Authors: Russell Brand
I want to tell that eager berk toddling from Lakeside to the Westside to check his compass, lost in naïveté. I want to tell him to sit still and breathe and ask him: “Do you really think that the answer lies on the other side of Simon Cowell’s smile? Or in the fairground ride of lacquered pride that won’t change you inside?” He wouldn’t’ve listened, though: he was very determined. And very high on drugs.
If you can’t escape the system, you’ve got to escape from yourself. If you’re looking for God, for salvation, for a connection, for sanctuary from the cuckoo self incubating in you, and there’s no map, no guide, no story, no folk memory of how to get there, sooner or later you’ll pick up a bottle, a pipe, or a brick.
In Maslow’s pyramid of needs, Abraham Maslow demonstrates the hierarchy of human requirements, most basic at the bottom, in a diagram. If you ask me, putting people’s most basic requirements in a pyramid is bloody exclusive in the first place: They’re extremely difficult to build, only pharaohs are allowed in ’em, and Indiana Jones was very nearly killed trying to get the treasure out. If Maslow really wants people to have a better standard of living, he should’ve used a tree, or a Primark, or something a bit more affordable. If you look at the pyramid, you’ll see that our most basic needs are not being catered to. Housing is on the bottom tier, and there are plenty of people whose accomodation is insecure. By the time you reach the second tier—security of body, employment, resources, housing, and health—pretty much everyone is fucked. The remaining tiers outline important but less tangible requirements, like self-esteem and spiritual and familial connection. God knows who’s getting access to the penthouse floor of Maslow’s pyramid, probably just the Queen and the leaders of the illuminati; that’s probably where the bejeweled fun bus of privilege is taking them.
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 something 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.
J
OSEPH
C
AMPBELL SAID ALL THE PROBLEMS THAT WE ARE
experiencing—economic disparity, ecological meltdown, crime, alienation, atomization, war, starvation—are the result of us having no communal myth. A story that unites us, defines us, in relationship to ourselves, other people, and nature. Campbell says the myths that we do have are antiquated and irrelevant “desert myths.”
Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, the dominant faiths in our culture, were devised to guide people living in very different circumstances to our own—put simply, deserts. How do the teachings of Christ or Abraham or Muhammed help us in the modern, postindustrial, secular world? Not to say these stories are totally obsolete; there’s some terrific advice in all of them. Primarily, though, they have become tools for oppression, segregation, and conflict. The aspects of these ideologies that testify against oppression, segregation, and conflict, which would seem to be the most vital bits, are consistently ignored.
Stripped of these myths altogether, though, what do we become? Where do we go? Without codes that emphasize our unity and the presence of a sacred consciousness, it seems that we become dominated by materialism and individualism.
Campbell said, “All religions are true in that the metaphor is true.” I think this means that religions are meant to be literary maps, not literal doctrines, a signpost to the unknowable, a hymn to the inconceivable.
Edward Slingerland is a professor of Asian Studies who studied at
Stanford. Stanford is most famous for “The Stanford Experiment,” where, in 1971 for a proposed two-week period, a group of male students were divided into prisoners and guards to perform a mocked-up prison experiment. The students took to their roles so passionately that after just six days the experiment had to be disbanded. Professor Zimbardo, who was in charge of the experiment and has a name that suggests he’d be better suited to a life as a circus ringmaster, made himself prison warden and totally lost his ability to observe proceedings neutrally and, like his guards, got totally wrapped up in running a tip-top prison. By the second day of the experiment, everyone involved had apparently forgotten they were at a top university and were carrying on like lunatics, administering psychological torture, going on hunger strikes, and locking folk up in solitary confinement. It was only when one of the guards’ girlfriends turned up to discover her previously affable fella had turned into a shades-wearing sadist, snarling like Lee Marvin, that the plug was pulled.
The experiment was supposed to demonstrate how quickly we accept the roles that are ascribed to us. It also demonstrated, however, that Professor Zimbardo was a bit of a loose cannon.
Edward Slingerland, then, studied the same university, which from one perspective is respectable and credible but from another is a bizarre thunderdome for crazy mind games. So I decide, when chatting to Slingerland, to remain objective and if at any point he tries to put me in an orange jumpsuit or tie me up and wee on me, to leg it.
Slingerland explains that Chinese philosophers like Confucius, Lao Tse, Zhuangzi, and a few others were concerned with accessing a state called Wu-Wei, pronounced “ooh-way.” This is a state of spontaneous flow. The ancient Chinese would use rituals and meditations to reach this state, and it was something that people were well into and were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve. The way I identified with Wu-Wei was through football. You often hear athletes talking about being “in the zone”—a state of unself-conscious concentration. In the World Cup, when England inevitably end up in a quarterfinal penalty shoot-out, I believe it is their
inability to access Wu-Wei that means the Germans win. (This was written prior to the 2014 World Cup, so my assumption that England would reach the quarterfinal has been exposed as hopelessly optimistic, but, look, I correctly predicted a German victory.)
If you are in a stadium with 80,000 screaming supporters and the hopes of a nation resting on the outcome of a penalty kick, you need to be focused, you need at that moment to be in a state of mind which is the result of great preparation but has total fluidity. Kind of like a self-induced trance where the body is free to act upon its training without the encumbrance of a neurotic mind. Stood in front of the keeper, the ball on the spot, you need to have access to all the preparation that has gone into perfecting the kick that will place the ball in the top right corner of the net. You cannot be thinking, “Oh, God, if I miss this they’ll burn effigies of me in Essex,” or “I think my wife is fucking another member of the team,” “My dad never loved me; I don’t deserve to score.”—those mental codes are an obstacle to success.
I once was a guest on
Match of the Day
, a British Premier League football-analysis show; before it began, I hung out with the host, ex-England hero Gary Lineker and pundit, and another ex-England hero, Alan Shearer. I chatted to the two men about their lives as top-level athletes and they both agreed that the most important component in their success had been mental strength, the ability to focus the mind, literally, in their case, on the goal, excluding all irrelevant, negative, or distracting information.
Both of those men have a quality that you can feel in their presence of focus and assuredness. Lineker is more superficially affable and Shearer more stern, but there is a shared certainty and connectedness to their physicality that is interesting. I am especially interested as I have never had that kind of physical confidence. My father and stepfather were both strong footballers, and as a child I must’ve received the message that the territory of sporting prowess was not mine to encroach. Without mentoring, training, or initiation, this remains unaddressed. The initiation of youth by elders is a vital social ritual which is widely neglected in secular culture.
When Campbell says, “We need relevant myths, guiding stories,” he is referring to structural apparatus like this.
I was a sensitive boy. Another word for sensitive is “aware”; this awareness requires structure, guidance, and direction, otherwise we cannot be certain what this sensitivity will become. My sensitivity became a kind of uncertainty. I still have anxieties about sport which are part of this early programming; the difference is that I now believe I can alter it. When I expressed my awe to the two England aces at their ability to be proficient under pressure, they replied, “What about you? You can go on stage in front of thousands of people and make them laugh—that’s much harder.” Through that observation I could understand how skills in one area could be transferred.
Before I go on stage or even on to a TV show, I prepare my mind, my consciousness. I repeat prayers, which, really, are linguistic codes that attune consciousness: words, mantras, vibrations to initiate neurological procedures. I treat the experience of going on stage, performing, as sacred. The origin of theater is in religion. There is a shamanism in performance. Don’t get me wrong, there doesn’t have to be; you can get up on stage in front of thousands of people and confirm things they already know, if you like, but it is an opportunity to bring down information from other realms, to induce a collective state.
“That’s a bit fuckin’ grandiose, ain’t it? Are you bringing down information from other realms when you’re talking about your willy at the Hammersmith Apollo? Were you trying to induce a state of transcendent consciousness when you left that message on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone?” Good point. There are definitely flaws in my nature and mistakes have been made, but I have observed that the more I have engaged with the transcendent, the more I have explored practices that are designed to alleviate the burden of materialism and individualism, the greater access I have to a feeling of serenity and freedom, the more I enjoy my work, the more I feel free. I think those techniques will work for anyone. I believe the techniques I have been taught to live drug-free, the
methods I have used to improve my work and relationships, will work for anyone who uses them and will release anyone from any behavior or pattern that impedes happiness—not just obvious stuff like drug addiction, but less-obvious stuff like food addiction, spending addiction, or caring-too-much-what-other-people-think-of-you addiction.
The stuff I learned in order to make me better at my job has taught me that my job doesn’t matter, that no individual job matters when compared to our common good. When we as individuals collectively access this frequency, we will realize that we have a shared destiny and that we can design a fair and rational system that does what it’s supposed to do: enhances the whole and respects the individual.
Wu-Wei, Slingerland explained, is usually accessed when in a state of relaxed concentration in pursuit of a higher purpose.
That doesn’t have to mean building an orphanage. I think the focus required to succeed in a penalty shoot-out is still an applicable example: when attuned to the objectives of the team and the supporters, an objective that transcends self, unencumbered by meddlesome individualistic concerns, you can achieve flow. When reflecting on the power that can be accessed by getting beyond the self, in the moment, it becomes apparent how prohibitive the concept of self is.
We are subject to a mass hypnosis and believe that our individual needs are more important and in conflict with our collective needs.
My friend Gareth has just returned from the 2014 FA Cup final; he is a fan of defeated finalists Hull City FC. In spite of the extra-time defeat, he talks excitedly of how fulfilling the experience was. What he is describing is how social codes and rituals can be used to create an identity that supersedes the concept of self with which we habitually connect.
Who are you really? Are you your name? The place you are from? The negative feelings you had as a child? The anxieties you have about your future? No, these are all conceptual. In this moment now, your name is not real, your relationships are irrelevant, and, most important, your thoughts—all your thoughts—are secondary.
In my mind, even as I type and adhere to the metaphorical codes of language, there is another awareness. A distinct awareness. An awareness beyond, behind, and around those incessant thoughts. Whilst some other inaccessible aspect of my being keeps my heart pumping, produces digestive enzymes, makes the muscles in my fingers spasm according to the precise qwerty ballet, there is awareness. This awareness is often neglected in favor of fear and regret or projected need.