On Having No Head Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus On Having No Head

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Zusammenfassung von On Having No Head

Name: On Having No Head
Rating: 3.9 (150 reviews)
Author: Douglas Harding

Douglas Harding

Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious

3.9 (150 Bewertungen)

31 Min.

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Östliche Philosophie Buddhismus

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On Having No Head
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Kernaussage 1 von 12

What’s in it for me? See yourself and the world around you in a totally new way.

Where does consciousness take place?

If you’re like most people, you’d answer this question by pointing at your head. After all, that’s where your brain is located. And your brain is the part of your body that enables you to think, feel, and perceive the world around you, right?

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.

But if you put aside these notions for a moment and just pay close attention to your firsthand experience of consciousness itself, you’ll find something very different. And that’s what these blinks are all about.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why your consciousness can be described as a headless void;
why that headless void is the cornerstone of your consciousness; and
how Zen Buddhism can help us to understand the meaning of all this.

The author’s reflections were sparked by a life-changing experience in his early adulthood.

When he was 33 years old, the author had an experience that completely transformed the way he saw himself and the world around him. All of the ideas we’re about to explore are basically reflections on that one experience. So, before we dive into them, let’s take a step back and discover what the author experienced.

The key message here is: The author’s reflections were sparked by a life-changing experience in his early adulthood.

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.”

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!

Of course, we know what “should” have been there: his head. But when he looked around and focused solely on his immediate visual perceptions, he didn’t see any head. Instead, he just saw an empty space where his head “should” have been. It was a “headless void,” as he would later call it.

However, as he looked closer, he noticed there was something rather odd about the empty space of this headless void. It wasn’t really empty at all. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It was totally occupied – filled with grass, trees, hills, mountains, and the bright blue sky of the Himalayan landscape that he was looking at. The absence of his head made room for the presence of the entire world around him.

But it wasn’t just his head that was absent. There was something else that was noticeably missing from the vast and beautiful scene in front of him: the author himself. There was no “he” who was observing it. There was just the scene itself. The world was simply present – existing as a “self-luminous reality” that was “brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void,” as he would later describe it.

That might sound rather esoteric or mystical, but to him, in that moment, it was as simple as could be, and it filled him with a sense of peace and joy.

The author’s experience in the Himalayas changed the way he thought about himself.

The author’s experience in the Himalayas lasted for just a few moments. When it was over, he immediately started to try to make sense of it.

The key message: The author’s experience in the Himalayas changed the way he thought about himself.

You can’t see your own head.

After learning about the author’s experience and his initial observations, you might be feeling a little perplexed or incredulous at this point. What the heck is this all about? What is it getting at? And why did he think it was such a big deal?

To answer these questions, let’s try to recreate his experience for ourselves. The first part is pretty easy, and you can do it right now. Look down and to your sides. There you’ll see your legs, arms, and torso. Now, follow your torso upward, and eventually, you’ll come to where your head “should” be. But it’s not there. It’s missing.

You cannot really see your head in a mirror, a photograph, or by any other means; you just see splotches of color.

You can’t see your own head. As strange or silly or obvious as it might seem, that’s the basic point of contention here. Later on, we’ll take a look at why it matters so much, but first, let’s look at the objections that can be made against it. After all, there’s no point in trying to understand the significance of the claim if it’s not even true in the first place.

Let’s start with the most obvious objections. First off, can’t you see your head in a mirror or a photograph? Well, imagine you’re looking at your image and focus on what you actually observe in your field of vision. Do you actually see your head? Or do you just see some splotches of color?

Just as you can’t see your head, you can’t see your body, either.

We’re on a roll, so let’s keep the objections coming!

Continuing where we left off, we could say the following: OK, sure, without the aid of a mirror or a photograph, we can only see a couple of splotches of color that we interpret as being our nose. And maybe it’s true that there’s a distinction to be made between those splotches of color and what we think of as being our nose itself. But can’t the same argument be made about every part of our body?

The claim that we don’t have heads or bodies is more reasonable than it might appear.

Alright, so at this point in the argument, we’ve lost not only our heads, but our whole bodies as well. Have we also lost our minds in the process? Surely it’s ludicrous to claim that we don’t have heads or bodies, no matter how clever our argument might be.

The key message here is: The claim that we don’t have heads or bodies is more reasonable than it might appear.

The testimony of outside observers does not disprove the claim that we do not have bodies.

We started with a claim that we can’t see our own heads. We’ve now expanded that claim into an even bolder one: as far as we can tell, based on the direct evidence provided by our senses, we don’t even have a body, let alone a head!

Now, here’s one of the most obvious objections that can be made against this expanded version of our claim: Can’t we just go up to someone and ask, “Hey, do I have a body?” She might give you a rather quizzical look and ask if something is wrong with you, but surely she’d say, “Yes, you have a body.” And everyone else in the world would agree. Doesn’t their testimony provide us with evidence for having a body?

The scientific explanation of consciousness fits the claim that we do not have bodies.

To avoid getting bogged down in too many details, let’s focus on just one aspect of our conscious experience – the same one we started these blinks with: our vision. How would modern science explain this to us?

The key message here is: The scientific explanation of consciousness fits the claim that we do not have bodies.

As far as we can tell, there’s nothing beyond our immediate experiences.

To recap the author’s argument and then drive it home, let’s imagine we’re in his shoes, going for a walk in the Himalayas. After realizing we can’t see our own heads, we stop and look around. What do we see?

The key message here is: As far as we can tell, there’s nothing beyond our immediate experiences.

Nothingness is at the heart of consciousness.

At this point, all of these ideas might seem like much ado about nothing. And in a way, that’s exactly what they are. But this nothingness is absolutely essential to our experience of consciousness. So it’s well-deserving of our attention.

The key message here is: Nothingness is at the heart of consciousness.

If nothingness is at the heart of consciousness, we can dispense with many assumptions of Western thought.

Alright, so nothingness is at the heart of consciousness. But who cares? Even if it’s true, why does it matter?

Well, if it were true, it would demolish many of the main assumptions underlying Western ideas of consciousness and selfhood. And in their place, we could construct a very different conception of who we are as conscious human beings.

Zen Buddhism contains many parallels to the author’s experience and reflections.

If all of this talk about “nothingness” sounds kind of “Zen” to you, well, there’s a reason for that. As the author tried to make sense of his experience in the Himalayas, he studied many ancient and modern texts of philosophy, religion, spirituality, and poetry. Some of the most useful texts, he found, were those written by the masters of Zen Buddhism. Here, he found many reflections and descriptions of experiences that seemed to be similar to his own.

The key message here is: Zen Buddhism contains many parallels to the author’s experience and reflections.

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Worum geht es in On Having No Head?

On Having No Head (1961) is a one-of-a-kind classic of philosophy, spirituality, and mysticism. Combining empirical observations, mystical experiences, logical arguments, personal introspection, practical exercises, Zen Buddhism, and other Eastern spiritual traditions, its aim is to smash through the dualisms that lie beneath much of Western thought: subject and object, mind and body, self and non-self, internal and external world. In their place, the author contends that we can see ourselves and the world around us in a radically different way.

Wer On Having No Head lesen sollte

Students of Western and Eastern philosophy
People wanting to understand the nature of consciousness
Anyone interested in Zen Buddhism

Über den Autor

Douglas Harding was an English philosopher, mystic, and spiritual teacher. He was the author of many books, including The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. The famous writer and Christian theologian C.S. Lewis wrote the preface to that book, where he praised it as “a work of the highest genius.” On the opposite end of the religious spectrum, parts of On Having No Head have been championed by the prominent New Atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris.

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