Douglas Harding hardly needs an introduction. He is a highly respected mystic/philosopher who, for more than forty years, has been sharing with others a direct method for rediscovering our original nature. This audiotape records Douglas and his wife Catherine’s second visit to the Gathering.
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Excerpt
The space that you are is filled with infinite space, consciousness. It has content, and one of the contents is sound. The sound of this voice and other sounds creep in. It is always changing, but the silence never changes. Are you not that silence? The silence is the back of all sound, unchanging, awake, unlimited. Sensations—all sorts of sensations—pressure, irritation here and there, perhaps a little pain or whatever, a whole host of ever-changing sensations, are given in this so-hospitable space. It is awake, which is your very nature. Then, of course, thoughts, ideas, feelings, pictures crop up all the time, one after the other. Images of this, that, and the other with feeling of every possible variety, always changing, come and go, except the background, which has no limits and never dies because there’s nothing there to die. It is your real nature, is it not? So what are you now? Are you this or are you that, changing? How could you be? You need those changing things, all the contents of your immensity.
They all have their job; they are indispensable. They’re not for getting rid of; they are for entertaining and letting go of. The big content of the space is the picture one has built up over the years of one’s personality, the huge complex of stuff. All of that is past memory stuff or future anticipation. Surely, at this very moment, what are you, what am I? Is not this consciousness, this “I am,” your true name? It’s not “I am Catherine,” “I am Douglas,” but just “I am; I am.” When you raise the blind and let in that colored world, you don’t have to change the name of the one you forever are. So let’s do that now.