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

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And the start of the book is just like if you were there in the Himalayas - but it’s all downhill from here! It’s a great opening gambit - for a book and series of books and, in apparently, for his writing career - though Harding will always be, to the newcomer, so delightfully and disarmingly Off the Wall. 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! A most interesting set of studies have examined the phenomenon of cardiac memory. This is a clinically important pathway, in which specific changes of heartbeat pattern can persist stably ( Otani and Gilmour, 1997; Goldberger and Kadish, 1999; Rosen and Plotnikov, 2002). This phenomenon has been modeled as a simple memory-like quantity that determines the relationship among the durations and amplitudes of action potentials ( Otani and Gilmour, 1997). Most importantly, a specific mathematical model has been proposed for cardiac memory, taken after Hebbian plasticity in the brain ( Chakravarthy and Ghosh, 1997; Zoghi, 2004). In the video Harding’s claim (and Harris agrees) is that we make the world, we are the source of consciousness. Or maybe it's the world that makes us? Or maybe it’s that old song: “We Are the World”? But it is best to experience the world fully and directly. It is possible through careful meditation, he says, to experience “headlessness,” where the subject/object distinction collapses and you are “fully present” in the world, closer to some kind of “pure” consciousness, where one is one-with-the-universe, a boundless openness to the whole world. So what’s not to like? had drawn himself without using a mirror – he had drawn what he looked like from his own point of view, from zero distance.

One day Harding stumbled upon a drawing by the Austrian philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach. It was a self-portrait – but a self-portrait with The book is a long look at an insight that blew Harding's mind — from the first-person person, as a matter of subjective experience, there was no evidence around that he had a head. Put another way — if you try not to read into what you're seeing, and just describe exactly what's in front of you, not only is there no head on display... but the whole picture of who you are, of the person doing the looking, looks quite strange indeed. 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.a difference. Most self-portraits are what the artist looks like from several feet – she looks in a mirror and draws what she sees there. But Mach For Harding - like other Dharma Bums (no slight intended - that’s only Kerouac’s humorous moniker for them) appears to have made a living from this, and numerous other Sunyata Redux titles! translate the actually-quite-ambiguous sense data into the much more abstract thought — "my forehead is itching". It was when I was thirty-three that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent inquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I?”

The transcriptional control machinery that guides embryogenesis has also been modeled as cognitive processes. Gene regulatory networks can be modeled as neural networks ( Watson et al., 2010), with genes representing nodes and functional links representing inductive or repressive relationships among those genes. That landmark study showed that changes to the connections in the regulatory net represent a kind of Hebbian plasticity (as genes whose expression is up-regulated in specific environments tend to become co-regulated and thus expressed together). In part due to this fire-together-wire-together process, a GRN will develop an associative memory of phenotypes selected in the past. This view sheds important light on the relationship between homeostasis and evolvability and shows that a transcriptional network can develop memory and recall capabilities often thought to be reserved for classical cognitive systems. As a consequence of memory, genetic networks can exhibit predictive ability, enabling anticipatory behavior with respect to physiological stimuli ( Tagkopoulos et al., 2008). A similar result was obtained for protein networks, showing that signaling via the tumor suppressor P53 could be modeled as a neural net ( Ling et al., 2013), while MAP kinase pathways implement specific decision-making processes ( McClean et al., 2007). Embryos make use of genetically encoded cellular memory, for example in the case of HOX gene expression patterns, which constitute a form of positional memory –“an internal representation by a cell of where it is located within a multicellular organism” ( Chang et al., 2002; Rinn et al., 2006; Wang et al., 2009), and hysteresis in Hedgehog protein signaling ( Balaskas et al., 2012), all of which are used to guide the subsequent activity of cells as a function of prior “experience”. He does mention the method, if not repeated, has no effect whatsoever, and that a student of the method may first find that here is nothing painted in bright colors; all is grey and extremely unobtrusive and unattractive.. That and the whole business of ‘seeing the face of the Void’ reminds of the dangerous fit of depersonalization, which is rather common for depression and schizophrenia. Especially this part - 'I come to realize that my seeing into the Absence here isn't seeing into my Absence, but everyone's. I see that the Void here is void enough and big enough for all, that it is the Void. Intrinsically, we all are one and the same, and there are no others.' reminds me very vividly of depression and, for the likes of me, I cannot see how does ‘what I do to anyone I do to myself’ follow from the aforementioned. Surely in the Void there’s no appetite to ‘do’. What a strange, fantastic little book! I recently read Douglas Harding's " On Having No Head" after hearing Sam Harris mention the book in one of " Waking Up" meditations, and then many times on subsequent podcasts. 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. But those are all interpretations too, and statements about some other mental model! To break through level two, notice what you can notice before the whatever-it-is in your head whips the raw sensation into the abstraction you're used to, like my body or the person I know is in that car. Level ThreeHarding promotes ‘the way’, to be more exact the ‘headless way’ or ‘headlessnes’, an odd little compilation of Zen teachings, mysticism and self-reflection. Those who know me would know what I think of anyone promoting ‘a way’. McCulloch said “Why the mind is in the head? Because there, and only there, are hosts of possible connections to be performed as time and circumstance demand it” ( McCulloch, 1951). Given the facts of protein, cytoskeletal, transcriptional, and bioelectric networks, it appears that many different media at various scales have the ability to form and rewire experience-dependent connections. The “dynamical hypothesis” ( van Gelder, 1998) asks, what if the brain is better understood as a dynamical system, than a computational one? We invert this hypothesis, and ask what if some dynamical systems are better understood as cognitive agents? The appearance of memory and computation at many levels of biological organization suggests a fractal organization of cognitive subsystems within systems – molecular, cellular, tissue, and body-wide (Figure 2). This has been suggested in the brain [Smythies’ nested doll hypothesis, ( Smythies, 2015)] but may indeed exist throughout the biological world. Whether each successive level of organization is in some sense smarter than the ones below it, or whether structures derive their cognitive powers from those of lower levels, remains to be discovered. It should be noted, however, that even in advanced brains, the relationship between cognitive capacity and biological structure is not trivial to pin down, as shown by the occasional example of potent function in the presence of severe structural deficits ( Lorber, 1978, 1981; Nahm et al., 2012). We have avoided here the thorny issues of philosophy of mind that arise from trying to define exactly under what conditions words like “knowledge” are appropriate, in favor of an intentional stance-like pragmatic, engineering approach grounded in cybernetics. The coverage of cognitive terms across biology can expand to the extent that information-centered approaches are shown to be effective in predicting and controlling the behavior of biological systems. The practical implications for biotechnology, unconventional computation, and regenerative medicine are enormous. Equally likely, the lessons we learn from unconventional cognitive systems will deeply impact our most basic understanding of how mind emerges from the brain. Author Contributions the Hierarchy, which I was then in the early stages of, had to begin with headlessness, and that this had to be the thread on which the whole of 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.

Headlessness, the experience of “no-self” that mystics of all times have aspired to, is an instantaneous way of “waking up” and becoming fully aware of one’s real and abiding nature. Douglas Harding, the highly respected mystic-philosopher, describes his first experience of headlessness in “On Having No Head,” the classic work first published in 1961. In this book, he conveys the immediacy, simplicity, and practicality of the “headless way,” placing it within a Zen context, while also drawing parallels to practices in other spiritual traditions.If you wish to experience the freedom and clarity that results from firsthand experience of true Being, then this book will serve as a practical guide to the rediscovery of what has always been present. On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious by Douglas E. Harding – eBook Details What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: just for the moment I stopped thinking. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine. Past and future dropped away. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it.” I would suggest people seek out these things before reading something like this, which needs a lot of work before taking seriously. But I appreciate and respect the effort nevertheless. The problem too I have with readings like this and its thinking and interpretations of Buddhism and eastern philosophy is that they profess that the 'true' way of seeing is that anything can happen and that anything is possible and we can be eternally happy if we just allow the moment and any desire and thing to come to pass. It is overly and chaotically passive and too overly culturally and civilly critical to the point of being dangerous. It comes across as cultural subversion in a nefarious way. Or maybe chaotically good way.

Cognition in Plants

I noted that he – and I – were looking out at that body and the world, from the Core of the onion of our appearances. (3) It was clear that Importantly, many cell types communicate electrically, not just excitable nerve and muscle ( McCaig et al., 2005; Levin, 2007a, b, 2012a; Bates, 2015). Recent molecular data show that developmental bioelectricity is an important modality by which cell networks process information that instructs patterning during regeneration, development, and cancer suppression ( Levin, 2014a, b, c). Thus, one obvious candidate for cognition outside the brain is via the same mechanism used in the brain – bioelectrical networks ( Levin and Stevenson, 2012; Mustard and Levin, 2014). Indeed it is likely that the processing in the brain is a direct extension (and speed optimization) of far older mechanisms used originally for morphogenesis ( Buznikov and Shmukler, 1981; Levin et al., 2006). Developmental bioelectricity in animal systems features slowly-changing, continuous voltage changes as opposed to millisecond discrete (binary) spiking usually studied in the brain. However, the brain also includes non-spiking neurons ( Victor, 1999) that have computational compartments similar to the membrane voltage domains observed in embryonic and other non-neural cells ( Levin, 2007b; Adams and Levin, 2012). It has recently been proposed ( Levin, 2012b, 2013; Mustard and Levin, 2014) that non-neural tissues support the same two types of plasticity as seen in the brain: changes of connectivity via electrical synapses (gap junctions) which corresponds to synaptic plasticity, and changes of ion channel function which corresponds to intrinsic plasticity ( Marder et al., 1996; Turrigiano et al., 1996; Daoudal and Debanne, 2003). In addition to computation via changes in resting potential, which is a primary regulator of pattern memory in embryogenesis and regeneration ( Adams, 2008; Funk, 2013; Levin, 2014b), as well as of processing in the brain ( Sachidhanandam et al., 2013; Yamashita et al., 2013), ion pumps such as the ubiquitous sodium-potassium ATPase, have been suggested as computational elements ( Forrest, 2014). If you can get out of the lab and just notice, and you try to notice what direct experience is available in the spot where your body-map tells you your head should be... you won't find a head. Instead you'll find an oval-shaped thing that contains, in fact, the entire world on view. At Level Two, the world itself is right in the center of things, right where your arms terminate.

Additional memory media include the extracellular matrix ( Becchetti et al., 2010; for plant cell walls see Humphrey et al., 2007; Seifert and Blaukopf, 2010; Hamann, 2015) and chromatin complex markings ( Francis and Kingston, 2001; Maurange and Paro, 2002; Ringrose and Paro, 2004), both of which are ideal media for recording traces representing specific environmental and/or physiological events. These are examples of internal stigmergy – activity that leaves traces in a labile intracellular or extracellular medium which can be read as memories in the future by cells making decisions for migration, differentiation, apoptosis, or signaling ( Theraulaz and Bonabeau, 1999; Ricci et al., 2007). What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head. Just a guess at level three, since I haven't been able to get here myself. The third level is probably — for the visual field — the machinery of object detection itself, the translation of the two dimensional pixel map in front of your face into what feels like a virtual reality landscape populated by objects. (Isn't the sense of distance so odd? You feel how far away something is. How? Spatial sense is an emotion.) You can see that OTHER people have heads! (I'm assuming that you haven't turned off your object detector completely, so you see people, not pixels.) What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.The Zen Teaching of thang Po and The Zem Teachings of Hui Hol We had scarcely settled into our conversations when in reference to some point. And Harding is a bit of an opportunist to give us an easy recipe for Satori. Satori, or any achievement of peace in our lives, cannot work without faith. And it can’t work without work - long hard work on dissolving our spiritual and mental bugaboos and thus clearing our heads of their inborn internal miasmal mists. Book Genre: Buddhism, Eastern Philosophy, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Self Help, Spirituality, Zen In the end, it all wraps up into full-blown mysticism, or what we here in the Western tradition call ‘a renewed surrender to God's will’. Too bad. I really liked the poetic idea of a revitalization of our childhood astonishment, but that’s about it. I wouldn’t be to happy about trying to dynamite the foundation of self.