Rick Archer: 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. And if this is new to you, and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to BatGap.com and look under the previous interview they’re past interviews menu, where you’ll see all the previous ones 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, which explains other ways to support it if you don’t want to use PayPal. And 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 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. So 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. So Georgi sent me a fairly, you know, 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 Johnson: Hi, Rick, you know, I want to say something before I begin talking about myself, you know, Rick says, you say, Rick, 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 on things which you can’t really put a price on what Rick does, unconditionally, to us contributing and when, you know, we will go and spend money, you know, in the shop, like nothing on a dress or on you know, we will invest in our, in our marketers in our, in our tobacco companies and in our consumer wants and needs. But this is something like it’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, it’s precious. I’ve been listening to your videos, Rick, for the past, uh – since you said you’re gonna interview me actually, I’ve been like, all the time in the background in the car and everything, totally binging and it’s so rich, it’s so amazing. That diversity, your interviewing style, your whole personality is like 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 Archer: Well, thanks, Georgi is very sweet and kind of you. You know, my initial concept with this was just to do it and make it freely available and grow it to the point where, you know, the small percentage of people who ever donate to anything would become sizable enough that it would enable me to do it full time. So when I first started out, I was working a day job and sort of doing it in the evenings and weekends and stuff. And then gradually I was able to, I was freelance, so I was able to diminish my day job as this grew. And then finally last March, I was able to a year ago March, I was able to drop it altogether and devote my full attention to this, as well as living life and I know the other things life involves. But people were pressuring me in the beginning, some people to monetize it, and to charge for it and to run ads and all that stuff. And I just didn’t really want it to have that vibe, you know, I just wanted to be freely available and to just let people who felt inspired to do so donate. And it’s kind of worked out that way. So we’re never gonna –
Georgi Johnson: 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 that 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 Archer: Thanks. Also, there’s a I should mention, there’s a great team of volunteers. My wife Irene spends as much time at this as I do. And I spent a lot of time outside the interviews, preparing for them and so on. And 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. So, you know, 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. And so labor of love, and, you know, people feel that they’re making a contribution in some way to the world, which I think they are. Alright, so let’s get on to you. There’s that joke. You know, me, me, me. Okay, enough about me. What do you think about me? Yeah, so Georgi, tell us about yourself.
Georgi Johnson: Okay, um, you know, part of growing up has been 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 consciousness, which is 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 started from that, I assumed that everybody knew what Awakening was, what it was to be conscious of consciousness, I kind of assumed that. And it was in teaching it and people and I, at a certain stage, in the middle of teaching, I realized that a lot of people didn’t actually get the kind of basic power of analyzing that consciousness is free of thought.
Rick Archer: Did you assume that even when you were very young, or just…?
Georgi Johnson: 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 an afternoon nap in England. And I was just learning to talk. And I was laying there and I was meant to go to sleep. And I was looking at my body and noticing that my legs had grown longer and kind of marveling at in proportion to the bed, and not really wanting to go to sleep. But I was really pleased with this new word that I’d learned which was guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, and I was saying it again and again in my head. It was the era of Gary Glitter in the 70s, early 70s. And my father was, you know, cool.
Rick Archer: Your father was a music producer or something?
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. Later on. He later on he became a music producer. Yeah. And so I was saying the word guitar, guitar, guitar do you target guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar until it has absolutely no relation to the musical instrument. And then I tried it also with my name, I didn’t have that many words, but they started saying Georgi, Georgi, Georgi, Georgi, Georgi, Georgi, Georgi did it and I think a lot of people must do this.
Rick Archer: I don’t know.
Georgi Johnson: I don’t know.
Rick Archer: It’s not inadvertently discovered the principle of the mantra you know using repeating a word and that doesn’t actually have meaning but ends up having some kind of effect.
Georgi Johnson: But it started out with meaning because you know, 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, Georgi until the name had absolutely nothing to do with me. And I lay there and thought so who I didn’t think ‘who the hell am I’ but I kind of wondered at that like and I looked out towards the window where there was light coming through this the afternoon light coming through the curtain with this question, and then this consciousness came forward, my own consciousness came forward. And then I became conscious of the consciousness and 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 like literally as if out the window like light after light after light, like reflecting mirrors; within a mirror within a mirror.
Rick Archer: Two mirrors facing each other, yeah.
Georgi Johnson: But with feeling content and then I fell asleep there was also a bit more I thought about my mother downstairs, not mommy, mommy, mommy, and who the hell is that woman making noise downstairs because it wasn’t mommy anymore. But uh, but then I fell asleep. But this became a kind of a strategy to survive; like a reset. So often I would, you know, months would go by with no – oblivion, just living, you know, totally, like just living. I don’t remember any of it. And then there will be the next moment of kind of like mini awakening, like walking to school in first grade and like, oh, the body is still healthy. That’s absolutely amazing and this kind of reawakening to this consciousness of consciousness, and then vowing to myself never ever, ever to again, forget this, this consciousness power, affirmation of who I am, and then, of course, forgetting it again, and over time during the teenage years it became a little bit when I was in trouble, I would reset the clock by going into the consciousness of consciousness in the here and now in order to not take things to hard that were going on around me.
Rick Archer: That’s interesting, at this point, you probably didn’t realize there was a world of spirituality and people had been thinking about this stuff for 1000s of years and you just cooked it up on your own.
Georgi Johnson: No context for it. I don’t you know that 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. And it was like, I think about it, but sex I could understand but God, it felt I get this critical sense of shame. And it was like, but I kind of thought that nobody talks about it, but everybody’s doing this. That’s what you do when you’re in trouble.
Rick Archer: Where you’re surrounded by atheists or something is that way you felt shame with God?
Georgi Johnson: 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 or nothing,” which would, which is kind of typical of me also today. To pick on people over like, you know, there’s no such thing as nothing, and nothing is something and all of this kind of things. There’s a little girl, and my mother was from a Catholic upbringing, and quite, very much mystically inclined as well, but quite lost in the world at that age. She had me very young. And I think that the kind of Catholicism, in which she was brought up involved an enormous amount of shame, as well,
Rick Archer: Yeah. Interesting. So, you kind of absorbed some of that.
Georgi Johnson: You know, like a French Catholic, you know, English Catholic is a minority. I mean, they used to say to her in school, you know, Catholic child, because she was the only Catholic in the room.
Rick Archer: Sure. Anglicans are the majority there, right.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. And the Catholics discriminated a little bit.
Rick Archer: Okay, so. So this is interesting. I don’t know, I wonder if people listening have how many of them 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, that didn’t mean anything. What, it’s funny, one of them was the word Hardeen, which it turns out was the name of the Houdini family. And 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. But that word would come into my mind, the strangest thing.
Georgi Johnson: And when and when you met him, did you have a feeling that you were meant to meet?
Rick Archer: Well, it turns out, I initiated him into meditation in about 1971. And I didn’t remember him very well. But then after I started BatGap, he discovered me again, and we got together and we’ve become best friends.
Georgi Johnson: Beautiful.
Rick Archer: So but 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’s some subtle, you know, fine-tunings to that. But essentially, you just kind of stumbled upon that and didn’t when you were repeating the word, I mean, you know, 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 repeatedly. Some kind of shift in consciousness it produced?
Georgi Johnson: I think it was meant to happen, but because of what I thought the needed the role, I needed to play how I needed to express into the world, because what really happened there for me back then. And it was only that first instance, after that I could just become conscious of conscious, I didn’t need the word. But when I was that little, it was exactly when I was learning language. So something forever and ever was broken, in the connection between the word and that which the word is supposed to signify. And if you think about the power of thought, because thoughts are made of words. So reality, in terms of thought collapsed at that moment, and was never ever, anything other than language then became a tool, which didn’t actually mean anything in itself, which means thought became a tool, but not something which is like inevitable or, you know, if I don’t think I will die, you know, if it can, and I’m a writer, so it became liberated, something of the playfulness and the palate and the, all of those areas. Were also the copywriter, in all those areas where you can be playful with language because the word is not tied to the meaning of the word – the word dog has no, absolutely no connection to the furry animal that we love so much.
Rick Archer: Yeah, although you know, I’ve heard this about Sanskrit I think I’ve also heard it about what is the original word language? For Israel. It’s not, It’s Hebrew, of course, Hebrew. But I’ve heard that there is there supposed to be a correlation between name and sound of sound and the object. So 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. And they say that other languages are not so tightly correlated than perhaps, hardly at all. Although if you look at languages, a lot of them are derived from Sanskrit, and there are some similarities. But that’s an interesting concept. And there’s supposed to be some significance to that, in that 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 some such thing.
Georgi Johnson: But you know, what, what, what’s important here is the vibrant, vibratory quality.
Rick Archer: Yes, yes.
Georgi Johnson: Because you know, if a lot of people are saying the word apple and they’re saying it like apple is some kind of divine entity which you can take into yourself and integrate through your whole system from the Garden of Eden till today and 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 they’re all saying apple, apple apple together with such a reverence and such an awe so then it’s like concepts gain a life of their own by the investment of the vibration inside the vessel, which is the word in a way. Is it? Is it inherent, is it always like that, is the word like is the word Aum? Is that 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, you know, there is something very primal about that sound. But that’s for each one to find their own feeling connection with, you know, what’s more powerful, in terms of the magic of words is the words that you’re not allowed to say. So I was ashamed to say the word God. In Israel, you know, in Jewish tradition, you do not say that the main name of God, “Y-A-H-W-E-H” because it gives it a power it by not saying it, a power is gained. And that’s interesting, psychologically, because when something is not spoken, and it’s only kept inside, you know, whether it was later on,
Rick Archer: Well let me just interject here. That’s the way it’s supposed to be with mantras, too.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I was coming to.
Rick Archer: Good, good, you say it then.
Georgi Johnson: So when I, when I was 12, my mother took me we were already living in Belgium, after my parents got divorced and stuff and my mother’s in her she began searching herself also, spiritually very much. She was born that way very much kind of a mystic. And she found the school of philosophy, which was a kind of middle class. In London, it was called the London School of economic science, which go figure that name, but it’s also in Holland. And back then, in the 80s, it was a school of meditation in a way, where they didn’t tell you it was that until you were two years in, but then they initiated you into meditation. And so when I was a 14, no 13, just 14, I was initiated into meditation in the school, and that’s when they gave me this mantra and forbade me to ever say it to anybody. And so for a while, I wasn’t sure if everybody else had the same mantra or not until people started whispering and spelling it out and stuff. And then we realize we’ve all got the same one.
Rick Archer: Yeah. That may be in some schools, or maybe different ones in other schools. But the principle of it is that a mantra is you have to impart it orally in order for the person to hear it. But then once they get it, it’s supposed to be kept on a subtler level, because its function is not to do anything in the gross, but to take you from the subtlest level, the level of thought, which is already subtle, to yet more subtle levels. And if you speak it out loud, it’s sort of brings it out in the opposite direction. And so that’s the principle of not speaking it out loud. Anyway, there’s that point.
Georgi Johnson: It’s kind of really, really interesting because when you think of the things that we are afraid to speak out loud, it’s often our most deepest pain, or our traumas, that which we are ashamed even to speak or even to think. And they also get a power when they’re not expressed. So it’s a tool, which can be,
Rick Archer: Probably never negative.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, I can go in different directions. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Interesting. So once you learn that meditation, did you practice it regularly?
Georgi Johnson: Ah, yeah, I was like, a little bit the Starchild because I was in these groups with like, grownups.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Georgi Johnson: And, and I found a context then I found a context for this experience of, because all the teaching there was about being in the now and the were classes in Sanskrit, and it was evening classes, but there were, it wasn’t all good there. There was a lot of pretense, you know, we would go in and people would be like po faced, you know, you’d have to wear a skirt and have your forehead in that we called it the school face, you know, like a disentangle, no emotion – Sort of cult-like. Actually, I think it was probably a cult, because they were are taking work for nothing unpaid labor. And if you left then you were excommunicated. And there wasn’t one of you was allowed to speak to you anymore. Yeah. So I was in the thick of it. And then my father died. Suddenly in England. They were, he was already divorced. And their response was, it’s only his body that’s gone.
Rick Archer: So it’s kind of cold and emotionless response.
Georgi Johnson: It was absolutely bloody ridiculous. Not only his body that’s gone, I lost my father, not only in the past, but present 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 anyway absent father that only his body that’s gone, his body was long gone, but my father had died. And I had gone into this tunnel of shock of mortality. And I spent months just contemplating death. And they come and say, only his body has died, it’s meaningless. And it came to a point with them where I would say to them, you know, I will have, when I die, when I die, I’m going to have to be accountable and responsible for whatever truth is true inside me. And what the school of philosophy says, is totally irrelevant. That’s not going to come with me not when I’m on my deathbed, what do you know, what whoever says, on the outside, I felt it so strongly this edge of mortality that and, and so I kind of bombarded one of the teachers with this. And he looked at me and said, let it rest, let it rest. So that was kind of it for me. Because it’s, you know, some things you can’t discuss anymore. If there’s no personal responsibility for the way and the school to us some school or organization becomes the way then there’s gonna always going to be that moment where you also have to leave that behind.
Rick Archer: Yeah, a lot of things are stepping stones for us, you know, and sometimes people get stuck in a particular thing for decades and decades, and they kind of stagnate there. And, you know, and on the other side to the other extreme, you can be a dilettante, you know, just flipping from one thing to the next without going deeply into anything, but there’s some kind of a proper balance in there, I think, you know, for realizing when it’s time to move on having extracted all the benefit, you can from a thing.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. And, and, you know, sitting there and learning Sanskrit and learning about Brahman and Atman. And all of this, as a teenager, this gave me an enormous amount in conceptual thinking. And, and then and I’d write essays in my regular school English essays, and they would talk about the absolute and stuff. And the teacher was saying, okay, this is, you know, something’s wrong here. Using consciousness like this, you’re talking about the absolute and he fed back to me that “this is cultish.” But at the same time, my conceptual mind had developed was able to develop way beyond what it could have done without this teaching. And that, you know, the teaching is never the same as the people doing it.
Rick Archer: Yeah, well, in reality, ideally, you walk your talk, but that doesn’t always happen. Yeah. It’s an interesting thing in your book that I read last night, I think, which is that it’s interesting how sometimes some kind of non-dual realization or consciousness awakening enlivens something in a such that you find people with relatively little education, at least in those sorts of areas, can be become conversant with deep philosophical principles, and even with quantum physics and stuff like that. It’s like it awakens our familiarity with the subtler mechanics of nature. And suddenly we find we’re able to talk about those things.
Georgi Johnson: It’s like, 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. Now, you know, one of the people I had the pleasure to meet in recent years was Russell Williams in Manchester. And he had absolutely no education. I’m not even sure that he could. He’s a teacher of Steve Taylor. And the head of them. He was head of the Manchester Buddhist Association in but he had no education at all. He was orphaned at a very young age and everything and he could speak so profoundly. And because he hadn’t had this education, he spoke in the simplest possible terms about comfort, discomfort, relaxation, all from himself or from direct experience, nothing learned. And he’d sit there in a suburb outside of Manchester in a suburb of Manchester in this little house, you know, on the sofa with a Jammie Dodgers and a cup of tea. And this kind of, you know, Buddha of Northern England is it was used to be teaching with such exquisite simplicity, but pure genius coming through which Einstein says that’s the biggest thing if you can speak your genius with simplicity.
Rick Archer: Yeah
Georgi Johnson: That’s it.
Rick Archer: Interesting.
Georgi Johnson: That was a big deal for me.
Rick Archer: There was a story about a fellow named Trotakacharya, who was one of Shankara1s four main disciples. And the other three disciples were giant intellects. And they would sit around working with Shankara on his commentaries on the Upanishads and things like that, and Trotaka with just a really simple guy, and he would be down at the river washing everybody’s clothes and, you know, doing those kinds of tasks. And one day while doing that, he became enlightened. And you know, the others heard him heard this beautiful voice singing coming up from the river towards the ashram singing this unknown melody and unknown meter and this beautiful, you know, devotional song. And it turned out to be Trotaka and what had happened was, he had sort of awakened this fine level of intellect through his enlightenment. And he then became this eloquent sage, you know, having just been basically a washer boy.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. And there’s a story in Judaism of the Baal Shem Tov,
Rick Archer: oh, yeah,
Georgi Johnson: which is very, very similar, right? All they’re all in there in the Yom Kippur. They’re all there praying, and all of you know, all of them. religious men, praying and saying all of the stuff on Yom Kippur, which is the holiest of holy days, and the village idiot, is there near the river, and he’s playing this flute, and he’s playing it and playing it and playing it. And they all come running out and saying, “shush, shush, shush, it’s Yom Kippur, it’s Yom Kippur, you, you, you, you shouldn’t be doing this. And 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 Archer: Nice.
Georgi Johnson: Because the kid was expressing the energy of the day.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Then there was the story of Christ. I mean, preaching, you know, in the temple when He was 14 years old, or something and blowing everybody away with his wisdom, and they’re thinking, “where’d this kid get this?”
Georgi Johnson: It’s always gonna be from somewhere else, right? Never from here.
Rick Archer: 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. So then you left that society and you went to Oxford, right?
Georgi Johnson: I probably it’s thanks to them, I got into Oxford because I had this conceptual kind of approach to literature. And so I was kind of blessed because I wasn’t really the kind of gray days student and suddenly there I was, you know, accepted in Oxford and it was kind of like being lifted on a bird into a kind of immunity away from effort.
Rick Archer: Did you enjoy Oxford? Did you do well there?
Georgi Johnson: I very, very, very, very much enjoyed the, the awakeness of mind and the concentration of thought, intelligent, creative, very traumatized people all in one place. I like that.
Rick Archer: Somebody sent in a comment, which I think is worth reading. Here is 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. Yeah. So it’s, it’s interesting.
Georgi Johnson: I’m happy to hear that.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I bet you a lot of children have all kinds of beautiful mystical, profound experiences.
Georgi Johnson: Oh yeah.
Rick Archer: Practically everybody listening can remember something, rather. And, you know, they tend to fade over time and they also tend to be dismissed as a child’s imagination or you know, something like that. But we come in usually pretty open.
Georgi Johnson: I’m sure about it.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Okay, so at Oxford, you studied Jungian psychology, the application of psychoanalytic and feminist literary theory.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, so literature, basically, but I took that chance on this excuse of English literature to really explore Carl Jung and Freudian analysis and Kant because we were in the age of literary theory, so 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 and deconstructionism is exactly from the same thing as I talked about, is that experience when I was two that the word and the and the object are not bound together, that there is no known no connection in the, you know, definite absolute connection between a word and a thing, the sign and that which is signified. So it was already playing out there. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of what would show up later again. So, in Oxford, they declare, you know, 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, you know, I have nobody, nowhere, nothing, you know, it’s just the text and the text is how you interpret it and 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 Archer: So are they saying that 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 Johnson: Yeah, yeah, that school of thought was very much in opposition to the other school, which is saying the author meant this. And the author meant that,
Rick Archer: Yeah, well see to me if the author has a right to actually try to say something and to mean it. And
Georgi Johnson: If he’s still alive, yeah, but when it’s Shakespeare, and he’s being interpreted in the year 2000,
Rick Archer: Then who can say what he meant? Yeah. Hm. Okay. Alright, 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 Johnson: Yes.
Rick Archer: Why? How is it that Israel is charged with bliss?
Georgi Johnson: Well, it’s the land, the land here has a very strong quality of bliss in it. And I was in, especially Jerusalem, and I was walking barefoot through Jerusalem, as one does. And I felt the connection between my feet and the ground and the kind of miracle of everything that was around me at that time. And also the history like in the ground beneath my feet, and again, came one of these kind of awakenings and my heart burst open. And I just went into this kind of, it’s not so much bliss as ecstasy. And for three weeks, you know, I went back to London, and I was on the Underground, smiling like an idiot, the whole time, I was so happy, it was like, it’s like falling in love, deeply, unconditionally in love, but with nothing, just this massive opening of the heart created by the quality of the light, the feeling sensation of the earth. And particularly around Jerusalem, they call it Jerusalem syndrome. Now, you know, they actually have a syndrome for that people go to the go there, or they go, especially if they go down to the Dead Sea, where the caves are of the Essenes. And sometimes people can get completely psychotic, and they were white, and they walk off and go and say, I’m going to live in a cave.
Rick Archer: Just because of the influence of the place.
Georgi Johnson: The atmosphere.
Rick Archer: I think people listening to this can understand that if you think of Arunachala, for instance, where everybody goes, where Ramana lived, you know, and places like that places in the Himalayas, certain places are said to be just sort of charged with spiritual energy. And if you go there, then you absorb some of that spiritual energy. So it’s not really an unusual idea for those listening.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, yeah. And I felt very, very much the energy of Jesus, but not in any of the churches, but like, so close to who, my own sense of self, that it’s almost like a strain inside the sense of self like, it’s so intimate, so close to the heart, that it was impossible to feel that 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, you know, almost like an obligation to bridge that. That lie of the split between Judaism and Christianity.
Rick Archer: I don’t think there’s a logical conflict between the mystics of all the religions, if all the really top-grade A mystics were to get together from all the different spiritual traditions and have a chat, they’d all be, you know, in complete agreement. It’s just the people who don’t experience what they were experiencing. See the conflicts and the contradictions.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, again, we got that thing with the outer authority, like when you trust and authority outside of yourself rather than your own direct heart connection, then it became very quickly becomes kind of tribalistic and partisan and defensive and recruiting.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And that was that’s been one of the problems with every spiritual tradition is the administrator types takeover, and they don’t have the inner experience and so they get all into imposing outer authority, and actually start to persecute those who claim to have some inner experience. Whole thing is lost.
Georgi Johnson: And it becomes all about the power. And often the teacher themselves gets relegated.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Anyway, seems to be a syndrome. Okay, so you say 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 to home breaker and a naughty woman. And somewhere along the lines, I heard you mentioned, you’ve had 10 kids,
Georgi Johnson: Seven of from my body, and Bart has three. And we have one together. So number seven of me is together. So
Rick Archer: So 10 altogether? Yeah,
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, exactly.
Rick Archer: That must have kept you busy on top of everything else.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah.
Rick Archer: How old is the youngest one now?
Georgi Johnson: She is 12.
Rick Archer: So you’ve lived a very active life, and then a lot tons of responsibility. But as we’ll continue to see, as we have this conversation, you know, like very dedicated to spirituality with all sorts of spiritual awakenings. And I think that sets a good example, you know, because anyone who feels that they’re too busy or have too much responsibility to have a really spiritual life might find inspiration and what you’ve been doing.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, well, the thing is that, because of the negative sides of the experience of the school of philosophy when I was a teenager because there was a negative side, and also I was at the age of leaving home, and which means kicking off against everything that was associated with home, and going to Oxford, so I really kind of put it all of that away. And the spirituality began to show up in terms of dream analysis and creativity. And, and I kind of, I still believed totally and absolutely believed in God and had my consciousness reset thing, but it didn’t have a context in and it didn’t have a practice, not at all. And I would never even dream of going to a psychologist that was for losers, I became quite arrogant, and I and the journalist, when I went to Jerusalem, despite this ecstatic experience, I was there as on a fact-finding mission to which involved going around the refugee camps and the East Jerusalem, where, which is the Arab side of Jerusalem, the religious Jewish side, the secular Jewish side, all the different the settler side, all the different aspects of the conflict just in Jerusalem. Which was amazing intellectually, to me. It was absolutely amazing that this country didn’t exist, but 1000 and what not years. And it was prophesized that the Jews would come back, and lo and behold, this horrific, unbelievable thing happens, which is the Holocaust. And then here is this country, with this incredible, like, it says, there, they’re not belonging, like nobody really belonging, but everybody comes from somewhere and everybody with a story and everybody with a tragedy. So for the first time in my life, I could talk about the death of my father without everybody blushing and killing the conversation. This was already because everybody had a dead somebody there. Which was like oxygen. You know, I can be myself here, you know what I mean? So, yeah.
Rick Archer: 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 Johnson: Yeah. So inside the investigative journalism, I built up quite a big ego structure connected with saving the world. And because I was using a lot of cannabis and drinking an enormous amount of coffee, and like, I can tell, like, psychologically now I can say, actually, quite soon afterwards, I saw that I was actually projecting my own parents’ divorce onto my life. And that was now coded as the end of the world at the same time that it was kind of psychic in the in that my son was getting to an age when my parents divorced, I got more and more psychotic with a combination of cannabis and coffee that I have to save the world against the threat of non-conventional terrorism. But at the same time, it was slightly psychic, because this was in 1998. And, you know, I have articles that I wrote was predicting a twin attack on America from Bin Laden. You know what I mean? And with the World Trade Center as one of the targets,
Rick Archer: Wow, you actually predicted that.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, because it’s according to the terrorist patterns also of what had been going on before that. But the emotional content of it was absolutely my ego structure is collapsing. I became terrified to be a mother because it was like if the kids come near me, I’m going to inflict the same pain on them that was inflicted on me. And I would just get these crippling anxiety attacks like my stomach is how do you say imploding and I’m having a heart attack and I went to a doctor
Rick Archer: Probably had a lot to do with all the coffee and cannabis too.
Georgi Johnson: Oh absolutely. And it was suddenly the cannabis was very, very strong. It’s this kind of skunk cannabis. I haven’t touched it for a long while but it became like not a soft drug anymore. And it was morning till night. That was the lifestyle.
Rick Archer: It’s amazing you could do anything.
Georgi Johnson: I was buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, my whole mind it was all in the head. All buzzing, buzzing, buzzing reaching out to forget information about where the threat was where this was imagining scenarios, but I imagined scenarios and then they would actually begin to experience them like being nerve gas attacked and stuff. Wow. Like when driving in a traffic jam, I would imagine what would it be like how many people would get killed if there was a nerve gas trail on the back of the exhaust pipe of that car? And I get this visions of everybody dying gas and it’s Jews and gas, right? So this is like something that people should be honest about, you know? And then I would begin kind of salivating and feeling utterly and totally like, I was being nerve gas attacked in that moment. I was utterly out of balance. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Interesting. I don’t suppose No, cannabis is not legal in Israel, right? You were just smoking it.
Georgi Johnson: It’s like everywhere else. It’s becoming legal, little by little. But it is a drug which, despite the legality, you know, we make DMT naturally in our own brains. And if and like with any drug, if you take it from the outside too much, if you abuse it, you stop making it yourself. Which means that when you start to come off it, the brain doesn’t know how to produce its own spirit molecule.
Rick Archer: Right. It’s forgotten, it’s lost. It’s atrophied.
Georgi Johnson: It takes time to open up that to heal that. The neurochemistry again.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s why I totally lost interest in drugs once I learned to meditate. It’s 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 Johnson: It snapped out of me. It snapped out of me. You know, it got to a place where if I smoked a joint, I would go into immediate, full time, proper anxiety, panic immobilization. I had little children.
Rick Archer: So you just couldn’t touch the stuff anymore.
Georgi Johnson: We were in Cambridge. And I remember I had a puff on a joint and I 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. And thank God 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. And so I took some simple Prozac, which I immediately felt like it kind of numbed half my brain and my creativity. So after a short while, after it kicked in, finally, then after a short while, it began to be only every other day. And it would be like alive brain, dead brain, alive brain, dead brain, according to whether I’ve taken the pill and could begin to wean 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 connection and there was nothing It was like this was almost worse than the anxiety, the sense of depression, of senselessness, of meaninglessness. And then
Rick Archer: what is, let me ask you a question. What do you think is going to happen to societies, which are now legalizing cannabis, you know, in Canada and US and various other places has been legal in Holland for a long time. Do you think it’s going to have a long-term deleterious effect? Or is there some? Or does the good outweigh the bad or, or what I just wonder, you know, after a decade, how we’re going to look at people, perhaps they’ll be some people who just indulge heavily as people will in any drug. And those people just be a ton of stupefied, and others will just use it occasionally, and they’ll be fine. But do you think it’s what do you think about the wisdom of the legalization,
Georgi Johnson: I think it will be short-term, there will be a kind of spike in nervous breakdowns and psychosis long term, it will be just like Holland and everybody will begin to take individual responsibility for their own regulation and their own habits. And some people needed a little bit, especially medicinally. It’s got 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. So we’re in an age where people have to start taking responsibility for their own health and their own, whether it’s alcohol or whether it’s drugs, whether it’s legal or illegal, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Ayahuasca or they need to start to develop a sense of self-abuse when they are abusing a substance when they are when it’s taking them in a bad direction. All roads always lead back to that.
Rick Archer: And whatever you say, I mean, it’s certainly not good that so many, hundreds of 1000s of young people are many of them black, young men are sitting in prisons because they had a little bit of marijuana or, you know, sold a little bit or something. I mean, it’s ruined a lot of lives. So that’s got to stop.
Georgi Johnson: And not only that, you know, 50% of I read a statistic recently that 50% of Americans have a family that have or have had a family member in prison.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Georgi Johnson: So this is having a direct effect on the conditions, the feeling of freedom, the feeling of wellbeing the freedom of being allowed to exist in freedom on 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.
Rick Archer: Sure.
Georgi Johnson: And the whole principle of be afraid, you know, be afraid, be afraid, you know, you’re not okay. You know, you can be put away. This principle is holding, you know, 50%. And that’s not counting the ones who are in prison.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I think we have the US has the highest per-capita incarceration rate of any country in the world. I think it’s worse than China.
Georgi Johnson: It’s big business, isn’t it?
Rick Archer: It is a lot of the prisons are private, and people are making money off them. Okay, so how to just snap out of this, you started to take?
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, so I was in this apocalyptic depression. I was just walking around Cambridge. And to a certain stage, I walked into the central town and the, there was a bunch of South African black schoolchildren singing from Soweto. And they were, they still had desert dust on their clothes, in a way. It was like there was something and they were singing with such an innocence and such a purity this song. And I stood there and it was like, my heart just burst open. And I started to cry and cry and cry. And after that, something started to come to life, again, on a completely different note from what had been before, much more authentic, much less arrogant. And I began working with smell with essential oils, and just massaging people’s feet, because it was the only thing that took away the anxiety. And the depression was to be of service to somebody. So as especially my worst enemies, I would grab their feet and people I didn’t like and treat them with essential oils and massage their feet. It was a bit Jesus like but it was really, really, really helped. Calm down and make a turnaround out of this. This place of total burnout, and existential crisis.
Rick Archer: 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 Johnson: The smell. It was smell.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Georgi Johnson: Just the smell.
Rick Archer: Sure.
Georgi Johnson: Amazing smells. So pure.
Rick Archer: 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 a spiritual wisdom or openness, particularly in the younger years for children are so open, but when it’s difficult, or not appropriate to have spiritual, philosophical conversations.
Georgi Johnson: You know, a spiritual or philosophical conversation will be initiated by every child, we have to be ready and open to receive it. You know, it’s not teaching them anything. We have this misconception that we educate our children, that we have what 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. And as soon as they begin to talk, they begin to transmit, what they can in simple language. And if they say they see colors, if they say that they saw a dog in their room and a dog wasn’t there, respect their experience, respect their feelings, ask questions, explore them, be interested 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 different, each one with a whole new set of skills and wisdom and awesome. Awesome. They’re all my teachers, all of them.
Rick Archer: Did you have any child any of your children that were much more difficult than the others? And would that probably if you had you would say that they were no less your teachers than the easier ones because difficult situations can often be our greatest teachers.
Georgi Johnson: They all because they went through quite a horrible divorce. They all went through difficult stages. 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, he absolutely wrecked the house. We went out and we came back the house was the chairs were upside down. All the plates were broken, the house was completely destroyed and he would never talk. He would just not talk he would just say yes or no and I’m bored. That was his whole vocabulary. And I thought there was no hope and I said to Bart, “what shall we do?” And he said we he will heal, he will heal. Bart is my partner. And now at a certain stage, he was playing computer games and his stuff got hacked so many times he had to have a complete and total rage attack on that. And then he went upstairs and started banging on the piano. And then he was banging for the whole summer, bang, bang, bang on the piano. But then 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. And he began to talk because he was playing the piano because he was expressing this quality of music, and his physics went, and mathematics and all the best grades. And he became this beautiful, sensitive, wise, meditating, yeah, studying mindfulness right now and psychology and in Jerusalem, individual, and he was one of the most difficult ones.
Rick Archer: That is so interesting. There’s a really cool story. I’m glad I asked you that question. I mean, that’s, that’s inspiring.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, yeah.
Rick Archer: I had a girlfriend many, many years ago, who was a schoolteacher teaching grammar school. And there was this kid that was the real problem child in the what they’re about to do with them. They thought he might have to leave school, and so on and so forth. And somebody I don’t know, whether it’s 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, you know, so he was actually a much more advanced kid. And then he blossomed, he was just bored and frustrated.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, our schools, our education systems are terrible. The whole very philosophical foundation of putting knowledge into kids’ heads as if their heads are empty. And the two smart kids get lost 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 and at least in Israel, it’s really, really, really not good. The best you can do is get to democratic school, which is a kind of opt-out, you pay for of the system. So that damage isn’t done.
Rick Archer: 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. But 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. So let’s, 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. And also, at some point, perhaps as a segue into this discussion,
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. Okay, so let’s speed it up a little bit. So 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, and then anything rather than go back to hell. And so I started going to a spiritual psychologist, and she referred me to these healing courses of Bart, who was later become my partner. And the very first time I met with her, I was in anxiety again, would come back to Israel, and I was sitting the next day, with the children in anxiety in the grass, and I felt her connecting with me. And it was such transmission of joy, and okayness. remotely, that my, it’s like my whole reality just transformed for about an hour and I could breathe and free of anxiety for about an hour. So the next time I went to her, I said, I want to learn what you know how to do. I want to study this, you know, it’s like, because this is, it’s like finding something which you always knew. And I was always very intuitive and always following my feet. But I never had found that such a tangible kind of experience that this is possible, through the felt sense, this kind of remote healing thing. And so in studying this spiritual psychology courses, the next stage came, which was deeper than awakening. And that was this kind of unconditional opening of the heart, in which they’re kind of it was like the heart had been so blocked and so closed, maybe my whole life and at a certain stage, it just splintered open. And there was this sense of Satori or just unconditional love for everybody, everything just ongoing, ongoing, ongoing, ongoing for a couple of months in which I was totally functional. I was thinking, am I going psychotic here? But no I was totally functional with the children, better than ever, totally clear-minded. Every time I put the experience down, it would come back again, with these kind of great blessings of like blankets of peace coming down and something which I’d never ever experienced before in my life, and it got to a point where I was hanging out the washing in the garden and I felt it stop and I’d felt you know, unconditional love for Osama Bin Ladin and unconditional love for every fucker on the planet. And, and then suddenly it stopped. I thought, why is it stopped like, what’s this? What am I but I met a wall in my heart and then I realized that I’d come up against myself and my heart just closed. And that was really where that part of that experience ended. And only about six, seven years later, there would be a third process which was much more to do with the body which I call the emptiness process, where a lot of the deep fears and self-rejections and deep inner splits and blocks to unity and subtle unconscious conditions on life began to fall away. So because of this in our teaching, we make it like this three layers of development and a people can organize it how they want but I think this is a really a good way you know, so awakening we use that word for the awakening of consciousness from mind, from thought identification, enlightenment with a little E, of a liberation of the heart, the liberation of the heart from the conditions and the contractions, which have kept it in no passage through in a way to the other side, that have kept it limited. And then emptiness, which is the liberation of the body from basic, subconscious, unconscious fears, from the fear of death, from the belief that the body is physically separate from the planet. And there’s those final rifts when which we kind of separate ourselves without even being aware of it from the outside what we see as the outside world
Rick Archer: It sounds very much like Adyashanti’s head-heart-gut model, you know,
Georgi Johnson: It does, you know, when I wrote “I Am Here”, I didn’t even know what non-duality was. I discovered it later. And it was a lot of it was kind of guided but from a guide that very much said speak it in your own right. I, later on, found out who he was, but then a year too late a year or two later, it felt like the world is so 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, you know, and then I discovered Adyashanti. And actually, this isn’t so like, off the wall, you know, but by then I’ve gone through a whole process of reducing it down to come on his 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, it was like, “what the hell is she talking about?” Especially for non-English speakers.
Rick Archer: Yeah, now you just said something interesting that there was some guide like a muse that was channeling this stuff through you or something? What’s that about?
Georgi Johnson: There was there was a, you know,
Rick Archer: Now you know who he is or who he was.
Georgi Johnson: 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?” you know. But, so following guidance for me is very, very automatic. But this particular guide would be coming 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 and the awareness, which is much more how things feel feeling atmospheres. And, and, and the third part, which is here, the body. And I asked him at a certain stage to show me who he is give me his face. And he showed up as an eagle and flew straight past. I thought, okay, that’s nice, you know, but then he said, I could call him Pappy. So we would talk about him as Pappy. And then one day I was scrolling through Facebook, and Nisargadatta shows up. And it’s a quote where he’s literally talking about consciousness and awareness and prior to being and 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 you know, I’ve got no claim to absolute realities here at all. I really had nothing to do with absolute realities and facts and no possession. No claiming, claiming him, nothing. But this is what I And I can feel him like, you know, like Jesus, you know, 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. And he didn’t get free of himself. And I think that was a bit of a disappointment.
Rick Archer: Could be, why not? Yeah, perhaps just because he was anticipating something else. But, you know, God had other plans.
Georgi Johnson: 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 Archer: 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. And then, later on, discovered him and others, several people I’ve interviewed had similar things, but they hadn’t heard of the guy. And then they had they saw him and then later they saw him in an actual book. So maybe –
Georgi Johnson: Russell Williams, Russell Williams in Manchester after he was enlightened by a horse, literally a horse looking into his eyes, and 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 know, “you’re totally off” – he didn’t have any context for it whatsoever. And 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. And he prayed, he said, Please, God help me with this. And he got this WOMP face of Ramana.
Rick Archer: Interesting.
Georgi Johnson: He had no idea who this Indian guy is.
Rick Archer: Right,
Georgi Johnson: Later on he match the face to the to a picture that somebody gave him years later. And it used to stand on his shelf there in Manchester.
Rick Archer: Fascinating. Is he still alive?
Georgi Johnson: No, he died a year and a half ago.
Rick Archer: Oh, I missed him. But anyway, that’s cool. You know,
Georgi Johnson: He was 96 or something. Quite ready to move on for a while.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I mean, certainly, the new agers talk about Ascended Masters. And I’ve, you know, interviewed people who say they’re talking to Mary Magdalene, and Jesus and so on. And so I keep an open mind. I mean, who knows, maybe, you know, these enlightened beings don’t just sort of melt into the, into the oneness and you know, without 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 Johnson: Yeah, maybe the realm that we’re living in is this realm. It’s just not visible.
Rick Archer: Yeah, yeah. But yeah, we can talk about realms. Because obviously, there’s a lot right here that isn’t visible. For.
Georgi Johnson: Exactly. We’re so arrogant without eyes and ears and noses, you know?
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Georgi Johnson: You think if we can’t see it, like dark matter, you think if you can’t see it, then we call it “dark”.
Rick Archer: Hmm. Well, that kind of in a way that shifts us into our discussion about non-dual therapy, because you talk about non-dual qualities or qualities of consciousness. And what we’ve just been discussing for the last five or 10 minutes is, you know, beings who have attained unity consciousness, and they’re just, 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. And it might sound like an oxymoron to say to speak of non-dual qualities, because qualities implies relative stuff. And non-dual, you think of sort of 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 Johnson: So if you’re talking about paradox, you know, the very word “non-dual,” “non-duality” is – what is that? It’s something that defines itself by what it’s not.
Rick Archer: Yeah, in fact,
Georgi Johnson: What’s not Rick, what is not Rick? How do we find “not” Rick in the universe?
Rick Archer: Yeah. Yeah,
Georgi Johnson: 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 the very word is a cone, which I really love about it. It’s a cone. But what it’s really the one word which is meaningful inside this cone non-duality is duality. Isn’t it?
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Georgi Johnson: And when we look to the, to the forms every single form in creation, it’s got a North Pole, South Pole, it’s got a left hand or right hand it’s got two eyes, it’s got up and down. It’s got its leaves are separating, branching into splitting into two cells are dividing, you know out that first embryo becomes two cells and then becomes four cells and then becomes eight cells. It’s all about division, and duality. So there is this something which is 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. It’s all duality in naturalness, harmony, symmetry, beauty, and balance.
Rick Archer: But I think what some people mean when they say non-duality, and they sometimes take, you know, they refer to physics as a metaphor, or as an actual example of it, is that you know, in on more manifest levels, we have all this diversity. But then if we go more and more fundamental into nature’s structure, we get down to simpler and simpler, more unified realities. And then ultimately, even the very first sprouting of diversity folds back into an unsprouted are unmanifest state which physics might call a unified field or spiritual people might call pure consciousness. And they say, Okay, well, that ultimately is what’s real, that non-dual state, all of this emergence of properties and diversities is less real in some way. You know, it’s more illusory in some way.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. So you see what’s there, there’s a hierarchization.
Rick Archer: There is.
Georgi Johnson: This is more real this is less real,
Rick Archer: That’s why it’s described. Yeah,
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. And the splitting, this is the true state, this is the false state.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s this the bias, that comes across.
Georgi Johnson: This is duality. This is pure duality, this is pure, you know, 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 consciously you’ve got subject/object, you’ve got the one that sees it and the and the vision, which is seen if it’s felt, resonantly through awareness, you’ve got an experience, and you’ve got an experience. 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 – doesn’t matter what to get drunk in a pub, or to have the most sublime meditational experience of a golden Buddha, is the same one. And it’s the same one expressing through all of these different forms of love, and peace and purity and innocence, and naturalness, and suffering. It’s the same one suffering in billions of different forms. The same one,
Rick Archer: Suffering and enjoying.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. Same one lost in the 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 is just an excellent word, to bring forward the paradox of there being ultimately no duality between existence and nonexistence, which is totally quantum physics, you know, the particle is blipping in and out if it’s here, and not here, here and not here, here and not
Rick Archer: Particle to wave.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, exactly.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Georgi Johnson: Exactly. And that’s very true to direct experience. Your consciousness is a flickering, flickering, it’s blipping in and out. Awareness is more of a wave, but anything, even the, when I’m aware that I’m aware? Yeah, that awareness that I’m aware of that field of awareness, it’s got a subtle vibration, it’s a form. It’s 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 Archer: Yeah, I think what you’re saying is in complete accordance with what the writers of the Upanishads and these great texts were saying, you know, and in fact, they said things such as you know, that alone is, and thou art that, and so on, and so forth, for referring to this non-duality. And all of this is that, so you know, they’re just saying
Georgi Johnson: And that’s exactly it, isn’t it, you can feel the that-ness in every single piece of mud and 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 there’s an evolution that starts to happen towards harmony, actually.
Rick Archer: Yeah, there’s two nice little themes there. I mean, 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. So all of this must be that. If that’s it,
Georgi Johnson: Exactly, exactly. But, but of course, people like to kind of like to, 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 a reunion there is a nirvana is in the otherness, in the experience of otherness, is it the beginner’s mind, is in the otherness, when you can look at the world with totally fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, you see all these people inside their thoughts inside their heads, and on their phones, and each one in their own bubble here and you look at it, it’s like, other. And that’s a nondual experience.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Well, you know, if they insist that there is no other, then it kind of belies their own experience. Because, you know, if you take a hammer and threaten to pound their thumb with it, then, you know, 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.”
Georgi Johnson: That’s a bit like, you know, “it’s only his body that’s dead,” you know, “yeah, it is only it’s his body that’s dead, but what the hell is death?” You know, what I mean? It’s, people have many, many, I think it’s Jung said; that people get will go to vast lengths to escape the mystery of their own souls, they will get that they have genius ways, including spiritual ways to deny, negate, not to 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, or enlightenment, or moments of Self-Realization, you’ll hear some teachers and you’ve got the whole array of them on BatGap, who talk about this profound piece. And others who will say all there is this love, it’s just love. Everything is love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love. Others who will be very much teaching about freedom. Others about the now, the now, the now. People are talking about different things, different experiences, they’re talking about different qualities, which became the foreground of their liberal, during their particular liberation. So you know, Eckhart Tolle, for example, was very much in conflict in a war inside his head. And so when he awakened, he had this experience of sublime peace. But somebody like I was at that stage when I was 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 in that experience, which is more like enlightenment with a little “e'”, there was this kind of sense of unconditional love. What 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, equality, these qualities 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, and people that 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 raised away, meaning at the end of our lives, when the psyche is gone, or when the mind is gone, these qualities still are there, then never taken away. They never get broken, they never get injured. They’re in unlimited supply. And they feel different, you know, the feeling quality of peace is a whole other dimension from the feeling quality of love. And love, you know, is very different from the feeling quality of care. No 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 the nature and it’s not the same as this love, which is another vibration again. So that’s what we’re talking that’s what we talk about when we’re talking about qualities and these qualities have a tremendous healing effect on the psychology on the psyche of an individual and the environment.
Rick Archer: That’s interesting. So you’re sort of saying that the predominant experience that a person has before awakening might determine the predominant experience they have after awakening. And I thought of an example, while you’re saying that, let’s say there’s a group of people, and one of them is really hungry, and one of them is really cold, and one of them is really tired, they haven’t slept in a long time. And, you know, we can go on thinking other examples. And then the whole group gets to move into a nice palace. And in the palace, there’s plenty of food and it’s nice and warm, and there’s a comfortable bed. Okay, so the guy who was hungry is gonna say, “oh, food, that’s, that’s what the palace is about.” And the other guy is gonna think, “oh, you know, warm, that’s so nice and warm here.” The other one’s gonna think, “oh, 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 Johnson: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I remember in SAND in Italy, Mauro,
Rick Archer: Maurizio?
Georgi Johnson: No, not Maurizio, Mauro, Italian philosopher, lovely guy who studied with a Nisargadatta, he asked me if it was cold and inside, or if you needed a sweater, you had to go and give a lecture. And I told him, that depends on how warm your body is. And he just cracked up laughing because in that moment, there was this, like, you know, relativity of all things. And it’s really interesting to look into because it could be also 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, afterwards, extreme conflict, we made her come here to learn, to experience the in-depth detail, experientially of 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 that’s what we would say is the duality of peace. Because in our teaching, each quality is associated with a duality, which is now not natural duality, but psychological duality. So peace, for example, is not in a competition with war. It’s not on that level at all. It’s not in opposition to war, you can’t make peace, you can’t orchestrate it from above, and stick it on a people, where I am right now as a living proof of that. But there is peace here, spontaneously arising in every moment between Arabs and Jews and Jews and Jews and Arabs and Arabs there is it’s a very, very peaceful country, actually, despite the news. So each quality has an associated contraction. And the contraction is around two poles of a psychological duality. So in the case of peace, it’s between the feeling that you’re fighting a war, the sense of war, being at war, and a sense of having to surrender, of being surrendered, and 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, and 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, you know, these non-dual qualities like love, peace, freedom, unity, non-duality, they’re not in competition with another opposite. They’re not on that level, they are a degree behind that with an immediate healing impact on that. So when you bring the energy of peace to a conflict, something in the conflict, just because the energy of peace is allowed to be there at the same time as the conflict. So something in the conflict begins to awaken and resolve by itself. And 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, so, there is some kind of connection which is really worth exploring between these qualities, which we talk about as nondual teachers so often, and the contractions, the places we suffer, the places where we are very stressed and in conflict with inside ourselves, in the psyche or in the ego structure in the personality structure.
Rick Archer: In one page of your book, he said non-dual qualities are evolutionary in the sense that they’re not yet freely manifested through 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. So would it be fair to say that, you know, deeply fundamentally there’s a vast repository of beautiful non-qualities such as peace and love and all these things, but they are just not percolating up. Clearly, in most people’s experience, and therefore, in society, they’re sort of, you know, bottled up down there. And so 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’s clouds in front of it, then the sun hasn’t reached the ground.
Georgi Johnson: 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 have to identify and we build ourselves a personality, which is disconnected from these qualities. And then we pretend these qualities because we miss them, which disconnects us still further. And they are everywhere, though, if you just look at your dogs in your house, they are just oozing nondual qualities, you know, if you look towards trees, or to flowers, or to the sky, or even to those places, in our regular, normal day, where we spend consciously we’re awake when we’re thinking about how we’re suffering and when we think about a problem, but the rest of the time, we don’t even give it appreciation. And that quality is there. So take a family, for example, the family, they’ve all got an issue, you know, Shula doesn’t like Peter and Peter doesn’t make Shula’s husband and the mother doesn’t like the daughter-in-law and the father. And so they all have their thing going on. And they’re all entangled like this, and they’re all entangled in webs of suffering. And then something happens you know, Shula’s got cancer. And suddenly, there’s this unity. And suddenly, this love, and even the quality start to shine through much, we’re always there, but nobody ever appreciated life, the quality of life, physical life. So the love is here, it’s really here all the time. You know, we spent so much time saying humanity is screwed, and we have to awaken and all of this, but actually, humanity is awesomely loving creature. It’s 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. And we believe with our beliefs, that there’s only a certain amount of love and that peace is only accessible after this in this that freedom is, you know, only when a you know, whatever. The freedom is there in the darkest prison. You know, Nelson Mandela’s life, maybe his whole life was a mastery of the quality of freedom. That transformation that took place there with the quality of freedom when he lost his when he became enslaved, actually.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I think you said about the woman, you know, Stella or Shula getting
Georgi Johnson: I just totally made that up. Yeah, I know, but it’s a good example. I mean, what you see a lot of times here and I’m sure around the world is if there’s a big hurricane or a snowstorm or something like that, everybody comes out and starts helping everybody knows this brotherly love kind of, you know, emerges and people are just going totally out of their way to save people and help them, feed them and clothe them and everything else. And it’s only when things get back into the humdrum, humdrum routine that people kind of get back into their limited perspective. Yeah, yeah. Isn’t that worrying? Because it looks like that’s what’s needed.
Rick Archer: Yeah, obviously, there must be a way of enlivening it, and in a much fuller and abiding way, other than catastrophes. It’d be nice if it became the norm without having to have hurricanes and snowstorms and, you know, other kinds of desperate situations. So that’s, that’s the key question is how do we unlock it and enliven it in, in not only within ourselves but in collective consciousness. So that becomes the norm.
Georgi Johnson: Well, you know, our education, the Dalai Lama spoke just recently about how we need to really begin teaching our children and education of the heart. We educated from the head with knowledge, dead knowledge, you have to really, really bring to the new generation and 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 only make a big difference. But at the same time, you know, behind your question, there’s a whole kind of sorrow about the need for suffering. And it comes from a very compassionate place, but you know, it’s was willing to look at what is this suffering really about? If you look at our own lives, you know, what effect did suffering have on us? In the deepest possible way?
Rick Archer: Me, deepest possible way?
Georgi Johnson: What, what is this feeling? How did it bring us down?
Rick Archer: It was evolutionary.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, exactly.
Rick Archer: Yeah. You know,
Georgi Johnson: And it brings insight, and it shows us why we’re not free. And it deepens our compassion and our empathy for other humans who are suffering.
Rick Archer: Yeah,
Georgi Johnson: See, I really don’t believe in private enlightenment. I don’t think that you kind of get off the boat and say, I’m separate now from your humanity because I’m nondual. And, and humanity is still suffering, but I’m not. I think it’s possible
Rick Archer: People that we regard as enlightened, didn’t behave that way.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, exactly.
Rick Archer: You know, they became universal citizens sort of once, once the Enlightenment dawned.
Georgi Johnson: And the Buddha actually started that way, he started in the, in the palace, at least a story of Siddhartha, you know, so he’s surrounded with unconditional, non-dual 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 to go out into the world and to begin at 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, there would be 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, very much about each other. Because we’re not separate.
Rick Archer: You use the word evolution quite a bit. For instance, he said, Nondual qualities are evolutionary, and the point I often make in these interviews is that, I feel, that 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. And if you look at it in that context, you know, then suffering is not capricious, or arbitrary, or cruel or meaningless. It must, in the biggest picture, have some kind of evolutionary significance, or it wouldn’t have happened because everything does.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. And maybe what it is, is, the evolutionary effect of suffering is in the opening of compassion. And compassion is the wisdom of interdependence and the wisdom of unity. And I tend to feel that’s the true non-duality is the wisdom of interdependence, the wisdom of unity. Compassion is not something that we should do and behave nice to each other. It’s something that arises by itself, spontaneously, as an impulse from the depths of our own source.
Rick Archer: It’s probably a reflection of the degree to which we actually do experience the oneness of everything. You know, if we truly experience our neighbor as ourselves, then we’re going to behave differently than if we experienced the neighbor as some kind of distant estranged, you know, person different from ourselves.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, yeah.
Rick Archer: Here’s another relevant paragraph from what you wrote, in your book, you said “our connection with a non-dual quality can be forgotten, obscured, confused, or derived, 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.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, so, so an example of a quality, which people don’t talk so much about two qualities: which one do you want innocence or purity?
Rick Archer: Oh, let’s do ’em both.
Georgi Johnson: So innocence. You know, there’s not many people waking up to the everything is innocence, the pure absolute flow of innocence, that every single aspect of experience is inherently innocent. And to get a feeling connection with innocence. You know, I had a client recently and she said, we did this whole process she’s got a very strong guilt complex, and, of course, accusation towards the world because guilt and accusation go together. The guilt is too painful, so we say the world is bad. The world is wrong, and 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. And so we worked with innocence and we worked with innocence in a sense of the innocence of her consciousness just touching the energetic contraction. There’s constriction in her body, wherever there was a stress response in the body, touching it with the attitude of innocence on her consciousness, and there was this kind of domino effect of innocence, innocence, innocence, innocence, innocence. And at the end of the process, she said, I always thought innocence was the same as compassion, but it’s not. It’s something it’s a completely different felt sense. It’s a whole vibration of itself. So this quality right now tends to come forward in people very, very strongly when they suffer because animals are suffering, because there is this quality of innocence inside animals that when innocence is suffering, it’s absolutely 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 enormous healing effect. Innocence isn’t for suckers, it’s very potent. It’s not for children, you know, like, oh, children child is innocent and all of this, but it is one of the most powerful qualities the 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 this feeling of inherent badness. And we say it’s a competition between this and it’s either you’re guilty or you’re innocent, you know, that the prisons are full of people who will always be, have, always been, and will always be innocent, and who are caught in the contraction of guilt and accusation at the same time.
Rick Archer: Well, you know, Christ said, “except ye be as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven” meaning innocent. And in that sentence, I think of the opposite of innocence as complexity, guile, you know, subterfuge,
Georgi Johnson: Pretense.
Rick Archer: Delusion, you know, just sort yeah, kind of putting all kinds of unreal, complicated, superstructures on top of the simple, naturalness of life, and thereby obscuring again, the word obscuring our true nature, because we’ve kind of muddied it up with complications.
Georgi Johnson: We very much forgot that we are innocent.
Rick Archer: Maharishi is to talk about pure consciousness or pure awareness is the simplest form of awareness, as opposed to sort of more complex, convoluted states. But just in simple, simple also applies innocence just getting down to pure simplicity. And it you see that in the eyes of someone like Ramana, there’s a sort of childhood resting and pure innocence, as opposed to the eyes of Donald Trump. Or someone.
Georgi Johnson: He has actually quite a strong quality of innocence. If you connect it.
Rick Archer: In a way.
Georgi Johnson: Inside Donald Trump, it’s in the idiot as well in him, you know what I mean? He’s like, he’s serving a certain purpose, and he’s innocent in it.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Georgi Johnson: If you don’t look at his personality, but you look at the quality that’s coming. 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 that is quite a strong quality of innocence, as well.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Georgi Johnson: 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. Oh, yeah. That’s the thing, quality is absolutely unconditional to our behavior or to what we do or to the guilt that we carry. Or, and then 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 is in at since the Garden of Eden or before or because we’re not enlightened and we got reincarnated. We all have this burden of badness, the sense of badness inside the psyche. It’s encoded in our DNA, you know, 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 innocence, innocent, and then at a certain stage, the sense of badness can become unbearable, just unbearable. And so we begin to throw it out on the world by behaving bad. And we are allowed to do that because the world is bad. So we kind of start this kind of guilt and accusation contraction. And then, of course, we get condemned back by the world and it reconfirms the sense of guilt and the sense of badness, and all the time what’s there is this innocence that never gets lost. Really, it’s there. It’s hard to, to maybe for people to get the babies are born with guilt complexes, but you know, if you look into the epigenetics, you look into the kind of traumas that passed from generation to generation, more often than not is connected with a contraction of guilt.
Rick Archer: 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 this the kind of the traumas and stresses of previous generations.
Georgi Johnson: And we live them, we live them firsthand as if it’s our unique, only, individual, separate experiences as if it’s new. The same themes of abandonment or rejection or desolation.
Rick Archer: Yeah, so one, one point we can get onto in a minute is possibly is, you know how to clear up the sort of 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 Johnson: I think it’s very, very, very, very healthy, to not see ourselves as separate from our ancestors to start off with. Let’s be non-dual about this, you know, every single molecule and cell in our body, every strand of our DNA is inherited, and our DNA and our personality, our eye color, or 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. And so, first of all, whatever we are experiencing now, it’s not separate from our parents. And it’s not separate from our grandparents. And 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’s part of our contribution in resolving some of these conflicts in 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, and the ones that come after us and 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 Archer: Yeah. I think both the Native American and the Vedic culture is talking about seven generations, a ripple effect through seven generations. And I know that in the Vedic which I’m more familiar with than the Native American, it said that when one becomes enlightened, it sort of has this major impact, both going forward and going backward, in turn for seven generations on your relatives, your predecessors and your ancestors.
Georgi Johnson: It goes forwards, backwards, and sideways in the here and now.
Rick Archer: That too, absolutely.
Georgi Johnson: To your environment and your whole speech.
Rick Archer: Huge wave, yeah. Yeah, well, well, let’s get talking 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 the – ” oh this is what you were just saying, “can expand beyond our experience and merge with the awareness of others, thus, feeling their turmoil, and frustrations? It seems that some masters like Ama, Maha, Maha Maharshi, etc., 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 the implication for reincarnation and growing human awareness?” Yeah, I think it’s kind of what he’s asking is relating to what we’re just saying that and it works both ways. I mean, the sages are, you know, much more acutely sensitive to what others are experiencing, but they’re also much more potent in rating and influence towards others.
Georgi Johnson: You know, it’s, we don’t have a separate awareness. It’s one field of awareness. The only thing that separates it is our mental filters. And, you know, I remember Barry? Is he called Barry?
Rick Archer: Barry.
Georgi Johnson: So I remember watching my parrot, my baby parrot who was watching my dog who was eating, and as the dog was eating, the parrot was going “nom, nom, nom, nom, nom.” Yeah, we have this thing in naturalness we have on both sides of the brain, and in the middle, we have mirror neurons, in which we naturally experience what the other is experiencing. So that’s not just like eating dog food. It’s also to the depths of empathy. You know, they have been called empathy neurons. Of course, if we don’t use them, we lose them. So the more we are able to relax in the idea that I am separate, and I have to know what’s mine and what’s yours. Yeah. And where I begin and where you begin, and this idea of separation, the more that becomes not an issue, meaning that the filtering mechanism of “this is not mine,” the repressive mechanism on the brain is not happening, then that the more we’re able to experience natural empathy without it upsetting the whole nervous system. So you can clearly know it’s not yours. It’s the other person’s because we allow the experience in totality and it’s full of their essence as well. You can feel the essence of the presence of the other person in the particular brand of fear that you’re experiencing. So, but what we tend to I think we have such a fear of having to defend ourselves that we kind of close down our natural empathy. It’s a natural empathy. It’s not a psychic ability, although, you know, we’ll get there in a couple of years, you know. So the more we don’t close down our natural empathy, the more it’s very, very clear what’s coming through what body and through what history, and but we’re able to experience it together completely with another human being what they’re experiencing as if it’s our own. There is this. And all of this is just experiencing happening within an awareness which is always, never divided. My awareness is the same as Rick’s awareness is the same as everybody else’s awareness. The only thing which is differentiated is the nature of experience. And that’s not so different, either. Half the time, especially when we’re talking,
Rick Archer: Some people said they become kind of hypersensitive, so they can’t be around crowds, can’t go to Walmart, you know, something like that, because you’re just picking up on everybody’s feelings and thoughts and stuff. 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 and yet not be undesirably impinged upon by other people’s stuff?
Georgi Johnson: What people are doing, they’re not becoming hypersensitive, they’re returning to naturalness. And there’s nothing about Walmart, which is natural. It’s fluorescent lights, it’s a bombardment of messages and colors and people with their “me first” trolleys and consumerism. And it’s very upsetting in naturalness to experience that, you know, it’s not the people themselves, if you take those people that and you sit under a tree together, and you kind of enjoy nature, and you sit in silence a bit after a couple of hours, they’re not going to be a problem. Anyway, you know, we have all those people in Walmart that are caught in consumerism, they’re in our field all the time, you know, you must have had some times when you go to sleep, and it’s like, the whole world is talking in your head. And you have to kind of reach you on the radio into the channel silence because this busy mind and it’s not your thoughts, it’s random, they all kinds of different frequencies of people just talking into the emptiness, you know, but maybe you passed in warmer months earlier in the day, you know, that’s what’s being described here with Walmart is the sickness of our society at its fulcrum. Consumerism. There’s this kind of consumerist monster, which is hypnotizing us and eating the planet. And not taking any risk by creating, creating, creating without any, any responsibility for the destruction that happens. And we’re quite right to feel bothered by it.
Rick Archer: Well, I used Walmart as a case in point I could have, I could have said, you know, going to the state fair, or something where people are having fun, but there’s a lot of people and you know, some people just find that they can’t be around anything like that because they feel too porous. They feel, you know, too impacted by everything. So I guess the question is, you know, does is that characteristic of enlightenment or could an enlightened person be, you know, nice and integrated in such a way that he or she could function normally in such circumstances and not be overwhelmed by them.
Georgi Johnson: It’s absolutely possible to walk into a battlefield and into Walmart’s and into 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 Archer: Yeah, in fact, that was the advice in the Gita. Lord Krishna said to Arjuna “Well, you 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. It’ll be you’ll do the right thing, etc.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, yeah.
Rick Archer: There was something we were talking about earlier, I wanted to ask you or comment on, or both. And that was we’re talking about different qualities that one might experience some, you know, some might experience more bliss, some more freedom, some more, you know, wisdom or something different qualities as awakening dawned, and we’re 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 of, you know, let’s say we could speak of it in terms of the Gunas some more Tamas, some more Rajas, some more Sattva, and it said traditionally, that, according to that, according to the condition of the nervous system, one might experience enlightenment quite differently. One might regard the world as an illusion other as others as much just plain material stuff others as divine, some might experience bliss more some more vastness or freedom. And so, you know, same realization in a way same liberation but different orientation to it according to our neurophysiological makeup. Have any thoughts on that?
Georgi Johnson: Well, the nervous system is part of, in so many ways the way the nervous system is encoded, it’s partly conditioned by our environment, meaning by education, and by what we’ve been taught, like “be afraid,” that you have to be stressed. It is also encoded out of our cellular inheritance from our ancestors like, you know, “watch out for men, they only follow their dicks,” you know, this kind of thing, you know, it’s like, encoded not to trust the opposite gender, for example, and already may be being programmed, the nervous system could be learning that inside the womb, you know, a baby inside the mother’s womb can hear what’s happening outside. And if every time the father’s voice shows up, the mother’s blood rushes with cortisol. And with stress hormones, then the baby is going to go into stress and associated already there with the sound of a male. So that stress response in the nervous system, for example, is going to play out. As a first reflex every time a male’s voice is heard. And it will be translated and interpreted into distrust and into beliefs. Like you can’t actually really trust males there, they fail, “fail male,” you know. So that’s just one example of the genius of the nervous system. But the nervous system is so malleable, it’s such an obedient animal, it takes a little bit of time, but it can be trained, and when the nervous system gets a sniff of true nature, that actually, if you relax inside the conflict, that this piece comes forward, and this piece is really yummy. And the whole system is actually fed by that, then the nervous system starts to kind of anticipate it and look for it. Where’s the peace? Where’s the peace? You know, it’s, it’s very, very, very agreeable to true nature wants to know, the energetic vibrations of the qualities like love and peace and togetherness, even as a thought introduced, it learns like a rat that gets an electric shock, like the now the rat gets a cookie, when it touches the bell, it learns that this is good news.
Rick Archer: 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. And the nervous system kind of enjoys the types of rested, natural, you know, 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 that to a new style, a new, more natural style of functioning, to the point where it just becomes perpetual, rather than momentary.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. You could also think about it as you know, because we think about the nervous system often as turning outwards, towards outer stimuli. And I really like to think of the nervous system as being like part of the nervous system of the universe. And as such, it, it’s responsive, and I think this is really true to experience it’s, 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, and as we begin to relax, then the senses begin to open. Right? If something’s like this then it can’t you can’t receive it the eyes are like this The ears are like this everything’s contract contracted. But as we relax it begins to open the sensory perception like a flower now these senses and that 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 subtle sense of touch. 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 Archer: Yeah, it’s nourishing.
Georgi Johnson: 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 know, you hear the divine music. It’s too much it will close down the whole show. And so you know, if you know what I mean, it’s so the nerve system is working both ways. And we vastly underestimate the power of 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, and 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 there? 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-outside collapses, and life becomes a kind of meditation in which the nervous system is just yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. Irene says that enlightened people can shop at Target instead of Walmart.
Georgi Johnson: [laughs]
Rick Archer: 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, you know, 30/40 years ago, if I went into the Walmart or something like that, I’d start to feel jangled after a while, as I got to get out of here, it’s too unnatural. Now 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, you know, 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 Johnson: 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, there kind of conditions on the outside become less of a problem.
Rick Archer: If you think back to where you were in the late 90s when you’re strung out on cannabis and coffee and contrast that with the way you feel now. I mean, if you could, if you could like step instantly from the way you were functioning then to the way you’re functioning now, do you feel like you’d have just like this huge relief, because your natural style of functioning is now so, so relaxed as compared to that.
Georgi Johnson: It’s absolutely inconceivable you know, the different you know, 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 Archer: Yeah.
Georgi Johnson: But back then I was an explosion in slow motion, there was the psychic part, there was the intellectual part, there was the pain that 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, you know, cuz I probably came because of the Holocaust, because I was so impacted by just 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 to connect it with misconceptions about good and evil, about survival about 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,” you know, like, out of the blue. And this was before I was, you know, back into all of this funky stuff. And at a certain stage, I was laying there on the floor of the kitchen in total and absolute nervous anxiety. And the drugs weren’t working, the psychiatric drugs, they were just making me like a robot and everything was imploding the whole physical body, like I’m dying, this not knowing at all, just no nowhere to go anymore. And I had this vision of these two figures coming across the field. And one of them was it was a man and 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 towards me. And as they came towards me, they’re this kind of two spheres of white, white, white, white, white, white, white light, silvery lights 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. And then I jerked away towards my son, my firstborn son, and touched the rock, I had a very strong connection with the rocks in the Carmel mountain to touch the rock and then woke up. But the charge of this experience was like a total and absolute reset. And for me, that is like where my second life began. It’s like I died in that moment, and 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 Archer: 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 can be reassembled in a much more desirable way. It would have been hard to be to get to where you are now without that disassembling.
Georgi Johnson: 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, and contraction, and friction, and conflict. And none of this would have been possible if I hadn’t been to Timbuktu and back. Yeah, and seeing the whole personality burn down and see that I’m still here.
Rick Archer: So it really helps you as a therapist, in addition to having helped you as an individual, you know, restructure your life, but you’re able to actually relate to probably just about anybody who comes to you, and tune into their level of pain, because you’ve been there done that. And then and then help them.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, yeah. And that’s kind of quite an important area because I was very much in almost very close to getting eaten up by the psychiatric establishment who heard me talking about Bin Laden and non-conventional 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. And the drugs that they first gave me was serious anti-psychotic drugs. And 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. And 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 it’s a there’s not a therapy in place to kind of work with bipolar, it’s very hard to work with a lot of these psycho psychological disorders when the capacity to feel has been limited. So the capacity to feel, feeling, the feeling is absolutely fundamental to restoring harmony in the psyche, and balance and freedom and naturalness. So when we take drugs, which limit our capacity to feel, to reunite with our deepest pain, the things that have affected us, the traumas that have formed us, then our, 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, the psychiatric drugs being pushed on people have incredibly awful withdrawal effects as well, so much show that people think that that’s the craziness underneath, but it’s the withdrawal effects which are playing out.
Rick Archer: I remember, some therapists that might have been somebody I interviewed several years ago, I remember hearing this the guy said, 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 Johnson: So I took one of these anti-psychotic pills and my arms went up like this.
Rick Archer: Just because of some weird reaction?
Georgi Johnson: And there was no relief whatsoever from, no, that’s how you that’s how a lot of people reacted like you become robotic like almost immediately and it had no effect on the anxiety, no effect on the, on what I was in.
Rick Archer: 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 taking a lot of these drugs, who are actually very spiritual people who have had some sort of spiritual breakthrough or something, but it’s just not integrated. And they’re diagnosed as crazy. And they ended up getting just, you know, 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 Johnson: Yeah, yeah, they need togetherness and belonging and someone to listen to them, it doesn’t matter to what they’re saying. You know, it’s not that they’re not mentally ill sometimes, but it’s that the drugs don’t help. So why give them drugs that are addictive and that have incredible effects in withdrawing which destroy the kidneys when it’s not actually helping and you’re locking them up anyway?
Rick Archer: Yeah. You know, I mean, a lot of people who are actually mentally ill are also very spiritual. We don’t want to just say, say all mental illnesses, spirituality, but spiritual transformation can be very unsettling. And you can go through a lot of intense I mean, I can look back at periods in my life when I was pretty darn nutty. Going through some long meditation course or something. and you just need gentle guidance through these phases and you know, not that sort of crude completely uninsightful, you know, suppression of whatever is happening through some biochemical means.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. You know, we have such a strong fear of insanity. In our culture.
Rick Archer: You say in your book actually that back in Greece, they didn’t distinguish between insanity and spirituality because they never, they weren’t so sure they could and so they kind of treated all such people with respect.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, and, and, and, you know, so much of what we would call insane is created by people attempting to be sane, meaning repressing their anger, denying their trauma, not, 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. So pretended sanity is a form of insanity, which creates a lot of personality disorders. You know, the whole paradigm of sanity and insanity is a judgmental shamefest where people you know, it’s an insult to call somebody crazy. You know, it’s so terrified, it’s so cowardly. It’s so unaware, you know, when losing my mind, this psycho when I was psychotic because at a certain stage, I was psychotic. I was never more lucid from another level. And 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. And I saw how not only my mind, but my patterns of behavior, my social context, everything needed to get totally lost. And I could see it in real-time, I was there, crazy, but I could see what was going on. And I was getting insight totally as to how this works at the same time. So sometimes things start to play out on life and then when there is shame delivered on that and exclusion and judgment. We should be grateful for the insane people for doing that, on behalf of the rest of us. You know, it’s so much of freedom of mind depends on are moving beyond the fear of insanity. Only the mind is only thought programs that’s all we’re talking about.
Rick Archer: Also, insanity is kind of a relative term, isn’t it? I mean, by isn’t everybody in the world insane to some degree compared to what’s possible?
Georgi Johnson: The whole to some degree, everybody, we have an insane society and insane culture, insane leaders. My goodness, insane systems, what’s called insane is actually moments of clarity and lucidity.
Rick Archer: And I would, you know, count myself among them. I mean, compared to what is potentially possible, I must be insane. Because I’m not totally there yet at the apex of human possibility.
Georgi Johnson: The mind is just a receiver. It’s a receiver of information. And sometimes the information that it’s being asked to receive is just too unbearably painful. There’s a layer of pain inside, which is just not we not able to contain it. And then the mind does all kinds of stuff to try and block it. To try and evade this area of feeling the unfeelable, the forbidden, the unspeakable. Remember, the unspeakable, traumatic mantra.
Rick Archer: So are you pretty busy as a non-dual therapist is that mainly what you’re doing? Aside from raising 10 kids?
Georgi Johnson: I do a combination of nondual therapy and teaching, we teach a lot. We have a lot of workshops, we have this whole Spiritual Psychology education, which is a seven-year process, but it’s divided into three and each module stands by itself in which we work with natural duality, energetic points in meditation, in order to set the stage for experience of our subtle nature to emerge, and for to escort people through a process of self-healing. In this way, it’s quite a beautiful system, which, by degrees, does that training of the nervous system which we were talking about earlier, and what you see in people is they move from a place of really not being themselves, being this, to flowering in their individuality. And I know that’s a very non-nondual 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 Christlessly beautiful and special than they ever would have been pretending to be somebody else.
Rick Archer: Absolutely. Hear hear to that. I mean, if you think of the paragons of spirituality that humanity holds up and respect. They were all just such charismatic, lively, unique, you know, interesting, expressive people. I mean, they weren’t playing vanilla by any means they were just like bursting with, with personality and creativity and charisma and, and all such qualities.
Georgi Johnson: And it’s not a paradox when it comes down to it.
Rick Archer: Not at all.
Georgi Johnson: But we do seem to be moving into an Age of Spiritual individuation like that.
Rick Archer: And if you think about look at the tropical rainforest, where the ground is so fertile, and look at the fecundity, the diversity, the expression of all plant life there, and animal life. So 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, express expressiveness, and so on?
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. And, and you know, this is where we get confused, we get confused between diversity and differentiation. Like that every single moment of even my finger is unique compared to the previous moment of my finger. It’s one second older, this incredible dice of diversification and differentiation that happens through all of nature. And through every moment of experience, and separation. We think that makes us a separate self. And that means that it’s not good, but it’s, and 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 is not the individual law, but it’s whatever is needed in the moment happens by itself. And that means that we don’t also don’t resist action.
Rick Archer: Exactly. I think it’s fair to say that true non-duality nourishes its individual expressions and makes them more every so much more so or, you know, it frees them from that which causes sameness actually, allows them to just flourish.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. And, you know, we have this kind of faulty belief system that we think that in order to belong, we have to be the same as each other. It’s the exact opposite of differentiation and diversity, that we all have to look the same, we all have to believe the same, we all have to have had the same journey. And there’s the same teaching and we use the same. This is conformity and conformity is what so often robs us of our inner truth, and our inner authenticity, and our inner authority. And it’s got absolutely nothing to do with belonging, because the moment we start conforming, how we look, in order to belong, meaning we pretend to be somebody else, in order to belong, then 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 that we’re putting forward as isn’t who we are, it’s a conformed image.
Rick Archer: Two things I would say here, one is variety is the spice of life – a well-known saying. And the other is that conformity is not how God rolls. You know, I mean, if you just look at nature, God is not into conformity. He or she is into, you know, explosive expression of diversity and creativity and all that stuff. And all within a non-dual totality, because that’s what God is, is that non-dual totality.
Georgi Johnson: And that’s certainly there in the Jewish mystical traditions and in the Islamic mystical traditions, to the extent that on the ancient Islamic floors, you know, they will, they will have one tile of this beautiful mosaic floor, which is done backwards, which is imperfect.
Rick Archer: Oh, I see. Yeah.
Georgi Johnson: Because it’s that little break in the perfection which is the momentum of growth of creation of change of evolution. You know, is there’s no perfect rose, although we all know we can feel we can sense them the template of the rose yet, the subtle template of the rose, but each individual rose is beautiful because of its slight imperfections, slight differentiation, it’s slightly varying shade of color or scent.
Rick Archer: A grain of sand creates the pearl.
Georgi Johnson: Exactly.
Rick Archer: Well, I guess we better wrap it up. This has been fun.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah. What a pleasure.
Rick Archer: 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. And at some point, you know, not too far down the line I’ll interview your partner Bart also.
Georgi Johnson: Yeah, he can he can talk about everything I forgot to talk about, and a lot more.
Rick Archer: Yeah he can take notes and bring them in. But anyway, Georgi has been it’s been great talking to you.
Georgi Johnson: It’s a pleasure, Rick, thank you so much.
Rick Archer: 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. So you can easily find her website from that. And through that, you can get in touch with her and she wants to engage in the things that she has been talking about here. And I imagine you can do that with people all over the world doesn’t matter where they are, right? Yeah.
Georgi Johnson: Especially we have workshops coming up in America in Virginia, in August, and in England next week, in Bradford on Avon, and in Israel in September.
Rick Archer: So it’s a combination of some online stuff and some in-person stuff?
Georgi Johnson: Online clinic all the time. And between that there are ongoing workshops, which are spaced like every six months in America, and Holland, and Israel, and England.
Rick Archer: Great. And then also they can find out more about non-dual therapy on a one-to-one basis if they if they’re interested in that, right.
Georgi Johnson: Absolutely.
Rick Archer: 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, sheikh, sheikh? I don’t know how I pronounce it – in Germany. It 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 it for the next one.
Georgi Johnson: Donate, donate!
Rick Archer: Okay, do that.
Georgi Johnson: Bye, Rick.