Revolution (15 page)

These social valves prevent uprising and a permanent reordering of social hierarchies. In mass demonstrations, I feel that trickster spirit surge. The people are sick of sausages and are coming for your steak. Not me—I’m vegetarian. I prefer the playful spirit of Hermes in protest, regardless of how serious the objectives, as piety and solemnity are tyrants too, oppressing ludic joy.

When up against the wall of police shields, when you’ve been well kettled—that means herded—you’re face-to-face with your oppressor. Or, rather, the guardians of order. The oppressors are
miles away, at Whitehall, or Wall Street, or at a Bilderberg meeting; the men and women who hold the shields are people like us, same fears, desires, accents. They just have a costume and a few months’ training at Hendon Police College under their belt.

Human beings, who want the best for their families. David Cameron said, in a rare foray into compassion, “Hug a hoodie.” He was right—we should. We should also cuddle a copper. Was that a bit “Yeah, man,” a bit reductive? It will be: The solution will not be rarefied, the Revolution will be televised, and it will be easy and based on simple things, like interconnectivity and union. Or love.

I’m still reeling from citing David Cameron, but actually he’s a human too, isn’t he? Strip away the Bullingdon balderdash and the Blairy gesticulations and he’s a bloke, with kids and a wife and a God, sporadically, and a day that he will die and people that will cry.

It’s not that we want an old-style Revolution of guillotines and gulags and big fancy show trials, it’s actually a powerful but gentle process where we align to a new frequency. A social recalibration. We don’t want to replace Cameron with another leader—the position of leader elevates a particular set of behaviors.

My mate Nik said the first act after a successful Revolution should be the execution of its leaders. Brutal, but smart. What he means is the type of people that lead Revolutions have tendencies that could become corrosive in a position of power. We have to overthrow systems, inner and outer. We have to overthrow the David Cameron in our head. We can also overthrow the literal one—that will be more fun.

Sometimes, when I’m casually condemning “them,” the politicians, the Halliburtons, the media, the Bilderberg regulars, the presumed illuminati, I pause to consider my own conduct. Am I just a less efficient tyrant confined to the sphere of my own little life? The fact is I am sometimes a bit. I worry that my flaws, broadcast on a global stage, would bring about a tyranny not dissimilar to the one we’re trying to replace.

My own defects of character, if not addressed by a spiritual program,
would make me as toxic as Rupert Murdoch or Hitler.
*
The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said (and please don’t be intimidated by the inclusion of such an esoteric reference; in fifteen seconds you’ll have read as much of his work as I have) “The dividing line between good and evil cuts through every human heart.”

We all have dualistic and dueling intentions. This is why systems are more important than individuals and the ideals we promote more important still. It’s also why David Graeber—remember him over there on the other side of that New Orleans anecdote that rolled by like the Mississippi?—believes that we must be wary of concentrated power, even if the intention is to bring about a fair and self-governing society.

“I think one thing we’ve learned is that creating more-centralized power to be able to start a process which is supposed to eventually lead to less-centralized power always backfires,” he said.

I feel the manner in which we construct our social organizations is integral. Rather than just eradicating the systems, we could also consider adjusting them to authentically fulfill their stated roles.

A Member of Parliament or a congressman is supposed to represent us. That means they convey our collective will. That is not what is currently happening.

The police force in America pledge to “protect and serve.” That would actually be dandy if it were happening. Bill Hicks used to joke that he’d like to hijack a typically unpunctual plane and force it to go to its scheduled destination on time.

David Graeber said the radical alternative that we should be aiming towards is “democracy,” because whatever it is that we’re toiling under now, it is not democracy.

Democracy means if enough people want a fairer society, with
more sharing, well-supported institutions, and less exploitation by organizations that do not contribute, then their elected representatives will ensure that it is enacted. I suppose that corruption by definition is a deviation, a perversion from the intended path.

We know that’s not what’s happening, don’t we? We know, for example, that the dismantling and privatization of the National Health Service is not for the benefit of us, the people who use it.

It benefits the government that proposed it and the companies that are purchasing it. Nobody voted for that, because nobody would be stupid enough to give us the option.

This troubles me not intellectually but spiritually. Spirituality ought not to be ethereal or insubstantial but pragmatic and active.

The reason I feel optimistic in such a superficially gloomy and apocalyptic climate is I know that there are wonderful possibilities for our species that we are only just beginning to reconsider.

When the physicist speaks of the expanding universe with atheistic wonder, he is feeling the same transcendent pull that Rumi describes:

Rumi was a Sufi mystic, though I imagine if you don’t know who Rumi was, the addition of the definition “Sufi mystic” isn’t tremendously helpful.

“Who is Alan Devonshire?”

“He had a great left peg but dodgy knees.”

“Oh. Thank you for clarifying.”

The manifest world is telling us what to do, with increasingly obvious signals; we need only look at our codes. Symptoms are signals. We are becoming through technology increasingly adept at
reading and responding to signals; alas, due to the perverse prevailing ideology, we are ignoring the most important messages.

The people that currently have power are tuned in on the wrong side of Solzhenitsyn’s line, temporarily forgetting that they are divinely connected. Hence ecological meltdown. The obvious signals that we need to switch to different energy systems are being ignored because they’re watching another channel, where the moot, outdated signal of individualistic self-advancement is being bombastically broadcast. Now is the time to change channels.

Where now can we feel this connection in our pre-packed and prescriptive lives? When are we supposed to have time amidst the deadening thud of our futile duties?

“You’ll find God among the poor,” they say. Is that true anymore?

Is the connection between poverty and divinity simply a panacea for the world’s destitute, an assurance that they’ll be rewarded in the hereafter? Or does a material deficit provide space for God?

My love of God elevates the intention of this book beyond the dry and admirable establishment of collectivized communities.

I am enraptured by the magnetic pull of evolution: What is this energy that heals the body and escalates one cell to two, that repairs and creates and calculates in harmony with environment, outside of time? Where is evolution trying to go? Evolutionary psychologists would likely say the imposition of an anthropocentric concept like “trying” or “intending” is naïve, but I’m not going to ask one, they get enough airtime, the killjoys.

I remain uncharmed by the incessant rationalization that requires the spirit’s capitulation.

The infusion of the scientific with the philosophical is materialism. The manifesto for our salvation is not in this sparse itinerary.

This all encompassing realm, this consciousness beyond mind, cannot be captured with language any more than you can appreciate Caravaggio by licking the canvas or Mozart by sniffing the notes on a staff.

The Transcendental Meditation Foundation, which taught me to
meditate, conducted an experiment in Washington to evaluate the effects of concentrated meditation on that city’s crime figures. They got a group of people, ranging from a few hundred to a thousand, to meditate in a hotel, to see if this would impact the behavior of the wider community. From a cynical perspective, it was a bold experiment to embark upon. Why would a bunch of … I’m going to assume hippies, sitting still in a room thinking a word change the way a criminal outside in Washington would behave? In fact who funded this madness? It makes no material sense. “We are living in a material world and I am a material girl,” sang Madonna. And she’s right, it is and she is.

Quantum physicist John Hagelin was one of the scientists behind this experiment. I’ve chatted to him about meditation and asked for neurological data that advances meditation beyond an esoteric practice for bearded wizards in the Himalayas. Transcendental Meditation, though, was actually brought to the West by a bearded wizard from the Himalayas. Known as the Maharishi, you might recognize him from “the sixties,” when he was at the epicenter of a countercultural explosion, perched cross-legged on a flower-strewn stage with the Beatles.

The technique of TM that the Maharishi taught them is the type of meditation that I use. Hagelin describes it as a tool to get “beyond thought to the source of thought.” When scanned in a meditative state, the brain behaves in a tangibly distinct electrophysiological way. It’s a fourth state of consciousness. Awake, asleep, dreaming, and the meditative state.

There is some distance to traverse, according to conventional thinking, between meditation producing unusual brainwaves and crime falling in a major metropolis as a result of a group of people practicing it.

Over the course of the two-month experiment, crime fell by 23 percent. What’s more, the figure increased in tandem with the number of people practicing. John Hagelin said through meditation we can access “the unity beyond diversity.” That beyond the atomic, subatomic, nuclear, subnuclear, there is a unified field. The results
of this experiment suggest that if a significant proportion of a population regularly meditated it will affect consciousness—beyond the people involved.

Burglaries, street crime, and violence all fell as a result of the state of consciousness achieved by a group of people inwardly thinking a word until a state beyond thought was reached. That’s weird.

It is irrefutable proof that beyond the world that we can currently measure with tools as yet inept for such an advanced task, there is a connection between the apparently separate consciousness of individuals.

Consciousness exists beyond your head, between our heads, and it can manifest harmony.

That is perilously close to affirmation of a Higher Power. My experiences of meditation began before bearded pajama time, which a friend of mine is encouraging me to describe as a mental breakdown. I don’t think it was, as I would say that despair is a necessary ingredient of a breakdown. What did happen at the time of my divorce was that a lot of my beliefs and their outward manifestations fell away.

My marriage ended as a result of the kind of incompatibility recognizable to anyone who’s been through a break-up. Where mine may have differed is that my wedding and accompanying move to Los Angeles represented to me the crescendo of a particular type of thinking.

I, like a lot of people who come from somewhere glum, was trying to be something spectacular, always though with the subtly unabating knowledge, like an unaddressed itch, that change comes from within.

The myth of the genie and his wishes or the stories of Midas or Faust are all, I suppose, telling the same story: that you cannot outwardly acquire solutions.

Anyone as indoctrinated by capitalism as me will miss the point in those tales.

The Midas touch is still thought of as a positive thing as opposed to the “gift” of turning your wife into an inanimate lump of metal. The three genie wishes always lead to the hapless recipient slumped,
head in hands, lamenting, “I wish I’d appreciated things the way they were.” Sorry! No more wishes. Usually in these stories people wish for fame and fortune and sex and power, the things kids today want (maybe not the sex), fed on
Closer Weekly
or
Us Weekly
or whatever. It’s what I wanted.

These primary-colored, neon-lit goals are what a lot of people want, and they serve as a kind of psychological signpost that bluntly indicates “Away From Here.” The present isn’t good enough; the people in these magazines seem happy or at least heightened, their faces a papped mandala for the contemplation of the secular flock.

The Transcendental Meditation practitioners have established a community in Fairfield, Iowa, where they can live in accordance with the Vedic principles behind TM. It is most recognizable for its two iconic meditation domes, which loom like tranquil boobs plopped on to the pastoral view. I just turned myself on then; that can’t’ve been their intention.

The members of this community are attempting to inhabit a kind of utopia, to live now, in accordance with spiritual ideals, not to regard the ideal society as a tantalizing pipe dream forever out of reach but as a daily reality.

I shall tell you now and for no extra charge that “living in the present” seems to be the key component across every scripture, self-help book, and religious group I’ve encountered. To harmonize with life in each moment, not to make happiness contingent on any prospective condition.

Not to be tormented by the past but to live in the reality of “now,” all else being a mental construct.

Osho, Eckhart Tolle, Jesus, Buddha, Oprah—anyone who’s anyone who’s ever grown a beard or shaved their head or dropped out and looked back at the material world with a sage shake of the head, a knowing wag of the finger, and a beatific smile—are all saying “Snap out of it”; liberate yourself from the tyranny of egoic introspection.