On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious

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The transcriptional control machinery that guides embryogenesis has also been modeled as cognitive processes. Gene regulatory networks can be modeled as neural networks ( Watson et al., 2010), with genes representing nodes and functional links representing inductive or repressive relationships among those genes. That landmark study showed that changes to the connections in the regulatory net represent a kind of Hebbian plasticity (as genes whose expression is up-regulated in specific environments tend to become co-regulated and thus expressed together). In part due to this fire-together-wire-together process, a GRN will develop an associative memory of phenotypes selected in the past. This view sheds important light on the relationship between homeostasis and evolvability and shows that a transcriptional network can develop memory and recall capabilities often thought to be reserved for classical cognitive systems. As a consequence of memory, genetic networks can exhibit predictive ability, enabling anticipatory behavior with respect to physiological stimuli ( Tagkopoulos et al., 2008). A similar result was obtained for protein networks, showing that signaling via the tumor suppressor P53 could be modeled as a neural net ( Ling et al., 2013), while MAP kinase pathways implement specific decision-making processes ( McClean et al., 2007). Embryos make use of genetically encoded cellular memory, for example in the case of HOX gene expression patterns, which constitute a form of positional memory –“an internal representation by a cell of where it is located within a multicellular organism” ( Chang et al., 2002; Rinn et al., 2006; Wang et al., 2009), and hysteresis in Hedgehog protein signaling ( Balaskas et al., 2012), all of which are used to guide the subsequent activity of cells as a function of prior “experience”. These experiements lead to a personal "First Person" reality of what is really here. He tells the story of walking in the Himalayas. Looking at the mountains, he realised that sitting on his shoulders, where he thought his head was, was in fact a panoramic view of the mountain! Here’s what happened. One day, the author was going for a walk in the Himalayas, when, all of a sudden, he stopped thinking. At that moment, he entered a simplified state of consciousness. He was no longer reasoning, imagining, or interpreting the world through language. For a short period of time, he even forgot his name and the fact that he was something called a “human being.” He does mention the method, if not repeated, has no effect whatsoever, and that a student of the method may first find that here is nothing painted in bright colors; all is grey and extremely unobtrusive and unattractive.. That and the whole business of ‘seeing the face of the Void’ reminds of the dangerous fit of depersonalization, which is rather common for depression and schizophrenia. Especially this part - 'I come to realize that my seeing into the Absence here isn't seeing into my Absence, but everyone's. I see that the Void here is void enough and big enough for all, that it is the Void. Intrinsically, we all are one and the same, and there are no others.' reminds me very vividly of depression and, for the likes of me, I cannot see how does ‘what I do to anyone I do to myself’ follow from the aforementioned. Surely in the Void there’s no appetite to ‘do’. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of ‘me’, unstained by any observer. Its total presenc

Of course, we know what “should” have been there: his head. But when he looked around and focused solely on his immediate visual perceptions, he didn’t see any head. Instead, he just saw an empty space where his head “should” have been. It was a “headless void,” as he would later call it. a difference. Most self-portraits are what the artist looks like from several feet – she looks in a mirror and draws what she sees there. But Mach You can see that OTHER people have heads! (I'm assuming that you haven't turned off your object detector completely, so you see people, not pixels.)

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Okay. I had trouble with this book at first, and I predict that you'll find it as hokey on a first reading as I did. But there is something special here. I'm going to try and describe what it was that I found so fascinating about the Headless insight, and why you should care about, and spend some time recreating, this insight for yourself. Being Present That theater is consciousness — that theater is "you", and "being present" is all about identifying with the theater itself, and not with the layer of autobiographical thought bubbles. Levels of Consciousness Memory, and often the intermediate processes of computation, requires that “stimuli produce a permanent record written on the irritable substance” ( Semon and Simon, 1921). What underlying mechanisms have been implicated in non-neural memory and related processes?

In the mid-1930s Harding moved to India with his family to work there as an architect. When the Second World War broke out, Harding’s quest to

Conclusion

it “a work of the highest genius”, The Hierarchy was published by Faber and Faber in 1952. (The Shollond Trust published copies of the I would suggest people seek out these things before reading something like this, which needs a lot of work before taking seriously. But I appreciate and respect the effort nevertheless. The problem too I have with readings like this and its thinking and interpretations of Buddhism and eastern philosophy is that they profess that the 'true' way of seeing is that anything can happen and that anything is possible and we can be eternally happy if we just allow the moment and any desire and thing to come to pass. It is overly and chaotically passive and too overly culturally and civilly critical to the point of being dangerous. It comes across as cultural subversion in a nefarious way. Or maybe chaotically good way. But many kids - as callow as I was - won’t listen. As Eliot says, Youth “smiles at situations which it cannot see.” Didn’t we all? (We can be such smarmy dozes!) parts. (1) I discovered in Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science, a copy of Ernst Mach’s drawing of himself as a headless figure lying on his bed.

Most people think that they have a head sitting on their shoulders, just like all the other people that they see, have one on their shoulders. One way of attempting to trigger the experience is to play with concepts. Think about sitting in a car while it’s moving. You can either conceptualise it as you are in the car, and you and the car are moving through space passing the scenery and other objects as you drive. Or you can conceptualise it as you are sitting perfectly still and the scenery in your experience is the thing that is moving, zipping to the edges of your visual field then passing away into the void. Like wearing VR goggle, the scenery changes depending on the direction you’re looking in. Some view this perceptual shift as a transcendent insight. Others view it as an appeal to solipsism; the dreaded ‘so what?’ response to the sublime from the uninitiated. We are talking about epistemology, not ontology (though Harding does make some metaphysical leaps of logic that I can’t follow him on: more on that shortly). uncover his identity at centre - his True Identity - took on a degree of urgency. Aware of the obvious dangers of war, he wanted to find out who

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is that you don’t see the artist’s head. For most people this fact is interesting or amusing, but nothing more. For Harding this was the key that By the end of the book, I was nodding my head a little and felt like I could understand something of what he was saying. But now that I'm trying to write a portion of it down, it just sounds like nonsense.

Your forehead itches? How do you know? What does an itch feel like? What's really happening is that you notice some... warmth? heat? Tingling? And you: The deeper realization is that there is another kind of consciousness – a pure kind of consciousness – that can be glimpsed in the short windows between thoughts and sensations and identification with them. This consciousness is untainted by the things it experiences, like a mirror that doesn’t get dirty when it reflects dirty things. This much I can grant Harding, both conceptually and from my own investigations of my mind. However he tries to make the further leap that all conscious beings are therefore partaking in the same consciousness, which he calls God, and that the apparent separateness of individual minds is an illusion. At this point he has made a metaphysical statement of faith about the ontology of the universe that is not justified by the evidence, and he and I part company. To his credit, Harding doesn’t ask you to take this on faith but to do the practice and see for yourself, as this is a profoundly empirical exercise, but one in which you are obliged to build your own scientific instrument before you can glimpse the hidden reality (much like a telescope or microscope opens up hidden realities). If you can turn it off and break through level two, then you're forced to admit that, without your pre-processing to help you, there's no "head" of your own on evidence. At level two, you still are detecting objects and seeing spatial relationships... but you're not thinking about what the objects and relationships imply.

To break through the first level, you've got to notice that these feelings, thoughts, anxieties are just suggestions that float up from somewhere, and that will float away if you make room for the next bubbles and don't obsess. Watch and enjoy. Level Two It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world. Harding promotes ‘the way’, to be more exact the ‘headless way’ or ‘headlessnes’, an odd little compilation of Zen teachings, mysticism and self-reflection. Those who know me would know what I think of anyone promoting ‘a way’. So I went to this meeting on a date. Cool. And it was presented as a non-judgmental space, a space of relaxed meeting and breathing and clearing one’s mind.