The Headless Way as a path to enquirying "Who am I" - Richard Lang 

Is that what this is...good.

"going to go over some of our heads"--good one!

try self enquiry

Interesting commentary..Have you listened to or watched Bernardo Kastrup? He talks about matter, reality, perception and idealism. Backs up what he says with solid evidence that will leave you thinking all night..This is such an exciting subject to work with but will have us going round in circles for sure!! Yeh, meditate..give rise to memories and meditate on them, see what happens. its all fascinating

Keep exploring! It will definitely give you many more questions, with very few answers. But I'm pretty sure it's Why we are here/ conscious. Exploring our selves , our realm, and the perception of others.

Is this Rollo may?

@@fergusmtiernan4411 it's either Alan Watts or It could be from a Jordan Peterson lecture. I am not sure. I don't even remember writing this.

Yes. KALI IS SO POWERFUL. Thank you for your explaination

Loujo did it work ? I do I for a month already and sometimes I kinda get it but I still doubt coz of its simplicity

@@travisbickle8008 Worked well enough eventually in my experience that I sat down once and crossed my right leg over the left and it felt like it was someone else controlling it and I was just an observer in a very high tower looking down at it, watching to see what it was doing. That of course is not a frequent experience, but I have had it.

@@csmith7404 who is the “I” you said had the experience?

@@youarewhatyourelookingfor4496 Awareness itself

@@travisbickle8008 If you can do it, you will know. It’s a shocking experience

I agree completely!

For who

@@juandinkerz4636 haha

It’s like we are the CPU of a computer. It never moves but is capable of processing all the worlds data.

I have found most of academia to conflict with reality. As science is observing and comprehending. Not trusting a textbook. And maybe in some other countries this approach is applied. But all that I have ever learned I either observed or I took somebody's word for it. And it took me many years to realize we've all been deceived! From the Latin the word science means to know, And you don't really know something till you've experienced it. And then the interwebs came out and I could look at textbooks from the 1800s. Talk about a conflict! I really enjoyed your comment by the way.

he means that, most of us are walking around convinced of a story we tell ourselves about who we are. thoughts enter your mind and you identity with the thought as if there is a "you" that is thinking them. he's trying to get you to see a subtle shift. When a thought arises in your mind, look for where the thought came from. are you the one thinking, or are you the consciousness (or the space) that is simply experiencing the thought arrive. How could you think a thought, before you think to have wanted to think it. thoughts, thought objects, and desires arise and fall away. you are the space for the world itself to be having that experience of being you. to be cheesy about it, you are the the universe, looking at itself, while pretending to not be the universe. you're pretending to be Eric Lim, human earthling, with a job, and a story. You are just one more eye of the one universe, looking out at itself.

​@Will Harris think about this mental experiment for a bit: imagine that we are in the year 2090. medical science has perfectly mastered the art, where you can be cut in half, then using stem cells, the missing halves could be regrown. so there is now two exact replicas of you. both brains would be exactly the same. the two brains would be programmed to have the exact same memories. which one of the two perfect clones of you, would be "you"? which one would be the "you" having the experience of having the universe being reflected back to them?

Reality is within you as the capacity to behold it. All that exists is within this capacity of seeing without a seer, of experiencing life without holding the position that you are the experiencer.

What is the finger pointing at?

@@-Boundless- the finger is pointing at a human head/face

@@ricp Based on present evidence here there seems to be a landscape with a hand in it pointing at nothing. It’s a pretty weird situation compared to the common interpretation of what’s happening.

@@-Boundless- nonsense. You can touch your face with that finger and it will stop at the start of your skull so there's a head and not nothing

"Based on present evidence" is key here. Not imagination, but present evidence.

Right on. Thank You.

What holds the memory and thoughts? It is consciousness. Consciousness fixates on certain thoughts and not others. It holds close and identifies with thoughts that reinforce the sense of self that the mind has been conditioned to believe comprises a sense of "me."

And low and behold, you created the sky just by looking up and your knee just by looking at it. You can make people disappear, too, just by turning around. Ha HA hA Ha.

@Tyler Whitney are you familiar with Rupert Spira? His articulation really grounds nonduality in my opinion. For instance, interpreting our 'ordinary' experience of beauty as the result of perception being traced back to its source by an object, where the apparent distinction between observer and the observed is dissolved. Similarly for the experience of love, happiness, truth. This sort of thing is actually happening for most, if not all of us, quite frequently.

We are born with it. New born babies have no concept of other. For them all is raw experience. It is socialized out of us in order that we may operate in the world. We get filled with dual language and concepts. The seperate me. We forget that no concept was original to us. When self realization comes we can operate knowing that the supposed separate me is only an activity not the entity that we thought it was. Life becomes lighter. Yes, I also recommend Rupert Spira.

Approaching your question with a thermodynamic lens has been helpful for me. The reason it’s not easily accessible by default is because we wouldn’t be here now if it was. The life process must take matter that is trending towards decay and package it together in a way that allows it to continue (to live). Concepts must be formed in order to navigate a social world, otherwise the life process would never have made it this far. Once they are formed, however, it seems like a natural next step that the system learn how to willfully drop them.

@@Milkshakman I think this is a good answer. It gives you instant perspective on the validity of your concepts and can be helpful to remind you or your true self.

Right on, again.

The only way for that particular feeling is meditation. Mindfull meditation

There is much more to enlightenment than this. People take ideas and make much of them. I would recommend Jiddu Krishnamurti for a full exploration of the center of what you are. Headlessness is a metaphorical demonstration that you are the capacity for everything rather than a person within the scenery. It is also a metaphor about images. You are born not to see your own head and therefore you are without an image of yourself until you are inculcated/conditioned to believe that you have an image. Harding's work is direct and unique, but it takes an enquiry into your own nature to realize that you are the capacity and not the object of an imaginary seer.

@@auggied6760 yes there is much more

The story is, you feel sensations in the area where you had a head. Similarly, you don't have a nose, but two (pink, brown or black) structures that go from bottom to top. Not a head or nose at all, just sensations.

@@1rocknroy Well in that sense I don't have a body either. Just sensation. Just experience. Just my mind, my inner life. So this is basically just idealism ? So there is nothing that is physical in the sense that normal humans refer to physical things.

@@Simon-xi8tb Good way to put it. It's all in the mind. Even Christian Science says that matter is mortal mind or error. The floor under my feet is not a physical thing. It is the IDEA of a physical floor. Wow

the one who is the nose knows the nose. when he knows the nose knows as well. he knows the nose is the nose and he knows he is the nose.

look for the origin of the nose, where does it emerge from? Try not to conceptualize - just go by what you see. Good luck.

Those may just be two, pink clouds, depending on your skin color. The sky has clouds, right? ;)

I see a hand pointing at nothing

in fact if you describe what you call a nose and seems to see when the finger points towards your open sopace, nobody would recognise it is the nose we normally see from outside... You see something and presime it is the nose...

Try to focus on what you are pointing at, rather than the finger itself. And don't think of it as pointing at your face, but pointing at your self. Most people feel that their self is inside their head, looking out from behind the eyes, but just point to wherever exactly you feel your self is, and try to focus on what the finger is pointing at. It's a relatively simple way to trigger the realization that the self doesn't actually consist of anything - it's an illusion.

You see the tip of your finger plus the room where you are sitting as being 'out there'. What you discover is that there is no 'out there'. There is no dividing line between what you are and the appearances. You are That.

@@razzle_dazzle I feel like I’m half way there after your comment. The self is an illusion- now what do I do with that?

@@dougs2533 self help is crucial to teach you there is no self to help

+valinor100 What conditioning could we possibly be born with? The process of acquiring the "headless state" or the state of emptiness as shown here aims at deconditioning which accumulates progressively AFTER birth and moreso in the subsequent years of our lives.

kwixotic Babies are born with the conditioning of millions of years of evolution hard-wired into our genes. There's also a lot of evidence that babies are influenced by their mother's experiences while they are in the womb, and also inherit epigenetic changes from their family histories - i.e. experiences their parents and grandparents had can cause genetic changes that can predispose them towards developing various issues in their lives. Also, if you buy into it, as all the Eastern spiritual traditions do, they are also born with the accumulated karma of past lives. That's a shitload of conditioning. Consider mental disorders like OCD, schizophrenia, depression, generalized anxiety disorder, etc. All of these have environmental influences, but all have genetic influences too. Neuroscientists estimate that the structural changes in the brain that lead to mental disorders begin as long as a decade prior to the appearance of symptoms. Most serious mental disorders manifest when people are anywhere from young adolescents to young adults. That means changes began when they may have been as young as 1 or 2 years old. It is very doubtful that environmental conditioning could so rapidly account for such severe clinical issues. Consider especially OCD. OCD almost exclusively develops in young people. If you don't have it by the age of 25, you are very unlikely to ever get it. There's something powerful going on there that is not environmentally induced, otherwise, why would the chance of developing it drop to almost zero after a certain age, regardless of what happens to you for the rest of your life? Mental disorders count as 'conditioning' too - they are the product of delusion, they cause tremendous suffering, they need to be purified or rooted out - they are just as much conditioning as whatever this man is referring to.

It's simply this. The mask of your ego, the mental character you use to interact with others weighs on your mind for as long as you believe it's inherently you. It's the openness of a baby combined with the development of the adult that constitutes enlightenment. Ideally you maintain the openness and as you develop your character into a well balanced adult. But if you lose touch with the openness all your identity has to depend on is that mental character which is a lot of pressure and expectation riding on a misconception of what you actually are which doesn't really have an identity that can be conceptualized or pinpointed though it can be directly known/felt/experienced. Due to the misconception arise the stories and fears that involve self-esteem, self-consciousness, anxieties and worries spun out by the character. Our society inadvertently feeds and glorifies the focus on the ego and it creates the myriad social problems we see today that are a result of being removed from the wisdom of knowing ourselves as interdependent. Actors take on many different roles, they embody those characters, but everyone has a character they don't remember putting on and don't realize how fulfilling it can be to take off and learn to operate independently from. This is literally the root of suffering. Upon recognizing your true identity you unwind your inner knots and tensions over a period of months to years depending on the amount of glitches one's ego accrued and find yourself as a psychologically healthy individual who is also aware of itself as the whole. Being freely able to align the values of the greater community they are inseparable from with their own values while developing their unique expression and perspective to further the collective project of refining ourselves. It's just good sense to make sure one has developed a thorough understanding of their own internal world which is the foundation of all our future perceptions yet public education for it is severely lacking.

I think so. Life works real good that way.

No

You feel your face. We are positioned no face to face, visually. Every human will form various meanings from this often overlooked fact.

If you touch your nose, ears, lips, mouth with your finger you'll feel sensations in the area other people call your face.

Yes that's why you just shave that guy's in your bathroom mirror.

You're right. You do have a head. From mine and everyone elses perspective. But from your point of view, you can see the whole world, except your head. Yes, you can see your head in the mirror, but that is out in the world, not in your center where everything appears. This is pretty new to me, so maybe I'm not explaining very good. But I find it really fascinating.

@@FriedZime that was a brilliant explanation well done Simon

@@thomasgrant723 oh you think? :) Thank you so much.

When you look from where you are looking out of, is there anything there? Or is there just the world? I like to close my eyes and inquire as well. How far is the darkness from "me"? How far is the shapes and colors from where "I" am? Regarding the nose, there are a couple of approaches. You could ask, "what is my nose attached to?" Or, you could notice that your nose has a shape and color and then you could ask, "Is what I am seeing out of have a shape and color, or is it transparent and empty?" Notice the contrast between the definite shape and color of the nose and the emptiness of the space you are looking from. Here is the headless website with an article on your question about the nose: www.headless.org/experiments/seeing-your-nose.htm :)

Lol you didn t get at all what he says. The body has a head but who sees it? You ll never see yourself because you are always the one that sees. Trying to see yourself is like trying to see the head with your eyes. It s a pointing / metaphor

But in what does the mirror and the reflection within the mirror appear? Within consciousness

No

I asked myself the same first. After some reflection I would say that what I see is from a third person perspective. The image in the mirror is not me but an object again. Like the floor, the wall, the door, etc. So in the mirror I see my face as an object. But what is looking is me, the headless me. From within, from the nothingness. Even though it really feels strange and the identification with our body and our face is so common and natural.

He is talking about direct experience/perceiving.. mirror is not..

that's not your face. that's a mirror and a reflection of your face. it's not your actual face.

Yes, " Literally talking about nothing." Nothing is CAPACITY for the world.

It's experiential though. Not an explanation to the mind. But you get it, you can tell by your comment. You're paying attention to your own perspective, how you experience yourself, not how the other does

And yet, when you confront or be with the world or others, are you aware of any nose or upper lip projection? When confronting the world do you see your eyebrows or tongue? I think you just see the world openly just as he says.