Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
then later the people down at the bottom of the mountain – could
you just briefly go over that story because it really touched me and
gave a very lucid description of what it’s like to shift from being
agitated by the way the world is to just being okay with things in a
very simple way. Do you want to tell that story?
CHUCK HILLIG: Sure. I had born and raised a Catholic and went
to Catholic grade school, high school, university. I was married as
a Catholic and I had kids back east and then my marriage fell apart
because my now ex-wife was not comfortable in dealing with
somebody who was into eastern philosophy when she had thought
she signed up for a fundamental Christian-Catholic dude.
So I was out in California, I’d been reading everything I could on
Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism and Zen. The book that
really shifted me, way back when in my mid-twenties, was
Siddhartha by Herman Hess and I was alone up in the mountains
near Mt. San Jacinto which is the mountain right above Palm
Springs. I was sitting there and reading all this stuff and I went
out on a walk. I was just walking, like a hike in the mountains and
suddenly everything just stopped. Everything just ended at that
point. My whole life both exploded and imploded at the same
instant and I was not there. The mountain that I was standing on
was not there; nothing was there. Somehow from that I was able
to move back into where I had parked my van at that point and I
was reeling from this experience from this great opening and I sat
down there at the table in my little van and I was seeing this whole
table filled with – I was smoking at that time – and there was wine
glasses and papers and I was writing furiously all the time, but the
table looked like it was totally a mess, but I looked at it carefully
and it seemed like it was absolutely perfect. Words can’t describe
how perfect all of that seemed.
I looked at this pen and looked at this wine glass and I looked at
the cigarettes over there and I deliberately tried to make it go
away, to mess up this perfection. I moved things around on the
table and no matter where I moved things; it was just always going
from one perfect place to yet another perfect place. I was crying I
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