Today, we go back to the roots of the Headless Deep Dive and look at chapter one of Douglas Harding’s book: The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. There is a fantastic new-ish website which serves as an archive for much of Douglas’s material, where this chapter can be found among many other things like his original handwritten notes, and various photos, etc.

The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, is Douglas Harding’s philosophical masterpiece where he seeks to answer the question “What am I”? Chapter One of the book gives us the simple, yet not intuitive, two-fold answer. What I am for myself is wide open capacity for all the sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts and emotions that fill my first-person point of view. What I am for others depends on the range of that other observer. At a certain range I am a person. Closer up, I am cells and molecules. Further away I am a town, a country, a planet, a star or a galaxy.

We spend so much time in our youth learning to be a member of the human club, that we forgot that is only one of the clubs we could belong to. Looking out at the night sky and pointing at Andromeda, I see my multi-layered self and can identify any of those layers with the same open center. I can identify my human self with that pointing hand I see, my earthly self with the moon I see, my solar self with the other stars I see and my Milky-way self with Andromeda.

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