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.
The problem I anticipated of re-entering a more normal tone of social interaction does not manifest. No one seems remotely bothered. I suppose to them it’s normal and their ritual can withstand various pitches. A few people want photos or whatever: the little girl, Carlton, Tall Bloke, who is called Julian and who, when he switches from Amharic to English, is actually bloody charming.
As I leave, I feel the value of shared ritual, community, common unity, and a forum in which to express energy and sensations that don’t have any safe context in secular society. We are paying a price for that. Where do we see this sense of abandon? Where do we participate in mass rituals of unity and transcendence? Where is it safe to put aside ego and self-consciousness? Anfield? Old Trafford? Upton Park?
Here in these aluminum coliseums, there is license to vent. For me, football is fused with fear and manhood and violence but also with craving, belonging, and hope. It usually takes until about halftime before I am even half relaxed. At first I am self-conscious, too aware of myself and my boundaries, real and imagined, to submerge. By staring into the lawn portal, by yielding to the rhythm of the chant, the drama of the game, the acceptance of the temporary order of the rules, and the end-to-end chaos within it, I become hypnotized.
Where are we relieved from the bean counting, box ticking, horizonless mute-horror of our technological gulags? Leicester town center, midnight, midwinter, drink some cider, get inside her. Two for one, in the Sun, Eng-ger-land. Do a gram, drop a pill, download an app, eat some crap, get a slap, mind the gap, do a line, Instagram, little grope in a cab.
6
Tiny Problems In Infinite Space
WHEN I STILL USED, I WAS ONCE WORKING IN IBIZA, HEDONISM capital of the nineties and the turn of the millennium. People swayed in sweaty swathes and stayed, pilled-up for days. I couldn’t participate, because I was too shy or broken, caught on some taut barbed wire in my mind. Me and my mate Matt, high one night, lost ourselves, found ourselves in a wood and pretended to be animals. It was just us, and we prowled and circled around. We locked eyes and growled and danced. “Let’s pretend we’re animals” was forgotten, and we were animals.
We are animals. We are free animals with a divine spark, we’re not in a farm or a zoo or a theme park, we’re free. We’ve forgotten that we’re free. There’s so much to do, so much on TV, that we’ve forgotten that we’re free.
No rituals or myths that remind us that we have a shared destiny and shared needs, even if our shared destiny is death and our shared need is life. We have downloaded a program with a virus in it. We’ve been boxed off and ripped off.
Terence McKenna, the philosopher–shaman fella, said the all-encompassing stance of conventional science is “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.”
That one miracle is the spontaneous appearance of all matter, energy, phenomena, consciousness, and rules in a single instant, which was preceded by and is surrounded by nothingness. This is the theory of the Big Bang.
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.
I believe that the mechanical model for understanding nature is a metaphor that science has got stuck on: this prevailing idea that humans are machines, biological robots with computer-like brains. This belief will, to the advanced
species that we are evolving into, seem as absurd as the flat-earth theories that we scoff at now.
Those flat-earth folk weren’t just pretending they thought the earth was flat, they genuinely believed it. They looked down at the flat ground and its flat appearance and took that as empirical evidence of its flatness. They could not conceive of another way of seeing it.
Left to me, the flat-earth theory would still be dominant. I’ve never been to space and seen the earth’s curvature; I’ve seen pictures of the spherical earth placed in the context of our solar system or spinning like a misty marble in the blackness, but I can’t say for sure what it looks like from space, because I’m standing on it. It took a new emergent strain of understanding that challenged the dogma of the time to re-contextualize the way we see our planet.
The time we live in now is similar, because the mechanistic, reductive dogma of “scientism”—the belief that everything in the world can be explained using the scientific method—is about to be similarly overthrown. There are just too many questions unanswered and unanswerable. Consciousness, the consciousness that is now experiencing these words, has no explanation in science. Scientists believe that matter has no consciousness and that consciousness comes from matter, that 70 percent of the universe is made from dark matter, although they don’t know what that is, what it does or anything. Just that it’s there.
Science requires faith, the way religion does. Science requires acceptance of metaphor, just the way religion does. “Does science cause wars, the way religion does?” you might ask. I would say those conflicts are actually about territory, either ideological or physical, and that those ideas are materialistic in the same way science is—and the weapons with which those wars are fought, who creates those?
I’m not condemning the process of gathering and testing information to advance our understanding of our environment—that is plainly a useful human tool. What I query is this pragmatic system of research being allowed to invade territories for which it was not designed to cater.
An astronomer once explained to me that the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, is vast, too vast to be understood without metaphor, so he gave me one. He said if you picture the Milky Way as being the size of mainland Europe, our solar system—that’s Mars, Venus, Saturn, us here on Earth (you remember from school)—in a Milky Way the size of Europe our solar system would fit inside a single teacup somewhere in Belgium. He paused for my amazement, which I duly offered.
But really what can you say?
“Ooh, a teacup.”
“Blimey, Belgium.”
“Cor, it makes you think, doesn’t it?”
Then he added, clearly sensing I was at a bit of a loss for words, having just been reduced to a dot on a speck in a teacup in a continent: “Russell, there are 400 million KNOWN galaxies in our universe.”
I’d been looking through a telescope at Jupiter (or what we call Jupiter; it can’t possibly know it’s called that any more than a newborn baby can know whether it’s a Christian or a Muslim), Jupiter is orbited by four moons. What struck me as I looked at Jupiter, 370 million miles away, in perfect suspension, with the moons visibly revolving, was not the might of this planet, which the Romans took to be the king of their gods, but its elegant fragility. The awe. Whatever you are doing, Jupiter and its moons are up there, silent or roaring, observing or ignoring, connected through time and light and an unbreakable chain of subatomic threads.
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, the moon that hung in the sky when Christ was crucified, the crescent moon, like a tear in heaven as the Prophet heard Allah. As Carl Sagan said, all human history, every poem, every lie, all here on this sphere.
What am I, a small creature measuring seven spans of my own hand? I am enclosed in a potlike universe composed of material nature, the total material energy, false ego, ether, air, water and earth. And what is Your glory? Unlimited universes pass through the pores of Your body just as particles of dust pass through the openings of a screened window.
(Bhagavata Purana 10.14.11)
It is perhaps because of passages like the one above that Joseph Campbell favored Hindu and pre-Hindu mythology as an efficient tool to convey important stories. Clearly this passage is poetic, philosophical, and attempting to explain a mystery which now has been colonized by materialistic thinking. I also wonder whether “seven hand spans” is a normal height. I’ve been trying to measure myself using this technique but am always hijacked at the groin.
The American poet and feminist Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is not made of atoms, it’s made of stories.” I suppose what that implies is that atoms are themselves a metaphor, a symbol, a tool for telling a story. They were only temporarily the zenith of our understanding; they have already been surpassed in the spiraling journey down into the microcosmic by quarks.
What mayhem too lives in that tiny world where electrons appear simultaneously in the same place—not different electrons, the same electron. Where electrons will behave as either particles or waves, depending on whether or not they are being observed. I don’t want to seem ungrateful to science—science, after all, is what has provided me with this story—but now is the time to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
The ideological battle that needed to be fought against repressive orthodoxy, bigoted institutions, and repressive religions can now be won. For it not to be futile, we must overcome similar dogma now in the field of science.
A person experiences life as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. Our task must be to free ourselves from this self-imposed prison, and through compassion, to find the reality of Oneness.
(Albert Einstein)
That bed-headed genius was on to something: We need to focus on relevant truths, the truths that will aid our survival. Not the temporary truth that we are dislocated, mechanical blobs motivated by our cocks and our guts.
We must promote the pertinent truths, the way that bigoted Republicans have Frankensteined the perfect Christ for their cause. Their Jesus has pulled off one miracle further to those documented by becoming some sort of gun-toting, homophobic, Rasputined-up Donald Trump.
Bible Jesus, who, let’s face it, has probably been through several prejudicial edits to reach the King James whitewashed version, is still a considerable theological distance from the vicious prick that them lot are so into.
For a kick-off, he doesn’t give a toss about sex or pushing misogyny or homophobia. He in fact seems much more interested in the corruptive power of money: “Give to the poor and receive treasure in heaven.”
Jesus is pretty committed to sharing. Also, as we know, it’s the moneylenders that Jesus kicks out of the temple: “This is my Father’s house and you have turned it into a den of thieves.” It’s the only time Jesus got really wound up. Even when he was being unjustly nailed to a cross, he stayed mellow; when the crowd, given the chance to pardon one of the convicts up for crucifixion, chose Barabbas, a known crook, Jesus took it on the chin. The only time he ever let himself go and knocked over tables was when the financial industry were prioritized over normal people.
It wasn’t gays he kicked out of the temple: “This is my Father’s house and you have turned it into a gay bar.” The gays were fine; Jesus had no policy on sex.
I met some members of the Westboro Baptist Church once, and they were alr
ight. It was like they knew they were being silly. I had them on a chat show I was doing in America. I felt like I could’ve gone, “Come on, lads, you don’t really believe that God hates fags, do you?” and they’d’ve gone, “Of course not, don’t be daft, we’re just having a bit of fun.”
The promotion of homophobia to priority status on the Lord’s behalf takes some doing. The scriptural evidence that he gave a toss is scant. It seems to me that a lot of people are using religious arguments to advance their own prejudices. I don’t think these preachers of hate and mad mullahs and whatnot were one day reading their doctrine of choice in a sanguine mood, aglow with joy and tolerance, when they happened upon a verse of bigoted scripture. “Bloody hell! I was inclined to quite like the gays—my cousin is one—but look! Here in Leviticus it quite clearly states, ‘Don’t lie down with another man.’ Well, that’s that.”
Clearly prejudice is a permutation of some psychological fear, later mandated by convenient evidence from the book. If God appeared tomorrow and said he’d changed his mind, would homophobia disappear? You’d think if God was that bothered about homosexuality, he’d’ve mentioned it in his top-ten do’s and don’ts, The Ten Commandments—it’s not in there.
From a biblical perspective, homosexuality is not considered as transgressive as the tenth commandment, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s oxen.”
If he’d considered it that important, he could’ve added a commandment—I mean, he is God, he doesn’t have to stick to decimal neatness. He could just go, “Oh yeah, number eleven is ‘Don’t be gay.’ ” Or let the whole oxen thing fall by the wayside.
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