Seeing Your True Nature: Experiments in Self-Inquiry, Perception and Consciousness

Can you see your head right now? What do you see instead? Rather than finding a head here, could you call it an open space for the world? We tend to assume that we are looking out of our heads onto the world, that we are separate from the world and from others. But is that actually true in your first-person experience? This workshop explores these questions through a series of simple, direct experiments developed by the philosopher Douglas Harding (the Headless Way). Rather than asking you to adopt a particular belief or theory, the approach invites you to look for yourself and investigate what it is like to be you in your direct experience. You are the authority on your own experience — no one else. The experience we will be exploring has close links to contemplative traditions, which have variously described our deepest nature as void-like, empty and yet full of the world, a clear light, or pure awareness. Such claims are for testing out rather than believing. Brentyn Ramm is a philosopher who researches consciousness and first-person experience using the Headless Way experiments. Join him and others interested in this experiential approach in Sydney for an afternoon of exploration of our first-person identity.