Awakening in Chinese Zen Buddhism involves seeing one’s true nature as empty and erasing the boundary between subject and object. Early Zen texts describe this as chopping off your head or seeing your ‘Original Face’. Douglas Harding’s first-person experiments, which investigate the gap where you cannot see your own head, produce experiences strikingly similar to Zen accounts: experiencing oneself as void yet united with the world. These repeatable methods open awakening experiences to empirical investigation and offer new insights into nondual traditions.
Twelve of twenty adults who had never practiced the Headless Way exercises reported a void-like experience after being guided through them, and five reported an experience of awareness itself. These experiences were categorized as subsets of perceptual absences and the sense of not being person-like. The exercises can effectively induce experiences of emptiness and awareness in participants without prior meditation experience. The findings suggest that such experiences can be elicited outside a traditional meditation context, and that the sense of not being person-like and perceptual absences may be precursors to recognizing awareness itself and the void-like nature of the mind.