Last season ended with a searchlight turning around. All that trained attention, aimed for a thousand years at breaths and disks and boring tasks, and then, at the last panel of the ox pictures, the frame empties and a stranger question arrives: not what are you looking at, but who is looking. This season is about the people who spent their lives on that question. And the best door into it is a moment on a mountain path in 1943, when an Englishman looked down and discovered he had no head.

The man was Douglas Harding. He was in his thirties, an architect by training, serving in India during the war, and by his own account he had been chewing for years on a single childish, enormous question: what am I, really. Not what does my passport say, not what do others see. What is here, at the center, where I look out from.

He was walking alone in the Himalayan foothills when the answer arrived, and it arrived as an absence. He looked, and where he had always assumed his head to be, the thing his whole life was supposedly happening behind, he found nothing. No head. Instead, on that spot, was the world: the grass, the far peaks, the enormous sky, all of it happening in a kind of open, boundless, headless space where a head was supposed to be.

Let me be careful right at the start, because this is exactly the sort of story that gets sanded into a miracle. Harding wrote this account himself, years later, and told it many times, and he is the only witness to what happened inside him on that path. The scene I can give you, the trail, the light, the solitary walker, is reconstructed from his own descriptions and my own filling-in. What he reported is not a fact about the outside world. It's a report about a shift in how the inside felt. I'm not asking you to believe he lost an organ. I'm asking you to notice what he noticed, which costs you nothing and which you can check for yourself in about four seconds.

Here is what he meant, stripped of the drama. Point at your foot. You see a foot. Point at your knee, your chest, your hand: you see each of them, objects, out there at the end of your arm. Now point back at your own face, at the thing right between your eyes. What do you actually see there, right now, honestly, not from memory and not from the mirror? Harding's claim was that if you go by direct experience alone, from your own side, you do not find a head there at all. You find a kind of opening. A single vast eye, if you like, that never sees itself, only everything else. On the spot where you keep your head, there is room for the world.

You have a head, of course. Everyone else can see it. The mirror confirms it. Harding was not denying anatomy. He was pointing at the gap between the you that others see, a person with a head in the middle of the scene, and the you that you actually experience from the inside, which is more like a headless window onto everything. We spend our whole lives assuming the two are the same, that we are the small headed thing in the mirror. He looked, on that mountain, and found the assumption simply wasn't in the experience.

What makes Harding worth a whole season, rather than a single strange anecdote, is what he did next. He didn't found a religion. He didn't ask anyone to take his word for it. He was almost suspicious of how obvious the thing was once he'd seen it, and that suspicion shaped everything after. Instead of building a doctrine, he spent the rest of his long life, and he lived into his late nineties, building little experiments. Physical gestures, pointing, cupped hands, simple things you do with your own body that walk you to the same edge he stumbled onto, so you can look for yourself instead of believing him. He turned a mystical experience into something closer to a laboratory demonstration you run on your own face.

And the deepest thing about his story is that he thought he'd discovered the most ordinary fact in the world, not the most exotic. The subtitle he eventually gave his famous book was the rediscovery of the obvious. Not the attainment of the rare. The rediscovery of something so close and so plain that we look straight past it every waking second, the empty, aware space we actually look out of.

But here's the part that surprised even Harding. He thought, for a while, that he might be the only person who'd ever seen this so plainly. He wasn't. Not long after his own experience, he came across a drawing, made decades earlier by a famous physicist who had never claimed to be a mystic at all, that showed exactly what Harding had found on that mountain. A man had drawn himself, honestly, from his own point of view, and drawn no head. And when Harding saw it, the whole thing snapped shut like a key in a lock.

Next episode: the physicist's self-portrait, the drawing that proved Harding wasn't crazy, and the book a very famous author called a work of the highest genius.