Russell Brand, UK comic commands revolution, daily Nonduality Highlights, Dustin LindenSmith: Rich Murray 2013.10.27
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Russell Brand, UK comic commands revolution, daily Nonduality Highlights, Dustin LindenSmith: Rich Murray 2013.10.27
 
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Russell Brand, UK comic commands revolution, daily Nonduality Highlights, Dustin LindenSmith: Rich Murray 2013.10.27 wicked rant... Brand’s interview with UK journalist Jeremy Paxman is here, and it’s worth watching in its entirety:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YR4CseY9pk 16 minutes
The Nonduality Highlights #5084 - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - Editor: Dustin LindenSmith 8:37 AM (11 hours ago)
Another video interview with Russell Brand has gone viral this week, to the point that even my own national Canadian newspaper, The Globe And Mail, has had one of its columnists, Elizabeth Renzetti, write about it in this piece called “Revolution may be a tired word, but Russell Brand has struck a chord”:
Renzetti correctly points out that if you’re above a certain age, you may not be likely to have seen the video in question, but that if you’re below a certain age, Brand’s comments strike directly at the heart of how disenfranchised, disillusioned, and excluded people feel from the current geo-political system.
She quotes an illustrative recent statistic that only 19% of Americans trust their federal government most of the time, compared with 75% fifty years ago. It would seem that most of us aside from the moneyed few -- the 1% of the 1% especially -- are completely disillusioned with the current system as it now stands. Comedian and political satirist Jon Stewart has won a poll as the most respected news source in America, and for one of the first times in my memory as a young 40-year-old, I am now seeing celebrities like Brand express opinions that used to be publicly held only by far left-wing environmental and social activists or spiritual teachers.
What I've noticed in the discussions that have ensued on my own Facebook posts on this topic is that people over a certain age have been quick to dismiss Brand’s ideas because they appear ( to them ) to lack specificity, concrete purpose or planning. But our friend Wayne Ferguson correctly pointed out the following in a recent dialogue he had with Jerry Katz:
It's unseemly [ to say the least ! -- ed. ] that we would spend a trillion dollars devastating the lives of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and we aren't willing to fund a single-payer health-care system in this country.
Russell Brand doesn't exactly know how this is going to unfold, but it is clear that the status quo won't do. He is much more aware of and sensitive to reality than the power elite that are only concerned with preserving and augmenting their well feathered nests.
Brand’s interview with UK journalist Jeremy Paxman is here, and it’s worth watching in its entirety: I have literally been moved to tears by several of the sentiments expressed in this interview, and also in the editorial piece that Brand has written for The New Statesman that inspired this interview in the first place. To wit:
The Agricultural Revolution took thousands of years, the Industrial Revolution took hundreds of years, the Technological Revolution took tens, the Spiritual Revolution has come and we have only an instant to act.
Now is the time to continue the great legacy of the left, in harmony with its implicit spiritual principles. Time may only be a human concept and therefore ultimately unreal, but what is irrefutably real is that this is the time for us to wake up.
The revolution of consciousness is a decision, decisions take a moment. In my mind the revolution has already begun. Brand had the opportunity to expand on these ideas in his piece in The New Statesman, below: From the preceding, here are just a few highlights: Capitalism is not real; it is an idea. America is not real; it is an idea that someone had ages ago. Britain, Christianity, Islam, karate, Wednesdays are all just ideas that we choose to believe in and very nice ideas they are, too, when they serve a purpose. These concepts, though, cannot be served to the detriment of actual reality.
The reality is we have a spherical ecosystem, suspended in, as far as we know, infinite space upon which there are billions of carbon-based life forms, of which we presume ourselves to be the most important, and a limited amount of resources.
The only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally serve the planet first, then all humanity. Not out of some woolly, bullshit tree-hugging piffle but because we live on it, currently without alternatives. This is why I believe we need a unifying and inclusive spiritual ideology: atheism and materialism atomise us and anchor us to one frequency of consciousness and inhibit necessary co-operation.
Brand also writes eloquently on the much broader historical context of our current paradigm: Suffering of this magnitude affects us all. We have become prisoners of comfort in the absence of meaning. A people without a unifying myth. Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, says our global problems are all due to the lack of relevant myths. That we are trying to sustain social cohesion using redundant ideologies devised for a population that lived in deserts millennia ago. What does it matter if 2,000 years ago Christ died on the cross and was resurrected if we are not constantly resurrected to the truth, anew, moment to moment? How is his transcendence relevant if we do not resurrect our consciousness from the deceased, moribund mind of our obsolete ideologies and align with our conditions?
The model of pre-Christian man has fulfilled its simian objectives. We have survived, we have created agriculture and cities. Now this version of man must be sacrificed that we can evolve beyond the reaches of the ape. These stories contain great clues to our survival when we release ourselves from literalism and superstition. What are ideologies other than a guide for life? Throughout paganism one finds stories that integrate our species with our environment to the benefit of both. The function and benefits of these belief matrixes have been lost, with good reason. They were socialist, egalitarian and integrated. If like the Celtic people we revered the rivers we would prioritise this sacred knowledge and curtail the attempts of any that sought to pollute the rivers. If like the Nordic people we believed the souls of our ancestors lived in the trees, this connection would make mass deforestation anathema. If like the native people of America we believed God was in the soil what would our intuitive response be to the implementation of fracking?
I find those last sentiments to be truly moving, and the reason why I highlight them in this issue of The Nonduality Highlights is because they attempt to transcend the status-quo narrative that so many individuals in the broader society are (perhaps mindlessly?) entrenched in.
Looking beyond "the story" to the unified nature of our reality is perhaps the most concrete "action" we can take in actualizing the nondual perspective. I continue to appreciate deeply such lucid and articulate expressions of this insight in the mainstream.
Proof that the message is getting out there is that Paxman's interview with Brand had just over a half-million views when I first watched it earlier this week, and it's now approaching 7 million.
Dustin within the fellowship of service, Rich Murray
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