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Georgi Y Johnson – I Am Here

Interview by Renate McNay.

Renate:  Georgi is a spiritual teacher and she offers non-dual therapy with her partner Bart ten Berge around the globe. Georgi wrote a wonderful book called, ‘I Am Here: Opening the Windows of Life and Beauty.’ I must say, this is one of my favourite books. It gives such a clear window into consciousness and what it means to be a human being. I’ve just heard the follow up of this book is in the pipeline and it’s going to be called, ‘Stillness of the Wind’ - a very interesting title, stillness of the wind, beautiful; and the book will be about the dance of duality.

Georgi was born in the UK and she presently lives in Israel with Bart and they have ten children. We’re going to hear about the process which led her to write this book and we’ll start chronologically with your first awakening experience or your first memory, which was even further back.

Georgi: Yeah…so before…when we open the windows of feeling, feeling memory, we have our memory, which happened, this happened, story memory. We also have an experiential memory, a feeling memory. And so, there’s plenty of feeling memories of the first atmospheres before conception and in the womb, those places that we call home, which feel like the reality here. But then there’s conscious memory and I must have been around two years old, just learning to talk. My mother had put me in the bed, I imagine to take a little rest. I was told to go to sleep now for a while and gone downstairs, and I lay there and I looked at my little legs. It was a big full-length bed and I looked at these little legs and I noticed that they’d grown longer than they were before and it was a kind of mystery that these legs would grow longer too. ….and looking at these legs and then I needed to sleep and so I closed my eyes.

It was the late sixties, so I imagined the word guitar was very much in the vocabulary. My father was a record producer, so it was alive with the culture in a way….the house. I started thinking about guitars and saying the word guitar in my mind. It must have been that I’d just learned the word.

Renate: Yes.

Georgi: …..and had been appreciated for knowing the word. So I started thinking the word guitar and started saying guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar….chanting it and then I kind of woke up again and it was this ..….has nothing to do with the object. It was just these syllables in space of guitar, guitar, guitar in my thought…no connection. It’s kind of tricky when your learning to talk because this baby to have this disconnection happen…

Renate: It didn’t have a connection to what?

Georgi: To the object, to the guitar was to signify guitar, guitar, guitar.

Renate: Oh right, yes, yes.

Georgi: …it’s just sounds. So I tried it with my own name….and so I began Georgi, Georgi, Georgi, Georgi, again there’s no connection and then it was, ‘So who am I?’  This was the question…’So who am I?’

Renate: You realized that you were not the name.

Georgi: Not Georgi and not a guitar. (Laughs)

Renate: Yeah…

Georgi: Not this thought, not this label and so this question, who am I? What then? What am I then?..there was a…this kind of sense of consciousness and then a leap of consciousness becoming conscious of consciousness, overwhelming….conscious of conscious of consciousness. This kind of…this kind of expanding existence and I was lying on the bed looking towards the window where the sunlight was coming through and there was this leap to the point of not being able to contain this pure consciousness of who I am and I kind of retracted from it where’s my mummy? I kind of retracted from it….where’s mummy? I could hear her downstairs in the kitchen, hear the pots and pans being washed up and I began thinking mummy, it’s not mummy. These sounds have no connection but the feeling was of incredible wholeness to it. It was almost like I was climbing the ladder back again. It was like reconnecting to a source, which was so clear where I’d arrived from.

Renate: But that was….. You didn’t know….did you know exactly what happened? Or is it just something you felt?

Georgi: Something that I very much experienced and what’s amazing is that this memory is like a deep notch in my mind,. In my mind I never forget, never forgot this memory.

Renate: But you didn’t have the word consciousness at two years.

Georgi: No…no…no..no

Renate: So what was it? How could you define the experience at that age?

Georgi: Yeah. So Georgi was gone. There was no Georgi. Georgi was just Georgi. It was just Georgi, Georgi, Georgi. So it was this seeing, the seeing of the curtain and of the light of the little body on the bed but I wasn’t this little body either and then it was the seeing of the seeing, it was then the seeing of the seeing, of the seeing but without leaving the body…kind of like a…expanding in a kind of light of perception. But you know we give words to it because we don’t have words.

Renate: Sure.

Georgi: I didn’t have words then for sure…it was a very, very vital home, which was more home than the home I was physically in and it’s not that the home I was physically in was a bad home, it was just much more familiar but also in this kind of conscious of conscious of conscious, not containable either. After that I went to sleep, which is also home, gone!

Renate: So, you didn’t run down to mummy and told her what you experienced? (They both laugh).

Georgi: No, well mummy wasn’t mummy..…no and I wasn’t afraid. I really wasn’t afraid. Maybe I was more afraid when I was put down to bed to sleep and began thinking about guitars, then after this…..

Renate: And did something change after this experience for you and the way you related?

Georgi: It’s so early, it’s such an early one, that in a way a link that normally would be cemented between thought and language and words and identity and the world was broken very early on, so I never really trusted it. I never really believed a word was what it said it was. I never really believed I was Georgi. Never really believed in this calling of identity. So, in a way it was a tremendous gift, like you’re here human but remember, remember who you really are. I don’t mean who you really are in a personal private perspective at all…It’s a benevolent breakage between word and what it’s supposed to mean and since then it became like a natural escape door in a way, so when I was suffering I could come to this place of pure consciousness, in the Now and step bigger than it, not step out of it but contain it much more easily, be free of it within it.

Renate: So what did you have to do to step back into that?

Georgi: Go…into the felt sense of the body and really allow it. Really allow the….as real as we can be, the Real Reality and that’s not the reality which stops here. It’s kind of… we can’t find a reality but we can allow reality to come to life in a way. So it’s moving into the now. It’s connected with the body, the miracle of the body and letting it be and then consciousness is free in a way.

Renate: So you mean with letting it be, whatever feelings are coming up, whatever emotions coming up it’s free to be. Is this what you mean?

Georgi: Yes, you know when you’re able to let something be, there’s two. There’s you that is able to allow and there’s that which is experienced…

Renate: Yes.

Georgi: So the moment that you can allow something to be, that which can allow comes much more to life.

Renate: Yes, I understand that.

Georgi: Yeah, there’s a space that opens up.

Renate: So, it’s so interesting after doing so many interviews over the last years, we only started, recently actually…that probably has to do with my own, our own process…realizing the importance in the awakening of the body…..

Georgi: Yes.

Renate: ….awakening happening through the body…yah…there’s so much out there, so much talk about the….but it’s the awakening of the mind, yah,.…it’s the body, somehow doesn’t play any role and that is more and more coming to the foreground as if it is….as if it would be an evolutionary move into the body. That is how it appears for me.

Georgi: Yes. You know there is an evolution happening also in terms of our basic attitudes towards life, towards creation, towards this world of duality and many people, myself included, no different, so we, in a way are motivated in a spiritual search by an aversion to the physical, to all of this suffering, to this….we have a body but it’s not going to last. It’s dying, it’s aging. You can’t trust it, we have a certain amount of time but we don’t know how long…

Renate: It fails, yeah.

Georgi: It’s full of loss, all the time…loss, pain, nothing is stable. We try to make it stable, it breaks in our hands, there’s love but we can’t hold it, we can’t keep it. So, many spiritual motors of development come from this rejection of creation and by creation I mean the physical world that we are seeing here now. Very quickly we move to this let go. You’re not your feeling body, you’re not your feelings, you’re not your pain, you’re not your emotions….prrff! But what we are really moving with then, is the energy of rejection, which is a big duality. ‘It’s not me. I’m enlightened! This is not me I’m awakened now’, so I’m not my body,’ and that energy becomes the dominant thing so we are launching into another spiral of illusion, in a way. It’s based on fear. Nothing needs to get left out if we are not afraid. Nothing! Not one aspect, not one particle of our experience needs to be rejected. It’s not even ours (arms extended), but it’s not even personal.

Renate: Yeah, but it’s the failure. It is as you say there’s suffering but I am not suffering, there’s pain but I don’t have pain and it’s allowed to be there because it’s shared.

Georgi: Yeah, it’s tricky…because when we…you drop all form, everything that you can perceive, everything that you can think, everything you can feel, even a sense of being, you move beyond it or you just let it go completely. What emerges of itself is a natural care. We care. Life cares. It really deeply cares and so we care about the suffering. We care so deeply about the pain, which is here, that we would be reincarnated by choice again and give up our enlightenment to be back here to be of service. It’s unstoppable this care at the core of creation and the problem is that we have these minds that want to avoid suffering and in this kind of either or thinking of the way we are programmed as little children, we have this belief that if we don’t suffer it, it’s not there. Or if I don’t….if I pretend I’m never going to die it’s not going to happen. If I don’t let this cruelty into my feeling of cruelty, if I don’t acknowledge this feeling it won’t exist.

And this is, in a way, the Achilles Heel of the healer. It’s the trap of the healer because every doctor knows that you cannot heal any ailment unless you are prepared to go there, to look at it, to go into it, to receive it. The same way every doctor knows that, you’re not really healing anything, you are creating the conditions in which healing can happen through the natural wisdom of life. Life is the healer. We make the conditions by removing the obstacles for life to do what it, of itself does with this supreme intelligence. So, sometimes it’s really important we find, me and Bart, in our lives and in our teaching, to really allow suffering. It doesn’t matter if it’s yours or not, it doesn’t matter if it’s on your bill or on the other’s bill. To really, really, really allow it completely to allow it to transform through you or to allow it to be is enough. This is where….in a way the depth of Karma is created when we….we reject the pain, the things we don’t want to feel and there’s such an agenda there and agenda is back again into the light, ‘I’m enlightened that means I’m free of suffering, free of fear, free of jealousy, free of anger’. It’s not true! Not with me, not at all. I’m free within it. Anger is free here, suffering is free here, jealousy is free here. It’s free to move, it’s free to tell its story. Fear is free and often….I’m afraid, often utterly and totally terrified but it’s just terror moving through me. I don’t even know any more if it’s mine or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a problem because the freedoms also here. Does that make sense?

Renate: Completely. Our normal reaction is to runaway.

Georgi: Yeah.

Renate:  Yeah and we don’t want to feel it. It’s too awful this feeling.

Georgi: …..to run away or to freeze or just to try and hold things as they are…which is totally fine but then it’s important to relax in the running away and to stay present to the running away and to relax in the freezing. If you relax in the freezing it can be quite beautiful.

Renate: Yah…I experienced several times in the midst of the worst suffering is the…is beauty.

Georgi: Yes.

Renate: Yeah, if it’s allowed to be..yeah… it just moves into beauty.

Georgi: Yes because it has….if it’s allowed to be, it has such depth of truth in it.

Renate: So, let’s move a little bit back to your story. (Laughs) So you had continuously awakenings of similar kinds through your childhood and at one point you were puzzled how this awakened consciousness couldn’t stay. In the interims you would disappear…so retrospect do you know where you went? Do you know what happens when we lose awareness?

Georgi:  No and neither…..I remember one when I was walking to school in the morning and suddenly I was there. I am here. Totally conscious with this strangeness, there was this strangeness like when you revisit yourself in your life.

Renate:  You recognize…It recognizes itself.

Georgi: …then I’m walking, vowing to myself, ‘I’m going to stay here. I’m going to stay here…grrrrr….(Renate and Georgi laughing).

I was saying to Bart last night that it’s a little bit like we are all drugged. There’s this opiate but like a dolphin you pop above water and ‘ahh this is truth!’ And then whumph! into the drugged state again…you come up again, ’Remind me of this, remind me of this, keep me there,’ then down again…so that’s the question; What’s with this ocean of non-awareness, non-heightened consciousness, what’s in that ocean?

So….if we take the body as a landscape in a way, the ocean is here, the horizon of the ocean (hands horizontal to the shoulders). Here is the air and the sun (hands pointing above the head), some seagulls and a lot of thoughts and here’s the horizon and the ocean is feeling, feeling energy and the feeling isn’t a thought. How do we know feelings not a thought? Because if you feel a feeling, immediately you’re out of time, you’re in the now. You can’t feel your anger or your love for tomorrow or for yesterday or as part of a story. You can as a mental activity and kind of rip up a bit of love and put it in but fundamentally if we agree to feel how it is, how it feels to be here, we are immediately in the now. So we move beyond time, just like that, power of the now, just by feeling a feeling, even a sense perception in the feeling body but also in feeling a feeling emotion and we are in real time we are in the now. We are in the now and it’s not stable, but here in the level of feeling and that is what we call awareness as opposed to consciousness, there is…..

Renate: You could not feel to….

Georgi: … still space, there’s bounded space so we have a feeling, for the first feeling could be you know, ‘This is where I am and this is where I end’. Or the grief can be here but I don’t want to feel the grief now so I’ll go to the joy which I can get in the crack between the grief and next days dinner…laughs….so we move into a dimension of space and it’s really, maybe important to realize that there are two kinds of experiences going on when people talk about awakening and enlightenment. One is the freedom from the mind, freedom from time, the freedom from the story and then there’s another kind of description where people talk about the sense of infinity and boundlessness. Those ones talk very much about love, these ones talk very much about peace, peacefulness from being free from the mind, the peace of mind…..which very much comes as a backdrop to conscious freedom of consciousness. The second one’s experience. This opening of the heart unconditionally, nothing confines them anymore. Their free of some kind of energetic restrictions in what they are allowed to feel and how they are allowed to feel. Their being becomes one with the kind of one being.

Renate: You talk about this, your own process. You had this… your first awakening was from the head and then you say your heart was still held prisoner and then later the heart was opened to unconditional love and yet the body was still held prisoner. So what were the different stages? I think we covered your awakening from the head. So how did you awaken your heart?

Georgi: So…

Renate: We make now a big jump. (Both laughing). We jump over here…..

Georgi: A few decades later. (Laughs).

You know, conscious awakening was great for me. It got me into Oxford. The conceptual mind was open. I could theorize an incredible amount of freedom in a way to a  kind of universal mind and all of this but, like we said, if the heart was…

Renate: You studied Literature?

Georgi: English Literature…

Renate: English literature.

Georgi: The theory…the theory of literature…so how do we approach it from a Marxist perspective or from a feminist perspective….went deeply into Jungian perspective at that stage. But the…as children we get shaped in how to be here which is different from the identity, it’s how we are allowed to be. So are we allowed, is our love allowed to be unconditional? Are we allowed to feel our emotions? Or do we get rejected? So, for a child when they are rejected for crying too much or being too angry or being natural in a way, there is a kind of deepening of separation, and a kind of separate self on the energy level of feeling, of what they are allowed to feel. It’s a contraction, a contraction of form, are created. It’s not even personal. Whole family’s carry contractions. Whole nations carry…whole cultures carry contractions of form. That we will not be afraid of or we will not talk about, death…sexuality is huge. Nothing…there were two dirty words for me when I was a child, one was sex and the other was god. Not because my mother wasn’t spiritual but I felt so ashamed to say these words. So, here there was no freedom and the best response for me was, to fix that with the mind and so I moved very much like other interviewees who were talking, in a way to…to fix that with the mind and so I moved very much to fixing  the outside, saving the world from this conscious, awakening perspective. So I went deeply into journalism and exposing all kinds of horrors that were going to happen to the world and what I was really, I was right but…(laughs with Renate).

Renate: Just to mention that Georgi worked for the BBC.

Georgi: A little bit at the beginning..yeah..and later as an independent investigative journalist about the threat of global terrorism but before there was any….before September…

(laughing with Renate)…

Renate: You were already ahead…(laughs)

Georgi: …..or it wouldn’t have been a secret would it?  (laughs)

But what I was really…. what was really driving me was the threat of the collapse of my own separate self, the fear of this ego needed to die and at a certain stage it became so obsessive that the identity broke down under the pressure of this thinking, thinking conscious…conscious and I went into a period of a lot of panic attacks and anxiety. Which of course, at the time is living hell. It’s really living hell with three little children, to be suffering really from panic and the…..professional authorities of course come in with medications which I’m so grateful I didn’t take and all kind of diagnosis which I’m so grateful I didn’t believe.

Renate: Were you afraid of something, or was it just…just panic, just fear?

Georgi: I was…because the form, the focus of my attention was on the threat of non-conventional terrorism and exposing it. The work of an investigative journalist is very much imagining what could happen, so it’s very fear based but I would empathically imagine, I would experience how it would be and this in the end had it’s incredible toll on the nervous system. I was trying to save children from that horror, so it was quite an obsessive spin, driven from this incredible difficulty to come to peace, beneath the level of the head.

Renate: Did you understand at that time what had happened that this is connected?

Georgi: No, I was saving the world. I was on a campaign to bring the truth and to save lives…especially living in Israel. The threat that Jews could be gassed by terrorists and thousands could die and that they weren’t being told of the threat and being sent to gas mask stations to get equipped and all of this, and a lot of this felt for me an incredible outrage. So it was also the sense of justice and a history behind it. But I was running like hell away from myself. I was at the same time a mother of three children. The greatest miracle of life giving birth to three little…..it was terrifying so I tried to fix the world. I was terrified of myself.

Renate: And so what stopped you? What turned it around?

Georgi: I think I cracked!(Laughs).

Renate: What turned around?

Georgi: What turned around was I became dysfunctional. I couldn’t function anymore and luckily we took a sabbatical in that time in England and there was an NHS counsellor who was amazing, just listened, she just listened, no judgment and then it stepped into a kind of apocalyptic depression and I felt like I was looking at the ruins of my own ego structure. There was no way I could pick up the stories again. I had many connections through the internet and they were kind of nagging for me to continue with the..the campaign. It was before September 11th, the threat was coming but I was finished. It was like seeing myself as a destroyed city and not…hardly able to move through the day and……. little by little life picked it up.  I kind of surrendered to the depression but then magical things like…I was in a bookshop, just walking, because walking was the only thing that gave a moments mercy from the suffering while the children were at school. I went into a bookshop, and walked immediately to a shelf and there was the face of the Dalai Lama looking back…’The Way to Happiness’, and there was this moment of instant recognition. I didn’t know, even remember, it wasn’t in the spirituality at all but I took the book, like a lifeline and his writings about compassion as an antidote to fear and the practice of replacing yourself in the other. I would try anything at that moment and it really worked and so there were many little synchronicities that helped show the way forward, step by step. I began just massaging people’s feet, not my own because that didn’t somehow help me feel better but the feet of the children, the feet of my husband and then moved into the smells, the aromatherapy. This helped so much, the smell. Now it makes sense to me because smell bypasses the control function and it’s a sensory perception that directly awakens something from far beyond normal thinking mind and so that was a process of erasure.

Renate: And Georgi, all this time of suffering, did you ever remember the experience you had as a child?

Georgi: Yes but I was so nervous, so anxious it wasn’t possible to have the nervous system activated like that. In a way I was always in an awakened aroused state. It was a total imbalance. There was nowhere to sink down into. There was no way into the body. It was a kind of spiritual psychosis in that sense.

Renate: You could not sense into it?

Georgi: But then….one time I lay down in total panic, my stomach totally in contractions and utterly, in a way just surrendered to the horror of it and I hadn’t quite fallen asleep and I had this vision. I wasn’t in meditation or anything at that stage and it was…..but I was on the hills near our house in Mount Carmel in Israel and there came from a distance a nun and a man….no, a nun and a woman and I was laughing because the nun…there was a man dressed as a nun and I was laughing at he, who I knew so well, was dressed as a nun and they began to walk across this golden field towards me and as they walked there was two spheres of white, white, white, white lights. So intense, expanding out of them and as they moved towards me, it was like…like I was going to dissolve. I was going to disappear inside the blessing of this white light of…inside of the dream, vision, my son Adidya, my first born was next to me, young, and he looked at me and I looked at him and he, we both turned towards a rock and held the rock and that brought me back from the….it was as if I almost died, it was almost as if they came to take me and this choice to stay was in moving towards me the rock with my children…and then because I was kind of in a psychotic state I began collecting rocks and moving rocks around our garden as it really made me feel better and created a picture..,,laughing.

Renate: Trying to ground you.

Georgi: Very much trying to ground myself, yes. I would cling to the rock, cling to the rock.

Renate: And that was, I assume the third stage when you said yet was the body was prisoner, still held. How did you open?

Georgi: Well, first there was the stage of liberating the feelings which was very much through studying with my partner, he was my teacher then..the spiritual psychology education. This is an education which is really moving without…when we say let’s get free of mind, that’s a thought. So this is a beautiful exercise is given by his teacher, Bob Moore, who was in Denmark through feeling perception, felt sense on the chakras on certain energy points to allow the energy to move by itself without a story.

Renate: Yah, so…so you went to Holland to find…

Georgi: He was in Israel.

Renate: Oh, he was in Israel?

Georgi: He was teaching it in Israel.

Renate: Oh yes, yeah..okay.

Georgi: Little by little..but of itself without even the story, the stories would come later but the energy itself would kind of present itself. The blockages and this spaciousness began to open up into a kind of …first all a permission to just feel what you feel, just feel it and not just feel it and okay, been there, done that, but really collapse into it to be curious about it, even if it is an unpleasant feeling. It’s a switch where experience becomes yummy, even if it’s negative or positive. And it’s like we said, the moment you move towards experience like that, towards feeling like that, you’re already not the experience, there’s a greater spaciousness opening up. So there was this Sartori stage when the heart could just burst open. This unconditional love and it went on for a few months and I was more functional than ever. This now wasn’t a psychosis. It was years after the anxiety but it…this incredible release of holding, holding the heart, always holding, always afraid, always with conditions. It all felt like dominoes, it fell and it fell and it fell for a few months. More expansion, more expansion and I’d reach a border and go through it …and such a stillness and such a love, such an opening to energies and felt presences around as well, this otherworldly in a way. Then the last…I was hanging out the washing outside, because at the same time I was still a functioning mother and all that and I noticed it was like hitting a brick wall. I was really hitting a wall with this. There was one place where this unconditional love wasn’t going to go and then I realized it was toward myself. I would love Bin Laden. I would love George Bush, (Georgi and Renate laughing as she speaks). I would love…but this, (holding her hands to her heart), this was a kind of…still a resistance and that’s the bridge to where the block was, being in a physical body at all in a way…yeah…

Renate: How did you overcome that?

Georgi: So, we jump forward another ten years..(they both laugh). So this left me extremely happy. This Sartori or enlightenment and these words have hooks so this experience of liberated awareness, boundless awareness, left me in a very, very good space with a lot of freedom. But it’s like being in a place then of almost happy, almost, almost free. It wasn’t quite….totally relaxed and peaceful and okay yet. It was okay up here (arms raised to head) and it was okay in meditation but in terms of living it wasn’t quite there yet and at a certain stage I was in the middle…I was giving a meditation in where we live and I came up against ‘this not quite there yet,’ feeling and there was such a spiritual tiredness in it. Such a ……almost boredom of being in this place where there are layers. It’s almost like states of subtle despair, states of subtle boredom or subtle resistance like….like smog.

Renate: I call that the itch of the ego….(They both laugh).

Georgi: Maybe it’s the breath of the ego…the smell of it. (Laughing).

Renate: I know what you mean…(Laughing).

Georgi: There was such a tiredness with it and then I could feel beneath it. I’d really had enough, really had enough of this. I want to get….I could feel lifetimes behind me of going through the same cycle and I had such a passion come forward. I want to get this now! I don’t care if I die in it! I don’t care if the worse nightmares happen! I don’t care what happens, this is it! I totally give myself now to go all the way. There was a choice and there was a choice really from the bases. It’s enough now. Now I get it. There isn’t a tomorrow. I’m not waiting any more even if I burn in it, even if I suffer and of course the conditions begin to come forward in the meditation and okay even if that… even if that….so that was a choice and then things began to move very, very fast. So, already there was this open question of the difference between awakening of the mind, this consciousness and the opening of the heart, between head and heart is the constant spiral and it seemed clear to me that the heart wasn’t a resting point either and nor was the head and so something…there was a duality here I wasn’t using duality and non-duality as terms then I didn’t even know about it. But there was clearly a spiral. It’s got a peace between head and heart and then…intuition really, really came to look down on the third level to look towards the body and of the body, and also there was guidance there as well. And I began to kind of playfully….because always in the healing education I’d done, we’d do all the chakras and of course I knew that it was important that there were chakras…was like the root chakra…yeah, yeah, yeah you know, that’s the baboons (Georgi and Renate laughing and agreeing). Don’t do a root chakra here! No need for that and….somehow the invitation came to move more deeply into the body and what I did was move very deeply into the…just the feeling sense, the sense perception of the coccyx of the tailbone. How was it to like….how was it to look at the world from there? So we’ve got consciousness, this whumph!. We’ve got awareness, this, this boundless space. So, what’s it look like from the perspective of matter, from the body, from the bone, really from the base bone of the spine. What does it look like? Let this consciousness completely sink into the….of course it brings also the atmospheres, so I was pondering that. Still I had to go to work at the university, so I packed up the kids to school and I was driving to the university. They’d just built this great big tunnel through the …Carmel, Mount Carmel tunnel. It was still fresh, a fresh tunnel underground and so I drove innocently inside this tunnel, all the time in my tailbone, eyes and ears, in a way sensing through the tailbone and something flipped inside the tunnel where, all separation physical, with the physical began to dissolve. It was…I went in the tunnel in one form and I came out in another form…it’s really weird. In a sense, every….everything….in a car it’s very easy to move into altered states in a way. One thing, the mind is occupied with the driving, so that’s taken care of, the automatic pilot is busy but also you’ve got sense perceptions happening all the time there’s the rumble of the car. There’s the music playing, there’s the wind, there’s lights changing all the time. It’s very hard to grab hold of anything and it’s not even…you don’t push it away either. So the sense of the engine of the car coming and going, passing physical sensations and feelings would come forward, but they come and they go..they come and they go and thoughts would come but thoughts were much less at that stage because they weren’t that relevant because feelings are more what cause thoughts. Thoughts would come forward like a field, so it’s like it’s bounded in space. I’m not bounded in space, the one that can feel the feeling, the sense perceptions, so, the body like now…we don’t really know we’re alive except through our sense perceptions. So, we feel our body on the chair. You see me. I see you. We don’t see ourselves. We see each other and it’s changing all the time. We feel the air on the face but it’s not stable. These are the only way that we even know we are here. So…

Renate: Through our senses…

Georgi: Through our senses and the senses….if you really allow the senses to be here, they’re changing all the time. They’re channels, channels into the physical. They are the windows of the five senses and there’s more senses which are the windows of the physical and what’s being channelled through the physical into consciousness and from consciousness through the physical, it’s content is changing all the time and it really doesn’t matter. Because the one which is moving, the one which is really here, which is here wherever we go, that never moves isn’t that which is  bound in time or bound in space. So this one gets stronger and stronger and stronger and expands in a way, into a kind of unity.

And I arrived at work and it begins the technology transfer. The discussion and everything is fluid but I’m absolutely going through the motions but everything is fluid and she’s talking and I’m looking at myself talking in a way. I don’t mean any personality, it’s like empty, this emptiness.

Renate: So Georgi was gone?

Georgi: Georgi was gone and Georgi arrived at the same time.

It’s also…this was the here from the, I am here. This is a kind of arrival point at the other end of the tunnel, like arriving into a here, which is not local to sitting on this chair. It’s a here which is here, also when Georgi was two years old and closed her eyes and thought how, I’m supposed to go to sleep, the darkness inside. It’s the same here tonight when I close my eyes, this timeless unconfined here. That’s the entry point. It’s beyond space and beyond time and we’re programmed to not trust it. To not….even, it’s beyond…it’s prior to consciousness. It doesn’t need to see anything or to be conscious at all in order to be here. It’s not separate.

Renate: Is it existence, existing itself? Or experience, experiencing itself? There’s no gap, no somebody who experiences it?

Georgi: There’s a somebody but a somebody is a kind of channel to the source of experience, the source of consciousness, the source of existence.

Renate: Do you call it the Absolute or is it prior to the Absolute?

Georgi: You know absolute is a tricky word because absolute suggests it can be seen, it suggests a form, an absolute form and it’s really not a form. You know, it’s also not possible in any way to hold it. Just as you can’t…you can be conscious of the effects of consciousness, you can even be conscious of consciousness but the real source of it, it doesn’t see itself. The moment it sees itself it’s made a loop and the real source of it is. …it doesn’t need to be conscious, that’s a condition. It doesn’t need to perceive. It’s not dependent on perception. It’s not dependent on form to be formless. It’s the other way around. Form depends on the formless in order to be in form. It’s the source.

I’ll give an example: We all want to be loved. We all talk about love. We all know what love is but when you really go into the feeling of love. How do we know what love is? How do we feel love?

Renate: Are you asking me? (Laughs).

Georgi: Yes.

Renate: It’s just…I guess it’s just a knowingness. It’s…I just cannot say in the moment. It’s…

Georgi: Yes.

Renate: It’s just…an interesting question…(she laughs softly).

Georgi: I asked the wrong person because you…that knowingness is really, has got absolute quality to it, for many, me included, love would be described as a warmth, an opening, a pleasant sensation, a nostalgia, an expectation.

Renate: But not if you are inside the love…..if you are inside the love you cannot name it.

Georgi: Yes…exactly. So, all of those feelings, like this feeling of heart opening, of expansion, the feeling of warmth, the feeling of pleasure, the feeling of happiness to which we associate with love. These are the effects of love. This is what happens when what you could call the Absolute is moving through this dimension and this great unknown, imperceivable absolute is moving through this form. So this effect is opening, opening of the form but the effect is not the cause, the cause is something we can dive into and be at peace in. If that same pure life is moving through the head, it’s much more likely to be experienced as peace because the effect is a quietening of the mind, an expansion, a resting, a release of stress but it’s the same one moving, that one is us. It’s the source of who we are and it’s not bound in time. It’s the same one that was there as a little girl. Nothing moved, nothing happened, nothing changed. It’s the same one that was there when we were most in illusion, most lost, most ignorant. Same one. Nothing moved. It will be the same one without anything happening at the moment we die. It doesn’t go anywhere also when we die, it doesn’t, but here can be trusted.

What I didn’t expect was is that it is at the core of matter…but then when you begin to look at the science of it, and this is where my day job helped. I interview a lot of scientists in my day job. You get down to the individual cells and all the intelligence of life, which is from the stem cells through to the cells expressing itself in form, in harmony, in duality, left hand, the right hand, in this remarkable beauty. But you go deeper down, you go down into the fundamental particles that make up the cells and look into the fundamental particle and it’s 99.99999999999% empty. All of that is imperceivable. That bit that can be perceived which is our whole life, our whole experience, all the love, all the longings, all the yearnings, all the fear, all the dramas, that’s .0000001%. That means that the only restriction on our pure freedom, on our pure infinite spaciousness, on our indestructible strength and creativity to be here, is our minds!

In saying that it’s the other way round, all this stuff is 99% and we are the 1% that’s God, that’s the source of ourselves, a little tiny bit,  it’s misprogramming. Matter dissolves when you get to the core into pure energy, and that pure energy I would gamble is consciousness, it’s perceptions, where we are perceiving…and in perceiving creating we’re co-creating.

Renate: So can we say freedom is in our body or through our body?

Georgi: There is no freedom, which excludes anything, certainly not the body. And the body is…who are we trying to kid that freedom wouldn’t be through the miracle of the physical for as long as we are here. That the opportunity is not here in this miraculously strange thing which we’re in, this fluid living life, everything is here and that’s where there is a kind of time restriction because this is our chance while we’re physical, while we’re manifesting physically, there’s an opportunity to do something, to let something move through us and it’s really okay, it’s really okay. A bit like working, in a way for IBM being born here. You know you work for IBM and at the end of the day you give back your equipment and your free of IBM and IBM goes on. It’s not really our problem but we are here and we’re here because it’s absolutely right for us to be here, right here in whatever position we are. The most damaging thing we can do to ourselves is to believe we’re not free in being here. And with every judgment that we make on ourselves, that it’s not okay to be as we are, we are taking away that freedom which is always here regardless of what form we’re taking and it’s very deeply programmed and this, this goes back to the deeper layers of liberation in a way. It’s in the Bible, the throwing out of Eden that happened because we’re guilty,….this condemnation.

Renate: We are a sinner.

Georgi: We are condemned. It’s not just religion that does this. It’s also the healers. It’s also us New Age people. We’re trying to fix it. So in trying to make the world a better place, what are we saying, what are we feeding?..…feeding a message that the world is not okay as it is. We don’t accept it.

In a way, collectively we are perpetually condemning ourselves. We put our….humanity puts itself in a state of condemnation and then begins this whole game of being okay. Is it okay for me to be here? Am I acceptable? Did I do good? It’s very childish in a way, but the…inside the opium field of the collective awareness we need those leaps of freedom into conscious awakening, in order to release the condemnation. Maybe that’s what they mean when they talk about redemption… (laughs)…and but it’s not historic and it’s not future, it’s inside us.

Renate: Georgie, I’m afraid we have to stop. (laughs). We just covered a fraction of your story……but maybe we have another chance. Anyway it was beautiful talking to you.

Georgi: It was beautiful talking to you too.

Renate: And so this was Georgi Y Johnson and I show her book again, ‘I Am Here: Opening the Windows of Life and Beauty,’ and thank you for watching Conscious TV and I will see you again soon. Bye bye.

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