Book 20: The Little Book of Life and Death
Written by Douglas Harding
Douglas Harding is my favorite non-duel teacher. I was introduced to his work in 2014 by way of Sam Harris’ Waking Up. Harding teaches the often misconstrued method of “headlessness.” The teaching boils down to the insight that our first-person perspective differs from our third-person perspective (or how others see us / how we appear in a mirror). From our first-person view, we are looking out of an empty void, an open and all-encompassing headlessness. In his most famous work On Having No Head, Harding describes the insight as follows:
It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything - room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.
In The Little Book of Life and Death Harding uses his non-dual approach to argue that our true selves, the awareness that predates our ego, will also succeed it. Our ego identities don't stand up to scrutiny from a first-person perspective. They appear as thoughts that arise and fall away. Our awareness is devoid of those characteristics and cannot be boxed in by any adjective including “mortal.”
That little one over there in the mirror had a name, an address and phone number, a job, a sex and marital status, an age, a nationality.... It had all sorts of general bodily and mental functions which settled what its ethnic group and species and genus were, and all sorts of particular ones which settled its unique identity within the group. And, going along with all this, it had a beginning and an end, a birthday and – coming up – a deathday. And not one of that immense array of characteristics and functions stood up to close inspection. All of it disappeared on the way in, leaving you totally free of anything of the sort, of anything of your own, and certainly of anything of your own that's perishable.
Other Favorite Passages:
As the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi insisted, the real answer to every serious question is see who asks it.
In fact, is anything whatever to be found now on your side – the near side – of the scene? Or have you vanished in its favour, become mere Capacity, empty for these pages, for the hands and truncated arms holding them, and their blurred background? A human being has a pair of eyes that open at birth and finally close in death. Isn't that what happens to those two eyes in your mirror – to the apparent you? Isn't that what could never happen to the one in front of the mirror – to the real you, the one who sees without any trace of eyes whatever?
The problem of What I am, leading to whether it's mortal, is solved only by giving up asking even that question-to-end-all-questions. There has to be a revolution. I have to turn away from all concepts, turn round precisely 180° from all that's centrifugal to the centripetal. I have to look in at this, and cease (no matter how 'intermittently') to look out for it – cease to work it out, think it out, suss it out, talk it out, spell it out, or come out with any answer whatever. Looking IN, right now, I see my eternal Nature with indescribable brilliance and certitude. I don't understand it, believe it, feel it, take it seriously, think it. I see. Even that two-word sentence is too long. Seeing! Stop.