“If you go through the doorway too fast and you’re not ready for it, you’re bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness. You may land anywhere and lots of people end up in mental hospitals. The reason is that they went through the door with their ego on.” Baba Ram Dass
(Click covers for links)
“You can only protest effectively when you love the person whose ideas you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.” (Baba Ram Dass)
“Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other — male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often do I. But none of us can do anything about it.” (James Baldwin)
“You can only protest effectively when you love the person whose ideas you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.” (Baba Ram Dass)
“Who knows, the world might wake up and burst into a beautiful flower.” (Jack Kerouac)
(I posted a version on of this entry as an amazon review of Russell Brand’s Revolution.)
A Poli Sci dissertation by a Punk Rock Ram Dass, a mash-up of anarchy and idealism, Revolution is the perfect book for the next generation of hippie waifs. Russell Brand, self-identified “professional weirdo” (169), touches on all the key points. Late capitalism and the culture of consumption are dying. The top dogs are as “lost” as the rest of us (232). “Ecological imperatives” (207) spell radical change coming, but whether that change is utopic or dystopic is up to us. Either we have a revolution that reinforces human values for all, or we have “something more draconian than we have ever dared to consider” (224). To seize the utopic track, we must initiate the revolution not in the objective arena of politics but in the subjective arena of human sensibility. Internalize the non-violent way, change our inner values, and then we can more surely change the political superstructure with less risk of someone hijacking the revolution.
And best to be ready, ‘cause when it comes it will come quickly. For one thing, those ecological imperatives come with a time limit. As it approaches, we can use new communication technologies to harness rapid change without the need for a centralized power structure. Or we can use them to escalate the death spiral of “jittery materialism” (106). Russell, bless his heart, is ready to give up his Dior boots and lead the charge.
The book has its imperfections – Russell is occasionally too earnest too long and scores best when he scores with hilarity, I wish there were more arc and less repetition as the chapters go by, and there’s a persistent low-level tone of belligerence that gives me pause before nominating Russell as cult leader of the commune. Actually, Russell grants me that last one when he opens a modern equivalent of Haight-Ashbury’s “free store” and his tyrannical interference leads him to conclude, with typical comic aplomb, that “the only thing the experiment proved is that I should never be allowed to run a shop” (203). But that very flaw leads him to think seriously about the principles that must take precedence over personalities if this is going to work (and if it doesn’t work, we will fairly quickly burn through the world’s remaining resources, so it won’t matter anyway). Yes, I said “to think seriously.” This book quite seriously thinks over our options for the planet. I can’t agree with every local strategy and assessment, but anyone who dismisses Russell Brand as a lightweight on issues of the social order is either making a mistake or buying into the idea that the only proper way to speak of such things is the Establishment way. Skinny yes, lightweight no. Everyone needs a vision, or multiple visions, of where to go from here (and we have to go somewhere – those “ecological imperatives,” you know), and this is a good big-vision, page-turner book delivered with the quirky, English, Monty Python wit of Russell Brand.
See also Russell Brand and Me.
These are selected re-posts of my Facebook status quotations, but some of you may recognize the title nod to William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, so I’ll start with a quote from that fine work:
“Man has no Body distinct from his Soul: for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age” (Blake)
“Break a rule when it doesn’t work” (Chicago Manual of Style)
“Who knows, the world might wake up and burst into a beautiful flower” (Jack Kerouac)
“Set your heart upon your work, but never on its reward” (Bhagavad-Gita)
“Christ is God externalized” (Karl Marx)
“Forge of blue metal, nights of still combats / my heart revolves like a crazy wheel” (Neruda)
“Where there is no echo … there is only silence” (Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves)
“The sea is like music; it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over” (Jung’s letters)
“The lights of the impure, illusory six realms will shine: the soft white light of the gods, the soft red light of the jealous gods, the soft blue light of human beings, the soft yellow light of the hungry ghosts, and the soft smoky light of hell-beings. These six will shine together with the pure light-rays of the four wisdoms. At that moment do not grasp or be attracted to any of them, but stay relaxed in a state free from thought.” (Tibetan Book of the Dead)
“You can only protest effectively when you love the person whose ideas you are protesting against as much as you love yourself” (Baba Ram Dass)
When you look into your hand, you can see thousands of generations before you and thousands of generations after you … All our ancestors and all future generations are present in us. Seeing this, we will know what to do and what not to do. (Thich Nhat Hahn)
“There is no way to peace; peace is the way” (A. J. Muste)
“Religion is like a banana skin. And spirituality the banana itself. The problem with this era is that people have thrown away the banana and are holding on tightly to the banana skin” (Sri Sri Ravi Shankar)
“When the average American senior is squeaking by on only $19,000, we shouldn’t be subsidizing millionaires’ yachts with $140,000 in tax breaks every year” (Congressional Asian Pacific Caucus Chairman Judy Chu)
“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”
(Henry David Thoreau)
“If you go through the doorway too fast and you’re not ready for it, you’re bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness. You may land anywhere and lots of people end up in mental hospitals. The reason is that they went through the door with their ego on.”
Baba Ram Dass
See also Psychosis and Enlightenment 2
shakemyheadhollow 