Chadwick Johnson Interview

Summary

The conversation explores a sudden shift from panic and anxiety into presence, peace, and a different relationship with thought. It also examines spiritual maturation, acceptance of imperfection, nonduality, and the danger of treating teachers as more divine than oneself.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can spiritual awakening change your relationship with panic attacks and anxious thoughts?
• How can you recognize and live from presence rather than identifying with the mind?
• Are some people more spiritually advanced, or is divinity equally present in everyone?
• How can spiritual seekers accept their imperfections without using spirituality to avoid growth?

Key takeaways

• Awakening can make panic feel harmless by breaking identification with fearful thought.
• Lasting peace includes accepting imperfect conditioning rather than constantly trying to fix it.
• Spiritual understanding may mature even while personality and habits continue to develop.
• Teachers should point people toward their own divinity, not create dependence or hierarchy.
• Direct experience matters more than repeating spiritual jargon.

Transcript

🕊️ Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. As I always say, there have now been over 340 of them. If this is new to you, you can find all the past ones archived at batgap.com, under the Past Interviews section.

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My guest today is Chadwick Johnson, Chad for short. He has a fairly long bio here that he sent me, but I think I won’t read the whole thing, because it’s better if he just tells us this stuff. He’ll tell the whole story in the process of this conversation.

To tell you a little bit about him, he and his wife, Erica, have been married for 18 years. They live in Sacramento, California, with their five children. He has a bachelor’s degree and a law degree. What did you just recently pass? You don’t know yet. He took the bar exam, and we’ll see. We’ll keep our fingers crossed, and we can all pray for Chad and hope that he passes.

He also works as a computer programmer for Hewlett-Packard. He’s an adjunct professor at Sacramento City College. He teaches or conducts regular satsangs in the area, and he has a YouTube channel with all kinds of good stuff on it. He used to be quite an athlete, too. I mean, you actually almost made the NFL, or you dipped your toe into it for a little bit, right?

Chad: A very quick dip. A very quick toe dip, but it was a good experience.

Rick: Yeah. And you’re a pretty good basketball player, so you’re a well-rounded individual.

Chad: Thank you. I didn’t know all that stuff was out there. You must have—

Rick: I heard all this stuff, and you were talking to Jerry Katz, and, you know, other things that I listened to.

Chad: You’re very thorough. Very thorough.

Rick: Well, I’m a junkie for this kind of thing. I love hearing people’s stories and hearing what they have to say. Each week is a new adventure for me, getting to know the person.

Chad: It’s a great hobby.

Rick: It is.

Chad: A great hobby to have.

Rick: Yeah. So I have heard you tell your story in various other interviews, and it’s quite an interesting one. Obviously, we don’t have to start from infancy, but there are some key points in your whole trajectory that I think will lay a foundation for the discussion we’re going to have. I think you know where to start, so let’s go ahead and start, and we’ll take it from there.

Chad: Okay. Well, I think the best place to start is back when I was in law school. That’s when I started having a bunch of panic attacks. I started having pretty severe panic attacks, and once you have one, you always think you’re going to have another one. So for my four years in law school, I was always thinking I was going to have a panic attack.

Then one day, while studying for my last set of finals, I was at Borders bookstore. I took a walk around to take a break from studying, and I saw The Power of Now. Somebody had told me about it previously, and I had put it in my phone. I had a list of books in my phone, and I just happened to see that book.

Right there in Borders, I started reading it, and after not too long, everything kind of just got silent. I knew at that point that I would not be having any more panic attacks. It was one of those drastic shifts.

Everything kind of just got silent.

Rick: Yeah. Drastic shifts are interesting. It’s almost as if the people who have reached more or less of a crisis often have the most drastic ones. Eckhart Tolle is a case in point. He was almost suicidal, and then he had that little thought of, “Are there two of me?” He thought, “I can’t live with myself.” In a way, there were two of them, and just that little thought triggered the shift.

Chad: Exactly. I can’t tell you exactly what I read in his book. Maybe it was that, or maybe something happened where the book was no longer important. I could just sit, with my heart pounding in my chest, and look around and see what was happening.

It was one of those things that I had never experienced or heard of happening. There was a tremendous amount of peace about it, so I knew that I didn’t have to worry and that it was not a bad thing. I also had a shift like this: I just knew that I was no longer a victim to panic attacks. They became very harmless. My whole mind movement became secondary, I guess.

Rick: So it’s not that you still had panic attacks but that they were harmless; you actually just didn’t have them, right? Is that what you’re saying?

Chad: Well, let me just say that there was a honeymoon phase after I had that initial awakening. For several weeks or months—I don’t know for sure—I was just really in a state of bliss. I hate to use those cliché words, but that’s basically what it was.

Every day, I would walk to the river and just sit with the ducks. I wouldn’t meditate; I would just sit with the ducks, be still, and enjoy the lack of thinking. I wasn’t worrying about the future or having ambition. I was just kind of getting used to this and testing it, too, because I wasn’t very certain. I was thinking, “Is this going to go away?” There was a lot of confusion.

After a while, I wouldn’t say I never had another panic attack, but my mind did turn and attack. I would say there were attempts, or the onset of panic attacks, where I was able to see it happen from a different perspective. So there was no panic in the attack.

Rick: Yeah, you were more detached from it or something.

Chad: Exactly.

Rick: And I wouldn’t say bliss is a cliché. Bliss is real, you know. It’s a real experience, and it can be very profound, nourishing, gratifying, and wonderful.

Chad: Whatever it is, whatever you call it, it was definitely one of those things that made me realize right away that nothing else mattered. I could actually throw everything in there and say that nothing else mattered. It was the only thing I cared about from that point on—not my job, not my family, not my friends, not my goals, not my dreams, not my aspirations, not anything. It was just that.

Rick: Did you become irresponsible or detached from your family or something? Did your family perceive a negative shift in you?

Chad: Oh, no, no, no. You have to remember, I was in law school and working full-time at the time, so they weren’t really seeing a whole bunch of me anyway. This happened during finals, so I was still studying for finals after the shift had already happened.

I remember sitting in the library and watching everyone walk around and stress about the exams. Even in my head, I was thinking, “You should probably be studying,” but then there was something greater saying, “All is well,” so I could just rest there. I didn’t have any sense of urgency about studying or anything. It was good.

Going back to my family, they definitely saw a shift, but I think everyone on the outside was probably pretty skeptical about it. I don’t blame them. It was something I probably didn’t handle—I mean, I did not handle—correctly. Looking back on it, I was very immature in having a spiritual awakening.

I didn’t understand it. My imagination caused me to do things that made me think I was more than I was at the time. It was a combination of bliss—or, you know, heaven—and hell, even after the spiritual awakening, after that honeymoon phase.

Reading, grace, and unfolding

Rick: Do you define what happened to you when you picked up that Eckhart Tolle book as the awakening, or was that just the beginning of it, with more unfolding afterward?

Chad: I think that was the awakening, as far as I’m concerned. From that point on, I knew that I was not my thinking. Although I fell asleep, and I continue to fall asleep in my thinking, there was never any continuity in my ego. Do you know what I mean?

When there are always these breaks in between egoic identification, it can never take hold. So there was an underlying sense that all was well, even within the drama.

Rick: Yeah. And you never lost that. That’s cool.

Chad: Yeah, and it just clarifies itself as I mature.

Rick: Yeah. I got the sense from listening to your other recordings and interviews and things that this really set you off on a quest to understand what it was about. You started devouring books and YouTube videos and all that stuff.

Chadwick: Absolutely. I mean, I was already in that study mode, reading and just going deep. I had actually paid for the bar exam, and while all of my classmates were studying for the bar, I was at the river, reading Eckhart Tolle, or reading some type of spiritual material.

I didn’t really start watching the videos until a little later on. So it was mostly just reading and sitting with it. A Course in Miracles—I read that thick book probably ten times over. I was reading in a way that I’d never read before, because there was something in me that was teaching me how to read. I already knew that when you read, you’re not reading to learn. You just read and allow the reading to do whatever it’s doing.

It was very much as if I was being held. My hand was being held the whole time, and I just trusted everything. Everything that I found myself doing, I just trusted it.

Rick: That’s kind of interesting. Even finding The Power of Now was sort of like your hand was being held. It’s like you were meant to see it, right?

Chadwick: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Rick: And I guess you’re saying that ever since then, there’s been a sense that the intelligence of the universe, or whatever, has been guiding you and prompting you to do the next thing?

Chadwick: Yeah. At this point, this is what, four, six, seven years later? Six years? I don’t know. It’s been a long time now, and it has depth. It’s a different experience. It’s very obvious to me now that this is kind of unfolding.

We have a sense that time is moving forward and that we’re kind of playing along. In order for the questions to ever stop, or for you to ever feel that you’re done or whatever, there has to be a knowing that something else is in control, and everything is just so—yeah.

Rick: Do you feel like you’re done?

Chadwick: I mean, to us, the answer to all these questions is going to be yes and no, right? So, of course, I’m done to a certain extent. I don’t have any more questions. The ego doesn’t. The egoic identification—Chad, the role that I play—has a lot of maturing to do. It’s very immature.

My spiritual knowing, or understanding, is far more advanced than my actual conditioning. It’s a beautiful balance, because I wouldn’t have it any other way. I like that. Now I have embraced the part of me that is more conditioned—not embraced it, but I enjoy that part equally as much. I’m not trying to get rid of it or heal it or anything. The universe knows what it’s doing, right?

I am perfectly imperfect.

Chadwick: Part of the peace—the lasting peace, not the sense of a peaceful experience or the bliss that comes and goes—comes from the sense that I am perfectly imperfect. I don’t have to heal or fix anything, and I don’t have to be more enlightened or less enlightened.

If I fall asleep in my identity, or in my ego, if my kids are getting on my nerves and I want things to be different, there’s nothing there to come around and judge me and say, “You should be more enlightened than that.” It’s just like, it is what it is, you know?

Rick: Yeah. So it sounds like you’re very accepting.

Chadwick: Yeah, very accepting.

Speaking from experience

Rick: I’ve listened to all your YouTube videos. I convert them to audio and listen while I’m cutting the grass and stuff. There was definitely a lot of genuineness and a lot of wisdom coming through. It didn’t sound like you had just learned the lines, or learned what to say. It was like you were taking this stuff to heart, speaking from your heart, and coming out with some very helpful stuff for people.

Chadwick: Well, I could say this: when I give interviews as a spiritual teacher, obviously you want to say things that help push along the movement or the understanding. You don’t want to say what everybody else is saying. Everybody says the same thing and regurgitates the same thing over and over again.

The good thing is that I don’t really know a lot of jargon. I’m not educated in that sense, so I just speak from my experience. In that sense, it’s always going to be unique in a way. It’s always going to be fresh.

Rick: That’s really what everybody should be doing, in my opinion. Even if they’re saying things and quoting the Upanishads, or speaking perennial wisdom, if they’re not speaking from their experience—or if they don’t make it clear that they’re not speaking from their experience—there’s something disingenuous about it.

Chadwick: I have to say that with spiritual teachers, there is something in me—I’m just a big skeptic. I’m a very skeptical person. I feel like sometimes we’re not being as honest as we can be, and it’s not helping people to snap out of it. More so, it seems like it’s prolonging things.

For example, when I go to satsang, one of the main things that I try to do is let people know that there are no levels of spirituality. There’s no one who is more enlightened than anyone else.

Then I always get hit with the same thing: “Oh, I just felt this person’s presence when I was in their presence.” And I’m like, “Well, it’s your presence. It’s your presence. It’s not anyone else’s presence that can make you feel.”

Whenever you feel like somebody else’s presence is what’s giving you a sense of spiritual enlightenment, or bringing you closer to the truth, then you’re shining your own divinity onto someone else in a way. We need to recognize our own divinity. Each person needs to recognize their own divinity, and every teacher should be trying to help everyone see that: You are the divine. You are the divine.

You are the divine.

Rick: When you sit in the presence of somebody like Amma, there’s definitely a sense of divinity that saturates the atmosphere, and you feel very uplifted. But it’s not like she’s sending cosmic Blu-rays from her to you or something. It’s more like the ground of being is enlivened in that atmosphere. It’s your own being, and it’s getting enlivened in everyone and everything.

Chadwick: Sometimes when you’re in the presence of a being, maybe when you see them, it causes you to go silent. But it’s not them. It’s your own divinity that you experience.

Rick: We’re all the same spirit. We’re all the same being. But different instruments have different radiating capacities. I’m looking at the light bulbs in my room, and some of them are brighter and some of them are dimmer, but they’re all tapped into the same electrical field. Yet they’re designed in such a way that they have different capacities for transmitting that field and converting it into light.

What nonduality points to

Chris from Sacramento asks, “I don’t know what nonduality is. Could you help me understand it?”

Chadwick: Nonduality is a great pointer to help us see that everything is one thing. There could be countless definitions, but it’s just another one of those pointers that causes you to say, “Okay, they’re saying there’s nonduality, but I see this pin here, and that’s not me. So there’s duality there.” Instead of trying to disprove it, you kind of look within and see, “Okay, well then, what might nonduality be pointing to?”

The only way to do that is not to try to approach it intellectually, trying to understand it, because the tool that you use to understand nonduality is a tool that is in the world of duality. It can’t understand it intellectually like that. Nonduality, whatever it is, has to be seen. Then any question about it kind of loses its meaning in a way.

Nonduality will reveal itself in stillness.

Chadwick: Anytime a question like that comes in, I just say, “Okay, well, nonduality will reveal itself in stillness.” Sit still, pay attention, and nonduality will reveal itself. Then the word nonduality will lose its meaning, and all other concepts will lose their meaning in that space.

Once you go back to thinking and participating in the world of duality, you’ll be able to talk about nonduality. I think that’s kind of how it works, because a definition will be misleading in a sense.

Rick: Science could tell us that, on some level, the pen and your hand are the same thing. If you get down deep enough, on the atomic level, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish them. You can go even deeper than that, and everything’s really all nondual. That’s useful as a metaphor, as an intellectual understanding. But if this is to really be meaningful to us and have any kind of impact on our lives, we should somehow settle into the actual experience of the nondual, not just be satisfied with intellectual explanations.

Chadwick: You could go infinitely deep into anything you want to learn about. When it comes to spiritual enlightenment, you could be infinitely complex, or you could be infinitely simple. From my experience, that’s not the way it happened.

My ego needed to get to the point where it realized that it knew nothing, and anything that it did know was still nothing. The unknown so heavily outweighs the known that what can you really say is known?

Rick: There’s a sort of simplicity about wise souls, even though they might be very learned in a way. There’s a childlike innocence about them. Look at somebody like Thich Nhat Hanh or the Dalai Lama. There’s a sort of innocent sweetness about them that shines through.

Chadwick: In order to find what you’re looking for when it comes to spiritual enlightenment, you have to have the courage to go in the opposite direction from the way you’ve been conditioned to go.

I had to rest in “I know nothing” before I had the courage to go out and start reading and enjoying life again. Any wisdom that I have comes when I am not using my intellect. It comes from being silent and just experiencing.

I think the obviousness of the neutrality of everything is crying out, but we’re all so asleep in our collective dream of bodies and our story that we can’t see the obviousness of how neutral and silent everything is. It’s just waiting here for us to recognize it.

Rick: What do you actually talk about when you want to do satsang? What sort of tools, if any, do you equip people with so they can explore on their own?

Chadwick: Satsang can cover a variety of topics. My goal with satsang is just to be as honest as I can be. I always make sure that I let people know about some of the things I do that they wouldn’t expect an enlightened person to do, because I have a ton of examples.

Rick: For instance?

Chadwick: Getting irritated with my kids is a very common example. I have five kids, and I’m not as patient as maybe Mooji would be. When I play basketball, sometimes it’ll get heated, and I want to win. I’m just very competitive in that sense. I have both the monkey and the mystic, and I embrace it.

In my role as Chad, I no longer feel like I have to monitor my spirituality to make sure that I don’t go too far into my egoic role. I’m free.

I remember when I first had my spiritual awakening, I was very detached from the world. Basically, I wore the same clothes every day, and I just was not interested in social themes or any type of endeavors. I didn’t have any goals or dreams. Nothing else mattered.

Now my life is very much secure. I’m not very spiritual. I’m not a very devout anything. I can go to church; I can embrace my Christian roots and participate fully in religion. I can just allow the universe to do whatever it wants to do through this vessel without interfering in any way. That’s true freedom.

Rick: It’s not like we’re all going to become Saint Francis of Assisi or something. Definitely, changes in personality take place, but there are certain fundamental attributes of personality and behavior, habits, tendencies, and so on that you might have all your life, no matter how enlightened you become.

Chadwick: Before I read The Power of Now, my wife and I—our marriage was just not good. We were basically just roommates. There was no trust from either side. There was a fundamental division; there was just too much ego.

I got the spiritualized ego bad. I really put myself in some embarrassing situations. I’m glad it happened the way it did, but it’s for humility. Humility is the key. Your ego—my ego—needed to be humbled over and over and over again, even to this day.

Humility is the key.

Rick: If you’re sincerely committed to spiritual unfoldment, it’s like God says, “Okay, buddy, you asked for it. Now I’m going to grind you down a bit, if necessary, and humble you.” We get smacked around a bit by situations that help refine us and diminish the sense of “me, me, me.”

Chadwick: You become more of an actor over time; even when my ego rears its ugly head, I just kind of notice it. I get to laugh at myself a lot. I think that’s part of why people come back to satsang. It’s because we’re in there together.

Rick: Did you have any experiences of a spiritual nature as a child?

Chadwick: As a child, I remember lying in bed at my grandmother’s house. I had to be between the ages of four and eight, and I was watching my thoughts.

I remember, as a young child, sitting and watching my thoughts, watching myself talk to myself, and being the silent watcher of my own thoughts talking to myself. But that was pretty much it.

I grew up in the church, and I always had a relationship with God. I was always in my youth group, and I prayed, although there was always something missing. I felt like I was faking it sometimes, but I felt like God was always there.

Rick: After your awakening, did you experience a phase of the dark night of the soul?

Chadwick: I definitely went through that period of confusion. I remember crying tears of joy, just saying, “What is happening?” I remember one specific time when I got out of the gym after playing basketball. I was sitting in my car, just crying, sobbing, saying, “Why is this happening? What is this? What is going on here?” I was overcome with a sense of unconditional love from God, the Creator, or the intelligence that has me here.

At the same time, I remember crying and saying, “I didn’t ask for this. Why? Why are you doing this?” I was shaking my fist at God, really saying, “I just don’t understand.” I was confused, exhausted, and tired. I was asking, “What is going on? When is this going to be over?”

As for how long it lasted, the end of it was so subtle that I don’t even know. It just dissipated slowly but surely, and I can’t put a time on it.

It’s the same with spiritual experiences. I used to have these incredible experiences that I don’t even really like to share because they’re so unbelievable. They’re temporary experiences that come and go, but the experience was so amazing at the time that it encouraged me to seek more and more, trying to recreate that experience or something like it.

But after a while, spiritual experiences are kind of like—you don’t really need one. What can be more spiritual than this conversation or just this moment?

🛤️ Letting go of seeking

Rick: I know people who have been on the spiritual path for decades, and they continue to have profound experiences. They don’t think these experiences are something they hang on to, but they come and go. They realize those things are transitory, and there’s a ground they rest in. That’s the truly significant thing.

Chadwick: The universe knows what it’s doing. Sometimes the universe can cause what we call spiritual experiences, but it will reveal those experiences by making a very everyday, ordinary experience more profound.

Yesterday I was somewhere looking at a tree. I drive for Uber, by the way, and I went into Walgreens late at night and got a Five-hour Energy. I was standing outside Walgreens, and I took it. It was so quiet. The cars were there, but it was quiet within me. I wasn’t thinking a lot, and I was looking at this tree.

I just stared at the tree, and it was amazing. The tree just came alive. It was standing there, and I was sober. I was just looking at this tree. Then I carried on, got in the car, and started driving. That in itself was an experience, a real experience.

Chadwick: I’m not saying that there won’t be experiences like that. I just think they’re a different type now. Spiritual experiences are more sober. They’re more subtle and just different.

Rick: There’s a time, I would say, for everything. There is a season. There’s a time for being with a spiritual teacher, and there may be a time for leaving a spiritual teacher. You can’t make it a general rule that applies equally to everyone, always.

Chadwick: The only rule that I think applies to everyone, always, is that a spiritual teacher cannot hold your hand all the way home.

No one can hold your hand all the way home.

Rick: They can’t do it for you. You have to sort of pay your own dues and do your own work.

Chadwick: You have to turn away from looking for wisdom outside of you. At some point, you have to trust the wisdom within.

🎵 Music, creativity, and openness

One of my hobbies is to come up with creative ways to talk about, or to demystify, mysticism in a way. I think younger generations are less conditioned, so it seems like sometimes they’re more open to it.

It’s all about being very open to what you can learn from everything. For a while, I was very turned off from Christianity. What I realized was that I was turned off from a lot of Christians and from the teachings of Christianity. But there are a lot of Christians doing very good, valuable work, and we should see what we can learn from Christians and from these different teachings.

Rick: If we get outside our genre or our comfort zone, we’re probably more likely to learn something new than if we just stay in our niche.

Chadwick: You need to be outside of your comfort zone. Another way to say that is that we need to be exposed to our own conditioning. Our own conditioning is very sly and sneaky. It can hide itself very well. Being able to recognize your own conditioning is one of the major components of awakening.

Rick: Is there any chance that you’d actually be able to do a rap during this interview?

Chadwick: No, I always have something that I could do. Let me see.

On the one hand, I’m over the hill. On the other hand, my cup runneth over with skill. And I’m just trying to do Jehovah’s will, let the real know that it’s real. This is self-therapy, and I’m a therapist. I’m one with the same intelligence that gave me this inheritance. So believe I’m gonna cherish this. I feel like a sage living in the Age of Aquarius now. I’m trying to free the slaves like Harry now, and lyrics rain on them like the various clouds. You are now rocking with the best, sending you the opposite of stress: unconditional love, knowledge, self-confidence, and rest— the only way not to get depressed. So know this: you exist not just in the flesh. It’s my hypothesis. The only option is to just give love. And there I go with that again. It must be all that madness, then.

Rick: That’s great.

Chadwick: Thank you.

Rick: You didn’t just make that up, did you?

Chadwick: No, no, no. I wrote that down, for sure. I took some time with it.

Rick: Is there anything else that comes to mind that you’d like to tell people while you have the chance?

Chadwick: I just hope that whoever’s watching got whatever they’re looking for. But I also want to encourage everyone to go within. Be still. The silence can tell you more than any interview or any book. Silence is so counterintuitive to listen to. It seems like there’s nothing there, so why would you go there?

The silence can tell you more than any interview or any book.

Chadwick: Sitting in stillness is sometimes like staring at the sun. It’s so bright that sometimes you have to look away. But I would encourage people to stay. Try to be objective as you’re talking to yourself. You can feel yourself trying to be still, or trying to become more enlightened. Watch all that movement.

It’s the watching of that movement—watching yourself, watching your ego—that’s important. There’s a very subtle arrogance that flies under the radar. It’s very arrogant to think that you could figure enlightenment out. But it’s something that we all go through.

I would say, watch that arrogance. Notice how the mind, or the ego, thinks that it’s going to eventually figure this out one day. Don’t judge it. Or, if you do judge it, notice the judging.

At some point, it’s like those posters we used to stare at. You could stare at them for a long time, and they would just look like a bunch of colors. Then, if you stared at them for a while, eventually the 3D image would appear.

I think sometimes it’s like that. You have to sit and constantly get in the habit of paying attention to what your mind is up to. That activity in itself kind of does the trick. The effort begins to subside, and the sense that you’re going to figure it out begins to subside. Then, the next thing you know, you’re no longer seeking.

Give up. It won’t happen until you give up.

Rick: There’s a subtlety to that, too, because it can be misinterpreted to mean, “Might as well just sit on the couch, drink beer, and watch television.” But one can still be very much engaged in spiritual pursuit without the effort. It can be more of a surrender than an individual, willful, force-based kind of effort.

Chadwick: The willful, forceful effort you spoke about is very important as well. But if seeking is going to happen to you, trying not to seek is probably pretty useless, because the ego wants to know, and it thinks it’s going to figure it out.

If you could boil it down to one word, it would be “notice.” Just notice, because there’s a lot going on on your behalf.

There’s a lot happening, as though it is you and you are going along with it. A silent watching of that will reveal that there is no one in there. There’s no individual; there’s no person in there. There’s just a sense of someone being in there.

Don’t expect that “aha” moment, but you can’t choose whether or not you’re going to expect that “aha” moment. Just notice that you’re expecting that “aha” moment. Watching your own thoughts objectively is a practice, something that you have to practice, and then it becomes second nature. Then you realize, beyond the shadow of a doubt, like Eckhart Tolle says, that you are not your thinking. You could swallow that, and everything else will be kind of like the game. You just play along with it.

Not being finished

Rick: We both said earlier that, in a sense, we’re all beginners. I always have a bone to pick with these people who say, “Well, I’m done, and everybody else should just be done,” and all that, because you’re never done.

You may have a sense of contentment, and you’re resting in that sense of contentment, but there’s no end to discovery and the refinement of clarity and understanding and so on.

Chadwick: Why would you want to be done? What does that mean? Anyone who claims to be done is doing so in their ego. How can you be done and, at the same time, have the unknown? The unknown is so vast, there’s no way you could claim to be done.

As long as I’m experiencing life through this, what we call a body, I look forward to the unknown of what’s going to happen as far as my awareness and everything else.

I think what it is is that people are looking for that person who is so enlightened that they could follow them. Looking for a spiritual teacher, trying to find that ultimately enlightened person, is definitely a rock in the bush.

There are people who resonate with certain people more than others, but the universal will bring that person into your life. Honestly, a lot of this is filler. We use all these different concepts and words to talk about something that is so simple.

Ultimately, I arrived at this sober place of quiet security, where I could just enjoy all of the variety of life without looking through the lens of that egoic sense of lack, of not being good enough, or whatever.

Rick: There’s a great quote from T. S. Eliot. He said, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Chadwick: That’s where experiencing really begins. I think that’s why people want enlightenment so badly. When they hear stuff like that, the ego and the imagination give them a sense of what that must be like, and they’re like, “Where I’m at right now is not that, so I have to go get it.”

It makes sense to start. I did the same thing. Ultimately, I arrived at this sober place of quiet security, where I could just carry on with life.

Rick: You went through all that stuff, and in a way you kind of arrived back where you started, but you’re a very different person now than you were. It’s not like all that stuff amounted to a big waste of time. You’ve been transformed, so it really had its value.

Chadwick: You’re not having panic attacks, at least.

Rick: Your life has been really enriched.

Chadwick: Oh, now that, that’s for sure. And also, I love my wife, and my wife loves me back.

Life has been really enriched. Once that subsided, once I realized that it was all a figment of my imagination, I realized that even the sense of separateness is part of my imagination.

My kids have to participate. You have to participate. My wife has to participate in this dream of bodies. Otherwise, if we all got still and said, “Okay, let’s not pay attention to our roles. Let’s just be here now and let silence be here,” and all roles and all conditioning fell away, then I think you’d realize that there’s no one, there’s no person here.

The person only appears when I start engaging in my egoic mind movements. When I’m not engaged in that, when my attention is not on my mind movement, there’s no one in here. There’s just spirit. There’s just this.

You can realize while you’re in the dream, while you’re playing in the dream, that it’s still a dream. It doesn’t make it any more real, but you can play in it, and it doesn’t disappear. Just because it’s not real doesn’t mean it’s not here for your experiencing.

Rick: It says in the Bhagavad Gita, “Established in yoga, perform action.” It doesn’t say just sit and be in Being. It says, “Being there,” which is yoga, but perform action. It’s both ends. It’s not just the silence or just the activity, but the integration of the two together that makes life much more than it otherwise would be.

Chadwick: For a long time, I struggled with something Mooji said: “You are not the doer of your actions.” That’s not an intellectual statement. He’s pointing to something that’s beyond my ego.

Don’t separate yourself from that movement. Don’t separate your own thought from everything else—from the leaf blowing in the wind. Your thought is just as much movement as anything else. Movement is movement. Stillness is stillness. Being able to realize that you are stillness even while you’re doing, while you’re working, or while you’re washing dishes, or whatever.

Rick: If you know yourself as that stillness, then you have the very real sense that you are not the doer, because stillness doesn’t do. Stillness is still, and yet doing goes on.

Chadwick: You don’t have to believe it. It’s not a belief. You can disbelieve it. In fact, the ego doesn’t believe it. An ego can’t believe it. It’s unbelievable. But it’s not for the belief system.

Closing

Rick: I know you do the local satsangs there in Sacramento. Do you do any Skype sessions with people or anything like that?

Chadwick: All my spiritual teaching has really tapered off a lot now. Other than satsang, I’m not doing much. Every now and then, I still have my website, so people contact me and I’ll do a Skype session, or I’ll have one-on-one meetings.

Rick: Obviously, you’re entitled to charge some reasonable fee to cover your time. You’re a busy guy, so I just want to throw that out there in case people wonder how they can follow up.

Chadwick: I love it. This is a hobby, a passion of mine—to continue to talk about it. I also get a kick out of talking to people who are honestly in that valley of the shadow of death. They’re not trying to have any ulterior motives; they’re really just trying to be done. I like having conversations with those people.

Rick: Great. Okay, well, thanks. This has really been good. I’ve been speaking with Chadwick Johnson. As always, I will link to his website and anything else he wants me to link to from his page on batgap.com. You can get in touch with him through that if you want.

This interview is part of an ongoing series. If you go to the website and poke around through the menus, you’ll see that the previous interviews are categorized in various ways. You’ll also see a place to sign up to be notified by email each time there’s a new one. There’s the PayPal button I mentioned in the beginning, and there’s an audio podcast of this that you can subscribe to on iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever.

Until next time, thanks for listening or watching. Thank you again, Chad. This was a lot of fun.

Chadwick: Yeah, it was very fun. I appreciate you allowing me to participate in this experience.

Rick: Yeah, it’s really great. I think people enjoy this. All right. Thanks. I’ll talk to you later.

Chadwick: All right. Thank you, man.