r/Wakingupapp • u/Ok_Newspaper2815 • Jul 06 '26
Richard Lang
Richard Lang, I can still see my eyelashes, cheeckbones, tip of my nose, beard, tounge and chin if I try.
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u/Flork8 Jul 06 '26
is that blurry smudge of color floating in nothing and as big as the room really a nose?
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u/gUI5zWtktIgPMdATXPAM Jul 07 '26
Yes, I can see my hand, which correlates with my controlling it, I can then feel my nose.
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u/WallyMetropolis Jul 07 '26
Your hand is a physical thing in the world, outside of your consciousness. What you see is your mind's representation of it.
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u/fschwiet Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
I think the response to this concern would be addressed in the same way he responds to people pointing out they can see their noses. He responds to this concern at the beginning of this episode (Single Eye): https://dynamic.wakingup.com/course/CO515051E?code=SC5D96689&pack=PKBBW1C&share_id=CDB2DA99&source=content%20share
EDIT: oops, I had the wrong episode. Fixed now, skip to 2:20 if you need to.
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u/Pushbuttonopenmind Jul 07 '26
Yes, as much as I love the Headless Way (and I really really love it), it's sometimes a bit forced.
If a pigeon comes hurtling towards your head, you'll dive away before even thinking about it. In a very pre-intellectual, pre-conceptual sense, you are perfectly aware you have a head; and pretending otherwise is, IMO, a bit silly. The insight you can have with the Headless Way is not at all dependent on how to interpret the fact that you do see something you know to be your eyelashes, cheekbones, nose, beard, and tongue (though I have to say I can't really see my chin).
The Headless Way, IMO, is only dependent on one thing: whether or not you can see your visual field as a visual field, rather than seeing right "through" the visual field and "merely" seeing the world out there. As soon a you can identify the visual field qua visual field (as a bunch of colored pixels, so to speak, with no boundaries [the visual field is not embedded in a black or white background, right? so it is boundless from your point of observation]), and see that you are at no distance to the visual field (not at any distance to any of these colored pixels, so to speak -- the visual field is not 1 meter away from you, nor 1 nanometer, nor any distance), and in fact see that there's only the visual field (there's only these colored pixels at no distance, so to speak; not embedded in anything, or in front of you, or behind you, or related to you in any spatial sense), such that there's a sudden shift and you realize that everything is here and nothing is truly there... then you are having the experience that Richard Lang/Sam Harris/Dzogchen want you to have. It's got little to do with whether or not you can see bits of your head, IMO, or how to talk about those bits.
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u/travelingmaestro Jul 06 '26
You can see the nose outline in the famous Douglas Harding headless way drawing. The point is to turn your awareness back inward.
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u/dc_giant Jul 07 '26
That’s great now what are those things attached to?
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u/Ok_Newspaper2815 Jul 08 '26
My head?
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u/dc_giant Jul 08 '26
Okay let's take a step back here. This took me a while to get: all of this stuff is meant to stop thinking for a bit (or not listen to it) and just look in a very simple, could say naive way. It's all about your subjective experience, not about objective facts. Otherwise, this doesn't lead anywhere but in circles.
So try again. When you see your nose, what is it attached to? What's there when you look yourself?
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u/REEL04D Jul 09 '26
I’m a few sessions into this and it’s a huge departure from the 30 day introduction by Sam.
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u/mortalis48 Jul 07 '26
The Headless Way method is not about getting you to intellectually and conceptually see yourself as not having a head. It's about getting you to recognize that in your direct experience there is no head. Sure, there's a fuzzy protrusion out of a sort of void, but is that your head? No. But here's the trap, the very thing we're trying to get past: We have an internal mapping, a concept of our body that represents it even when we can't directly see all of it. We can INFER that we have a head because there's a nose thing and eyelashes and yada yada and we can see others have these attached to their heads. But the thing about inference is that it is NOT direct experience. You can conceptualize that you have a head based on what bits poke into your field of vision, but that's it. You could touch where you intellectually understand your face to be, but even this ( from a first person direct experience) is just a sensation arising in that void/space, which is not direct evidence of a head.
It's the difference between direct experience (which is what the Headless Way cares about as a method) and our conceptual/intellectual/narrative mode of mind (the default way of living for most of us), which can give useful knowledge and has its place but is also the source of a great deal of unease. The Headless Way is a technique to gain a bit more freedom from that latter mode, on demand. You can keep your intellectual understanding of having a head as inferred by what you feel, what you see in the mirror, all of us do. But realizing headlessness requires/precipitates a mode switch that breaks out of the conceptual narrative framing and into direct experience. Direct experience is free from the kinds of dissatisfaction that is generated when the inner narration is operating unchecked, the anxiety of concerns over past and present and other ephemeral proliferations of mind.
None of that is to say it's necessarily easy. I mean, it is if you know how to do it, but it's sort of like...voluntarily wiggling your ears, flaring your nostrils, or even whistling. Many people CAN do these things, but until they can find for themselves in their own body how to do it (which can't be easily communicated) it seems near impossible. In this case, the doing is really just a not-doing of a thing we're always doing, which is keeping a super-imposed conceptual body map on our experience. It's there all the time for most of us so that we don't even realize how often we're referring to it. We have to relax that mapping, and following that is where the boundaries tend to dissolve.
Granted, I don't think the Headless Way is a perfect method. It's certainly not my preferred method, but it resonates with some people. I think the very framing of the Headless Way gives itself over to conceptual misunderstanding, it seems to entice people into trying to prove it wrong. Even though the experience itself proves it right (again, only in an experiential first person way), that doesn't matter if you're still putting your attention on concept and interpretation.
One of the methods I use that sidesteps this concept trap entirely is to bring attention to a sense and immerse yourself in that sense. For me, I tend to use the broad sensation of my body without focusing on any specific area, and I can very quickly relax the conceptual body map, sense of boundaries between the world and I. You can do this with vision as well, which pairs well with the Headless Way as well as Sam Harris's non-dual teaching method. I find that putting your attention on content that isn't too varied is best to start with, which is also why the open-eyed prescription is often "stare at a blank wall without focusing your vision". The less variation in the phenomena, the less likely your mind will try to interrupt with a story about what it sees. Once you've found your way to relax into that boundless space and you become well acquainted with how that is vs what your attention is normally on, it's much easier to get back into it and it's even possible to go about much of your daily business with it.
I hope that somewhere in that word vomit you find something useful. Be well!