Concepts

The coyotes were howling last night, the mosquitoes whining. I looked for my no-head and I couldn't find it. Where has my no-head gone? It used to be my favourite thing! A.S. Canada.

One danger following the insight that we have no head, is that we make a concept of it and tend to value "headlessness" to such an extent, that we don't see how necessary it is to step out into manifestation. Do you need to give up "headlessness"?

Is there a danger that you are staying in "headlessness" and not exploring the marvel of being "headed"? This isn"t disrespect, in my experience, but the fulfilment, and deepening of "headlessness". C.M. Australia.

I found A.'s comment on a hurdle created by the "headless" concept most interesting. I do agree that openness, emptiness, facelessness, whatever, are probably notions less provocative of both resistance and underestimation. On the other hand, there is something playful about headlessness - not as verifiable phenomenology, but as a metaphor for disowning "the little man/woman", the conceptual mind, ego, however one wishes to construe it.

More important to me, though, is not whether or to what degree I can endorse the notion of not having a head, but rather a mode of perception that is the ground of making such an assertion in the first place. In other words, I've taken "having no head" as a playful, in some ways silly, some ways exhilarating, metaphorical description of perception minus the objectified observer, and in that mode of perception, existence is truly inside out from the way I'd experienced it since having become "myself". Of course I have the twenty pound, eight inch ball on top, I've never really doubted it, just as I rarely doubt the reality of Mexico, even though I can't see it from here. But when I see as if not from out of the two windows, I am open, in no trivial way. And when I can relocate sensation and perception back to where they take place, instead of projecting them outwardly - creating space and time for them - that makes an important difference in my being. I once had a teacher who was fond of saying "Turn everything upside down, and you"ll see the truth," but I think "inside out" is more like it.

By the way, one of the consequences of "headlessness" for me is that the conceptual frame in which I read, say Lao-Tse, is much different, namely, it's not some item drastically distant from me in cultural space and time, but rather something immediate and vital - not a dusty old sage that's managed to hang on over the centuries, but something which has become present in my immediate awareness. T.P. Denmark

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