Russell  Brand

a  few  excerpts  from  his  book

My belief is that we do not currently operate on a frequency of consciousness that is capable of interpreting the information required to understand the great mystery.

We receive data through five portals, five windows; the house of human consciousness has but five windows. Do you imagine that we will ever perceive all through these five windows? Do you imagine that that which is most important can ever be seen? How do you describe the most important things that have ever happened to you? The moment you knew you loved her: Can you reassemble that magnetic pull with the Lego of light and language? The moment you heard he’d died—can you define it, calcify it, crystallize it, make it live again, or is it at best a kind of taxidermy that language can provide? A stuffed dead effigy with cold unseeing eyes.

And Jupiter revolves. And the moon watches, the moon you saw as a child that hung in the sky when Christ was crucified, the crescent moon, like a tear in heaven as the Prophet heard Allah.

When people are content, they are difficult to maneuver. We are perennially discontent and offered placebos as remedies. My intention in writing this book is to make you feel better, to offer you a solution to the way you feel.

I am confident that this is necessary. When do you ever meet people that are happy? Genuinely happy? Only children, the mentally ill, and daytime television presenters. My belief is that it is possible to feel happier, because I feel better than I used to. I am beginning to understand where the solution lies, primarily because of an exhausting process of trial and mostly error. My qualification to write a book on how to change yourself and change the world is not that I’m better than you, its that I’m worse. Not that I’ m smarter, but that I’m dumber: I bought the lie hook, line, and sinker.

My only quality has been an unwitting momentum, a willingness to wade through the static dissatisfaction that has been piped into my mind from the moment I learned language. What if that feeling of inadequacy, isolation, and anxiety isn’t just me? What if it was internally engineered by the result of concerted effort, the product of a transmission? An ongoing broadcast from the powerful that has colonized my mind?

Who is it in here, inside your mind, reading these words, feeling that fear? Is there an awareness, an exempt presence, gleaming behind the waterfall of words that commentate on every event, label every object, judge everyone you come into contact with? And is there another way to feel? Is it possible to be in this world and feel another way? Can you conceive, even for a moment, of a species similar to us but a little more evolved, that have transcended the idea that solutions to the way we feel can be externally acquired? What would that look like? How would that feel—to be liberated from the bureaucracy of managing your recalcitrant mind? Is it possible that there is a conspiracy to make us feel this way?

If we were cops right now, we’d look for a motive. If our peace of mind, our God-given right to live in harmony with our environment and one another, has been murdered, who are the prime suspects? Well, who has a motive?

We are living in a zoo, or more accurately a farm, our collective consciousness, our individual consciousness, has been hijacked by a power structure that needs us to remain atomized and disconnected. We want union, we want connection, we need it the way we need other forms of nutrition, and denied it we delve into the lower impulses for sanctuary.

We have been segregated and severed, from each other and even from ourselves. We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue our petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial desires.

When I was bulimic, I needed to fill myself up, there was a void to fill, I needed to purge, I felt poisoned. Why? I didn’t buy any modem psychoanalytic diagnosis. I didn’t buy ADHD or OCD; they have as much veracity as MTV and the WBC. I heard that pharmaceutical companies lobby for conditions to be diagnosed for which they have the chemical solution. I was disconnected, cut off from the source. The reason I became a drug addict was because it was too painful not to. What’s more, I had no means to describe the pain and no way to access any kind of solution. In the absence of any alternative, self-medication was a smart thing to do. Even now, eleven years clean, I still feel the feelings that led me to drink and take drugs, but now I have access to an alternative way to change my feelings. The techniques are simple but not easy. I believe that by sharing these methods we can overcome together, not only addiction to substances but our addiction to a way of life that has been intoxicating us all.

Firstly I had to accept that there was a problem—that was blessedly evident with drink and drugs: I was miserable, becoming physically sick, getting hospitalized and arrested. The people that loved me were afraid that I was going to die. It was clear that some thing had to change, but I couldn’t see an alternative. I was fortunate in that my problem was obvious and pronounced but didn’t kill me. I know so many people that shuffle along with anxiety and pain like a stone in their shoe, but because they’re coping, holding down a job, not being forcibly institutionalized, they shuffle on, unaware that there is an alternative.

Once I’d accepted there was a problem I was able to regard my situation differently. When I was in treatment it was explained to me that I couldn’t use drugs or drink—one day at a time. This was anathema to me. My life, identity, and ability to cope on the most fundamental level were all dependent on substance use. I could not countenance even the most trivial interaction without some kind of chemical wetsuit to protect me. When I was introduced to the concept of “getting to bed that night without using,” I was afraid and suspicious. The fear had become a prison whose walls I would not breach.

Without the compassion of others, the support and encouragement of people who had been through what I was going through, and learned to live a different life, I would never have been able to stop. Through them I saw a vision of how I could live differently.

If people whose problems had been more severe than mine could stop, then perhaps I could. More importantly than that, the feelings they described were the same as the ones I was experiencing. This gave me something that my life had lacked until that point: community. Common unity.

I shall tell you now and for no extra charge that “living in the present” seems to be the key component across every scripture, self help book, and religious group I’ve encountered. To harmonize with life in the moment, not to make happiness contingent on any prospective condition. Not to be tormented by the past but to live in the reality of “now,” all else being a mental construct.

Osho, Eckhart Tolle, Jesus, Buddha, Oprah—anyone who’s anyone who’s ever grown a beard or shaved their head or dropped out or looked back at the material world with a sage shake of the head, a knowing wag of the finger, and a beatific smile—are all saying “Snap out of it”; liberate yourself from the tyranny of egoic introspection.

This is the seam of the self that consumerism can continually mine, the unrelenting inner voice that wants and fears, that attaches and rejects. The people in robes and beards want us to learn to live beyond it, to calmly watch the chattering ego like clouds moving across a perfect sky, to identify with the stillness that is aware of the voice, that hears the voice, not the voice itself.

Well, that’s easy for them to say, all relaxed in their flowing robes, like giant, hairy babies. It’s extremely difficult, especially when that voice has such omnipresent external allies to rely on, whilst the very idea of a spiritual life has been marginalized and maligned.

Perhaps this state needn’t be the product of strenuous esotericism; it’s possible that calm presence of mind is our natural state and our jittery materialism the result of constant indoctrination. Much as I love spirituality to be served up properly branded in a turban, dressed in curtains, the accoutrements are surely an aesthetic, not a prerequisite.

This is not just a psychological notion. Robert Lanza, in his concept-smashing book Biocentrism explains that our perception of all physical external phenomena is in fact an internal reconstruction; elaborating on the results of experiments in quantum physics, that particles behave differently when under observation—itself a universe-shattering piece of information—so that, and forgive my inelegant comprehension of the quantum world, electrons fired out of a tiny little cannon, when unobserved, make a pattern that reveals they have behaved as “a wave,” but when observed, the kinky little bastards behave as “particles.”

That’s a bit fucking mad if you ask me. That’s like finding out that when you go out your dog stands up on its hind legs, lights a fag, and starts making phone calls. Or turns into a cloud.

Lanza describes how our conception of a candle as a yellow flame burning on a wick is a kind of mentally constructed illusion. He says an unobserved candle would have no intrinsic “brightness” or “yellowness,” that these qualities require an interaction with consciousness. The bastard. A flame, he explains, is a hot gas. Like any light source, it emits photons, which are tiny packets of electromagnetic energy. Which means electrical and magnetic impulses.

Lanza points out that we know from our simple, sexy everyday lives that electricity and magnetic energy have no visual properties. There is nothing inherently visual about a flame until the electromagnetic impulses—if measuring, between 400 and 700 nanometers in length from crest to crest—hit the cells in our retinas, at the back of the eye. This makes a complex matrix of neurons fire in our brains, and we subjectively perceive this as “yellow brightness” occurring in the external world. Other creatures would see gray. At most we can conclude, says Lanza, that there is a stream of electromagnetic energy that, if denied correlation with human consciousness, is impossible to conceptualize. So when Elton John said Marilyn Monroe lived her life “like a candle in the wind,” he was probably bloody right, and if he wasn’t we’ll never know.

We apply reality from within. The world is our perception of the world. So what other people think of you, famous or not, is an independent construct taking place in their brain, and we shouldn’t worry too much about it.

My friend Meredith, who is archetypically “a wise woman”—if we were in a fairy tale, we’d meet in a wood—said to me, “Enlightenment is already present, how could it be otherwise?” meaning that the state of enlightenment, union, Christ-consciousness, or whatever, must be present already in the mind, at least the capacity for it. It is not manufactured or engineered; it is by relinquishing other stimuli or factors that this state can emerge.

“The kingdom of heaven is within,” said Jesus, perhaps in reference to the euphoric relief from earthly burden achieved through alignment with a preexisting but unutilized frequency of consciousness that carries you to the bliss that exists beyond self.

I experience that bliss when I meditate. It feels simultaneously relaxing and empowering. Actually, though, the awareness that it has been pleasant comes subsequently, because during a “successful” meditative experience there really isn’t a self to apply the labels of “relaxing” or “empowering.”

 

I wish I had it every time, but even after five years’ practicing, sometimes my scuttling mind will not yield—the jittery busybody of my inner museum cataloging and caterwauling, applying adjectives and conditions to external phenomena that would be best left alone.

An unexpected benefit of this process is an increased compassion for others, a dawning recognition of the connection between us all. Since meditating I feel that the intuitive connection to others that I’ve always felt has been somehow enhanced.

I’m lucky in that I have a mother who is pathologically loving and gentle. Who unfussily loves animals and children and tries to see the good in everyone—thank God, because in my case it was pretty well hidden. This perhaps-inherited positive trait, though, was redundant and unexpressed for much of my life as I was entangled in the sparkles and the spangles, mangled in the crackling drudge, addicted to attention and drugs.

Since I’ve been clean and have increasingly made spiritual pursuits my priority, these neglected traits have become more and more definite. Don’t get me wrong—erring is for me a daily occurrence.

Each evening when I reflect on the day’s events, like a Match of the Day highlights show which is just about the stuff I’ve done, there’s usually one or two clips where I wince at my selfishness or missed opportunities to move closer to the source.

For example, part of the program I follow is to each day try to do something for someone else. If that seems gallingly obvious to you, you are likely not an addict. I can quite easily, if not guided by higher intention, spend the whole day just pursuing things for myself. Being nice to your cat or husband doesn’t count: Those immediate tribal alliances could be regarded as self-serving, in that it’s like pruning the garden of your life. You live in these relationships as surely as you live in your house; maintenance is a necessity.

I mean general kindness to others in the spirit of service. This can include, for someone in my position, aiding, advising, and supporting other recovering drug addicts and alcoholics. Taking time to help them with their, frankly incessant, problems and quandaries, knowing that some other poor recovering drunk will have to listen to mine. It can also mean helping strangers and people that circumstance has put in your way but are of no obvious benefit to you. What used to be called civility: carrying bags, opening doors, giving up seats—putting others before yourself.

I have begun to understand that in doing these things I ameliorate the invisible boundaries that imprison me in my head. If I prioritize the needs of others, even in small ways, above my own needs, the illusion of my material, individual self being supreme subtly begins to break down.

There is great relief in this as we were designed to live in communities and tribes but these systems have in our culture for various reasons broken down and we feel lonely as a result, because we are detached from nature—I don’t mean nature as in a bunch of trees and rivers, although they’re nice too, I mean nature as in our own nature, we are nature.

We are a part of the whole, connected to the whole, like old Edgar [astronaut Edgar Mitchell] saw from the moon. We are all one, on a speck of dust in a shaft of light. When I live in the illusion of a separate self, the part of me that knows I am at one with all phenomena feels starved and bereft. These dopey little acts of kindness move me back towards the truth.

It actually gives me a little rush if I do a kind thing, like just phone someone up, someone who I want nothing from, and check if they’re okay. After I’ve done it, I get this little tingle and I think that is a small synaptic reward for reconnecting with truth.

I saw once a depiction of the ol’ brain in action; I saw the synapses, the nerves or tunnels or roads through which energy or information travels. It wasn’t a photo, this stuff is too microscopic to be observed in that way; it was probably some sort of scan or graphic. Energy travels from synapse to synapse across a tiny space.

A thought, or an impulse, crosses space to get to a related synapse. Consciousness, thoughts, are traveling through space in your head; we are traveling through space on this beautiful biosphere. Earth. If consciousness can traverse inner space, then perhaps it can traverse outer space. Perhaps we are as connected by consciousness as we are by the air that we all breathe. The air we inhale through the holes in our faces which tumbles into our lungs and blood, which travels through our hearts, which forms the words we speak, the air which we exhale, which is connected to all air, an unbroken entity, like all the water in all the rivers in the world, leading to the sea, touching one another.

John Lennon said when you look into the sky you think of it as far away, but if you follow it down with your eyes, you’re standing in sky.

You can regard this as adorable tosh and bunkum if your conditioning demands it, but so much of the truth is neglected. These truths are more important than the beliefs that I was taught to make me a compliant subject instead of an active citizen.

West Ham’s results, the Oscars, X Factor, even high cultural nursings on Piketty or Roth or Bach or Beckett are not more important than the physical reality of our oneness. Anything that directs consciousness away from that truth instead of towards it is bollocks and it has to go.

Don’t worry, I panicked myself there a bit. I’m not suggesting a year-zero book-burning immolation of all culture. I’d really miss West Ham, and, to be honest, there’s nothing wrong with XFactor, in its place.

Given that the profound can be quite well hidden in the spritz, tits, and glitz of the all-encompassing barmy mainstream culture, it is helpful to have stories, rituals, and practices that attune us to less obvious but more important aspects of reality. Prayer, meditation, and simple altruistic acts are behavioral portals to a neglected dimension. My personal daily program includes all three: I pray, meditate, and try to be kind—not generally, particularly. If I feel sad or agitated, I check myself and think, “Hang on, Russell, have you done anything for anyone but yourself today?” Shockingly, the answer is sometimes “No,” then I immediately hurl myself into enforced altruism, inflicting my aid on anyone in the vicinity.

“Sir, let me carry that.”

 “It’s my walking stick; I need it.”

 “Hogwash, hand it over.”

The super-Jedi level of advanced altruism is when you do a kindly act and don’t get found out. Like no one is allowed to know about it. Now, that is hard. God, I thought keeping my mantra secret was a challenge; try doing something generous and kind and not telling anyone—even your boyfriend or your mum. It’s like knowing George Michael was gay in 1986 or that Kennedy was murdered by the Secret Service in 1963—you want to scream it from a grassy knoll outside the Club Tropicana.

If you tell anyone, it doesn’t count. God, it’s tough. The other practical measure you can take is to make amends when you inevitably do something wrong. If you’re rude or if you hurt someone’s feelings, you have to apologize. I often get impatient. Impatience means I think, or my ego thinks, that it knows how the world should be running and wants to impose its will.

My impatience can flare up in any situation. When I’m stuck in traffic I can quickly sever my connection to serenity and become a senselessly fuming impotent Hulk. The infuriating sense that my environment isn’t behaving how it’s supposed to is a kind of mental illness. The belief that my anger can influence the flow of cars up Shaftsbury Avenue is insanity. That is a very simple demonstration of how I voluntarily enter into a negative illusion. I become an impotent fury; the only people affected by my emotions are myself and the people with me, unless I allow them to contaminate the world further by winding down the window. To have the presence of mind to acknowledge that my only power in this situation is the power to make the situation worse.

I checked into a hotel the other day. I had a belief that the process of administering a key should happen more quickly than it was actually happening. I began to become hot and fast and flustered. I started to impose my will on the people working at the hotel.

As this is happening, there is a silent presence in me that knows my conduct is not cool, that I have moved out of alignment with my principles, that I have become defective. The presence also knows that it will be the one that has to come back downstairs to the hotel lobby later and apologize for being impolite and impatient. For now, though, this presence is tethered and very much a breathy backing vocal, drowned out by the bombastic lead singer, who is saying stuff that is hard to own. “Just use a skeleton key to get me to the room and then do the admin later, and I’ll sign when I next pass through.”

The backing vocal is in this moment just a passenger but knows this behavior is arrogant, that this is not the man I have worked hard to become, that temporarily, arrogant Russell has seized control of the steering wheel and is trying to do as much damage as he can before he’s pulled over. Even whilst I’m administering haughty admonishments, the secondary, recently acquired, more awakened aspect of my being is preparing to apologize. Of course, the aim is to reach the point where I can fully contain the drama, where my defective conduct doesn’t leak out into other people’s lives. I reckon 80 percent of my madness is caught at the gateway to the outside world, which I suppose is my mouth. Before, when I drank and used drugs, I had no ability to refine my madness and it would bleed, unfiltered, across the blank day. The drink and drugs are in effect tools to anesthetize the impetus to act destructively and the pain caused as a consequence.

When drugs and alcohol and other compulsive behaviors are removed, you can address the problems that lead to their use. When you have an understanding of those behaviors and some techniques to help you when you inevitably err, it is possible to develop a different conscious experience through prayer and meditation.

read the book

Ballantine Books

www.russellbrand.com