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CHAPTER 1

Experiencing Great Space

Now and then it is good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.

Guillaume Apollinaire

In 1961 the British Buddhist Society published a remarkable book by Douglas Harding entitled On Having No Head. Diminutive in size and less than sixty pages in length, this small volume has subsequently been reprinted many times and has become a classic of modern spiritual literature. The book is based upon a very simple but revelatory experience that arose while Harding was walking in the Himalayas. This is how he describes it:

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness came over me. 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 trouser legs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirt front terminating upwards in – absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

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 (pages 5–6).

I didn't catch up with Harding's book until the mid1970s but it had an immediate and extraordinary effect upon me. On reading his introductory account I suddenly felt my awareness swivelling through three hundred and sixty degrees, as if the view from a small television screen had suddenly been stretched out into full Sensurround; my visual perception in particular seemed greatly enhanced. Then, after a while the experience gradually faded. Subsequent attempts to reproduce this experience were not very successful and I only discovered why much later, when I learnt about the dangers of trying too hard or, in fact, of trying at all.

Douglas Harding's story is so arresting because he points to something that is immediately apprehensible: we have no direct perception or knowledge of our own heads! We have an idea of a head resting on our shoulders, but close inspection reveals nothing like a head – only space, a conscious space filled with the world. This insight seems so simple that one wonders why it appears to have largely escaped comment in centuries of spiritual literature. Perhaps, as Ramana Maharshi would have said, it is because headlessness is an "open secret", something so contrary to the common or cultural sense, that it defies detection.

Something else that struck me forcefully about Harding's account was that headlessness involved a radical change in perception with eyes open and not some exalted mystical state obtained through hours of grinding meditation. Of course, as a callow youth back then, I was looking for shortcuts, and now forty years later, realise that such things are generally only available at a hairdresser. However, the idea of having no head did set me on the path of looking for other accounts of spontaneous and radical changes in perception and the freedom that such transformation promised.

I soon came across Franklin Merrill-Wolff's Pathways Through to Space, a unique account of the one hundred days that followed a sudden transition into spaciousness. Besides being a follower of Advaita, Merrill-Wolff trained as a mathematician and philosopher and so provides a detailed philosophical exegesis of his experiences both in Pathways and a subsequent volume The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object. The later work in particular places Space as the central orientating concept through which he was able to make sense of his mystical journey.

His writings might have passed into obscurity had it not been for the fact that John Lilly (of float tank and LSD fame) came across an early draft and was moved to write a laudatory introduction for the 1973 edition of Pathways. Such is the depth of Merrill-Wolff's deliberations that I hesitate to say more about him at this stage. I have included an introduction here for the sake of chronology and context, but we will return to his work later in the book when we have built up sufficient stamina for his more rarefied cogitations.

Instead let me turn to another remarkable spiritual autobiography written by Flora Courtois, and published by the Theosophical Society in 1985. Like Douglas Harding's book, An Experience of Enlightenment is a refreshingly small volume, a mere ninety pages, yet it is astonishing in every way. Not only did Courtois's spiritual quest start at an early age, but it was characterised by an unusual singleness of purpose and a very early fruition to her search while still a young adult. It is also particularly interesting to me because of the way she emphasises the changes in her visual sense and in her experience of space. Here's how she describes a pivotal experience that occurred when sitting quietly on the edge of her bed gazing at a small desk:

The small pale green desk at which I had been so thoughtlessly gazing had totally and radically changed. It appeared now with a clarity, a depth of three dimensionality, a freshness I had never imagined possible. At the same time, in a way that is utterly indescribable, all my questions and doubts were gone as effortlessly as chaff in the wind. I knew everything and all at once, yet not in the sense that I had ever known anything before.

All things were the same in my little bedroom yet totally changed. Still sitting in wonder on the edge of my narrow bed, one of the first things I realised was that the focus of my sight seemed to have changed; it had sharpened to an infinitely small point which moved ceaselessly in paths totally free of the old accustomed ones, as if flowing from a new source.

What on earth had happened? So released from all tension, so ecstatically light did I feel, I seemed to float down the hall to the bathroom to look at my face in the mottled mirror above the sink. The pupils of my eyes were dark, dilated and brimming with mirth. With a wondrous relief I began to laugh as I had never laughed before, from the soles of my feet upward (pages 47–48).

Courtois continued to experience unfolding changes and insights over the subsequent weeks and months, but the most obvious revelation was in the new way that her sight seemed to function: her eyes "released from their former tension to reach out and see the world outside, were now as free as if they had been blanked out, eliminated altogether" (page 56). In addition, she particularly notes that any trace of her nose or face had completely disappeared from her field of vision. I found this latter comment particularly amusing but also important, because Douglas Harding singles out the nose for special mention on more than one occasion, when he ridicules the old saying "as plain as the nose on your face". Clearly there is nothing less plain than the nose on my face or yours, and this is especially the case when we practise Courtois's Open Vision, a form of looking that relaxes our habitual narrow, restricted focus.

We return to Flora Courtois in later chapters because her little book is packed with nuggets of wisdom relevant to our discussion of attention and the way in which we use our senses to mould the Great Space around us.

To complete this introduction to spacious perception, I close this chapter with a contemporary and local account of 'seeing'. It was told to me by a friend in a totally matter of fact fashion, which is, of course, the Aussie way.

I had been attending a conference in Brisbane for two days. It was beautiful spring weather but I'd been cooped up in a soulless hotel concentrating hard on a particularly demanding subject. On the third day I decided to 'cut classes' and go for a walk. It also happened to be Grand Final day with the Brisbane Lions playing Collingwood and so it was very quiet for a Saturday afternoon. I walked along the riverside for a while admiring the tropical flowers and the harmoniously designed recreation areas. Everything was very fresh and light. I eventually found myself in the Botanic Gardens and sat down on a bench beneath a tree with strange dangling fruits. I felt a mixture of pleasant weariness and muted excitement as I looked out over the city. Suddenly everything I was looking at came up to greet me. That is the only way I can describe it. At the same time I noticed that my internal chatter had receded to my voice box and was burbling away down there in a barely audible fashion. And as I looked out, I realised with complete clarity that seeing was all that was happening. There was only seeing. Nothing in particular was seen and no-one doing the seeing. Just seeing. This understanding was completely ordinary and obvious, yet extraordinary at the same time. Yes, of course, there is just seeing, just hearing, just doing and so on. After a while the indistinct talking in my voice box moved back up into my head, I got up and went on my way.

I like several things about this account, but most of all the idiosyncratic feature of the voice receding to the larynx. The intruder had left the building and gone back to his rightful spot leaving the owner free to SEE, or rather leaving a free space in which everything could arise naturally.

When we look at these three accounts it is clear that there are many similarities, especially with regard to seeing and spatial awareness. It is also of interest that the individuals involved had all been regularly practising some form of self-enquiry, so that although these unusual experiences seemed to arise spontaneously, they did so against a background of disciplines that involved attentional change. Flora Courtois, for example, had realised that since Reality obviously transcends the mind, then it could not be attained through any conceptual or strategic approach. As a result, she adopted a posture of waiting and letting be. In effect she radically changed the way she attended to her experience. So perhaps a change in attentional style is the key to attaining a new form of perception and understanding. This is the question that will occupy us for the rest of the book.

Please Pay Attention

If you endeavour to construct knowledge of what you're trying to seek, you close the door to the actual experience.

Russel Williams

While doing medicine at university I was foolish enough to do an elective year in experimental psychology. I remember we studied attention and perception in some detail, and this involved laboratory work in which we followed dots on screens and listened to weird sounds through headphones. We were assured that there was some relevance for air traffic controllers, but the connection to everyday life or the practice of psychotherapy seemed remote. I don't think that much has changed since then. Students are still not taught that there are different modes of attention, and that attending to the way one is paying attention is the most important skill that any adult can have.

We should not be surprised at this lacuna in our education. As Westerners we tend to be preoccupied with foreground experience and with the isolated objects that appear there. We could say that our attentional style is both narrow and monotonic: we tend to see the trees and not the wood. This style has so pervaded every aspect of our scientific, artistic and intellectual lives, that until recently it has escaped any serious comment or investigation.

Fortunately there are always those who slip through such cultural nets and I want to introduce you to two such individuals who definitely fall 'outside the box': Marion Milner and Les Fehmi. Marion Milner was a British psychologist born in 1900, who like Douglas Harding lived to the ripe old age of 98. As a young adult she decided to investigate what made her happy and how she should manage her life. The genius in her subsequent enquiry resided in the fact that she determined to answer these questions solely by experiment and not by recourse to tradition, external authority or rational theory. Her only method was scrupulous self-observation and keeping a detailed diary of her experiences and reflections. A summary of this process as it unfolded over several years was published in her first book, A Life of One's Own in 1934. This was the first of several books devoted to the various approaches that she took to personal development, and it is hard to praise any of them enough. However, in my mind, A Life of One's Own stands out as one of the most significant psychological texts of the 20 century and I return to it again and again for inspiration.

Milner's discoveries are too numerous to describe here, but included "blind thinking" and the distortions so beloved of cognitive-behavioural therapy, as well as mindfulness practice which she describes as a "continual readiness ... to accept whatever came." Yes, Milner uses the word mindfulness in 1934! However, it is her approach to attention that most interests us here. Her findings were based on very vivid periods of perception, such as the one described below, which was recorded when on holiday and looking out over a valley. This opening of "a door between me and the world" was initially facilitated by naming to herself everything that she was experiencing through the senses.

I sat motionless, draining sensation to its depths, wave after wave of delight flowing through every cell in my body. My attention flickered from one delight to the next like a butterfly, effortless, but following its pleasure; sometimes it rested on a thought, a verbal comment, but these no longer made a chattering barrier between me and what I saw, they were woven into the texture of my seeing. I no longer strove to be doing something, I was deeply content with what was. At other times my different senses had often been in conflict, so I could either look or listen but not both at once. Now hearing and sight and sense of space were all fused into one whole (italics mine).

(A Life of One's Own, page 79)

This episode of enhanced perception was also accompanied by a radical change in mood from bored and frustrated to pure joy. Little wonder then that she went in search of ways to reproduce such experiences. Eventually her enquiries led her to a simple but profound conclusion: it was largely a matter of changing the way she paid attention to the external world. She noticed that normally attention was narrow and concerned only with its own interests and purposes. She called it a "questing beast", always moving on to the next thing and neither interested in objects themselves nor in the broader context. This was in contrast to wide attention which arose when the questing purposes were held in check and she was free to attend without wanting something from the objects concerned. Such widening of focus could sometimes be achieved by a voluntary gesture or by using a phrase such as "I want nothing".

Over time, however, the question of a broader kind of absorptive consciousness gave rise to an expanding sphere of considerations to do with expectancy, purpose and the everyday ability to feel relaxed and secure. And to find out what Marion Milner discovered about these matters, dear reader, you will have to read her books – you will not regret it. I will say only one thing here: her journey brought her to concepts that we would now recognise as very Eastern in quality, and to the central idea of mindfulness, a term which she used very much as we use it today, but based on a truly profound understanding. Her journey also tells us much about the importance of finding out things for yourself, and that the touchstone to self-knowledge is rigorous self-observation.

Much water has gone under the bridge of attention research since Marion Milner's day, but it has mainly been concerned with narrow focus. A good contemporary example is the invisible gorilla experiment described by its progenitors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in their 2010 book The Invisible Gorilla. You may wish to go straight to the video on theinvisiblegorilla.com before I describe it any further.

The essence of the experiment is very simple: subjects watch a video in which two teams are playing with a basketball and are asked to carefully note and count how many passes are made by one of the teams. On the surface this seems to be a simple vigilance task, except that halfway through the short film a man in a gorilla suit walks across camera. About half the subjects in the early experiments did not see the gorilla, indicating that their attention was very narrowly focused by their intentional set (the task which they had been given). Chabris and Simons call the phenomenon of assuming that you have seen more than you actually have the illusion of attention.

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Excerpted from "Living Space"
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Copyright © 2017 Paul Holman.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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