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 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 musings 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 X Factor, 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, th
e 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.
Fairfield, Iowa, a community built round an ideal and a pair of tin boobs, provided me with sanctuary when I was writing Booky Wook 2. We stayed in one of the serene cottages that satellite out from the orbs. Bob Roth gave us daily meditation lessons and took us round the educational institutes, which are central to the community. There was a university and several schools catering to kids of all ages, and they seemed to me pretty typical, except twice daily the kids would break and meditate.
I meditated with the kids and it was lovely. I was surprised, though, when I chatted to a group of them, that their ambitions for later life, which is one of the mandatory routes of inquiry open for an adult quizzing strange children, along with “How’s school?” and “Are you courting?,” were utterly in synch with those of any teenagers: They all wanted to be famous. The ambience of serenity and access to a realm of inner peace, a daily connection to the source of all phenomena, hadn’t alleviated the yearning to strut about on stage in glittery leggings. Of course these kids were smart enough to dress it up in fancy notions of art and humanitarianism—we can all do that: “I’m going on Britain’s Got Talent to end the horror of landmines”—but it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that inner peace does not exempt you from the tractor beam of pop culture. Only one kid wanted to be a scientist, and I’m pretty sure he was Japanese. Thinking about it, Lakeside had a sort of dome bit at the center, like a mammary-gland conservatory, an augmented bust on an eroticized Statue of Liberty. Are humans really so geometrically rudimentary? Like ducklings waddling along after our first nutritional kick?
I’m certainly not condemning Fairfield—it has a lot going for it, and an aspiration to place spirituality at the core of the human experience, more than all else, is integral to our survival.
Perhaps it’s like communism in the traditionally understood sense: It must be absolute; it can’t survive in an adversarial context, continually bombarded with oppositional consumer messaging. Those Fairfield kids with their stardust dreams are like pre-glasnost Moscow teens craving blue jeans and Big Macs.
One night a couple of college girls came to the house while me and Nik were sleeping, to flirt with us. We awoke to see them, youthful and hopeful on the veranda. I was engaged at the time and had to turn them away due to a moral code. We watched them leave, dopily incensed by our angelic chastity, the way a dog watches distant sheep, doleful with swaddled instinct. We comprise the high ideals of the meditators and the earthly yearnings of the indigenous farm folk, for whom I noted (from posters about the town) a traveling cage-fighting contest was a forthcoming attraction.
13
Spider-Man On Line One
THE OFT-TROTTED-OUT NATIVE AMERICAN PARABLE SEEMS APPOSITE here. It goes, “Each of us has two dogs in us, a black one and a white one.” This is clearly metaphorical; don’t get caught up in the old-lady-who-swallowed-a-fly anatomical improbability of the setup. Or the stock folk-tale assumption that black is negative and white positive, otherwise we’ll be here all day and will never get to the point of the story.
If I was an Iroquois tribal witch doctor and you started quizzing me on the visual grammar of my fable, I’d slip you a herb to make you impotent or just whack you with my tomahawk.
“The two dogs are vying for dominance,” the tale continues.
“Which one wins?” asks the necessarily cooperative recipient of the lesson.
“The one I feed,” is the sage conclusion.
There are two Fairfields, as surely as we have multiple potential selves; the dominant ideology will likely be the one that’s the focus of the most energy.
The subversion or coalescence with this corporeal, prior culture is the most obvious challenge we face in trying to bring about a truly different human experience. This is the nexus: Do you want to learn how to unify your individual field of consciousness with a realm of bliss and tranquillity, or do you want to lie spread-eagled and drooling on crystal while Taylor Swift tickles your brain into a saccharine coma?
My only qualification for proselytizing is my ardent pursuit of the latter option and eventual acceptance of the former. I suppose we must each ask of ourselves—or each other, have fun with it, it could be a quiz—two fundamental questions: 1. Are you happy with things the way they are? And 2. Do you believe that things could be better?
I know most people want change. I know most people can’t be happy with the current regime, not least because, in any electoral process worth having, we might assume that the 3.5 billion people that have as much wealth collectively as the 85 people on the increasingly clammy, fast-moving, unsustainable fun bus would vote for a fairer system.
Surely the remaining 3.5 billion earthlings, minus the 85 fun bustards and their relatives, are up for some amendments an’ all. I just used the calculator on my phone to subtract 85 from 3.5 billion, and the answer had a letter in it. It did, it had a letter “e” in it.
Even the calculator has gone berserk at this injustice.
That aside, I think a significant number of people are not happy with the way things are; I’m not, and I’ve done alright out of this system—I’ve got a big house, a nice cat, and when I write books, they’re immediately put on the school curriculum. So this system has not been bad to me. I’ve been given everything that I wanted. The problem is, I didn’t really want it, that desire was put there. Who put it there? And why?
And why doesn’t it work? Do you remember when Haiti had that earthquake? You probably don’t, you self-centered swine, and if you do I bet it’s because of the star-spangled telethon that came in its wake.
The telethon is a near-permanent fixture in our culture and in a way the perfect concoction for a society that wants to release hot little farts of compassion but without wanting to ever actually follow through.
I have done a fair bit of that stuff, like Comic Relief in the UK, and I was invited to participate in this grotesquely beautiful effort to provide aid for the victims of the 2010 Haiti disaster by George Clooney and was instantly told by someone at the agency that attendance was mandatory as it was a good career opportunity. Which I’m sure, as much as the rice and antibiotics, soothed the displaced Haitians. “I’m sorry you lost your house and leg and dog and daughter—here’s some medicine that was purchased in the most glamorous way imaginable, in a format that’s given some Hollywood newcomers a real chance to shine.” George Clooney obviously set up this event with the best of intentions, with incredible effort, using his visibility and luminance to draw attention to the vital need for humanitarian aid. Clearly no one would condemn him for this kindness. It is just unfortunate that when philanthropy meets the machinery of celebrity, it acquires such an unpleasing hue.
The reason this event was spectacular in the crowded marketplace of televised benefits was because of the sheer density of stars. It was obscene. Like fame porn. As I nervously shuttled through security, like a first-day intern into the CBS studios, I was so overwhelmed by the frequency of famous faces in an enclosed space that I almost exploded. If I had’ve done it would have dramatically reconfigured the firmament of popular entertainment and been so newsworthy that it would’ve dwarfed the earthquake we were nominally there to redress. What is this tenuous equation between fame and tragedy?
What
celestial matchmaker has slung together these mismatched phenomena? Fame to treat famine; fame to treat poverty; fame to take the boredom away. An implausible coupling that advances the benefactor more than the beneficiary. A panacea for a sickness that we feed as we claim to treat it. A snake-oil cure for a reptilian nation. Still, I went anyway; as I say, it was a good opportunity.
I’m glad I went too, it was like Madame Tussauds after a visit from a wizard. I was instructed that under no circumstances was I to be late—this was a compassion party for the glitterati, and lateness was not an option. At no point in the administrative process that preceded my attendance was there a whiff, hint, or mention of the people of Haiti. It appalls me to confess that I don’t recall having any actual connection with the reality of the situation, that a natural disaster had sent a nation spiraling into chaos, disarray, and tragedy. In my head it was kind of like I was a last-minute replacement for the best man at George Clooney’s wedding and had to get to the venue on time at all costs. Which sounds a bit like the plot of a film he’d be in.
I’m not pointing the finger at anyone else, by the way; they may all have been there with the noblest intent. I can’t imagine that Robert De Niro was there to hobnob and network. I’m prepared to accept sole responsibility for this hollowness and duplicity; perhaps it was just me that had no visceral human connection to the suffering. Actually, though, isn’t that what these telethons are for? Not to actualize the disaster, to make it real, feel it, process it, and resolve it, but to remove it, package it, give it a framework that is manageable somehow.
Yes, the tectonic plates are colliding and humanity is tumbling into the magma at the earth’s core, but don’t worry, we’ve got Leonardo DiCaprio on line 1.
If you’re lucky, you get Leo or De Niro or Pacino or Daniel Day-Lewis or J-Lo or Brangelina.
Revolution Page 14
