What it felt to me was like the dissolution of my idea of myself. I felt like separateness evaporated. I felt this tremendous sense of oneness. I'm quite an erratic thinker, quite an adrenalized person, but through meditation, I found this beautiful serenity and selfless connection. My tendency towards selfishness, I felt that kind of exposed as a superficial and pointless perspective to have. I felt very relaxed, a sense of oneness. I felt love.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a transformative experience where the speaker discovers a deep sense of oneness and love through meditation, shedding a superficial sense of self.
In this quote, Russell Brand describes his profound experience during meditation, where he experienced the dissolution of his individual identity and a feeling of unity with everything around him. This moment of clarity allowed him to recognize the futility of his selfish tendencies, leading to a new understanding of love and connection. The transition from being an 'erratic thinker' to feeling 'beautiful serenity' signifies a significant personal transformation, highlighting the potential for inner peace that meditation can bring.
In practice
In a meditation workshop, someone could quote this to share their journey of self-discovery.
Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it's just the perceptions that we have are governed by people with self-interest and are not inalignment with the health and safety of us as individuals or as a planet.
Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'.
I've never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I've not been on other drugs as well. It's just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that's just life. I don't think of it as, "Ah, this is mental illness," more as, "Today, life makes me feel very sad." I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I'm able to utilize that.
I know that's the sort of thing people say and I really hate it when people say the sort of things people say. I always think, 'You don't mean that, you just think it sounds good.
Im happy to be a part of the conversation, if more young people are talking about fracking instead of twerking were heading in the right direction. The people that govern us dont want an active population who are politically engaged, they want passive consumers distracted by the spectacle of which I accept I am a part.
When I was poor and I complained about inequality they said I was bitter. Now I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm starting to think they just don't want to talk about inequality.
The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition.
God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?
Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge a priori, depends the existence or downfall of metaphysics.
The true cost to the world of a burger is far greater than the money you hand over to buy it.
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