Douglas Harding is an English spiritual master (1909-2007) not well-known in France. Born in Suffolk in Christian fundamentalist sect, he decides to discover life by himself and leaves at 21 years-old his family. This will bring him to exhort his auditors to question every form of belief system and to experience by themselves what they call reality.
He becomes a prosperous architect but his real interest remains the quest of the Self. "Who am I? ", this is the question of principle to which Harding wants to give the answer.
He realizes that the individual which often feels separated, or even isolated, is within a complex hierarchy, many successive envelops which go from the smallest cell of our body to galaxies and cosmos. But the fundamental question remains: "Who is at the center of all these envelops? ".
At thirty-three, Douglas finds a drawing of the philosopher Ernst Mach who represents a man lying on a couch in the perspective in his own eyes. So a headless man. It's the revelation! "The most wonderful day of my life, somehow my new birth, was the day I discovered that I had no head", this is how Douglas Harding describes his awakening in his book "On having no head ».
Suddenly the world of forms, substances, disappears, to essence. A lightening vacuity! A vacuity conscious of itself! "I had lost a head and won a world", he will says. From that day he starts a method of investigation of the self called "headless way» which enables to see who we really are, here and now, through a certain number of simple and direct experiences.
Till his death, in 2007, Douglas Harding will devote all his energy to transmit this experience to thousands of persons through the world. To José Le Roy, a philosopher, his meeting with Douglas Harding in 1993 was deciding. In this 28-minutes presentation, he shares this non dualist way at the junction of philosophy, mystic and science.
