Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

My whole life I’ve been locking myself in toilets to summon up a transcendent experience of one kind or another: as a kid gorging on chocolate and then puking it up, then frenetically spellbound by porn, then drugs, then finally prayer. In every instance the need was the same, to get out of my head, to feel a connection, to feel something beyond being me in a body, on a planet, in infinite space. I contest that we all have this yearning for connection, even if from a humanist perspective. What is the numinous jolt we feel when witnessing the heroic sacrifice of another? Or the tearful pull when people come together in a common cause? What string is being plucked when we encounter heroism? Could it be that we are reminded by the hero’s sacrifice that the appearance of individualism is temporal? That when the hero sees beyond this artificial world of selfish wants and needs, and falls in faith, into the arms of the Ulterior Oneness, we are reminded and relieved? What is the value of fraternity? What is solidarity’s power? What manner of virtue is kindness if it is not the acknowledgement that in truth and in fact we are all one, together here, and what we do to each other we do to ourselves? Heroism’s power is in redolence. It reminds us what we’ve always known but forgotten: we are all connected.