Why Physical Immortality? Why your Events?

An interview with James Strole, Bernadeane and Charles Paul Brown for "Forever Alive" magazine, 1992.

Why do you want to live forever?
Many people want togetherness, but why should they have to take the "foreverness" along with it?
Besides your increased intimacy with others, what other aspects do you associate with immortality?
Why do you talk about death so much?
Do you expect people to achieve Immortality by reading your book?
What happens at your events? What is different about them?
At your Events, people begin to feel even though they may be intellectually disagreeing with your message. What is it that causes this?
Why do you invite other people to speak?
Your events sometimes have the feeling of a revival meeting.
Why aren't you drained or worn down by your interactions with others?
What is your vision for the world?
Do you see any signs that you are making progress?
Why do you move and speak as one?

Q: Many people question not only the possibility of living forever, but the value of it as well. A recent Time magazine cover, for example, suggested that, even though we may soon be able to put a stop to aging, we might not want to. Let us start off, then, by asking you three why you want to live forever?

Chuck: There's no way I can do everything I want to do without living forever. I want to see the changes that will take place in the world, in the next ten years, the next hundred years and the next thousand years. And I want to experience more of the quality of life we are creating as we bring about a deathless condition for humanity.

Bernie: The longer I'm here, the more living I experience, the better my life gets, the more exciting my life becomes. I feel so much richer, when I look back at the way I have come, all the happenings along the way, and then feel where I am now. I find that I'm constantly experiencing more of a quality of my everyday living. And to be able to look ahead to more...!

I'm not saying that everything is joyful all the time. Sometimes I experience more pain than I have before. Pain is stronger for me, just as joy is. Everything I'm experiencing gets stronger. What's important to me is being here, and taking everything that happens and benefitting from it. If it's sadness I'm experiencing, I take that and I benefit from it, I make it work for me. I'm learning how to make all these things work.

Jim: For me, the feeling of ending death opened up a whole new freedom of my person: a freedom to feel, a freedom to get close to other people, a freedom to experience an intimacy that I wanted. Before I realized the possibility of living forever, I felt a fear of losing those I was closest to, and that very fear kept me from getting closer! The only way I could protect myself, it seemed, was to keep my distance from people, so that I wouldn't be devastated when they died.

So the abolition of death opened up for me the excitement of exploring all that we are together. This feeling of being endless, of having no end with each other... it's such a feeling of freedom.

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Q: You would say, then, that the prospect of living forever enhances your relationships to others today. Can you elaborate on this? It seems that many people want togetherness, but why should they have to take the "foreverness" along with it?

Jim: Let me give you a real concrete example. A television documentary that I saw recently spoke about life in New England during the American Revolution. It said that, because infant mortality rates were so high during this period, parents were literally afraid to get close to their children until they had reached a certain age. Now, what's interesting is that most people today feel so distant from this situation. Yet what has really changed? As long as we and those we love are subject to death, we still create separation to protect ourselves from that loss.

But this is not just an abstract theory - what's wonderful is that we can feel the difference every day. We're finding that, as we let go of death, we are opening up a whole new way of being together. We're experiencing a melting into one another, an abandonment to each other. We are unleashing an energy between us that nourishes as nothing else can.

Chuck: You see, death represents an end to all your relationships. As long as you keep anticipating that end, you will be unavoidably programming yourself for a limit to all your relationships, and you will bring about that result even before your death. After all, if we are going to leave each other in death, why stay with each other now?

Bernie: Physical immortality isn't just long life or being here forever. It has to do with being with people. I have a hunger for people because I'm alive. There's something about living forever that requires me to be have a hunger for people... when it comes right down to it, there isn't anything else worth sticking around for.

You are my reason for living. You weren't that when I was expecting to die. There was no reason for living then, other than to have the best life I could before death took me. But now, you are my reason for living, and if I'm not with you I feel a definite difference. I feel a building of the physical body when we are together. I derive my liveliness from you - I don't just get that from me as a lone identity or as an individual. I am an individual but not everything that I am comes from me. It comes from you.

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Q: You mentioned a quality of life that you associate with immortality. Are there other aspects to this quality, besides your increased intimacy with others?

Jim: There is a quality of living that comes about from taking our lives here on earth more seriously. You see, if you believe that your life here is of limited duration, then you will automatically place less value on it, and put more value on things you see as "eternal."

Many people tremble at the thought of living forever because they are not really living lives of joy and fulfillment now. They've already given up on life, and are counting on death to release them to an afterlife, or at least to put an end to their suffering here on earth.

Once you decide that you're going to be here forever, you no longer have the "luxury" of death to look forward to. You end up taking a long hard look at your life. You take the quality of your life much more seriously, because it's all you have! This is why we say we're creating a quality of living with each other that has never existed before.

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Q: I've heard many people question why, if you are so excited about life, you talk about death so much?

Jim: We talk about death because we are concerned about it and want to do something about it. You see, most people live in a sort of ivory tower when it comes to death. They distance themselves from what is really going on in the world. I have news for you: death won't go away just because you ignore it! It's good for us to get in touch with what is really going on. It may not be pretty, but maybe it's getting in touch with that ugliness that will cause us to do something about it.

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Q: You have written a book, called Together Forever: An Invitation to be Physically Immortal. What sort of reaction do you expect people to have to this work? Specifically, do you expect people to achieve Immortality by reading it?

Chuck: The purpose of the book is to stimulate within people the feeling of immortality This is the beginning. But no book can be enough by itself. It's important for people to have an ongoing communication with others who feel this way. There has to be a biological agreement with others that death is not necessary, otherwise the feeling will fade, will give way to the general agreement to death and dying that is prevalent today. It is only through our connection to others that we can create the permanent reality.

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Q: The three of you are speakers as well as authors. You offer weekends that you call simply "events"- not workshops or seminars or trainings. What happens at these events? What is different about them?

Chuck: When people attend a training, they're looking for some new truth or technique they can take home with them, because that has been the program of how people improve their lives. They come looking for a new, more positive view on life, or some new affirmation, or a purification ritual that they can practice.

This is not what we are offering people. We are giving people a chance to connect with us, and with others, and to experience a deep bonding with human flesh. We are providing people with an opportunity to wake up to an intelligence of their entire body, and not just of the intellect. We are offering people what we call a cellular connection, an interaction with other human beings that is so powerful that it can actually cause biological changes at a deep cellular level.

Jim: We are not offering a program that has a certain starting point and a certain fixed ending point. We are offering ourselves, and asking other people to give themselves, so that we can move with each other and create more and more of the world we want to build together.

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Q: At your events, people come, as you say, to hear a truth. What I've seen, though, is that while people are listening to your words, there is at the same time something different happening at a more physical level. There is an excitement, an aliveness that people begin to feel even though they may be intellectually disagreeing with your message. What is it that causes this?

Chuck: The body doesn't lie. Consciously they may be waiting for that truth, but their bodies are responding on a cellular level. And so they find themselves opening to us in spite of their conscious program. There is that innate knowing.

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Q: I find it Interesting that you are not the only ones who speak at your events. There doesn't seem to be a division between trainers and trainees. You invite other people to take the microphone as well. Why is this?

Jim: We are about, not just us speaking, but inspiring other people as well to speak all that they are. When we speak we come from our guts, from every cell of our bodies, and that's what we want to stir in other people. We need that. We need the spontaneity and excitement of that exchange. We're not just trainers out to deliver a message, we are out to stimulate other people to become totally alive, and then to feel the excitement of their aliveness as well.

Bernie: Oh yeah, it's the best. I like what Chuck and Jim and I do but the best is to have the total interaction with people. It's exciting for me to hear from others.

Chuck: It's this spontaneous interaction that produces change on a physical level. It's during this "open forum," as we call it, that we get in touch with the language of the body, and begin to stir the body electric.

Jim: I can't imagine the loneliness that must be involved in just teaching someone, in just bringing an enlightenment. We love to express ourselves, but it would be so empty without that feedback. We are always hungry to know what is happening, to know what people are feeling, what is rolling in them.

Bernie: With so many speakers or teachers there is a feeling that, if the people begin really to move, they will lose control. Well, I don't want to have that control! I never could stand it. We are open to everything going haywire if that's the way it needs to go. if there can be chaos, let there be chaos until there cannot be chaos any longer If we can lose something in the loss of control, then the sooner we lose it the better. We're not afraid of disagreement. We can still be true to a person, and be there for them, even without the intellectual agreement.

Chuck: There is a harmony that comes forth, a flow and respect for each other, that can only come forth when we let go of the conscious control.

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Your events sometimes have the feeling of a revival meeting.

Jim: I used to love going to revival meetings! I liked the flow of energy, and the way people would unleash themselves. The freedom that people would feel during these meetings was wonderful - the problem was that they would go back to being tight and locked up during the rest of the week! What we are doing is living with that sense of abandonment all the time.

The feelings that people have gotten from Christian religions and from Eastern religions have been wonderful. It's wonderful to shout "Hallelujah" and it's wonderful to chant a mantra. The difference we are making is that we are not getting locked into a belief system. We are not rnaking a belief system more important than one another. We are making each other sacred, instead of the belief system.

Bernie: We want everyone to feel that they can be emotional with us. There is an emotional state of body that is so important. It's only out of the emotions that we can feel a sacredness with one another, a sense of consecration, a worshiping of us together. These are the feelings we are reviving at our events.

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Q: In seeing you at your events, and In other social situations, it is obvious that you are really nourished by your contact with people. Yet so often it seems that the opposite is true, that people are drained or worn down by their interactions with others. Is there something you are aware of that makes a difference for you in this area?

Chuck: We do not discriminate against any person, regardless of who they are or whom they see themselves to be. We always see the potential of an individual, apart from all the programming that is there. As a result, there is a language of our bodies that draws from that person the best communication we could possibly have. We actually draw from human flesh a different intelligence, an intelligence of aliveness that may have been lying dormant up to that point.

Bernie: What wears people out is resisting one another, being with other bodies and yet not being with them all the way.

We build bodies. There is no end to it with us. It's a joy to see people break forth to really live, to see them open up and blossom. I get the greatest joy from that.

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Q: Many politicians today are talking about the emergence of a "new world order." I sense that you three also have a new global vision, but that it is somewhat different from theirs.

Bernie: I woke up recently with the feeling of how wonderful it would be to be able to go anywhere in the world, and just walk up to someone and lay my head on their chest. without having to worry about political boundaries, cultural barriers, or racial differences. Just to be able to rest my head on another. This is the vision we have, of a world where people accept other people without question, just because they are human.

Jim: Yes, that's what we are inspired to create. We want to make human flesh the most valued thing on this planet. We want it to be recognized as more important than our belief systems, more valuable than our property, more treasured than our great works of art. To create more of that feeling for one another on the planet, that is the most magnificent work that we can do.

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Q: Do you see any signs that you are making progress?

Jim: Yes, in our events all over the world we are seeing the armoring and the walls coming down as never before. No matter where we appear, we draw participants from many nations. There is a feeling from all these people, for one another, as never before. We are seeing that the barriers can be broken. We've done it on a small scale. Now we're ready to expand it to a global level.

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It is a remarkable phenomenon that there are three of you who, although so very different as individuals, are moving and speaking as one In this revolutionary way.

Jim: We are different personalities yet we are together. That is the way of the world we are creating. It's not a messiah or a guru that is coming - it's one body of people.

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