Harding’s Headache and Grinder’s Hawk: Is Seeing Believing?

Over on ‘Birds on the Blog’ Linda Mattacks has written an illuminating article titled ‘5 Compelling Reasons to Question Seeing is Believing‘. I enjoyed it. It is a poke in the eye for all those who believe that life can be objective and that humans are always right. But Linda doesn’t go far enough!

In 1961 Douglas Harding‘s book ‘On Having No Head’ was published. It’s been in print ever since. In it Harding writes:

“At its briefest and plainest, (a scientist’s) tale of how I see you runs something like this. Light leaves the sun, and eight minutes later gets to your body, which absorbs a part of it. The rest bounces off in all directions, and some of it reaches my eye, passing through the lens and forming an inverted picture of you on the screen at the back of my eyeball. This picture sets up chemical changes in a light-sensitive substance there, and these changes disturb the cells (they are tiny living creatures) of which the screen is built. They pass on their agitation to other very elongated cells; and these, in turn, to cells in a certain region of my brain. It is only when this terminus is reached and the molecules and atoms and particles of these brain-cells are affected, that I see you or anything else. And the same is true for other senses, I neither see nor hear nor smell nor taste nor feel anything at all until the converging stimuli actually arrive, after the most drastic changes and delays, at this centre. It is only at this terminus, this moment and place of all arrivals at the Grand Central Station of my Here-Now, that the whole traffic system – what I call my universe – springs into existence. For me, this is the time and place of all creation.

“There are many odd things, infinitely remote from common sense, about this plain tale of science. And the oddest of them is that the tale’s conclusion cancels out the rest of it. For it says that all I can know is what is going on here and now, at this brain terminal, where my world is miraculously created. I have no way of finding out what is going on elsewhere – in the other regions of my head, in my eyes, in the outside world – if, indeed, there is an elsewhere, and outside world at all. The sober truth is that my body, and your body, and everything else on Earth, and the Universe itself – as they might exist out there in themselves and in their own space, independently of me – are mere figments, not worth a second thought. There neither is nor can be any evidence for two parallel worlds (an unknown outer or physical world there, plus a known inner or mental world here which mysteriously duplicates it) but only for this one world which is always before me, and in which I can find no division into mind and matter, inside and outside, soul and body. It is what it’s observed to be, no more and no less, and it’s the explosion of this centre – this terminal spot where ‘I’ or ‘my consciousness’ is supposed to be located – an explosion powerful enough to fill out and become the boundless scene that’s now before me, that is me. . . .

“…. The commonsense or un-paradoxical view of myself as an, ‘ordinary man with a head’, doesn’t work at all;  as soon as I examine it with any care, it turns out to be nonsense.”

In writing thus he invokes an ancient paradigm first recorded in the Upanishads which is echoed by Zen and Sufi Masters. Even Christian mystics such as St. Thomas Aquinas, come close to Harding’s conclusion when they assert that whilst chaos may well seem to prevail in outer worlds, of politics and commerce, within every one of us no matter our stations in life, there is only ‘One’ who ‘sees’ and life’s goal is to realise ‘It’.

In ‘The Republic’ Plato likens people untutored in the ‘Theory of Forms’ to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire.  Between the fire and the prisoners there are puppeteers, who are behind the prisoners. They hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners are unable to see these puppets, the real objects, that pass behind them. What the prisoners see and hear are shadows and echoes cast by objects that they cannot know at first hand.

It’s clear Plato is referring to the idea that what we experience, seemingly as reality, is a construct, and that wisdom comes from identifying with the light, or the puppeteer? Some think he is simply communicating that people would be better off if they were as clever as he? I like to think he points to the light, but whatever, he certainly is asserting that the world, as you know it, is constructed within what passes for your personal head space.

Now, before you go off the deep end, and start typing comments such as: ‘Of course I have a head, you buffoon!’, or, ‘ why has this mystical clap-trap been permitted to be here on a blog where men to discus beer, and cricket, Spanish brothels and similar?’ – be warned Plato has pre-empted you.

” if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, – what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them, – will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?

“And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?”

Keep taking the tablets and read on . . .

You see the illusion of a separate you has become our dominant paradigm simply because the truth is too complicated and will give you a headache. Just as the lunar landing was calculated using Newton’s Laws of Motion, rather than the more accurate Quantum Mechanics, so the everyday world is so much easier to ‘see’ as something out there separate than if we bother to think about it. Indeed thinking creates too many anomalies.

Do you know, for example, that once you reject the idea of what you see being as-it-is and accept it as a construction within you, if you have the energy to think about it logically, you will find that you must be possessed not of one head but an infinite number!

When we can never truly know objectively an external universe which we inhabit and submit to the idea of experiencing life as a model inside our heads, which in turn includes within it all common-place taken for granted items such as car keys, sherry, wives, and so on, it follows that whatever exists beyond us out there must be far larger than its model which is compressed into our head-space?

Since your head also is conceived of as an object within your model, of reality, it too must contain its own microscopic model of the universe within it, including a model of your ‘pin-head’, and so on . . .

Such logical problems only occur if clinging stubbornly to the idea of separateness whilst, as semi-intelligent beings, having to accept the idea that follows such acceptance, which is to conclude, that what we perceive is a tiny subset of a totality, apparently,  surrounding us?

The totality, I suggest, isn’t an external entity out there  waiting to be conquered in a fleet of Newtonian powered starships. Instead it is a ‘Big Bang’ occurring right now, as you read this. Each of  us is constantly fabricated in the apparent miracle of times, spaces, events, and stories, without judgement.

As John Grinder put it, in ‘Whispering in the Wind’, his latest, and best, book on N.L.P. ~ ”A marsh hawk swoops swift and graceful over the damp meadow and then with a shrill cry falls like a broken dream precipitously to the earth . . . only to rise again triumphant in the hunt, its prey grasped firmly in its talons.

“For that suspended moment we witness without words, filled with rich textured sensory knowledge, confirmed in our identification with living things. We are for this brief passage of time close to our non-human companion species. Our eyes focus with precision, capturing and savouring the grace, speed and precision of the falcon, our eyes tune themselves to the sounds of the desperate movements of the prey’s futile attempt to escape and the last wisps of the morning sea fog giving way before the position to follow the unfolding drama before us. We are alive; we are present. We witness without emotion, without judgement . . .

“‘Did you notice the way he turned on his wing to fall upon the rabbit?’ asks our companion . . . and the moment vanishes along with the coastal fog and we are again human, for better or worse.”

Stephen Bray writes in a stream of consciousness, but sometimes is a good read . . .