On Having No Head

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The way really to live is to look in and see Who is doing so, that only you are in a position to see this ‘Who’, that this in-seeing establishes You as the authority on what matters supremely, and that accordingly your path will not conform to some set pattern laid down from above, by this or any other book or person or system.” 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

An interesting kind of cognitive process is revealed by drug addiction. The increased tolerance with exposure is desensitization (one kind of basic memory element). Drug addiction reactions have been shown in somatic mammalian cells in culture ( Corssen and Skora, 1964; Manner et al., 1974; Higgins et al., 1978), suggesting that this form of memory is not always a body-level phenomenon that necessarily involves the brain. Slime Molds: Between Unicellular Life and Metazoan Bodies The book is a long look at an insight that blew Harding's mind — from the first-person person, as a matter of subjective experience, there was no evidence around that he had a head. Put another way — if you try not to read into what you're seeing, and just describe exactly what's in front of you, not only is there no head on display... but the whole picture of who you are, of the person doing the looking, looks quite strange indeed.Though down the centuries this in-seeing has been made out to be the most difficult thing in the world, the joke is that it is really the easiest.” McCulloch said “Why the mind is in the head? Because there, and only there, are hosts of possible connections to be performed as time and circumstance demand it” ( McCulloch, 1951). Given the facts of protein, cytoskeletal, transcriptional, and bioelectric networks, it appears that many different media at various scales have the ability to form and rewire experience-dependent connections. The “dynamical hypothesis” ( van Gelder, 1998) asks, what if the brain is better understood as a dynamical system, than a computational one? We invert this hypothesis, and ask what if some dynamical systems are better understood as cognitive agents? The appearance of memory and computation at many levels of biological organization suggests a fractal organization of cognitive subsystems within systems – molecular, cellular, tissue, and body-wide (Figure 2). This has been suggested in the brain [Smythies’ nested doll hypothesis, ( Smythies, 2015)] but may indeed exist throughout the biological world. Whether each successive level of organization is in some sense smarter than the ones below it, or whether structures derive their cognitive powers from those of lower levels, remains to be discovered. It should be noted, however, that even in advanced brains, the relationship between cognitive capacity and biological structure is not trivial to pin down, as shown by the occasional example of potent function in the presence of severe structural deficits ( Lorber, 1978, 1981; Nahm et al., 2012).

This Way puts headlessness – alias seeing into Nothingness– at the very start of the spiritual life … Our overriding purpose is seeing into and living from Nothingness.” While the dominant model of neural-based cognition relies on the signaling dynamics among networks of neurons, it’s becoming increasingly appreciated that single neurons can execute subtraction, addition, low- and band-pass filtering, normalization, gain control, saturation, amplification, multiplication, and thresholding with respect to the input-output relations they implement ( Koch and Segev, 2000). Memory and computation is thus not exclusively a multi-cellular phenomenon, and is not restricted to somatic neural cells. Recent computational studies have revealed conditions under which cells expressing ion channels can keep a stable memory with respect to resting potential, and these conditions do not specifically require neuronal cell identity – they can be fulfilled by numerous cell types, somatic as well as free-living ( Ramanathan and Broach, 2007; Cervera et al., 2014; Law and Levin, 2015). Sam Harris, in his book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, interprets Harding's assertion that he has no head by stating that Harding's words "must be read in the first-person sense; the man was not claiming to have been literally decapitated. From a first-person point of view, his emphasis on headlessness is a stroke of genius that offers an unusually clear description of what it's like to glimpse the nonduality of consciousness". [4]Breaking through the third level would require ignoring object detection completely and treating as equal all of the sensations and thoughts popping into the oval-shaped visual theater. No more distance, no more trees and tables and chairs, no edges, no emotion... just tingles and pixels. On Having No Head It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. 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 presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around. Douglas Harding had a strange experience when he was a young man. As he was hiking in the Himalayas, Harding had a moment he would later describe as of "no thought", and where he perceived his body as having no head. In addition, he had a vision of his body as a house with a single window, but inside the house, there was nothing looking out at the world. It seems that, from a very early age, our learned view of ourselves from outside begins to overshadow, to superimpose itself upon, and eventually to blot out, our original view of ourselves from inside. We have grown down, not up. Instead of being present and together with the stars – and all things under the stars – we have shrunk away and withdrawn from them. Instead of containing our world, it now contains us – what’s left of us. And so, reduced from being the whole scene into being this tiny part, is it any wonder that you and I find ourselves in all sorts of trouble – if we grow greedy, resentful, alienated, frightened, defeated, tired, stiff, imitative instead of creative, unloving, plain crazy?”