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 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 How could there be a ‘first-time’ seeing into the Timeless, anyway? One occasion I do remember most distinctly – of very clear in-seeing. It had

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. by peeling away the layers. Here however was a self-portrait from the point of view of the centre itself. The obvious thing about this portrait

Cognition in Plants

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). self-portrait the penny dropped. Until this moment he had been investigating his identity from various distances. He was trying to get to his centre I do not recall the point he used it to amplify, but I remember vividly his enthusiasm for the book itself. “I have no idea who this man Harding is,” he said: “he may be a London cabbie for all I know. But he’s got it just right.” Your face is itching? Great, that's a nice thing to notice. You want it to stop? Boom, lost in thought. You've taken your mind off of the itch, and you're now anticipating the next itch you'll feel. you're in your head again, ignoring external input, looping away.

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.) And Harding is a bit of an opportunist to give us an easy recipe for Satori. Satori, or any achievement of peace in our lives, cannot work without faith. And it can’t work without work - long hard work on dissolving our spiritual and mental bugaboos and thus clearing our heads of their inborn internal miasmal mists. In London in the early 1930s Harding was studying and then practising architecture. In his spare time, however, he devoted his energies to philosophy

Having a head", and feeling like it's silly to say that you don't, reveals you to be so obsessed with the abstraction-world that you can't recognize how much preprocessing is going on; or even that there's any preprocessing at all. If you don't think there's any pre-processing, then of course you can't imagine a world where it's turned off, even for the sake of discussion. Instead, he became focused entirely on the present moment and the immediate sensory experience he was having within it. Here, his attention was drawn to his visual field in particular, and he started mentally tracing the outlines of his own body. Following it downward, he found his pant legs ending in a pair of shoes. To the sides, he found his shirtsleeves ending in a pair of hands. And moving upward, he found a shirtfront ending with – well, nothing. There was absolutely nothing there on top of his shoulders! A number of non-neural cells have been shown to exhibit memory, with respect to somatic position ( Carlson, 1983; Chang et al., 2002; McCusker and Gardiner, 2014) or differentiation ( Xiong and Ferrell, 2003), implemented via long-term stable changes in bioelectric state ( Marder et al., 1996; Turrigiano et al., 1996; Rosen and Cohen, 2006) and transcriptional profile ( Kragl et al., 2009; Wang et al., 2009). These are now beginning to be understood via physiological modeling and dynamical systems theory that views memories as attractors in transcriptional, bioelectric, or epigenetic state space ( Huang et al., 2005; Cervera et al., 2015; Law and Levin, 2015). Yet perhaps that’s overkill - for Roshi Kapleau in New York in the awakening sixties, it is a sudden ecstatic glimpse into groundlessness, which many of us experienced firsthand in those heady days. But it’s still only the Tail of the Elephant! Buddhism, as any religious system of insight, requires a lifetime total commitment from us. The fundamental insight – if I am understanding him correctly – is that by paying attention to your raw experience as carefully as possible, you can find that it’s nothing at all like what you believe it is 24/7. Most people are aware that our experience is mediated by our expectations (google the Gorilla Illusion), but fewer still are aware that our experience is itself shaped by the most basic concepts such as space, time, distance, and distinctness. What’s being delivered from your eyes to your visual cortex is a stream of electrical impulses that map out the double 2D retina images (upside-down). That information is decoded, combined, and filtered to generate the 3D world out of two 2D images. An information transformation has taken place. It is possible through careful meditation to interrupt those filters and algorithms. The end result is a state of ‘headlessness’, where the mental subroutines that delineate ‘you’ from ‘all else’ go offline and the subject/object distinction collapses.

Headlessness, the experience of “no-self” that mystics of all times have aspired to, is an instantaneous way of “waking up” and becoming fully aware of one’s real and abiding nature. Douglas Harding, the highly respected mystic-philosopher, describes his first experience of headlessness in “On Having No Head,” the classic work first published in 1961. In this book, he conveys the immediacy, simplicity, and practicality of the “headless way,” placing it within a Zen context, while also drawing parallels to practices in other spiritual traditions.If you wish to experience the freedom and clarity that results from firsthand experience of true Being, then this book will serve as a practical guide to the rediscovery of what has always been present. On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious by Douglas E. Harding – eBook Details Just a guess at level three, since I haven't been able to get here myself. The third level is probably — for the visual field — the machinery of object detection itself, the translation of the two dimensional pixel map in front of your face into what feels like a virtual reality landscape populated by objects. (Isn't the sense of distance so odd? You feel how far away something is. How? Spatial sense is an emotion.)PDF / EPUB File Name: On_Having_No_Head__Zen_and_the_Rediscovery_-_Douglas_E_Harding.pdf, On_Having_No_Head__Zen_and_the_Rediscovery_-_Douglas_E_Harding.epub But it wasn’t just his head that was absent. There was something else that was noticeably missing from the vast and beautiful scene in front of him: the author himself. There was no “he” who was observing it. There was just the scene itself. The world was simply present – existing as a “self-luminous reality” that was “brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void,” as he would later describe it. And the start of the book is just like if you were there in the Himalayas - but it’s all downhill from here! It’s a great opening gambit - for a book and series of books and, in apparently, for his writing career - though Harding will always be, to the newcomer, so delightfully and disarmingly Off the Wall.

It's somewhat of a winding path to get there, but Harding eventually points to the idea that consciousness is space in which reality is perceived. One time I went to a meditation meeting. I am already skeptical about yoga, and I have to tell you I am skeptical and resistant to stretching. I don’t mean that this is a good thing or anything I would defend or support. It actively works against me. But really what it comes down to is that I hate feeling vulnerable. Yoga makes me feel so, and man does the idea of meditating.That might sound rather esoteric or mystical, but to him, in that moment, it was as simple as could be, and it filled him with a sense of peace and joy. 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 What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. [...] Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head. 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.