Mister Christopher Joseph Petersen: what makes an actor

I woke up one day and realized that I was miserable because I wasn't pursuing my dream career. I wasn't being a professional actor. I could say that I had bad guidance counselors, un-attentive parents who failed to steer me the right way, BUT I guess I was just a victim of simple greed. I was a victim of those old sayings that a career in art is an unsure career and that a career in business or engineering or law would yield much higher and securer financial rewards.

Well, I sampled all of the above in the past and looking back while realizing that the USA is now conducting a war on terror, I can see how all of these alternate careers would now be a sure bet:

As an engineer I could make even more powerful "weapons of mass destruction",

As a business man, I could try to raise sufficient capital from investors to fund a corporation which manufactures these "weapons of mass destruction"

As an attorney, I could twist the laws in such a way that they would support the war and the diversion of public funds to fund the war and build more "weapons of mass destruction".

BUT, bottom line: Given these three options, My career would somehow be involved in the marketing of death and destruction.

BUT As an actor, I would be opening the hearts and minds of many individuals by somehow instilling in them feelings of hope and thereby allowing them the opportunity to see that dreams can become a reality.

So I finally grabbed myself by the balls and said, listen! Enough is enough! You have spent your whole life of having people telling you what you are and what you are not and you have felt them doing everything in their power to force their beliefs onto you. Well, I am not going to give anyone the opportunity to do this any longer! DECIDE WHO YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU WANT IN LIFE AND DON'T GIVE OTHER PEOPLE THE OPPORTUNITY TO DECIDE THESE THINGS FOR YOU!!!

I know we all want acceptance and friendship and love and somehow are willing to contort ourselves into whatever form would provide this acceptance.

My childhood is a great example of this. I was born in the USA to a German man and a German woman as Harald Petersen. My parents had both come to the USA to make the almighty dollar and had met at an English for Foreigners night school class. They then got married, decided to settle down in the USA and had me!

I was raised as a German at home and seeing as at that time there was a huge network of Germans in the Area, I spoke exclusively German. I was a very happy and accepted and loved child who woke up in the morning feeling that every day is a new and exiting adventure. I later learned some English so as to get by and like so many other American children went on to Kindergarten.

In Kindergarten I remember my teacher correcting me on the spelling of my name HARALD insisting that it was Harold and she kept pronouncing it Harold! I also remember her correcting my table manners because Europeans put the fork in the right hand and the knife in the left and eat accordingly to the food on the plate and do not do this STUPID cutting up of the food and then laying down the knife and stuffing the mouth akin to filling a coal furnace.

The kids thought this was funny and I, feeling somewhat hurt and unaccepted sought my comfort in food. And with the comfort in food came my getting fat. Me getting fat, needless to say, only added to other kids teasing me and me feeling more ostracized just for being myself.

Then I had the guts to lose the weight in high school and get somewhat in shape. So, I figured with a new me should also come a new identity, so I changed my name to Christopher.

I was evolving nicely as a human being despite these small setbacks, but then the biggest setback came in 1984 when I was hit by a car while bicycling and spent 5 months in hospitals. I remember being humiliated in one of the hospitals by the staff which had a set of so-called rules and regulations to such I never seemed to conform to. So again came more of those lovely judgments such as the one of being cognitively impaired.

I just wanted to be helped so as to get back into the condition I was in before being hit by that car and not changed into a distorted version of that person by these so-called experts in therapy. They wanted to turn me into a typical American as had so many before and I was not going to let them.

BUT I ALSO WANTED TO BE LOVED AND ACCEPTED AND WAS GOING TO GO TO ANY LENGTH TO GET THAT!

I went back to college a year later hoping to recapture the magic I had felt there in the spring of 1984 and did badly primarily because my mind had been changed or yes, even opened up (in many ways) and I answered the professors' test questions in a manner the I believed appropriate. After all, these classes were in Political science and there are always several sides to politics. The sides to politics can be compared to political parties. For unlike the USA and England, which has 2 predominant parties, countries like Germany and Italy have many!

Well, many years and many adventures later, I have finally realized that I was and am just fine the way I am and that I can access whatever I need in myself that would enable me to be a successful actor. I do no need classes as they would again make a vain attempt at making me another cloned copy of some pre-supposed ideal candidate!

I WANTED TO BE AN ACTOR SO I LOOKED AT MYSELF IN THE MIRROR AND SIMPLY UTTERED THESE WORDS, "YOU ARE NOW OFFICIALLY AN ACTOR!"

I was and is that easy! Yes, people have gone to this school and that school and have tried method upon method upon method upon method... ONLY to realize in the end that they will get hired only for portraying a role which in varying degrees resembles and embraces the person which they truly are. AND you are many things! You always have been, are, and will be many things. This is the way of existence. This is the way of the universe. I am simply restating what so many eastern religions have made clear to us before.

It is true that some acting schools can get you to expound your talents and skills developing them further, but the trick to watch is that THEY are getting YOU to be the best YOU that YOU can be, and NOT the best YOU that THEY want; a YOU that is merely a reflection of who THEY are.

I can sum being creative and being an original actor through the words of OSHO who stated:

Creativity Unleashing the Forces Within

Creativity is a handbook for those who understand the need to bring more creativity, play-fullness, and flexibility to their lives. It’s a manual for thinking "outside the box" - and learning to live there, as well.

Every creative soul -- it does not matter what he creates -- should be respected and honored, so that creativity is honored. But even politicians get Nobel Prizes -- who are nothing but clever criminals.

It does not matter whether you paint, sculpt, or make shoes; whether you are a gardener, a farmer, a fisherman, a carpenter -- it does not matter. What matters is, are you putting your very soul into what you are creating? Then your creative products have something of the quality of divine.
Except creativity, there is nothing divine.

If you want to create, you have to get rid of all conditionings otherwise your creativity will be nothing but copying, it will be just a carbon copy. You can be creative only if you are an individual, you cannot create as a part of the mob psychology. The mob psychology is uncreative; it lives a life of drag, it knows no dance, no song, no joy; it is mechanical.

Of course, there are a few things you will get from the society only if you are mechanical: respectability you will get, honors you will get. Universities will confer D.Litts on you, countries will give you gold medals, you may finally become a Nobel laureate, but this whole thing is ugly.

A real man of genius will discard all this nonsense, because this is bribery. Giving the Nobel prize to a person simply means that your services to the establishment are respected, that you are honored because you have been a good slave, obedient, that you have not gone astray, that you have followed the well-trodden path.

The creator cannot follow the well-trodden path, he has to search out his own way, he has to inquire in the jungles of life, he has to go alone, he has to be a dropout from the mob mind, from the collective psychology. The collective mind is the lowest mind in the world; even the so-called idiots are a little more superior than the collective idiocy. But the collectivity has its own bribes: it respects people, honors people, if they go on insisting that the way of the collective mind is the only right way. It was out of sheer necessity that in the past, creators of all kinds -- the painters, the dancers, the musicians, the poets, the sculptors -- had to renounce respectability. They had to live a kind of bohemian life, the life of a vagabond; that was the only possibility for them to be creative. This need not be so in the future. If you understand me, if you feel what I am saying has truth in it, then in the future everybody should live individually and there will be no need for a bohemian life. The bohemian life is the by-product of a fixed, orthodox, conventional, respectable life.

My effort is to destroy the collective mind and to make each individual free to be himself or herself. Then there is no problem; then you can live as you want to live. In fact, humanity will really only be born the day the individual is respected in his rebellion. Humanity has still not been born; it is still in the womb. What you see as humanity is only a very hocus-pocus phenomenon. Unless we give individual freedom to each person, absolute freedom to each person to be himself, to exist in his own way.... And, of course, he has not to interfere with anybody -- that is part of freedom. Nobody should interfere with anybody.

But in the past everybody has been poking his nose into everybody else's affairs -- even into things which are absolutely private, which have nothing to do with the society. For example, you fall in love with a woman -- what has that got to do with the society? It is purely a personal phenomenon, it is not of the marketplace. If two persons are agreeing to commune in love, the society should not come into it, but the society comes into it with all its paraphernalia, in direct ways, in indirect ways. The policeman will stand between the lovers; the magistrate will stand between the lovers; and if that is not enough then the societies have created a super-policeman, God, who will take care of you.

The idea of God is that of a peeping Tom who does not even allow you privacy in your bathroom, who goes on looking through the keyhole, watching what you are doing. This is ugly. All the religions of the world say God continuously watches you -- this is ugly. What kind of God is this? Has he got no other business but to watch everybody, follow everybody? Seems to be the supreme-most detective!

Humanity needs a new soil -- the soil of freedom. Bohemianism was a reaction, a necessary reaction, but if my vision succeeds then there will be no bohemianism because there will be no so-called collective mind trying to dominate people. Then everybody will be at ease with himself. Of course, you have not to interfere with anybody, but as far as your life is concerned you have to live it on your own terms. Then only is there creativity. Creativity is the fragrance of individual freedom.

I have also taken the words of Rev. Joel Osteen to be thankful to God for many things. I have found a way to be thankful to God for the opportunity to have these many life experiences and for giving me the strength to learn from them and use them as a stepping stone to go onto the next chapter of my life.

I have also found a way to see the silver lining in every dark cloud and this has allowed me to go on with my life in a productive way without holding onto bitter resentment over what has occurred. I just realize that despite the fact that things were bad, they could have been much worse.