On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious

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It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of "me", unstained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around. The key message here is: The author’s reflections were sparked by a life-changing experience in his early adulthood.

Book Genre: Buddhism, Eastern Philosophy, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Self Help, Spirituality, Zen I had raised he reached for a slim volume on his rattan coffee table which he said had arrived out of the blue the week before; it was this book in hand.Harding promotes ‘the way’, to be more exact the ‘headless way’ or ‘headlessnes’, an odd little compilation of Zen teachings, mysticism and self-reflection. Those who know me would know what I think of anyone promoting ‘a way’. 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.)

The result is this book- a discussion of not only what happened to him, but an examination of consciousness itself. Where does consciousness reside? Where is the 'me' of our constant thoughts and emotions? In the mid-1930s Harding moved to India with his family to work there as an architect. When the Second World War broke out, Harding’s quest toMoving up in organization, several tissues have been suggested to exhibit memory. One is bone, which has many similarities to a neural network, both molecularly and functionally ( Turner et al., 2002). For example, the neurotransmitter glutamate plays a role in cell-to-cell communication among bone cells. Glutamate of course is a key neurotransmitter for learning and memory in the hippocampus. Bone cells exhibit habituation (to repeated mechanical stimuli) and sensitization (to mechanical loading) – two of the most basic components of memory. Skull bones react quite differently to mechanical loading and hormones than do long bones, and it has been speculated that the past history of weight bearing imparts long-term cellular memory to the bone cell network, manifesting as differential responses to a variety of stimuli. A model involving long-term potentiation via the NMDA receptor has been proposed to explain memory of past stresses, and its subsequent influence over growth control, has been proposed ( Spencer and Genever, 2003; Ho et al., 2005). Muscle comprises of some of the largest cells of animals, and also process, store and retrieve information via muscle-specific memory which can last from 15 years up to the entire lifetime in humans ( Bruusgaard et al., 2010; Gundersen, 2016).

Importantly, many cell types communicate electrically, not just excitable nerve and muscle ( McCaig et al., 2005; Levin, 2007a, b, 2012a; Bates, 2015). Recent molecular data show that developmental bioelectricity is an important modality by which cell networks process information that instructs patterning during regeneration, development, and cancer suppression ( Levin, 2014a, b, c). Thus, one obvious candidate for cognition outside the brain is via the same mechanism used in the brain – bioelectrical networks ( Levin and Stevenson, 2012; Mustard and Levin, 2014). Indeed it is likely that the processing in the brain is a direct extension (and speed optimization) of far older mechanisms used originally for morphogenesis ( Buznikov and Shmukler, 1981; Levin et al., 2006). Developmental bioelectricity in animal systems features slowly-changing, continuous voltage changes as opposed to millisecond discrete (binary) spiking usually studied in the brain. However, the brain also includes non-spiking neurons ( Victor, 1999) that have computational compartments similar to the membrane voltage domains observed in embryonic and other non-neural cells ( Levin, 2007b; Adams and Levin, 2012). It has recently been proposed ( Levin, 2012b, 2013; Mustard and Levin, 2014) that non-neural tissues support the same two types of plasticity as seen in the brain: changes of connectivity via electrical synapses (gap junctions) which corresponds to synaptic plasticity, and changes of ion channel function which corresponds to intrinsic plasticity ( Marder et al., 1996; Turrigiano et al., 1996; Daoudal and Debanne, 2003). In addition to computation via changes in resting potential, which is a primary regulator of pattern memory in embryogenesis and regeneration ( Adams, 2008; Funk, 2013; Levin, 2014b), as well as of processing in the brain ( Sachidhanandam et al., 2013; Yamashita et al., 2013), ion pumps such as the ubiquitous sodium-potassium ATPase, have been suggested as computational elements ( Forrest, 2014). So I went to this meeting on a date. Cool. And it was presented as a non-judgmental space, a space of relaxed meeting and breathing and clearing one’s mind. 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). One way of attempting to trigger the experience is to play with concepts. Think about sitting in a car while it’s moving. You can either conceptualise it as you are in the car, and you and the car are moving through space passing the scenery and other objects as you drive. Or you can conceptualise it as you are sitting perfectly still and the scenery in your experience is the thing that is moving, zipping to the edges of your visual field then passing away into the void. Like wearing VR goggle, the scenery changes depending on the direction you’re looking in. Some view this perceptual shift as a transcendent insight. Others view it as an appeal to solipsism; the dreaded ‘so what?’ response to the sublime from the uninitiated. We are talking about epistemology, not ontology (though Harding does make some metaphysical leaps of logic that I can’t follow him on: more on that shortly). Everybody says these constructs are the thing itself. However, as Harding points out, they're not really, are they? If you look down your own face, you can usually 'see' your nose as a series of splotches and shapes. Is that your nose though, or just splotches?

Perhaps this is a book to be experienced rather than described. Rather, I might humbly suggest, like consciousness itself? his world was no head, no appearance - nothing at all. And this ‘nothing’ was a very special ‘nothing’ for it was both awake to itself and full What about when I look in the mirror? Well, there's a head in the mirror. Is that... my head? Whoops, at Level Two, that question makes no sense. By calling the pixels in the mirror "your head", you're making inferences that you could test... but not at Level Two. Inferences occur in the little lab in your brain where you go to figure out what things mean. In the present, who cares what things mean? That's so Level Zero.

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. 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. While the dominant model of neural-based cognition relies on the signaling dynamics among networks of neurons, it’s becoming increasingly appreciated that single neurons can execute subtraction, addition, low- and band-pass filtering, normalization, gain control, saturation, amplification, multiplication, and thresholding with respect to the input-output relations they implement ( Koch and Segev, 2000). Memory and computation is thus not exclusively a multi-cellular phenomenon, and is not restricted to somatic neural cells. Recent computational studies have revealed conditions under which cells expressing ion channels can keep a stable memory with respect to resting potential, and these conditions do not specifically require neuronal cell identity – they can be fulfilled by numerous cell types, somatic as well as free-living ( Ramanathan and Broach, 2007; Cervera et al., 2014; Law and Levin, 2015). closer ranges he was cells, molecules, atoms, particles… and from further away he was absorbed into the rest of society, life, the planet, Additional memory media include the extracellular matrix ( Becchetti et al., 2010; for plant cell walls see Humphrey et al., 2007; Seifert and Blaukopf, 2010; Hamann, 2015) and chromatin complex markings ( Francis and Kingston, 2001; Maurange and Paro, 2002; Ringrose and Paro, 2004), both of which are ideal media for recording traces representing specific environmental and/or physiological events. These are examples of internal stigmergy – activity that leaves traces in a labile intracellular or extracellular medium which can be read as memories in the future by cells making decisions for migration, differentiation, apoptosis, or signaling ( Theraulaz and Bonabeau, 1999; Ricci et al., 2007).

If you have no experience with (guided) meditation, I would not recommend reading this. It will make little sense. But it's a great exploration of an underexplained phenomenon for those who have glimpsed it! 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.) It was when I was thirty-three that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent inquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I?” The first level involves realizing that when you get lost in thought, much of what you're reacting to isn't even happening right now. You're being assaulted with memories and getting lost in those, sure... but even the act of getting pissed off in traffic is an act of mild obsession with the past. The car cuts you off, and you freeze-frame the moment and start looping on it, even as the moment that annoyed you slips away. I noted that he – and I – were looking out at that body and the world, from the Core of the onion of our appearances. (3) It was clear that