measure, its own delighted awareness of doing so).”
“What I experience depends upon many things—upon the state of my physical and chemical layers, my brain, my body, my world, and ultimately upon the whole of things. That I experience depends upon No-thing. Awareness is the function of—it is—this unbounded Emptiness at the heart of my many-layered world.”
“I find that it is when my attention is centred primarily upon the One who is attending here, and only incidentally upon the world that confronts me, that the world is made marvellous in me. Then the great surprise, the most astounding fact of all, isn’t what the Cosmos is but that it is; not the infinitely varied products there but their simple Origin here. Nevertheless when they are seen as proceeding from This they take on its wonder, and nothing is ordinary any more.”
“I notice that when I come to myself and recognise Who I am, I work and play much better, with more energy and zest and enjoyment, more creatively: what I do I tend to do well, lovingly, effectively.”
“When I am seeing clearly Who’s seeing, it is unnecessary—it is fatal to that seeing—to worry about what to say or do, to think or feel: the fitting expression of 1st-Personhood occurs as a matter of course, spontaneously, according to circumstances. The outcome is unpredictable.”

Seeing & Enlightenment

“What, at root, is this Science of the 1st Person but the Mystery’s enjoyment of itself as infinitely incomprehensible, its perfect knowledge of itself as perfectly unknowable?”

“Only in the Absence of eyes, ears, nose, tongue, brain, do the seen and heard and smelled and tasted occur, and even a particle or a shadow of a receiving agency here would be enough to blot them out. What is called sense-experience happens, not in and to a finite body, a local thing, but in and to this infinite Emptiness which is myself-at-large, myself as I am to myself. This is the way the universe comes—all duly set out in this 1st Person. I don’t live in the world, it lives in me; and it doesn’t live in any head-cage, but out-of-doors—free, shining, energetic, parading its colours, noisily showing off and disporting itself in this immense playground I provide it with. Indeed, now the imagined centre has dropped out of my life, I am both playground and everyone in it, the whole world just as it appears. How, then, could I have any problem of getting in touch with it? For the 1st Person there is no external world.”
“Here is nothing whatever, a Capacity so ample and unselective that it rejects nothing, an Emptiness so void that it could never be distinguished from any other emptiness, a Boundlessness so vast that it holds no hint of spatial or temporal limitation, a Plainness so simple that it is innocent of number and quality and function, a Sameness that is forever the same—and keenly aware, nevertheless, of all this. Such are the present findings of this 1st Person singular.”
“This Root or Plainness or Core of Sameness is identical in all beings for ever, their Long Home, their Perennial Simplicity.”
“Since there is Nothing to see I cannot see half of it, nor can I half see it; this is an all-or-nothing (all-AND-Nothing) discovery which removes any anxiety lest my Enlightenment should be dimmer than yours, or less mature, or deficient in any way whatsoever. To see this one perfect Sight is perfect Sight-seeing, therefore among those who enjoy it there can be no elite, no pecking-order – while the seeing lasts.”
“About the Observer there can be no difference of opinion, for there is nothing to disagree about. The one subject on which all must concur is, precisely, the One Subject, the 1st Person singular, present tense, in whom we are at one because we are One. This is a marvellous antidote to the terrors of an unknown and alien universe, whether science-fictional or science-factual; it shepherds Home the entire cosmic herd; it is the universal eirenicon.”
“The universe I find myself in is meaningful throughout because, in fact, I find it in me, and I am its meaning. This universe occurs to and in and from the Void which I am here and which unites me with all things whatsoever. Accordingly for me as 1st Person there exist no mere 3rd persons, no intrinsically opaque bodies, no objects that aren’t Void-based, and therefore none that is not myself; thus the world contains not so much as an atom that is alien to me, nothing that need frighten me, and indeed no creature that I can spare and wash my hands of.”
“How odd that the one spot in the universe which I had systematically overlooked turns out to be the Spot that matters, the more-than-holy Ground which is, precisely, the Solution of all problems and the Fountain-head of all creation!”
“Enlightenment is shining the light steadily upon this obstruction-less Spot.”
“He has no mind of his own at all, no personal or central experience or life or substance or manhood or thinghood or quality of any sort, but only Emptiness, this boundless Empty-headedness—which is filled with all creation.”
“One of the paradoxes of the Emptiness here is how, though forever the same, it gets more intriguing, more surprising, more wonderful, more precious, the more it is noticed. Here and here alone, familiarity breeds respect, dedication, reverence.”
“When at last he sees this observing thing to be No-thing, but the Ground or empty Container of all the things that confront it, they are now all there; he sees them as one filling, as a Universe, no matter how mutually incongruous they might seem apart from him.”
“This 1st Person is the empty Centre and the filled Container of the whole world.”
“Seeing himself as Nothing, he is all set to enjoy Everything.”
“Though every-thing perishes the No-thing remains.”
“For everything, when viewed simultaneously with its Viewer, thing to No-thing, is radically changed thereby.”
“Clearly seeing What one is centrally makes a great difference to what one is peripherally.”
“Everything is changed—and not merely for the better, but actually perfected. This is because it is no longer outside me and alien and therefore a potential or actual threat, but instead is from me and in me, is mine, is profoundly Myself, and therefore all of it acceptable and even—in the end—intentional. In religious terms, my whole-hearted acceptance of God’s will (as expressed in how things are) is the alignment of my will with his until what he wants I want, and my total impotence and surrender and his omnipotence become the same thing.”
“When I am consciously at large … I am Liberated, and the world, in spite of everything, is all right because it is all me.”
“All is immediately given, simply present; it is just how it is, where it is, un-interfered with.”
“This conscious sanity (of the Seer), or Enlightenment, has been breaking out here and there in the human race for the past 4,000 years, and is at last becoming less rare.”