HEADLESS AWEN?
by contemplativeinquiry
In my current spiritual inquiry, I am exploring Douglas Harding’s ‘Headless Way’, now with some direct guidance from Richard Lang and the Shollond Trust. For me, the brief passage below suggests a re-framed view of what we Druids call Awen. It also feels very Sophian, so I’m finding my pointers to an integrated path. I just have to be patient as new understandings unfold and I learn better how to live them.
“Speaking from my own experience now, if I picture a writer here who is thinking up these words, the result is more-or-less mechanical, uninteresting, inappropriate.
“But to the extent that I experience these words moving spontaneously from the empty Awareness that I am, from the Tao, why then they have a more authentic ring. That is not forgetting myself in the heat of literary composition. Quite the contrary: it is being clearly Self-aware as the Tao, the formless origin of all form.” (1)
(1) Douglas Harding Religions of the world: A handbook for the open-minded London: Shollond Trust, 2014 (digital edition). Originally published by Heinemann Educational Books in 1966.
contemplativeinquiry 
I’m fascinated by this, not least because it is so removed from my own experience of writing. I may have to write a counter argument 🙂
I would find a friendly counter argument really interesting!
“On Having No Head”
http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-2-on-having-no-head.html
Sam Harris comes back to Hofstadter & Dennett in a brief section on Harding in his ‘Waking up: searching for spirituality without religion’ – worth a look for many other reasons as well. He stressed the value of the experience without fully embracing Harding’s narrative, and I discussed this briefly in another post: https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com/2016/07/02/interpretation-in-contemplative-inquiry/
I have found value in exploring the Headless Way exercises, but I do find myself beginning to back away now. They do model an evangelical insistence on a single insight, and make too much out of it, in my view. Thanks for engaging with this topic Tom. And my very best wishes for your mother. Warm wishes, James