Pointing out the way

An exploration of our true nature

Who are we, really? This question is at the heart of Zen practice, and in this week's article we're going to take a look at some ingenious methods for exploring it developed by Douglas Harding, a 20th century English philosopher and spiritual teacher.

How insight changes our practice

In last week's article we talked about the importance of the view we bring to our practice. What we're trying to do affects both how we practise and the outcome of that practice. This is particularly important in the non-dual traditions, where the practice requires us to take on board a view of ourselves and the world which is not necessarily widely held. We tend to see ourselves as things in a world of things - separate, individual creatures going about separate lives, often in competition with one another, trying to protect our little piece of the world from everyone else. But the message of the non-dual traditions is clear: this is, at best, only one way of looking at the world, and one which comes with severe limitations. There's another perspective which can open up to us through practice, one in which we are not separate at all. From this perspective of non-separation, we have no problems, because there's no separate 'us' to be at odds with anything else.

It's important to keep this view in mind, even if (perhaps especially if) you haven't experienced this non-dual perspective for yourself yet, because it directly affects how we approach our practice. Silent Illumination can be practised in a totally dualistic manner as a kind of simple mindfulness exercise in which I sit and pay attention to all the things that are coming and going - sights, sounds and sensations 'out there', thoughts and feelings 'in here'. Alternatively, Silent Illumination can be viewed as an effortless resting, allowing the non-dual nature of reality to unfold moment to moment, absolutely perfect just as it is. In both cases, we sit still and pay attention to the total sphere of experience for a period of time, but depending on how we understand that experience, the net result may simply calm our nervous system and develop some concentration, clarity and equanimity toward the usual world of things, or it may allow us to contact and deepen our experience of non-duality.

For some people, it's enough to hear a description of the non-dual experience. For others, more explanation can be helpful, which I've tried to provide in two previous articles. Still others do well with a koan, such as 'Who am I?' or 'What is this?' Yet another approach, and one I enjoy very much myself, was developed by the aforementioned Douglas Harding in the mid-20th century, and that's what we're going to explore in the rest of this article.

Credit where it's due

The original experiments, and plenty of other writings about Harding's approach, can be found at The Headless Way. You can also find some excellent guided audio by one of Harding's successors, Richard Lang, on the Waking Up app, which I highly recommend if you like guided meditations - the quality of instruction on that app is very high, and I'm usually not a big fan of apps!

So you're more than welcome to stop reading at this point and simply go back to the source. That being said, if you're a regular reader of these articles and you find my way of expressing things helpful, it's possible that you'll benefit from an articulation of these exercises in my voice rather than Harding's or Lang's. So here goes!

The pointing experiment

​For this experiment, you will need to point in a succession of directions. Please actually do the pointing with your finger - you might feel silly at first, but it really does help.

• Place a cup across the room from you, and point at it.

Follow your pointing finger with your gaze. What do you see?

At first, the answer is obvious - the cup!

But look more closely. The label 'cup' is really an idea - a kind of thought. What you actually see is really some coloured shapes - it's just that what happens next is that your brain helpfully supplies the label 'cup', so as far as you're concerned you're 'seeing a cup'.

Spend a little time with this to see if you can get to a point where you can separate the coloured shape from the label. You don't need to stop the label, you just need to get to the point where you can recognise that the coloured shape and the label are two separate things, not one.

(I'm told that learning to see the world as coloured shapes is an exercise that artists do, because breaking free of our natural tendency to conceptualise the visual field is a helpful step in being able to draw more realistically, seeing what's actually in front of you as opposed to what you merely think is in front of you.)

When you can separate shape and label, you're ready for the next step.

• Point at your foot.

Again, follow your pointing finger with your gaze. What do you see now?

At this point, you might 'know' that the correct answer is 'coloured shapes, and the label "my foot"', but make sure you're actually experiencing that rather than simply thinking it before you move on.

• Point at your chest.

Again, follow your pointing finger with your gaze. What do you see now?

Once again, you're seeing coloured shapes, and thinking of an associated label. Hopefully it's getting a bit easier by this point.

Notice that, so far, everything we've pointed to has been a thing, an object 'out there' in the world.

Now you're ready for the next step.

• Point to where other people see your face.

Again, follow your pointing finger with your gaze. What do you see now?

You're now pointing back at your own face - or are you? Do you actually see your own face? You know what a face looks like - everyone else has one - but can you see yours at the end of your pointing finger? And if not, what do you see there?

Everywhere else we've pointed, we saw coloured shapes. But do you see colours or shapes in the direction you're pointing now? And if not, what do you experience instead?

When I look this way, I don't find any colours or shapes. I find only a kind of presence, a capacity for awareness and clarity, within which my whole visual field arises all at once. There are no 'things' back here - the 'things' are all 'out there', merely conceptually designated 'parts' of my total experience of the world, which is unified and seamless.

Spend some time pointing alternately between 'things out there' and 'what's back here' until the difference becomes clear.

This first experiment is Harding's classic, and can be extremely powerful in its own right. If you'd like to continue playing with just this one, that's absolutely fine. However, I'll go on to include a couple more that I personally enjoy, because I've always found it helpful to have a few different 'angles of attack' when I'm exploring new insight territory.

Visual field experiments

• Find two objects of different sizes, and look at them.

Notice that size is comparative - one of these objects is 'big' and one is 'small', but if you brought in a tiny object, the 'small' one would now be 'medium-sized' instead.

Perhaps you might object that size is an objective property, because it can be measured. But notice that 'measurement' just means 'comparing the size of one object with another in a particular way' - for example, by placing a ruler or tape measure next to an object and reading a number from it.

Notice also that, in your immediate experience, the sizes of objects don't match up at all to what you 'know' them to be. For example, you can place two objects six inches apart (and measure the gap with a ruler, if you like), then sit some distance away. By placing your thumb close to where other people look when they see your face, your thumb easily fills the gap - no matter how much you remind yourself that your thumb is much smaller than six inches, and even if you 'prove' this to yourself by measuring it.

At this point, you might be tempted to dismiss this as a trick, or a kind of deliberate ignorance of perspective. But what we're doing here is trying to see for ourselves how much interpretation of our experience our minds are normally doing behind the scenes. It's immediately obvious to us that our thumb is not bigger than the gap between those objects, despite the evidence of our senses. This is because our powerful minds have created a mental model of what's going on, and we believe the model to be more accurate than what our senses tell us.

This is important because we need to see that our models are just models - just one way of understanding what's going on. Those models can be limiting at best, and simply flat-out wrong at worst. And as we continue to explore who we really are, it can be helpful to distinguish our model of who we are from our first-person experience of who we are. So let's continue.

• Now consider your visual field as a whole. How big is it?

Is there any answer to this question?

We've just explored the idea that we understand size by comparing two objects with each other, but our visual field isn't really an object - our visual field contains all the objects. We don't have two separate visual fields to compare - there's nothing 'outside' the one we have, because 'outside' doesn't even make sense in this context.

And we can't really measure it in terms of the objects within it - our hand can appear relatively small, or larger than the entire visual field, depending on where we put our hand.

• How far away from your visual field are the objects within it?

Again, we understand that two things in the world of things can be separated by distance, and that we can measure that distance 'objectively' by placing a third object such as a ruler or tape measure between them, or we can fill that distance 'subjectively' by placing a third object such as a thumb appropriately.

But how far away from the visual field itself are the objects? Is there any answer to this question? Or can we only say that that every object in our visual field is simply 'here', no nearer or farther than any other?

Exploring the other senses

The experiments I've presented above are primarily visual, and another way to dismiss their implications is to say that they're just optical illusions, a kind of trick that we can refute through the evidence of the other senses. But can you? Consider sounds, for example - individual sounds can be near or far, but what happens when we look at the whole field of hearing? Or touch sensations - individual sensations are things located within space, but what about the whole field of sensation itself?

When you've spent some time exploring the senses one at a time, come back to the original pointing experiment. What do you point to when you point at the place where others see your face? Is there any 'thing' there at all? Or do you find something else, quite different to the world of things? And what happens when you continue to look, resting in this new world where no separate things can be found?