Chris Hebard interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Chris Hebert. And Chris does something kind of similar to what I’m doing, but in my opinion with a great deal more professionalism. He is the founder of StillnessSpeaks.com, on which he offers interviews with spiritually awakened people and teachers, such as Francis Lucille and many others. But he does it with a very high level of audio-video quality, professional equipment, and puts out very nicely produced DVDs. I’m trying to do this thing on Skype and it’s a little bit of a challenge always, but we’re kind of like barking up the same tree. So I got in touch with Chris and it turns out he has a very interesting story about his own spiritual awakening, to whatever extent he acknowledges that it has happened. And I thought he’d be a fascinating guy to talk to. And so here we are. Welcome Chris.

Chris: Thank you, Rick. Nice to meet you, if only by phone.

Rick: Yeah, or by Skype. So Chris and I have been chatting a bit before starting this recording and he was saying so many interesting things. I said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, let’s start this because we’re just wasting this. We can share this with others.” So we can either get right back into what we were talking about or we can start from the beginning and have you tell your whole story and then kind of weave into some of these topics as we go. Maybe we should do that because you have a fascinating background. I think, let’s just plunge into that.

Chris: Sure.

Rick: So, I’ve read, I listened to an online interview you did with somebody. I also read your thing. You know, I must tell you, when I was listening to your online, I forget whether it was a radio show or something, yeah, it was a radio show with some guys in Nova Scotia. I was actually feeling waves of joy while listening to you. I often feel that when I listen to somebody who is speaking in a way that just really strikes a chord with me. I thought, “Yes, yes!” You know, points you kept bringing out. So I’m really kind of happy that we’ve managed to make this connection. Now, I’ll let you tell your own story. I don’t want to start to reiterate it, but you were a fairly hard-bitten businessman and high-stress, type A kind of lifestyle. That didn’t work out so well for you, but in the end it worked out very well. So let’s hear the whole thing.

Chris: Well, the whole thing…

Rick: Or most of the thing, whatever you want to say.

Chris: Well, the whole thing is really no thing, but as we were saying before, as interviewers, as you and I both interview, I think part of the issue is trying to meet our audience where they are as opposed to where we want to take them. And one of the things that I try to do when the teachers are accommodating is to have them talk a little bit about their story. And that’s really… you have to be very careful with that, because it really doesn’t speak to the point of what they want to speak. But in as much as most people think that they’re human beings on a journey through time and space, sometimes it’s nice to come back and take a look at a little bit of the background. And so with that understanding, I’ll share with you this. I am a child of the ’60s. I was raised back in Pennsylvania in Connecticut. When I say a child of the ’60s, that’ll be obvious, I think, to you, Rick, and me, but maybe not to all the audience.

Rick: May I ask where in Connecticut? Because I’m from Connecticut.

Chris: I was born in Greenwich.

Rick: I used to teach Transcendental Meditation in Greenwich, and I grew up in Fairfield. So there you go.

Chris: That’s amazing.

Rick: Yeah. I taught there in ’70, ’71, ’72.

Chris: Well, I left there long before that. When I was fairly young, my mother’s family was from Greenwich, Connecticut, and my father’s family was from the suburbs of Philadelphia. And their two families ended up buying a business in northeastern Pennsylvania, in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. And we moved there when I was fairly young into a fairly rural part of Pennsylvania, which was about 80 miles from New York City and about 80 miles from Philadelphia. And so we had sort of a town and country lifestyle. We had an apartment in Manhattan, and my grandparents were in Connecticut, and my other grandparents were in Chestnut Hill. When I was very young, you were saying that you were teaching in Connecticut in the ’70s. When I was very young, in fact, when I was 12 years old, I was sent off to prep school on the East Coast.

Rick: Which one?

Chris: I went to Millbrook. I have two brothers. All three of us went to prep schools. My older brother went to Hitchcock, which is where George Bush went. My younger brother went to Blair Academy down in New Jersey. I don’t know if that means anything.

Rick: I’ve heard of it. I taught at some of those schools. I went to Tabor Academy for a year up in Massachusetts.

Chris: Wow. There are no coincidences.

Rick: Yeah, really. Small world.

Chris: So in any case, I ended up at Millbrook School for Boys, which also happened to be the residence of someone else who became quite famous when I was there. I think it was 1966 or ’67 that I ended up there. Dr. Timothy Leary was living there.

Rick: I’ll be darned.

Chris: Yeah, Dr. Richard Albert, who later became known as Baba Ram Das. I went from a very strict prep school where you had to wear a coat and a tie. You’d be thrown out if you smoked a cigarette. We went to church five times a week. They did white glove inspections.

Rick: Wow.

Chris: Somehow I fell into the influence of Stanley Augustus Owsley in LSD and managed to get expelled from prep school in my junior year and ended up in another school which couldn’t have been any more different called the Woodstock Country School.

Rick: That sounds different.

Chris: The only rules were no smoking in bed and no cohabitation between the girls and the boys, neither rule of which denied me. That’s how it all started. This is interesting because there’s a turning point, Rick, that I’d like to talk to you about because you went through this period of time. This probably won’t make a lot of sense to some of the people in our audience who weren’t around at this time, but a lot of us were. There was then the beginning of the Vietnam War. That was, I think, a remarkable turning point. There were two things that happened when we were growing up. One was the Beatles and the other was the war. Both of those things, if you talk to younger people today about them, it just doesn’t register how big those two events were. But the Beatles were really a cultural change of a huge shift that was much bigger than just their music.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Chris: The Vietnam War was absolutely the most horrifically scary, nasty mess that you could ever possibly go through. A lot of us, myself included, got very alienated in the United States during that period of time. In fact, I left the country for a while. I was not about ready to serve. I had a lot of friends that were coming back in boxes from Vietnam. The draft was going on. There was a lot of disagreement as to whether or not we should be there. During that period of time, a lot of people experimented with drugs. I’m no exception to that. During that period of time, a lot of people were introduced through the Beatles to transcendental meditation. I know one person here that that probably happened to at that time. And Eastern religions, which seemed to go hand in hand with some of the experimentation that was going on with hallucinogens. There was some kind of connection there. Coming out of that into the 70s, there seems from this position to have been a split. Either you went further down the road, and a lot of my friends went actually to the East. They went to Tibet, they went to Nepal, they went to India. They continued down that path. Some of them joined communes. Some of them became alternative lifestyle organic growers and that kind of stuff. Their whole life went that way. Another group seemed to try to recover their position in America coming out of the war and try to go back into the beast. I was one of the ones that went back into the beast. That gives you some context, but having gone back into the beast, I became very entrepreneurial. I became a business person. As that happened, I became very aggressively extroverted. A large part of my story has a complete spiritual disconnect to it. There was a huge period in my life where I just didn’t care. I didn’t care. I only wanted one thing in life, and that was more. My career was involved in direct response television, infomercials, and direct mail, and all sorts of direct consumer advertising.

Rick: Do you know Ed Beckley and Tim Hawthorne?

Chris: Yes, they’re both terrificly talented people.

Rick: They’re both friends of mine, actually, and they both meditate. Ed Beckley had his own spiritual awakening when he was in prison. Tim Hawthorne’s company is based right here in my town.

Chris: Yes, and Hawthorne Direct, I’ll tip my hat to. They’re a very talented group. I was sort of more like Butch Cassidy in Sundance Kid. I was always looking over my shoulder going, “Who are those guys?” I was doing a lot of promotions that were right on the edge. One of the big ones, ironically, was that I was involved with the Psychic Friends Network with Dionne Warwick. That was a pretty big deal.

Rick: Oh, yes, I remember that. Yes, call this 900 number and talk to a live psychic.

Rick: Right.

Chris: It was $800 or $900 million worth of sales done on that.

Rick: Wow.

Chris: And then a whole bunch of other stuff like that. But that is about as close as my life got to anything that would be called New Age, and I was very cynical about it. There was really no heart connection going on with any of that.

Rick: Yes.

Chris: I would say that my life was in resistance to everyone and everything. In other words, I was pushing and trying to control my environment. I was fairly successful at that for a long time. Did you ever in your quiet moments think back, “What about that experience I had on acid? There must be something more to it.” Or did you sort of completely blot that out?

Chris: I don’t think you could blot that out. I don’t want to degenerate this conversation into the whole hedonist drug culture thing, but I do want to make one statement for people of our age who went through that period. If I was to say one positive thing about LSD that for sure was a fundamental shift for me, it was coming out of those experiences, I absolutely realized that there were alternative ways of looking at reality that were just as legitimate as the one I was commonly aware of.

Rick: Exactly. That was my big lesson from it. Before that I always assumed that everybody saw the world the same. Then when I went through that experience I realized, “Holy mackerel, everybody sees it completely differently according to their level of consciousness or perspective or whatever. It’s like 7 billion different worlds out there.”

Chris: Yeah, and if you’ve ever really done a strong psychedelic drug, all the assumptions, even the fundamental assumptions about the solidity of objects comes into play and what your relationship is with the world and that kind of stuff. So at a very, very basic level, I think even though I stopped doing all that, and all drugs and all alcohol after a while, I think that that was a lasting impression that left an openness, and this is just presumption and guessing to me, that there was an openness here towards the exploration of who I was from that.

Rick: Right.

Chris: So that would be the irrelevant part.

Rick: We planted a seed and that seed just kind of stayed in the ground for several decades.

Chris: Yeah, and I also had developed this sort of, from the 60s, 70s thing, this sort of renegade, anti-authoritarian, rebellious attitude. And I would say that was sort of a takeaway from that that went into my entrepreneurial career. If I looked at Chris during that period of time, I would say that part of the problem, part of the reason I became an entrepreneur is that I was essentially unemployable. And that may have come from my raising during the 60s.

Rick: Yeah, okay. Okay, so carry on. I interrupted you.

Chris: Well, no, you’re not interrupting. I’m trying not to eat up too much time on this issue, but the next significant thing would be that in 1980 I got sober. I got very heavily into drugs and alcohol, and in 1980, thank God, I got sober. I buried a lot of friends who didn’t get that message.

Rick: Yeah.

Chris: But enough of that. And at that time, all that energy that was going into partying and getting high and all that stuff sort of got redirected in a twisted sort of way into saying to myself, “I’m now sober. All my friends are still partying, so now I really can. I have a competitive advantage.” It turned all that energy into business. And so this whole extroversion and aggression in business came out, and I went on a run for 20 years. Everything went my way, and it was not the way of the Tao. It was the way of Chris. That eventually, as we all know, will lead you at some point to needing to see that the world doesn’t operate that way. And perhaps it was that and my cocky self-assuredness, let’s put it that way. I was so clear from my side of the company with 75 or 80 employees. I operated in three different countries, and everything had gone my way. And then suddenly, everything stopped going my way in every area of my life, and it was very dramatic, and it went on for a long period of time. And during that period of time, I fought and I fought and I fought and I fought, and it just ground me down and ground me down and ground me down. And then eventually, I just had a complete collapse. That’s the best way of putting it. I have called it things like a dark night of the soul. I think it’s an apt description, coming out of it and looking back at it. But everything came to a full stop there. And there was an experience that some people are familiar with that precipitated a whole change in direction in my life at that point.

Rick: It seems like you’re feeling a lot of emotion right now when you talk about that. Am I right? It’s like you almost get choked up when you mention it.

Chris: It’s sort of like it comes back into this moment.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: I sort of re-experience it.

Rick: Well, they say the world is your guru, and it seems like in your case, the guru of the world was doing some major ego-busting, which in the style of Milarepa’s experience or something.

Chris: I have to say, I want to comment on that. I think it’s really brilliant. One of the things I realize now that I didn’t realize then is that everything is prasad, everything is a gift. And some of us get this message very, very simply. We seem to be born that we’re a lot more in sync with what’s going on. But from here, I was sort of at war with everyone and everything. And the only way I ever learned anything, it seems like if someone came up with a baseball bat and hit me behind the head. And that’s sort of what life did to me at that point. And I would have said, “God, this is the most horrible thing I’ve experienced.” If I went through and explained to you this whole thing, your mouth would drop open. You’d say, “It was so horrible.” But it only takes what it takes. And you know, like every crisis that I’ve had in my life, when I look back at it from where I am now, and I look back at what happened, I realize that those points were when my life made these dramatic turns that I would never have chosen to make myself. I put my life on a whole new course, which turned out to be a much better course of life. And so I’ve sort of gotten to the point now where when things apparently are going wrong, that that’s okay too. Something needs to change. The universe needs to change. I need to allow things to change. And that experience was my first lesson in that.

Rick: And you know, theoretically that could have been dragged out over decades, and it could have been a very gradual dismantling, but in a way you could look at it as a blessing that it was pretty much radical. And Kali was really wielding her sword, and let’s get this over with, and get this guy into a better position.

Chris: It was a Kali-type experience. I remember one of the first books, because I had no background in any of this, I knew nothing about Advaita, I knew nothing about any of this stuff. My feeling about New Age was it was about pet psychics and power crystals.

Rick: Right, airy-fairy stuff and all that.

Chris: Yeah. And I read, one of the first openings for me was some of Jed McKenna’s books. He sort of brings that cynical view into the inquiry thing.

Rick: He’s actually from Fairfield, but Jed McKenna is not his real name, and no one knows who the guy really is except his book cover designer, who is a good friend of mine but won’t tell.

Chris: I’ve heard some things on that, but I don’t think it’s for the interview.

Rick: Okay.

Chris: The gentleman who refers to himself as Jed McKenna, the only reason I brought it up is that he talked about this Kali-like inquiry.

Rick: Yeah.

Chris: This burning, flashing burning thing. And from this point of view, that was very similar to what the experience was. There was nothing very graceful, nor pleasant actually, when I went through.

Rick: Yeah, and specifically, you’ve lost your business, you’ve lost your wife, you’ve lost your money. I mean, that’s what you’re referring to here, all that stuff you’d spent two decades building up was being lost, right?

Chris: Yeah, and it just went on and on and on. It was just absolutely a moment in time. It was a great coincidence, but it was everything.

Rick: Health too? Did you lose your health also at that point?

Chris: Yeah, I was diagnosed with chronic active hepatitis C. I was five years to live. My mother died, my father died, my grandmother died, my dog died, my two cats died. My wife left me with my one-year-old son. I got sued by the federal government in a huge suit that went on for seven years. Eventually won it, but it cost us millions of dollars and aged me. So, there were a lot of things that sort of magically all came together at a single point in time that were just absolutely overwhelming. It essentially brought me to a place where I just broke down and I couldn’t go forward one more breath. I just broke down. I curled up in the fetal position in the library at my home and just started convulsing and crying. That was a major turning point for me.

Rick: How long did you lie there, like all night long or something?

Chris: It’s hard for me to put a time on that because what happened during that was there was a tremendous cathartic release from this crying and praying. It’s about the only honest prayer there is, which is, “Please help me.” I was just saying that over and over and over again. At some point I lost all concept of time and of space. So, I’m not sure how long it went, certainly not more than the night. There was a place that I was that was very hard to describe.

Rick: I think we get the picture. So, when you began to come out of that, did you feel like a new day had dawned? Did you feel like a big relief?

Chris: No. Actually, my experience is not about blissful, Samadhi-like experiences, which a lot of people have. I came to this, as you can see, from a fairly violent and sudden experience. What actually happened was I went into this space, this spaceless space for a period of time. It’s maybe the best way that I can describe it. In that period of time, or timeless time, I started noticing, from this space, remotely, thoughts arising, and then thoughts going away. Each time the thoughts were away, I was back in this spaceless space, as soon as I could put it. And then another thought would arise, and go down. And as I was watching it…

Rick: You probably could call that Samadhi if you wanted to, you know? But, you don’t need to.

Chris: As I was watching this, Rick, I realized that the thoughts that were arising were Chris thoughts. And I had this very, very simple awareness. And that was, if I’m sitting here in this emptiness, whatever this is, and thoughts are arising, sitting around, and then going away, and those are Chris thoughts, then who am I? Who am I? And that single thought completely devastated me. A lot of people say, “Oh, I had this Samadhi-like experience, and I saw the nature of reality and everything.” This experience, for me, I don’t want to give the impression, was some kind of great opening of my heart, and the ability to communicate about anything. It was just… I couldn’t turn left or right. The reason I said some of this about my career was to try to set the stage that what I was, was very aggressive and self-assured, very confident in everything that I was doing, right?

Rick: Yeah.

Chris: Coming out of this, I didn’t know who I was. I really didn’t know who I was. And so it was impossible for me to have any confidence. I didn’t know how to turn left. I didn’t know whether to turn right. I didn’t know anything anymore. It was actually very disconcerting. And I didn’t know how to deal with it, other than I took my entire life and put it at full stop. I just put my entire life at full stop. I couldn’t go forward. And so I started spending a lot of time journaling and meditating. I stopped working altogether. I left my family. I moved into a private place. I barely came out for a year, almost a year I didn’t come out, except maybe to have a meal or something like that. And occasionally, as things went on, to meet some people who called themselves teachers. And all that time was really looking at this issue of trying to figure out who I was. Because from where I was standing, there was no thing that I was. I know that sounds sort of silly, and probably is difficult to…

Rick: No, I think it makes sense. I think the people listening to this will be able to relate to what you’re saying. At least they’ve heard things like that before.

Chris: It’s interesting because I knew no one. I had no experience in any of this. I wasn’t a meditator before. When I was in college, I used to do a speaker program, and I knew Alan Watts. I used to drink with Alan Watts, but it was more about partying with Alan Watts than listening to Alan Watts. So I really had no reference point in all of this. Actually, all I had was my own sort of cocky, self-assured cynicism, egocentric sort of shell. And coming out of this, I just didn’t know anything. I didn’t know who I was or what I was going to do, and that, I guess, put me in a position of openness. But I didn’t know where to turn to, and I didn’t know that anyone else had had this experience. And frankly, there was a good part of me that thought that I might end up getting psychiatrically hospitalized. No reference point on any of this. I just said, “Do I need to go see a psychiatrist?” I didn’t know what was going on.

Rick: That’s interesting because listening to it now, I think, “Oh, this is great. He really had the slate wiped clean. He was in a great position to start investigating the spiritual life,” or whatever you want to call it. But for you, actually, you didn’t have that background information to inform what you were in, and so you were just kind of like, “You’re lost,” as you say. But you did, it seems, have the insight or the intuition to begin pursuing spiritual things. I mean, maybe you had that doubt that you might have a psychiatric problem, but it’s like your natural instinct was to meditate and start reading spiritual books and stuff, right?

Chris: My actual inclination was to spend more time looking at who I was and trying to sort things through. It’s funny, when I was in my career before this happened, someone had brought a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s “Power of Now” into my house. I looked at all things like this as New Age garbage. I can remember looking at that book and saying, “Who brought this into my house?” and picking it up and throwing it across the room saying, “Get this garbage out of my house.”

Rick: Wow.

Chris: I guess that’ll give you some kind of idea of just how arrogant I was. I was really very arrogant. After this whole thing happened, I was still experiencing… I wasn’t really sleeping in cycles like I used to sleep. I would sleep when I got tired, and I would wake up when I was awake, and my sleep was all disturbed. Some nights I didn’t sleep at all. One night when I couldn’t sleep, I was walking around, and I saw this book. I thought I’d thrown it away two or three times, and still to this day I don’t know how it got in my house. I read this book, “The Power of Now,” the third time I’d seen it. I just looked at it and I just got angry. I said, “God darn it, it’s still here?” I took what I’m going to do. I said, “I’m going to speed read this.” When I was younger, I’d taken this Evelyn Wood speed reading thing. I’m just going to get done. I’m going to throw this thing away. I sat down and I started reading it. As I started going into it, I got about 10 or 15 pages into it. I thought, “Oh my God, I’m not going to read this in 15 minutes. I’m not going to read this in 15 hours.” So I read another 10 or 15 pages, and I thought, “Oh my God, this is unbelievable.” As I was going through that, this was over a period of an evening, I got up to the part where he was telling a story about being at Oxford University and a dark night of a soul experience he had. Here in this book, and this is the first time I heard anyone say anything like this, he talked about this dark night of a soul experience where his thoughts started appearing to him and then disappearing. That was a huge turning point for him. I saw that and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m not the only guy who’s had this experience.” I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I was. I was so excited that there was someone out there who might be able to tell me something about what was going on, and I might not need to be on Thorazine for the rest of my life.

Rick: It’s funny because when you were telling your story, I was tempted to interject and say, “Boy, that sounds a lot like Eckhart Tolle’s story.” He was sitting there on the edge of his bed, semi-suicidal, and thinking, “I cannot live with myself anymore.” And then, “Wait a minute, are there two of me? Who is this self with whom I cannot live?” And then that precipitated his shift.

Chris: I got terribly excited because that was really the first thing that I ever read. The funny thing was that there was no openness to this material when I came into the book. I did it dismissively. I was going to read it and get rid of it and get back on with what I was doing. And when I got to that point, I went apoplectic. I said, “I’ve got to meet this guy.” And that’s really what turned the whole scale for me. I have always been a guy who has had experiences first, and only later, through help from other people, been able to understand or learn the knowledge of those experiences. These kinds of experiences for me come up, and I really don’t know what to make of them. And then as time goes on and I’m working with people, then maybe the mind begins to get some kind of understanding as to what was going on. So it all happened in that order for me. And there have been a number of times where there are these glimpses. Let’s call them “glimpses,” to try to be less dramatic about them. These “seeings” that happen spontaneously. And a lot of the times, they’re just like chunks of an iceberg that sort of fall off. The full impact of what’s going on isn’t clear for quite a while afterwards. It’s just coming into the event and coming out of the event. When you compare who you were before the event, who you were after the event, you know there’s something very essential that happened.

Rick: Yeah, I think that kind of happens with most people. It takes a while to integrate these shifts, you know, and to have our understanding catch up with our experience. Although I suppose it can also work the other way around, where people have an understanding that way exceeds their actual experience, and they sometimes mistake that understanding for the experience. And that’s a whole other issue. But they’re very often out of sync and have to kind of balance out with each other.

Chris: So that’s how it happened for me. I immediately began reaching out to Eckhart Tolle and the people that were associated with him. And that’s when I first started getting turned on to some other teachers and some books that made sense. And that was such a huge relief for me. That was really where all of a sudden I started feeling comfortable, like my life was going in a new direction and this was an exciting thing. And then as I met more people and I spent more time, my whole life changed around this.

Rick: That’s great.

Chris: Completely changed around this. It became this initial– there was a clean sweep and everything was fine after that. It’s a tremendous amount of conditioning here. And it’s sort of like a conditioning. Maybe it’s like a clutch on a car. You might be able to disengage the clutch. The clutch is still spinning. You don’t have any traction anymore. But there’s still–I don’t want to give the impression that there was some kind of an event that all of a sudden everything was behind me and good. Because there was and is from time to time still conditioning that comes up, things that I see about myself that are incongruent with what I knew to be true. If that makes any sense.

Rick: Sure. I think everybody can relate to that. Everybody has a good deal of conditioning whether they admit it or not. Yeah, we don’t go from being a total idiot to an enlightened sage overnight. There’s definitely a–I mean a lot of people are down on this whole idea of some kind of progressive development, but I’ve never seen an exception to it personally. I always feel like there’s–maybe on some level there’s no growth to undergo because there’s some level of life that’s always the same, but on all the levels of life where we see change and difference, there’s infinite room for improvement. That’s my take on it.

Chris: It’s a very beautiful journey. It’s a very beautiful journey. So in any case, as these–as pieces of this picture started to come together for me and as I met people who I thought were really helpful for me, I was really excited about that. I do know, Rick, and I’m sure you do much better than I have said in the past, that when this happened, it was in 2006, that there weren’t a lot of organized Advaita sites out there. I’ve had some criticism from some people that have been around much longer than I have, saying, “Well, that’s just not true. Eckhart Tolle’s site was up, Gangaji’s site was up, Wayne Liquorman’s site was up, Advaita.org.uk.” Well, that is true, and I did find some of them. I ended up over at Advaita.org.uk, which is Dennis Waite’s traditional Vedanta site at one point. He was very helpful. But it was not as easy–perhaps it was just not easy for me, certainly it was not easy for me, finding these resources. I stumbled into the Eckhart thing, and then it was sort of word of mouth that got me from one place to another. And as I found stuff that I knew was sincere and honest and that helped me, it was all about the selfish journey of Chris. And then as things connected here, I had this little website, and I would just say, “Great, okay, I’m just going to start putting them on here, like in an image at night, the sea and a harbor, and trying to find your way into the harbor in a boat.” And I sort of looked at it like, “We’re just going to leave channel markers out there, so that if someone else is coming along and is trying to find their way to shore, that these channel markers might be some help to them.” So that was how Stillness Speaks came to be.

Rick: I think it’s a laudable impulse. It’s also a matter of personal dharma. I think maybe you and I have similar dharmic tendencies in terms of wanting to share with others. Some people are perfectly content to just do this for themselves, and that’s okay too. But some people have to do this also.

Chris: Well, you know, ultimately speaking, I do this for myself. And I think even doing the stuff of filming, and then doing the editing, and doing the writing, is the way I really investigate and learn what’s going on. It takes that kind of thoroughness with me to do it. But the actual process of doing that, and then putting it up on the internet and doing all that, it’s sort of my journey and my road map. The thing that’s important, I think, and the thing that I’ve discovered is that my road map is not your road map. It doesn’t have to be the same. There may be places that it are, and places that it aren’t. I never tell anybody that what’s worked for me should work for them, because really I see that there are an infinite number of roads. There’s only one destination for sure. But I’ve met so many people who have come at this from so many different directions, from Tibetan Buddhism, to Hinduism, to Kabbalah, to Western philosophy, to stepping on a leaf. No teacher, with teacher. And so I get to see this beautiful thing unfold in an infinite number of ways, that always leads to the same thing.

Rick: Yeah, it does. And it’s funny because a lot of times people go through a lot of different things before they end up coming to something which sounds pretty similar to what everyone else has been coming to. Like for instance, Jac O’Keefe, I’m sure you’re aware of her. She went through everything under the sun, and eventually has arrived at a non-dual way of looking at things. But boy, what a journey. Or this lady I interviewed a couple of weeks ago, who has nine kids, and her whole path was the Jesus prayer, which she did with great intensity every night, despite her nine kids, from like three in the morning until the kids woke up. And it sort of lit a fire in her that resulted in this, really ultimately, this profound awakening or transformation. Letting the cat in here. So it just emphasizes your point that someone, I forget who it was, but there was some well-known teacher recently, I heard him quoted as saying, “You know, all six billion of us are on a spiritual path. It’s not like there are spiritual people and non-spiritual people or something. Everyone is on that journey. You were on a spiritual path in the midst of your entrepreneurial business life, a decade or two decades ago.”

Chris: Absolutely. Robert Adams said it the best, Rick. He said, “All is well and is unfolding exactly as it should.” It was not clear to me before, for quite a while, that every single thing that I was going through was exactly what I had to go through to get to where I am. So it’s all good. And if someone is, you know… What kind of cat is that?

Rick: She’s a Siamese Himalayan.

Chris: Yeah, I have two Siamese cats.

Rick: She often sits on my lap while I do these interviews.

Chris: Very cute.

Rick: Her name is Leela.

Chris: Leela! My Shiva and Shakti.

Rick: Oh, great. We could get them together, but I don’t think they would like it. Hi, Chris! (Laughter)

Chris: My wife is right there.

Rick: So, OK, to get back to your evolving story, and incidentally you have a cool email address. It’s oncechris@stillnessspeaks.com. I saw that a year ago. That’s a clever email address. But getting back to your story, you read Eckhart Tolle, that was a big wake-up for you, or “aha”, and you started reading all these other guys, but you eventually ended up with Francis Lucille, and in fact you moved from Dallas to California to live near him. So how did you stumble upon Francis, and was it sort of like, you know, really obvious to you when you finally met him that this was the guy that was for you?

Chris: Stumbling is a really, really important word. Jerry says it a lot, and I think that most of the legitimate things that have happened for me have been stumbling. It really doesn’t have a lot to do with my conscious decision. I had met some people associated with Eckhart Tolle who gave me an unpublished copy of a manuscript called “Eternity Now.” It was just a printout, and I started reading it, and as I read that book I was absolutely amazed in itself. I said, “My God, who wrote this?” And at the very end of it, because it was someone’s personal copy I suspect, was the phone number, his phone number. And I’d finished reading it, and I sat there and I went, “No, this can’t be.” I looked at it again, and I said, “No, I really shouldn’t.” And I thought about it for a little more, and I said, “Oh, hell with it, I’m calling.” And I picked up the phone, and I called the number, and I got Raj Thakur, who is an Indian who works with Francis, helps him at his home. And I just said, “Look, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know anything at all about Francis Lucille.” I had met a few teachers at this point. I was very lucky. Eckhart’s people had put me in touch with Adyashanti, with Gangaji, and Pamela Wilson. But outside of those, I really had no experience at all, and I was really, really seriously stumbling. And I said, “You know, this book is unbelievable.” And he said, “Well, Chris,” Raj says to me, “Chris, why don’t you come on down?” And I said, “Yeah, well, maybe I will.” “Do you have retreats?” “No, no, just come on down.” He says, “You know, you can ask what we get together in the living room. You can ask some questions, and then we’re all going to get together for dinner, and then maybe afterwards we’ll watch a movie together.” And I’m like sitting here, and I’m like, “Oh.” I guess in my own mind, there was still this hierarchy thing going on now. Teacher, student, you know, all these separate things going on. And I said, “Watch a movie?” My life is a catastrophic meltdown, and this guy was talking about hanging out and watching movies. So I thought about it for a minute. I was in Vancouver at the time, and I said, “Okay, I’m going.” And so I went down here to Temecula, and I met him, and I stayed here for a while. And during that period of time, yeah, I had some very profound experiences, again, happening that I can’t even begin to explain. But they were more traditional. I hate to use these words because these words alienate as well as communicate, but they were more traditionally called like a Nirvikalpa Samadhi experience.

Rick: Did those experiences happen just spontaneously as a result of sitting around with Francis, or did you do some practice, or what?

Chris: It makes almost no sense at all, some of the things that I say about this, Rick, you’re very strongly about them, and I get criticized a lot about them.

Rick: I won’t criticize you.

Chris: Physical proximity, you may have noticed this from the–

Rick: Oh, absolutely.

Chris: Physical proximity to someone who’s fully awake has a huge and direct impact on me. Franklin Merrill Wolf called it the induction. He used to say when he used to speak live with people that people, in spite of the words, that there was a transmission of sorts that happened, that people actually got what was going on in the presence, that there was something going on which appeared to be geographic or somehow tied up in the phenomena of the house, the place, the person, or whatever it was. Ramana Maharshi talked about the transmission of silence. So this is not unheard of. He said that the power is in between the words. The power is not in the words. The truth is in between the words. The words are just sounds.

Rick: Yeah.

Chris: No, the Indians have a word for it. They call it “darshan.” I think “darshan” means “sitting near,” does it? Or is it “cognition?” I think that’s what the translation may mean. There are many people whose spiritual path has just been to be in the proximity of their guru, and there’s a sort of an osmosis that takes place, and they get awakened by virtue of that. I enjoy going to see Amma, the hugging saint. It’s a real profound thing, just having that sort of proximity. It may appear superficial, “Oh, she’s just hugging people, isn’t that cute?” But boy, it’s like a spiritual transmission, and you come away from that just feeling a major shift.

Chris: Yeah, I have to say, very early on, after my first year while I was stumbling around, I got a hold of Dennis Waite and I said, “Listen, I’ve never been to India. I feel the need to go to India, but I need to go with someone who really knows India.” And he put me in touch with a guy named James Schwartz, who is such a…

Rick: Oh yeah, I’ve interviewed James.

Chris: Yeah, James actually had almost no public interface when I met him. He was living in India, and I went to India and I spent a lot of time traveling. We went to Varanasi, went to Tiruvannamalai, went to Kerala, went all over the place. Most of what I know about traditional Vedanta started with him. And he’s just about the funniest human being you’ll ever meet.

Rick: Yeah, he’s a great guy.

Chris: I feel like I’m with my grandfather and he’s going to tell fishing stories or something. We hang out at my house and watch basketball together, so there’s a real heart connection for me in there. When I was in India, one of the things that I noticed, Rick, and some people are going to say, “Oh, this is just psychological and nonsense,” but it’s the truth of my experience. There are certain temples that I would go into, and I could feel this container-less space, this infinite space, this deep, deep, deep pool when I went in there. And it would be so powerful sometimes that I wouldn’t even get inside. I would just sit down and I would sit there for hours and hours, and James would come up, “Chris, what are we doing? What’s supposed to be going on?” I’d go, “I’m going to hang here for a little while.” So that was always sort of peculiar about me. There was some sensitivity to that. Maybe that explains some of what happened when I was with Francis, but some very extraordinary things happened. And I try not to spend too much time on the experiences, because all the experiences begin and end. But there are shifts that occur in them, and then over time, you begin to notice your whole view and your whole direction of life has changed. I hate to say this, but I just said it to someone else and someone took offense to it. It’s almost like when you’ve been kissed by God, your life is over, and you’re just sort of drawn to the sweetness and the perfume. Francis talks about the perfume of silence, because awareness has this, even though it doesn’t have attributes, it does have attributes. It affects the body.

Rick: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know why you’re getting so much flack for this stuff. I mean, to me, this is like, you know …

Chris: Only from those people who haven’t had the experience of being in the presence of the teacher who did this.

Rick: Right, maybe that’s it.

Chris: There’s a lot of people, Rick, particularly on the Internet, who are jumping from teacher to teacher to teacher. And I’m not judging that, please. I’m not judging anyone on anything. I love everybody. But this jumping from teacher to teacher and doing it on the Internet, may not, on reading books and coming to conclusions on their own, I’m not saying that that’s good or that’s bad, but the experience, which really makes no sense that a perception could be veiling ananda, veiling presence and bliss in such a way. But my experience is, and the only way I can explain this, is that it seems that consciousness is aware of itself, and when in the company of like-minded people, knowing and being create this phenomena called anandam. It’s that feeling of love and bliss and openness that really doesn’t belong to a Chris or to anything else. It’s what’s here before all that. So I’m not a teacher, okay? I don’t have these great skills of explaining all this, but I’ve been a junkie of this ever since I experienced it. And so I had this experience and it was so profound I could hardly walk at one point. I got on a plane going back home to Dallas, Texas. I was on the plane and I said, “What am I going to do now?” I had no idea. I still had my home, everything in Dallas, and all of a sudden the thought just occurred to me. I said, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to sell everything I have, I’m going to pack up everything, and I’m going to move down here and live right next door to Francis.” And so that’s what happened. And that did not stop me from going out and interviewing and trying to share and see what this beautiful blossoming that’s going on, I think. And sometimes people think that my fingerprints end up too much on this film work that I do and that kind of stuff.

Rick: Oh, me too. I get criticism for talking too much.

Chris: I apologize for that, but it’s my own enthusiasm.

Rick: No, you’re fine. I’m not criticizing you.

Chris: I know that you’re not, but for anybody who’s watching this, I apologize. It’s not meant to be any indication on anything about a Chris. It has nothing to do with a Chris, okay? It has to do with that which precedes a Chris. But my heart is so thrilled and so happy about all this that I really enjoy doing it. And sometimes, Rick, and I’m sure you know this, I get so enthusiastic that it’s not an interview anymore. It’s a conversation between two truth lovers, and that’s what I love to do. And sometimes when that happens, people are like, “I don’t really want to listen to Chris. I came here to listen to Jeff Foster. I came here to listen to Peter Juben, Rupert Spiro, Francis Lucille, Greg Good, whoever it is that I’m working with.”

Rick: I’ve gotten the same criticism. A couple of weeks ago, some guy said, “Why don’t you just interview yourself?” And then some other guy chimed in and said, “No, I like the discussion quality of it. You’ve been around for a while, you have something to say also.” Larry King said, “If I’m talking, I’m not learning anything.” But I think this is a little bit of a different situation when we’re doing these.

Chris: Well, for me, what I do with Stillness Speaks is not my primary business. I’m very lucky that I have a career which allows me to do what I do with Stillness Speaks. People ask me, “Why would you do Stillness Speaks? It’s a sea of red ink. It’s obviously a fairly sophisticated site, and it costs quite a bit of money to put it together and all that.” And I just said, “You don’t understand that the commerce of Stillness Speaks isn’t cash.” The commerce of Stillness Speaks is the unbelievable friendships that I make on this journey. The people that I know, I say, “I cannot even begin to express to you how many beautiful people I meet.” And they become my heart friends. I mean, from here on out, if I’m in Fairfield, Iowa, if you don’t think I’m showing up at your house to meet your cat, you’re down here, you know I’m going to be saying, “Come on down, let’s have a cup of tea together and spend some time together.” This is my love. And what I’ve discovered is that beyond my basic needs of food and clothing and shelter, that what really makes me happy is the company of like-minded people. And this has given me not only the opportunity to spend time with people that we call teachers, but also because Stillness Speaks is actually quite large. We have a fairly big newsletter and a lot of people. We get over 2,000 visitors a day on Stillness Speaks some days. And I get these emails from all over the world and I call them “Yanni’s in the mist.” They’re people that don’t want any attention. They’re people that don’t need a limelight, they don’t need to teach. They’re as clear as bells. They’re magnificent people and they’re generally very humble. I have to be careful when I talk to them so that I don’t come off as being braggadocious or arrogant or delusional because they generally know more than I do. And they’re just there to nurture and to be friendly and to help this thing unfold. So I keep meeting, every day I’m meeting people that are part of the unfolding that’s going on here. It’s so magnificent. And so it only makes sense, what Stillness Speaks is only makes sense in that context and I’ve just met the most unbelievable people and I’m proud to be able to call these people my friends.

Rick: Yeah, you stated very eloquently something I could say myself as a result of my experience with this Buddha at the gas pump thing. It’s like this global family and it just keeps deepening and expanding its connections and so on. It’s really a joy.

Chris: You know something Rick, I’ll ask you this question. The table’s on you. Something that’s very clear to me is that all these people that I’m meeting are exactly who I need to meet.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, that too. I mean once in a while I’ll do an interview and I think, “Well I should have thought about that one a little bit more ahead of time, that turned out to be a bit of a dud.” But most of them, it’s like they’re kind of, as I think you said about half an hour ago, that this is kind of in a way become a spiritual practice for you, doing this whole interviewing thing. And I experience that too. It’s sort of like I keep, as you say, meeting the people I need to meet, getting bits and pieces of understanding and insight, having people kind of prod and probe me and change my kind of perspective in different ways. I found it to be a very, I’ve only been doing it for a little over a year, it’s been very conducive to my own growth.

Chris: Right, and that’s really ultimately what it’s all about. When you start getting the impression from afar that this is a commercial enterprise that we’re involved in here, even though we do sell DVDs, we try to recover as much of the money as we can, it is much more likely that Stillness Speaks will just become one day a formal 501(c)(3) non-profit.

Rick: Yeah.

Chris: But it’s, you’ve missed the entire point. The point of Stillness Speaks is to create, my heart tells me that what we’re trying to do is create a safe place, in other words, that I’ve met the people that are on the flight and I have some confidence that they’re not bad actors, because we have bad actors in this arena, that they’re honest and that they’re sincere and that at least some of what I’ve talked to them with me has helped open things up here now. And if I see that, then I say, why not share this with other people? It’s an open gate from that point forward. And some people say to me, why is this person not on here, why is this person on here? And I just say to them, you know, it’s not that Byron Katie is not on the site because I don’t want her on the site, I would love to have her on the site, but I need to spend some time with her, so that I really understand what I’m doing and put her up there, because I just want to make sure that everything that comes on to Stillness Speaks is really a great thing. And I’m not saying that I’m the only resource or the best resource or anything, what I am saying is, this is about my journey, and I share it with you, if you like it, it’s yours, I’ll try to make as much of it free as I possibly can, and if it’s not for you, that’s okay too.

Rick: I’m going to come back to a point you were making a little while ago, about sitting in temples and sitting with teachers and all, and I think that there could probably be a scientific explanation for that phenomenon of the transmission or the contagion of awakeness from one to the other, and I think Rupert Sheldrake has tried to do that with his whole morphogenetic fields idea, and I have a friend who wrote a very interesting book about subtle energy, and how subtle energy is as real as any other thing we know about, and how it has a role to play in spiritual awakening. And I think that some temple in India where people have been going for thousands of years and doing spiritual things can kind of build up a surplus of subtle energy, or whatever term we want to use, so that when you sit in that presence of that place, you become saturated with it. And the same is true of a spiritual teacher, especially one who is the right one for you, with whom you have the right resonance. It just naturally triggers profound shifts, as it has in your case with Francis.

Chris: Yeah, it’s true, and I can say that I don’t think that places accumulate this kind of, whatever it is, energy, or Shakti, or subtle energy as you call it. I know that to be true. And I can’t explain it because I see all perception as being empty. You know, like when I close my eyes and I talk to myself, really all that I hear, and I do hear these thoughts, are sounds. And before they’re sounds, there’s nothing but this magnificent space, and then there are the sounds, and then there’s the space. And when I look at that, I realize that the sounds don’t have any intelligence. They really don’t have any meaning. So where did the thought come from? Well, it had to have come from what was there before, and where did it go to after it was done? And the examination of that shows me that sound, in this particular case, is an empty perception, that what’s going on is going on between the sounds. And when I start looking, examining bodily sensations and sensory perceptions in the same way, I realize that the same is all true. That the substance of what’s going on isn’t in the perception. It’s in the free, open awareness that supports it all. And it’s turning around and realizing that my own beingness, my essential beingness, is never gone. That is the great reward. And that sense of beingness is somehow attracted. Oops. It’s attracted when there is a proximity to other perceptions. So somehow consciousness is aware of itself, and there’s this… It’s a vibrational thing. It’s an anonym. It’s the great joy of being. And it’s magnificent. It’s called love. And it’s love without an opposite, in my experience.

Rick: Yeah. One thing I was impressed with when I listened to you, when I’m talking to you now, and also preparing for this interview a little bit, is that you’re a relative newbie to this whole thing. I mean, it’s only been about five years, and yet you’ve become so articulate with it. Maybe you’ve… I guess that’s a reflection of the degree to which you’ve immersed yourself. But you’re really quite an articulate mouthpiece for this knowledge. I commend you on that.

Chris: You know, Rick, I’m very simply a one-trick pony. After having been dropped, for lack of a better term, into this spaceless space, I have only one interest in mind. I’m really actually very boring. But yeah, I’m fascinated. I’m fascinated even though what we’re talking about can’t be spoken of, even though it’s not in the words, I just find it endlessly fascinating trying to describe it with words. So I read all traditions, because I find this material in all traditions. I find it in Christian literature, Hindu literature, Sufi literature, Muslim literature, Western philosophical stuff, and in Satsang, and from people, and in nature. I just see it everywhere. Every perception that I see is only a confirmation of that which is. So it’s a great joy, it’s a great joy. Everything else to me is sort of pale; nothing else to me has any great attachment. There are some things. I like comfort. I’d rather be in a first-class seat in an airplane than a coach seat, and I like to have a really comfy bed, but the truth of the matter is that my heart has been stolen.

Rick: Yeah. Jesus said something about not being lukewarm, you know, and it appears that that hasn’t been your tendency. I mean, first you were not a lukewarm businessman, and now you’re not a lukewarm spiritual guy. Yeah, plunged into this thing.

Chris: That’s definitely true.

Rick: So what would you say with regard to, I mean, you’ve been hanging with Francis now for four or five years or something, and you’ve been having, undoubtedly you could probably recognize that there has been a progressive unfoldment or maturation or deepening or something over this period of time. Can you say a bit more about that, or is it too abstract and hard to describe?

Chris: I’m going to take a shot at something that’s another controversial topic, which is, is there progression at all? Standing as the absolute, there is no time or space; that’s very clear. But in as much as most people who are listening to an interview believe that they’re human beings on a journey through time and space, there is something to do, and that something to do is to investigate the truth of whether or not you’re a human being on a journey through time and space. And whether or not that journey precipitates or doesn’t precipitate anything, from my perspective, it has prepared my mind or answered questions that were in my mind that allowed it to settle down. I know this may sound strange, but until I had answered enough of the questions that were in my mind regarding the nature of reality and the nature of who I was, my mind wouldn’t let go. I have a very Western background, very scientific. I had a very materialistic view of the universe. And so I really needed, I needed someone who was well-grounded academically, scientifically, as well as well-grounded in these traditions to be able to walk me through this tremendous minefield that was my belief systems. And they were all beliefs that turned out to be all beliefs. So from that point of view, yeah, as long as I felt as though I was a human being on a journey through time and space, I think there was something to do. And yes, I do believe there is progression. And Francis, of course, I have to tell you that in spiritual matters, it’s very dangerous to go things alone, and I have some very dear friends who have done this without any teachers. I mean, Carl Renz is a remarkable guy, no teacher. Jeff Foster is a remarkable guy, no teacher. I mean, there are a lot of people I can point to. Tony Parsons stepped on a leaf.

Rick: Oh, was that him? Yeah. I mean, Gangaji had a – not Gangaji, Eckhart Tolle had – excuse me, Byron Katie had a cockroach crawl across her foot. So at that moment, everything that I’d done up until that point, when the cockroach crawled across my feet, it became very clear looking backwards that none of that mattered. But I do find it coincidentally important as a human being to point out that all of the people, virtually all of the people, maybe Ramana Maharshi, who I’d never met, might have been an exception, most virtually all of the people that I’ve met were people that were sincerely and deeply looking at these issues prior to having it dropping away. And so from that point of view, and that may just, from this point of view, had to do with satisfying the mind so that the mind – because the mind’s not invited to this party. The mind is not invited to this party. And until the mind understands that and realizes that it’s okay, it’s going to keep trying to reconstruct its personality and its identification. It’s going to try to co-opt itself as a teacher. It’s going to try to co-opt itself as knowing something, figuring something out. And I had a lot of that stuff that I had to sit with. So, but yeah, and yes, I feel that there are a lot of teachers that are perfect. Francis is a great candidate if you need to go deep sea fishing. Okay, and…

Rick: So are you saying that you had your own cockroach moment at some point? I’ve had, and I suspect I always will have, cockroach moments.

Rick: Okay, there have been many.

Chris: It’s the interface with life.

Rick: Right.

Chris: It’s just, the beauty is that the mystery that I am and that we are is constantly revealing itself in the moment. There is no past and there is no future, and right now, right here, things appear. So…

Rick: There’s a nice quote from Francis… I’m sorry, what?

Chris: I guess the only question is who are they appearing to?

Rick: Right. There’s a nice quote from Francis’ teacher, Jean Klein. He said, “Awakening is instantaneous. Clarity takes place in space-time.”

Chris: Yeah, this is… Francis speaks about that a lot. I like that a lot, and I urge people when they talk to me that… Like when we were talking in the beginning, “Oh, it’s nice. You had this experience. You cleaned the decks, and you’re ready to go forward.” There are… Francis uses two words. He uses the word “enlightenment” and he uses the word “self-realization.” Enlightenment is the overwhelming seeing of the nature of reality, not necessarily in a way that makes any sense, but it’s a seeing, maybe a consciousness without an object, in a sense, followed by a period of time where everything that’s going on in my life, which is habitual, as it comes back up, is seen to be either consistent with what I now know or inconsistent with what I now know. And there’s this process of self-realization as that stuff falls away. And during that period of time, yeah, there’s a sadhana. There’s a sadhana of cooperating with reality and allowing that rearrangement to take place. And it happens here. It wasn’t only a mental thing. The thing that’s wild for me is that it’s also becoming a body thing. There are actual changes going on at the level of the body as well.

Rick: Absolutely.

Chris: That process, I believe in that process.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, this is lived through a body. If you had a serious stroke or something like that, this wouldn’t be lived anymore, or if your body died, obviously. And so it stands to reason that this… I like to kind of think of it like the analogy of a radio or something. I have this little cheap $5 radio in the bathroom and I listen to NPR in the morning and it’s always getting out of tune and I have to kind of keep it on the station. And there’s a great range to which the physiology can be fine-tuned in order to be a more fit instrument for living this.

Chris: Yeah. It’s not like it requires any effort here.

Rick: Right. It just happens.

Chris: Things appear. The things that are incongruent appear. They’re seen and they’re let go of. There’s not a lot of effort to this. It’s really nice. Totally incongruent with the first half of my life.

Rick: Yeah. I know you know Chuck Hillig. Have you ever heard his little interpretation of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”?

Chris: I don’t recall it right now.

Rick: Very sweet, the way he kind of picked up that nursery rhyme. Think about the lyrics. “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream.” So you’re going with the stream, you’re flowing, but there’s a little bit of rowing involved. You’re not just letting yourself drift aimlessly. And then, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, four times for emphasis, life is but a dream.”

Chris: Good. Good to stand up.

Rick: Yeah. This whole thing about progress being some kind of a dirty word in some circles, I kind of like to…

Chris: Doer versus non-doer.

Rick: Pardon?

Chris: Doer or non-doer. I get it. I understand.

Rick: Yeah, it’s like, you know, it’s not either/or. It’s both/and, as Tim Frieck likes to say. On one hand, there’s a level at which there could not conceivably be progress. It is what it is. It’s never going to be anything other than that. There are other realms of life in which progress is built in. That’s the way it works.

Chris: Yeah, there’s an absolute and then there’s a relative. The relative is an appearance, but it’s… I mean, it would be like saying that there’s no dreaming at night, right?

Rick: Yeah.

Chris: I mean, denial of my experience.

Rick: Right. Yeah.

Chris: So the question, the only question that ever arises is, “How much free will is there about any other?” And that’s a good question to keep looking at.

Rick: Oh, that’s an age-old debate. And even on that one, I think we can sort of say both/and. You know, yeah, there isn’t any and yet there is. And if you perceive yourself as having some, then exercise it wisely.

Chris: You know, Greg Good said something. I just put out a new DVD called “Western Masters of Nonduality.” What a pretentious title, huh? I interviewed 17 teachers and put them all on it, but Greg had a great line in it. Greg said, “You know, on this issue of doing or not doing,” he says, “I’m not taking a position one way or the other.” He said, “A very good friend of mine once said, ‘Listen, there’s an awful lot of different things you do. My recommendation would be to throw the kitchen sink at it.'” (Laughter) I say, “That’s very good advice.” Just throw the kitchen sink at it. Why not? Does he mean, like, you know, grab all the gusto you can get, just sort of do them all or do whatever you want to do?

Chris: It’s super hard in the moment, you know?

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: Everything. Find out what in your direct experience works for you. This isn’t about anyone else’s journey. It’s about your journey.

Rick: Yeah, you know, and that was one of the things that gave me joy when I was listening to your interview, that you do seem to have this all-inclusiveness, which is a little bit different than some of the people out there who seem to have this exclusiveness, in which they kind of dismiss the value of what a lot of people have been doing for thousands of years. They say, “Well, it’s all a waste of time. You shouldn’t meditate. God is just a human concept,” and all kinds of things they throw out, which to me is not the whole picture. I’m much more inclined to say, “Great, whatever works for you, and it’s all good.”

Chris: I don’t force any of this stuff on anyone, but I have to tell you that, like you, the Vedanta, the Brahma Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Upanishads, seems to have a track record of a couple thousand histories of consistently waking people up.

Rick: Yep.

Chris: And my experience of studying those texts has been tremendously pleasurable. This has never been an effort for me. It’s something I really love to do. So if your heart is telling you to do that, why not do that? Because after it’s all over, what is life other than celebration? Do what you like.

Rick: I think one of the hang-ups, one of the problems is that people often mistakenly use a description as a prescription. In other words, they’re describing the state they’re in, or maybe their understanding of the state that they feel they would like to be in, and using that as something that should apply to all levels. As if a guy is standing on a mountaintop, describing his immediate surroundings and expecting that to be helpful for the people who are climbing still. He needs to give and shout down instructions that are relevant to where they are at in the climb. And then maybe when they get close to the top, maybe then there can be a little thing where they still think they’re climbing, and they’ve got to break out of that habit. And it might be appropriate to say, “Hey dude, you’re here. Stop climbing.”

Chris: I absolutely agree with you that it’s a question of levels. And I think as communicators, and I think you’re a communicator, and I think these teachers need to be communicators, that when you’re dealing with someone who’s asking questions, that first we need to listen. And we need to hear where the question is coming from. And then rather than showing them where you want them to go, to come back and stand where that question is being asked, gently, and look around with that person and say, “Okay, well let’s just see if that’s true.” And let’s walk forward from there. That to me I think is very successful. And so whether or not it’s relative or it’s absolute, really depends upon the question and the person and the time and the place. But to try to answer a relative question, like, “What am I supposed to do about my kids who I have to pick up at daycare, it drives me absolutely crazy,” with a “you don’t exist” answer, is not helpful.

Rick: Yeah, there’s that Indian saying, which I’m sure is not even exclusive to India, that it takes a thorn to remove a thorn. And ultimately, it may be that a lot of things that are useful in the name of teaching, ultimately, are all BS, they’re all nonsense from the perspective of the ultimate truth, but they sure can be helpful at whatever stage they need to be used at.

Chris: Take a look at the whole process of Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka of the witness and what you’re witnessing. Ultimately, that whole teaching teaches you that you’re awareness, but when you look at it at a certain point, you realize that there’s another duality here. So you have this thorn, as you said, and you use it to establish your certainty that what you are is not objective. And then you use that thorn to remove it, and then when that’s done, you get rid of it all. But it’s a tool that’s being used on the way.

Rick: Exactly, and at a certain point, that stage of witnessing and finding that the creation is completely unrelated to you, that melts. Maybe that’s what you were just saying, that melts into a grander unity in which there is no longer this dichotomy. But that’s then. There’s going to be a phase for many people where they’re in this dualistic witnessing state.

Chris: That’s okay too.

Rick: Alrighty, well, are we done? This has been great.

Chris: I’m having a wonderful time. I don’t know if we’re done or not. We’re probably just starting, right?

Rick: Yeah.

Chris: I’ll be on this film.

Rick: Pardon?

Chris: I said, I don’t know if we’re ending. I more feel like we’re starting, but I think it may be the end of this particular film.

Rick: Yeah, I just had that wave, that feeling comes at a certain point, “Ah, okay, we’ve done it.” So this has been great. I’ve really enjoyed this, and I commend you on what you’re doing. You might, you know, well, I don’t know what your criteria are for choosing people to interview, but maybe some of the people that I discover will be useful for you in your efforts and vice versa.

Chris: Yeah.

Rick: And we’ll be in touch.

Chris: We’re going to do that today, actually.

Rick: Yeah, I’m going to check out this Benicio guy, or whatever his name is. Yeah, he sounds great.

Chris: When he gets to the house, I’ll have him talk to you. And then, you know, absolutely, I want you to understand that everything you do, I watch.

Rick: Oh, do you?

Chris: Yeah, I really do.

Rick: That’s great. I really appreciate it.

Chris: I’ve met. It’s my great joy, and I think you do it well.

Rick: That’s sweet. I’m honored by that. And if you ever want contact info for anybody that you might want to talk to yourself, I’ll be happy to provide that.

Chris: And here too for you.

Rick: Yeah, thanks. So let me just make a few concluding comments. One thing I forgot to mention in the beginning is that sometimes people ask me, “Well, who are your favorite interviews that you’ve done?” You know, because I can’t watch 60 of them. Where should I start? And so a couple of weeks ago I put in this little star rating system on the site, and so I’m speaking to everyone now, listening. And when you watch an interview or listen to one, if you feel like it, click on a star according to how much you like that particular interview. And after enough people do it, it will become statistically significant perhaps, not to say that there won’t always be exceptions, you know, because everyone has their own proclivities, but maybe it will emerge that certain ones might be a good place to start with. So there’s that. Not too many people have clicked on them yet, and maybe people didn’t understand what the stars were for. And I just want to say in conclusion that, you know, depending upon how you’re hearing this, there’s one place you can go to find them all, because I keep doing them and there are about 62 of them now, and that is batgap.com, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump. So go to batgap.com and you can sign up for an email thing there to be notified every time a new one gets posted. Or a podcast if you’d rather listen in your car, or a video if you’d rather watch it in video, and so on. So I’ve been speaking with Chris Hebert, who is the founder, and there’s Chris’s cat. It just jumped up behind you and walked across. Another Siamese, beautiful. My cat has gone outside so I can’t quite introduce the cats at this point. But it’s a beauty. So I’ve been speaking with Chris and his cat of Stillnessspeaks.com. Go there and you can also sign up for Chris’s emails and check out all the beautiful interviews that he’s been doing. So thank you very much for watching and we’ll see you next week.