3.3.4. On Having No Head

“All twoness — all duality of subject and object — has vanished: it is no longer read into a situation which has no room for it.”

— Douglas E. Harding, On Having No Head (1961), p. 18

Some insights steal upon us so quietly that we hardly notice until the world itself has changed. Other times they break open like thunder on a clear day, leaving us awash in a bewildered calm. In this chapter, I return to one such moment — a simple walk that ended all division and revealed how absurdly near reality has always been. As I reflect, I find it is not the insight itself that matters most, but the slow ripening that made it possible.

I am struck by Harding’s vivid account in On Having No Head, a small book with the curious power to dissolve old certainties. He describes how, while hiking in the Himalayas, he suddenly stopped thinking. Past and future fell away, taking with them the familiar story of himself. In their absence stood only the stark immediacy of what was given: khaki trouser legs, pink hands, blue sky, and where his head should have been — nothing at all. Or rather, a nothing vastly filled. Gone was the habitual sense of being an observer apart from the observed. Instead, there was simply the world, bright and singular.

This was not some esoteric revelation, cloaked in ritual or dogma. Quite the opposite. It was, as Harding wrote, like waking from the sleep of ordinary life, encountering a reality self-luminous and clean of all mental clutter. For a moment, cognition itself ceased its restless weaving, and true reality stood unobscured.

Harding’s experience came after months of exhausting inquiry — endlessly asking, What am I? This was a kind of vipassanā practice pushed to its outermost edge. Such questioning can be gruelling. It drives the mind to the brink, thinning the fabric of our conditioned model of reality until it can no longer hold. Then, often when we are too spent to sustain even doubt, the whole edifice collapses.

The resulting realisation is as simple as it is devastating. All our dualities — self and other, subject and object — are fictions sustained by thought. When thought stops, these divisions vanish. Trying to understand this only reintroduces the problem, because cognition stands between us and what is. It is like confusing the word red with the pure experience of colour.

This is why the alchemists warned that cognition itself is our subtle adversary. The moment we attempt to grasp reality conceptually, we slip back into fantasy. The truth does not appear through some mystical production; it only seems to appear when the mental obstructions clear. It was always there, merely hidden by our compulsive thinking and by our very desire to experience it.

Harding’s language of “headlessness” is poetic — a koan of sorts, crafted to jolt us out of habitual conceptualisation. It is not that we are literally without heads. Rather, it is that the “head,” as the presumed seat of a perceiving self, is discovered to be an illusion. We create both our inner sense of a “self in here” and our outer appearance of a “world out there,” forgetting that these arise together in the same mind.

So long as we cling to these divisions, we remain ensnared in saṃsāra. Rarely do we come so close to seeing through the deception. When we do, we glimpse how every sense, thought, and feeling plays upon a single field of consciousness — one that has masqueraded as many. This insight, fleeting though it may be, demands of us a renewed commitment to our Great Work. For until this delusion is thoroughly known and undone, it will continue to weave our suffering, life after life.

Layers of Cognitive Delusion

There is something quietly radical in discovering we have no true boundary — no watcher standing apart from the watched. In moments when cognition falls silent, reality reveals itself as seamless, immediate, and entirely sufficient. Though these glimpses may fade, they plant a seed that bends us ever back toward simplicity, humility, and the patient undoing of our deepest delusions.

This text is excerpted from the upcoming book Citrinitas: A Course in Modern Alchemy. The complete volume will include additional study guides, glossaries, and extended teachings. Learn more about the book here.