Authors: Russell Brand
“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
L
ORD
—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.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit too self-conscious—well, selves-conscious, because there’s more than one of me in here—to just leap into full-force abandonment. I’ve got a too finely attuned sense of humor, I’m too English to blaze out onto a dance floor or altar and start flinging my limbs around. The second voice, the fearful me, is not going to stand for that. He’s in there perched on an ottoman, waiting for me to relax, and then with an intonation like
Terry-Thomas: “What on earth do you think you’re doing? I suggest you sit back down.” It’s hard to commit or join in with him in there. Bellamy has clearly overcome any doubt he has in his self, if not in me, as he is now insistently inquiring, “Do you accept Jesus Christ?” He says it in English, so he definitely knows I’m not Eritrean; the jig is up. “Do you accept Jesus Christ?” he says again, like Jesus is a credit card and I’m an unhelpful waiter.
The conditions of the inquiry do not suggest that there is time for me to go into my honest answer: “Yes, but there are caveats.”
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, sent to earth to redeem us all. Jesus Christ, the Jewish nationalist radical.
Jesus Christ, the metaphor for the divine within the corporeal. Jesus Christ, the human being superimposed, literally, placed on the cross: the pagan geometric emblem that represents on the vertical plane the relationship between the earthly and the divine and on the other, horizontal plane the lateral relationships between individual humans.
Christ as the end of paganism, the beginning of individualism, of idolatry. Of the acceptance that some humans are more equal than others. Christ as a reminder that we must all constantly die and be born again, moment to moment, to live forever in the now, if as Wittgenstein says, “eternity is taken not to be an infinite temporal duration but the quality of timelessness, then are we not all eternal if we live in the present.”
Christ as the symbol that the flesh is human, that the carnal human ape has expired, and that we can achieve no more until we transcend, until we ascend, into new conscious realms and manifest the divine. “On earth as it is in heaven”?
“Do you accept Jesus Christ?” he says again, and this time gives me a bit of a prod, which he tries to pass off as shamanic but I think is actually frustration. The answer, as I have outlined above, is conditionally “yes,” but the most expedient answer is a totally unconditional “yes,” so that is the answer I give.
“Yes.”
Bellamy wants more.
“Demon out!” he hollers, and grabs at my gut in a manner that in
any, literally any, other context would be totally unacceptable. I mean, he grabs a handful of my belly—I’m not fat, so he’s probably got some actual intestine an’ all—then he sort of twists it like an apple stalk. I’m torn between the respectful compliance required of a tourist, shock, and also curiosity, as the place he grabs is where, if asked to point, I would consistently locate my anxiety. Anxiety that is exacerbated by being grabbed in the guts in a church hall in Kensal Green.
When, at the umpteenth time of asking, in a voice as loud as I can muster, I admit that yes, I do accept Jesus, everyone cheers. They are well chuffed that I accept Jesus. I then shuffle back and take a seat, now less self-conscious and a little more entitled.
When the worship is at its peak, its wild, emphatic, orgiastic, juddering, shrieking, spasming peak, I wonder how will they ever climb down from this summit of selflessness. How will this animalistic holy frenzy segue into people shaking hands and stacking chairs?
At some Anglican sermon in Surrey, the “file-down-the-aisle, handshake-and-smile” ending is the energetic climax of proceedings. After a polite rendition of “Jerusalem” (in which Blake was apparently being sarcastic) or “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (which Stewart Lee breaks down beautifully), there isn’t a moment of postcoital awkwardness where everyone thinks, “Fuck me, we really let ourselves go there.” The hymns, the prayers, the sermon, and the departure never interrupt the frequency of neat obedience. That is, of course, the problem. I mean, what’s the point? If there is some omnipotent force behind all phenomena and we are trying to access it through our consciousness, then surely that can’t be done without breaking a sweat or ruffling some hair?
The lady I sit next to explains that the language is Amharic, that this is a community of Ethiopian and Eritrean people, that they are Christian. I’m invited to stand up and introduce myself; from the pulpit, before I stand to speak though it is announced by the pastor that I am famous.
Another bloke, it transpires, is also there for the first time and
feels compelled to admit apologetically that he isn’t famous, which makes me feel a bit sad.