On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious

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If you can turn it off and break through level two, then you're forced to admit that, without your pre-processing to help you, there's no "head" of your own on evidence. At level two, you still are detecting objects and seeing spatial relationships... but you're not thinking about what the objects and relationships imply. And the great philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel said you won’t find any answers OUTSIDE of your personal daily struggles. For as the postmodernists reiterated, there IS no outside. and finally, realizing that you can ignore most of the layers... but what you can't ignore is that there's some sort of big theater where all of the thought bubbles and messages are playing out. is that you don’t see the artist’s head. For most people this fact is interesting or amusing, but nothing more. For Harding this was the key that

The fundamental insight – if I am understanding him correctly – is that by paying attention to your raw experience as carefully as possible, you can find that it’s nothing at all like what you believe it is 24/7. Most people are aware that our experience is mediated by our expectations (google the Gorilla Illusion), but fewer still are aware that our experience is itself shaped by the most basic concepts such as space, time, distance, and distinctness. What’s being delivered from your eyes to your visual cortex is a stream of electrical impulses that map out the double 2D retina images (upside-down). That information is decoded, combined, and filtered to generate the 3D world out of two 2D images. An information transformation has taken place. It is possible through careful meditation to interrupt those filters and algorithms. The end result is a state of ‘headlessness’, where the mental subroutines that delineate ‘you’ from ‘all else’ go offline and the subject/object distinction collapses. At least the opening part is good, and it rather blows you away. Here’s the young Harding hiking through the grandeur of the Himalayan foothills, suddenly being bereft of all thought - of anything, including himself - for a long period was of time, awed by the grandeur of it all.

Conclusion

The first level involves realizing that when you get lost in thought, much of what you're reacting to isn't even happening right now. You're being assaulted with memories and getting lost in those, sure... but even the act of getting pissed off in traffic is an act of mild obsession with the past. The car cuts you off, and you freeze-frame the moment and start looping on it, even as the moment that annoyed you slips away. You can’t understand what your life really means in the big picture by evading responsibility. And that’s the attitude this book could inculcate in you if you’re not careful! Douglas Harding created a simple way of "seeing". His mission was to help people experience what is really "here", right where they thought their head was!

Moving up in organization, several tissues have been suggested to exhibit memory. One is bone, which has many similarities to a neural network, both molecularly and functionally ( Turner et al., 2002). For example, the neurotransmitter glutamate plays a role in cell-to-cell communication among bone cells. Glutamate of course is a key neurotransmitter for learning and memory in the hippocampus. Bone cells exhibit habituation (to repeated mechanical stimuli) and sensitization (to mechanical loading) – two of the most basic components of memory. Skull bones react quite differently to mechanical loading and hormones than do long bones, and it has been speculated that the past history of weight bearing imparts long-term cellular memory to the bone cell network, manifesting as differential responses to a variety of stimuli. A model involving long-term potentiation via the NMDA receptor has been proposed to explain memory of past stresses, and its subsequent influence over growth control, has been proposed ( Spencer and Genever, 2003; Ho et al., 2005). Muscle comprises of some of the largest cells of animals, and also process, store and retrieve information via muscle-specific memory which can last from 15 years up to the entire lifetime in humans ( Bruusgaard et al., 2010; Gundersen, 2016). While the dominant model of neural-based cognition relies on the signaling dynamics among networks of neurons, it’s becoming increasingly appreciated that single neurons can execute subtraction, addition, low- and band-pass filtering, normalization, gain control, saturation, amplification, multiplication, and thresholding with respect to the input-output relations they implement ( Koch and Segev, 2000). Memory and computation is thus not exclusively a multi-cellular phenomenon, and is not restricted to somatic neural cells. Recent computational studies have revealed conditions under which cells expressing ion channels can keep a stable memory with respect to resting potential, and these conditions do not specifically require neuronal cell identity – they can be fulfilled by numerous cell types, somatic as well as free-living ( Ramanathan and Broach, 2007; Cervera et al., 2014; Law and Levin, 2015).

Molecular Mechanisms of Non-Neural Cognition

Instead, he became focused entirely on the present moment and the immediate sensory experience he was having within it. Here, his attention was drawn to his visual field in particular, and he started mentally tracing the outlines of his own body. Following it downward, he found his pant legs ending in a pair of shoes. To the sides, he found his shirtsleeves ending in a pair of hands. And moving upward, he found a shirtfront ending with – well, nothing. There was absolutely nothing there on top of his shoulders! Here’s what happened. One day, the author was going for a walk in the Himalayas, when, all of a sudden, he stopped thinking. At that moment, he entered a simplified state of consciousness. He was no longer reasoning, imagining, or interpreting the world through language. For a short period of time, he even forgot his name and the fact that he was something called a “human being.” Brethren’ believed they were the ‘saved’ ones, that they had the one true path to God and that everyone else was bound for Hell. When Harding The deeper realization is that there is another kind of consciousness – a pure kind of consciousness – that can be glimpsed in the short windows between thoughts and sensations and identification with them. This consciousness is untainted by the things it experiences, like a mirror that doesn’t get dirty when it reflects dirty things. This much I can grant Harding, both conceptually and from my own investigations of my mind. However he tries to make the further leap that all conscious beings are therefore partaking in the same consciousness, which he calls God, and that the apparent separateness of individual minds is an illusion. At this point he has made a metaphysical statement of faith about the ontology of the universe that is not justified by the evidence, and he and I part company. To his credit, Harding doesn’t ask you to take this on faith but to do the practice and see for yourself, as this is a profoundly empirical exercise, but one in which you are obliged to build your own scientific instrument before you can glimpse the hidden reality (much like a telescope or microscope opens up hidden realities).

The classic studies on plants showing animal-like features and activities were accomplished more that 150 years ago by Charles Darwin, assisted with his son Francis Darwin, and Claude Bernard ( Darwin, 1880; Bancroft and Richter, 1930; Perouansky, 2012). Later, Jagadis Bose accomplished his sophisticated experiments on plants, confirming and extending the previous results obtained by Charles Darwin and Claude Bernard ( Shepherd, 2005). Despite the fact that plant action potentials are known for more than 150 years now, and these are known to control many plant processes ( Wayne, 1993, 1994; Masi et al., 2009; Volkov et al., 2010; Sukhov et al., 2011; Böhm et al., 2016; Hedrich et al., 2016), plant action potentials are still ignored by the mainstream. For example, there is no single mention of plant action potentials in the book Plant Physiology by Lincoln Taiz, which represent the most accepted view of plants in biology ( Taiz, 2010).That’s what modern science tells us – and our common sense and everyday experiences of consciousness seem to agree. For example, as you look at the world around you, where are you looking at it from? Your head, of course – specifically, the eyes inside your head. Like other memoirs of "enlightenment" that line the less salubrious shelves at Waterstone's, On Having No Head either works for you or it doesn't: it either jolts you into an altered perspective or leaves you feeling like you wasted several hours of your life. (Harding's friends certainly thought he was losing it: "When people start seeing things others can't see, eyebrows are raised, doctors sent for.") Unlike most such books, though, Harding's – while totally off-the-planet – is delightfully down-to-earth. There's no new age mumbo jumbo; it's mysticism for sceptics. Just look at the evidence, Harding says. Sure, you can achieve various sensations by scratching your chin or tapping your forehead, but that hardly amounts to evidence of a head – not compared with the clear evidence you have of other people's heads. He proposes an exercise: "Point to your feet, legs, belly, chest, then to what's above that. Go on looking at what your finger's now pointing to. Looking at what?" (There are others at headless.org.) What Harding does is suggest a series of personal experiments that anyone can do, to help them realise that what they experience and see from atop their own shoulders is fundamentally different from what they see on top of other people's shoulders. much larger original manuscript in 1998. Visit the bookshop.) In this book Harding explores, tests and makes sense This is a mystical reality that is hard to describe, because it needs to be experienced by the "seer".