Georgi Y. Johnson – I Am Here
Interview by Renate McNay of Conscious TV
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:
We have our memory of what happened – the story memory. But we also have our experiential memory – the feeling memory. So, there are plenty of feeling memories of the first atmospheres before conception and in the womb – those places that we call home – which can form as what feels like the reality here. But then, there’s conscious memory.
I must have been around two years old, just learning to talk. My mother had put me in bed, I imagine for a little rest. I was told to go to sleep for a while and she had gone downstairs. I lay there and 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 still longer. I was looking at these legs and then I needed to sleep and so I closed my eyes.
It was the late ‘sixties, so I imagine the word ‘guitar’ was very much in the vocabulary. My father was a record producer, so the word was alive in the culture of the house. It must have been that I’d just learned the word and had been appreciated for saying the word. I started thinking about guitars and saying the word ‘guitar’ in my mind: guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar – chanting it. And then suddenly there were just these sounds, that had nothing to do with the object, just these syllables in space – of gui-tar, gui-tar, gui-tar in my thought – disconnected.
Renate:
Disconnected from what?
Georgi:
From the object, from the guitar in itself as a thing.
Renate: Oh right, yes.
Georgi:
Just sounds in the head. So, I tried it with my own name and began: Georgi, Georgi, Georgi, Geor-gi. Again, there was disconnection. And then it was, ‘So who am I?’ This was the question: ’Who am I?’
Renate:
You realized that you were not the name.
Georgi:
Not Georgi and not a guitar. (Laughs)
Renate:
Yeah…
Georgi:
I was not this label, not this thought, and was drawn back into this question: Who am I? What then? What am I then?
There was a sense of consciousness and then a leap of consciousness becoming conscious of consciousness – it was overwhelming from the inside – becoming conscious of conscious of consciousness. It was a kind of expanding existence through mirrors of consciousness.
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 contracted from it with the question: Where’s mummy? I could hear her downstairs in the kitchen, and the sounds of the pots and pans being washed up, and I began thinking ‘mummy’… it’s not ‘mummy’.
The sound of thought was disconnected from the objects, but the feeling had an incredible wholeness to it. It was almost like I was climbing the ladder of life back to its source. It was so clear where I’d arrived from.
Renate:
But did you know exactly what happened? Or is it just something you felt?
Georgi:
It was very much experienced and what’s amazing, is that this memory is like a deep notch in the mind. I never forgot this memory.
Renate:
But you didn’t have the word ‘consciousness’ at two years.
Georgi:
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, there was just this seeing: the seeing of the curtain and the light and the little body on the bed but I wasn’t this little body either, and then it was the seeing of the seeing, and the seeing of that, but without leaving the body. It was like expanding in a 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, the inner light was just much more familiar. But also, this consciousness of consciousness was not containable either. After that I fell asleep, which is also home: gone!
Renate:
So, you didn’t run down to mummy and tell her what you experienced? (They both laugh).
Georgi:
No, well mummy wasn’t mummy, and I wasn’t afraid; I really wasn’t afraid. Maybe I was more afraid when I was put down to sleep and began thinking about guitars, but not 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, words, identity and the world was broken early on – so I never really believed in 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 identity.
So, in a way, it was a tremendous gift, like: “You’re here as a human, but remember, remember who you really are.” I don’t mean ‘who you 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 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 be bigger than the suffering: not stepping out of it, but containing it much more easily – being free of it, within it.
Renate:
So, what did you have to do to step back into that?
Georgi:
To go into the felt sense of the body and to really allow it. Really allowing the sense of reality – and that’s not a reality which has limits. We can’t find a stable reality, but we can allow reality to come to the instability, to come to life, in a way. So, it’s about moving into the ‘Now’, the present moment. It’s connected with the body, with the miracle of the body – deeply letting it be, and then consciousness is free, in a way.
Renate:
So, what 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 are two. There’s you that can allow, and there’s that which is experienced. So, the moment that you can allow something to be, the ‘allower’ comes much more to life. There’s a space that opens.
Renate:
It’s so interesting after doing so many interviews over the last years, we only started, recently realizing the importance in the awakening of the body and that is more and more coming to the foreground as if it would be an evolutionary move into the body.
Georgi:
Yes. You know there is an evolution happening also in terms of our basic attitudes towards life, creation and this world of duality. Many people, myself included, are motivated in a spiritual search by an aversion to the physical: an aversion to suffering, an aversion to this contraction of a physical body – a body which isn’t 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 and pain – nothing is stable. We try to make it stable, but 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!’, so that energy of rejection becomes the dominant thing, and we launch into another spiral of illusion, in a way. It’s based on fear. Nothing needs to get left out if we’re not afraid. Nothing! Not one aspect, not one particle of our experience needs to be rejected. It’s not even ours (arms extended). It’s not even personal.
Renate:
Yeah, but it’s the failure. 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 you drop all form, everything that you can perceive, everything that you can think, everything you can feel, even dropping a sense of being, then you move beyond it. What emerges of itself is a natural care. We care. Life cares. Life 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 pretend I’m never going to die, it’s not going to happen. If I don’t let this cruelty be felt, 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. In the same way, every doctor knows that you’re not really healing anything, you’re 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 its own supreme intelligence.
So, sometimes it’s important 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 allow it completely; to allow it to transform; or to allow it to be is enough.
In a way, the depth of Karma is created when we reject the pain – the things we don’t want to feel – and then there’s such an agenda there: ‘I’m enlightened and 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 – 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 freedom is also here. Does that make sense?
Renate:
Completely. Our normal reaction is to run away. 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 freezing. If you relax in the freezing it can be quite beautiful.
Renate:
Yah… I have experienced several times amid the worst suffering is beauty. If it’s allowed to be, it just moves into beauty.
Georgi:
Yes, because it’s allowed to be. It has such depth of truth in it.
Renate:
So, let’s move a little bit back in your story. You had continuous 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 in retrospect, do you know where you went? Do you know what happens when we lose awareness?
Georgi:
I remember one day when I am walking to school in the morning and suddenly I am here – totally conscious with this strangeness. There is this strangeness as if 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 when we are all drugged. There’s this opiate of illusion but like a dolphin, you pop above water and recognize: ‘Ah! This is truth!’; and then whoomph! into the drugged state again. You come up again, ’Remind me of this, remind me of this, keep me here!!’ then down again. So that’s the question; What’s with this ocean of non-awareness, this non-heightened consciousness? What’s in that ocean?
So, if we take the body as a landscape, the ocean is here (shows chest area), the horizon of the ocean is here (hands horizontal to the shoulders). Here is the air and the sun (hands pointing above the head), some seagulls and a lot of thoughts. The ocean is feeling, ‘feeling energy’; and the feeling isn’t a thought.
How do we know feelings not thoughts? Because if you feel a feeling, immediately you’re out of linear time, you’re in the now. You can’t feel your anger tomorrow or your love yesterday. So, we move beyond time, just like that, power of the now, just by feeling a feeling, even a sense perception is directly in the now.
We are timeless, but here in the level of feeling awareness there is still space. There’s bounded space when we have a feeling. The first feelings could be: ‘This is where I begin and this is where I end’. Who decides where I end in feeling? Or 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 in the grief. So, we navigate within this dimension of space.
It’s maybe important to realize that there are two kinds of experiences going on when people talk about awakening and enlightenment. Awakening could be understood as the freedom from the thinking mind, freedom from time, freedom from the story.
Then there’s another kind of description which feels more like enlightenment, where people talk about the sense of infinity and boundlessness in feeling. Those ones talk very much about love, while the former talk very much about peace – the peace of mind. This is awakening. Enlightenment is more spatial. It’s about this unconditional opening of the heart beyond confinement, and a freedom beyond energetic contractions in what we’re allowed to feel and how we’re allowed to feel. In this freedom of heart, individual being is inseparable from the one being.
Renate:
You talk about this, your own process. 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.
Georgi:
Yes, you know, conscious awakening was great. It got me into Oxford. The conceptual mind was open. It was free.
Renate:
You studied Literature?
Georgi:
English Literature, especially the theory of literature – from a Marxist and Feminist perspective. I also went deeply into Jungian theory at that stage.
As children, we get shaped by how we feel permitted to be here. We wait for the permission ‘to be’. For example, is our love allowed to be unconditional? Are we allowed to feel and show our emotions? Or do they get rejected? So, when a child is rejected for crying too much or being too angry – or being natural – there’s a deepening of the sense of separation, and a kind of separate self emerges on the energic level of feeling, and we hold back our inner naturalness. Contractions of feeling and emotion get created.
It’s not only personal. Whole families can carry contractions; whole nations or whole cultures carry contractions of form. For example: that which we will never fear, or that which we will not talk about, such as death or sexuality.
There were two dirty words for me when I was a child: one was sex and the other was god. I felt so ashamed to say these words. So, here there was no freedom to be natural, and the best response for me was, to try and fix that with the mind.
So, I moved very much to fixing the outside, to saving the world. I went deeply into journalism and exposing all kinds of horrors that were going to happen to the world. I became an investigative journalist into the threat of global terrorism. But what was really driving me was the threat of the collapse of my own separate self, the fearful knowing that this ego needed to die and at a certain stage, it became so obsessive that the identity and belief structures broke down under the pressure of this thinking and being overly conscious. I went into a period of panic attacks and anxiety, which at the time was a living hell. It’s really a living hell with little children, to be suffering from panic; and the professionals 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:
The focus of my attention was on the threat of biological and chemical terrorism and the need to expose it. The work of an investigative journalist is about imagining scenarios of what could happen, so it’s very fear-based; and I would empathically imagine and experience how it would be and this had an incredible toll on the nervous system. I was trying to save children from that horror, so it was quite an obsessive spin, driven by this difficulty to come to peace, beneath the level of the head.
I was saving the world. I was on a campaign to bring the truth and to save lives…especially of children 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 were being sent to gas mask stations for masks that offer no protection felt for me an incredible outrage. The campaign had a sense of heroism, justice and 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. This was terrifying, so I tried to fix the world. I was terrified of myself.
Renate:
What turned it around?
Georgi:
I became dysfunctional. Luckily, we took a sabbatical in that time in England and there was an NHS counsellor who was amazing: she just listened without judgment. Then the anxiety stepped into an apocalyptic depression and I felt like I was looking at the ruins of my own personality. 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 campaign. It was before September 11th (the attack on the Twin Towers), the threat was still coming, but I was finished. It was like seeing myself as a destroyed city and being hardly able to move through the day.
Little by little, life picked it up. I kind of surrendered to the depression, but then magical things happened; like, I was in a bookshop, just walking, because walking was the only thing that gave moments of mercy, and I walked to a shelf and there was the face of the Dalai Lama looking back: ’The Way to Happiness’. There was this moment of recognition. I wasn’t into spirituality at all then, but I took the book like a lifeline out of despair, and drunk in 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 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 the fear-based thinking mind.
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, hyper-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.
But then, one time I lay down in total panic, my stomach totally in contractions and in a way just surrendered to the horror of it and I hadn’t quite fallen asleep and there was this vision. I was on the hills near our house in Israel and a nun and a woman came towards me from the horizon; and I was laughing because the nun was a man and I knew him so well. They were walking towards me across this golden field and as they walked, there were two spheres of white, silvery light. This light was expanding out of them it was so intense that they were vanishing in it as they moved towards me, and it felt like I was also going to dissolve into this light. I was going to disappear into the blessing of this white, silvery light, and then my first-born son Yedidya was suddenly next to me and he looked at me and I looked at him, and we both turned towards a rock and held the rock and that brought me back. It was as if I had almost died, as if they came to take me and this choice to stay was expressed in moving towards the rock with my son. After that, I began collecting rocks and moving rocks around our garden as it really made me feel better.
Renate:
Trying to ground you.
Georgi:
Very much trying to ground myself, yes. I would cling to the rock.
Renate:
And that was, I assume the third stage when you said the body was still a 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, Bart ten Berge. He was my teacher then – of spiritual psychology. Little by little, the energy itself would present itself. The blockages and this spaciousness began to open energetically with the permission to just feel the feelings, and not just feel it but to really collapse into it and be curious about it – even if it is an unpleasant feeling.
There’s a switch where experience becomes yummy, whether 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. So, there was this Sartori stage when the heart just burst open with unconditional love and it went on for a few months and yet I was more functional than ever. This wasn’t a psychosis. It was years after the anxiety. It was an incredible release of holding, holding the heart, always holding, always afraid, always with conditions. Contractions fell like dominoes, beliefs fell and fell and fell for a few months. More expansion, more expansion and then I would reach a border and go through it… there was such a stillness and such a love, such an opening to energies, including otherworldly presences. It was really a radical movement beneath and beyond judgement.
Then at the last phase, I was hanging the washing out to dry and I noticed I was energetically hitting a wall. There was one place where this unconditional love wasn’t going to go. I could love Bin Laden. I would love George Bush, (Georgi and Renate laughing as she speaks). I could love any form – but this, (holding her hands to her heart): I was unable to love myself. There was still a resistance and the block was towards being in a physical body called Georgi …yeah.
Renate:
How did you overcome that?
Georgi:
So, we jump forward another ten years (they both laugh). The Satori left me extremely happy. This experience of liberated awareness, boundless awareness, left me in a very, very good space with a lot of freedom. But later, it’s like being in a place of almost happy, almost free. It wasn’t 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. At a certain stage, I was in the middle of a meditation and I came up against ‘this not quite there yet,’ feeling and there was such a spiritual tiredness in it – almost a boredom of being in this place where there are layers. It’s like states of subtle despair, states of subtle boredom or subtle resistance, like an atmospheric smog at the backdrop of existence.
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 that I’d really had enough of this. I could feel lifetimes behind of going through the same cycle again and again and such a passion came forward. I want to get this now! I don’t care if I die in it! I don’t care if the worst nightmare happens! I don’t care what happens, this is it! I totally give myself now to go all the way.
There was this recognition, the tiredness, and then a choice which was really from the basis. It’s enough now. 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 of fear began to come forward in the meditation… I will get it, even if this… even if that…
So that was a choice and then things began to move very fast. So, already there was this open question of the difference between conscious awakening of the mind, and the healing awareness of the heart. Between head and heart is a constant spiral and it seemed clear to me that the heart wasn’t a resting point either and nor was the head and so there must be something unifying both.
I wasn’t familiar with duality and nonduality as terms then. But there was clearly a spiral. The intuition came to look down on the third level and to look towards the body. Somehow, the invitation came to move more deeply into the body and what I did was move very lightly but deeply with the felt-sense, the sense perception of the coccyx or the tailbone. How was it, to be there, in this bone? How is it to look at the world from there?
So, we’ve got consciousness from the centre of the head. We’ve got feeling awareness, this boundless space. So, what does 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 feel like? I let this consciousness sink into the emptiness of the bone – and of course, it brings also the atmospheres, and so I was pondering that.
Still I had to go to work at the university, so I packed the kids to school and I was driving to Haifa. They had just built this big tunnel through the Carmel Mountain. It was still fresh, a fresh tunnel deep underground and so I drove innocently inside this tunnel, all the time perceiving through the tailbone, rhythms, eyes and ears – in a way sensing through the tailbone.
Something flipped inside the tunnel where all separation with the physical began to dissolve – a kind of melting of boundaries. I went in the tunnel in one form and I came out in another, in subtle fluidity.
In a sense, in a car it’s very easy to move into altered states. 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 on the car and on the face, there’s lights changing. The foreground is emerging in vision and vanishing. It’s very hard to grab hold of anything and you can’t push it away either. So, with this rhythm of the engine coming and going, it could be experienced that all physical sensations, feelings, thoughts are bound in space. But I’m not bounded in space – the one that can feel the feeling, sense the senses of the body, it’s unbounded.
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 instabilities are the only way that we even know we are here.
Renate:
Through our senses…
Georgi:
Through our senses. And if you really allow the sensory perceptions to be here, you find they’re changing all the time. The senses are channels, channelling through the physical. They are the windows of the physical and what’s being channelled through the physical into consciousness and from consciousness through the physical. The content is changing all the time and it really doesn’t matter, because of the one which isn’t moving, the one which is here, wherever we go – that one which is never bound by local conditioning of time and space. So, this one gets stronger and expands into a kind of unity with all phenomena.
And I arrived at the office. The discussion and everything is fluid and I’m easily going through the motions but everything is fluid and she’s talking and I’m looking at myself talking in a way, from an infinite space. The seeing becomes spacious, and the separation between personalities dissolves. It’s emptiness, but it’s full of everything.
Renate:
So, Georgi was gone?
Georgi:
Georgi was going and Georgi was arriving at the same time.
This is the ‘here’ from the title: I Am Here. It’s 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. It was here also when Georgi was two years old and closed her eyes and thought how I’m supposed to go to sleep into the darkness inside? It’s the same Here where I’ll be later tonight when I close my eyes – a timeless, unbounded Here. That’s the entry point. It’s beyond space and time and we’re programmed to distrust it. It’s somatic, prior to consciousness. We don’t need to be conscious at all to be here. It’s totally fulfilled and is alive with everything.
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 the somebody is porous – it’s 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 it suggests it can be seen, rather than the seer of all phenomena. It suggests a form, an absolute form – and it’s not a form, it’s the emptiness of all forms.
You know, it’s also not possible in any way to hold it. Just as you can’t hold anything. 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. That is, the moment it sees itself, it has made a loop into reflection. The source of consciousness doesn’t need to be conscious. That would be 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 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:
That knowingness has got an absolute quality to it. Yet for many, 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 those feelings, like this feeling of heart opening, of expansion, the feeling of warmth, the feeling of pleasure, the feeling of happiness are what we associate with love. These are the effects of love. This is what happens when what you could call the Absolute is opening in this dimension and this great unknown, imperceivable Absolute is being expressed through this form.
So, the effect is a feeling of opening, opening of the form but the effect is not the cause – the cause is something we can dive into and just be that. The feeling effect is not the love. The love is causal, before and behind the feeling.
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 unfolding through us. It’s the source of who we are and it’s not bound in time. It’s the same one that was here as a little girl. Nothing moved, nothing happened, nothing changed. It’s the same one that is here when we are most in illusion, most lost, most ignorant. The same one. Nothing moved. It will be the same one without anything happening now that we die. It doesn’t go anywhere, also when we die.
What I didn’t expect was that the entry point is at the core of matter… but then when you begin to look at the science of it, it makes sense, and this is where my day job helped. I interview a lot of scientists in my job. You get down to the individual cells and all the intelligence of life, from the molecules, proteins, stem cells, through to the cells expressing in form, in harmony, in duality - left hand, right hand – in this remarkable beauty.
But you can go deeper into the fundamental particles that make up the cells, and find that the fundamental particle is 99.99999999999% empty. All that emptiness is imperceivable. That bit that can be perceived is our whole story, our whole experience, all the effects of love, all the longings, all the yearnings, all the fear, all the dramas, that’s .0000001%. This 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!
But mind will say that it’s the other way around: all this stuff is 99.999999% and the source of life is the .0000001%. Our reality is based on misconception. When you get close enough, fundamental particles dissolve into pure energy, and that pure energy I would gamble is consciousness, it’s perception, where we are perceiving… and in perceiving co-creating experience.
Renate:
So, can we say freedom is in our body or through our body?
Georgi:
Both. There is no freedom which excludes anything, certainly not the body. Who are we trying to kid that freedom wouldn’t be through the miracle of the physical for as long as we are here?
Everything is here and while we’re manifesting physically, there’s an opportunity to do something, to let something move through us and it’s okay, it’s okay. It’s a bit like working for IBM. You know, you work for IBM and at the end of the day you give back your equipment and you’re free of IBM and IBM goes on. Physical form is not a personal problem but we are here and we’re here because it’s totally 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. We’re very deeply programmed in not being free – in this condemnation. It’s in the Bible, the expulsion from Eden that happened because we’re not OK.
Renate:
We are sinners.
Georgi:
We are condemned. It’s not just religion that does this. It’s also the healers. It’s also us. We’re trying to fix the world. So in trying to make the world a better place, what are we saying, what are we feeding? We’re acting again and again from the belief that the world is not OK as it is. We don’t accept it. In a way, we are collectively, perpetually condemning ourselves. 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, so from within the opium field of feeling awareness we need those leaps of freedom into conscious awakening, to release the condemnation. Maybe that’s what they mean when they talk about redemption… (laughs) …but it’s not historic and it’s not in the future, it’s inside us.
Renate:
Georgi, I’m afraid we must 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
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