A Course in Miracles Explained

What is fascinating for me – being a young man – is hearing about the New Age / spiritual / consciousness exploration movement that took place in the 70s and 80s, especially in the US and in Europe, with all of the things associated with it – the Beatles, Rock and Roll, the Harmonic Convergence, Hippies, etc. I can only imagine what an immense period of change it was – politically, socially, and culturally.

This interview took place at Brian’s home in the outskirts of Paris, in October 2010.

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KB: Hi Brian. To start off, could you tell us how you came across the Course?

BVDH: So I was there at the inception of the Course. As I wrote my article, I was a journalist for the Village Voice in New York City. At the Stanford Research Institute at the Futures Research Division  I was talking with Ron Hawke – a physicist, he had some papers  on his desk, and I said, ‘What is this shit?’ it was something circulated by Judy Skutch in loose leaf copies – it was like Helen Shucman’s original notes – you know typescript – and I said to myself – this is pretty good! Mind you – I had received Shaktipat from Muktananda, worked with Zen monks, had a all sorts of yoga and consciousness experiences, est, actualisations, gestalt..

KB: Was it an inner search that was prompting you to find all of these things? Did you find them interesting or was it an inner need?

BVDH: Well, I think that’s probably because – well, I was a vice-president of a film company at the age of 26, then I had enough of the psychedelic experiences of those times – this was the 60s and the 70s – which opens you up to the realisation that there is an inner world. And I worked as a journalist and staff writer a few years later with the Village Voice. Nobody else was interested in covering the New Age, so it was a pretty free area. I wrote the first article about Findhorn, about Muktananda, about Rajneesh. I got a little reputation. I was going to a lot of seminars, amongst other things – one, I could do it for free, and two, I was interested in regaining those peak experience I had several times in my life: playing folk music, taking LSD, being in wonderful love affairs – there are a lot of peak experiences in life that direct you to some kind of inner fulfillment.

So A Course in Miracles was brought to me by Judy Skutch later because Ron Hawkes told me he got it from Judy Skutch. Judy had worked with, a psychic healer and Uri Geller. She represented many parapsychological and consciousness people. At that time, this was the early 70s – and Judy said ‘Oh well there’s this course that, it’s called the Course in Miracles’, she gave me a brief overview and I said, ‘this is a good story’.

So she said, ‘okay, I want you to do it.’ So I ended up writing the first article about it and it was the only article out at the time. Judy told me the article sold about 50, 60 thousand copies – of course, there was the word of mouth too, but it was the major publicity at the time.  I did a follow up a couple of years later and they, Judy wasn’t exactly as happy with that one.  She was thrilled about the first one because it was so optimistic and it was actually recommending people to take it.

In the follow up, I reported how it was being used by various organizations. they weren’t so thrilled with that because you know, I’ve always been an investigative reporter – which reminds me of my favorite story about consciousness movements.

God and the devil are walking down the road.  God bends over, picks up this beautiful shining light and the devil says, ‘what have you got there?’ And God says, ‘I found the truth’. And the devil says, ‘let me organize it for you’.

These days, I’m no longer a journalist– I brought neuro-linguistic programming to France. I had an institute in San Francisco in 1981 to ‘87, ‘88 and then I started the first major institute here [Paris] in 1985.  I trained about 7,000 people in certification programs in NLP, and I always taught it as a tool for raising consciousness – people would ask me, ‘What’s your mission, what’s your bottom line Brian?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, I’m trying to teach only love.’

KB:  Through NLP?

BVDH:  Well I’m saying all the choices in the world are a choice between fear and love. And that life is pretty great – if miracles aren’t happening in your life, you are not paying attention.  So these are all things that I learnt in the Course. I was kind of living the Course everyday. That’s the great thing about being in front of an audience seven hours a day, talking seven hours a day – it’s about eight or nine hours in the [NLP] course – because it gave me an opportunity to raise the consciousness of people that otherwise wouldn’t do it. I give them the little things about improving their communication, improving their internal psychology and then they develop some hunger for spirituality too. I think the Course was one I think for communication psychology, one of the best complements to my work among the many things I’ve studied.

Something else which I‘d done earlier was the est training and I think…

KB: That’s one of the big things in the 70s right?

BVDH: Yeah right.

KB:  And Gary Renard did it as well, I don’t know if you know Gary, he wrote this book, ‘The Disappearance of the Universe’ and he speaks about this experience that he had during the est training. I think he was on stage and he just had this feeling of total oneness with the audience.

BVDH:  Yeah right, it’s a peak experience of garden variety enlightenment – a bit of satori I think. I was actually Head of the Public Information Office which made me about the fifth or sixth highest executive in est for about two years. So I knew a lot about marketing consciousness. Then for the last 10 years, I’ve been the Chief European Representative for the Integral Institute, Ken Wilber’s organization, and that is again another way to communicate some of the basic truths in the Course in Miracles. See that’s the thing about the Course in Miracles, it was always so inclusive, it covered so many bases. Bill Thetford said it’s like a Western Vedanta.

KB: I think he said Christian Vedanta.

BVDH:  Yeah, when he first saw it. I called my original article, ‘Simple, dumb, boring truths and A Course of Miracles’ because it’s the same truths that people have been talking about for at least 6,000 years of recorded history – and knowing that they exist, the question is, how come human beings haven’t applied it? And that’s what I like about the Course because it’s a way of applying it, it’s something you do everyday, it’s not this kind of you know… bullshit theory talking about enlightenment abstractly and spiritual, it’s more of like – go out and do it!

KB:  And it’s very structured as well. I mean for me, the beauty of the Course is how it’s organized into a fashion whereby the ego is forced to get involved with the content of it – because the language is beautiful, it’s poetic, so the mind takes to that. And also the lessons, 365 lessons and so on..

BVDH:  Well I used to say in all my courses over the last 30 years that I’ve been a trainer and [laughs] a reluctant guru… that enlightenment is easy. It’s really simple to do. All you have to do is know that there is the position of ego and all you know is yourself. You might feel the world is your toy and your projection, but you don’t know there are other people.  To the point you can go over to the perspective and experience yourself as an other person, to experience the world from the model of the world of another person. And really know that you and the other are one—and ultimately the same person. From this position – compassion, universal love, Bodhisattva commitment is really easy to do because you experience, you are the other person. It doesn’t mean, it doesn’t matter if you are a spirit or a god or a tulku or avatar or something like that, just the experience of ‘I am the same entity as other people’ – that’s enlightenment.

KB:  But how do you get people to that… basis of understanding – because when you go out to man in the street and you say, ‘You know, when someone steals your wallet, the thief is you, yourself!’ How do you convince that person that underlying truth?

BVDH:  Well there are some people who of course have been able to do this – there’s a guy called Bill Whitson, he’s an entrepreneur and he was once in New York and was beside a cab and somebody came along and stole two pieces of luggage, and so he just turned around and said, ‘well, I guess God said I needed lesser baggage now.’ I think that was great, I think that’s a real example of the application of the Course.

KB: I know this is a very tough question – but I am interested to know how people summarize the Course in a couple of sentences. It’s one of those simple questions, ‘What is A Course in Miracles?’, that a lot of people seem to have difficulty transmitting the entire message to the non-A Course in Miracles student. I’ve watched this documentary, The Remembered Song, it’s way back in 1987, and you have different personalities speaking about the Course and phrasing it in their own language, and I thought that was very powerful because everybody uses their own language, and somewhere out there, there is another person who is not a student of the Course and understands the language as you do. So I just want to hear from you, personally, what is A Course in Miracles?

BVDH:  Yeah that’s the problem with all enlightenment programs, that they generally give people a new vocabulary, but there is that thing about ‘those that don’t know talk a lot about it and those who know are silent’ because the representation is different from the experience, it’s just a different category of experience, of existence. So when people study the Course they often get a new repertoire for rationalizing their same old problems. Then they start talking about their same old problems with a new language and that becomes incomprehensible to people that haven’t had the Course. People that have had the Course would say, ‘okay that guy is struggling with it and he’s doing the best he can’, even if he’s got the same old problems, maybe that’s a different attitude about him that might lead him a couple of lifetimes from now into some… ‘notch up’.

In France I’ve been sort of… exasperated.. [laughs] because two things happen, [you] talk about the Course and when people ask me what’s the difference between the consciousness courses I give here and the ones I give in the United States, my answer is that in France they say, ‘if it’s a beautiful idea, it has to work’ and in America we say, ‘well if it works, it’s probably a good idea.’ So the French talk, talk, talk and in America, they start a seminar, 10 minutes in, you do an exercise. Here I gotta talk an hour about philosophy and the background and the history of the whole thing or they won’t do any exercises.

So in France, among the Course people [students of the Course] I’ve met, I found they’ve got several groups – they’ve got one group that just talks about philosophy and the abstractions, so they fling abstractions at each other all night. Another one, they pray and they meditate. Another one, people bring in problems and then the person who has been the longest in the Course, who has a little to do with translating or making up the Course gives pedantic descriptions because they feel, you know, if they understand their problem according to the vocabulary of the Course, then of course they will be a little better.  Like we say in the 70s in terms of solving your ego problems – understanding you get is often the booby prize,. You haven’t grown or you haven’t evolved, but with sufficient understanding you can explain why you haven’t gotten it or you can blame various events in your life for why you haven’t got what you want. So, okay – you asked me a question.

KB: Yeah.

BVDH:  I need to talk about it in a very few words. [wondering] Okay, how do you describe it to new people?

KB:  Exactly. How do you describe A Course in Miracles to someone who knows nothing about it but maybe is familiar with various concepts like Freud, maybe he is curious, he’s spiritually curious, he’s open – but how do you explain A Course in Miracles.

BVDH:  Yeah Freud said that  if he had to live his life over he would have studied spirituality and perhaps parapsychology. [laughs] I tell people first it’s an inclusive, all embracing approach that gives you the structure of what most of the spiritual traditions ask you to do. And it does so pretty quickly because doing a lesson a day of meditation a day, well, maybe once or twice a day for a year is really short. Most of these disciplines say, ‘Oh, you got to meditate for 20 years before you actually get into the groove.’ [laughs] Ken Wilber says or points out that there are probably only about 40 people in the entire human history, that have been enlightened, out of all the people that have lived, but just because it’s rare it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to go that way.

Generally I ask people, ‘Well, what do you want out of life? What are your problems?’ They say they’re stressed or I’m too jealous, or people hurt me or I’m too timid or something like that – Then I say, ‘well you might want to try the Course for that’ and they just try it. I think most of what you want to do when you are talking with somebody who doesn’t know the Course is somehow bridge over to their experience of how it could be relevant to them because if it isn’t relevant, who wants to do it?

So then I say, basically it teaches some very ancient things that you’ve probably always heard but have never been able to do. And some of its basic precepts are – that there is only love in the world, everything else is illusion. That’s easy to hear but very hard to do. Another one is that miracles are commonplace.  They happen all the time and in fact, if a miracle doesn’t happen, it’s probably because you either: A, haven’t been paying attention or B, haven’t allowed them to happen. Other basic things like: every human decision is just between love and fear, and fear doesn’t exist. The third thing is that you are not your ego, you are part of a great entity that’s bigger than you and so… if you want to learn how to do this, you ought to try the Course for a year.

I did a television program with the Dalai Lama, it was a video series, there is a picture of.. [points at the picture in the living room] you can find it on my website, that’s the TV studio. I was the interviewer . It was supposed to be explaining Tibetan Buddhism to new people in 1979, ‘78 when we did this, it was one of the earliest things with the Dalai Lama.  Now everybody’s and his dog has met the Dalai Lama, [laughter] it was cool then, he had more – he had better security then too.  You can see it in the picture, around me are all these heavyweights, martial-arts trained Tibetan people, in case I tried to touch him!

Nowadays everybody gives him a big hug. So anyway and one of the things the producers made me ask him was, ‘Your holiness, in Tibetan literature, there are things like the Lung-gom-pa runners that run for 500 miles a day, there’s incidences of clairvoyance, psychokinesis, telepathy. Does that really exist in Tibetan Buddhism?’ And he said, ‘Sure! Of course, of course they do. But don’t spend much time with them, those are the little things.’ So of course the next question was what are the big things? And he said, love, forgiveness, compassion.

KB:  Yeah I read your article, actually it was very interesting, you talk about this concept that you are talking about – Siddhi, is that how you pronounce it?

BVDH:  Yes I did have the experience when I wrote the article.

KB:  Right, these things are all peripheral – psychic ability, astral projection, all these things are things of the world, they are within the domain of the world but spirituality – truth seeking – is something completely different, would you say?

BVDH:  Well that’s the thing about the Course. The Course allows you to get away from your ego – actually the Dalai Lama once said that the idea that you could be without ego is the most egotistical thought of all. You have to be able to include it and transcend it.  So the Course lets you do that and spends a lot of time on tools for enlightenment like forgiveness, like loving another person, like… all that you see is an illusion. This is the perennial philosophy that there is something beyond the material world that is more important and more real.

KB:  Sure.

BVDH:  And this.. It is my illusions – samsara – that are cloaking the real experience of who we are. So and I say, again, my words are nonsense like anybody else’s until you’ve had the experience.  If you want to have the experience, try the Course – it might work for you, it worked for hundreds of thousands of other people.

KB:  How did you deal with that Christian terminology? Was it an issue for you when you started the Course and how do you deal with the fact of telling people that Jesus wrote the course?

BVDH:  Well actually, I don’t think they use the word Jesus.

KB:  That’s correct; they don’t use the word Jesus but… [Ken’s note - I am agreeing with Brian that the word ‘Jesus’ is used much less than ‘Christ’ in the text, not that the Course did not come from Jesus.]

BVDH:  They use the word Christ.

KB:  Yes.

BVDH:  That’s a big difference.

KB:  It is.

BVDH:  So the Christ is a kind of.. Christ is really more of a process than a person. Being the Christ is like the redeemer and the one who brings life. Big things about love instead of hate – 2000 years ago was pretty radical stuff to say that.  So the Christ was saying, like the Course – that to love instead of hate goes against everything that we know automatically in life. It’s against the survival principle. And so, it’s a process, it’s a way to tell yourself, ‘Well, Christ is love instead of hate.’ A lot of people, the French do that too, they started using the word Jesus. They say well Jesus is going to protect me, Jesus is talking, I’m giving my problems over to Jesus, that’s not very different from an American evangelistic Baptist approach to things which is again.. beliefs! It’s mouthing off platitudes instead of doing something. I think it’s cool – to see that the bearded guy with blue eyes and looking sweetly out at you. In my meditations that soon fell away to some kind of white light.

KB:  Right. Something that’s more abstract.

BVDH:  Something that’s more radiant, ineffable, and indescribable really. In terms of words that’s the idea that you want to get beyond illusion. Helen was really [laughs] shocked because she was Jewish and she said, ‘Why is Christ talking to me?!’

KB:  Right. She was, well, she declared herself atheist although Ken Wapnick thinks she was really agnostic and she was just putting on the atheistic persona to justify the fact that she was a prestigious psychologist.

BVDH:  Ken is a priest or something, isn’t he?

KB:  Yeah.. Ken was going to go into, yeah, was going to be a Trappist monk when he met the Course.

BVDH: Yeah he was in the process of, just before confirming his vows, I don’t know if he got his vows or something.. I can’t remember.

KB:  He got baptized and then he went to Israel and then he came back because he kept thinking about the Course.

BVDH:  Cool.

KB: You write about some interesting experiences that you’ve had with when you were doing the Course lessons, which are not dissimilar with some of the experiences that some A Course in Miracles teachers have had and maybe even some that I’ve had. And I know this is not really material in the biggest sense but it’s interesting nonetheless. Would you care to share?

BVDH:  Yeah the one that I wrote about was you know, some kind of meditation one night – I was at a Japanese-Buddhist girlfriend’s place, I was meditating and all these kriyas came [there was] a great explosion, beautiful. And then some other times I felt great abiding peace which lasted for a few days or weeks – when I first did the course and the second time, I called this my white-on-white period because for about two years while I was doing the Course, I worked with an international program to end world hunger, I worked with a lot of consciousness areas, I mean.. I was good. I didn’t have any of the ordinary materialistic thoughts that most of us find in daily life .The experience was of great peace and joy and for about two years – which is one of the effects of doing the course.

KB:  Did you deal with feelings of wanting to go back to that kind of experience because once you’ve had that kind of experience, everything else in your life kind of falls apart right, and for me, after having those kinds of experience…

BVDH:  Everything else?

KB:  Everything else seems like it’s got no color, I mean, like after you’ve had a very intense mystical experience, how can you do the dishes and did you have the experience of craving for it and did you, how did you deal with that?

BVDH:  Well you know, first these kind of big experiences what the Chögyam Trungpa used to talk about spiritual materialism.. the toys..

KB:  The trappings.

BVDH:  Yeah. There’s a Zen parable that before enlightenment you chop wood and carry water and after enlightenment you chop wood and carry water! Life returns to the same things but what’s different is the inner attitude. So I think that even though I haven’t done the Course everyday for about 20, 25 years. The three or four times, I’ve done it have made, these experiences always accessible. I once gave this seminar in Paris, one of my favorite seminars, it was put together actually by the Rosicrucians or the Masonics – I don’t know, some organization that’s spiritual and they had about 140 spiritual leaders – really multi-disciplinary, multi-approach, they had Sufis and Muslims and Buddhists and Kabbalists… You know – all these mystics together.

The seminar I designed for them was about models of the world, that every human being makes up their own model of the world and that you can never really know in terms of objective, ordinary day-to-day life, the spiritual experiences of another person, that’are created by each person. And that each of us creates our own belief system. They said, ‘Oh this is great! We never thought about this before.’  So – many of them ask me, ‘How do you learn this sort of thing?’, I said, ‘Well there is this thing called the Course in Miracles and it has some very simple truths that I was able to experience and it allowed me to make up my own model..’

KB:  Sure.

BVDH:  …my own experience, so I think that’s what the Course allows a person to do in the long run. You know, it’s very artificial to continue doing the course every year, every year, every year – but you come back and refresh yourself from time to time, you know.. look at some of the basic principles. Sometimes the people who’ve been doing the Course for a long time will be surprised, ‘oh, I’m doing that and that and that which is from the Course and I forgot about it!’ And that’s what mastery really is. It’s doing something so many times and so well for years, so it becomes a response automatic. They say that in martial arts you have to do a single movement at least a thousand times before it becomes automatic.

KB:  Sure. Was there an incidence of kind of a forgiveness lesson for you that you felt couldn’t have happened without the Course and like… I’ve spoken to some people and, they always, they have one or two incidents that really strike them and it was like, ‘wow!’ – a total shift – and for Bill and Helen maybe it was Bill saying there must be another way. Did you have any kind of experiences like that?

BVDH:  Well.. For beginners that’s often the case.  I think the Kundalini experience I talked about was, ‘oh, this is really capable of moving people at a very basic level’ but in terms of the kensho-illumination-inside thing, most of the time because I’ve done so many other things before, I said, ‘Yeah this is a good way to do it, yeah this is a good way to remember how to do it.’

On my website, bvdh.com – my initials – I have several articles and presentations I gave about modeling spirituality and one of the things I suggest is that there are basically six to seven things most religious and consciousness approaches attempt to do.  They try to teach responsibility, resonance, identity with other people.. and basically at the end I said, a consciousness system is basically a way to remember. The three Rs.

KB:  Right.

BVDH:  That all these systems, if you don’t remember to use them, what good are they? So the Course in Miracles is 365 day way of remembering it, at least for 365 days.

KB:  Brian, you’ve done a lot of interesting things in your life and one of the things I’m sure our readers would really want to know about is your stint in Playboy. You were a staff writer for Playboy in the 70s – what was that like?

BVDH:  I was writing two columns a month for them and actually one of them was the – I was writing it with a partner – the Playboy sex poll. We’d go out and each of us would interview 100 people a month and ask them a question, we would tell people it was just a straw poll, nothing statistically significant.. actually we were asking very sophisticated demographic because we lived in New York and we were living rock-and-roll lives and that sort of stuff.  The second Playboy column was psychological news about sex, so I’d taken a lot of psychology and I was news editor for Practical Psychology Magazine, so I was privy to a lot of information that I tried to pass on to the readers. They said that our columns were some of the most popular in Playboy. This was when I began studying  the Course. But I’d also taken a lot of other spiritual courses during this period.  I also followed a few spiritual practices in my life, so I sort of skewed it for what is beyond… Anyway at least up to the third chakra. [laughs]

KB:  Do you see a lot of links between NLP and A Course on Miracles?

BVDH:  Absolutely, because NLP’s even more pragmatic,  day-to-day experience-oriented than the Course in Miracles. A Course in Miracles is actually pretty abstract when it  says something like “go see some beautiful abstractions in the clouds”, that will allow you to forgive, but for a beginner, that’s okay, that’s where they live.  It allows them to insert their own experience into those abstractions.

In the 1990s, I reexamined  the integral approach of Ken Wilber and about 200 philosophers and writers, teachers and other people who were writing about, an integral approach – is very ‘code-coherent’ with NLP. But the integral vision allows you to deal with  the community,ethical and social systems, political systems – NLP doesn’t. These domains are a valuable part of our experience, if you ignore them then you are an incomplete human being.

KB: It’s personal.

BVDH: …but NLP offers many pragmatic and effective ways to deal with objective reality and internal emotions, thinking patterns, strategies, external behaviors. It’s very, very good and this is how you communicate with another person from the objective to the subjective – and that interface is how you are going to deal with any other human being, and yourself. You are going to give yourself words, pictures, feelings, of course most people don’t, that’s what the Course and in other consciousness disciplines do too, They give you this connection between ‘oh, I feel scared’ and ‘how do I feel scared? What’s the structure of it?’ ‘Well, I see this picture of me being attacked in the future’ and so what we do in NLP is we say, ‘well can you make the picture a little closer, a little farther away, a little brighter, a little dimmer, can you make it in 3D or 2D, can you make it move or be static?’ [snaps fingers] As soon as the person can do this, then they are no longer victim or slave to their own neurology. Most people deal with their neurology in a one way: ‘oh my brain is making me do this’, so we say, ‘who is driving the bus?’, It’s your bus, here are the controls now you can do it, so that’s – in a nutshell – what NLP is able to do. There’s a great deal of other stuff. So I really like it as a discipline and the integral stuff I’ve been studying and teaching is more in terms of taking it out to the world and really having an interface with everything in existence. It’s about humanity – so you just don’t spend all your time inside yourself..

KB: Right. In your own world.

BVDH: … having wonderful spiritual experiences – that’s more ego stuff.

KB:  Well, that is – I have to say – that is quite a Course principle that you seek not to change the world, you seek to change the way you see the world. And the Course is coming from this perspective that you are the creator of everything and you don’t need to change the external things. Do you see that as something.. I should say, contrary, to integral theory?

BVDH:  See, I’ve sampled a little bit of  the entire New Age spectrum which .(Spreads hands wide apart) On one end or edge of this sprecturm  people say they are completely creating their own personal reality. On the other end there is just objective reality and people say all that stuff inside is imaginary. So I live about here [puts a palm at the middle of chest] I’m saying that you do make up a lot of your impressions, your responses and you have chosen your interpretation of life, however unconsciously. So I try to take responsibility for it – not in terms of blame but in terms of the ability to create responses. That you have the choice to do something about it.

Because over here on the total you-are-all-making-it-up side,  you’ve got the, ‘What the Bleep?’ people… The ‘What the Bleep Do I know?’ film , and ‘the Secret’, sort of stuff.

In 50 years of dealing with various elements of the consciousness movement, I’ve noticed there’s a new New Age that comes around every 20 to 30 years at least.. since the 1700s. And every theory is like, ‘We’ve got a New Paradigm!’ This is probably associated with adolescent hormones [laughter] but it’s almost the same thing. So this is the latest iteration of things that Madame Blavatsky and Gurdjieff and all the prophets, saints, and gurus were saying every 20, 30 years.

So that’s my answer to all the ‘What the Bleep?’ people – got to do both! If you stop with, ‘oh, I’m creating my own reality now. All I have to do is think of a beautiful representation and see a beautiful vision of my future, now I’m going to make a lot of money and everything like that.’ Sooner or later, they are disappointed and then have to start a new New Age.

KB:  So where were you born Brian, what’s your ethnicity?

BVDH:  New York City.

KB:  So you are American?

BVDH:  Yup.

KB:  And you decided to move to France because you…

BVDH:  Cherchez la femme. [laughter] I fell in love with one of my students that had come to my courses in the United States and a couple of my seminars in Paris when my American girlfriend broke up with me saying ‘I don’t want to go with somebody who goes away every month to Europe’ – and so I started dating one of the people that had taken my courses – after the course was over.

I had an NLP center in San Francisco and my French wife and I decided, to start another in Paris. After 20 years I sold it because I’d done the same six month, well, 25 day course, 78 times, among many others. I wanted to explore more of life.

KB:  And you wanted to do something new.

BVDH:  Yeah.  And also one of the things I’ve done, I’ve had three art shows with my paintings, I sing classical music in a serious choir, I play Blues in bistros, and I recently started doing stand up comedy.

KB:  In French?

BVDH:  No, in English, there’s an English comedy club here . I can do it in French. I have even taught hypnosis in French, so I have a pretty good command of French, at least in psychological, medical, business French. I’ve tried to slip a little consciousness in my comedy routines too, like Dalai Lama jokes.

What did the Dalai Lama say when he opened up his Christmas gift and it was an empty box? ‘Oh nothing, just what I always wanted!’ [laughter] and or ‘What did the Dalai Lama say when he was in New York and bought a hot dog on the street, when the vendor said, what do you want on it, mustard, sauerkraut?’ He said, ‘make me one with everything.’ [laughter] So I’ve got a whole bunch of them…

KB:  It’s [spiritual jokes] actually very popular humor. I didn’t know if you’ve seen this, but there’s this puppet out there on YouTube, it’s called Puppetji and he’s a puppet spewing out all of these deep spiritual truths and it’s very effective actually.

BVDH:  Oh, then I’ve got to look some of these up, the French probably don’t watch it.  I’ll take material from any place. These guys in the comedy club here they say, ‘oh no we should never take from another person’s routine’ and they don’t know that in their routine are things that I’ve heard in the entertainment industry 30, 40 years ago.

They feel that they can be egotistically inventive and proprietary about it. When I steal a joke, I just give somebody a reference and say, ‘oh this is something I heard from Robin Williams’ or something like that. I know enough people – see in seminars, that’s where I started stand up comedy – because in seminars for about 25, 30 years, everyday I tell jokes for pedagogical purposes. Like there’s this joke I told about organization and truth [the joke about God and the Devil] because it gets across the point in a way that people can learn very personally. And it’s a challenge doing stand-up in a night club in front of an audience that’s expecting to laugh every five to ten seconds. It is a lot different from having an audience in a seminar, where they are at worst a captive audience.

KB: Brian we were talking about the new age movement and you were saying that it kind of reinvents itself every, with every new guru that comes along or…

BVDH:  Every generation at least.  A generation is usually called 20 years.

KB:  Do you think this is phenomenon of this 2012 thing, a lot of people say this ending of the age of Aquarius or something, is that just another, incarnation of change that we see cyclically?

BVDH:  Oh I thought the age of Aquarius ended with the Rolling Stones at Altamont. [laughter] But anyway.. 2012? I don’t know, a lot of times when they talk about cataclysmic, apocalyptic, end of the world events – if you look around you – what’s the difference? We have enough catastrophe in the world anyway, if it’s going to be generalized to all of humanity – according to Al Gore and a lot of other people that believe in, we’ve got about 20, 30 years to avoid it. So 2012? Maybe they’ll say that’s the beginning of the end, who knows.  And again, people like Ray Kurzweil who says that in 30, 40 years human beings are going to shift from wet-ware to digital and that it’s possible that Artificial Intelligences can arise, that will either include us or treat us about as well as we have treated our cats and dogs.

KB:  A bit like the Matrix.

BVDH:  Yeah right. The thing is I’ve been burned with so many different apocalyptic warnings including the harmonic convergence and the 2000 bug and various other end of the world things that have happened . I feel people are just going to muddle along in terms of world catastrophe.  Actually I feel that Gaia or the world ecosystem will probably survive. It might eliminate human beings and it’ll start.. so if they had reptiles, they had monkeys and maybe they’ll go to fishes next time.. of course they say the dolphins were there and they came back, but the dolphins were on land and they went back to the sea. So maybe, the next big life experience here will be aquatic mammals, who knows, God knows. There’s enough things that can happen – in terms of solar flares, asteroid collisions.. Look on the internet, you can find a whole list of apocalypses that are just as juicy as the Mayans.

KB:  Brian, I think that’s about all the time we have for our interview. Is there anything else that you would like to share with our viewers or any words of final advice?

BVDH:  I think what the Course in Miracles can help people learn is, one, be a little nicer to yourself and to other people. Two, don’t take anything too seriously and that your fears are probably incomplete, unfounded or uninformed. And three, remember that belief, certitude and religious faith are the enemy. The thing that will keep you evolving, and conscious, and in connection with the spirit is curiosity, asking yourself, ‘How do I know what I know, anyway, what are the truths that I know that I can learn from?’ rather than simply listening to another expert.

KB: Cool. Brian thank you so much for your time.

BVDH: You are welcome.

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