The Science of the First Person with Richard Lang
Clues to ultimate reality hiding in plain sight: Exploring the Headless Way
Date: 8 September 2026
Duration: 1h 58m
Topic: Consciousness & Mind
Title: Galileo: Look for yourself
Duration: 4:03
https://player.vimeo.com/video/1225744069?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479&max_quality=720p&quality_selector=0&preload=none&autoplay=0&loop=0
00:00 Welcome to Richard Lang
03:34 The Headless Way: Who am I?
08:05 A map of yourself at different distances
12:16 The view in and the view out
13:44 Experiment: where do your hands disappear?
14:27 Experiment: pointing back at the one who looks
15:56 Meeting others face to no face
18:06 What about touch and the other senses?
19:04 Growing up: baby, child, adult, seer
21:57 Are we really behind the eyes?
23:25 Finding a language for first-person experience
25:48 The body as object and the body as subject
28:10 Douglas Harding’s map of body and mind
31:47 Is the view out limited to the human scale?
36:33 Experimenting with eyes closed
38:26 If we are one, why do we have separate minds?
46:36 Integrated Information Theory and the experience of self
48:00 Do glasses or AI smart glasses get in the way?
51:12 The void as mirror and projector
52:26 Ernst Mach’s picture: nothing to manufacture
54:08 Why doesn’t everyone see this?
1:04:42 An experiment with time and timelessness
1:08:37 Does time change across the different regions?
1:12:16 Death: what Richard knows and what he doesn’t
1:21:44 Sleep and altered states of consciousness
1:25:07 Galileo: looking for yourself and revising the model
1:30:05 In what sense can we feel the planet?
1:32:19 Feeling trapped in a body: conditioning and practice
1:40:33 Experiment: a tense hand in an unstressed space
1:42:55 Conflict, empathy and boundaries
1:50:41 Closing experiment: the whole field of experience
1:55:09 Further experiments and meetings
1:56:46 Bernardo’s dashboard of perception and closing thanks
Clues to reality in the dashboard of perception
In 1886, physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach drew his famous "View from the Left Eye". It's a sketch of the world that doesn't take an imagined third-person perspective, but instead depicts reality as it actually shows up: The blur of a nose. The arch of an eyebrow. A body trailing off into a room, with no head in sight.
Mach's point was that this inner perspective, the Innenperspektive, is where all experience begins, and that we habitually overlook it in favour of the third-person view.
This careful, empirical and direct investigation of experience was later developed by philosopher Douglas Harding as a "Science of the First Person". His Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth was called by C.S. Lewis “a work of the highest genius”, and gained the interest of contemporaries including Owen Barfield, Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley.
“Though in essence the same as Zen, Sufism, and other spiritual disciplines, this way proceeds in an unusually down-to-earth fashion.” — Douglas Harding
The approach claims you are more likely to see who you really are in a few minutes of experimentation than years of reading, meditation or traditional spiritual practice.
Richard has been a lifelong student of this Headless Way, steeped in both its practice and philosophy. (His discussion with Sam Harris is an excellent introduction.)
Today, he will introduce some essential observations that you can verify for yourself, followed by a Q&A.
Richard Lang
Headless Way teacher and author
Richard Lang is Co-ordinator of the Shollond Trust, the UK charity set up in 1996 to help share the Headless Way as widely as possible in the world. He first saw who he really was when he attended a workshop with Douglas Harding in 1970. He is committed to making this Vision as widely available as possible. If you have a way in which you can help in this endeavour, or would like to invite him to give a workshop in your part of the world, please contact him.
Richard's first book, Seeing Who You Really Are, was published by Watkins in 2003. His second book, Open to the Source - Selected Teachings of Douglas Harding, was published by Inner Directions in 2005. These publications are available through our bookshop. Richard has also produced many videos about Seeing, which are available on The Headless Way Youtube channel.
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