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Douglas Edison Harding (12 February 1909 – 11 January 2007) was an English philosophical writer, mystic, spiritual teacher. He authored several books, including On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious (1961), which presents practical methods aimed at helping readers directly experience non-duality and the concept of anattā (selflessness), rather than merely understanding them intellectually.
"The life and philosophy of Douglas Harding." video by Richard Lang—he worked as an architect in London and later in India. During World War II, while in India, Harding was commissioned as a Major in the British Army and served with the Royal Engineers.
In 1943, aged 34, after ten years of self-enquiry, study and writing, Harding had decided he was made of 'layers'. What he was depended on the range of the observer. As a result of his studies, Harding was convinced that he was human only at a certain range. Closer to, he saw himself as cellular, molecular, atomic. At very close range, therefore, he saw himself as almost nothing. It made sense to him therefore that at centre he was a mysterious 'nothingness'. In 1943, he looked back at himself and noticed that from his own point of view he was headless. He was looking not out of two eyes but a 'single eye', a boundless openness – an openness that was self-evidently aware, and was also full of the whole world. Here was direct experience of his central identity, his True Self. No longer did he have to rely on speculation. Following this he spent the next 8 years exploring the scientific, philosophical, psychological, and religious implications of his discovery, presented in his book The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, described by C. S. Lewis (who wrote the preface) as "a work of the highest genius". This book was published by Faber & Faber in 1952. After a period away from his professional work, Harding returned to practicing architecture.
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Following this breakthrough, Harding gradually began sharing his approach to perception and self-awareness with a wider audience. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he developed a series of practical exercises he called "experiments". He described these as a significant development in making the direct experience of one’s true nature—what he referred to as being both “No-thing and Everything”—accessible to others. Harding was emphatic that people tested out his claims for themselves - "you are the sole and final authority on you". He rejected the role of 'guru', always pointing others back to themselves. "Look for yourself". Harding said of this meditation, "While it lasts, this is an all-or-nothing (actually, an All-and- Nothing) meditation which can't be done badly."Douglas Harding, The Toolkit for Testing the Incredible Hypothesis, Shollund Publications, 1972.
Sam Harris, in his book , interprets Harding's assertion that he has no head by stating that Harding's words "must be read in the first-person sense; the man was not claiming to have been literally decapitated. From a first-person point of view, his emphasis on headlessness is a stroke of genius that offers an unusually clear description of what it's like to glimpse the nonduality of consciousness".Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, Simon & Schuster (reprint edition) 2015.
Harding taught several techniques to help readers attain this experience. The first one is a pointing 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?"Douglas Harding, On Having No Head, The Shollund Trust (illustrated edition), 2013.
Harding travelled widely, sharing the concepts of “Seeing” and “Headlessness”, as described in his most popular book, “On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious”. In 1996, he and Richard Lang founded the Sholland Trust, a charity created to help share Harding's teachings, known as “The Headless Way”. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Harding conducted workshops alongside his second wife, Catherine.
He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter. He died in Nacton, near Ipswich, England.
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