I want to echo and add to an earlier comment about Dr. Martin’s mentioning of Douglas Harding’s Headless Way. Prior to listening to this episode I came across numerous seekers from diverse schools who shared exactly what Dr. Martin and his Buddhist research subjects reported here: that they spent numerous years or decades seeking fruitlessly or only experiencing minor or modest therapeutic gains and then discovered the headless way and WHAM! self-realization took hold. These were people who sacrificed attending college or having relationships or garnering financial stability in order to lay it all down for self-realization - AND THE WAY THEY TOOK FAILED THEM... and then, maybe decades later they found the headless way and that was the end of the road.
When I heard Dr. Martin share about the headless way in this episode I laughed out loud because, of course, this seemingly silly collection of experiments that you can watch on YouTube for free is what did it for Dr. Martin and his Buddhist lifers but we’re supposed to fork out $2,500 for a meditation course when Douglas Harding says in his books that he hated meditating and gave it up because it was boring and he disliked it!
WTF? Let’s just do the headless way! It’s all but free! The books are cheap and YouTube is littered with Harding’s experiments! Who cares if it’s so simple that it’s embarrassing!? If that’s what works then that’s a virtue, not a failing! Sounds like the real “finders” are the people who take the headless way!
There's a key page on YouTube that introduces the headless way, which I've been vaguely aware of for some time, but watching and listening to a student of Douglas Harding (Richard Lang) in the first two videos on the page reminded me that the experience of the One can also be experienced in other ways.
I mentioned one in another post of mine: simply being in the right mood whilst exploring YouTube for music videos, where at some point I become aware of the Oneness, of being one with the singers and musicians, and their being one with me. The difference is, that particular trick of mine probably can't be used by others unless they've experienced Oneness at some point prior to that (and also like to search for music, of course).
OTOH, Harding's way or trick should work for anyone, right from the first experience. It doesn't depend on having had some prior seminal experience of Oneness (as I fortuitously had for a couple of weeks back in '94, and which I find I can reconnect with via occasional YouTube experiences). Harding's way is a very quick and eminently practicable method of demonstrating the One, and the many within the One, with very little metaphysical manoeuvring involved. It doesn't challenge one's existing spiritual or religious views, and can be used in conjunction with any philosophy (except perhaps materialism!) and other methodologies (e.g. meditation), one might be used to.
Moreover, it can be repeated at will and can form the basis for much further introspection, which can potentially be life-changing. So all in all, it gets my vote as the only way I've come across so far that should unfailingly work for any sighted person because it starts not in conceptualisation or faith, but in simple, incontrovertible observation. Of course one probably won't achieve full enlightenment in one session, but with a number of repeats/reminders that can be made anywhere and at any time (even in imagination), one should be able to build on it.
Incidentally, I liked the way Lang described what we usually call "lateral inversion" in a mirror. I don't think, strictly speaking, it's lateral inversion. Imagine a rubber mask over one's face that one pulls off along an axis extending directly out from the nose, gradually inverting it along the way. The eye socket on the left of your face is still on the left of the image of the mask when it's inverted, and vice-versa for the right socket.
The "inversion" could be thought of as occurring along a front-back rather than left-right axis, and to be psychological. When you wink your left eye as you look in a mirror, you actually see the eye on the left of the reflected image of your face wink. However, you've been trained, consciously or otherwise, to think of that as a
right eye in someone else.
Thing is, you usually see other people's faces when they are turned towards you, i.e. when their frame of reference is opposite to your own. Ask someone facing you to wink their left eye, and you will see that the eye on the
right of your image of them winks, but you invert it to your own point of view and think of it as being a
left eye. There's no lateral inversion; it's just a psychological thing to invert left and right so that the viewpoint is always outwards from the self.
Prior to the advent of movies, people only ever saw themselves as reflections in shiny surfaces such as water and latterly, actual mirrors. They never saw their own faces as others saw them. But nowadays they can if they've ever viewed themselves in photographs, home movies or selfies. All of these are taken from someone else's frame of reference, which is often opposite to one's own. Within your own frame of reference, the left and right of your face are inverted with respect the frame of reference of anyone else looking at you, and the two frames only ever become aligned when you're all looking in the same direction and can't actually see anyone's face.
Anyway, just thought I'd mention that...:)