Revolution

by Russell Brand

  Everyone looks poor. The women are mostly seated, occasionally escorted to the front by the equivalent of an altar boy or a verger. Once the women are there, the main man—the bearded preacher—bridles and jabs, spasms and gurns like a pre-ejaculatory James Brown. The younger ones—a fella with a shaved head and an orange polo shirt like a cashier at Halfords might wear, and a bloke who in my head has already been replaced by Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air—swoop round each new arrival to the stage area, though let me stress it is not a stage, not raised, distinguished only in that it is nominally the “front.” Intermittently, when a space becomes vacant, the assistants stray into the congregation to recruit another participant. The candidates are seemingly selected on the basis of eye contact, then ushered to the front. There is a pull-down screen with a projection of, I assume, a biblical text, again in an unrecognizable language, again but for the appearance here and there of “Jesus.”

  It looks to me to be a patriarchy; the men are dominant. I stand at the back, not knowing quite where to put my hands. I try clasped at the back, like a royal being shown round a former colonial village, then at the front, like a footballer in a wall awaiting a free kick. The little girl, who seems to be the only person there taking any managerial responsibility, sweetly offers me a chair; I tell her I’m okay. Me and her are the only ones not in some degree of reverie.

  Bellamy, Orange Shirt, and Carlton are screaming their heads off. A tall, really tall, man with a shaved head in a long, really long, suit is having a wild time up there, with none of my self-doubt in where to position his hands: They are thrust heavenward, taut, like a Nazi for whom one “sieg heil” is just not enough, a double-barrelled Nazi.

  The women sway and jump and shriek. Whilst this is all almost entirely foreign, there is something familiar, like a place in your mouth where food always gets caught. Something I recognize. It is orgiastic. This Christianity with a voodoo twist is on the brink of Dionysian breakdown. Through this ritual, I see the root of ritual. The exorcising of the primal, the men engorged, enraged, the women serpentine and lithe. Only the child excluded. I get on my knees, which a few other people are doing, out of respect but also because I’m beginning to sense that it’s only a matter of time before I’m ushered to the front. I’ve not been taught how to be religious. Religious studies at school doesn’t even begin to cover it. There the world’s greatest faiths and the universe’s swirling mysteries are recited like bus timetables.

  No teacher of RE ever said to me: “Beyond the limited realm of the senses, the shallow pool of the known, is a great untamable ocean, and we don’t have a fucking clue what goes on in there.” What we receive through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch is all we know. We have tools that can enhance that information, we have theories for things that we suspect lie beyond that information, filtered through an apparatus limited once more to those senses. Those senses are limited; the light range we detect is within a narrow spectrum, between infrared light and ultraviolet light; other species see light that we can’t see. In the auditory realm, we hear but a fraction of the sound vibrations; we don’t hear high-pitched frequencies, like dog whistles, and we don’t hear low frequencies like whale song. The world is awash with colors unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests.

  Expressible only through symbol and story, as it can never be known by the innocent mind. The stories are formulas, poems, tools for reflection through which we may access the realm behind the thinking mind, the consciousness beyond knowing and known, the awareness that is not connected to the haphazard data of biography. The awareness that is not prickled and tugged by capricious emotion. The awareness that is aware that it is aware.

  In meditation I access it; in yoga I feel it; on drugs it hit me like a hammer—at sixteen, staring into a bathroom mirror on LSD, contrary to instruction (“Don’t look in the mirror, Russ, it’ll fuck your head up.” Mental note: “Look in mirror.”). I saw that my face wasn’t my face at all but a face that I lived behind and was welded to by a billion nerves. I looked into my eyes and saw that there was something looking back at me that was not me, not what I’d taken to be me. The unrefined ocean beyond the shallow pool was cascading through the mirror back at me.

  Nature looking at nature. Not me, little ol’ Russ, tossed about on turbulent seas; these distinctions were engineered. On acid, these realizations are absolute. The disobedient brain is whipped into its basket like a yapping hound cowed by Cesar Millan.

  When meditating, it is, initially, more tenuous. Let me explain it this way. You know that bloke who tightrope-walks between skyscrapers? No? You want his name? Google it yerself. His great triumph was a walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center—I don’t know the exact date, except it was some time before September 11, 2001. He walks across a thick metal cable strung between the two buildings. Obviously, this requires great training and presence of mind and, might I suggest, a touch of Wu-Wei. The last thing you want when suspended a mile above Manhattan in little ballet slippers is some taunting, recorded voice from your childhood telling you you’re a cunt. More than the incredible bravery of the man and his tenacity and focus, I was interested in how they attached the rope between the two buildings. A helicopter? An elevator? How do you get a metal cable that probably weighs a ton across a 200-foot gap a quarter of a mile in the sky?

  What they did was attach a thin piece of very light fishing thread to an arrow, then they shot the arrow between the two buildings. The thin thread was attached, and then wires, strings, ropes, and cables of gradually increasing thickness were pulled across. It is with increments of this nature that mantra meditation induces a different state of consciousness.

  At first when you close your eyes, the mantra is like a thin thread, continually interrupted by other thoughts. A mantra is just a word, a thought vibration, repeated in the mind. At some point in the past, the mind has for some reason taken on the duty of trying to solve every single problem you are having, have had, or might have in the future, which makes it a frenetic and restless device.

  There is always something for it to think, always something for it to solve, so whenever I first start to meditate, the mantra is a tiny clear droplet lost in a deluge of sludge. I’m not a person who finds meditation a doddle or to whom yoga comes naturally. To tell you the truth, I find the whole business a bit poncey and contrary to the way I used to see myself. It’s only the fact that I decimated my life by aggressively pursuing the models of living that were most immediately available—eating, wanking, drinking, consuming, getting famous—that I was forced to look at alternatives. Alternatives that you could call spiritual.

  I’m not a total idiot: If taking drugs worked, I’d still be doing it; if promiscuous sex was continually fulfilling, I’d’ve carried on; if fame and money were the answer, I’d hurl this laptop out of the window and get on with making movies. They don’t work, in spite of what I was told, and there’s a reason for that, as we’ll discover.

  I don’t see myself as a yoga person or a man who meditates and prays and eats well and says “Namaste” or “God bless you.” I became that because I exhausted all other options. There was a point, I’ll admit, when I flung myself full force into an L.A. New Age lifestyle. I’d just got divorced, and a movie I wanted to do well didn’t meet my expectations. My response to this was to stop shaving and start wearing pajamas outdoors.

  That is relatively typical behavior for any lunatic; we see them everywhere—twitching, twisting, hollering at their imagined foes. The difference is I was doing it in Hollywood and my pajamas looked suitably ethnic, so I think I got away with it. Although my mates have subsequently told me they were worried and, thinking about it, they did drop hints like “Trim your beard, you look like a
shoe bomber” and “Stop wearing them gap-year trousers, you fuckin’ nut,” but I was immune.

  A friend of mine, himself no stranger to mental illness, and that’s putting it lightly—he’s a right fucking fruitcake, living at his mum’s on disability benefits—said to me, “In India if you have a mental breakdown, they don’t build you back up again; they leave you in communion with God.” He then looked up, mimicking, I supposed, an Indian yogi, and raised his hands and eyes skywards as if he were playing a tiny accordion just in front of his hairline. “They say, ‘Ah, he’s in conversation with Brahman now,’ and they revere you. In this country they just give you a bus pass.” He carried on waving his hands and flickering his eyes.

  “You’ve demonstrated that for too long now, mate” I said; we were in company.

  “I’m not demonstrating it,” he said. “I’m doing it.”

  He does have a free bus pass.

  In a way I suppose what he meant was that when you redact the conventional behaviors and beliefs of your culture, you’re regarded as a nutter. But who are you, stripped of those things that tell you who you are? Your job, your car, your husband, your kids, your favorite TV show, that pasta dish you do that’s just so mmm? All these things that will one day go with death if not before. With death if not before.

  Good to find out who you are with nothing, because nothing is really what we have. During this pajama time I was doing a lot of meditation and a lot of yoga, kundalini yoga. Kundalini yoga is the crack cocaine of yoga. If hatha is a mild weed high, iyengar is a deep hash glow, and ashtanga is amphetamine, kundalini blows the fucking doors off.

  Technically it is distinctive because of its use of “breath of fire”—this is a rapid, rhythmic, usually nasal inhalation/exhalation that you motivate from the abdomen. This is accompanied by mantras and movements and definitely changes the way you feel. A cynical person might call this change wooziness brought on by hyperventilation, but I think that’s reductive. What is the alteration in consciousness that occurs during inadvertent hyperventilation? There are several yoga positions that induce in me (In me? Is there a me?) a state of awareness that is cracked open with sudden abundance. Like the filters and commentary are suddenly flipped off. I don’t in these scarce and beautiful moments have a conventional sense of self, I don’t know my name, I don’t know what I want or what I’m afraid of—all that data is wiped. And I fucking like it.

  An hour of these kundalini exercises in the correct sequence can induce some interesting states of consciousness. Most yogas relax or invigorate. If you do hatha yoga, your mental focus on breath and movement reduces the torrent of egoic thinking and designates the mind in the present, which, let’s face it, is where it belongs; no point leaving the mind loitering around last Tuesday, especially if something bad happened.

  Ashtanga is more aerobic, and through the repeated movement and the strict relationship between breath and “asana,” or position, a vital elation can be experienced. My understanding of most yoga is that the exercises connect mind, body, and spirit and in so doing alleviate the suffering of incessant thinking. When relieved of this thinking, peace can come; like it says in the St. Francis prayer, you become “a channel of the peace,” an instrument of a state that exists and wants to be expressed but is blocked by the kinks in the pipe, typically angst, fear, pride, whatever.

  Interestingly, Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu deity, is known as the remover of obstacles. When I first heard that, I thought it meant obstacles like a boss who irritates you or a boyfriend of a girl you like. Now I think it means the obstacles within the self that prevent you from being in harmony with “God.” If you can be free from pride, self-pity, self-centeredness, selfishness, jealousy, envy, intolerance, impatience, greed, gluttony, lust, sloth, arrogance, and dishonesty, then there is a state of serenity and connectedness within. Like Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is within,” which seems, once and for all, to bust wide open the daft afterlife view of heaven as some kind of Lando Calrissian cloud kingdom that you can get into like Alton Towers if you acquire enough good-boy tokens.

  Kundalini in my view is more boldly transcendent, more euphoric, than other yoga that I’ve done, so I obviously got totally addicted to it and started doing it all the time. The experience wasn’t entirely free from ego either as I was quite prolific in my physical engagement with female members of the class and eventually nominated myself as leader and took over the entire shebang, like Hitler in a sari. In my hands, or, more importantly, my head, even a tranquil canvas like a yoga class can end up spattered with the neon splurge of my avaricious ego.

  The need for personal vigilance is well demonstrated by my conduct around the kundalini yoga experience. I have no doubt that kundalini yoga as a technology for improving consciousness is valid and that doing it in communities is beneficial, but there is no context in which my ego, if not fastidiously monitored, won’t run amok. It is extremely difficult to put aside a lifetime’s conditioning. The only way I can stay drug free is one day at a time, with vigilance, humility, and support. My tendency is still, after eleven years, to drift towards oblivion. My appetite for attention too can only be positively directed with great care.

  Look out your window, turn on your TV, see which values are being promoted, which aspects of humanity are being celebrated. The alarm bells of fear and desire are everywhere; these powerful primal tools, designed to aid survival in a world unrecognizable to modern civilized humans, are relentlessly jangled.

  A facet of our unevolved nature—comparable to that which still craves sugar and fat, a relic from the days when it was scarce—is being pricked and jabbed and buzzed every time we see a billboard bikini or a Coca-Cola floozy. Our saber-toothed terrors and mammoth anxieties are being dragged up and strung out by shrill transmissions about immigrants, junkies, pit bulls, and cancer. Once I sat in that kundalini class, in white robes, cross-legged, with pan-piped serenity caressing the congregation as we meditated as one, and all I was really thinking about was if I should buy a gun.

  I was in America after all and you are allowed a gun. Have you ever held a Glock 38? It feels so cool in your hand. Even the word makes you feel tough. “Glock.” Tupac had one; Eminem loves them—I want one. Never mind all this hippie-dippie, yin–yang, Ramadan, green-juice bullshit; I want a gat, like Tupac. Of course, I think things like that; the messages that are broadcast on that frequency move fast and stick hard. Look at the state of the world. I didn’t buy one, though; my mum had to remind me that I’m a peace-loving lad and that if I had a gun in the house, the person most at risk would be me. The kundalini techniques worked: They advanced my mind, they tuned me in. How much more powerful these techniques would be if supported by a culture of spiritual evolution, not one of self-fortification.

  Perhaps if my religious education had constituted more than glum, Calvinist witterings and brass rubbings of church doors I’d be better equipped in the midst of the numinous howl in the Kensal Green church hall. Here a sentiment like “Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory” is not a bureaucratic proposal stenciled on to a municipal sign—NO DIVING, NO HEAVY PETTING, GLORY IN THE BLAZING LIGHT OF THE LORD—but a dance, a stomp, a chant.

  I’ve been hunched at the back for a little while now, a static Rodin of disingenuous genuflection, when I think, “Would it really matter if I got taken to the front?” I’m the only member of the congregation aside from the little girl who has as yet been spared the backslapping, prodding, and spinning that occurs when you’re summonsed to the front. I consider leaving; it’d be easy enough, just a nod to the tweenie administrator and then a purposeful sidle. But, I think, how bad can it be? I’ll just be hauled up to the front before this spellbound assembly. I mean, it might be embarrassing, but no one ever died of embarrassment, even if shame is the number-one cause of suicide. These paddocks we inhabit, these mind-made manacles, hold us back from the exhilarating naked chase of freedom. I should stay to prove to myself, to other me, negative, fearful me, that we
can do it, me and him, the pair of us, both “me’s”: confident, strident, connected me, and fearful, clenched, small-town small-minded me, together.

  I decide to stay, knowing too that anecdotes are the product of decisions like this. And as I kneel in negotiation with aspects of myself, along comes Carlton.

  He seems slightly self-conscious too, like he is not too enraptured to notice that I’m conflicted. He gives me a “Shall we do this?” nod, and I give him a “We shall” one back.

  On the short walk to the front past the others, either bowing or kneeling or whirling or howling, I feel glad that my life is this way; so full of jarring experience. Sometimes you feel that life is full and beautiful, all these worlds, all these people, all these experiences, all this wonder.

  You never know when you will encounter magic. Some solitary moment in a park can suddenly burst open with a spray of preschool children in high-vis vests, hand in hand; maybe the teacher will ask you for directions, and the children will look at you, curious and open, and you’ll see that they are perfect. In the half-morning half-gray glint, the cobwebs on bushes are gleaming with such radiant insistence, you can feel the playful unknown beckoning. Behind impassive stares in booths, behind the indifferent gum chew, behind the car horns, there is connection.

  Now I’m up at the front and Tall Bloke, Long Suit, is still Sieg-Heiling; women are still jiggling and beseeching. There is an unspoken acknowledgment that I am an interloper, that I am unlike everybody else there, neither Eritreanh or Ethiopian, and that there is a risk, therefore, that I am there to mock or judge or disrupt, and I’m capable of all those things. The three main men, Bellamy, Orange Shirt, and Carlton, close in, and it’s a bit like a scene from The Lion King—you know, one of the scary bits. Then there are hands on me and a kind of revolving. It’s a bit like being the blindfolded one in pin the tail on the donkey.