Chuck Hillig Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Chuck Hillig. Chuck, since you and I first– since you and I made a date to have this interview, your name has popped up a few times here and there. In fact, just yesterday you came up on this website that Francis Lucille is often on, Stillness Speaks–

Chuck: Ah, yes.

Rick: And they had some videos of you. So it seems you’re getting to be relatively well known so I may very well be speaking to a very famous nobody here.

Chuck: I certainly hope so.

Rick: The way we’ve been doing these shows, as you may have noticed if you looked at one or two, is that people find it interesting to hear a person’s story, how they arrived at where they’re at. That sets up a little bit of a paradox for some people, because some people don’t feel like there’s really a person whose story is all that important, and yet it’s interesting to see how one might have arrived at that realization or perspective. And some people like to take it chronologically, like, “Oh, I was a teenager and I took LSD and I realized there was more to life and then I moved along.” And others like to jump right into some watershed moment they had when they had a profound realization that turned their life around. How would you like to do it?

Chuck: Well, I appreciate the fact that you warned everybody, saying, “I know that it’s not the story and we have to jump in someplace and pretend like there is a story and that there was some kind of event that occurred and some kind of calendar date someplace and a linearity thing.” I understand that that’s not what happened and I want everybody who’s watching this to understand that I don’t believe any of that anyway. All of that being said, here’s my story.

Rick: Okay, good. Well, I was born and raised in the Catholic tradition. I was– I went to Catholic grade school with the Sisters of St. Joseph, a Catholic high school with the Dominican priests, and a four-year Catholic university with the Jesuits.

Rick: I’ve been getting a lot of Catholics lately on this show.

Chuck: There is a lot. And I’m a recovering Catholic. I was probably in my senior year at the university when I was– when I began–

Rick: The University of– oh, the Catholic university, okay.

Chuck: The Catholic university. It was in Cleveland. John Carroll University. And I began to have a growing disenchantment with my faith. And that’s an interesting choice of words when I think about it because when you’re enchanted with something you’re bewitched by it. So I was disenchanted by it. I realized or I began to question things that I had, up until that point, taken for granted. For lack of a better phrase, “God’s own truth.”

Rick: Right.

Chuck: I was very uncomfortable with this because this was not something that I had entertained or had looked for or tried to seek out in any way, shape, or form. I was– I wanted to be a Catholic and that’s what I was. Period. The end. Case closed. But it was just too much of a cognitive dissonance or spiritual dissonance between what was going on in my heart of hearts and how I was recognizing myself walking through the world. So I was married at that time. I was getting married. I got married in the Catholic church and we had started having kids as all good Catholics back in the ’60s were wont to do. No birth control. That’s not what the Vatican wants. But I was becoming even more and more uncomfortable. And my wife, who I loved deeply at that time, was really a major Catholic. She was a super Catholic. She would go to sleep with a rosary in one hand and a statue of Mary in the other and there was no wiggle room for anything else. So I began to lead a double life. My double life was– I was– We had the kids so on Sunday she would go out and go to church and I’d watch the kids. She’d come back. I’d go out ostensibly to go to church. And what I would do is I’d just go to the park and get the New York Times. I was living in New York at the time. Read the paper. I’d come back. She’d say, “How was mass?” I’d say, “Fine.” She’d say, “What did they talk about?” I’d go, “Love.” And that was it. This was true. But then, around 1967, I was in the Navy for a while. I was an officer in the Navy actually for three years and then I got out. We were living in Brooklyn and I was working as a substitute or as kind of an interim thing because I wanted to eventually go into my profession which– I had had a master’s degree in theater arts from St. Louis University. Another Jesuit university. And so I wanted to have this interim thing of about four or five months and I was working as a caseworker for the Bureau of Child Welfare in New York City. Well the woman who was sitting next to me said, “You’re kind of restless in your mind. I think you ought to read this book.” I went, “No, I don’t want to read the book.” She said, “No, you have to read this book. This book will change your life.” I was going, “Oh.” Anyway, three weeks later I was in a bookstore and I was walking down a labyrinth in there and there’s the book right there in front of me, eye level, and so I snatched it up and I started to read it. The name of the book is– everybody’s wondering– “Siddhartha”

Rick: Oh, right.

Chuck: By Herman Hesse.

Rick: Wonderful book.

Chuck: Fantastic.

Rick: Yeah.

Chuck: I started to read that and it was like water on parched earth. I was just going, “Oh, where has this stuff been?” I didn’t hear about any of this stuff as a Catholic. And so after that book I started to read everything I could on Eastern philosophy, on Hinduism, and Buddhism, and Taoism, and Zen, and my mind was exploding with ideas and possibilities and insights. And I started to write furiously about all this stuff that was just pouring out of me.

Rick: What did your wife think about all this?

Chuck: Well, funny you should ask. I was about to mention this. She didn’t like that at all. She wouldn’t even read this stuff. She thought that I’d gone over to the dark side of the force and I was a cross between Satan and the Antichrist because I was thinking maybe Eastern philosophies has something really here that’s of value and something to look at and to pay attention to and she wasn’t going for any of that.

Rick: Right.

Chuck: Let’s leap ahead a couple of years. I was going for a doctorate and we had just moved and she said, “Enough is enough is enough. I want a divorce.”

Rick: That’s not very Catholic, is it?

Chuck: No, not very Catholic but she said, “Oh, this is just not working for me.” And so I took literally a knife, a fork, a spoon, a bowl, a plate, a glass, I think a cup, my car, my books, and my clothes, and I headed west out to San Francisco. And I landed in Haight-Ashbury and I lived in Haight-Ashbury for a while. In January of 1970– I was down there in Hollywood now because I’d moved around and I came down to Hollywood and somebody turned me on to– They said, “Oh, you have to read this book.” It’s one of these, “You have to read these books” moments. And the book was Talks by or about Ramana Maharshi. So I read– I went, “Wow, this stuff just blows me away.” It just popped me inside out. So I started to read everything that I could about Ramana Maharshi, and I would go over to the Bodhi Tree Bookstore– if people are familiar with the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in Los Angeles, West Hollywood– and I would just devour that stuff. It was like, “Wow, such a coming home.” After I went and saw and knew about and was experienced and opened through my connection with Maharshi, it was like, “Where else could I go after that?” I mean, there was no place else for me to go. So about two months before that– and I think this was the opening that you were pointing at– about two months before that, I was living out of my camper. I was in Idyllwild, California, which is on the mountain, San Jacinto, which is right near Palm Springs. I was way up in the mountains and it was in December and I had been writing furiously. I was lonely. We were divorced by that time. And I was reading the Upanishads, and I was reading the Bhagavad Gita, and I was reading Shankara’s Crest Jewel of Discrimination, and I was reading the Dhammapada. I was reading Alan Watts.

Rick: Were you doing any kind of actual meditation or were you just reading all this stuff?

Chuck: I was reading this stuff and I was going, “This is absolutely mind-boggling.” So I was– I remember very distinctly I was up in this parking lot and there was nobody else around and I had my little camper and it was sometime in the afternoon and I just decided I’d been writing here too much in the camper, so I’d get out and take a walk. So I went out, started walking up the trail, and here’s the perennial of those words, “Something happened.” I don’t know what happened, but by the time I got back– I kind of staggered on back to the van– I had shifted. Something had shifted. I had had like an experience of some kind of quintessential oneness. Like I stopped. I stopped. I stopped being who I was and everything else stopped being what it was and there was no sense of separation or difference between those two, and it was staggering me. It just shook me to the core. When I got back to the van– I remember climbing on in there and sitting down there in the very same seat that I was sitting in a couple of hours before and looking down there at the table– And this is the most fascinating thing. I looked and there was coffee cups– and I was smoking at the time– There was an ashtray. There was all my papers scattered around. There were papers and pens and things. The whole table was just in a state of dishevelment and yet I was absolutely just dumbstruck by how perfect it all was. Every single thing was exactly in place. There was not one pencil or scrap of paper or butt in the ashtray that was out of place. It was beyond perfect. I mean, it was beyond perfect. And I was going “Hhhhuh. It takes my breath away!” So I tried deliberately to mess it up. Naturally, I experimented. So I moved this pencil from over here, this pen over there, and moved this stuff around, and no matter what I did, I was just going from one perfect place to another perfect place and every movement, every space along there was equally perfect. I could not mess it up. I could not make it less perfect or anything other than just perfect. And I just sat there and just, “Hhhuh.” It was just my mind, which is always going up until that point, just stopped and said, “How is this possible?” I remember going out later on in that afternoon and seeing a bird fly from this tree to that tree and thinking, “That’s perfect. That’s exactly what that bird needs to do right now. It’s so appropriate.”

Rick: Yeah. It’s funny. I had that same experience with birds.

Chuck: Oh, you did?

Rick: It seems like they’re following– I saw some birds fly across the sky one time, and they were following the perfect exact course for those birds.

Chuck: Yes. How did they know that? And several days later, when I finally came off the mountain, I’d be talking to people, and it was like, “How did they know that they should be saying these things and with the exact way?” Everybody’s so well-rehearsed. It’s their lines and it’s like everybody’s got an invisible script around their neck that they’re reading off of. I was just beyond– I was dumbstruck. It was just nothing else that I could say, and people would come up to me going, “Wow, man. What kind of dope are you on?” And I hadn’t said a word but I must have had a glow about me or something. After a couple of weeks, it began to fade, but that was a real major shift in my experience when suddenly the perfection of everything just overwhelmed me and I was washed away.

Rick: Neat. It’s interesting because sometimes teachers will present that kind of perspective as almost like an instruction, like Byron Katie, “loving what is,” and so on. But what you experienced was the actual experience that they were pointing to. You experienced the moon, not the finger pointing at the moon. But sometimes people take a descriptor of a state– They mistake a descriptor of a state for the state itself. Or as– Or for a means to that state. But you just slipped into that state.

Chuck: I did, and I think that what helped was I was getting primed for it. First, the separation from my wife and my disenchantment with Catholicism, and then the reading that I had, and then this great opening. And all of a sudden, then, like I said, a month later, that’s when somebody said, “Read Ramana Maharshi.”

Rick: Right.

Chuck: It was like–

Rick: I’m sure that was perfect, too.

Chuck: It was absolutely perfect. The great line out of Shakespeare’s King Lear in Edmund the legitimate son of Gloucester says, “Ripeness is all. Ripeness is all.” When you’re ready, boy, there’s just no stopping it. It just pops into it. But I could see progression– Now that I have some hindsight to it, I can see how it went from this, from being a college instructor all the way over to my hippiedom days, and then finally discovering Maharshi. But it was really a progression that I enjoyed only after it happened. It was like a great period of spiritual upheaval.

Rick: Cool. Now, not to get ahead of the story– but maybe we’ll touch on this later on– the whole issue of whether methods to ripen oneself are legitimate or whether you appreciate or respect that. Because some teachers seem to say, “You don’t need to do any of that. Just get there. See it, and you’re done.” There’s that kind of camp as opposed to the camp that says, “Do this, do this, do this, do this,” and you’ll become more and more ripe and you’ll facilitate an awakening when you’re good and ready for it. But anyway, if you want you can come on that now, but we can shelve that and have you continue with your story as well. That might be the way to go.

Chuck: Well after– Okay, we’ll just shelve that for a while and come back to it. That’s an interesting point though. After I had this awareness of Maharshi’s existence and all the writings that he had, I began to again get back into my reading, because I’m a great, voracious reader. I love to read all of these different books and stuff. Now I remember walking up and down the aisles there at the Bodhi Tree. Have you ever been to the Bodhi Tree, Rick?

Rick: No, I haven’t. I think Timothy mentioned– Timothy Conway– it in our interview just a week or two ago. But I’ve heard about it for decades. I just haven’t spent that much time in Los Angeles.

Chuck: I think it’s going out of business this year though, unfortunately.

Rick: Oh, that’s too bad. We had a delightful little bookstore here in my town that went out of business. It’s just hard to compete with Amazon these days.

Chuck: Yeah, I’m very sad that they’re doing that. Anyway, I remember walking up and down the aisles and thinking, “Well, this thing that I had, this thing that showed up for me– How come people are not putting it in a real simple way?” I come across these books that were five, six hundred words long with many appendices and footnotes and esoteric words. I said, “Wait a minute. This should be really able– How come they can’t distill this and crunch it down into a way that can be understood just as it is? As it is.” I said, “Well, maybe I should write that book.” So what I did was I went home– I was living up in Ojai at the time– and I made a list, literally made a list of all of the words that I did not want to use in my book. I said, “I’m not going to use ‘consciousness’ or ‘astral plane’ or ‘hierarchy’ or ‘grace’ or any words that would possibly– when people would read them– would tangentially move them off in another direction because they would probably think, “Well, I know what he’s talking about,” when that would not be where I was trying to lead them to. So I went to use very simple, almost monosyllabic words that everybody could agree, “Yep, that’s what these mean.” So I put the book together and it was called “Enlightenment for Beginners.”

Rick: I’m surprised you used the word “enlightenment” but I guess you had to use it somewhere.

Chuck: Well, interestingly enough …

Rick: Because that word is heavily laden.

Chuck: That’s a very good catch. Actually, I didn’t. That was the– “Enlightenment for Beginners” was the second title. I retitled it in 1999. The first title was– and you could probably still get it at dusty old used bookstores-– it was called “What Are You Doing in My Universe?” That was the original title. So I crushed it together. It was like 2,000 words and gave it to the publisher. The publisher says, “Yes, but you need an introduction.” So I wrote a 1,500-word introduction to it. So the introduction is almost as long as the book itself. So then I sent it off to the publisher and it was published by Newcastle Publishing. So that was the beginning of my writing career. I was working at the time– I was a state-licensed psychotherapist. I worked in that field for 30 years now. I retired a couple of years ago to Virginia. But that was about the time that I had started my professional career as a psychotherapist.

Rick: Cool. I have two other friends who are awake in the spiritual sense who are professional psychotherapists and it’s interesting– It must be a precious qualification for that profession. If I had to go to a psychotherapist I would definitely want to go to one who knew who they were before they tried to help me figure out what was going on with me.

Chuck: Well when I was doing psychotherapy, a lot of people would say, “How did you justify–” Not justify, but “How did you reconcile non-duality with doing very mundane, secular kinds of problems?” And I said, “Well, I don’t have a problem with it. They’re dreaming all of this and I’m going to involve myself in their dream and give them dream solutions for this.” But I– But most of the people that would come to me, Rick, were in their 20s and 30s and their problems were very mundane and secular. They were about relationships. They were about job-related stuff or problems with their children. They were depressed or anxious– various things that spoke really of their humanness.

Rick: Right.

Chuck: However, but I had an older clientele in their 40s, mid to late 40s or 50s or 60s, I would be approached by people as clients and they would want to have a conversation about more spiritual things. Things like, “Hey, I’ve done all the– I’ve done all the stuff that everybody said would make me happy. I have all these accoutrements of wealth, this power, I’m the CEO and the CFO, but I’m still really unhappy and I feel empty inside and I don’t know why.” It’s kind of a “What’s it all about, Alfie?” kind of moment. So at that point, at that point, when they put that on the table, that gives me an opening or gave me an opening to begin to say, “Well, maybe we can go down that path and find out who you think you are.” And so with that opening, then– Let’s see how many– I would suspect that maybe one out of ten would want to walk down that path.

Rick: That’s not a bad percentage.

Chuck: Not a bad percentage, but nine out of ten would be very mundane, secular things having to do with the game and the dance and the play.

Rick: Yeah. So you left us on the mountaintop there. You had this awakening experience in Idyllwild–

Chuck: oh, right.

Rick: and then it faded after a couple of weeks, but you kept reading all these books and everything. So when it faded, did it really fade or was it a matter of integrating it into ordinary life so that the newness of it was no longer almost a distraction and you were just living in that state more naturally?

Chuck: I found that it was very difficult to talk to people about that. When I did, they’d go, “Oh, you’ve been smoking too much dope, Chuck.” And I was smoking back then. Or had taken some acid– I’d dropped some acid way back in the ’70s. But I said, “No, that’s not it. There’s something else that happened here that was significant that I’ve shifted from.” I began to notice that whenever I’d be around friends or in bars and drinking and stuff– I’m very clever with conversations and I can shape them in such a way that I lead people down paths that begin to address these problems. I would ask them, “What do you think about what’s really going on here? What happens after you die? And who you really– Who’s underneath you who you think you are?” Questions like that, and people would give me some interesting answers after a few drinks, but I would find myself– What I would notice that I was longing to have a conversation or a discussion or an involvement with other people at that level and not being able to find it except in books.

Rick: You wanted a sangha, basically.

Chuck: I did. I did. It didn’t show up. It didn’t show up. Then I– The universe interfered. Well, it didn’t interfere, it just came along and said, “Well, we have a new plan for you, dude. You’re going to be in charge of your children.” So my wife had turned them over to me.

Rick: That’s strange.

Chuck: Well she had had some issues, for lack of a better term, and so she asked me to be the parent. So I said, “Sure.” I bought a house in Ojai and the kids came out. There were two girls, just ten and just twelve, and I began to be a parent and do parenting things. And all that happened at the same time that I became licensed as a psychotherapist and the same time that I wrote the book “What Are You Doing in My Universe.” So it was a significant time, the mid-70s for me.

Rick: Yeah. And so did you feel in the mid-70s at this stage that you had– Was there still a sense of seeking or did you feel settled into that realization and content and seeing the unitive nature of things? Were you still looking into, “Maybe I should go see this teacher, maybe I should do this practice,” or whatever?

Chuck: I wasn’t so much into practicing. I was interested in seeing what the teachers were saying, but back then they didn’t have a whole lot of teachers back then. I mean not ones that were out there on the circuit. The teachers really came in in the 90s with Gangaji and all of the people that came in after Gangaji.

Rick: Right.

Chuck: Papaji was over there in India and I hadn’t heard about him until– gosh, until the 90s and so forth. And Nisargadatta– I did not hear about him either. So you hear people when you need to hear about them, but I sure didn’t hear about them at that point. So I was more interested still in just reading and having conversations. I didn’t really go to satsangs and stuff until maybe the mid-90s or so. I began to hear and sit in the middle of– sit in the presence of people who were purported to have something and had had some kind of similar awakening or realization. So I just wanted to measure what I had experienced– for lack of a better term– against what they had and see how that would compare.

Rick: How did it?

Chuck: Well, I said, “I could probably do this. I could probably get out there and do this and probably have more fun with it.” Because I noticed a whole lot of these people were very serious about it and I was going, “What’s up with that? I’m having a good time with this. I’m laughing and joking and kidding and poking fun at myself and poking fun at the whole realization and enlightenment trip, and these guys seem so serious about it. What’s up? I don’t understand that.” I didn’t get that. I couldn’t resonate with that. And then I got to thinking, “Well, I’m sure Maharshi wasn’t joking around like I am either.” So then I began to tone it down a little bit but I had different things that I was trying to do. I said, “No, I have to just be true to myself.”

Rick: Yeah, yeah. I mean, everybody has their own personality.

Chuck: That’s right, and my books are kind of fun too.

Rick: Not everybody’s going to be a skinny little guy in a loincloth sitting in a cave. We’re all just going to have our own way of doing it.

Chuck: There you go.

Rick: Did uh– So during this period– What I’m trying to get at– Did you look back somewhat longingly on that cool experience you had had in the early ’70s, or did you feel that something had shifted and the shift was permanent and it was just sort of a continuum of whatever? It wasn’t just a flash in the pan. It was– Something had shifted and that shift continued to this day.

Chuck: I– Looking back on that, I thought something happened and I could never go back to the way that I was.

Rick: Right.

Chuck: It was like, once you have the omelet broken there, you can’t put the eggs back together. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Something happened and I could not go back to looking at the world and looking at myself– the world in general, myself in particular– in the same way. Those days were over. Now I have to say, “No, this is really something else that’s going on here and I need to explore it further.”

Rick: You didn’t suffer from the “I got it, I lost it” syndrome, in other words.

Chuck: No, I said, “I have it, but I’m going to have different levels of experiencing it,” and I began to use analogies like, “Well, when you’re sleeping, you’re not going to go down deep and stay at the same level and then come up eight hours later. You’re going to have a sleep cycle and sometimes you’re going to be closer to awakening than you are at others. Sometimes you’re going to be in deep sleep and it’s going to go back and forth three or four times during the night.” And so I figured, “Okay, sometimes I’m going to feel really very light and absolutely part of the quintessential oneness of the universe” and yet other times I said, “Well, I’m going to feel really dark and I’m going to feel lost and like I don’t know what’s going on and stuff” but I felt comfortable with that. I didn’t push that away, and when I was way up here, I didn’t try to cling to this, because I figured if I were trying to cling to this up here, that would be taken away from me faster and if I tried to push this stuff away, it would stay around longer. I just let things come and go and come and go, and I began to adapt “yes” as my default position in life. “Yes.” So if this showed up, I said “yes” to it; if that showed up, I said “yes” to it. Everything was always “yes.”

Rick: Yeah. Loving what is. One friend of mine expressed it as a spectrum, and he just finds his awareness shifting to different points on the spectrum as is appropriate for the situation. And sometimes you might be very zeroed in on some very specific individual human task, and other times more relaxed into the unboundedness and more cosmic value. But even as you swing back and forth on that spectrum, you’re not utterly devoid of one end of it or the other at any given time. The whole spectrum is there but just the focus shifts around according to necessity, according to the circumstance.

Chuck: Yes, that’s a good way to describe it, very much so. It’s almost like having a flashlight. It depends on where you want to put the laser of your attention.

RICK: Yeah. And then also– tell me whether this would work for you. Despite the fact that– In light of what we just said or in addition to what we just said, do you also feel that there’s an ongoing evolution yet taking place – a deepening, a clarification, a maturation, some kind of– some sort of ongoing evolutionary development?

Chuck: Yes there is, and it’s interesting how it unfolds. I’ve noticed that it shows up in rather subtle ways. Sometimes I just hear a hint or a phrase that somebody speaks– it could be on the news, it could be the radio, it could be somebody I’m just passing by in the street-– but that is like an opening. It’s like a little seed that’s planted there and suddenly there’s a whole new awareness that shows up there. And the more that I’m aware of that, the more that I’m open to having those seeds, the more that they show up. But they’re not talking-– It’s so interesting. 99.9% of the time, they’re not talking about any of this stuff, they’re not talking about enlightenment or realization or awareness. They’re talking about really mundane, down-to-earth, solid kind of stuff. That’s what they’re talking about, but somehow when they say that to me, it shifts me over into those areas and just makes a significant impact on me. I wish I could come up with an example of it, but they happen on a regular basis.

Rick: Perhaps it might even be something inanimate, like a bus horn or something like that, that just serves as a catalyst for some little shift.

Chuck: Yeah, anything like that. Yeah. But it has nothing to do at all with this particular topic, this particular philosophy, nothing at all. But suddenly it just shows up and wow!

Rick: There’s a saying in the Vedas, which is something like-– I don’t know the Sanskrit of it, but the English of it is “The world reveals Brahman.” And I was just reminded of that by what you were saying, as if the world becomes our guru and every little thing that happens is a catalyst or a stimulus to some greater degree of awakening.

Chuck: I think you’re always meeting your guru and consciousness appears in front of you as everything that you’re pretending that you’re not. So that it’s all consciousness and it’s all the guru’s teaching– whatever happens to, with, and for you-– and actually I don’t think that anything happens to you. It all happens for you. It’s an application, uplifting thing. It’s benign, you know, and it’s not something that is out to hurt you in any way, but here it is. This is the stuff that you need right now in this moment to realize it. So people would come up to me and say, “What has to happen? How do I become more enlightened?” And I go, “It’s right there in front of you. Whatever your path is, whatever you’re doing or not doing, or thinking or not thinking, or sane, or whatever that is, that’s your path. That’s what you need to do. That’s where you’re being led. That’s what you need to unfold through. So go there.”

Rick: Yeah, that’s true. And that leads us back to that thing that we put on the shelf a few minutes ago, which is that very often the respected teachers of Advaita, like Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta and others, are presented as having just espoused this absolute perspective of no-self and the world is an illusion and so on and so forth. But if you actually– as I’m sure you have– read these guys in some detail– And as Timothy was saying a couple of weeks ago, he spent a lot of time with Nisargadatta in person. He said that Ramana Maharshi read the newspaper and was concerned with world events and so on and actually was quite enthusiastic about having his followers do practices such as meditation or selfless service or whatever was appropriate for them at their stage of development. And Nisargadatta too. I mean he said he took Timothy by the shoulders– Timothy said he took him by the shoulders one time and just looked at him with great intensity and said, “You must meditate. Meditate.” So on the one hand, yes, life is our teacher, but I don’t think we necessarily have to say to the guy, “Okay, just go back and work in your factory and that’ll get you enlightened. That’s your teacher.” There are things what one can do to supplement and augment one’s development, to enrich and deepen one’s experience. You know, specific practices. And the fact that ultimately the world may be an illusion doesn’t negate the value of these things any more than it negates the value of eating a meal. You could say, “Well, the world is an illusion, so why should I eat?”

Chuck: Right. But I understand–

Rick: But things have their value on their own levels. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Chuck: Well, only dream food can satisfy the dreaming dreamer.

Rick: Right.

Chuck: But I understand what you’re saying and I agree with it. I have nothing against anybody who wants to do any of those practices at all. If the spirit moves you, if you feel motivated, if there’s a fire in your belly to go down a path of doing, of sitting in a cave or meditating or chanting, I go, “Go for it.” One hundred percent. One thousand percent. But I encourage people who do that, though, not to be attached to that, not to think that, “Wow, this is going to take me someplace.” Because it’s so easy to think of that as some kind of tool, some kind of strategy that, “If I do this and apply this, I’m going to be given a golden star of enlightenment after come I’m not enlightened?” I’ve seen people who have chanted for 40 years and they’re just not very happy at all. They still have a lot of messy things going on in their lives and they don’t have a sense of joy– an inner sense of joy that supersedes everything else in their life, no matter how crazy it is. They don’t feel happy about it. They’re not happy in their happiness and happy in their unhappiness.

Rick: They’ve gotten stuck in a rut.

Chuck: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah.

Chuck: Exactly. So I go, “If chanting or meditating comes up for you, do it. And if it doesn’t, it can’t be forced. It shouldn’t be forced. It’s just what shows up.”

Rick: I mean, for you, you read a lot of books and it could be argued that the books were illusory and the concepts and words in the books were illusory and so on, but it takes a thorn to remove a thorn. And as Shankara said, when the elephant chased him up the tree, the illusory elephant chased the illusory me up the illusory tree. So we sort of have to do unto-– That’s not the right saying. It’s just sort of each in its own place. Each thing in its own place. And for each– To each his own also. I don’t know if there’s any universal prescription as you’re saying. But I’m just sort of emphasizing that a little bit because some spiritual teachers dismiss all that stuff as being bunk and worthless and a waste of time and you don’t need it. All you need to do is realize that there’s no person and the world’s an illusion and you’re done. And I don’t think it’s quite so cut and dried necessarily. And that might work for some. In fact, Ramana Maharshi himself used to give that sort of ultimate teaching to people if he felt they were ripe for it but if they weren’t, then he would give a more preliminary teaching. He would say, “Okay, well, do self-inquiry,” and if they weren’t ripe for that, he’d say, “Okay, well, meditate,” and if they weren’t ripe for that, he’d say, “Okay, well, do service.” So he acknowledged the legitimacy of different strokes for different folks.

Chuck: Yes, I certainly would concur with that. That certainly makes good sense to me. I have no problem with anybody doing anything, really. I’ve known people who wanted to reach nirvana by having crazy sex every night for three weeks as a way of somehow connecting with the cosmos. I go, “All right, do whatever moves you want.”

Rick: Try it and if that doesn’t work try something else.

Chuck: But there comes a time when all those strategies and devices, I think, have to be set aside and you address the ultimate primordial question, which is, “Well, who is this one who thinks that they’re unenlightened and that if they do these things, they’re going to be enlightened? They’re going to have something going on.”

Rick: Right.

Chuck: So who’s that one? Who’s the one who says, “I’m chanting,” or, “I’m meditating,” or, “I’m fasting”? Who’s this “I” in that sentence? And you go there because I think Maharshi also pointed out that sooner or later you’re going to have to address that.

Rick: Yeah.

Chuck: Maybe you just have to do it over a period of decades and stuff, but sooner or later there comes a time when you’ll have to find out who it is that wants this. And who is it that believes that they are in some kind of spiritual bondage and that they need to wake up from that. Who is that “I”?

Rick: And also I think there comes a time when you have to dispel the notion that enlightenment is something that you’re going to get, that there’s somebody who could get it. Like you could get a new car or something, or a new– or learn a new skill or some such thing. You know I’ve met– I’ve talked to people who have been meditating and doing spiritual practices for decades and who have an awakening and even after all that experience and practice, they say that they were really quite surprised at how different it turned out to be than anything they had conceptualized.

Chuck: That’s interesting, yes. Well, that’s the one way of not getting it, and that’s to try to wrap your intellectual arms around it and figure it out because this stuff is un-figure-outable.

Rick: Yeah, It’s a– Good point. It’s not that the intellect can contain it or the mind can contain it because it contains those faculties and everything else.

Chuck: Yeah. In Zen philosophy they say it’s ungraspable. Ungraspable. We want to grasp it. We want to contain it. We want to control it. We want to somehow have it and, “Well now I’ve got my spiritual part and I’ve got that going on over here and–” We want content. We seem to have this thing about collecting content that– And especially I’ve talked to a lot of people, as I’m sure you have, who go to different gurus and they go to conferences and they go to workshops and seminars and lectures, and they collect content. And then, as part of the ego trip, they go to coffees and cocktail parties and they talk about the content that they got. “Well, this is what I learned from this guru, and this is what I got from that conference,” and stuff.

Rick: Yeah.

Chuck: But it’s content. And I tell people– I say, “I’m not interested in giving you new content. That’s not where I’m going with this. What I’m trying to do is to see if you’re willing to shift the context of how you hold the content in your life.”

Rick: Right.

Chuck: And they go, “What’s that?” And I said, “Well, if this water bottle is the context and the water inside is the content, you can take this water and pour it in another vessel and it’s the same content but now it’s held in a different context. So maybe if you shift how you’re looking at things, the things that you’re looking at will begin to change. But what would happen if you held your entire life in the ultimate context that says, ‘It’s a dream. This is all one. Everything is consciousness?'” They go, “Oh, I don’t know. Let me figure about– Let me think this out.”

Rick: “Let me add that to my content.”

Chuck: “I want to solve this, I want to resolve this,” and I go, “Well, good luck with that.”

Rick: Well, have you ever said that to anybody who has really gotten it in the way that you would hope they would?

Chuck: Not that I can recall. But I have had people come back to me who said, “Wow, you said something in our conversation–” or, “I read this in one of your books and it totally transformed my life.” And sometimes this is what happened in doing the therapy, and I’ve had people who came to me after 15 years or 20 years later. I don’t remember them at all. They’ve changed. But they said, “Wow, there was one conversation that you and I had that when we– when I walked out of that room, my life just changed and I walked off in a different direction and I had a whole different experience of myself in the world.” And I went, “Great, I didn’t know that I was part of that. That I was an instrument of that. And I thank you for sharing that with me.” Yeah, it was really cool.

Rick: The Lighthouse may not know how many ships it’s saving in the night.

Chuck: Ah, true enough. Wow! But you know, saving from what? What do they have to lose?

Rick: Hitting those rocks.

Chuck: Hitting those rocks.

Rick: I’m guilty of doing what you just said but for me it works in a sense. I’m always listening to stuff. I get up in the morning, slap my headphones on, start listening to something, grab my toothbrush.

Chuck: You just mentioned that so I gave you that audio. That’s good.

Rick: Yeah, in fact I just finished your audio this morning and there’s some points in it that I want to bring up. But it’s sorta like– It’s not like I’m craving information in the sense that I’m going to learn some new nugget from this person that’s really going to put it all together for me, but I just– I really appreciate hearing how different people express it. And it’s sort of– I see new angles of how to explain it, or ways of explaining it more clearly, and it facilitates my own ability to think through things clearly and explain them clearly, and so on. And it really seems appropriate that there are so many different teachers teaching each in their own way because people resonate with certain expressions and some people really resonate with this one and some with that one.

Chuck: Right. Right.

Rick: So it’s kind of appropriate– It’s nice that there’s so many people out there doing this these days.

Chuck: Oh, I’m very, very happy that there are because like I said, way back in the 70s I felt like a stranger in a strange land even in the strangeness that California was. We didn’t just seem– We don’t seem to have that kind of– I didn’t find them at that connection. Let’s see, back in the– Oh, let’s see– the mid-70s, well that’s when I started my career as a psychotherapist and I just didn’t find people out there that I could talk to about that stuff. What they did want to talk about, however, was things like astrology, crystals, channeling, clairvoyance, mysticism–

Rick: None of which really has anything to do with knowing who you are.

Chuck: Nothing at all, but I said, “Well, all right, it’s better than talking about other things. At least they’re kind of going in the right direction and maybe they just have to be in that area for a while.”

Rick: Yeah. I learned TM myself back in ’68 and so that was there. And they were barking up the right tree in terms of the idea of self-realization and so on. Of course, there was Yogananda’s movement before that.

Chuck: Right. Right.

Rick: And Vivekananda before that– but that had its own organizational structure which I’m sure didn’t accommodate everyone comfortably. But there was that sort of– That was my focus and emphasis for many years.

Chuck: The only person that we had out there in Ojai that I know you’re familiar with was Krishnamurti.

Rick: Right.

Chuck: Krishnamurti would come up– would visit Ojai about three months out of every year until he finally died, I don’t know, about 15, 18 years ago or so in Ojai. But he used to give talks– they would call them talks– in the oak grove over in Miner’s Oaks, about half a mile from where I lived. So my kids would walk on over every Saturday and Sunday and sit down there in the grove and listen to Krishnamurti talk.

Rick: Cool.

Chuck: But he was very serious. This guy was extremely serious. I never saw him smile.

Rick: Yean.

CHUCK: I never saw him make a joke. He was very austere and intellectual and cerebral, for lack of a better term.

Rick: Yeah, I only listened to him once in a recording, and it’s sort of like the way he came across was he seemed to regard his audience as a bunch of idiots who just weren’t getting it. It was kind of abusive toward them, really.

Chuck: Yes, he was. He was. That’s true.

Rick: Although the woman I interviewed last week has listened to a lot of Krishnamurti talks and she said it really helped her tremendously. So again, To each his own. And uh–

Chuck: One of the coolest things that I heard him say once was he had been exasperated, like you had pointed out, for the people just weren’t getting it. So he said, “I’m going to tell you–” I’m paraphrasing this, of course– “I’m going to tell you what the secret of it– what the real secret is,” and the whole audience kind of leaned forward en masse. We all wanted to get this, and he leaned down there and he said, “I don’t mind anything.”

Rick: That’s very good actually. That’s very good.

Chuck: I know. He said– really cool and I still remember it to this day.

Rick: And that harkens back to your “yes” thing that you mentioned a while back. It’s like, you know, when you say “yes” to everything.

Chuck: Yes. “Yes” is your default position. It’s the ego that says, “This should not be so.”

Rick: Something that is akin to that and kind of the way I end up seeing things these days is the uncertainty principle which is that I find it really hard to take an adamant position on anything. And sometimes people try to get you to do that. “Well, you must have a strong feeling about that,” and I definitely have feelings and opinions about things, political attitudes and environmental opinions and all that kind of stuff. But it’s hard to get adamant about them because you can always see the broader perspective in which paradoxical opinions and perspectives also have their place. We’re looking out through a certain peephole that works for us, but other people have their peepholes and it’s hard to just be absolutely rigid about the supremacy of one’s own peephole.

Chuck: When they come from a place of certitude and, yeah, the adamance– being adamant about a particular point of view– I think to whatever extent they are that rigid and intransigent, it’s the same extent and the same degree that they are really caught in being the dreaming dreamer.

Rick: Very, very good point. And I think this ties into the point– a point about humility too. Which I heard a very interesting definition of humility one time which was that it’s the quality of not insisting that things happen any particular way. And if you think about that, the opposite of humility would be a superimposition of one’s ego on a situation, insisting that it be this way, whereas humility would be like– In fact, this might be a good time to bring up your nursery rhyme that you used at the end of your book there, “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”

Chuck: Yes.

Rick: I love the way you ended up using that and interpreting that little song. Perhaps I’ve been talking too much. Perhaps you could reiterate that interpretation for the benefit of our listeners. I thought it was really sweet.

Chuck: Well, I thought of– at the end of “Seeds for the Soul” I put together, I don’t know, 700 or 800 words about the ditty that we all know very well from our American heritage –  “Row, row, row your boat,” and I thought this interesting little song that we often sing in the round, like around a campfire, really contains the kernel and the real essence– the quintessence of what’s going on and how to live life, and then kind of an overview saying, really, life is but a dream. You start off with making some kind of effort. You’re rowing your boat. You have to make some kind of effort. You’re doing that. And it says, “Row it, row it, and row it.” And you’re in a boat. You’re in some kind of vehicle that’s going someplace and, “Row, row, row your boat merrily down the stream.”

Rick: Gently.

Chuck: Or no, “Gently down the stream.” So gently. Not with force. Not with trying to crunch it up into demanding that it has to unfold in a certain way. It’s gently. And it’s down the stream. You don’t want to– you’re not taking your boat upstream. You’re allowing it just to flow downstream and it’s gentle. It’s not something that’s forced and there’s no kind of ego demand on it. And the way that you should do all of that, going down the stream, and its inevitability of going down the stream in a particular path– you do it merrily. And it says it four times, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily” to really emphasize it. That it should be done with joy and with a sense of celebration, and “Wow, this is really a lot of fun.” But then the last line really catches the whole thing, because it says, “Life is but a dream.”

Rick: Yeah.

Chuck: So it’s that there was no boat. There is no water. There is no journey. There is no one making this journey. Life is a dream. And it’s all okay.

Rick: Yeah.

Chuck: It’s just part of the play but have fun with it and enjoy it for what it is. So I was struck with– I think it was 18 words. In 18 words, someone was able to put the whole core of all of this stuff and sneak it into our culture in such a way that we sing it all the time and everybody in the whole country, over the age of five, knows that little ditty. And so it snuck on in there and let’s see how that plays out. But that really, I think, is the core of it, the quintessence of what we’re talking about and pointing at.

Rick: Yeah. I had never thought of the song that way. I never– But it’s brilliant when you think about it.

Chuck: Yeah, it is.

Rick: It’s cosmic little teaching.

Chuck: Just dropped in there, see?

Rick: Perhaps some really insightful person actually wrote it. I don’t know who did. I’ll have to look it up on Wikipedia.

Chuck: Which brings me to another interesting point. I think that if you really claim the responsibility of being the source of everything, then you are really the source of all the teachers and of all their teachings. You– So when people say, “Wow, the Bhagavad Gita–” You wrote the Bhagavad Gita.” Where do you think that came from? You wrote the Upanishads. And Ramana Maharshi and Christ and Buddha– You’re the source of all of that. You’re the source of that. That’s sourced within you. These people are not separate from you. They’re not other entities – something other than you. They are dream characters that you have created and dropped into your story history to remind you that you’re really dreaming and that it’s a good idea to wake up.

Rick: Very true. And from that perspective I was also manning the ovens in Auschwitz.

Chuck: You certainly were. And throwing the babies in.

Rick: Yep. And also basically creating the whole universe. Because you can’t stop if you’re going to take it from that perspective. You are the originator, the source, the ultimate foundation of all that.

Chuck: Absolutely.

Rick: And you are. And from that perspective there’s only one of us. And we’re in this particular universe– We’re 13.7 billion years into creating this fascinating manifestation.

Chuck: It’s– It is. It’s fascinating. And– But I– You know, the people who are watching this on YouTube, I want you to know that Rick and I are not having a dialogue at all. This is not a dialogue. This is a monologue but it’s just coming out of different mouths.

Rick: Yeah.

Chuck: But it’s that there’s only one thing here. There’s only one person here.

Rick: And that same person is listening to this.

Chuck: That’s right. And Rick and I are dream characters that you have made up and have brought to your life right now to remind you that you’re really pretending and making it all up.

Rick: One analogy I think it helps to understand that is the analogy of an ocean where it’s really only one ocean but there are all these different waves and the waves appear to be discrete and unique and separate from one another but they’re really all made of the same water.

Chuck: Same water.

Rick: And if the ocean kind of settles down, then the wave– sort of stretching the metaphor– the wave realizes, “Oh, I am just the ocean. I wasn’t a wave.” And then maybe it rises up in waves again and the wave appreciates its wave-ness, but perhaps having had that settled down experience it doesn’t forget that it’s the ocean while it’s nonetheless behaving as a wave.

Chuck: Yes. Yeah. I love that analogy. That just seems to fit in. So I always look for really cool analogies like that and other ones that– like the movie screen one that Ramana Maharshi would talk about with–

Rick: Yeah.

Chuck: –the seamless oneness of the movie screen and yet what’s being projected on it would be like the story of your life and you think you’re just this little character that’s interacting on the screen when really the essence of it and the truth behind all that is that you are the screen because that’s all that there is, was, and ever will be.

Rick: Yeah. And personally I really like to always use, say, “On the other hand,” and having made a statement like this, in the very next breath, reemphasize that it’s not– One doesn’t glom onto this universal perspective as a dogma and intellectually devalue all the expressed aspects of life. If your daughter dies, you don’t just say, “Eh, just an illusion, no big deal.”

Chuck: No. No.

Rick: You experience that as a human being because on one level you are a human being.

Chuck: Not to do that would be to dishonor this and not to be an appreciative audience for your own melodrama and all the stuff that shows up on the human path that you are. You’re the personification of this human path but you need to play it out. You need to enjoy it and revel in it, and that means crying the cry, and weeping the weeping time, and then moaning and groaning and doing all those things that our– that flesh is wont to do from time to time, but to throw yourself into it and not to say, “I’m much too cool” or “I’m much too enlightened to cry or to feel sad or to feel angry or to feel anything at all.”

Rick: Yeah.

Chuck: The idea is not to be free of those emotions but maybe to be freed from them.

Rick: To be standing in a liberated place from which those emotions can be lived but not become the all-consuming reality. They’re a component of reality, each having their own legitimacy on their own level, but there’s another dimension which is also being appreciated, which like the movie screen, is the background against which all this other stuff is playing.

Chuck: Yes. Very well put. I agree.

Rick: Yeah. Somehow I’m reminded of that verse in the Gita. Krishna said, “Creatures act according to their own nature. What can restraint accomplish?”

Chuck: Yes. We have our nature and it plays out as it does.

Rick: Yeah. And I think there’s a cautionary note in here, I think, which is that I sense that some people take the kinds of points we’re bringing up as an intellectual position and mistake that intellectual position for the actual realization. It’s almost like you take a nice picture of a dinner and think you can nourish yourself with that and think that you have what you need to nourish yourself just because you have the picture.

Chuck: Yes.

Rick: And I think that could be a danger on the path in that you feel like, “Well, I know everything is an illusion. I’m done. There’s nothing more to gain here. There are no levels of awareness. There are no stages of enlightenment. Anybody who says there are is just trying to make money or something.” And I take exception with that when I hear it. And I feel like you always have to play this game of, “This reality is very, very true. But on the other hand it doesn’t negate–” And Tim– When I was talking to Tim Conway, he was telling me the Sanskrit terms for all this, but he– and he knows that stuff — but he was saying how this is actually the way Ramana taught. He didn’t just teach a one-sided perspective on the whole thing, he gave equal credence to the whole manifest life and what is it that Christ said about, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s?” Just sort of giving proper treatment of whatever level one was living and not just taking an intellectual position with things.

Chuck: I think that that’s oftentimes used as a defense mechanism against saying, “Well, I’ve gotten this so far and I’m just going to stop there because if I progress further I’m likely to put my ego into jeopardy here and I don’t want to go that far. I don’t want to go into the abyss, into the void, but I’ll just stay right here and intellectualize it and say everything is an illusion and it’s a dream and who cares about it.” But it’s a way of dishonoring, and I can’t think of a better more appropriate word other than dishonoring and disrespecting the great drama of life and the great humanness of all of this. I think instead of compartmentalizing it and saying, “Well, this is the only part that I want to hang on to and the rest of it is marginalized,” I think it’s doing it a great disservice and I think that you’re not dancing the dance. I think you need– I mean, look at Shiva. Shiva gets in there and dances the dance and we need to dance the dance because this is what we’ve thrust ourself into and we need to go ahead and do it. Not to do it is a dishonoring. And I don’t want to dishonor it. I want to have fun with it because at some level it’s having fun with me.

Rick: That’s an interesting perspective. I don’t think I ever thought of it that way – as an ego protection mechanism. That’s an interesting way of looking at it. In a way, it’s also– I don’t mean to be too critical but you could also think of it as a cop-out because if you reach the conclusion that you’re done, then it lets you off the hook. “What more is there to do?” “I can just chill now, you know?”

Chuck: And “I have the credentials, and now that I have that realization–“ But people– then they trot that out. They talk about that. They say, “I’ve got that,” but that becomes very much of a stoking the fires of ego and spirituality, and going, “Oh yes, I know a little bit more than you do. And I’m–“But it’s spiritual one-upmanship.”

Rick: Yeah. Did you ever read Tim’s Neo-Advaita page on his enlightenedspirituality.org website?

Chuck: No. I haven’t.

Rick: If you do a search for Neo-Advaita in Google, he– that page comes up number one.

Chuck: All right!

Rick: And I printed it out. It was like 44 pages. But he brought up some of the very same points you just mentioned.

Chuck: Oh really? Oh.

Rick: This spiritual one-upmanship thing, for one thing. Like people who you ask them to pass the salt, and they say, “Who is asking to pass the salt?”

Chuck: Yes. That’s right. Slap [unintelligible]. Yep. But it’s like playing the non-dual trump card. You’re having a conversation, you’re having a dialogue, an inquiry, and suddenly he says, “Ah yes, but who is asking?” It kills all the conversation. It’s a big blockage, and people go, “Oh, he played the trump card. What do we do now?” But it’s fun– And it’s funny how people do that but what are you going to do? That’s how they are.

Rick: Yeah. And the stream– to get back to our nursery rhyme– the stream is flowing and you can row as you might this way and that but you can’t ultimately evade the current.

Chuck: Nope.

Rick: And so I don’t think– I heard someone say the other day– I forget who said it– I think it might have been somebody named Reggie Ray. I was listening to Mariana Kaplan give a talk and she was saying that this fellow made the point that sometimes we speak about people who are on a spiritual path, and he said, “Everybody is on a spiritual path. All seven billion of us. And it just takes all these different forms, but everybody is in where they need to be in terms of what they need to experience.” ___________ I’m elaborating now. I don’t know what else he said about all this, but we’re all kind of progressing from wherever we are, and you can’t ultimately get stuck forever anyplace because that stream just keeps flowing.

Chuck: Keeps on flowing.

Rick: Old man river.

Chuck: And you’ll get it when you get it. One of the things that I remember that Maharshi talked about once– and I wrote this down a long time ago and I can’t remember what book it was in– but he was talking about different levels and he said there are some aspirants who are like– let’s see, oh like gunpowder, that all you have to do is put the match there and they get it. You know, it’s like a great explosion and they get it. He says other aspirants are like charcoal. The flame has to be applied for a considerable period of time before it finally catches on and there’s a glow and then it finally–but it takes a period of time that goes on to it. The third, he said, is like wet wood with the flame there, and it just takes a long time to dry out the wood and finally heat it up to a place where it would catch fire.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good metaphor.

Chuck: Yeah

Rick: Amma said a similar thing. Well I’m reminded of the log analogy. Amma the Hugging Saint.

Chuck: Yes.

Rick: Someone asked her, “What’s the value of coming and seeing somebody like you?” And she said, “Well, if a log that’s not burning very brightly comes into proximity with one which is, then this log gets this one burning more brightly.”

Chuck: That’s good.

Rick: Yeah. So that’s an interesting point to bring up, because some people would say, because essentially we’re all the same, that means nobody is any different than anybody else and therefore why go see somebody like that? Why would you even go see Ramana Maharshi because he’s the same person I am? But obviously his manifestation or expression of that had a way of igniting logs, including wet wood.

Chuck: Yes. Yes. And it’s a simple fact that some people have that ability or that influence, perhaps more than others, and so it’s legitimate to associate with teachers if that’s what you feel inspired to do. It can have a profound effect.

Chuck: Within the context of the dream we have teachers and we have designated some of these teachers to have great power, great awakening abilities, and so we’ve cast them in that role. Well, let them play out their role.

Rick: Yeah.

Chuck: Let us play out our role and sit down there at their feet and listen to these cast of characters that we put together.

Rick: Yeah, it can be very potent.

Chuck: Yes.

Rick: So how are we doing? We’ve been going about an hour now. Do you feel like there’s something that we haven’t been touching upon that you would like to? I haven’t been thinking to ask you certain questions or anything like that?

Chuck: Well, I can talk a little bit about the movie that I’m in, the DVD that I just came out– that just came out.

Rick: Oh cool, yeah, let’s hear about that.

Chuck: It’s called Leap 3.0. Leap 3.0. There’s a Leap 2.0, and they asked me to be in that one, but I was traveling at that time, so I missed the screening. But I’m in Leap 3.0, and there’s people in it like Dan Millman, and Fred Allen Wolfe, and Joe Vitale, some of the people who were in What the Bleep Do We Know, and The Secret. And so we filmed this about a year ago and now it’s just coming out and if people want a copy of this DVD, they can get it on my website. My website is just chuckhillig.com.

Rick: Right. And I’ll also be linking to that from my website when I put up this interview.

Chuck: Okay. Good. I just updated it so anybody that wants to get any of my books or any of my DVDs, or the audio tapes or CDs and stuff, can just get all that stuff from my website.

Rick: And what is this Leap 3.0 all about?

Chuck: Well, it’s like talking heads kind of thing. They’re talking about non-duality. They’re talking about the nature of reality and how we see it. Some of them, like Stuart Hameroff, who’s a famous, pretty well-known quantum physics kind of scientist. So they’re trying to crunch all this stuff together and show that reality is not as solid as we think it is and that maybe there’s something beyond that that we need to pay attention to. So yeah, it’s a very interesting movie.

Rick: Interesting. Is John Hagelin in any of those Leap things?

Chuck: The name doesn’t ring a bell. He may–

Rick: Physicist.

Chuck: He may–

Rick: I’m just curious. Great. And so what do you do with yourself? You’re retired from psychotherapy. I understand you speak at some conferences here and there. I mean, you keep yourself pretty busy with this enlightenment stuff.

Chuck: This non-dual stuff? I take my little non-dual dog and pony show on the road here.

Rick: I mean you write books, so that must take up some of your time, and you speak at some conferences here and there. Is that about it, or what?

Chuck: Well, I like speaking, yes. I take long walks in the woods because I live in a wooded area about 60 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. It’s near Fredericksburg and it’s like a hotbed of Civil War battlefields and stuff so I like to walk through the battlefields and kind of be alone, have my alone time. I live near a lake. I’ve got an 18-foot pontoon boat I take out on the lake and have a good old time on that. I don’t do any writing right now but I’m kind of leaning in that direction. I think that another book is going to be coming out sometime early next year. At least I’m going to be starting to write it. Most of what inspires me now is to actually do face-to-face contact with people. I like to give speeches. I like to give presentations. So if anybody who’s seeing this has an opportunity for me to do that, I’d be happy to do that. You can contact me through my website. I’ve got all kinds of different presentations I can give and would be very happy to come and visit you.

Rick: Yeah. Do you ever do little satsangs over the web or anything like that?

Chuck: I haven’t done so but I would certainly consider that as a possibility but nothing’s ever shown up for me to do that.

Rick: Some teachers do that these days, both audio and video even. There’s some people who’ve got it set up and you can tune in and watch them through some technology or whatever.

Chuck: Yeah. Yeah.

Rick: Cool. Great. Well, I think that’s a good stopping place unless you feel like there’s something that you’re going to think of after we hang up that you wish we had talked about.

Chuck: Probably, but I can’t think of anything. You’re a very kind interviewer, though. I’ve had interviews before from other people, but not to be unduly gushy about it, but I thought you were very competent and asked some excellent questions and were interactive, so I really appreciate the fact that we were able to dialogue like that.

Rick: Thanks. Sometimes I feel like I talk too much. As Larry King put it, “If I’m talking, I’m not learning,” but that’s not always the case either, because sometimes you learn as you say something. The idea gets more clear in your mind as you try to express it.

Chuck: Very true. Sometimes I start to talk and I don’t know where this stuff comes from. I’m going, “Hey, that’s pretty good shit.” Whatever I’m talking about, somehow it seems to make really good sense.

Rick: That’s an interesting point. Actually I used to– As I mentioned, I was into Transcendental Meditation. I was once teaching a teacher training course of people learning to become teachers and people would ask questions and I wouldn’t really know the answer, but I’d have a seed thought and I’d just start with that seed thought and then the whole answer would unfold. And I asked Maharishi about that– Maharishi Mahesh Yogi– and I said, “Is that okay?” He said, “Yeah, that’s the way I do it most of the time.”

Chuck: That’s how it works for me too. I just open my mouth and I start jumping in, and all of a sudden I’m going, “Where is this stuff coming from?” I’m channeling something or I’m an instrument or whatever kind of analogy you would want to use, but it’s not something that I’m thinking about. So I’m not really the thinker of these thoughts, but these thoughts just show up and I speak them out through my mouth.

Rick: Yeah, good. Well, as long as it’s through your mouth. I wouldn’t want to have it be through any other orifice.

Chuck: Oh, there you go! Rick laughs.

Rick: All right, well, thanks Chuck. This has been a lot of fun. So–

Chuck: It has been fun, yeah.

Rick: I’m glad you liked it.

Chuck: It’s been fun.

Rick: It has been fun, yeah. I do appreciate having the opportunity to hang out with you for an hour or whatever it is, and we’ll keep in touch and see how things go.

Chuck: Yeah, absolutely. My name, again, to conclude, is Rick Archer and I’ve been speaking with Chuck Hillig on Buddha at the Gas Pump. If you happen to be listening to this without actually connecting with the website– maybe somebody sent you an audio of it or something– there’s a website, www.batgap.com, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump, B-A-T-G-A-P. You can go there, and I think Chuck is interview number 28 or something like that, and so there’s a bunch of other ones there, and I do new ones every week. There’s also a podcast if you’d like to listen to this kind of stuff in your car on the way to work or something and there’s a YouTube channel which I put up some of the interviews on. I’ll put them all up eventually, but I always get the audios ready before the videos, and there’s been a backlog of the videos. But in any case, they’ll all be here eventually and new ones keep coming. And if anyone watching or listening to this has a suggestion for someone else that they think I should interview, let me know. I do get– In fact, that’s how I found out about you, Chuck. Your publisher, Connie Shaw.

Chuck: That’s right.

Rick: Connie Shaw said, “Hey, you should interview this guy,” and I said, “Okay.”

Chuck: I’m glad that she did and I’m glad that you did.

Rick: Yeah, good. Well, thanks. I really appreciate it. Enjoy. And we’ll be in touch.

Chuck: All right, buddy. Thanks again. Bye-bye.

Rick: Thank you.