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 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.

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.