On Having No Head (Douglas E. Harding)
Pop Zen Pabulum
[My 2-star Amazon review (NDA) of “On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious†by Douglas E. Harding.]
A fan of my Amazon reviews asked me to review this book, and after zipping through its 77 pages in about forty-five minutes, I’m ready to--ream it.
This skinny little text, first published in 1961, was a precursor of the pop Zen and neo-Advaita Vedanta nonsense that were destined to infect the world of spirituality.
The author, D.E. Harding (1909-2007) taught comparative religion at Cambridge, and the level of his spiritual discourse mirrors that of former Cambridge graduate student Eckhart Tolle’s. In other words, it’s superficial and tainted with metaphysical nonsense.
I spent four uninspiring years at an esteemed university, and Harding is reminiscent of the professors I encountered—men and women unable to think and write clearly. To illustrate Harding’s cognitive and literary limitations, I’ll quote and then deconstruct a paragraph of his.
“I can find no division into mind and matter, inside and outside, soul and body. Iis what it’s observed to be no more and no less, and it’s the explosion of this centre – this terminal spot where ‘I’ or ‘my consciousness’ is supposed to be located – an explosion powerful enough to fill out and become this boundless scene that’s now before me, that is me.â€
First off, whether or not one can find the “division†Harding talks about, it is a reality. If you don’t believe it, try walking through a wall. When you smash your head against the wall, you’ll realize that you have a head and that the “matter†of the wall differs from both it and your mind. Second, Harding, in this book has nothing to say about this “center†or its “explosion.’ And if this center, or “terminal spot,†explodes, is there another one that supersedes it? I say there is, but Harding fails to talk about this center—the Heart-center--located two digits to the center of one’s chest. It is at this center—and only at this center--that one can “locate†one’s true “I,†the transcendental Self. Finally, the boundless scene before you is hardly you. Good luck convincing yourself that the mosquito that bites you or the computer you’re reading this on is you. I’m an ultra-advanced, Kundalini-suffused mystic who regularly abides in the Heart-center, and in forty years of spiritual practice I’ve never experienced the universe or objects within it as me.Â
Harding mentions Ramana Maharshi a number of times, but doesn’t grok him. Whereas Ramana said to inquire into, and obviate, “I†thoughts, and thereby “locate†the true “I,â€or transcendental Self, in the Heart-center, Harding’s essential, or “headless†method for achieving Self-realization is “seeing into Nothingness.†It is almost unimaginable to me that a university professor could be so clueless as to apothoeisize Nothingness, a Non-existent. If Ayn Rand were alive, she would doubtless find Harding guilty of the Reification of Zero and probably sentence him to thirty years in a Gulag labor camp.
The second part of this book is devoted to what Harding calls “The Eight Stages of the Headless Way.â€Â These stages—The Headless Infant, The Child, The Headed Grown-up, The Headless Seer, Practicing Headlessness, Working It Out, The Barrier, and The Breakthrough—are a joke, and in no way provide a descriptive progressive map of the Enlightenment process.
In the final subchapter of the book, Summary and Conclusion, Harding summarizes his teaching: “This way puts headlessness–alias seeing into Nothingness—at the very startof spiritual life. From the beginning it is ‘the true seeing, the eternal seeing,’ and isn’t superseded or improved or changed at all as we travel along.â€
Now that I think about it, maybe Harding is on to something with his “seeing into Nothingnessâ€â€”because that’s pretty much what I saw on the pages of this text by a typical empty-headed professor.
[My 2-star Amazon review (NDA) of “On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious†by Douglas E. Harding.]
A fan of my Amazon reviews asked me to review this book, and after zipping through its 77 pages in about forty-five minutes, I’m ready to--ream it.
This skinny little text, first published in 1961, was a precursor of the pop Zen and neo-Advaita Vedanta nonsense that were destined to infect the world of spirituality.
The author, D.E. Harding (1909-2007) taught comparative religion at Cambridge, and the level of his spiritual discourse mirrors that of former Cambridge graduate student Eckhart Tolle’s. In other words, it’s superficial and tainted with metaphysical nonsense.
I spent four uninspiring years at an esteemed university, and Harding is reminiscent of the professors I encountered—men and women unable to think and write clearly. To illustrate Harding’s cognitive and literary limitations, I’ll quote and then deconstruct a paragraph of his.
“I can find no division into mind and matter, inside and outside, soul and body. Iis what it’s observed to be no more and no less, and it’s the explosion of this centre – this terminal spot where ‘I’ or ‘my consciousness’ is supposed to be located – an explosion powerful enough to fill out and become this boundless scene that’s now before me, that is me.â€
First off, whether or not one can find the “division†Harding talks about, it is a reality. If you don’t believe it, try walking through a wall. When you smash your head against the wall, you’ll realize that you have a head and that the “matter†of the wall differs from both it and your mind. Second, Harding, in this book has nothing to say about this “center†or its “explosion.’ And if this center, or “terminal spot,†explodes, is there another one that supersedes it? I say there is, but Harding fails to talk about this center—the Heart-center--located two digits to the center of one’s chest. It is at this center—and only at this center--that one can “locate†one’s true “I,†the transcendental Self. Finally, the boundless scene before you is hardly you. Good luck convincing yourself that the mosquito that bites you or the computer you’re reading this on is you. I’m an ultra-advanced, Kundalini-suffused mystic who regularly abides in the Heart-center, and in forty years of spiritual practice I’ve never experienced the universe or objects within it as me.Â
Harding mentions Ramana Maharshi a number of times, but doesn’t grok him. Whereas Ramana said to inquire into, and obviate, “I†thoughts, and thereby “locate†the true “I,â€or transcendental Self, in the Heart-center, Harding’s essential, or “headless†method for achieving Self-realization is “seeing into Nothingness.†It is almost unimaginable to me that a university professor could be so clueless as to apothoeisize Nothingness, a Non-existent. If Ayn Rand were alive, she would doubtless find Harding guilty of the Reification of Zero and probably sentence him to thirty years in a Gulag labor camp.
The second part of this book is devoted to what Harding calls “The Eight Stages of the Headless Way.â€Â These stages—The Headless Infant, The Child, The Headed Grown-up, The Headless Seer, Practicing Headlessness, Working It Out, The Barrier, and The Breakthrough—are a joke, and in no way provide a descriptive progressive map of the Enlightenment process.
In the final subchapter of the book, Summary and Conclusion, Harding summarizes his teaching: “This way puts headlessness–alias seeing into Nothingness—at the very startof spiritual life. From the beginning it is ‘the true seeing, the eternal seeing,’ and isn’t superseded or improved or changed at all as we travel along.â€
Now that I think about it, maybe Harding is on to something with his “seeing into Nothingnessâ€â€”because that’s pretty much what I saw on the pages of this text by a typical empty-headed professor.
