Douglas Harding sees God where most people see consciousness

It's a familiar feeling. I'm enjoying a book about spirituality, because the author makes sense to me and doesn't go overboard on religious mumbo-jumbo. 

Then... I reach a chapter where I fill the margins with question marks, because what's being said doesn't make sense to me and sounds like religious mumbo-jumbo. That doesn't stop me from enjoying the previous part, but it makes me wonder how the author could shift so suddenly into religiosity. 

That's what happened to me today with Douglas Harding's Face to No Face: Rediscovering Our Original Nature. I wrote about my initial reading of it in "Love is keeping your mind open for other people and things."

I was cruising along in the second chapter, enjoying how Harding looked upon the "faceless" aspect of him as being a capacity for knowing, which is pretty much how Thomas Metzinger describes pure awareness in his book The Elephant and The Blind.

Harding uses anxiety as an example of how consciousness has space for anything that can be known.

Look, just as I find myself Capacity for you, just as I find myself faceless Here for your face, colorless Here for your color, formless Here for your form, so I find myself Space Here, Capacity Here, for anxiety. I'm Space for it.

This Space, this Capacity for the changing feelings, is always me, always available. So what I'm on about is not a case of feeling. It's a case of fact. I should have said this right at the beginning of the evening. We are not on about feelings. We are on about where they come from, what is upstream of feelings, the facts. 

It's facts which will bring us relief from our anguish. Feelings will not.

Music to my ears. I love facts. I'm not always capable of distinguishing fact from fiction, but I aspire to being as factual as possible in my life. This is a big reason why I've come to dislike religion, which all too often is fact-free.

I guess I should have paid more attention to all the capitalized nouns in the excerpt above from Harding's first chapter. That's often a giveaway when a spiritual writer elevates everyday words to a meaning that is anything but obvious, as in Capacity, Here, Space.

Because it turned out in the second chapter that Harding somehow concludes that our usual human consciousness is God. And this from a guy who just said a few pages before that he was all about facts. Here's some excerpts that show what I mean. 

Harding says that if we're to see God Here and find God Here, "we have to know what we are looking for so that we can tell whether those mystics and sages got it right... something very specific, not something vague."

Well, this makes little sense. After all, there's no proof that God even exists, much less that God has certain well-defined characteristics. Religions heartily disagree on both fronts. (I call Buddhism a religion that has no god.) Harding then says:

And I would say that which we can name God provisionally (or if we prefer, Atman-Brahman or Reality or Essence or even No-thingness -- I don't care what you call it) has five characteristics. 

The first characteristic is that it has no boundaries, no fence around it, no edges. It's absolutely unlimited in all directions. The second characteristic is that it is absolutely clear, clean, empty of contamination. It is utterly simple, totally transparent, empty of everything but itself, empty even of itself, clearer than glass, cloudless, an infinite sky.

The third characteristic is that it is also full of the world. Because it's empty, it's full -- full of the scene, whatever the scene is, absolutely united with it. The fourth characteristic is that it is awake, it's aware, it's conscious. And the fifth characteristic is that it is right where you are. 

The only place you will find Her Majesty is nearer to you than everything else. That's her throne room, her royal palace, right where you are. The Kingdom is within you.To sum up, there are five characteristics of Her Majesty: she is infinite, empty, full of the world, awake, and right where you are. Now that's a description of God. But doesn't the description also fit you?

This is an amazing bit of bad philosophizing from someone who claims to be factual, but obviously is deeply religious in a Christian sense, which is the religion he was brought up in by a fundamentalist father. 

First of all, Harding makes the mistake that Thomas Metzinger warns about repeatedly in his own book about pure awareness. He uses the phenomenology of how awareness appears to us humans to draw unwarranted conclusions about the actual reality those phenomenal experiences point to. 

Metzinger calls this theory contamination, which is exactly what Harding does in the excerpt above. Harding describes how consciousness appears, then claims that those characteristics are those of God, so, using horribly twisted logic, our consciousness is God. 

Circular reasoning gone wild.

Harding neglects to mention that God also is considered by major world religions to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent -- qualities that definitely don't apply to human consciousness, since he only focused on those that match up with how our limited consciousness appears to us. 

Here's some additional quotations to show further how Harding equates God with human awareness.

We should have the humility to be a little bit traditional here and realize that for two thousand years great saints have been working at this, and the common feature of their discovery is: "Not I but Christ liveth in me." Paul goes on and on: "I am crucified with Christ." Father Gerard Hughes, author of the book, God of Surprises, says, "God calls on us to become Christ." Not Christs, but Christ. When I hold out my arms, I see the pattern of the Crucifixion. We're built to that incredible pattern.

It is really true that Who you are is the Origin of the world, everywhichway you look at it. Just think! You never moved an inch. You are the unmoved mover of the world. You are timeless. You have no boundaries.

The big thing for me, a development over the last few years, is the realization of the Incarnation. To put it very, very simply, if it is true what Tennyson says, what the Koran says, that God is nearer to me than my hands and my feet and my breathing, then God is Here and This is where he lives...These feet go on the errands of God, and this voice speaks his words. They are the instruments of Who we really, really are.

I really, really disagree. Harding's first book, On Having No Head, appealed to me because it was almost entirely based on what I considered to be facts about our human consciousness. However, somewhere along the way, Harding merged the Christianity of his youth with his headless perceptions. 

The result isn't useless, but it contains way too much gibberish for my taste.

Comments

[Ron E.]

Harding does indeed seem to be trying to align his insights with his earlier Christian indoctrination. He seems to be trying to align ‘emptiness’ with what he calls the five characteristics of God. It sounds like hard work to me and totally unnecessary to define and pigeon-hole such experiences (what Metzinger calls ‘pure awareness’ and what others term ‘what is’, ‘the present moment’ etc.)

It’s must be quite difficult though and tempting to want to name and define any sublime experiences, more so if there is a desire to communicate them. Saying that, I can understand the Buddhist’s main impetus – to help alleviate suffering – but even that needs some honest self-enquiry.

With all this I believe/think it often comes down to words. Using words, which after all are merely tools to explain thoughts and concepts to explain what is – the unexplainable. It’s easy to get attached to words and to end up with taking words to represent reality. They also seem to carry an emotional content such as when we here (or think) of the name of our religion or country for example that can evoke strong feelings.

Perhaps then, words, or rather the concepts they try to convey, need to be subjected to awareness, to be taken notice of before (if it’s not too late), they form pseudo-realties that are merely a series of mind-made constructs – and which we end up believing to be the truth.

[sant64]

"Harding neglects to mention that God also is considered by major world religions to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent -- qualities that definitely don't apply to human consciousness, since he only focused on those that match up with how our limited consciousness appears to us."

Guess who else is tacitly arguing that some kind of God may exist? Anyone who calls themselves a Buddhist. "But Buddhism rejects God!" atheist Buddhists exclaim. But go read the very first Buddhist sutta, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta. There's no way to read it but to conclude that the very point of the Buddhist path is that it's a path to "the deathless." Implicit in that path is the survival of some kind of self that takes birth and takes birth again. Disagree? Tell us then what "deathless" meant. And what did "Once Returner" mean, if not survival of some kind of self and reincarnation? That's in the sutta as well.

If the Buddha and his followers weren't seeking life after death, precisely just were they on about? "They were just trying to be better human beings." Seriously? All that austerity, for trying to be a better human? Let's not get lost in terms. The Buddhist is no different from the Christian. Both seek salvation and harmony with the order of the universe -- an order they have a personal and enduring stake in.

You can't even abide D. Harding's meek personal ideas of theism? Gee whiz. Pot, kettle Mr. Buddhist. Until you come up with a better and more consistent argument, it might be time to stop telling us that believers in the transcendent irritate you. You clearly believe in the transcendent yourself, for the same motivations as the believer in a personal God. You're no better, no wiser than they are. And it's time to get over the word God. Begin by taking a hard look at why that word irks you so much. Own up to the fact that even the goofiest religions have produced societies of admirable order and charity (go hang out with some Mormons if you don't believe it).

[Ron E.]

Sant64. Just to point out that the whole gist of the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta is to do with Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion. That is, the Buddhas teaching of the eightfold path and the cessation of suffering.

The Buddha has set the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion (so the sutra goes). “At Varanasi, in the Game Refuge at Isipatana, the Blessed One has set in motion the unexcelled Wheel of Dhamma that cannot be stopped by brahman or contemplative, deva, Mara, or God or anyone at all in the cosmos."

It is more likely that it means the whole Indian cosmological way of thinking and believing in the deva’s Mara, God etc. that the Buddha’s Dhamma put an end to. It just superseded the old belief systems rather than disposing any actual or real supernatural entities. After all, one of the chief causes of suffering is belief, a major source of dissent and separation.