Georgi Johnson Transcript: Nondual Therapy, Psychosis, and the Nature of Awakening

Georgi Y Johnson Interview

Summary

Georgi Johnson describes spontaneous childhood experiences of awareness and how repeating words revealed a gap between language and reality. She also reflects on meditation, spiritual institutions, personal responsibility, and the tension between genuine insight and inherited beliefs.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can spiritual awakening happen spontaneously in childhood?
• How can repeating a mantra or word change one’s experience of thought and awareness?
• How can someone tell when a spiritual teaching or organization is no longer serving their growth?
• What is the relationship between language, thought, and consciousness?

Key takeaways

• Repeating a word can reveal that words and meanings are not identical.
• Awareness can become a practical reset during periods of fear or difficulty.
• Spiritual teachings may offer value even when the institutions behind them are flawed.
• Personal responsibility matters more than conformity to any spiritual group.
• When attachment to personal thoughts relaxes, deeper intelligence can express through us.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people, and I’ve done over 500 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to BatGap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll see all the previous interviews organized in different ways.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site, and also a donation page that explains other ways to support it if you don’t want to use PayPal. We really appreciate those who have supported it and are supporting it. We literally mean it couldn’t be doing this if it weren’t supported. I’d have to be doing something else.

I still have a little bit of a cold, so I’m sounding a little bit froggy, but not as bad as I was last week. My guest today is Georgi Y. Johnson. Welcome, Georgi.

Georgi was born in Sheffield, England, and as she puts it, she has led a life of charm, intoxication, collision, and perpetual reawakening. So she’s going to elaborate on what all those things mean. She’s in Israel at the moment, which is her primary place of residence now.

Georgi sent me a page of biographical information, but I think it’d be kind of boring if I just read it. So I think I’ll just let Georgi say it, and we’ll get acquainted with who she is and proceed from there. So, Georgi, where would you like to start?

Georgi: Hi, Rick. You know, I want to say something before I begin talking about myself. You say every week, “I tell people about donating if they can, if it’s possible, that you’re doing this just based on donations.” I also want to add my voice to that. It’s really, really, really important to donate to things like Buddha at the Gas Pump and other online channels, because what’s being offered there is like a whole online education in everything that’s needed, and in things which you can’t really put a price on.

What Rick does unconditionally, contributing to us—when we will go and spend money in the shop, like nothing, on a dress, or we will invest in our marketers, in our tobacco companies, and in our consumer wants and needs—but this is something that’s really, really, really worthwhile. So I really, really want people to hear that. I hear it every week, the same script, and I really, really want to add to that. It’s precious.

I’ve been listening to your videos, Rick, ever since you said you were going to interview me. I’ve had them on all the time in the background, in the car and everything, totally binging, and it’s so rich, it’s so amazing. The diversity, your interviewing style, your whole personality is also a transmission, at best. That’s what I wanted to say before we say anything else, in case I didn’t get a chance to later on.

Rick: Well, thanks, Georgi. That’s very sweet and kind of you. My initial concept with this was just to do it and make it freely available, and grow it to the point where the small percentage of people who ever donate to anything would become sizable enough that it would enable me to do it full time.

When I first started out, I was working a day job and sort of doing it in the evenings and weekends and stuff. Then gradually I was able to diminish my day job as this grew. Finally, last March—or a year ago March—I was able to drop it altogether and devote my full attention to this, as well as living life and doing the other things life involves.

People were pressuring me in the beginning, some people, to monetize it, to charge for it, to run ads, and all that stuff. I just didn’t really want it to have that vibe. I wanted it to be freely available and to just let people who felt inspired to do so donate. It’s kind of worked out that way. So we’re never gonna—

Georgi: That’s really, really beautiful, because when you give totally out of your own freedom, it’s something else altogether than giving from “must have this.” There’s this kind of appreciation movement that becomes unconditional in a way, so there is quite a wisdom behind that. But it requires that people take individual responsibility to appreciate the value and the work that’s going in.

Rick: Thanks. Also, I should mention that there’s a great team of volunteers. My wife, Irene, spends as much time at this as I do. I spend a lot of time outside the interviews preparing for them and so on. Then we have Jerry and Larry and Angel and translators, and a bunch of people doing video and audio post-production and all kinds of stuff.

It’s just been this really sweet family of people that I’ve gotten to know over the years who chimed in to do this. It’s a labor of love, and people feel that they’re making a contribution in some way to the world, which I think they are.

All right, so let’s get on to you. There’s that joke: “Me, me, me.” Okay, enough about me. What do you think about me? Yeah, so, Georgi, tell us about yourself.

Georgi: Okay. You know, part of growing up has involved realizing that not everybody is the same as me, and not everybody is the same, although everybody is completely the same. They’re not really having the same experiences.

When I first wrote my first book, I Am Here, which is about three levels of perception and consciousness—the mind and awareness, which we kind of designate to the heart and the feeling awareness, and emptiness, which we designate to the physical body in the physical dimension—when I first started writing that, I assumed that everybody knew what awakening was, what it was to be conscious of consciousness. I kind of assumed that.

It was in teaching it to people that, at a certain stage in the middle of teaching, I realized that a lot of people didn’t actually get the basic power of analyzing that consciousness is free of thought.

Rick: Did you assume that even when you were very young, or just—?

Georgi: So that’s the thing. Yeah. My first memory ever was when I was two years old. I was in bed in the afternoon for a nap in England. I was just learning to talk, and I was lying there and was meant to go to sleep. I was looking at my body and noticing that my legs had grown longer, kind of marveling at them in proportion to the bed, and not really wanting to go to sleep.

I was really pleased with this new word that I’d learned, which was “guitar”: guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar. I was saying it again and again in my head. It was the era of Gary Glitter in the early ’70s, and my father was—you know, cool.

Rick: Your father was a music producer or something?

Making Words Meaningless Through Repetition

Georgi: Yeah, later on. He later became a music producer, yeah. So I was saying the word “guitar”—guitar, guitar, guitar—until it had absolutely no relation to the musical instrument. Then I tried it also with my name. I didn’t have that many words, but I started saying, “Georgi, Georgi, Georgi, Georgi,” and did it until the name had absolutely nothing to do with me. I think a lot of people must do this.

Rick: I don’t know.

Georgi: I don’t know.

Rick: You inadvertently discovered the principle of the mantra, using a repeated word that doesn’t actually have meaning but ends up having some kind of effect.

Georgi: But it started out with meaning, because if “guitar” is an important word, then “Georgi” is an important word, obviously, because that’s what everybody keeps shouting at me, right?

So I started saying, “Georgi, Georgi, Georgi,” until the name had absolutely nothing to do with me. I lay there and thought—not “Who the hell am I?” but I kind of wondered about that. I looked out toward the window, where afternoon light was coming through the curtain, with this question. Then this consciousness came forward, my own consciousness came forward, and then I became conscious of the consciousness. Then they became conscious of the consciousness, and it was like this kind of Jacob’s ladder of light going—check, jump—and this incredible feeling of home, literally as if out the window: light after light after light, like reflecting mirrors, within a mirror within a mirror.

Rick: Two mirrors facing each other, yeah.

Georgi: But with feeling content. Then I fell asleep. There was also a bit more. I thought about my mother downstairs—not “Mommy, mommy, mommy,” but “Who the hell is that woman making noise downstairs?” because she wasn’t “Mommy” anymore. But then I fell asleep.

This became a kind of strategy to survive, like a reset. Often months would go by with no—oblivion, just living, totally, like just living. I don’t remember any of it. Then there would be the next moment of a kind of mini-awakening, like walking to school in first grade and thinking, “Oh, the body is still healthy. That’s absolutely amazing,” and this kind of reawakening to this consciousness of consciousness.

Then I would vow to myself never, ever, ever to again forget this consciousness, this power, this affirmation of who I am—and then, of course, forget it again. Over time, during the teenage years, it became that when I was in trouble, I would reset the clock by going into the consciousness of consciousness in the here and now, in order not to take things too hard that were going on around me.

Then this consciousness came forward, my own consciousness came forward, and then I became conscious of the consciousness.

Rick: That’s interesting. At this point, you probably didn’t realize there was a world of spirituality and that people had been thinking about this stuff for thousands of years. You just cooked it up on your own.

Georgi: No context for it. I don’t know. When I was little, there were two words which I felt incredibly ashamed to say out loud, and those two words were “God” and “sex.” I could understand sex, but God—it felt like this critical sense of shame. It was like, “I think about it, but nobody talks about it, and everybody’s doing this.” That’s what you do when you’re in trouble.

Rick: Were you surrounded by atheists, or is that why you felt ashamed about God?

Georgi: No, no, no, no. Interestingly, not. My father was an atheist. At least, he said he was a “nothing,” and I remember having quite a serious argument with him about “What’s a nothing?” Which is kind of typical of me also today, to pick on people over things like, “There’s no such thing as nothing, and nothing is something,” and all of these kinds of things.

My mother was from a Catholic upbringing and was quite mystically inclined as well, but quite lost in the world at that age. She had me very young. I think that the kind of Catholicism in which she was brought up involved an enormous amount of shame as well.

Rick: Yeah, interesting. So you kind of absorbed some of that.

Georgi: You know, like a French Catholic. English Catholicism is a minority. They used to say to her in school, “Catholic child,” because she was the only Catholic in the room.

Rick: Sure. Anglicans are the majority there, right?

Georgi: Yeah, and the Catholics discriminated a little bit.

Rick: Okay, so this is interesting. I wonder how many people listening have had something like what you described. I would get certain words in my head when I was young, and they would seem unusual to me. They didn’t mean anything. One of them was the word “Hardeen,” which it turns out was the name of the Houdini family. Now one of my best friends is named George Hardeen, who is Harry Houdini’s great-nephew. But I didn’t meet him until a couple of decades later. That word would come into my mind—the strangest thing.

Georgi: And when you met him, did you have a feeling that you were meant to meet?

Rick: Well, it turns out I initiated him into meditation in about 1971. I didn’t remember him very well. But then, after I started BatGap, he discovered me again, and we got together and became best friends.

Georgi: Beautiful.

Rick: So there’s definitely some connection there. But in any case, this whole thing of taking a word and repeating it is the mechanics of how to think a mantra, although there are some subtle fine-tunings to that. Essentially, you just kind of stumbled upon that.

When you were repeating the word—I mean, now that you’re more familiar with the notion of transcendence in the mind, settling down to deeper levels and all that—did that actually happen as a result of thinking a word that became meaningless through repetition? Did it produce some kind of shift in consciousness?

Georgi: I think it was meant to happen because of what I thought was the role I needed to play and how I needed to express myself in the world. What really happened for me back then—and it was only that first instance—was that afterward I could simply become conscious of consciousness. I didn’t need the word.

But when I was that little, I was learning language. Something was forever broken in the connection between the word and that which the word is supposed to signify. If you think about the power of thought, thoughts are made of words. So reality, in terms of thought, collapsed at that moment.

After that, language became a tool that didn’t actually mean anything in itself. Thought became a tool, but not something inevitable, as in, “If I don’t think, I will die.” It became liberated. Something of the playfulness, the palette, and all of those areas was also available. I became a writer, and in all those areas where you can be playful with language, the word is not tied to the meaning of the word. The word “dog” has absolutely no connection to the furry animal that we love so much.

Rick: Yeah. Although I’ve heard this about Sanskrit, and I think I’ve also heard it about Hebrew. I’ve heard that there is supposed to be a correlation between the sound of a name and the object. In other words, if you take the word for “apple” in Sanskrit, whatever that sound may be, the vibratory quality of that word is supposed to correspond to the vibratory quality of an actual apple.

They say that other languages are not as tightly correlated, perhaps hardly at all. Although if you look at languages, a lot of them are derived from Sanskrit, and there are some similarities. It’s an interesting concept, and there’s supposed to be some significance to it. If you can use the word in the right way and sort of use its vibratory quality at a subtle enough level, you’re supposed to be able to have certain effects on the environment, possibly even manifest an apple or something like that.

Georgi: But you know what’s important here is the vibrant, vibratory quality.

Rick: Yes, yes.

Georgi: If a lot of people are saying the word “apple,” and they’re saying it as if an apple is some kind of divine entity which you can take into yourself and integrate through your whole system—from the Garden of Eden until today, taking it out of India and back to our own culture—but still, let’s say “apple” is the whole deal here: “Apple, apple,” and people are going to churches and all saying “apple, apple, apple” together with such reverence and awe, then concepts gain a life of their own through the investment of vibration inside the vessel, which is the word, in a way.

Is it inherent? Is it always like that? Is the word “Aum” really the sound that God made when he created the universe? It’s close, because every baby says “Aum,” but pretty early on after they’re born, they stop. There is something very primal about that sound, but that’s for each person to find their own felt connection with.

What’s more powerful, in terms of the magic of words, are the words that you’re not allowed to say. I was ashamed to say the word “God.” In Israel, in Jewish tradition, you do not say the main name of God, “YHWH,” because saying it gives it power. By not saying it, a power is gained.

That’s interesting psychologically, because when something is not spoken and is only kept inside—whether it was later on—

Rick: Well, let me just interject here. That’s the way it’s supposed to be with mantras, too.

Georgi: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I was coming to.

When I was 12, my mother took me—we were already living in Belgium, after my parents got divorced and everything. My mother was also searching spiritually. She was born that way, very much a mystic. She found the School of Philosophy, which was a kind of middle-class school. In London, it was called the London School of Economic Science, which, go figure, is quite a name. It was also in Holland.

Secret Mantra Initiation at Meditation School

Back then, in the 1980s, it was a school of meditation, in a way. They didn’t tell you it was that until you had been there for two years, but then they initiated you into meditation. When I was 13—no, just 14—I was initiated into meditation at the school, and that’s when they gave me this mantra and forbade me ever to say it to anybody.

For a while, I wasn’t sure whether everybody else had the same mantra or not, until people started whispering and spelling it out. Then we realized we all had the same one.

Rick: That may be the case in some schools, or there may be different ones in other schools. But the principle is that a mantra has to be imparted orally in order for the person to hear it. Once they receive it, though, it’s supposed to be kept on a subtler level, because its function is not to do anything in the gross realm. Its function is to take you from the subtlest level—the level of thought, which is already subtle—to yet more subtle levels.

If you speak it out loud, it brings it out in the opposite direction. That’s the principle behind not speaking it out loud. Anyway, there’s that point.

Georgi: It’s really interesting because when you think of the things we’re afraid to speak out loud, they’re often our deepest pain or our traumas—things we’re ashamed even to speak or think about. They also gain power when they’re not expressed. So it’s a tool that can be—

Rick: Probably never negative.

Georgi: Yeah, it can go in different directions.

Rick: Interesting. So once you learned that meditation, did you practice it regularly?

Georgi: Yeah. I was a little bit of a star child because I was in these groups with grown-ups.

Rick: Yeah.

Georgi: I found a context for this experience. All the teaching there was about being in the now, and there were classes in Sanskrit. They were evening classes, but it wasn’t all good there. There was a lot of pretense. We would go in and people would be very po-faced. You had to wear a skirt and have your forehead marked. We called it “the school face”—a kind of disentangled, emotionless expression.

It was sort of cult-like. Actually, I think it probably was a cult, because they were taking work for nothing—unpaid labor. If you left, you were excommunicated, and no one was allowed to speak to you anymore.

I was in the thick of it, and then my father suddenly died in England. He and my mother were already divorced. The school’s response was, “It’s only his body that’s gone.”

Rick: So it was a cold and emotionless response.

Georgi: It was absolutely ridiculous. “Not only his body that’s gone”? I lost my father—not only in the past, but in the present and the future. He wasn’t going to see my children. It was so uncontainable and unprocessable for a 14-year-old to experience the death of an already absent father, and they said, “Only his body has died.”

His body had been gone for a long time, but my father had died. I had gone into this tunnel of shock about mortality. I spent months just contemplating death, and they would come and say, “Only his body has died.” It was meaningless.

It came to a point where I would say to them, “When I die, I’m going to have to be accountable and responsible for whatever truth is true inside me. What the School of Philosophy says is totally irrelevant. That’s not going to come with me when I’m on my deathbed.”

I felt this edge of mortality so strongly. I bombarded one of the teachers with all of this, and he looked at me and said, “Let it rest. Let it rest.” So that was kind of it for me.

Some things you can’t discuss anymore. If there’s no personal responsibility for the way, and the school or organization becomes the way, then there’s always going to be a moment when you have to leave that behind, too.

When I die, I’m going to have to be accountable and responsible for whatever truth is true inside me.

Rick: Yeah. A lot of things are stepping-stones for us, and sometimes people get stuck in a particular thing for decades and decades and stagnate there. On the other hand, you can be a dilettante, just flipping from one thing to the next without going deeply into anything.

There’s some kind of proper balance in there, I think, for recognizing when it’s time to move on, having extracted all the benefit you can from a thing.

Georgi: Yeah. Sitting there and learning Sanskrit and learning about Brahman and Atman and all of this as a teenager gave me an enormous amount in conceptual thinking. I would write essays in my regular school—English essays—and talk about the Absolute and things like that. The teacher would say, “Okay, something’s wrong here. You’re using consciousness like this. You’re talking about the Absolute.” He told me that “this is cultish.”

At the same time, my conceptual mind had developed. It was able to develop way beyond what it could have done without this teaching. The teaching is never the same as the people who are doing it.

Rick: Yeah. Ideally, you walk your talk, but that doesn’t always happen.

It’s interesting that in your book, which I read last night, you mention how sometimes some kind of nondual realization or awakening of consciousness enlivens something in a person. You find people with relatively little education, at least in those areas, who can become conversant with deep philosophical principles and even with quantum physics and things like that.

It’s as if it awakens our familiarity with the subtler mechanics of nature, and suddenly we find we’re able to talk about those things.

Georgi: It’s like there is this quality of genius. And when we let go of our belief in our own local thoughts, when there is that degree of surrender, this genius can move through and express through whatever form is possible.

One of the people I had the pleasure to meet in recent years was Russell Williams in Manchester. He had absolutely no education. I’m not even sure that he could read. He was a teacher of Steve Taylor and the head of the Manchester Buddhist Association, but he had no education at all. He was orphaned at a very young age, and yet he could speak so profoundly.

Because he hadn’t had this education, he spoke in the simplest possible terms about comfort, discomfort, and relaxation, all from himself or from direct experience—nothing learned. He’d sit there in a suburb of Manchester, in this little house, on the sofa with a Jammie Dodger and a cup of tea. This kind of Buddha of Northern England used to teach with such exquisite simplicity, but with pure genius coming through. Einstein says that’s the biggest thing: if you can speak your genius with simplicity.

Rick: Yeah.

Georgi: That’s it.

Rick: Interesting.

Georgi: That was a big deal for me.

Rick: There was a story about a fellow named Totakacharya, who was one of Shankara’s four main disciples. The other three disciples were giant intellects. They would sit around working with Shankara on his commentaries on the Upanishads and things like that, and Totaka was just a really simple guy. He would be down at the river washing everybody’s clothes and doing those kinds of tasks.

One day, while doing that, he became enlightened. The others heard a beautiful voice singing as it came up from the river toward the ashram, singing an unknown melody and unknown meter—a beautiful devotional song. It turned out to be Totaka. What had happened was that he had awakened this fine level of intellect through his enlightenment. He then became this eloquent sage, having just been basically a washer boy.

Georgi: There’s a story in Judaism of the Baal Shem Tov, which is very, very similar, right? They’re all there on Yom Kippur. They’re all praying and saying all of the things on Yom Kippur, which is the holiest of holy days. The village idiot is there near the river, and he’s playing this flute. He’s playing it and playing it and playing it.

They all come running out and say, “Shush, shush, shush. It’s Yom Kippur, it’s Yom Kippur. You shouldn’t be doing this.” The Baal Shem Tov comes and says, “No, no, no. The sound he’s making is going straight to heaven. This is the real thing.”

Rick: Nice.

Georgi: The kid was expressing the energy of the day.

Rick: Yeah. Then there was the story of Christ preaching in the temple when He was 14 years old or something, blowing everybody away with His wisdom, and they’re thinking, “Where’d this kid get this?”

Georgi: It’s always going to be from somewhere else, right? Never from here.

Rick: Yeah. Anyway, so your dad died, and this really hit you hard. My dad also died of an alcohol-related thing, so I can relate, although I was a lot older at the time. Then you left that society and went to Oxford, right?

Georgi: Probably, thanks to them, I got into Oxford because I had this conceptual kind of approach to literature. I was kind of blessed because I wasn’t really the kind of straight-A student, and suddenly there I was, accepted at Oxford. It was kind of like being lifted on a bird into a kind of immunity away from effort.

Rick: Did you enjoy Oxford? Did you do well there?

Georgi: I very, very, very, very much enjoyed the awakeness of mind and the concentration of thought: intelligent, creative, very traumatized people all in one place. I liked that.

Rick: Somebody sent in a comment, which I think is worth reading. Jennifer from Ventura, California, said, “Just a note to say that I had nearly identical experience as a child to that described by Georgi in her crib and in the early ’70s, as well, just one in a series of many awakenings throughout life.” And then she said, “I was given a TM mantra at the age of four in 1974.”

Yeah, they teach children at about that age. So it’s interesting.

Georgi: I’m happy to hear that.

Rick: Yeah. I bet a lot of children have all kinds of beautiful, mystical, profound experiences.

Georgi: Oh, yeah.

Rick: Practically everybody listening can remember something, rather. They tend to fade over time, and they also tend to be dismissed as a child’s imagination or something like that. But we come in usually pretty open.

Georgi: I’m sure about it.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, so at Oxford, you studied Jungian psychology and the application of psychoanalytic and feminist literary theory.

Georgi: Yeah, literature, basically. But I took that chance, on this excuse of English literature, to really explore Carl Jung, Freudian analysis, and Kant, because we were in the age of literary theory. You can theorize anything and then make your own interpretation of Shakespeare, or whoever, based on that theory: Marxist theory, feminist theory.

Interestingly enough, I got very much involved with deconstructionism. Deconstructionism is exactly from the same thing I talked about: that experience when I was two, that the word and the object are not bound together, that there is no known, definite, absolute connection between a word and a thing, the sign and that which is signified.

So it was already playing out there. A lot of what would show up later showed up again. In Oxford, they declared “the author is dead.” The deconstructionist literary theorists declared the death of the author because the author doesn’t exist, which is pretty much like, “I have nobody, nowhere, nothing.” It’s just the text, and the text is how you interpret it. The text in itself is totally fluid, according to the generation or the conditioning of the readers, and the author is hard to find.

Rick: So are they saying that it really doesn’t matter what the author had in mind when he or she wrote the thing? What matters is how you interpret it?

Georgi: Yeah. That school of thought was very much in opposition to the other school, which says, “The author meant this, and the author meant that.”

Rick: Yeah. Well, to me, if the author has a right to actually try to say something and to mean it—

Georgi: If he’s still alive, yeah. But when it’s Shakespeare and he’s being interpreted in the year 2000—

Rick: Then who can say what he meant? Yeah. Hmm. Okay. All right, so then, when you were 20, you arrived in Jerusalem in search of a midway point between the mysticism of the East and the decay of the West. You experienced a part of the earth that is charged with bliss. It was also a country where it seemed that nobody belonged?

Georgi: Yes.

Rick: Why? How is it that Israel is charged with bliss?

Georgi: The land here has a very strong quality of bliss in it. I was in Jerusalem especially, and I was walking barefoot through Jerusalem, as one does. I felt the connection between my feet and the ground, and the kind of miracle of everything that was around me at that time. There was also the history, in the ground beneath my feet.

Again, one of these awakenings came, and my heart burst open. I went into this kind of—it’s not so much bliss as ecstasy. For three weeks, I went back to London and was on the Underground, smiling like an idiot the whole time. I was so happy. It was like falling deeply and unconditionally in love, but with nothing—just this massive opening of the heart created by the quality of the light and the felt sensation of the earth.

Particularly around Jerusalem, they call it Jerusalem syndrome. They actually have a syndrome for people who go there, especially if they go down to the Dead Sea, where the caves of the Essenes are. Sometimes people can get completely psychotic, and they walk off saying, “I’m going to live in a cave.”

Rick: Just because of the influence of the place?

Georgi: The atmosphere.

Rick: I think people listening to this can understand that if you think of Arunachala, for instance, where everybody goes, where Ramana lived, and places like that—places in the Himalayas—certain places are said to be charged with spiritual energy. If you go there, then you absorb some of that spiritual energy. So it’s not really an unusual idea for those listening.

Georgi: Yeah, yeah. I felt very, very much the energy of Jesus, but not in any of the churches. It was so close to my own sense of self, almost like a strain inside the sense of self. It was so intimate, so close to the heart, that it was impossible to feel there was any conflict at all—any logical conflict at all—between Christianity and Judaism.

When I was in that ecstatic state, it just felt like almost an obligation to bridge that lie of the split between Judaism and Christianity.

Rick: I don’t think there’s a logical conflict between the mystics of all the religions. If all the really top-grade mystics were to get together from all the different spiritual traditions and have a chat, they’d all be in complete agreement. It’s just the people who don’t experience what they were experiencing who see the conflicts and the contradictions.

Georgi: Yeah. Again, we have that thing with outer authority. When you trust an authority outside of yourself rather than your own direct heart connection, it very quickly becomes tribalistic, partisan, defensive, and recruiting.

Rick: Yeah. And that’s been one of the problems with every spiritual tradition: the administrator types take over, and they don’t have the inner experience, so they get all into imposing outer authority and actually start to persecute those who claim to have some inner experience. The whole thing is lost.

Georgi: It becomes all about the power. Often, the teacher themselves gets relegated.

Rick: Yeah. Anyway, it seems to be a syndrome. Okay, so you say—and I’m reading bits of your bio here because it sort of prompts you along—your life in Israel would include a compulsion for conflict. You worked as an investigative journalist, exposing lies told about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Later, you would undergo a high-conflict divorce in which you were condemned by rabbinical courts as a fake convert, a home breaker, and a naughty woman. Somewhere along the line, I heard you mention that you’ve had 10 kids.

Georgi: Seven are from my body, and Bart has three. We have one together, so number seven of mine is together. So—

Rick: So 10 altogether?

Georgi: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: That must have kept you busy on top of everything else.

Georgi: Yeah.

Rick: How old is the youngest one now?

Georgi: She is 12.

Rick: So you’ve lived a very active life, with a lot of responsibility. But as we’ll continue to see as we have this conversation, you’ve been very dedicated to spirituality, with all sorts of spiritual awakenings. I think that sets a good example, because anyone who feels that they’re too busy or have too much responsibility to have a really spiritual life might find inspiration in what you’ve been doing.

Georgi: Yeah, well, the thing is that because of the negative sides of the experience of the School of Philosophy when I was a teenager—and there was a negative side—and also because I was at the age of leaving home, which meant kicking off against everything that was associated with home and going to Oxford, I really put all of that away.

Spirituality began to show up in terms of dream analysis and creativity. I still totally and absolutely believed in God and had my consciousness-reset thing, but it didn’t have a context, and it didn’t have a practice—not at all. I would never even dream of going to a psychologist; that was for losers. I became quite arrogant.

As a journalist, when I went to Jerusalem, despite this ecstatic experience, I was there on a fact-finding mission. It involved going around the refugee camps and East Jerusalem, which is the Arab side of Jerusalem; the religious Jewish side; the secular Jewish side; the settler side; and all the different aspects of the conflict just in Jerusalem.

It was intellectually amazing to me. It was absolutely amazing that this country hadn’t existed for 1,000 years and yet it was prophesied that the Jews would come back. Lo and behold, this horrific, unbelievable thing happens, which is the Holocaust, and then here is this country with this incredible history. It felt like nobody really belonged, but everybody came from somewhere, and everybody had a story and a tragedy.

For the first time in my life, I could talk about the death of my father without everybody blushing and killing the conversation. Everybody had lost somebody there. It was like oxygen. I could be myself there, you know what I mean? So, yeah.

🩺 Burnout, addiction, and recovery

Rick: Interesting. So you say in your bio that everything you went through there reawakened your deeper purpose—the exploration of the mysteries of consciousness?

Georgi: Yeah. Inside investigative journalism, I built up quite a big ego structure connected with saving the world. Because I was using a lot of cannabis and drinking an enormous amount of coffee, I can say psychologically now that, actually, quite soon afterward, I saw that I was projecting my own parents’ divorce onto my life. That was coded as the end of the world.

At the same time, it was kind of psychic, in that my son was getting to the age when my parents divorced. I became more and more psychotic through the combination of cannabis and coffee. I felt that I had to save the world against the threat of unconventional terrorism.

At the same time, it was slightly psychic because this was in 1998, and I have articles that I wrote predicting a twin attack on America by Bin Laden, with the World Trade Center as one of the targets.

Rick: Wow, you actually predicted that.

Georgi: Yeah, because it was based on the terrorist patterns and what had been going on before that. But the emotional content of it was that my ego structure was collapsing. I became terrified to be a mother because I thought, “If the kids come near me, I’m going to inflict the same pain on them that was inflicted on me.”

I would get these crippling anxiety attacks. My stomach felt like it was imploding, and I thought I was having a heart attack. I went to a doctor.

Rick: It probably had a lot to do with all the coffee and cannabis, too.

Georgi: Oh, absolutely. Suddenly, the cannabis was very, very strong. It was this kind of skunk cannabis. I haven’t touched it for a long while, but it became like not a soft drug anymore. It was morning till night. That was the lifestyle.

Rick: It’s amazing you could do anything.

Georgi: I was buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. My whole mind was in my head, all buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, reaching out to forget information about where the threat was. I was imagining scenarios, but then I would actually begin to experience them, like being attacked with nerve gas.

For example, when driving in a traffic jam, I would imagine, “What would it be like? How many people would get killed if there were a nerve-gas trail from the exhaust pipe of that car?” I would get visions of everybody dying from gas, and it was Jews and gas, right? This is something that people should be honest about.

Then I would begin salivating and feeling utterly and totally as if I were being attacked with nerve gas in that moment. I was utterly out of balance.

Rick: Interesting. I don’t suppose—no, cannabis is not legal in Israel, right? You were just smoking it.

Georgi: It’s like everywhere else. It’s becoming legal little by little. But it is a drug which, despite the legality, can cause problems. We make DMT naturally in our own brains, and with any drug, if you take it from the outside too much, if you abuse it, you stop making it yourself. That means that when you start to come off it, the brain doesn’t know how to produce its own spirit molecule.

Rick: Right. It’s forgotten, it’s lost, it’s atrophied.

Georgi: It takes time to open that up and heal the neurochemistry again.

Rick: Yeah, that’s why I totally lost interest in drugs once I learned to meditate. It was like, “Oh, yes, all this nice inner bliss, and I’m not even smoking anything.” Interesting. So how did you snap out of that?

Georgi: It snapped out of me. It snapped out of me. It got to a place where, if I smoked a joint, I would go into immediate, full-time, proper anxiety, panic, and immobilization. I had little children.

Rick: So you just couldn’t touch the stuff anymore.

Georgi: We were in Cambridge. I remember I had a puff on a joint and was walking through Cambridge, and it was like an LSD trip. The grass became too green and the sky became too blue. It literally brought me to my knees.

Thank God that in England there was a decent general doctor who had a lot of respect and wasn’t just pushing psychiatric drugs. He had a lot of compassion. I took some simple Prozac, which I immediately felt numbed half my brain and my creativity. After a short while, once it kicked in, it began to be every other day. It would be like an alive brain, a dead brain, an alive brain, a dead brain, according to whether I had taken the pill. I could begin to wean myself off it.

But what came after the anxiety was exactly that: without the DMT function in the brain, I went into this place of total apocalyptic depression. I took down all of the web campaigns, ended the newsletter on terrorism, broke all connections, and there was nothing. It was almost worse than the anxiety—the sense of depression, senselessness, and meaninglessness.

Rick: Let me ask you a question. What do you think is going to happen to societies that are now legalizing cannabis in Canada, the United States, and various other places? It has been legal in Holland for a long time. Do you think it’s going to have a long-term deleterious effect? Or does the good outweigh the bad? I just wonder, after a decade, how we’re going to look at it.

Perhaps there will be some people who just indulge heavily, as people will with any drug, and those people will be stupefied, while others will use it occasionally and be fine. What do you think about the wisdom of legalization?

Georgi: I think that in the short term there will be a kind of spike in nervous breakdowns and psychosis. In the long term, it will be just like Holland, and everybody will begin to take individual responsibility for their own regulation and their own habits.

Some people need it a little bit, especially medicinally. It has a huge advantage. It gave me some significant things in the opening of experiential memory—the memory of how things felt. It really opened my right brain at a certain stage.

We’re in an age where people have to start taking responsibility for their own health, whether it’s alcohol or drugs. Whether it’s legal or illegal doesn’t matter, whether it’s ayahuasca or something else. They need to start to develop a sense of self-awareness about when they are abusing a substance, when it is taking them in a bad direction. All roads always lead back to that.

Rick: Whatever you say, it’s certainly not good that so many hundreds of thousands of young people—many of them Black young men—are sitting in prisons because they had a little bit of marijuana, sold a little bit, or something. It has ruined a lot of lives, so that has to stop.

Georgi: And not only that. I read a statistic recently that 50 percent of Americans have or have had a family member in prison.

Rick: Yeah.

Georgi: So this is having a direct effect on the conditions, the feeling of freedom, the feeling of well-being, and the freedom of being allowed to exist freely throughout the whole population. It’s a kind of slavery that’s going on, because if your brother goes to prison, you’re in prison as well.

The whole principle of “Be afraid, be afraid, be afraid. You’re not okay. You can be put away.” This principle is holding 50 percent of the population. And that’s not counting the people who are in prison.

Rick: Yeah, I think the United States has the highest per-capita incarceration rate of any country in the world. I think it’s worse than China.

Georgi: It’s big business, isn’t it?

Rick: It is. A lot of the prisons are private, and people are making money off them. Okay, so how did you snap out of this? You started to take—

Georgi: Yeah, so I was in this apocalyptic depression. I was just walking around Cambridge, and at a certain stage I walked into the center of town. There was a bunch of Black South African schoolchildren singing from Soweto. They still had desert dust on their clothes, in a way.

There was something about them. They were singing with such innocence and such purity. I stood there, and it was like my heart just burst open. I started to cry and cry and cry.

After that, something started to come to life again, on a completely different note from what had been before—much more authentic and much less arrogant. I began working with smell and essential oils, just massaging people’s feet, because the only thing that took away the anxiety and depression was being of service to somebody.

Especially with my worst enemies, I would grab their feet and treat them with essential oils and massage their feet—people I didn’t like. It was a bit Jesus-like, but it really, really helped calm me down and make a turnaround out of this place of total burnout and existential crisis.

Rick: Well, that’s nice. I think you’re the first person I’ve ever interviewed who had a big boost from essential oils, or who at least told me about it.

Georgi: The smell. It was smell.

Rick: Yeah.

Georgi: Just the smell.

Rick: Sure.

Georgi: Amazing smells. So pure.

Rick: A question came in from Dan in London, wondering: Do you have any advice for raising children in a way that can infuse them with spiritual wisdom or openness, particularly in the younger years? Children are so open, but when is it difficult or not appropriate to have spiritual or philosophical conversations?

Georgi: You know, a spiritual or philosophical conversation will be initiated by every child. We have to be ready and open to receive it. It’s not teaching them anything. We have this misconception that we educate our children, that we have something to give them. It’s the other way around. They come, you know; there’s an evolution going on. These children are born as living masters. As soon as they begin to talk, they begin to transmit what they can in simple language.

If they say they see colors, or if they say that they saw a dog in their room and a dog wasn’t there, respect their experience and respect their feelings. Ask questions, explore them, be interested, and affirm what they experience, no matter how crazy it might sound. That’s my advice with children. They are amazing. This is why I had so many. Each one is a total miracle, and each one is different, each one with a whole new set of skills and wisdom. Awesome. Awesome. They’re all my teachers, all of them.

Rick: Did you have any child—any of your children—who was much more difficult than the others? And if you had, would you probably say that they were no less your teachers than the easier ones, because difficult situations can often be our greatest teachers?

Georgi: They all went through difficult stages because they went through quite a horrible divorce. And they all came out amazing, having been allowed and safe enough, and held enough, to be able to kind of—

One of our children absolutely wrecked the house. We went out, and when we came back, the chairs were upside down, all the plates were broken, and the house was completely destroyed. He would never talk. He just would not talk. He would say, “Yes” or “No” and “I’m bored.” That was his whole vocabulary. I thought there was no hope, and I said to Bart, “What shall we do?” And he said, “He will heal. He will heal.” Bart is my partner.

At a certain stage, he was playing computer games, and his stuff got hacked so many times that he had a complete and total rage attack about it. Then he went upstairs and started banging on the piano. He banged on it for the whole summer—bang, bang, bang on the piano. But by the end of two months, he was playing Rachmaninoff and Mozart and this and that. He had his first piano lesson, and the teacher nearly collapsed.

He began to talk because he was playing the piano, because he was expressing this quality of music. His physics and mathematics went up, and he got all the best grades. He became this beautiful, sensitive, wise, meditating individual. He’s studying mindfulness and psychology right now in Jerusalem, and he was one of the most difficult ones.

Rick: That is so interesting. There’s a really cool story. I’m glad I asked you that question. I mean, that’s inspiring.

Georgi: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: I had a girlfriend many, many years ago who was a schoolteacher, teaching grammar school. There was this kid who was the real problem child in the class. They were wondering what they were going to do with him. They thought he might have to leave school, and so on and so forth. Somebody—I don’t know whether it was my girlfriend or somebody else—had the idea that he was actually just too smart for the grade he was in. So they skipped him a grade. He was actually a much more advanced kid. Then he blossomed. He was just bored and frustrated.

Georgi: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, our schools, our education systems, are terrible. The whole philosophical foundation of putting knowledge into kids’ heads is as if their heads are empty. The too-smart kids get lost, as do the kids with a different kind of brain. We’ve got a few dyslexics who are incredible conceptual thinkers and poets, but there’s no recognition of them whatsoever—just shaming. At least in Israel, it’s really, really, really not good. The best you can do is get to a democratic school, which is a kind of opt-out—you pay for it outside the system—so that damage isn’t done.

✨ Three dimensions of awakening

Rick: Yeah. Okay, so we spent about an hour, although we had some downtime with that technical difficulty, and we’ve been talking about you and jumping around a little bit in terms of our subject matter. But I think we’re covering a lot of interesting stuff. There’s a whole thing we want to talk about, which is what you do now, which is non-dual therapy, and the whole interesting discussion about non-dual qualities and all. So I want to make sure we have plenty of time to really go into that. Let’s go into that. But if there’s anything critical in your whole story of your life that we haven’t covered, we should weave that in. Also, at some point, perhaps as a segue into this discussion—

Georgi: Yeah. Okay, so let’s speed it up a little bit. After the nervous breakdown, I was ready to do anything rather than go back to that hell, which is anxiety. It’s very egoic. You know, I didn’t give up drugs; drugs gave up me. Then it was anything rather than go back to hell.

So I started going to a spiritual psychologist, and she referred me to these healing courses with Bart, who later became my partner. The very first time I met with her, I was in anxiety again. I had come back to Israel, and the next day I was sitting with the children on the grass, in anxiety, when I felt her connecting with me. It was such a transmission of joy and okayness, remotely, that my whole reality just transformed for about an hour. I could breathe, and I was free of anxiety for about an hour.

The next time I went to her, I said, “I want to learn what you know how to do. I want to study this.” It was like finding something that you had always known. I was always very intuitive and always following my feet, but I had never found such a tangible kind of experience—that this was possible through the felt sense, this kind of remote healing thing.

In studying these spiritual psychology courses, the next stage came, which was deeper than awakening. That was this kind of unconditional opening of the heart. It was as if the heart had been so blocked and so closed, maybe my whole life, and at a certain stage it just splintered open. There was this sense of satori, or just unconditional love for everybody and everything, ongoing, ongoing, ongoing, ongoing for a couple of months.

In studying these spiritual psychology courses, the next stage came, which was deeper than awakening. That was this kind of unconditional opening of the heart. It was as if the heart had been so blocked and so closed, maybe my whole life, and at a certain stage it just splintered open. There was this sense of satori, or just unconditional love for everybody and everything, ongoing, ongoing, ongoing, ongoing for a couple of months.

I was totally functional. I was thinking, “Am I going psychotic here?” But no, I was totally functional with the children—better than ever—and totally clear-minded. Every time I put the experience down, it would come back again, with these great blessings, like blankets of peace coming down, and something which I had never, ever experienced before in my life.

It got to a point where I was hanging out the washing in the garden, and I felt it stop. I had felt unconditional love for Osama bin Laden and unconditional love for every fucker on the planet. Then suddenly it stopped. I thought, “Why has it stopped? What’s this? What am I?” I met a wall in my heart, and then I realized that I had come up against myself, and my heart just closed. That was really where that part of the experience ended.

Only about six or seven years later, there would be a third process, which was much more to do with the body. I call it the emptiness process, where a lot of the deep fears and self-rejections, deep inner splits, blocks to unity, and subtle unconscious conditions on life began to fall away.

Because of this, in our teaching we make it into three layers of development. People can organize it how they want, but I think this is a really good way to understand it. Awakening—we use that word for the awakening of consciousness from mind, from thought identification. Enlightenment, with a little e, is the liberation of the heart: the liberation of the heart from the conditions and contractions which have kept it from passing through, in a way, to the other side, and have kept it limited.

Then there is emptiness, which is the liberation of the body from basic subconscious and unconscious fears, from the fear of death, and from the belief that the body is physically separate from the planet. There are those final rifts in which we separate ourselves, without even being aware of it, from the outside, what we see as the outside world.

Rick: It sounds very much like Adyashanti’s head-heart-gut model, you know.

Georgi: It does. You know, when I wrote I Am Here, I didn’t even know what non-duality was. I discovered it later. A lot of it was guided, but by a guide who very much said, “Speak it in your own right.” Later on, I found out who he was, but that was a year or two later.

It felt like the world was not ready for this I Am Here thing. By then, it was such a kind of, “How the hell am I—what am I on?” Then I discovered Adyashanti, and actually, this wasn’t so off the wall. But by then I had gone through a whole process of reducing it down to, “Come on: head, heart, and body. Head, heart, and body. That’s all it is.” It’s thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations, really having to simplify it, because when I first started teaching, people would say, “What the hell is she talking about?” Especially non-English speakers.

Rick: Yeah. Now you just said something interesting: that there was some guide, like a muse, channeling this stuff through you or something. What’s that about?

Georgi: There was. There was, you know—

Rick: Now you know who he is, or who he was.

Georgi: All my life, I followed still, small voices and intuitive voices. I never had a problem with voices in my head, even when the psychiatrist had me and they said, “Do you hear voices in your head?” I said, “What, don’t you?” So following guidance for me is very, very automatic.

This particular guide would come very precisely with indications about this whole thing of consciousness and awareness: head, and the sense perception of consciousness through the center of the head; awareness, which is much more about how things feel and feeling atmospheres; and the third part, which is here—the body.

I asked him at a certain stage to show me who he was, to give me his face. He showed up as an eagle and flew straight past. I thought, “Okay, that’s nice.” But then he said I could call him Pappy, so we would talk about him as Pappy.

One day I was scrolling through Facebook, and Nisargadatta showed up. There was a quote where he was literally talking about consciousness and awareness prior to being. So I began looking into Nisargadatta, and it was like, “Oh, my God, this is absolutely and totally him. Is this you?” “Yes, that’s me, but it’s not me.”

So I don’t know. I’ve got no claim to absolute realities here at all. I really have nothing to do with absolute realities and facts, and no possession, no claiming him, nothing. But this is what I—

I can feel him like, you know, like Jesus. There is this—I can even feel the kind of disappointment that he—this sounds a bit arrogant—but there was this hope that he would become nothing but eternal source when he died, and he became a whole universe called Nisargadatta. He didn’t get free of himself. I think that was a bit of a disappointment.

Rick: Could be. Why not? Perhaps just because he was anticipating something else. But, you know, God had other plans.

Georgi: It could be that that’s how it is: that we are in the universe and the universe becomes more and more free. Each one of us giving birth to each one could be like—

Rick: I like that idea. I have a feeling that’s the way it works. I mean, with Ramana too. There are so many people who have had visitations from Ramana and messages from Ramana, and visions, and so on and so forth, that it kind of seems like even people like Pamela Wilson, who had never heard of him before and then had this experience when she was young.

Later on, she discovered him, and others—several people I’ve interviewed—had similar things happen, but they hadn’t heard of the guy. They saw him, and then later they saw him in an actual book. So maybe—

Georgi: Russell Williams in Manchester, after he was enlightened by a horse—literally, a horse looking into his eyes. He saw himself in the horse and himself as the horse.

After that, he went telling all of these Christian priests and everything, and they all said, “Oh, no, it’s blasphemy. It’s rubbish. You’re totally off.” He didn’t have any context for it whatsoever. He began to go into despair because he felt like he was this lone island of incredible Self-Realization, but no one to talk to about it.

He prayed, saying, “Please, God, help me with this.” And he got this WOMP face of Ramana.

Rick: Interesting.

Georgi: He had no idea who this Indian guy was.

Rick: Right.

Georgi: Later on, he matched the face to a picture that somebody gave him years later. It used to stand on his shelf there in Manchester.

Rick: Fascinating. Is he still alive?

Georgi: No, he died a year and a half ago.

Rick: Oh, I missed him. But anyway, that’s cool.

Georgi: He was 96 or something. Quite ready to move on for a while.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, certainly, the New Agers talk about Ascended Masters. I’ve interviewed people who say they’re talking to Mary Magdalene and Jesus, and so on. So I keep an open mind. I mean, who knows? Maybe these enlightened beings don’t just sort of melt into the oneness, like a drop into the ocean, but maybe they retain some kind of structure or functional capacity and continue to guide humanity from whatever realm they’re dwelling in.

Georgi: Yeah, maybe the realm that we’re living in is this realm. It’s just not visible.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. But we can talk about realms because, obviously, there’s a lot right here that isn’t visible.

Georgi: Exactly. We’re so arrogant without our eyes, ears, and noses, you know?

Rick: Yeah.

Georgi: You think if we can’t see it—like dark matter—you think if you can’t see it, then we call it “dark.”

✨ Non-duality and the qualities of consciousness

Rick: Hmm. Well, that kind of, in a way, shifts us into our discussion about non-dual therapy, because you talk about non-dual qualities, or qualities of consciousness.

What we’ve just been discussing for the last five or ten minutes is beings who have attained unity consciousness, and yet there are certain qualities and functions which are retained not only when they’re in the human body, but apparently after they’ve dropped the human body.

It might sound like an oxymoron to speak of non-dual qualities, because “qualities” implies relative stuff. “Non-dual” makes you think of an oceanic plane, wholeness, oneness, with no differentiation. But I think we can resolve this paradox in the course of our conversation as we go forward here. So let me send it back to you to get started.

Georgi: If you’re talking about paradox, you know, the very word “non-dual,” “non-duality”—what is that? It’s something that defines itself by what it’s not.

Rick: Yeah, in fact—

Georgi: What’s not Rick? What is not Rick? How do we find “not Rick” in the universe?

Rick: Yeah.

Georgi: Everywhere in the universe we look, we find Rick; we find a Rick-ness. There is no “non-Rick.” So, in a way, non-duality is a kind of cone, which I really love about it. It’s a cone.

But the one word which is meaningful inside this cone of non-duality is duality. Isn’t it?

Rick: Yeah.

Georgi: When we look at the forms, every single form in creation has a North Pole and South Pole. It’s got a left hand or right hand. It’s got two eyes. It’s got up and down. Its leaves are separating, branching, splitting. Cells are dividing. That first embryo becomes two cells, then becomes four cells, and then becomes eight cells.

It’s all about division and duality. So there is something in the splendor of everything created in our physical universe—which is all that we can see and know as creatures of this physical universe—that is all duality in naturalness, harmony, symmetry, beauty, and balance.

Rick: But I think what some people mean when they say non-duality—and they sometimes refer to physics as a metaphor, or as an actual example of it—is that on more manifest levels, we have all this diversity. But if we go more and more fundamental into nature’s structure, we get down to simpler and simpler, more unified realities.

Ultimately, even the very first sprouting of diversity folds back into an unsprouted, or unmanifest, state, which physics might call a unified field, or spiritual people might call pure consciousness. They say, “Okay, well, ultimately, what’s real is that non-dual state. All of this emergence of properties and diversities is less real in some way. It’s more illusory in some way.”

Georgi: So you see what’s there? There’s a hierarchization.

Rick: There is.

Georgi: This is more real; this is less real.

Rick: That’s how it’s described, yeah.

Georgi: Yeah, and the splitting: this is the true state, this is the false state.

Rick: Yeah, that’s the bias that comes across.

Georgi: This is duality. This is pure duality. This is pure either/or: this is right, this is wrong; this is safe, this is unsafe.

In terms of physics, what’s expressing from the unified field of emptiness—I would call it emptiness, not consciousness—the moment what is emerging is perceived or felt, it could seem conscious. You’ve got subject and object. You’ve got the one that sees it and the vision which is seen. If it’s felt resonantly through awareness, you’ve got an experience, and you’ve got an experiencer.

So non-duality, the unified field of emptiness, is always the one which is able to experience, the one which is able to perceive, the one which is able to—it doesn’t matter what: to get drunk in a pub or to have the most sublime meditational experience of a golden Buddha. It’s the same one.

It’s the same one expressing through all of these different forms of love, peace, purity, innocence, naturalness, and suffering. It’s the same one suffering in billions of different forms. The same one—

Rick: Suffering and enjoying.

Georgi: Yeah. The same one lost in ignorance. It’s not separable.

So, at least from how we understand it, non-duality is about the wisdom of non-separation. It’s not about an alternative state, and it’s not about a club. It’s just an excellent word to bring forward the paradox of there being, ultimately, no duality between existence and nonexistence—which is totally quantum physics. The particle is blipping in and out: it’s here and not here, here and not here, here and not—

Rick: Particle to wave.

Georgi: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: Yeah.

Georgi: Exactly. And that’s very true to direct experience. Your consciousness is flickering, flickering; it’s blipping in and out. Awareness is more of a wave.

But anything—even when I’m aware that I’m aware—yeah, that awareness that I’m aware of, that field of awareness, has a subtle vibration. It’s a form, a subtle form of vibration, which means it’s not who I am ultimately. I’m prior to that. Even the experience of pure awareness, perhaps.

Rick: Yeah, I think what you’re saying is in complete accordance with what the writers of the Upanishads and these great texts were saying. In fact, they said things such as, “That alone is,” and “Thou art That,” and so on and so forth, referring to this non-duality.

All of this is That. So they’re just saying—

Georgi: And that’s exactly it, isn’t it? You can feel the That-ness in every single piece of mud, every moment of perception, and every touch with the physical. You can feel the That-ness. It’s really not excluding anything, but it is accelerating something.

There is a quickening of vibration when That-ness connects to That-ness—when That inside me connects to That inside you. There’s a quickening of vibration in which things become kind of either chaotic or very painful or clarified. But an evolution starts to happen toward harmony, actually.

Rick: Yeah, there are two nice little themes there. One is that if any of this has somehow become something other than That, then That couldn’t be non-dual, because it must be off in some corner, because something has emerged and become separate from it. So it couldn’t really be all-inclusive or all-embracing. All of this must be That.

If that’s it—

Georgi: Exactly, exactly. But, of course, people like to fundamentalize everything. So you get people who say, “There is no other. There’s no such thing as other. There is only That.”

But there is arising in the That-ness: the experience of otherness. And that is such an important experience in creation.

Of course, we’re not limited to the physical dimension, the creative physical dimension. But there is ecstasy in the otherness. There is bliss. There is reunion. There is nirvana in the otherness.

In the experience of otherness is the beginner’s mind. When you can look at the world with a totally fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh mind, you see all these people inside their thoughts, inside their heads, and on their phones, each one in their own bubble. You look at it, and it’s like “other.” And that’s a non-dual experience.

Rick: Yeah. Well, if they insist that there is no other, then it kind of belies their own experience. Because if you take a hammer and threaten to pound their thumb with it, then there’s definitely an aversion to that experience. It’s not like, “Oh, it doesn’t matter because it’s all one.” It’s like, “No, I don’t want that experience.”

🩺 Non-dual qualities and healing

Georgi: That’s a bit like, you know, “It’s only his body that’s dead.” “Yeah, it is only his body that’s dead, but what the hell is death?” You know what I mean? People have many, many—I think it was Jung who said that people will go to vast lengths to escape the mystery of their own souls. They have genius ways, including spiritual ways, to deny, negate, and not feel what is anyway here, happening.

And this is splitting inside the psyche, again and again and again. So, if we move to non-dual qualities, when people have experiences of awakening, enlightenment, or moments of Self-Realization, you’ll hear some teachers—and you’ve got the whole array of them on BatGap—talk about this profound piece. Others will say, “All there is is love. It’s just love. Everything is love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.” Others will very much be teaching about freedom. Others about the now, the now, the now.

People are talking about different things and different experiences. They’re talking about different qualities, which became the foreground of their liberation during their particular liberation. So, you know, Eckhart Tolle, for example, was very much in conflict, in a war inside his head. When he awakened, he had this experience of sublime peace.

But somebody like me was, at that stage, in a very deep conflict inside the heart—in a way, a loyalty conflict between my mother and father. When I awakened, when I went into that experience, which is more like enlightenment with a little e, there was this sense of unconditional love. In the emptiness experience, there was a sense of freedom—absolutely mind-blowing freedom—and unity. Two qualities.

So these qualities—love, peace, joy, freedom, innocence, purity, okayness, equality—are all from another dimension of our experience, from those places where we suffer. Now, I’m not talking about people who pretend they are loving all the time, or people who think you have to be peaceful. I’m not talking about complexes where we pretend to be something, like behavioral therapy of the psyche, in order to try and get a bit of that, like at the school of philosophy where everyone had to be disentangled.

These qualities are what’s there when everything else breaks down. When everything falls apart, in that trauma, in that shock, when everything is erased away—meaning, at the end of our lives, when the psyche is gone or when the mind is gone—these qualities are still there. They’re never taken away. They never get broken; they never get injured. They’re in unlimited supply.

And they feel different. The feeling quality of peace is a whole other dimension from the feeling quality of love. Love is very different from the feeling quality of care. Care is not love. The whole universe, the whole of nature, is caring for itself. There is this incredible, sublime, unconditional, spontaneous care in the universe and in nature, and it’s not the same as love, which is another vibration again.

So that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about qualities. These qualities have a tremendous healing effect on the psychology, on the psyche of an individual, and on the environment.

Rick: That’s interesting. So you’re sort of saying that the predominant experience a person has before awakening might determine the predominant experience they have after awakening. I thought of an example while you were saying that. Let’s say there’s a group of people, and one of them is really hungry, one of them is really cold, and one of them is really tired because they haven’t slept in a long time. We can go on thinking of other examples.

Then the whole group gets to move into a nice palace. In the palace, there’s plenty of food, it’s nice and warm, and there’s a comfortable bed. The guy who was hungry is going to say, “Oh, food. That’s what the palace is about.” The other guy is going to think, “Oh, it’s warm. It’s so nice and warm here.” The other one is going to think, “Oh, a comfortable bed. Now I can sleep.” So they all experienced the palace in predominantly different ways because of the preconditions before they moved in.

Georgi: Yeah, yeah. I remember at SAND in Italy, Mauro—

Rick: Maurizio?

Georgi: No, not Maurizio. Mauro, an Italian philosopher, a lovely guy who studied with Nisargadatta. He asked me if it was cold inside, or if you needed a sweater, when you had to go and give a lecture. I told him, “That depends on how warm your body is.” He just cracked up laughing, because in that moment there was this relativity of all things.

It’s really interesting to look into, because it could also be that the way in which we’re suffering is because that particular quality is being mastered as a human being in this psyche. So it’s not just an effect—that we feel peace after extreme conflict. Maybe we came here to learn, to experience in-depth, experientially, what it is to be in a conflict, to be in a duality of war versus surrender, to have to fight or to have to surrender.

That’s what I would say is the duality of peace. In our teaching, each quality is associated with a duality—not a natural duality, but a psychological duality. Peace, for example, is not in competition with war. It’s not on that level at all. It’s not in opposition to war. You can’t make peace, orchestrate it from above, and stick it onto people. I am living proof of that. But there is peace here, spontaneously arising in every moment, between Arabs and Jews, Jews and Jews, Arabs and Arabs. It is a very, very peaceful country, actually, despite the news.

Each quality has an associated contraction, and the contraction is around two poles of a psychological duality. In the case of peace, it’s between the feeling that you’re fighting a war—the sense of war, of being at war—and a sense of having to surrender, of being surrendered. These two are in conflict with each other, but the peace is always there, whether we’re on a battlefield or whether we are surrendering.

The more we’re able to rest back in the peace, the more we’re able to dance according to what’s actually needed between this duality of war and surrender, in order to support the general well-being of the whole. So the message here is that these non-dual qualities, like love, peace, freedom, unity, and non-duality, are not in competition with another opposite. They’re not on that level. They are a degree behind that, with an immediate healing impact on it.

When you bring the energy of peace to a conflict, something in the conflict begins to awaken and resolve simply because the energy of peace is allowed to be there at the same time as the conflict. Maybe if you bring the energy of peace to somebody who’s caught in compulsive surrendering, then the energy of action—or needing to fight a war, to stand for something—will come forward.

You see, there is some kind of connection which is really worth exploring between these qualities, which we talk about so often as non-dual teachers, and the contractions—the places we suffer, the places where we are very stressed and in conflict with ourselves, inside the psyche, the ego structure, or the personality structure.

Rick: In one passage of your book, you said, “Non-dual qualities are evolutionary in the sense that they’re not yet freely manifested through the physical dimension. The physical dimension is evolving to let their light shine through.” To say it another way, we’re in a collective process of non-dual healing.

Would it be fair to say that, fundamentally, there’s a vast repository of beautiful non-dual qualities, such as peace and love and all these things, but they’re just not percolating up clearly in most people’s experience and, therefore, in society? They’re sort of bottled up down there. The whole process of spiritual awakening is a process of removing the obstructions or the obstacles, kind of like the sun is always shining, but if there are clouds in front of it, then the sun hasn’t reached the ground.

Georgi: Yeah, exactly. Except that they’re not very deep, deep, deep down. They’re absolutely everywhere around us all the time. The only thing is that we’re not conscious of them, and for some reason we’re so traumatized that we resist them. We associate them with trauma.

So we have to be clever, and we build ourselves a personality which is disconnected from these qualities. Then we pretend to have these qualities because we miss them, which disconnects us still further. They are everywhere, though. If you just look at your dogs in your house, they are oozing non-dual qualities. If you look toward trees, flowers, or the sky, or even at those places in our regular, normal day when we’re consciously awake—when we’re thinking about how we’re suffering or thinking about a problem—but the rest of the time we don’t even appreciate it, that quality is there.

Take a family, for example. They’ve all got an issue. Shula doesn’t like Peter, Peter doesn’t like Shula’s husband, the mother doesn’t like the daughter-in-law, and the father has his own thing going on. They’re all entangled like this, in webs of suffering.

Then something happens. Shula has cancer. Suddenly, there’s unity. Suddenly, there’s love, and even the qualities start to shine through much more. They were always there, but nobody ever appreciated life—the quality of physical life.

So the love is here. It’s really here all the time. We spend so much time saying humanity is screwed and that we have to awaken and all of this, but actually humanity is an awesomely loving creature. The love that is there among humans is tremendous. The passion to do good is tremendous.

We’re in an evolutionary process where we are very much caught in the suffering of having a mind which is too weak to liberate itself from the dictates of fear. That was a speech, wasn’t it? But I got a bit upset because we’re so spoiled. We’re so spoiled, and Nirvana is right here. Now. It’s really here.

We believe, with our beliefs, that there’s only a certain amount of love, that peace is only accessible after this or that, and that freedom is only available under certain conditions. Freedom is there in the darkest prison. Nelson Mandela’s life may have been a mastery of the quality of freedom—that transformation that took place with the quality of freedom when he became enslaved, actually.

Rick: Yeah. I think you said something about the woman, Stella or Shula, getting—

Georgi: I just totally made that up.

Rick: Yeah, I know, but it’s a good example. What you see a lot of times here, and I’m sure around the world, is that if there’s a big hurricane or snowstorm or something like that, everybody comes out and starts helping everybody. This brotherly love emerges, and people go totally out of their way to save people and help them, feed them, clothe them, and everything else. It’s only when things get back into the humdrum, humdrum routine that people get back into their limited perspective.

Georgi: Yeah, yeah. Isn’t that worrying? Because it looks like that’s what’s needed.

Rick: Yeah, obviously, there must be a way of enlivening it in a much fuller and abiding way other than through catastrophes. It would be nice if it became the norm without having to have hurricanes and snowstorms and other kinds of desperate situations. So that’s the key question: How do we unlock it and enliven it, not only within ourselves but in collective consciousness, so that it becomes the norm?

Georgi: Well, our education—the Dalai Lama spoke just recently about this—needs to really begin teaching our children an education of the heart. We educate from the head with knowledge, dead knowledge. We have to really bring to the new generation an education of the heart, in which they learn to feel their feelings and to be truthful to what is experienced, even if it seems out of place. This would make a big difference.

But at the same time, behind your question, there’s a whole kind of sorrow about the need for suffering. It comes from a very compassionate place, but it’s also willing to look at what this suffering is really about. If you look at our own lives, what effect did suffering have on us, in the deepest possible way?

Rick: Me, in the deepest possible way?

Georgi: What is this feeling? How did it bring us down?

Rick: It was evolutionary.

Georgi: Yeah, exactly. It brings insight, and it shows us why we’re not free. It deepens our compassion and our empathy for other humans who are suffering.

Rick: Yeah.

Georgi: See, I really don’t believe in private enlightenment. I don’t think that you get off the boat and say, “I’m separate now from your humanity because I’m nondual, and humanity is still suffering, but I’m not.” I think it’s possible—

Rick: People whom we regard as enlightened didn’t behave that way.

Georgi: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: They became universal citizens, sort of, once the enlightenment dawned.

Georgi: And the Buddha actually started that way. He started in the palace, at least according to the story of Siddhartha. He’s surrounded with unconditional, nondual qualities. He’s got all the riches, all the abundance; everything is taken care of. And there is an impulse that makes him leave the palace and go out into the world, to begin meeting suffering and then trying to understand suffering.

So there is something that, if we were in a state of nondual quality all the time—which we were before we were born—would create a need, an impulse. Maybe it’s an impulse of compassion or an impulse of care, or because we are One, to incarnate because we care so very, very, very much about each other. Because we’re not separate.

Rick: You use the word evolution quite a bit. For instance, you said nondual qualities are evolutionary. The point I often make in these interviews is that I feel there’s an evolutionary trajectory, or agenda, or something built into the fabric of the universe—that the whole thing is just one huge evolution machine.

If you look at it in that context, suffering is not capricious, arbitrary, cruel, or meaningless. It must, in the biggest picture, have some kind of evolutionary significance, or it wouldn’t have happened, because everything does.

Compassion as the Wisdom of Interdependence

Yeah. And maybe what it is is that the evolutionary effect of suffering is in the opening of compassion. Compassion is the wisdom of interdependence and the wisdom of unity. I tend to feel that’s the true nonduality: the wisdom of interdependence, the wisdom of unity.

Georgi: Yeah. And maybe what it is is that the evolutionary effect of suffering is in the opening of compassion. Compassion is the wisdom of interdependence and the wisdom of unity. I tend to feel that’s the true nonduality: the wisdom of interdependence, the wisdom of unity.

Compassion is not something that we should do, as in behaving nicely toward each other. It’s something that arises by itself, spontaneously, as an impulse from the depths of our own source.

Rick: It’s probably a reflection of the degree to which we actually do experience the oneness of everything. If we truly experience our neighbor as ourselves, then we’re going to behave differently than if we experience our neighbor as some kind of distant, estranged person, different from ourselves.

Georgi: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Here’s another relevant paragraph from what you wrote in your book:

Our connection with a nondual quality can be forgotten, obscured, confused, or denied. Yet the quality remains at the depth of ourselves. Regardless of changes in the way we connect, we are literally unable to negate our true nature; we can only temporarily obscure it.

We’ve kind of covered this point, but it’s nicely written there, so I thought I’d read it.

Georgi: Yeah. An example of a quality—which people don’t talk so much about—is innocence. And another quality is purity. Which one do you want, innocence or purity?

Rick: Oh, let’s do them both.

Georgi: So, innocence. There aren’t many people waking up to the fact that everything is innocence—the pure, absolute flow of innocence, that every single aspect of experience is inherently innocent.

To get a feeling connection with innocence: I had a client recently, and she said—we did this whole process—she’s got a very strong guilt complex and, of course, an accusation toward the world, because guilt and accusation go together. The guilt is too painful, so we say the world is bad, the world is wrong. Either I’m wrong or the world is wrong.

This is the contraction around innocence. It’s frozen innocence, which hurts like hell in the chest. So we worked with innocence, in the sense of the innocence of her consciousness just touching the energetic contraction. There was constriction in her body wherever there was a stress response. She touched it with the attitude of innocence in her consciousness, and there was this kind of domino effect: innocence, innocence, innocence, innocence, innocence.

At the end of the process, she said, “I always thought innocence was the same as compassion, but it’s not. It’s something completely different. It’s a completely different felt sense. It’s a whole vibration of its own.”

So this quality tends to come forward in people very, very strongly when they suffer, because animals are suffering. There is this quality of innocence inside animals, and when innocence is suffering, it’s absolute agony for us, because that’s partly what’s happening inside ourselves.

So that’s a quality which isn’t very often talked about, with an enormous healing effect. Innocence isn’t for suckers; it’s very potent. It’s not for children, as in, “Oh, children are innocent,” and all of this. It is one of the most powerful, unveiled qualities of the universe, alive in every single human being.

And what do we do? We say, “Okay, it’s guilt—guilty or innocent. It’s either-or.” We bring it down to this level of an inherent feeling of badness. We say it’s a competition between the two: either you’re guilty or you’re innocent. The prisons are full of people who always have been and always will be innocent, and who are caught in the contraction of guilt and accusation at the same time.

Rick: Well, Christ said, “Except ye be as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,” meaning innocent. And in that sentence, I think of the opposite of innocence as complexity, guile, subterfuge—

Georgi: Pretense.

Rick: Delusion. Just putting all kinds of unreal, complicated superstructures on top of the simple naturalness of life, and thereby obscuring—again, the word is obscuring—our true nature, because we’ve muddied it up with complications.

Georgi: We very much forgot that we are innocent.

Rick: Maharishi used to talk about pure consciousness, or pure awareness, as the simplest form of awareness, as opposed to more complex, convoluted states. But simple also applies to innocence: just getting down to pure simplicity.

You see that in the eyes of someone like Ramana. There’s a sort of childlike resting in pure innocence, as opposed to the eyes of Donald Trump, or someone—

Georgi: He actually has quite a strong quality of innocence, if you connect with it.

Rick: In a way.

Georgi: Inside Donald Trump, it’s in the idiot as well, in him. You know what I mean? He’s serving a certain purpose, and he’s innocent in it.

Rick: Yeah.

Georgi: If you don’t look at his personality but look at the quality that’s coming through, he’s very direct. He says what he thinks. I’m not in any way a Trump voter; I think he’s an absolute nightmare. But there is quite a strong quality of innocence as well.

Rick: Yeah.

Georgi: This is going to upset a lot of people, isn’t it—that he’s lied 10,000 times since he took office? But I know what you mean.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Georgi: That’s the thing: the quality is absolutely unconditional to our behavior or to what we do, or to the guilt that we carry. Guilt has nothing to do with having done something wrong. We are all born with a guilt contraction, because this is the state that humanity has been in since the Garden of Eden, or before, or because we’re not enlightened and we got reincarnated.

We all have this burden of badness, this sense of badness inside the psyche. It’s encoded in our DNA. Just as they found the biochemistry of stress hormones, they will find the biochemistry of guilt and how it plays out through our blood, through our bones, through our living experience.

Every baby is born guilty at the same time that it is sublimely innocent. Then, at a certain stage, the sense of badness can become unbearable—just unbearable. So we begin to throw it out onto the world by behaving badly. And we are allowed to do that because the world is bad.

So we start this kind of guilt-and-accusation contraction. Then, of course, we get condemned by the world, and it reconfirms the sense of guilt and the sense of badness. All the time, what’s there is this innocence that never gets lost. Really, it’s there.

✨ Ancestral patterns and shared awareness

It’s hard for people to grasp that babies are born with guilt complexes, but if you look into epigenetics and the kinds of traumas that pass from generation to generation, more often than not, they are connected with a contraction of guilt.

Rick: Yeah, I think it says in the Bible someplace, “The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons.” There’s some such thing—that we inherit the traumas and stresses of previous generations.

Georgi: And we live them. We live them firsthand, as if they’re our unique, only, individual, separate experiences—as if they’re new. The same themes of abandonment, rejection, or desolation.

Rick: Yeah. So one point we can get onto in a minute is possibly how to clear up the ancestral karma, so to speak, in addition to our own load. Maybe we should touch upon it right now while we’re on the topic. Do you have anything to say about that?

Georgi: I think it’s very, very, very, very healthy not to see ourselves as separate from our ancestors to start off with. Let’s be nondual about this. Every single molecule and cell in our body, every strand of our DNA, is inherited. Our DNA and our personality, our eye color, our body structure, our traits, our skills, and talents—it’s all that we think we are as a separate thing. It’s not separate; it’s all an inheritance.

And it’s an inheritance of an inheritance. Humans inherited it from our animal ancestors and from our mineral ancestors. So, first of all, whatever we are experiencing now, it’s not separate from our parents, and it’s not separate from our grandparents. It’s not a reason to isolate ourselves as if there was something separately, individually cursed about me. It’s not. It’s part of what we came into as a job when we took human form.

When we showed up in human form, it became part of our contribution in resolving some of these conflicts and taking care of what couldn’t be taken care of by our ancestors and by our environment. We are doing a service to our ancestors, to the ones that come after us, and to our environment. It’s part of our purpose.

So already, though, we can take off the guilt and the shame, at least about being fucked up, because it’s what we’re working with. It’s our raw material.

Rick: Yeah. I think both the Native American and the Vedic cultures talk about seven generations—a ripple effect through seven generations. I know that in the Vedic tradition, which I’m more familiar with than the Native American tradition, it’s said that when one becomes enlightened, it has this major impact, both going forward and going backward, for seven generations on your relatives, your predecessors, and your ancestors.

Georgi: It goes forwards, backwards, and sideways in the here and now.

Rick: That too, absolutely.

Georgi: To your environment and your whole speech.

Rick: Huge wave, yeah.

Yeah, well, let’s talk about that more. But first, there’s a question that came in from Barry in Spokane, Washington. He said, “Do you think that at a high stage of enlightenment or awareness, our connection with Unity awareness can expand beyond our experience and merge with the awareness of others, thus feeling their turmoil and frustrations? It seems that some masters, like Amma, Maha Maharshi, et cetera, are able to tap into the reality of others and share some tangible encouragement or loving embrace. This would point to the capability of awareness to expand to every part of the human experience, but what are the implications for reincarnation and growing human awareness?”

Yeah, I think what he’s asking is related to what we were just saying, and it works both ways. I mean, the sages are much more acutely sensitive to what others are experiencing, but they’re also much more potent in radiating influence toward others.

Georgi: You know, we don’t have a separate awareness. It’s one field of awareness. The only thing that separates it is our mental filters.

I remember watching my parrot, my baby parrot, watching my dog, who was eating. As the dog was eating, the parrot was going, “Nom, nom, nom, nom, nom.” We have this thing in naturalness on both sides of the brain, and in the middle we have mirror neurons, through which we naturally experience what the other is experiencing.

So that’s not just like eating dog food. It also extends to the depths of empathy. They’ve been called empathy neurons. Of course, if we don’t use them, we lose them. So the more we’re able to relax around the idea that I am separate and I have to know what’s mine and what’s yours, and where I begin and where you begin—the more that idea of separation becomes a non-issue.

That means the filtering mechanism of “this is not mine,” the repressive mechanism in the brain, is not happening. The more we’re able to experience natural empathy without it upsetting the whole nervous system, the more clearly we can know that it’s not ours; it’s the other person’s. We allow the experience in its totality, and it’s full of their essence as well.

You can feel the essence, the presence of the other person, in the particular brand of fear that you’re experiencing. But what we tend to do, I think, is have such a fear of having to defend ourselves that we close down our natural empathy.

It’s a natural empathy. It’s not a psychic ability, although we’ll get there in a couple of years, you know. The more we don’t close down our natural empathy, the more it becomes very, very clear what’s coming through which body and through which history. We’re able to experience together, completely with another human being, what they’re experiencing, as if it were our own.

All of this is just experience happening within an awareness that is always, and has never been, divided. My awareness is the same as Rick’s awareness, which is the same as everybody else’s awareness. The only thing that is differentiated is the nature of experience, and that’s not so different either. Half the time, especially when we’re talking—

Rick: Some people say they become kind of hypersensitive, so they can’t be around crowds, can’t go to Walmart, or something like that, because they’re just picking up on everybody’s feelings and thoughts. Do you have any comment on that in terms of being able to integrate, so that you can mix it up with people and be open and wide open, yet not be undesirably impinged upon by other people’s stuff?

Georgi: What people are doing is not becoming hypersensitive; they’re returning to naturalness. There’s nothing about Walmart that is natural. It’s fluorescent lights, a bombardment of messages and colors, and people with their “me first” trolleys and consumerism.

It’s very upsetting, in naturalness, to experience that. It’s not the people themselves. If you take those people and sit under a tree together, enjoy nature, and sit in silence for a bit, after a couple of hours they’re not going to be a problem.

Anyway, we have all those people in Walmart who are caught in consumerism. They’re in our field all the time. You must have had times when you go to sleep and it’s like the whole world is talking in your head. You have to kind of retune your radio into the channel of silence, because this busy mind—and it’s not your thoughts—is random. It’s all kinds of different frequencies of people just talking into the emptiness. Maybe you passed through Walmart earlier in the day. That’s what’s being described here with Walmart.

It’s the sickness of our society at its fulcrum: consumerism. There’s this kind of consumerist monster that is hypnotizing us and eating the planet, not taking any responsibility by creating, creating, creating without any responsibility for the destruction that happens. We’re quite right to feel bothered by it.

Rick: Well, I used Walmart as a case in point. I could have said going to the state fair, or something where people are having fun, but there are a lot of people, and some people find that they can’t be around anything like that because they feel too porous. They feel too impacted by everything.

I guess the question is, is that characteristic of enlightenment, or could an enlightened person be nice and integrated in such a way that he or she could function normally in such circumstances and not be overwhelmed by them?

Georgi: It’s absolutely possible to walk into a battlefield, into Walmart, or onto a beach, and to be in unity with the environment—even a very angry environment—without losing our own center. It’s absolutely possible, but it takes time.

Rick: Yeah. In fact, that was the advice in the Gita. Lord Krishna said to Arjuna, “Well, you’ve got to fight this battle, but first get established in Being and then do it, and then you’ll be okay. You’ll have equanimity. You’ll do the right thing,” et cetera.

🕊️ The nervous system and spiritual development

Georgi: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: There was something we were talking about earlier that I wanted to ask you about, or comment on, or both. We were talking about different qualities that one might experience. Some might experience more bliss, some more freedom, some more wisdom, or different qualities as awakening dawned. We were talking about it in terms of the predominant experiences you had been having before awakening dawned, but I think there’s also a physiological consideration: different nervous systems having different qualities and different predominances.

Let’s say we could speak of it in terms of the gunas: some more tamas, some more rajas, some more sattva. It’s said traditionally that, according to the condition of the nervous system, one might experience enlightenment quite differently. One might regard the world as an illusion, others as plain material stuff, and others as divine. Some might experience more bliss, and some more vastness or freedom.

So, in a way, it’s the same realization, the same liberation, but there’s a different orientation to it according to our neurophysiological makeup. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Georgi: Well, the nervous system is part of it. In so many ways, the way the nervous system is encoded is partly conditioned by our environment, meaning by education and by what we’ve been taught—like “be afraid,” or that you have to be stressed.

It’s also encoded out of our cellular inheritance from our ancestors. For example, “Watch out for men; they only follow their dicks.” This kind of thing can encode us not to trust the opposite gender. We may already be programmed. The nervous system could be learning that inside the womb.

A baby inside the mother’s womb can hear what’s happening outside. If every time the father’s voice shows up, the mother’s blood rushes with cortisol and stress hormones, then the baby is going to go into stress and associate that stress already with the sound of a male. That stress response in the nervous system, for example, is going to play out as a first reflex every time a male voice is heard. It will be translated and interpreted into distrust and into beliefs like, “You can’t really trust males; they fail”—”fail male,” you know.

That’s just one example of the genius of the nervous system. But the nervous system is so malleable, such an obedient animal. It takes a little bit of time, but it can be trained. When the nervous system gets a sniff of true nature and realizes that if you relax inside the conflict, peace comes forward—and this peace is really yummy—the whole system is actually fed by that.

Then the nervous system starts to anticipate it and look for it. “Where’s the peace? Where’s the peace?” It’s very, very agreeable to true nature. It wants to know the energetic vibrations of qualities like love, peace, and togetherness. Even as a thought is introduced, it learns, like a rat that gets an electric shock—or, now, a rat that gets a cookie when it touches the bell—that this is good news.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a very good point. I mean, the whole idea of spiritual practice over a long period of time ties in with the notion of neuroplasticity, and the fact that the brain actually can be changed. The nervous system kind of enjoys the types of rested, natural, profound states that spiritual practice can elicit. And so it begins to take on those states as the normal style of functioning, as opposed to just a momentary experience.

And one way of looking at the development of enlightenment is the acclimatization of the nervous system to a new style, a new, more natural style of functioning, to the point where it just becomes perpetual rather than momentary.

And one way of looking at the development of enlightenment is the acclimatization of the nervous system to a new style, a new, more natural style of functioning, to the point where it just becomes perpetual rather than momentary.

Georgi: Yeah. You could also think about it because we think about the nervous system often as turning outward, toward outer stimuli. And I really like to think of the nervous system as being part of the nervous system of the universe. And as such, it’s responsive—and I think this is really true to experience—it’s responsive to inner adventures as much as outer adventures. In fact, there’s no difference between the two.

Which means that as we relax in meditation, and the body begins to relax, we begin to trust relaxation. Because remember, every trauma happens when we trusted relaxation, so we have to get over that and begin to trust relaxation again, and our naturalness.

As we begin to relax, then the senses begin to open. Right? If something’s like this, then you can’t receive it. The eyes are like this, the ears are like this; everything’s contracted. But as we relax, it begins to open the sensory perception like a flower.

Now, these senses, for a while in the meditation training, could be, “Oh, God, I’m distracted, distracted, distracted,” until we realize that these senses also are opening inside ourselves. There is subtle sight, there is subtle sound, there is subtle vibration, there is a subtle sense of touch, and there is subtle smell. There is this whole incredible dimension of subtle experience available to our senses, which is also extremely yummy to the nervous system.

Rick: Yeah, it’s nourishing.

Georgi: It’s not boring. The nervous system doesn’t like boring sometimes. It makes it something—the parasympathetic, okay, let’s rest and digest. But it also likes a bit of excitement when, you know, when Golden Buddha shows up in your meditation, and the system is like, “Cool!” You hear the divine music. If it’s too much, it will close down the whole show.

And so, you know, if you know what I mean, the nervous system is working both ways. And we vastly underestimate the power and the sensitivity of our nervous system.

So yes, when we go to Walmart, it’s a drag. It’s like going to an acid-house discotheque. You know, it’s not our cup of tea. But when you go inside the possibilities of what we can sense, the refinement, we can get to a position where you take any old raw, sordid, dualistic emotion like jealousy, and you can begin to sense it through the nerve endings, through the body, but in its refinement. What does it feel like, this energy of jealousy? What’s it really made of?

Oh, it’s a little bit like alcohol. Now, what is it really? It stings, it’s strong, it’s vicious. It’s in this. It’s amazing what there is to explore.

So at that stage, inside and outside collapse, and life becomes a kind of meditation in which the nervous system is just yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy.

Rick: Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. Irene says that enlightened people can shop at Target instead of Walmart.

Georgi:[Laughs]

Rick: I don’t know if she wanted me to read that. Don’t send me these things if you don’t want me to read them. Or you have to put “don’t read.”

I mean, if I think about my own experience, I can remember, 30 or 40 years ago, if I went into Walmart or something like that, I’d start to feel jangled after a while. “I’ve got to get out of here. It’s too unnatural.” Now I just feel comfortable. I mean, I wouldn’t want to live there all day or hang out there all day, but it’s sort of like you just build up an inner reservoir, and it doesn’t matter as much whether you’re in a fluorescent-light place or out in the woods.

Oh, you prefer the woods, but if you have to be in the fluorescent-light place, then, “Eh.”

Georgi: Yeah. So often, when we’re overwhelmed by external stimuli, it’s a sign to us that there’s not enough space on the inside. And it’s very worthwhile to create, to explore inside, and to realize how much space there is. Because when we begin to access that vastness on the inside, the conditions on the outside become less of a problem.

When we begin to access that vastness on the inside, the conditions on the outside become less of a problem.

Psychosis, medication, and integration

Rick: If you think back to where you were in the late ’90s, when you were strung out on cannabis and coffee, and contrast that with the way you feel now: if you could step instantly from the way you were functioning then to the way you’re functioning now, do you feel like you’d have just this huge relief? Because your natural style of functioning is now so, so relaxed compared to that.

Georgi: It’s absolutely inconceivable, the difference. I can recognize that that is the same one that was experiencing that and which is experiencing this. This I can recognize, and that immediately puts me in a state of timelessness.

Rick: Yeah.

Georgi: But back then, I was an explosion in slow motion. There was the psychic part, there was the intellectual part, there was the pain, the traumatized part. I was just exploding in slow motion.

And I think that it was also the nature of my coming to Israel and the whole subject of Jews and gas, because I probably came because of the Holocaust, because I was so impacted by the history books as a child. And it was like a karmic chapter closed, together with the death of the personality, with a nervous breakdown. It connected with misconceptions about good and evil, about survival, about the Second World War, and something was closing.

And I even had this dream at the end of that process that these two guides came and gave me a certificate, like, “Job well done,” out of the blue. And this was before I was back into all of this funky stuff.

At a certain stage, I was lying there on the floor of the kitchen in total and absolute nervous anxiety. The drugs weren’t working—the psychiatric drugs were just making me like a robot—and everything was imploding. The whole physical body was like, “I’m dying.” There was no knowing at all, just nowhere to go anymore.

And I had this vision of these two figures coming across the field. And one of them was a man and one a woman, but I kind of laughed in the vision that the man was dressed as a nun. This is going to make sense one day. I already get a smell of it making sense. But then the other one was dressed as a woman.

And they came toward me. As they came toward me, these two spheres of white, white, white, white, white, white, white light, silvery light began to expand out with them and include me in it. And then I really felt like I was going to die inside this light.

Then I jerked away toward my son, my firstborn son, and touched the rock. I had a very strong connection with the rocks in the Carmel Mountains. I touched the rock and then woke up.

But the charge of this experience was like a total and absolute reset. And for me, that is where my second life began. It’s like I died in that moment. I could have died, but I picked up a whole new chapter with this body. It’s fine, partly because of the connection to my son.

Rick: Do you feel that your nervous breakdown, the whole sort of collapse of your life, was, in retrospect, a good thing? I hate to use the word “good,” but it’s sort of—you needed to be disassembled completely before you could be reassembled in a much more desirable way. It would have been hard to get to where you are now without that disassembling.

Georgi: Absolutely blessed, every moment of it. In every sheer, horrific moment of agony, it burned down this arrogance to the ground. It means that I really get fear, anxiety, and stress.

And this experience meant that I could really study that. The whole book of nondual therapy is based on the understanding of stress, contraction, friction, and conflict. And none of this would have been possible if I hadn’t been to Timbuktu and back—seeing the whole personality burn down and seeing that I’m still here.

Rick: So it really helps you as a therapist, in addition to having helped you as an individual restructure your life. You’re able to actually relate to probably just about anybody who comes to you and tune in to their level of pain, because you’ve been there and done that, and then help them.

Georgi: Yeah, yeah. And that’s quite an important area, because I was very close to getting eaten up by the psychiatric establishment, who heard me talking about Bin Laden and nonconventional anthrax terror attacks on America in 1998 and thought that I was one of these end-of-the-world freaks and that I should be locked up immediately.

The drugs that they first gave me were serious antipsychotic drugs, from which there would be no way back. And they threatened me. They said, “If you don’t take this, you’re never going to get well.”

Luckily, because of my upbringing, when somebody threatens me, that’s it—I don’t do it. And so I didn’t do it. I stopped smoking grass, which they didn’t know about, because that’s probably the cause of the psychosis—the marijuana.

And I’m not saying that people shouldn’t take medication. But often I get clients who are on the edge of taking medication like lithium, and they’ve been diagnosed bipolar or whatever. And I know there is no way back from that. It’s like a death sentence, a life sentence under a death sentence, because it destroys the kidney after 10 years.

So there’s not a therapy in place to work with bipolar. It’s very hard to work with a lot of these psychological disorders when the capacity to feel has been limited.

The capacity to feel—to feel the feeling—is absolutely fundamental to restoring harmony in the psyche, and balance, freedom, and naturalness. So when we take drugs that limit our capacity to feel, to reunite with our deepest pain, the things that have affected us, the traumas that have formed us, then it’s like putting us in prison and throwing away the key. Our ability to heal is actually delayed for a very, very long time.

And sometimes it’s possible to catch people just before that, before they get on this treadmill, because a lot of the psychiatric drugs being pushed on people have incredibly awful withdrawal effects as well—so much so that people think that that’s the craziness underneath, but it’s the withdrawal effects that are playing out.

Rick: I remember some therapists—it might have been somebody I interviewed several years ago—I remember hearing this. The guy said that if he was going to prescribe some drug, it might have been Thorazine or something, he said, “Well, I’m going to try it once, so that I can experience what my patients are going to experience if I give them this.”

And after he tried it once, he thought, “No way. I’m not giving this to anybody. This is horrible.”

Georgi: So I took one of these antipsychotic pills, and my arms went up like this.

Rick: Just because of some weird reaction?

Georgi: And there was no relief whatsoever. No, that’s how a lot of people reacted. You become robotic almost immediately, and it had no effect on the anxiety, no effect on what I was in.

Rick: It’s really tragic. I think there’s probably a lot of people in psychiatric hospitals. My mother was in and out of them throughout my adolescence and was taking a lot of these drugs. Some of them are actually very spiritual people who have had some sort of spiritual breakthrough or something, but it’s just not integrated. They’re diagnosed as crazy, and they end up getting pushed down into a hole with these drugs, whereas they really need some kind of spiritual guidance that would enable them to go through the metamorphosis.

Georgi: Yeah, they need togetherness and belonging and someone to listen to them, no matter what they’re saying. You know, it’s not that they’re never mentally ill, but the drugs don’t help. So why give them drugs that are addictive and that have incredible effects when withdrawing, which destroy the kidneys, when they’re not actually helping and you’re locking them up anyway?

Rick: Yeah. A lot of people who are actually mentally ill are also very spiritual. We don’t want to say that all mental illnesses are spirituality, but spiritual transformation can be very unsettling. You can go through a lot of intense experiences. I can look back at periods in my life when I was pretty darn nutty, going through some long meditation course or something.

You just need gentle guidance through these phases, not that sort of crude, completely uninsightful suppression of whatever is happening through some biochemical means.

Georgi: Yeah. We have such a strong fear of insanity in our culture.

Rick: You say in your book that back in Greece, they didn’t distinguish between insanity and spirituality because they weren’t so sure they could, and so they treated all such people with respect.

Georgi: Yeah. So much of what we would call insane is created by people attempting to be sane—meaning repressing their anger, denying their trauma, trying to be somebody other than what they are because they’ve been so seriously rejected. Pretending to love their mother when their mother is totally abusive.

Pretended sanity is a form of insanity, which creates a lot of personality disorders. The whole paradigm of sanity and insanity is a judgmental shamefest. It’s an insult to call somebody crazy. It’s so terrifying, so cowardly, and so unaware.

When I was losing my mind—when I was psychotic, because at a certain stage I was psychotic—I was never more lucid from another level. It was such an important experience for me because I got insight, added insight, into the nature of mind. Before that, I thought I was invincible.

I saw how not only my mind, but my patterns of behavior, my social context—everything—needed to get totally lost. I could see it in real time. I was there, crazy, but I could see what was going on, and I was gaining insight into how this works at the same time.

Sometimes things start to play out in life, and then shame is delivered on that, along with exclusion and judgment. We should be grateful for the insane people for doing that on behalf of the rest of us. So much of freedom of mind depends on moving beyond the fear of insanity. The mind is only thought programs. That’s all we’re talking about.

Rick: Also, insanity is kind of a relative term, isn’t it? Isn’t everybody in the world insane to some degree compared to what’s possible?

Georgi: To some degree, everybody. We have an insane society, an insane culture, insane leaders—my goodness—insane systems. What’s called insane is actually moments of clarity and lucidity.

Rick: I would count myself among them. Compared to what is potentially possible, I must be insane, because I’m not totally there yet, at the apex of human possibility.

Georgi: The mind is just a receiver. It’s a receiver of information. Sometimes the information that it’s being asked to receive is just too unbearably painful. There’s a layer of pain inside that we’re not able to contain, and then the mind does all kinds of things to try to block it, to try to evade this area of feeling the unfeelable, the forbidden, the unspeakable. Remember the unspeakable traumatic mantra.

Rick: So are you pretty busy as a non-dual therapist? Is that mainly what you’re doing, aside from raising ten kids?

Georgi: I do a combination of non-dual therapy and teaching. We teach a lot. We have a lot of workshops, and we have this whole Spiritual Psychology education, which is a seven-year process. It’s divided into three parts, and each module stands by itself. In it, we work with non-dual energetic points in meditation in order to set the stage for the experience of our subtle nature to emerge and to escort people through a process of self-healing.

In this way, it’s quite a beautiful system, which, by degrees, trains the nervous system that we were talking about earlier. What you see in people is that they move from a place of really not being themselves, of being this or that, to flowering in their individuality.

I know that’s a very non-non-dual thing to say, but there is this thing that happens with spiritual liberation and the liberation of the heart, where people become more awesomely unique and individual and exquisitely beautiful and special than they ever would have been pretending to be somebody else.

Rick: Absolutely. Hear, hear to that. If you think of the paragons of spirituality that humanity holds up and respects, they were all such charismatic, lively, unique, interesting, expressive people. They weren’t playing vanilla by any means. They were just bursting with personality, creativity, charisma, and all such qualities.

Georgi: And it’s not a paradox when it comes down to it. But we do seem to be moving into an age of spiritual individuation like that.

Rick: If you look at the tropical rainforest, where the ground is so fertile, look at the fecundity, the diversity, and the expression of all plant and animal life there. If we live in a world in which the ground of being is lively and we’re all connected with it like that, why shouldn’t the whole world be like that in terms of people’s liveliness, expressiveness, and so on?

Georgi: This is where we get confused. We get confused between diversity and differentiation. Every single moment—even my finger—is unique compared to the previous moment of my finger. It’s one second older. There’s this incredible dance of diversification and differentiation that happens through all of nature, through every moment of experience and separation.

We think that makes us a separate self and that means it’s not good. Somehow, non-duality is becoming that robot. It’s not like that. It’s being totally free in this ocean of diversity and differentiation. According to what law? Not the individual law, but whatever is needed in the moment happens by itself. That also means we don’t resist action.

Rick: Exactly. I think it’s fair to say that true non-duality nourishes its individual expressions and makes them so much more. It frees them from that which causes sameness, actually, and allows them to flourish.

Georgi: We have this faulty belief system that, in order to belong, we have to be the same as each other. It’s the exact opposite of differentiation and diversity: We all have to look the same, believe the same, have had the same journey, and follow the same teaching. We use the same things.

This is conformity, and conformity is what so often robs us of our inner truth, our inner authenticity, and our inner authority. It has absolutely nothing to do with belonging, because the moment we start conforming in how we look in order to belong—meaning we pretend to be somebody else in order to belong—we have rejected ourselves. We don’t belong.

You know what I mean? We are filled with a sense of lack, of not belonging, because the one we’re putting forward isn’t who we are. It’s a conformed image.

Rick: Two things I would say here. One is, “Variety is the spice of life,” a well-known saying. The other is that conformity is not how God rolls. If you just look at nature, God is not into conformity. He or she is into explosive expression of diversity and creativity and all that stuff, all within a non-dual totality, because that’s what God is: that non-dual totality.

Georgi: That’s certainly there in the Jewish mystical traditions and in the Islamic mystical traditions. To the extent that, on the ancient Islamic floors, they would have one tile of this beautiful mosaic floor done backwards—imperfect.

Rick: Oh, I see.

Georgi: It’s that little break in the perfection which is the momentum of growth, creation, change, and evolution. There’s no perfect rose, although we all know we can feel and sense the template of the rose—the subtle template of the rose. Each individual rose is beautiful because of its slight imperfections, slight differentiation, and its slightly varying shade of color or scent.

Rick: A grain of sand creates the pearl.

Georgi: Exactly.

Closing remarks

Rick: Well, I guess we better wrap it up. This has been fun.

Georgi: Yeah. What a pleasure.

Rick: I’m sure there are many things we could have talked about that we didn’t, because it always goes that way. There’s only so much you can do in a two-hour period, but I think people have gotten a nice taste of what you’re about. At some point, not too far down the line, I’ll interview your partner, Bart, also.

Georgi: Yeah, he can talk about everything I forgot to talk about, and a lot more.

Rick: Yeah, he can take notes and bring them in. But anyway, Georgi, it’s been great talking to you.

Georgi: It’s a pleasure, Rick. Thank you so much.

Rick: Yeah. So let me just make a couple of wrap-up remarks that I always make. I’ve been talking with Georgi Y. Johnson, and I will be linking to her website and her books from her page on BatGap.com. You can easily find her website from there. Through it, you can get in touch with her if you want to engage in the things that she has been talking about here. I imagine you can do that with people all over the world; it doesn’t matter where they are, right?

Georgi: Especially. We have workshops coming up in America, in Virginia, in August; in England next week, in Bradford on Avon; and in Israel in September.

Rick: So it’s a combination of some online stuff and some in-person stuff?

Georgi: There’s an online clinic all the time. In between that, there are ongoing workshops, spaced about every six months, in America, Holland, Israel, and England.

Rick: Great. They can also find out more about non-dual therapy on a one-to-one basis if they’re interested in that, right?

Georgi: Absolutely.

Rick: Okay, good. So I’ll link to all that, and you can get in touch with Georgi. So thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. I won’t have an interview next week, but the following week, I’ll be speaking with a Sufi sheikh in Germany. Sheikh, sheikh? I don’t know how to pronounce it.

He was originally a German, but there was a fellow who had been sending us all these recommendations for different Sufis that I should interview, and he said, “Well, pick the best one.” So he picked this guy. So that’ll be fun to explore.

So thanks again, Georgi. And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching, and we’ll see you for the next one.

Georgi: Donate, donate!

Rick: Okay, do that.

Georgi: Bye, Rick.