Showing results by author "Douglas Edison Harding" in All Categories

'Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down... I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine. Past and future dropped away... Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.' Thus Douglas Harding describes his first experience of headlessness, or no self. First published in 1961, this is a classic work which conveys the experience that mystics of all times have tried to put words to.

This is a dramatic story, a wild dream, at times a nightmare, at times a hilarious and subversive satire. It involves a quest, a monster, and a shape-shifting hero, strange characters and dangerous goings-on, and an end that is a beginning - the tightest corner of hell opening out into the widest smile of heaven, the darkest of nights turning into the early morning freshness of the world. 

This book, by the author of the well-known spiritual classic On Having No Head, is a kind of Pilgrim's Progress for the third millennium. It is also a condensation, in the form of a romantic adventure story, of Harding's major work, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. 

Visible Gods is an imaginary dialogue between Socrates and four fictitious modern-day characters. Socrates' worldview is of a living cosmos with man only half-way up the hierarchy of all beings; above him reign suprahuman beings of great majesty and power - the visible gods. The moderns with whom Socrates converses disdain his ancient Greek cosmos as primitive and false.