WillowRaven

“When it comes to genius you have to separate a man's work from his hobbies.”
― Russell Brand

“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.”
― Russell Brand, Revolution

“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.”
― Russell Brand, Revolution

“That’s the problem with trying to be friends with Buddhists. They don’t get attached.”
― Russell Brand, Revolution