Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
TRIP: After encounters with thick and ponderous books on
spirituality, you decided, before writing your first book, to write
down all the words you did not want to use. And I have to say, it
really shows because there is not a single word in any of your
books that is not totally accessible; there’s no spiritual mumbojumbo
or eastern inscrutability in here. That’s quite a feat.
CHUCK HILLIG: Thank you. Yes, that was the driving force when
I created the first book. I had gone to the Bodhi Tree, maybe some
of your listeners are familiar with that, it’s like the number one
metaphysical-philosophical bookstore in Los Angeles, and I would
wander up and down the aisles and I would see all of these books
and they were 600 pages with many appendices and many
footnotes and I said well, if the Truth that they’re pointing at is
truly simple, then how come people aren’t putting it in a very
simplistic, easy-to-understand format? So that’s when I went
home and I said I do not want to use these words, these words
tangentially spin the listener and the reader out to other places
that I don’t want them to go to. I prefer everybody to be on board
as we move from this page to the next page and I don’t want to
lose anybody along the way so that at the end of the book they’re
getting what I’m pointing at. That’s why I’ve used it for all of my
books. I’m very much of a minimalist, a spiritual minimalist; I like
to describe myself as because it just seems to be the way to go.
TRIP: I think it is the way to go. One of the people that called in
to the interview that I watched had been blown away by your
incredibly slim little volume The Way It Is. When I got your books
from your publisher to review, my ego, which is still obviously in
full bloom operation said, “What are these baby books I’ve been
sent here?” Even when I first cracked the books initially in the
first few minutes of reading through them there was such
simplicity to it, my ego wanted to dismiss it, but as I got deeper
into it, the richness in that simplicity just blew me away and it
spoke to me right where I am right Now. It was amazing. Fewer
words are powerful, isn’t it?
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