Harry Hamlin on "A Course in Miracles" || Books That Changed My Life

I'm sound asleep and all of a sudden I hear this voice from my girlfriend. I don't think we're gonna make this. And I open my eyes and I look up and I see two semi-trucks on my right and we're creeping along in the other lane going around the corner up a hill trying to pass these two semis. And on the left over here is a bridge abutment that goes down 500 feet. And I got these two semis and I look up and now I see coming right at me a Country Squire station wagon. And I had at that moment, the absolute most amazing sensation that everything was perfect and just fine. Next moment, bam, we hit, and I should have been killed. And my brain, I'm sure at that moment, knew that I was going to die, and it clicked into this unbelievable sensation of peace, absolute peace. That sensation was extraordinary. I don't know where it came from, why it came. But it had a very lasting effect on me.

So the big question: how did A Course in Miracles change your life?

It changed my life completely and utterly.

Um, I'm Chris Collins, and you're watching Books That Changed My Life. This week we're joined by actor and book lover Harry Hamlin, and he's here to talk about the book that changed his life, A Course in Miracles. So the reason why you're here is because your beautiful wife, Lisa, right? The whole time she was here, she said, oh, my husband should be doing this. Like, this is, you know, for him. And she was talking about your library at home and how you have a lot of books at home and stacks sometimes.

Yeah. I mean, after, you know, 60-some-odd years of reading books. Yeah. And it's hard to throw them away, you know, or to give them away. From time to time I'll give a bunch away 'cause actually I don't have any room in my library anymore for many more books. So I listen to books mainly now. And so I've got on my phone, I've got my library. I just looked at it and it's got 350-some-odd books in it right now. 'Cause I used to, I have some tendinitis in my left hip right now, but my normal routine for the last 5 or 10 years is to walk 3 miles every morning and then go to the gym. And I would listen to the books during the 3-mile walk every day. So I could go through a book in 3 or 4 days. So I went through a lot over the last 10 years, but I haven't been able to walk for a few months 'cause I got this, well, I got old, put it that way, but I'm gonna fix it. Yeah, I do. I'm interested in a lot of shit, a lot of stuff.

So go through your library at home with me. What is the contents? What are the books that you're—

Well, the library is separated into, like it is here, into different disciplines, right? So I got a large section on Shakespeare, for example, a whole section on Shakespeare because I've been a Shakespearean actor as well as being an actor actor. So I've got a lot of that going on. And then I got a lot of philosophy. Psychology, got my degree from Yale psychology. So a lot of that, a lot of, you know, the journey that I've been on since I was a kid, and I can get into why I was, been on that journey, it's been about trying to figure out just how to live. I mean, there's no how-to, right, that we're taught when we're kids. I mean, we're taught how to add and subtract and we're taught to memorize shit you know, and we're taught to regurgitate facts and to understand historical moments in history, but we're not taught how to live our life. We're not taught how to be happy, how to relate to other humans in a way that is positive all the time. Because that's, and that's looking for that primer. Of course, the Bible is there as a, as a primer. But the Bible's pretty inaccessible. The stories in the Bible are beautiful stories, but they're parables and they're metaphors and they're similes and they're not necessarily on the mark. And we're living in a society now at a moment in history when we're not, we need accessibility. We need things to be written in a way that we can understand them rather than having to search through. Well, this book is, not an example of when something is completely clear and easy to read.

Yeah. So the book we're here to talk about today is A Course in Miracles, and we'll, we'll kind of get— we'll get into that a little bit. I'm curious, um, your interest in psychology and human behavior, how much of acting is understanding that? How are those two connected?

Well, they're totally connected, 100% connected. So the, uh, The journey of a human being on this planet, it can either be passive, it can be just going along for the ride, or we can figure out, we can try to figure out the best way to handle any given situation. And that's what this book teaches us. Gosh, it's, there's no way in a conversation like this that we could actually cover all these topics, but we could try, you know, but. Getting back to my library, there's sections on psychology and philosophy, but there's also, I'm into astrophysics as well. My father was in the rocket program, so I grew up in the space program and there's a lot on space. There's a lot on just astrophysics in general, understanding the universe. I also have a whole section on quantum mechanics because I got into that many years ago. Because I started the biggest fusion energy company in the world in 1998. I got deep into particle physics and the kind of stuff that we work with in trying to bring fusion to the world. And that's been my passion for the last 40 years, has been nuclear fusion. So a lot of books on that, a lot of books on how to effectuate that. And then a lot of novels as well. You know, I mean, I'm much more the last 30 or 40 years, I'm much more into nonfiction than fiction, but I still, you know, sprinkle in some fiction from time to time. Though I don't really have time for it because there's so much to learn and to try to understand in the nonfiction realm that the fiction realm becomes kind of like a, like dessert. You know, it's fun.

Yeah, my experience is the same. I rarely read nonfiction, but I appreciate it. Yeah.

I mean, every once in a while a good romp is great. I got into Neal Stephenson a few years ago. Is that right? Neal Stephenson, right? Yeah. Cryptonomicon.

Never heard of that. Yeah.

No, Neal Stephenson, in terms of novels, I mean, his stuff is amazing, but He also wrote a book that kind of, I think, described not cryptocurrency, described the metaverse. I mean, one of the first metaverse ideas around the metaverse came from Neal Stephenson. I forget the title of the book right now, but anyway.

So in your library, what are some highlights of books that you really would hold dear? If there was a fire and you could only take a handful of them, which ones would you grab?

Probably wouldn't grab many books in a fire, but—

Just in this fictional scenario.

In this fictional scenario, I can't answer that question. There's just too many books. There's too many things, and I can always buy them. Somewhere else, or they're online or whatever. But the books that had the most effect on my life— you're asking me what book I cherish the most or whatever? Well, my book, the one that I wrote. I like that one. It's hard to say.

Yeah, I struggle with the question myself.

What would you do? I mean, yeah, there's too much interesting stuff.

Yeah.

I can't pick out one thing.

Yeah, it's a hard question. But I did get the impression from your wife that we have similar sensibilities and that we have stacks of books. And I just love books. I'm always going to bookstores.

I don't go to bookstores. I went to a bookstore and browsed last year. I found two books that turned out to be kind of interesting and I had no idea what they were about. And one is called The Courage to Be Disliked, I think. I think that's the title of it.

Yeah, I'm familiar with that.

Yeah. I'm trying to think of what the other one was, but they were both great. But that one was really good.

Have you struggled with being disliked?

No. And that's not what the book is about. The book is really about Adlerian psychology, but it's written from a Japanese perspective, oddly enough. But it's about Adlerian psychology, which is, you know, one of the many ways to approach psychology. I'm more of a Jungian. I studied Jung in college. I got my degree in Jungian psychology, not necessarily behavioral psychology, but which I saw that you had a thing on alchemy over there. And, you know, Jung was big into alchemy. And there's one, essay written by Jung that has stayed with me my whole life. It's called Septem Sermones ad Mortuem, which is Seven Sermons to the Dead, which appears in the glossary of Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. And it's an extraordinary journey. Jung, he was a kid when he wrote, he was a teenager when he wrote this. But it, I don't know how I could describe it. It's so fucking weird. But it's also just an amazing, his brain, his way of looking at life and the world and the opportunities for spirituality in the midst of psychological discovery and the nexus between those two things, I think kind of it's all encapsulated in this one essay called Seven Sermons to the Dead.

Oh, if you were to summarize that sermon, what is it?

I knew you were going to ask me that question.

No, what do you think of the, the Red Book?

Which is the Red Book?

I don't know, the one where he did the drawings.

Jung did the drawings? Yeah, I've never seen the Red Book.

Josh, could you, could you grab that really quick? Oh, I have the larger version, which is very limited. They only did, um, a few of them, but It's fascinating that he visually tried to illustrate what he was thinking.

Huh. I can't wait to see that. I've never even heard of it. And I studied Jung. My professor was head of the Jungian Institute. Thanks, Josh. Here's what he says: The years which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me. Like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life, but the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then. Okay, he may be talking about when his early days, when he wrote Septem Sermones, Seven Sermons, because he's referring to something that happened, everything after his early understanding of life or whatever seemed to be his explanation of how he got there. But anyway, look, I mean, it was a long time ago. I studied Jung 55 years ago.

Well, look at these images though.

Well, this mandala here, I did my dissertation on mandala. On what I called the Quaternity. And my professor was a guy named James Hillman who ran the Jungian Institute. And I wrote this paper, my dissertation in Jung, and he gave me an F. And he called me into his office and he said, "What the fuck?" He said, "What is this all about?" And I said, I said, "I understand the mandala to be an elaboration of the quaternity rather than the trinity. And Christian dogma, the trinity is really kind of the representation of that paradigm. But Jung had these quaternity eyes. So in other words, rather than a trinity, a quaternity, the number 4 was more of a balancing act than the number 3.

I would contend that it is a quaternity because I had this conversation with James Bonnet. Do you know who that is? He wrote Stealing Fire from the Gods. Okay. And I was talking to him once and he was telling me— I was trying to write this thing and he said, you should do 4, just like what you said. It has a better balance. And through history, it's always a quaternity. And I said, well, what about Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost? And he goes, and you. And I was like, oh yeah.

Oh yeah. Hello, yeah. Okay, so that's enough.

So it is a quaternity if you look at it in that way.

Well, I mean, that's coming from a Christian dogmatic perspective. I mean, what is the Trinity? It is the Father, Son, Holy Ghost, but you know.

But it discounts us. We're a participant in that.

Well, we are everything.

Yeah.

As a matter of fact, you know, so.

That balances it out to me.

I ended up getting an A on the paper.

After you explained it?

After I explained it to him.

You were teaching the teacher?

Well, he understood it. I had to go in and I had to say, but yeah, let's see the whole notion of quaternity, the balance issue. But there was also something sort of magical about it. I have the paper still. I wish we'd had this conversation. I would've brought it in. I said, read this.

I would love to read it.

I say I got an F and then an A.

But the way he illustrates it is something else.

This is almost Balinese.

Wow.

I would never have imagined that this is— he drew these things? Really? This has a Gustav Klimt thing to it going on.

Yeah, a little bit. But it's definitely his own style too.

And did he do the calligraphy as well? I wonder.

Wow. No, I think somebody else did the calligraphy to his images, but I think it's his writing.

Oh. Now what does this refer to? Look, we're going to go down a rabbit hole.

I have one of the smaller ones of these. I'm going to give it to you so you can take it because you'll want to experience it. It's something else. Yeah.

I mean, I haven't really gone back into Jung that much in 30 or 40 years, but I was deep into it back then. Wow.

Yeah, striking. So where did you grow up?

Pasadena.

Oh, really? So you grew up in California?

Yeah, my dad, as I said, was in the space program, and Pasadena was the epicenter of the space program back in the '50s and '60s. They had Rocketdyne and in North American aviation and Caltech and JPL was all right here.

So Dad was really smart.

Well, Dad was, you know, I mean, he called himself an aeronautical engineer and he became a rocket— look, they hadn't even coined the word rocket scientist yet when he was doing this. But he grew up in Buffalo, New York and actually grew up on a lake in Ontario in Canada because his father was a bigwig in Buffalo, New York when Buffalo was in its heyday.

Big industrial town?

Buffalo was the biggest city in the country in turn of the century. I mean, it was much more important than New York City in the latter part because of the Erie Canal. It became like the epicenter of commerce and banking, you name it. I mean, Buffalo was the place to live back 120 years ago. Anyway, so they grew up there, but he grew up on a lake in Canada where we also still go every summer. And there was this one girl he wanted to impress. And in those days, in order to impress a girl, like today you could become a rock star or a movie star or something, you get the girl, right? But in those days, there were no movie stars or no rock stars. And so But nobody had really gone very fast at that point at the turn of the century because trains went a certain speed and horses went a certain speed, but nobody went like 80 miles an hour. Never been done before 'cause nobody went fast. But if you could go really fast in a car or a boat or some other vehicle, you could get the attention of the ladies, you know? So my dad decided to get this girl and to really impress her that he would build the fastest boat in the world. 'cause he was a boat racer. And he went to MIT after college and he learned how to make the fastest boat in the world, which he did. And he won the world's record, world speed record in 1939.

What was the speed, the top speed?

89.8 miles per hour. Wow. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, people hadn't gone that fast, but he got the girl. But he learned when he went to MIT how to make things go extremely fast in water and air. In other words, he learned aero and aquadynamics in order to build the fastest boat in the world. So one of the times he was driving the boat before the big race, the steering cable broke and it ripped off his left arm, which was sewn back on, but he lost the use of his fingers. So he was 4F for the Second World War. So he went to work for Bell Labs during the Second World War and ended up developing the Polaris missile, which is a missile that takes off from a submarine and can actually go through the water and then go into the air and be a missile. So very difficult aquadynamically and aerodynamically to do that. He figured it out, designed that rocket, and then the space program snapped him up because he knew how to make things go really fast through air and water. And he became the thrust engineer for the Saturn V project. It was called the His project was called the Jupiter Project, which evolved into the Saturn V. He developed the engine for the Jupiter rocket. So he was the thrust, he was the main thrust engineer for much of the space program up until the Saturn V, which is the rocket that took the guys to the moon. So he basically designed the F-1 engine, the rocket engine. So as a result, we lived in Pasadena, growing up and I developed a real passion for space. Even though my father, who was a pragmatist, very smart, always said that there was absolutely no reason to go to space. He said he loved the challenge of making a rocket that could escape terminal velocity or whatever it's called. But he always said that it was just a publicity stunt. And there was no real reason to go. Now of course that's changed because we found out that asteroids have minerals on them that we could actually use on the planet Earth. And also in terms of fusion, which is my main passion for the last 40 years, one of the fuels for fusion, one of the is helium-3, which is isotope of helium. It doesn't exist terrestrially on planet Earth, but in very, very small quantities, really found in the deep, deep trenches, the vents that are at the bottom of the ocean, very small quantities of helium-3. But the regolith on the moon, and regolith is the word that's used for the dirt on the moon, is filled with it. It permeates all the regolith. So there will be mining on the moon at some point for helium-3 to bring back to Earth to use as a fuel for fusion energy devices. Anyway, I don't know if we got on a tangent there.

No, it's great. What about mom? What did mom do?

Mom was an alcoholic.

Okay, unpack that for me a little bit.

Well, if you look at some, like, I think in Wikipedia there might be something about my family. I haven't looked at my Wikipedia pages many years, but there used to be something that said something about my mother being a socialite. Now, being a socialite in Pasadena in the '50s and '60s and '70s was all about alcohol because socialites drank. What did you do when you were being social? You drank. So it was cocktail parties. So she was a cocktail party maven, put it that way.

Okay. And what are your memories of that as a kid?

Of what?

Of your mom and your dad and just the environment that you grew up in.

It was dysfunctional and my brothers paid the price for that. So I realized that my Family was dysfunctional early on. My father was a John Birch Society conservative, died-in-the-wool, like badass, totally prejudiced, absolutely bigoted, 100% racist. And I grew up in that environment and thank God I was really stupid when I was in 5th, 6th, and 7th, and 8th grade. And When my parents wanted to send me to boarding school on the East Coast, I couldn't get in 'cause I was so stupid. So they sent me to a summer camp near Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. It was an academic summer camp to get into this boarding school. And I grew up in this environment with my father being completely, my parents totally racist, absolutely bigoted, 100% John Birch Society Republicans. Basically took that ethos with me to summer camp. And my camp counselor one day heard me talking and saying the words that my parents said around the dinner table about these races of people. And he took me behind the tent and beat the shit outta me. And he said, that's not the way the world works, buddy. And he spent the rest of the summer teaching me how wrong I was and how wrong my parents were and how their, Their outlook on life was just really tweaked. And this guy saved my life. Saved my life. I always wanted to see if I could find that guy somewhere, you know, who is that guy? Who was he? He was a big bruising guy. He just beat the crap outta me continually all summer because he knew that I was messed up. But he saved my life. So I realized at that moment that I better figure something else out because the life that I was taught as a child in the household that I grew up in was not gonna work.

Was it just chaos?

Well, it was a lot of fighting. My parents fought all the time, screaming at each other all the time. And it was a lot of alcohol, a lot of alcohol.

Where are you in the sibling hierarchy?

Youngest.

Youngest of how many? 3.

3? But my eldest brother didn't grow up with us. He was quite a bit older. He was like 13 or 14 years old. Both of my brothers died in their 60s and 70s from smoking and alcohol. But I learned early on that I better figure out another way, you know, because it was not going to be pretty. I knew it wasn't going to be— if I kept going the way I was going, it wasn't going to be pretty. So in high school, I discovered Jesus and got very into Jesus. It was odd because I was not at all. I mean, my memory of Sunday school, 'cause we were Episcopal, you know, the Republican Alcoholics were mainly Episcopal in Pasadena. And I'll never forget going to Sunday school and my parents would make me put a coat and tie on and we'd go and sit in the pews and we would actually, you know, And then the hymns would start, and all the parents would stand up and start singing these hymns. And the smell of their breath at 9:30, 10 o'clock in the morning on a Sunday morning after being out drinking all night, and it was disgusting. And when they're starting to sing, they're singing, you know, hallelujah, and the shit's coming out of their mouth. And I'm sitting there going, you know, it's like, get me outta here, get me away from anything that even resembles Christianity, or, 'cause it was just a horrible experience. But then in high school, I was going out to Palm Springs for spring break. There was gonna be a big concert out there. I think Crosby, Stills and Nash were to play. And I got out there with my buddy and the city of Palm Springs shut it down 'cause there were too many hippies. Had come to Palm Springs. So they shut it down and there was no concert, but there we were in Palm Springs. But we heard music coming from this vacant lot, you know, and we went up there and sure enough, there was a concert going on there, but they allowed it because it was a Christian concert, you know, and it was all these Bible people. They're all kids and with crosses around their necks. And we wandered in there and we looked around in this beautiful girl, buxom cleavage. I mean, I was like 17, right? Comes up and she says, "Can I teach you the good news?" And I go, "What's the good news?" I'm looking at her boobs the whole time, right? And she gave me a copy of this Bible that was called the New Something or other. It was some new interpretation of the New Testament, you know, basically rewritten for kids in the '60s, right? And, but she was gorgeous. Her name was Tracy, I remember that. And she had long blonde hair. And had it not been for her, I would not have become a Jesus freak, which I did. And then I forgot about her because I read this Bible and then I started reading the Bible and I got way into it. I mean, way into it. I was—

How old are you at this episode?

17.

17?

And so I go back to boarding school. I got into the boarding school, by the way. Thank God, because the counselor helped me like reinvent myself at that moment. So I actually got in and I actually got really good grades in the rest of my high school time. But I really got into Jesus and I got baptized by the minister at school. Because I got it, of course, we had this minister at school and I told him, I said, I'm totally into Jesus now. I've got— and of course he pulled me into his fold and then he baptized me. It was a big ceremony and he's my godfather. And then my English teacher was my other godfather. And I'm 17 years old getting baptized for the first time, even though my parents were Episcopal, they never had us baptized. So I graduated from high school and I'm back in California and I've been doing this Jesus thing. I'm involved with a group of people who are, they have this new wave church of some kind. Here in downtown LA. And they finally, after about a year of that, they said, you know, we think you're ready to accept the Holy Spirit. I said, whoa, what does that mean, accepting the Holy Spirit? They said, well, we'll do a ceremony, a laying on of hands ceremony, and you'll be given the gift of tongues. And I go, whoa, the gift of tongues? Because all these people around us were like, speaking all this weird tongues stuff. And they said, you come down to our church, which was here downtown, which is basically a warehouse at the time. It wasn't really a church. It didn't have an altar or anything like that. But they said, if you come down, wear white, no belt, no shoes, and we will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and we'll have the laying on of hands ceremony, at which time you will meet God and you will be given the gift of tongues. And I went, meet God. Wow. Cool. Yeah, you know, and so I found the right white outfit and, you know, a friend of mine drove me down to this place in downtown LA and I go into this room and there's all these people I don't know. A couple of them I did know. There was like the main priest or whatever that ran the thing. And they were all dressed in white and they had candles going. And it was like this, like I was somehow chosen at that moment, right? I don't know how. So I walk in and they've got a, you know, a little barrel on the floor, one of those little things that's, you know, aluminum or something. It's a little barrel, you know, filled with water. And they say, okay, now "Roll up your pants." I rolled my pants down, step in the barrel. I step in the barrel. I'm standing in the barrel in the water. And I guess that's my baptism, right? And then they start talking in tongues, you know, and, you know, they say, "Close your eyes," you know, and say the Lord's Prayer, whatever the fuck it was. And then they come over and they lay their hands on me and they say, "Be prepared to meet your Lord and Savior." I'm standing there like this. I'm concentrating, I'm praying, I'm doing all the stuff that I need to be doing at that moment. And all of a sudden I feel the hands coming on me and they're all, all these tongues going on and all that. And I'm waiting at any moment, you know, I'm going to meet God, right? He's going to appear, right? And I'm standing there and I'm standing there and all of a sudden, and then all of a sudden the vision that I had was of the universe, and it was absolutely chaotic, like planets, particles, things whizzing around, like complete chaos, absolutely energetic, amazingly, just completely insane chaos. But at the very same moment, it was absolutely perfect. There was a perfection about that moment, about that chaos that was, ah, I don't know how to describe it other than it totally blew my mind. But nowhere in that vision was the God that these people were talking about, 'cause their God was a patriarchal God who sat on a throne. He had a long beard, longer than yours. And he, you know, that was the God I was hoping to meet, right? But I didn't. I think I met God at that moment. But it had no resemblance whatsoever to what these guys were talking about. And I got up and I stepped out of that bucket of water. I walked out of the church and never once referred to Christianity again. Completely abandoned that whole paradigm and went off on my own journey to find what really life was all about.

When you say you met God, so then what is God?

God is everything. God is the universe. God is, you know, and we are the universe that has evolved itself to have eyes and ears. I mean, as far as we know, we're the first eyes and ears of the universe. It's 13.5 billion years old. It took a long time for the universe to get its shit together to evolve us so that it could look out at itself and go, wow, You know, and then, and so that started me on this kind of how I—

What about that moment made you drop it?

Drop Christianity?

Yeah.

'Cause that's, it didn't, they got it wrong. I mean, it's like, yeah, they got it right. I mean, the original conceivers of this idea of God and the universe got it right.

But it wasn't a man on a cloud.

No, it is, It was everything. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't this idea of a vengeful God staring down at you, checking out whether you deserve to go through the gates with Saint Peter. It wasn't that. It was an entirely different, but still God in the sense that it was everything. I don't know. I mean, that's all I can say about it.

So with that sort of experience as a kid growing up in the home, the Christianity, what was your overall opinion of authority?

Well, certainly the authority that we're taught to recognize and pay attention to, to live up to that authority, I don't know how you put it, but that authority is patriarchal. Usually.

Could you see the system? Could you kind of disassociate enough to understand that there were things controlling you or controlling society?

Well, certainly societal control. It can be distilled down to religion. I mean, this is— how much time do you have?

Okay, well, I just— for me, I, I had a similar chaotic upbringing, and one of the things that came out of it was I, I always questioned authority because I— because authority had let me down. Like, what people said was never what it really appeared to be. Like, there was always a difference, there was a gap to me. And like, hey, if you follow Jesus and you do these things, you'll be happy. But everybody was miserable. It just didn't add up. 1 1 wasn't 2.

Yeah, I see what you're going at. So then from that lens, using that lens, yeah, I didn't trust authority.

And then hence you were trying to figure it out.

Well, yeah. I mean, I knew that if I followed the path that my parents had laid out for me, I'd be I knew that that was not going to work out.

And that's a big deal because most people just kind of go with the flow.

Probably. My brothers did that. They went with the flow.

But you were, in a sense, breaking the mold.

Breaking the pattern. I knew that I had to. I knew that if I didn't break the mold, I'd be doing the same thing they were doing through their lives, which I could tell was not the way to do it. But there's no how-to, there's no like, so, you know, my journey has included science of mind. I started that in the '70s and '80s. Ernest Holmes, have you ever heard of that? Science of mind? It was a big, you know, it was before Deepak Chopra, it was before Wayne Dyer, before all these other self-help guys came along, the Eckhart Tolls and people like that. So back in the '70s, it was, Ernest Holmes and the science of mind, but then less accessible than Deepak Chopra, who was able to articulate some of his ideas in a way that you could actually come away and go, oh, I get it. You know, as opposed to having to, you know, if you're reading the Bible, you gotta go through a Bible study class. You gotta, who's gonna interpret this parable this way or how is this gonna be interpreted? So there's a whole lot of room for getting things wrong or at least misinterpreting. Much easier when you're reading someone, some of these new authors like Eckhart Tolle or Wayne Dyer or any of those guys that they kind of speak in a language that we can understand in the 21st century. Well, put it that way.

Yeah. Okay, so then you go to college?

I went, yeah, I somehow got accepted at Berkeley. I don't know how that happened, but I applied to, you know, in those days you applied to a whole lot of colleges and I applied to a bunch and I got into a bunch of colleges, but I got into Berkeley. 'Cause they had, I wanted to go there because they had a great architecture school. Their environmental design department was one of the best in the world.

And is that what you were thinking you wanted to do?

Well, I wanted to be an architect for sure. You know, my parents, you know, the idea of being an actor would never gone over very well, but it didn't go over very well with them in fact. But I wanted to be an architect and I had studied it But I drove up to register at Berkeley. I registered by Wednesday. I drove up on the weekend before that, and I went to a friend's house in Oakland who was having a party on Saturday night. I went to this party and she said, "Oh, by the way, my dad owns these tree houses in La Honda, California," which is south of San Francisco. And they've been occupied for the last couple years by this guy Ken Kesey, who has this merry band of pranksters that he runs around with with a school bus. And they have appropriated these treehouses that were high up in the redwoods. But the rangers and the highway patrol had gone in 2 weeks before this party that I was at in Oakland and had gotten them out, had kicked them out. So the treehouses that were owned by her father that had been inhabited by Ken Kesey for the last couple of years were now abandoned. And she said, "Let's go over and check 'em out." Because she said, "They're amazing and we should all go and look at 'cause we can go there. My dad owns them and we can go." So we caravaned over the next morning on a Sunday morning. We go over to these treehouses, which were amazing. Built high up in these gigantic redwoods. These treehouses, they had catwalks and there was like a Hobbit thing, right? The stairway went around the tree, you go up 100 feet and there's the, there's, you're in a suite. Now they hadn't, they had been abandoned since before the Second World War. At one time they'd had electricity and plumbing. They were like totally decked out. Now the roofs were leaking, the plumbing didn't work, the electricity didn't work anymore, but the beds still had mattresses on them and you could kind of camp in them, but they were amazing. So we go and we're sitting around the campfire the first night we're there. We made some spaghetti and all that, and I'm playing the guitar and we're having a real kumbaya moment. All of a sudden, this big Harley-Davidson motorcycle comes down from the highway above, comes down to this dirt road, and comes right into the place where we're sitting around playing the guitar. And this big Hells Angel gets off of his motorcycle and he comes over and kind of readjusts his testicles and says, "Hey, anybody here got a wrench or a hammer?" "Hammer." And I had a toolbox in my car 'cause I'm a Boy Scout. And I said, "Sure, I got a hammer." And he said, "Got a flashlight?" And he said, "Come with me." And we go up in one of these tree houses high up in the, we get up there. He says, "Shine the light on that sink over there." And I'm shining the flashlight. He takes out a hammer and he starts banging on the sink. And all of a sudden the pipes break and out come like 40 or 50 little purple pills like that. And he goes, "Oh yeah, man, the cops came. I threw these down here." they're in the sink. I came back to get them. And I'm on my hands and knees with a flashlight like this. He goes, "Yeah, there they are." He goes, "Open wide." I go, "What?" He goes, "Krr." And I spent the next 2 days chasing butterflies around through the ferns at La Honda in these tree houses. So I was late getting to Berkeley to register for my architecture school. And I finally got there on Wednesday morning. We had to be registered by Wednesday at like noon or something like that. And I ran to the architecture school to register and like there was nobody there and it was just a bunch of paper on the floor and some guy walks through. I said, wait a minute, I gotta register. He said, buddy, this class was completely filled up within an hour on Monday, you know, so there's no chance of you getting into any architecture classes. And I went, oh no, what do I do? I gotta register by noon or I gotta wait a quarter. And he goes, well, that building over there is the drum. Department. If you go over there, you might be able to satisfy your requirements. You know, you got, you got 45 minutes, you better hurry. You know, so I ran over to the drama department and I held these cards and I filled them out and I took them to the registrar's office. And sure enough, I was able to get all of my requirements filled out. But I didn't look at the small print on Acting 101, which it said that I was required, it was mandatory that I audition for all plays. If you were in Acting 101, you had to audition for everything. I'd never auditioned for anything in my life.

And you had no interest in acting up until—

Well, I— no, I mean, I— look, I had done a high school play. I— in The Fantasticks, I played the man who dies. It's the smallest part in the play, no words. Um, I got it because the guy who was going to play it got mono, and so they came to me and put me in. I was in the glee club or something like that. So I don't know, I had this marginal idea about acting, but I auditioned for the first play, which was like the next day I had to audition for it. And it was Oscar Wilde's Salome. I didn't know anything about Oscar. I'd never auditioned for anything before. But I went, I did the audition, and I went home and they cast me in the play. And I had the smallest part in that play too. Soldier number 2. I had one line. And the line was, "It is an old cistern," trying to describe where some prisoners were being held by Herod in Salome, right? And I was terrified. And we rehearsed it, and opening night I walk out and I've, "It is an old cistern," and I'm freaking out like that, right? And then I go back and the next day, the Berkeley Gazette or whatever it is, the paper, comes out and does a review of the play and they destroyed it. They said the play was horrible. And, you know, but they said there was only one person on that stage who had a voice that was adequate for the stage. And they said my name. Now, I had the smallest part, like I had one line, right? But my name got in the paper because they said he had a stage voice. So the drama department went, "Oh boy, that's our guy," right? So then I ended up doing every play. After that. I did play after play after play. Never got back to do the architecture thing at all. No? No. And then I was actually kicked out of Berkeley at the end of my sophomore year.

Why'd you get kicked out?

I got kicked out for running a brothel.

Yeah.

Profitable? No, I wasn't running a brothel, but that's what they thought, right? That's what got into the newspaper. I was living in a fraternity house because in 1970, nobody wanted to pledge a fraternity at Berkeley. I mean, that was not— you just didn't do that. You took acid, you smoked weed, you know, you were a hippie, you marched, but you didn't join a fraternity because that was bullshit for them, you know? So, but there were all these fraternity houses and they remained empty because no one was pledging the fraternities, but they had to rent out the rooms because they had to make the rent. So I joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. It's a long story, but it was not a fraternity. It was a commune, essentially. And they couldn't get enough guys to pay the rent, so they rented out the second floor to girls. So we had like 5 or 6 girls living in the house. I mean, it was a fraternity house, remember? And so we would The university thought that we were a fraternity 'cause we had to send paperwork in every quarter. And if there was a girl named Andrea, we called her Andy, or, you know, so they had no idea that we had girls in the house, but we had the highest grade point average of any fraternity there because the girls were smart and they did their homework. And all was well and good until Christmas of my sophomore year. And I had been the least stoned person in the house. Because I was an actor, I had to be able— I was doing all these plays. I couldn't get shit-faced. I couldn't get loaded, right? So I was the most responsible person in the house and they made me the house manager, which meant that I was the de facto president of the fraternity. Okay, so everything was fine until there was a fire in the basement. Some street person came in and knocked over a heater, caused a fire. At 3 o'clock in the morning, the fire department came to put the fire out, and so did the Berkeley Daily Gazette. The paper came because they heard it on the radio, and they saw that these girls were being plucked off the second floor in their nightgowns, and they said, what's wrong with this picture? And it got in the paper that I, being the house manager, was running a house of ill repute. And Reagan, who was governor at the time, saw it and he got really mad and he called up the university and said, "That guy's gotta go," meaning me, 'cause I was the president of the fraternity and I was responsible for this horrible miscarriage of justice, having girls living in a fraternity house, right? So they called me into their office, or the dean called me into his office and he said, He said that I had to kick all the girls out right away. I had to open the house for inspection. I had to write a letter of apology to Reagan. I had to write a letter of apology to the fraternity. And I said, "I'm not doing any of those things." And I went back to the house and I called a meeting of everybody. I said, "Lock all the doors. Don't let anybody wearing a suit come in. We're gonna circle the wagons." And we'd never locked our doors before, but there we were. And we were gonna ride this out. We're gonna fight the university on this. Um, and then about a week later they called me back in and I went back and they said, look, we did some research. Your house is not part of the university system. It's private. Therefore you haven't broken any laws. Um, therefore we can't legally kick you out, but the governor and the head of the university and I, meaning the dean, in the strongest possible terms asks that you not re-enroll in the fall. I said, well, what does that mean? They said, just as long as you don't come back, we're good. And I said, well, do you want me to transfer then? Will you? And they said, well, you can do whatever you want. I said, will you help me transfer if you're not gonna let me come back? And they said, well, sure, you're president of your fraternity and you're a 4-point average. I was at the time. And they said, well, we'd be glad to help. And I said, well, How about Yale? And they go, okay, as long as you don't come back here, we'll help you go wherever you want to go. And I ended up at Yale for the last 2 years.

Wow.

Weird story, but that's how that happened. That's—

and Yale has an incredible drama.

Yeah, I was an undergraduate. I was not in the drama school. I did take some classes though, but they had, you know, this amazing— you know, I was studying psychology and philosophy and they had this My Sartre teacher was Hazel Barnes, who actually was close friends with Sartre and translated all of his work into English. And my Jungian guy was the head of the Jungian Institute. I mean, the people at Yale that you had to teach you were like the top of the top. So it was very inspiring.

So when does this come into your life?

Okay, so I've been married 3 times, and I would say that, you know, you can read all these books and stuff about, you know, how to interact with other human beings, whatever, but love and passion and romance, everything gets kind of discombobulated when you throw that into the mix because it's so mercurial and so ephemeral, the idea of emotion and love and all that. You can't put your finger on it. So my second wife—

How old were you?

I was like 38, I guess, when I met her, my second wife.

And what were you doing?

I had just finished doing LA Law, which is a law series that I did. I just had finished, or I was maybe in the last year of that when I met her. And my first wife had run off with the cameraman on a show that she was doing. And I was working a lot, so maybe I wasn't paying enough attention to the people in my life. But my second wife, we, you know, she ran off with a pop singer after we were together for a year and blew my mind. It's like, whoa. And I'll never forget, you know, in my Sartre class, Sartre, one of his most famous quotes is, life begins on the far side of despair. Which is I think a common theme among existentialists, you know, that you're gonna have this moment. And it's also a common theme in literature and mythology. You know, you get stuck in the belly of the whale, for example, and you're stuck, you're screwed, right? How do you get out? What happens next after you go through the worst moment in your life? And the worst moment of my life for me was my wife running off with a pop singer. You know, it was like, what the fuck? That doesn't happen, right?

And who was the pop singer?

Michael Bolton was the pop singer.

So yeah, I mean, her running away is hard, but then was it even harder that it was Michael Bolton?

I'm not going there. Not going to go there. So, um, um, oh, he's sick right now. But anyway, um, Yeah, it was just a, it just was like, what? That's not the way life works. You make it, you say you're gonna be with someone forever, you're gonna be true to them. And then all of a sudden they went off with a pop singer or the cameraman on their show. And you go, well, wait a minute. And I'm sure I must have had a hand in that in some way by working so much and not paying attention to who knows what.

But it caught you off guard.

Totally. I mean, just like pulled the rug out from under everything that I thought I knew in life. All of a sudden, I was totally out of balance.

And like not eating, depressed.

I lost— yeah, I mean, I quit smoking. I started smoking 2 packs again a day. And I just had no anchor. I had no North Star. I had none. It's like, what? What is going on, you know. And I ran into Marianne Williamson, who was— I was introduced to her at some point, and she was giving a lecture at a place called Agape, which is a sort of church thing in LA. I don't know if it's still going or not, but I saw her and I actually found her after the lecture and went up to her and I said, you know, I told her that I was in trouble, you know, that this had happened and I didn't. And I asked her if she had any advice. And she said, "The Course in Miracles." Don't stop. Just run to get it and do it. And so I did.

And so the book, A Course in Miracles, is also like an outline for a course, right? Like they taught a course?

Well, there is a course. This book is a course.

Did you ever take a separate course or just the book?

Just the book.

Just the book? And so for somebody who hasn't heard of the book or read it, just explain what is the book about?

If one is looking for a guidebook about how to live the best possible life, that is it. That is the guidebook for living the best possible life. That's, you know, I don't know how else to put it. And it's a guidebook. You don't necessarily get it all in one fell swoop. It takes going back into it time and again. And in my copy, I went back and there's, I annotated it each time I did it. I did the course once, which takes a year, 365-day course. You've gotta be dedicated and do it every single day. And then while you're doing each daily exercise, you're also reading it. Reading the companion book, which is, I don't know, kind of like the main part of the Bible. I don't know, it's not necessarily parables like the Bible, but it's an instruction book. What to do, what not to do, how to see life. I mean, okay, Shakespeare. Shakespeare said it, I think, in one line, almost as well as this entire book. And if you come away with that one line and understand what it means and actually deconstruct it, it's what this book is all about. And the line that I'm talking about is from Hamlet, which I did, played Hamlet. And in one, he says, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." That one line basically is the definition of everything that I've begun to understand since I did this.

So unpack that for me. What does that mean?

That means that there's nothing real. Nothing is real.

What is it if it's real?

It's all inside here. So that if nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, that means the entire world and what it means to you is all contained in your gray matter. There's nothing out here has any meaning. It only has the meaning that you attribute to it. Because in A Course in Miracles basically says, look around, look at that light. It's meaningless. Has no meaning. This, whatever thing you think has meaning has no meaning. Your fancy car is meaningless. It only has meaning in your brain. So if you can figure out how to recalibrate your thinking and your perception so that things no longer have the meaning that you gave to them or your parents gave to them or the society gave to them, then it's much easier to have the acceptance of the way the world is without trying to make the world be the way you want it to be.

So in a sense, if I'm understanding this right, instead of trying to impose your perspective on the world, accepting the world as it is?

From a Buddhistic point of view, yeah. Acceptance being the primary moment of realization. Acceptance is everything. I mean, if you can accept the world—

Is that salvation in a sense?

Of course.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, I mean, and I suppose when we're looking for a primer of how to live our lives, how to live the best life, we get one chance at it, one shot at it. How can you do it the best possible way? You know, that's, that's the sort of crux of my journey.

That's what you've always been trying to figure out.

Yeah. Yeah.

How would you describe the style of the book? The style of the writing?

Well, I would say it's closer to the Old Testament style of writing. It's pretty arcane. It takes a while to figure out how they're I mean, this woman Helen Schulman, I think is her name, who wrote the book, and she always says that she actually didn't really write it. It was presented to her through a spiritual, I don't know exactly. I don't pay much attention to that stuff, and I don't pay much attention to all the references in here to God and Jesus and all that, 'cause it does come from a kind of a Christian perspective. Every time I saw those words, I would say the universe or, you know, because I can be taken more in a context of a Buddhist. Exactly. It can be much more secular. You don't have to be— it doesn't have to be a religiosity.

But her context was that it was unveiled to her through Jesus.

Well, Jesus represents a kind of love, and the book is really about love. And you come away after reading the book with the notion of love being the only thing that actually exists and that its opposite is fear, but fear doesn't exist, is an illusion. Fear only exists once again in your brain. There's no such thing as fear. Fear is only inside your head. And love, on the other hand, actually exists. Love is everywhere and love is universal. And if you contemplate the universe and the intelligence of the universe, and the universe is definitely intelligent because we have replicable laws of physics that are the same here as they are 13 billion years ago, and that's space-time I'm referring to there. But love is universal. And the universe has love in it, but where did that come from? You know, and consciousness, I have a whole section in my library on consciousness as well, trying to figure out what the hell that is. Oh, me too.

Okay.

Okay. Yeah. But it exists. We know it's there. Right.

But it's hard to explain.

Well, I guess, yeah. I mean, we've tried to explain it.

We're experiencing it, but it's hard to explain.

But it's, pretty singular to, as far as we know, to humans. But on the other hand, it may not be. I mean, I was thinking this morning about consciousness and whether or not, you know, we think of ourselves as conscious. We think of our, you know, humans have a kind of consciousness that we can identify. But we look at a dog or a cat, we look at an animal, a fly, a mosquito, a tree, a fern, Do those have consciousness? Is there an interconnectedness? I mean, we're connected through our consciousness and Jung was all about the collective unconscious, but maybe there's consciousness everywhere in all living things, but maybe not. Maybe consciousness is specific to humans. Don't know. But nevertheless, it's a very ephemeral aspect of our lives.

And the one thing that we do control is our perspective.

Perspective.

So if our perspective is love, we'll get more love. If our perspective is fear, we'll get more fear.

Exactly. 100%.

But it's the thing we control.

Exactly. 100%.

And understanding that—

This teaches you how to do that, to let go of fear and to embrace love, because one is not real and the other is real. So all of this stuff can— there's manifestation. I'm sure you've heard about— there's a lot I have a whole section on manifestation too. A lot of these, a lot of like The Secret, for example, is sort of the latest, most popular thing about, but it's about love, The Secret. It's about if you live your life without fear and if you share love, the word that they use is not share in here. The word that they use for interacting with other people Maybe Ryan knows what it is, but I forget what the word is. But as you share yourself with the world, if you share yourself with love rather than fear, the universe becomes a very comfortable and safe place.

And so how did that realization change you personally and your interaction with the outside world?

Less fear. A recognition that a lot of people are involved with fear and, you know, are driven by fear. That fear is an extremely powerful force in our lives, and yet it doesn't exist. That's the odd and ironic thing is that fear is an illusion. But so how does it change the way—

Did it give you more empathy?

You know, I think so. I think it did, but I have a weird condition. I'm just beginning to understand now. I have what are called sympathy pains. Do you know what those are?

Where you feel other people's pain?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if I—

So very like an empath.

I guess. I mean, that could be what it is. I mean, I'll give an example. I was just speaking to my therapist the other day about this. So, and I still do therapy because why not? I was watching a thing on TV where they showed Lindsay Vonn in a hospital room and her leg was all like, and all of a sudden my body was completely wracked with pain, you know, seeing that. And it's a physical thing. It's not emotional. And I said to this person I'm working with, you know, I explained that. She said, "That's unusual." I said, "Doesn't everybody have sympathy pains?" And she said, "No, it's quite unusual." And empaths have sympathy pains.

I experienced that.

So yeah. But you're the only person I've ever met who does.

Really?

You're the only— I've asked people, like, if you see, you know, somebody, if you're like, if my daughter stubs her toe and she goes, oh, I stubbed my toe, my whole body's racked with pain.

I feel it too.

Yeah. Yeah. But apparently that is very unusual.

Hmm. Hmm. I wonder what that comes from.

Yeah, I don't know. And I'm just kind of investigating that right now.

But the one thing about the book is that The style is like, I guess it's called koans, but I would— Koans? Koans. How did you say it, Ryan? Koans. Koans.

Oh, koans. Oh, I see.

I describe them as confusion statements in a sense. And I'll just give you an example of one is, if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him. Buddhist teaching, and it has a meaning, but it's kind of a confusion statement at the same time. If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him? Yeah.

Okay. Not my perspective of Buddhism, but then again, okay, you never know. There's lots of different ways that it's going to go.

Well, I mean, it's kind of saying like, you shouldn't idolize the person.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, well, that makes sense. Yeah.

But it's wrapped in a confusion statement.

Uh-huh.

And there's some of that in here. Like some of the stuff I was reading is like, it's a little bit where you have to sit on it for a minute.

You definitely have to sit on it. That's why it takes a year to do it because you got to sit on it.

It's a bite at a time.

Yeah, exactly. And those bites, they seem at first to be pretty superficial, but if you actually dig into them, they're not superficial at all. And they take quite a bit of effort to really dig into it.

Okay, let's go into the book. So let's go to the first tab there.

This has been many years since I've been in this book, so. The first half.

So this is the introduction to the Course.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. The real is love. The unreal is fear. And nothing unreal exists. Well, I see it, you know, after doing the Course, what is real is love. And it can't be threatened. I mean, it exists. It is pure. It is everlasting. It is unreproachable. And the unreal is, are all the illusions that we create in our mind about what things are, should be, um, the way we want things to be.

Well, in the context of the society we live in today, where people are very polarized and we tend to focus more on the things that we don't agree on than the things that we do, and love would make us more see the commonalities and the good in people versus the things that we disagree with, right?

Absolutely, 100%.

And so how do you see that in perspective of the time we live in today?

The time we live in today is pretty intense.

How would you compare it to Berkeley and growing up in that time?

You mean, are we talking about geopolitically or just culturally?

Maybe culturally. Both. I mean, I don't know, just society, because—

You know, I'm beginning to learn about society today. You know, in society, you look at society, there are different strata in society. So, and I'm going on chronological age here. So I'm trying to understand right now what the younger generation, the people who are between 15 and 30, are going through right now and what their experiencing psychically.

How old's your daughter?

One's 24 and one's 27.

So they would be experiencing that, right?

Yeah, they're very successful at what they do. They're busy all the time. They're working a lot. So I'm not sure they have much time to contemplate that, but what was the question again?

So just how does this apply to society today? And how to me it seems like we're more divided. And if we focus more on the love and found the commonalities, of course it would just make more sense.

The second part, nothing unreal exists. Everything that's going on out there right now is pretty much unreal. The propaganda that's being foisted on us, the notions that are being foisted on us, The fear that's being engendered in us. The only way an authoritarian system can work is through fear. And fear, as it says in the Course, doesn't exist. It's an illusion. So we're basically living under a gigantic illusion right now in the world. And I think the same illusion was existent in the '30s in Europe. We're living in this illusion of fear. Right now. And in our dining room, we have a big sculpture of the Kwan Im, which is the bodhisattva of compassion. And so you asked me how I deal with what's going on today. And it's very difficult to have compassion for those who are basically shoving bullshit down our throats and creating this fear. But the only way to deal with it is through compassion and trying to understand, which I've been trying to do. I've read 100 books on this, political books in the last 5 years, 10 years, hundreds of books on it to try and figure out why they're doing what they're doing, what it is, what has caused this phenomenon of anti-democracy, authoritarian, this shove towards authoritarianism. Whether it's greed or fear, whatever, I still can't quite figure out what the endgame is there, but it's not a good one if you ask me on any level. How to steer consciousness back toward love and away from fear, that would be our big agenda for right now if we could do it.

I always think about John Lennon.

Yeah, well, there you go.

We don't have a John Lennon.

We don't have a John Lennon, we don't have a Jesus Christ. What we need right now is, a personality to show up, a leader who can lead— talking about love, talking about love, compassion, the, you know, trying to eliminate fear. I mean, we're just heading totally down the wrong—

it's a different energy. That John Lennon love energy is just completely different than what we're experiencing right now.

Totally, 100%.

Nobody's, nobody's showed up You're absolutely right.

That energy that was snuffed out, we haven't had anybody come along who's been able to elevate that voice, that notion as well as he did. And we still get chills when we hear his music, you know, and we still get tears in our eyes when we hear his music because there's a promise there. There's a hope there. That we're ignoring 100% right now.

And acceptance. Yeah.

Anyway, so that's—

Okay, the next tab. 106.

This is gonna be a problem.

And my question to you about this one is, what does to have give all to all mean?

Well, that's pretty easy, actually. You know, if we want to live our best life, if we want to have that which is happiness, equanimity, peace, all of those things, the path to that is— you could interpret this as give all to it, give everything away. Buddhists sort of look at it, but that's not what you're talking about here. They're talking about giving love, projecting love, projecting, because that's all there is, since love is all there is. And that's basically what this book is about. Love is all there is. So this— surprised that John Lennon didn't do this course, but maybe he did. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. This means this is— if you want to have the best life, you know, just project love continually.

To have, give all to all. Mm-hmm.

Love to everything, to everyone. And this is something that we've taught our children.

So even the people you don't agree with.

Yeah, unfortunately, yes, you gotta go there. Yeah, that's the compassion aspect of it, yeah. And right now it's very difficult to do that because what's going on is so hateful. I'm sorry, it's just like, it's so, abominably bad what's happening right now.

I think though, if you disassociate from it, you see the confusion. There's a lot of trauma. It seems like—

Yeah, it's all trauma right now. Yeah. It's all about trauma.

So when you see it from that perspective, it's easier. It's easier to love. I don't know, for me, I guess. 2:11. And this is about unlearning and trust in our perception.

The Bible tells you to become as little children. Little children recognize that they do not understand what they perceive, and so they ask what it means. Do not make the mistake of believing that you understand what you perceive, for its meaning is lost to you. So It's referring to how we are indoctrinated in our culture. Things that we look at are real, that that camera is real, that this book is real, that— and they are real in a certain sense, but they're not what we think they are. Because we think there's meaning, intrinsic meaning in this book somewhere, but it's just paper and print. There's no meaning to it whatsoever except what we attribute to it. So basically what they're saying here is do not make the mistake of believing that you understand what you perceive. Because basically the Course is saying until you reorganize your perception to, to the things that you see are not what they appear to be in our perception, as we define them, they exist, but they don't exist as we perceive them to exist.

So does that make you challenge your own perception?

Of course.

And how do you personally do that?

These are really tough questions. Okay. So—

I think this helps a lot of people though, because I think a lot of people struggle with this.

Well, I mean, I go back to Shakespeare. I go back to There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Yeah. I go back to that and when I encounter a phenomenon, I'll go, wow, what is that? What's going on? And try to find out if my perception of it is real or am I adding something to it that doesn't exist that could engender some fear? So it's— look, these are pretty arcane things to talk about, but it's possible to drill down and get there and discuss it, I think. It's not easy.

No. Okay, next one. 338. What's the difference between seeking love and seeking to eliminate the barriers to it?

Well, this goes to the, you know, a lot of this talk about The Secret and manifestation and all that. If you're trying to eliminate the barriers to it, then you're basically asking for those barriers to exist. You are trying to eliminate those barriers means that you believe that there are barriers, but there aren't any barriers. That's where the illusion is. And if you focus on what I would say is the negative here, which is if there are barriers to my experiencing love, I've got to get rid of those barriers. Well, in actual fact, there are no barriers. Those barriers are here. They're an illusion. So that's what they're saying here.

So Duchamp famously said, there is no solution because there is no problem. Right. In Eastern philosophy, one of the things that's different than Western philosophy is if you know the concern or you know the problem, you automatically know the solution. You don't need years of therapy. If you know that you behave a certain way in a situation and the outcome isn't what you want, then you automatically know what the fix is, but you have to put your biases aside or disassociate enough in order to see it for what it is.

You have to have awareness.

It requires a disassociation in a sense from your automatic pilot or your perception.

Exactly. That's what this is about. The automatic pilot that we've been indoctrinated with to understand the world the way we're shown it on television, the way we're shown it in movies, the way our parents described it, whatever. Those things, those associations and perceptions that were engendered by that experience, those experiences, they're asking us here to abandon those and to try to see the world as it really is, which is really love everywhere. And we blur that all the time by saying, my watch is better than his watch. I drive a fancier car, I have a better, you know, my house is better or whatever it is.

I have more books than you.

Yeah, well, whatever it might be. Exactly, there you go. So if we hang our hat on those things, we're not hanging our hat on anything real. And at the end of the day, it's gonna smack us in the face because we're never gonna get that thing that we think is out there that we should get. I mean, we're all kind of told like when we're, we're born, we're growing up, that, oh, there's, yeah, you can get it. You know, you can be successful. You can have that billion dollars, whatever the brass ring might be in your head, you know? But that brass ring doesn't exist. That's a total illusion. And there are people out there for millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years who've been chasing that thing that doesn't exist. And the end of the day, It's like, what the fuck have I been doing? You know? So my journey has been trying to find out, you know, how to not need the brass ring, how to have a wonderful life without having to go for the brass ring.

Yeah, it has to be interesting too for you being famous that people perceive you to be one thing when you meet them and it's nothing like who you really are.

Not my problem.

But it is an interesting experience, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, if I wanted to think about that too much, I could go down a rabbit hole with that, I suppose. But I don't care.

Okay, next one. 445. Is the outside world just a reflection on the inner world?

Is this for projection? See, projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. That's like, that's, there's nothing other here, good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Basically it's saying the same thing. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. So the world, I look at this, these books are amazing. Well, okay, so I can have that thought. These books are amazing, but are they amazing? To you they are, to me they are, but are they amazing? Yeah, it depends on who's looking at them, who thinks they're amazing. Somebody who rides a camel through the Sahara Desert could look at this and say, that's something for fire. I can burn those and cook my dinner. So it just depends entirely on your perception of it. So let's read the more. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. 'But though it is no more than that, it is not less.' See, the thing about A Course in Miracles also is there's never— there are no larger or smaller miracles. There's nothing either bigger, good, better, and best doesn't exist. Those are all qualifications that we create in our brain. There's no good, better, or best. There's no bigger. There's no smaller. Everything's exactly the same. And this goes back to the vision that I had, you know, in the Jesus Freak vision was that everything was exactly the same, all totally chaotic, all different, all completely, everything was separate, but it was all one thing. It was all a singularity at the same time. So I don't know. Anyway, so, but though it is no more than that, it is not less. So it's nothing, it can't be bigger or smaller. It is just what it is. Therefore, to you, it is important. If you make it important, it's important. Important, but that's only because you're making it important in your brain, in your head. It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. A man, as a man thinketh, so does he perceive. Once again, there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Shakespeare just could distill it down to little iambic pentameter, and there's a whole book But he did it in one sentence. You know, crazy, right? Did that explain that? Yeah. Okay.

503. What does specialness mean?

Um, well, in A Course in Miracles, nothing is special. I mean, there's— there is no specialness of any kind. Um, it's all the same. It's all a singularity, essentially. And if, as we, I don't know, I haven't read the rest of the sentence, but in my perception of this idea of specialness, that it is an illusion, specialness. It's what we attribute, specialness doesn't exist. It's not intrinsic. We give it specialness. So it's really all about that, once again. There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. So let me read the whole thing. Nothing employed for healing represents an effort to do anything at all. It is a recognition that you have no needs, which mean that something must be done. I suppose, you know, once again, this goes back to acceptance. Everything is as it is. And Nothing employed for healing represents an effort to do anything at all. That's weird.

That's one of those like bookends that—

It is a recognition that you have no needs, which mean that something must be done. Basically, you know, the recognition is that everything is okay as it is. Nothing needs to be— The image I always get is that we spend our lives trying to smash a square peg into a round hole. I mean, always the effort we have to make the world exist as we want it to exist rather than it just allowing it to exist. Because I find that if I allow the universe to instruct me, I get everything I need and it's given to me just without effort. It's effortless. I don't know how that happens, but it just happened to me a couple of times while I was in New York the last couple of days. You know, I'd say I need I need to go to the store and get X or something. And then I walk outside and I ran out of tea and I drink tea every morning. And our schedule was so packed in New York, I was like, when can I get to a store to buy tea? Because if I order it from the hotel, it's going to be $50 for a tea bag. So I'd rather go and get a tea bag. But we couldn't find the time to get to a store to get the tea. So we go to a clothing store and I buy this shirt. I only buy a shirt once a year. I buy a shirt and the woman says, "Oh, by the way, would you like some tea? We have special tea that we disseminate to all of our clients." And she pulls out 5 bags of the most delicious tea ever and gives it. So how did that happen? And that happens all the time. I mean, that is not just a one-off. If I need something, it'll just appear. It just happens. And maybe that's because I allow it to happen. I don't resist. Who knows? But it kind of goes back to this. It's a recognition that you have no needs, which mean that something must be done. Because if you're open to the universe and accepting, those things are handed to you. I don't know how or why, but they wrote a whole book called The Secret about it. People read that book and loved it. What's the next one?

Let's jump ahead to 617.

Okay. Seek not outside yourself, for all your pain comes simply from a little futile search for what you want, insisting where it must be found. What if it's not there? Do you prefer that you be right or happy? Well, that goes without saying. You know, we of course would rather be happy than right. If you have a desire, and this is Buddhist also, so I spent a long, many years, I studied Buddhism at Yale, Mahayana and Hinayana, and then got into Alan Watts really big time. Alan Watts was in the '70s and '80s, very big sort of translating Buddhism to the Western world. But this was, This is very Buddhist. Do you prefer to be right or happy? Seek not outside yourself. In other words, do I need to have a fancy watch? Do I need a better suit? Do I need a fancier car? Do I need, what do I need to apply it to myself to make me more whole? And that's kind of how we've been indoctrinated. And by the way, without that, without our feeling less than, the economy would collapse. Right.

It's a consumer economy driven on insecurity.

Exactly.

That a watch makes you better than somebody else is nuts.

I know.

But it's how it works.

It's how it works. It's how our economy keeps pumping along because everybody feels terrible about themselves.

I'm not driving a Yugo. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not either. You know, but, um, maybe we got away with having a nicer car or, you know, uh, I mean, I don't have a fancy watch, but, uh, but I mean, I, I appreciate architecture and design and good things, but I don't think they make me better. Well, I mean, that's good.

I like having them around because things that are well designed that somebody put care into, uh, makes, you know, it has an energy to it that feeds me, but I don't think that it makes me better than anybody else.

Well, then that's a good way to be. I think most people don't come from that place. I think most people come from—

No, they're like, look at me, I've got this thing.

Yeah, they need that in order to feel better, whole, or whatever. And I have that too. You never lose that in your life. I don't covet anything anymore, but I let my wife do that. It's kind of expensive.

But she's an amazing, amazing dresser.

Yeah. Good. Anyway, you want to move on to the next?

Yeah. Okay, let's go to 645.

Okay. What is this? The Simplicity of Salvation. The final vision. Okay. How simple is salvation? All it says is what was never true. All it says is what was never true, is not true now, and never will be. The impossible has not occurred and can have no effects, and that is all. You know, one of the things that you come away with after doing the Course is that we reach, we're reaching for something. Through religion or philosophy or Buddhism, what is it that we can get to that, I guess, what is the brass ring of life, you know, if there is such a thing as the brass ring of life. And here salvation would be considered to be sort of the brass ring of life, I guess, right? And it says, how simple is salvation? Because one of the things you come away with is that it's really just, takes that long to make the adjustment. It's instantaneous, the adjustment. Once the groundwork is laid and you have an understanding of the kind of transition that needs to be made, it's just a simple moment and can take years and years and years to get to the point where that click happens, but it's just a click. And maybe that's what they're talking about here. All it says is that was never true, is not true now, and never will be. What was never true is that fear exists. It doesn't exist. It only is in our brains. It never will be true that fear is real. The impossible has not occurred.

Most fear is based on things that are kind of impossible.

Well, I guess, I mean, fear is usually engendered by a lack of feeling okay. I mean, if I feel strong and empowered and self-confident, what can touch me? What can hurt me? But if I feel weak and disempowered and off balance, I can be touched by a lot of things. I can be hurt by a lot, and I can have a lot of fear about those things getting to me. But there's just a simple click, eliminates all of that. Because none of that is real. It's all unreal. I don't know. To me, it's simple.

But then again, it's And that's salvation, I suppose.

I don't know. I mean, what is salvation? What does that word mean? It has a lot of meanings in religiosity, I suppose.

What does it mean to you?

I never gave the word salvation much meaning. I don't look at it that way. I don't look at it as salvation.

Is salvation too final?

Maybe. Maybe it's too final. Maybe because our existence, our perception, our consciousness is open-ended.

You've never understood everything. You never stop learning. No. You never put your feet up and like, "I've won life." It's a journey, right?

Oh yeah. There's no getting there. You know, maybe the final curtain is getting there. But here's another thing about the final curtain I find really interesting. When I was 19, after I got accepted at Yale, I went on a drive to go and look at it because I'd never seen it, right? And so, and my girlfriend was gonna go to Bennington. So we wanted to, we flew to New York and we got a little rental car, little Datsun 600 or something. And we went up to, Bennington, and then we drove down to New Haven, and then we went down to her ancestral home in Fort Royal, Virginia. And she was— I was always driving in this little tiny car because I was a guy. I don't know, my girlfriend was— But one day when we were just about to get to her ancestral home in Virginia, we stopped at a Howard Johnson's for lunch. And I got tired and we walked outside and I said, why don't you drive for a while? And so she got behind the wheel and I got in the passenger seat. And in those days, in 1970, '71, nobody ever wore a seatbelt. They didn't have these kind then that came across here. They only had lap belts, but you never wore 'em. Nobody ever wore a seatbelt. But on this day, I thought, "Oh, I'm gonna take a nap." Oh, shit, what the fuck? I snapped my belt closed. Never did that before. So we get to driving. And I'm asleep, I'm sound asleep. And all of a sudden I hear this voice from my girlfriend, "I don't think we're gonna make this." And I open my eyes and I look up and I see two semi-trucks on my right. And we're creeping along in the other lane going around the corner up a hill, trying to pass these two semis in a two-lane road. And on the left over here is a bridge abutment that goes down 500 feet. I got these two semis and I look up and now I see coming right at me a Country Squire station wagon. We're going 65 miles an hour trying to pass these trucks, the little car going like that. And this big Country Squire station wagon is coming right at us. And I looked up and I had at that moment the absolute most amazing sensation. That everything was perfect and just fine. A sensation that I've been trying to get back to for the rest of my life because it was so beautiful. It was so— I don't know how to describe it, but next moment, bam, we hit. And I should have been killed. And my brain, I'm sure at that moment, knew that I was going to die. And it clicked into this unbelievable sensation of peace, absolute peace. And then we hit and I survived it. Barely survived it, but survived it. I've often thought maybe I was catapulted into another universe, you know, in the multiverse maybe, because I should have died, you know. And maybe this is, you know, a second chance in another universe. As in quantum physics, they call it the collapse of the wave function because everything is waves. And whenever anything happens, that thing's wave function collapses and goes into another— it transforms essentially. It's hard to describe, it's quantum mechanics. But anyway, so that sensation was extraordinary. I don't know where it came from, why it came, but it had a very lasting effect on me because it was the most amazing sensation I think a human being can feel. Maybe there's another one, but that was a pretty amazing one. That's wild.

So the big question, how did A Course in Miracles change your life?

It changed my life completely and utterly. My perception of the world changed absolutely after that, after reading this book. And I would say that, I would say I have a beautiful life. My kids are amazing. Our family is amazing. I would say that, yeah, this helped me understand and to be the best human I could be.

That's beautiful.

There you go.

That was fun. Let's talk a little bit about other things that you have going on. Tell me about your food company.

Ah, the Open Food Company. Okay, so I cooked some food for my wife's cast members on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Okay. They came to us one day and they said that they wanted Lisa to throw a dinner or luncheon for her castmates. And, you know, normally what the people would do is they'd hire a caterer and they'd do a big fancy luncheon and all that. But that's not me. I don't, you know, so I said, if we're going to do this, I'm going to do it. I'll cook them. I'll "Look, I'll set the whole thing up. I'll throw the party." I didn't hire anybody, didn't hire a waiter or anything like that. I did the whole thing myself. I cooked the food, laid it out, did the whole thing. And they absolutely loved— I made bolognese, which is something, our Sunday sauce that we make at home. And they flipped for it. They loved it. So it became a thing out in the zeitgeist. Harry cooks this amazing sauce. And everywhere I'd No, seriously, Chris, everywhere I go, people say, oh God, I love your wife. How can I get your sauce? I mean, literally, I mean, everywhere. So finally, you know, AMC offered me a cooking show. I don't know why I ended up doing it with my niece, who was a certified chef. I mean, a major chef. And she and I created the Oakland Food Company. Really, it was her idea more than mine. And she is I mean, she's a monster in the food business. She's been working in it for more than 30 years. She studied at the Cordon Bleu and then went on to be an executive chef in Paris and then an executive chef in California. Then she helped bring a company called Prêt à Manger to America and a company called Le Pain Quotidien to America, created the menus for both of those. Then she was hired by Google to run their entire food operation. Which she ran for 5 years. She was responsible for curating 65,000 meals a day. Wow. In North and South America. So this girl knows food and she knows flavors and she knows nutrition like nobody else. So her idea, she said, "Okay, let's start this sauce company, but let's change the entire food system in America." I mean, she thinks big and she says, "Okay, we'll do it one product at a time." Well, we'll start this company called the Open Food Company, which is the very first completely transparent food company in America. By that I mean we tell you exactly what's in the sauce, but we also tell you how to make it. We give you the ingredients and we tell you exactly how to make it at home because nothing is in the sauce that you can't buy at your local store. No chemicals, no preservatives, nothing like that. We take a look from a bird's eye view of what's happening in America right now is you go into any supermarket and 90% of the stuff in that supermarket is ultra-processed, is junk. It's just junk. And they've spent years and years in laboratories trying to figure out how to make it taste so good that you want another one. And it's all just calculated chemistry and it's all bullshit. And so you look around, for example, just go to Disneyland any day and you'll see what has happened to the American population.

Oh yeah.

Okay, so—

It's genius that it's open source.

Open source, the first open source food company in America. So what we hope to do over time is to create a situation where all the other companies have to meet our standards. Because right now the trend is moving away from processed foods, moving toward healthy foods that don't provide you high fructose corn syrup, all this shit that's making people diabetic and have heart disease and hypertension, cancer, all that. It's all because of our diet. It's all because what America is being fed. So our mandate to ourselves in the Open Food Company is to change that. Just like with fusion, I wanted to change the whole way we get electricity in the world and clean it up and so that we get our power from a source that's completely pollution-free and non-toxic. The same thing we wanna do with food. Take the toxins outta the food, clean up the food system, and make America healthy again.

That's amazing. I love that. Then you're on Mayfair on AMC, right?

Yeah.

Mayfair. And so tell me a little bit about Tri Alpha Energy and yeah, just explain that to me.

So like I said, fusion has been my passion for the last 40 years. Tri Alpha Energy, we're the first fusion company, a private fusion company ever created. I created it in 1998 at the urging of a guy named Glenn Seaborg. Glenn Seaborg won the Nobel Prize for discovering plutonium. He's the first living human to have an element named after him on the periodic table. So element 106 is seaborgium. And Glenn Seaborg and I became very good friends in the '90s. And he urged me to shepherd this technology, this fusion technology, which it's a very long story how I got involved with that. But By 1998, it came, I was chairman of an advisory board that was trying to shepherd this to find a way to fund this research. And the research was coming out of the UC Irvine. And the man who used to run, it was now chairman emeritus of the physics department at UC Irvine, had invented this approach to fusion, which was a very different approach than a lot of the other physicists who had been working on fusion had come up with. He had a different fuel cycle. A non-radioactive fuel cycle because all of the other fuel cycles for fusion, and there are 3 essential fuel cycles for fusion. We're getting into the weeds here, but if you don't mind, I'll get into the weeds. So fusion could be accomplished. First of all, the sun is a fusion energy machine and all stars are fusion energy machines. And the way they were ignited is after millions of years of gravity accumulating hydrogen atoms, which are the most ubiquitous atoms in the universe, accumulating them, gravity over time, over millions of years pulls all these molecules together and you've got these gigantic balls of hydrogen that are sometimes a million miles or even more in diameter across. And just because of the way gravity functions, they're spherical. And they're jam-packed with hydrogen molecules. Now hydrogen is the lightest element, just one proton and one electron. It's like no neutrons. So it's like really elemental, okay? And gravity, but gravity works on that too. And over millions of years, you get these gigantic balls of hydrogen. And at the very core of those gigantic balls of hydrogen, the gravitational gravitational force is so great because of all these, they're pushing on each other because of the gravitational pull, they're able to get the positively charged protons to fuse. So a positively charged proton will always rebel, repel from another positively charged proton. As you take a magnet and you try to put the, you can't do it. It's called the Coulomb barrier. So if there's enough pressure and under the right circumstances, those things can fuse. And when they do, they release tremendous amounts of energy. In the form of helium nuclei that are very highly charged. They're called charged alpha particles. So what we're trying to do is reproduce the same conditions that allow those protons to fuse in the sun in a laboratory so that we can actually harvest the alpha particles directly and derive the energy from those particles. This is getting into the weeds, but like I said, there are 3 ways to do it. You can combine helium, or you can combine a proton of hydrogen and a proton of deuterium. No, scratch that. Okay, so you can, it's a little weedy, this. Okay, so let's start with the way we're doing it. We're using a proton of boron-11 and hydrogen. Those are non-radioactive elements that are ubiquitous on the planet Earth, terrestrially. So the fuel cycle is endless. We have an endless amount of fuel. Not endless, but close to endless. That's one way to do it, non-radioactive. The other two ways to do it involve radioactivity. The next and most benign way to do it aside from our approach is using deuterium, and hydrogen. But the hydrogen is coming from what I told you exists on the surface of the moon, which is— Okay, so I'm getting confused now. Helium-3 is the isotope that exists on the surface of the moon. So if you combine deuterium and helium-3, you can get to fusion at a lower temperature with less density. Density than the way we're doing it. The way we're doing it requires much higher density and much higher temperatures. Then the easiest way to get to fusion, to get to ignition, is using deuterium and tritium, which are heavy hydrogen. So hydrogen, if you add a neutron to a hydrogen molecule, you get deuterium. You add two—

Is that nuclear?

Yeah, nuclear. So you add two neutrons and you get tritium. And tritium and deuterium are heavy hydrogen. They're both radioactive. Tritium, much more radioactive than deuterium, but they're easier to combine in terms of a fusion reaction. But the big problem with that is that once you get to fusion, you immediately release what are called 14 MeV neutrons, which are really, really bad, nasty neutrons. So everything around the reaction gets degraded by these neutrons and it'll kill anybody who gets near it. So it's like pretty nasty.

It's a weapon.

Well, no, it can't be weaponized. You can't use it as a weapon and it can't blow up and it can't melt down. It's just, is, you know, if you go near it, you're gonna get fried, you know, and it's gonna fry any of the walls that hold it. So they know that if they get to fusion using deuterium and tritium, about every 18 months, they're gonna have to take the containment vessel out, break it down, bury it, and put a new one in because it'll be degraded by the 14 MeV neutrons. It's getting way weedy, but so what we're doing is non-radioactive. We're using hydrogen from water and boron-11, which is soap. So you could say soap and water is what we're using for fuels, but that's a pretty cheesy way to say it. But nevertheless, Tri-Alpha Energy is the company that I started in '98 in order to make sure that this particular approach to fusion didn't die on the vine. Because a lot of people believe that this ultimately would be the way we do it because if we are able to crack the fusion nut and get to ignition using this fuel cycle, we can put it right on the grid. We don't have to go through a process of deconstructing the containment vessel every 18 months at a cost of $1 billion every 18 months to do so. Every power plant would just cost billions billions of people.

Very cool. How close are you?

Well, they always say that fusion is 30 years away, you know, and we've been doing it for 28 years. Now that doesn't mean that we're 2 years away, but I would say that if all goes well, we could crack this nut maybe by the mid-'30s. Hopefully by the mid-'30s.

That's pretty soon. Yeah.

And you know, the other companies are much younger than ours. We've been going for much longer than anybody else. So I imagine that they're going to run into a lot of the hurdles that we ran into along the way. I know the guys who run the other companies pretty well. And yeah, they got a long road to hoe, put it that way. But that's what that is.

That's fun.

Well, it's essential.

You're incredibly smart and well thought. Like, it's really fun talking to you. I could talk to you all day. But this was a really great conversation.

Oh, good. Yeah, no.

And I appreciate you bringing this book into our lives. It wasn't one that I was aware of previously.

Uh-huh. Yeah, well, I ran into that. Thank God I ran into this book, whatever God is, but thank the universe that I ran into the book.

It's great. Thank you for doing this.

No, I appreciate it. Yeah, I love it. No.

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