Douglas Harding's Tip

[Sphere70]

When we dare to doubt what we are told and take a fresh look at what’s going on, we are in for lots of pleasant and fascinating and useful surprises. A new and more satisfying way of life begins to open up, just by noticing what we see.

For instance: If you find your travel in the rush hour, to and from work, tiring or boring, just notice that it’s the scenery that’s doing all the rushing about while you take a nice rest. If you find your eyes getting tired and tensions developing in that region, just notice that you are looking out of one huge and relaxed Eye, and not out of a pair of tiny screwed-up peep-holes in a box. If you feel ill at ease with some people, shy, or often too self-conscious, just notice that what you are looking out of is not a face but a huge and tranquil Space for taking in those faces. If you are scared of spiders, or the possibility of cancer, or of death, just notice that this Awake Space that you really are at centre is quite safe in all emergencies... This is a small sample of the welcome surprises that are there for the noticing.

As a young man my curse was morbid self-consciousness, with all its embarrassments and anxieties. I was cured by refusing to “see” what I was told to see, and looking at myself for myself. And I went on to find, over the years, that the same medicine cleared up all the other big problems of my existence. Truly, I can’t imagine a happier way of life—in which you are warmly invited to participate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Harding

[David Quinn]

A neat mental trick, but it has nothing to do with wisdom.

-

[Sphere70]

,-)
What you intrinsically are is Wisdom. This can be rested in and explored at all times.

[David Quinn]

If a person has to use mental tricks to support him, then he is not resting in wisdom. He is simply using a mirage to quell the anxieties generated by another mirage.

This isn't to say that such tricks aren't useful, particularly for those who are afflicted with self-induced anxieties. It just has nothing to do with wisdom.

-

[Sphere70]

Well, I wouldn't say it's a trick to go back to the deepest, subjective, taste of oneself which is constantly shimmering behind the various mirages - which is what Harding is pointing to. I would say that it is the same pointing as Nisargadatta Maharaj does, described for example in the following quote from 'I Am That':

Go deep into the sense of ‘I am’ and you will find. How do you find a thing you have mislaid or forgotten? You keep it in your mind until you recall it. The sense of being, of ‘I am’ is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes or just watch it quietly. When the mind stays in the ‘I am’, without moving, you enter a state, which cannot be verbalized, but which can be experienced. All you need to do is to try and try again. After all the sense of ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it- body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions and so on. All these self-identifications are misleading, because of these you take yourself to be what you are not.

And equating things to wisdom - sure it's a subjective definition, but except from being Enlightened, which in my view is the highest wisdom, this is for me the Way of (and to) Wisdom - by being in it the stripping of the false happens on its own accord, and so does the formation of the accompanied, explanatory, thoughts helpful for communication. But to get stuck in a definition of conceptual wisdom is something I'm not currently finding fruitful.

[Dennis Mahar]

Dougie pinched 'empty heads turned to the World' from Merleau-Ponty and turned quite a pretty penny out of it.
There's no shortage of cashed up Seekers.

[Sphere70]

Here Dennis, you'll get this one for free:

The Results of Seeing Who You Really Are

Douglas Harding

(The following article is an excerpt from 'The Toolkit for Testing the Incredible Hypothesis' by D.E. Harding, published in 1972, now out of print.)

THE MEDITATION
The results of seeing What and Who one really is will depend, very largely, on one's faithful practice of that seeing. An occasional glimpse into one's True Nature, if it isn't taken seriously enough to be followed up and cultivated, isn't likely to make much difference. Meditation is needed, to break one's old habit of thinging oneself and to establish a new habit of No-thingness here, a habit of conscious 1st-personhood. First, then, before looking at possible results, let us look at the means, at the kind of practice which is likely to produce worth-while benefits. Conscious 1st-personhood is a kind of meditation (in an exact sense, the most radical sort) and the pragmatic or field test of our hypothesis is the sustained practice of this meditation. Its watchword is SEE WHO'S HERE, and its distinctive marks (again, all are for you to try out) are that it is:

DOWN-TO-EARTH
It works at least as well in the marketplace as in the meditation hall, when you are active as when you are resting, when your eyes are open as when they are shut.

UNWITHDRAWN
So far from requiring or inducing a some-what trancelike state and temporary retirement from the world and from people, it sharpens your appreciation of what's going on. You are more alive and with it: indeed you are the view, without being lost in it. It's not when you look at, but when you overlook, the Seer that the seen grows dim and distorted. Not only the 'outer' world, but also your 'inner' world of psychological states, is obscured when you ignore the Inmost which covers and underlies them all.

VOLUNTARY
The initial seeing gives the ability to renew it. Since the Absence of things here is as plainly visible and as coolly factual as their presence there, the seeing of this Absence is available immediately, anytime, at will. Unlike ideas and feelings, you can have this simple seeing when you need it most, as when you are agitated or worried. It's ready to hand for dealing with troubles as they arise, on the spot.

EXPRESSED PHYSICALLY
This meditation requires no special postures or physical skills. On the other hand, the physical effects can become very noticeable. Typically, they include an alert stillness, a muscular relaxation felt as energising and not depleting, a marked slowing of the breath, a straightening and raising of the neck and spine. The complexion tends to clear, the eyes to shine, the general bodily tone to improve. Of course, you may find it easier to start at the physical end, and, when you are sitting, to sit up: this can indeed help you to see Who is sitting up.

EVENTUALLY CONTINUOUS
There are no occasions when this meditation is inappropriate, no times when you may safely wander from the 1st-person position. In the end you stay at Home where it goes on unbroken, though at times unobtrusively, as the bass accompaniment in music.

LIFE-INTEGRATING
This way, your life isn't split into two compartments - a Self- aware (interior, meditative, religious) and a Self-unaware (exterior, discursive, secular) - worlds apart, not easily brought together and reconciled.

FOOLPROOF
While it lasts, this is an all-or-nothing (actually, an All-and- Nothing) meditation which can't be done badly. You can't see half your Absence, nor can you half-see it. Either you are looking at What s central to you, or you are overlooking It.

UNMYSTICAL
This meditation is certainly not in itself a mystical or religious experience, not euphoric, not a sudden expansion into universal love or cosmic consciousness, not any kind of feeling or thought or intuition whatever. Quite the contrary, it is absolutely featureless, colourless, neutral. It is gazing into the pure, still, cool, transparent Fountainhead, and simultaneously out from it at the streaming, turbulent world - without being carried away into that world. You can ensure your full share of mystical or spiritual experiences, not by going downstream after them, but only by noticing that you are forever upstream of them all, and they can only be enjoyed there from their Source in you.

UNEXPLOSIVE
It's true that the initial sight of your Source may come as a blazing, world-shaking revelation: and what event in your life, for sure, could better deserve such celebration? But these fireworks aren't necessary, and the display fizzles out soon enough anyhow. Many (if not most) serious practitioners of this meditation have come to it quietly, with some such remark as "Why yes of course, that's exactly how it is here." All depends on your individual temperament, upon your cultural-religious background and expectations, and above all upon how much tension, how much psychological stress has been built up - whether undeliberately in the course of ordinary life or deliberately by special religious disciplines and meditational practices.

MATTER-OF-FACT
It is true, also, that the days or weeks or months following your initial seeing (whether it came explosively or not) are liable to prove joy-filled and light-some. You feel new-born into a new world. But sooner rather than later, alas, all this fades - much to your surprise and disappointment. "It does nothing for me!" The temptation is then to give up the meditation, under the mistaken impression that you have lost the art of it. In fact, if you persist nevertheless, it comes to be valued less for its appetising but incidental fruits than for itself - for the plain and savourless truth of it, for the nothing which it does indeed do for you, instead of the something it used to do - and this is a great advance. Beginning to lose interest in the fruits, you ensure they grow all the more healthily, unobserved and undisturbed, and ripen in season. Meantime, and always, your sole business is their nourishing Root.

UNIFYING
Only in this Root, only as this Root, are we all One and the Same for ever. This meditation infallibly unites you with all creatures at the one Spot where all converge, where we are at last wholly relieved of those manifest peculiarities and hidden feelings and thoughts which distinguish and part us from one another. The Void, just because It really is void, is identical in all beings everywhere and at all times. If It could be experienced as loving in me, bright in you, and specially empty in him, It would only serve to thrust us still further apart. But in fact you are him and me, without the slightest doubt or anxiety, directly you find the Spot where there's Nothing to come between us.

DEMOCRATIC
One welcome consequence is that among those who faithfully practise this meditation there can be no hierarchy or pecking-order, no gurus or chelas, no spiritual one-upmanship and intimidation. Indeed what other sure basis of human equality (not to say democracy) could there be but this - our common Identity?

EGOLESS
Nothing is achieved, but only discovered. And What s discovered is totally humbling: your Nothingness when actually seen (and not merely entertained or believed in) can't be doubted. This alone carries conviction. Here is the one Spot, the Spot where you are real and no appearance, which is plainly free from egotism and everything else - in a word, free.

SAFE
This meditation is safe, not only because it can't be bungled, not only because it avoids dependence upon others on the one hand and self-pride on the other, but also because it is uncontrived. There's nothing arbitrary or fanciful about it, nothing to strain your credulity, nothing to go wrong, nothing to set you apart from ordinary people, nothing special. It is safe because it is finding out how matters stand, not trying to manipulate them. What could be less dangerous than ceasing to deceive yourself about your Self, or more dangerous than not doing so?

NATURAL
Though notably natural from the start, this meditation gets more so, and in the end entirely so. At first you probably need little reminders to bring you to your senses - such as counting your eyes (what eyes?) and getting face-to- no-face with a friend. but in time (not necessarily reckoned in years) these devices are dispensed with: 1st-personhood becomes second nature (or first Nature regained) and the last thing you do is go around preoccupied with your facelessness. It's much simpler than that - more like resting at Home in Home's superbly clear air, without any thoughts about it at all. Just as no man loiters in the hall studying the front door he's just come in by, but goes on to enjoy the comforts indoors, so you come to enjoy the Immensity within, and these little gates to It are recognised to be the paltry and temporary contrivances - indeed gimmicks - which they are. (Many traditional religious devices are so complicated or mysterious or beautiful or impressive that they divert attention from their underlying purpose, and the means have come to replace the end. Hopefully the blatant triviality of our gadgets will render them less likely, in the course of centuries, to evolve into sacred objects credited with value in themselves.)

NOT EXCLUSIVE
This meditation doesn't preclude, and need not interfere with, any other kind of meditation - such as 'sitting meditation' or za-zen - which you may find helpful. What it does rule out is meditation which assumes the meditator isn't already at Home.

AUTONOMOUS
Because this meditation is quite ordinary - secular, simple, obvious, commonplace - and because there's precisely Nothing to be learned, no expert guidance is needed, no meditation manuals or masters, no agonising choice between their often conflicting systems, no hunting for the infallible Teacher - seeing He's located right where you already are. On the other hand, the company of friends who are engaged in this meditation is both helpful and delightful.

INFECTIOUS
And in the beginning a friend is practically indispensable. It is very rare for the initial seeing to occur spontaneously: nearly everyone is initiated into this meditation by someone who is already doing it, for the condition is highly infectious, a direct person-to-person transmission: Books have proved almost - if not quite - incapable of this transmission: their job is to awaken the desire to discover Who is reading the book, and to confirm the discovery once it has been made. [But this] is for you to say.

UNSELF-CONSCIOUS
The principle of this meditation is: never lose sight of your Self in any circumstances, and your problems are taken care of - including, strange to say, the problem of self-consciousness. For finding the Self is losing the self. Our meditation cures bashfulness, not by enabling you to lose yourself in the objective world, but by enabling you to find yourself - as its Container.

PARADOXICAL
Inconsistent and hard to please, you demand a meditation which detaches you from all creatures yet unites you with them, which reduces you absolutely yet exalts you absolutely, which makes you wholly present and self- aware yet wholly absent and self-forgetful, which gives you rest yet inspires action, which is aimless yet purposeful, which leaves you nothing to do because you are already at the goal yet everything to do because you are still at the beginning. What's wanted, in short, is a meditation which reconciles all your built-in contradictions. As impossibly tall order! Nevertheless - wonder of wonders - this is just the meditation which our hypothesis ["Closer is He than breathing, nearer than hands and feet."] put into everyday practice, has to offer!

FASCINATING
And you can go on tirelessly with this meditation because it is so interesting, and it is so interesting because it is the ever-renewed discovery of What, after all, concerns you most. If this Subject isn't your business, what is? It wouldn't be surprising if every other subject of meditation were in the end to fail to hold your attention. But how could this Inside Story, this very Core of you, always the same yet always fascinatingly new, ever be rivalled or ever fail you? How could you ever get to the end of Its indescribable, breath-taking mystery?

TWO-DIRECTIONAL
Above all, this meditation, Janus-like, faces both ways. Simultaneously looking in at the Seer and out at the seen, it takes in and makes sense of the seen because it puts No-thing in its way - and gives priority to this No-thing. Seek the 1st person and the 3rd shall be added. Seek the 3rd, and even that shall be taken away.

[Dennis Mahar]

Here Dennis, you'll get this one for free:

I'd prefer the cash if you can hook me up.

[Sphere70]

I got you... PM me for some ov dat quick €€€

[Dennis Mahar]

You appear as fresh, lucid and 'there' as in available for rational discourse Sphere.
As in not weighed down by massive, burdensome, bullshit fantasy predicates that simply must be gushed all over the place like a drunk vomiting.
What's your name please?

[David Quinn]

Well, I wouldn't say it's a trick to go back to the deepest, subjective, taste of oneself which is constantly shimmering behind the various mirages - which is what Harding is pointing to. I would say that it is the same pointing as Nisargadatta Maharaj does, described for example in the following quote from 'I Am That':

Go deep into the sense of ‘I am’ and you will find. How do you find a thing you have mislaid or forgotten? You keep it in your mind until you recall it. The sense of being, of ‘I am’ is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes or just watch it quietly. When the mind stays in the ‘I am’, without moving, you enter a state, which cannot be verbalized, but which can be experienced. All you need to do is to try and try again. After all the sense of ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it- body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions and so on. All these self-identifications are misleading, because of these you take yourself to be what you are not.

And equating things to wisdom - sure it's a subjective definition, but except from being Enlightened, which in my view is the highest wisdom, this is for me the Way of (and to) Wisdom - by being in it the stripping of the false happens on its own accord, and so does the formation of the accompanied, explanatory, thoughts helpful for communication. But to get stuck in a definition of conceptual wisdom is something I'm not currently finding fruitful.

One needs to have a basic standard or benchmark that keeps the mind pointed towards the very highest. Ideally, this benchmark would be wisdom itself (i.e. full consciousness of ultimate reality), but short of that one needs a clear intellectual understanding that will help check the mind from becoming the victim of a delusion or an hallucination.

For example, what steps have you taken to establish that you are not pursuing an hallucination, that what Harding and Nisargadatta Maharaj point to isn't in fact an hallucination? Have you really gone that deeply into it and ascertained with 100% certainty the absolute validity of this kind of teaching?

This is very important. Life is too short to waste going down blind alleys in the pursuit of mirages.

-

[Sphere70]

What's your name please?

My name is Christopher, a Swede without a mission ,)

[Sphere70]

From my eyes it's quite logical - this most subjective sense 'I Am'. If I am honest with myself and strip all that is faith-based from my being (that is, as hypothetical examples: I am a Writer, I am a Worker, I am an American, I am a Socialist, I am a Christian, I am a Man, I am a Woman, I was born, I will die, and so on) I am left with this sense, this "feeling", best dressed as 'I Am', which escapes all further definitions. This is what, especially, many of the philosophers/sages of Advaita (but I think it's in all/most perennial philosophy's) points to and suggests to cultivate in the name of the Self.
Of course - from a further standpoint of the Absolute (to use Nisargadatta-language) even this sense is an hallucination, but before one has searched, dwelled and ultimately gone through the process oneself (through ones own innermost, impersonal, being which is the root of saying "I'm Alive!"; that is the 'I Am') it stays as a statue of mere speculations.
But just for the sake of getting an insight into Nisargadattas view on that I'll quote four parts from 'Consciousness and the Absolute' which points to the two different steps I discussed above:

This first talks about the need to stabilize in the deepest, subjective, being:

Get to know that ‘I am’ without words, which arises in the morning. Knowing the Self, abiding in the Self-knowledge, is not a mere intellectual knowing. You must be that, and you should not move away from it. Remain firm.

And also in the process on cultivating this sense:

Start with the body. From the body you get the knowledge ‘I am’. In this process you become more and more subtle. When you are in a position to witness the knowledge ‘I am’, you have reached the highest. In this way you must try to understand, and the seeds of knowledge will sprout in you.

And then he touches on the nature of this I Am:

You did not have the concept ‘I am’ in the course of the nine months in the womb. Understanding this state of affairs, the concept ‘I am’ comes spontaneously and goes spontaneously. Amazingly, when it appears, it is accepted as real. All subsequent misconceptions arise from the feeling of reality in the ‘I amness’. Try to stabilize in the primary concept ‘I am’, in order to lose that and with it all other concepts. Why am I totally free? Because I have understood the unreality of that ‘I am’.

And this talks about ultimately following it further (which I guess could be defined as Enlightenment, to use that word):

Presently the feeling that you are is also memory. To sustain that memory of ‘I am’, all these raw materials are necessary. You are not that ‘I am’. You are as the Absolute, prior to this ‘I am’.

Myself though, I'm still in the process of inspecting, dwelling, cultivating, looking and retracting to this original and most subjective sense, so for me it would be of contradictory effect to speculate to much about the faith-based idea of what lies further. But yes - Nisargadatta and the others speak often that even this sense of I Am is ultimately a hallucination, but it is the deepest and most subjective one, which all mental concepts, emotions and identifications is built on. It is in their eyes the Absolute manifested as duality through specific organisms. The Atman in relation to the Brahman.

[David Quinn]

Myself though, I'm still in the process of inspecting, dwelling, cultivating, looking and retracting to this original and most subjective sense, so for me it would be of contradictory effect to speculate to much about the faith-based idea of what lies further. But yes - Nisargadatta and the others speak often that even this sense of I Am is ultimately a hallucination, but it is the deepest and most subjective one, which all mental concepts, emotions and identifications is built on. It is in their eyes the Absolute manifested as duality through specific organisms. The Atman in relation to the Brahman.

Fair enough. It is important to always push on and never settle. It is Brahman which needs to be reached, not the Atman. That is where the real treasure is.

My name is Christopher, a Swede without a mission ,)

In my experience, people who boast that they are without a mission have lives that are full of missions...

-

[Sphere70]

In my experience, people who boast that they are without a mission have lives that are full of missions...

Yes this is true, I was only joking. My so-called introspective search could be labeled a mission if anything, or the simple fact of eating every time I'm hungry to keep this body healthy and alive.

[Tomas]

In my experience, people who boast that they are without a mission have lives that are full of missions...

Yes this is true, I was only joking. My so-called introspective search could be labeled a mission if anything, or the simple fact of eating every time I'm hungry to keep this body healthy and alive.

Hey Swede. I "saw" the wink with the happy face.

To quote from the Belushi/Aykroyd 'The Blues Brothers' movie, "We're on a mission from God"

[Sphere70]

Hey Tomas

=) Yeah Belushi was on point - too bad his taste of poison was speedballs, that's a rough trip... May he Rest in Peace!

[Sphere70]

Schopenhauer-approved intermission:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxfW8lKI ... re=related