Douglas Harding
Douglas Edison Harding (12 February 1909 – 11 January 2007) was an English philosophical writer, mystic, spiritual teacher and author of a number of books, including On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious (1961), which describes simple techniques he invented for readers to experience (not just understand) the non-duality of consciousness.
Harding was born in Lowestoft in the county of Suffolk and raised in the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren, a Christian sect.
In India, during World War Two, Harding was commissioned as a Major and served in the British Army in the Royal Engineers.
In 1943, aged 34, after ten years of self-enquiry, study and writing, Harding had decided he was made of 'layers'.
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".
Harding continued to write, but it was not until 1961 that he clearly shared the experience of "headlessness" in his most famous book, On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious.
The drawing, titled "View from the Left Eye"", inspired Douglas Harding to notice his own headlessness in 1942.
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".
"[5] As well as writing many books and articles and developing experiments to demonstrate the concept of “Headlessness”, Harding also designed his Youniverse Explorer model, which models the layers of our body/mind, from the galaxy to particles, and includes at the centre of all these layers a clear sphere, symbolising one's True Nature - one's No-face.
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”.
