Face to No-Face

Face to No-Face: Rediscovering Our Original Nature

by Douglas Harding

Inner Directions, Carlsbad, California      © 2000      206 pp.

This book by contemporary mystic Douglas Harding, is a series of dialogues taken from talks and interviews conducted over the past 20 years. Harding’s previous works are numerous and generally pertain to an oft-returning theme which may be summed up in the title of his 1961 book, On Having No Head. In Face to No-Face the same essential revelation presented in previous books is re-examined, with more light and clarity.

His approach in teaching, true to mysticism and true to his previous style, is using down-to-earth investigations separating our direct experience from “what we’ve been told.” He presents guided investigations into perceptual and conceptual fictions that tend to lock awareness into identification with “me here and you there.” Using cardboard tubes, a hand mirror, a few Zen proclamations, and a good deal of humor, Harding presents a series of injunctions or recipes that point back to this moment’s direct experience of Original Ground.

With his British colloquialisms and imaginative lines of thought, he elucidates what may be found by anyone, through recognizing that “I have no Head.” The book’s theme is based on the simplicity of direct inquiry and direct experience to assist awakening through not ignoring what is obvious to us always.

-- unknown reviewer


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