Free Revolution by Russell Brand

destiny is death and our shared need is life. We have downloaded a program with a virus in it. We’ve been boxed off and ripped off.
    Terence McKenna, the philosopher–shaman fella, said the all-encompassing stance of conventional science is “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.”
    That one miracle is the spontaneous appearance of all matter, energy, phenomena, consciousness, and rules in a single instant, which was preceded by and is surrounded by nothingness. This is the theory of the Big Bang.
    My belief is that we do not currently operate on a frequency ofconsciousness that is capable of interpreting the information required to understand the great mystery.
    I believe that the mechanical model for understanding nature is a metaphor that science has got stuck on: this prevailing idea that humans are machines, biological robots with computer-like brains. This belief will, to the advanced species that we are evolving into, seem as absurd as the flat-earth theories that we scoff at now.
    Those flat-earth folk weren’t just pretending they thought the earth was flat, they genuinely believed it. They looked down at the flat ground and its flat appearance and took that as empirical evidence of its flatness. They could not conceive of another way of seeing it.
    Left to me, the flat-earth theory would still be dominant. I’ve never been to space and seen the earth’s curvature; I’ve seen pictures of the spherical earth placed in the context of our solar system or spinning like a misty marble in the blackness, but I can’t say for sure what it looks like from space, because I’m standing on it. It took a new emergent strain of understanding that challenged the dogma of the time to re-contextualize the way we see our planet.
    The time we live in now is similar, because the mechanistic, reductive dogma of “scientism”—the belief that everything in the world can be explained using the scientific method—is about to be similarly overthrown. There are just too many questions unanswered and unanswerable. Consciousness, the consciousness that is now experiencing these words, has no explanation in science. Scientists believe that matter has no consciousness and that consciousness comes from matter, that 70 percent of the universe is made from dark matter, although they don’t know what that is, what it does or anything. Just that it’s there.
    Science requires faith, the way religion does. Science requires acceptance of metaphor, just the way religion does. “Does science cause wars, the way religion does?” you might ask. I would say those conflicts are actually about territory, either ideological or physical, and that those ideas are materialistic in the same way scienceis—and the weapons with which those wars are fought, who creates those?
    I’m not condemning the process of gathering and testing information to advance our understanding of our environment—that is plainly a useful human tool. What I query is this pragmatic system of research being allowed to invade territories for which it was not designed to cater.
    An astronomer once explained to me that the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, is vast, too vast to be understood without metaphor, so he gave me one. He said if you picture the Milky Way as being the size of mainland Europe, our solar system—that’s Mars, Venus, Saturn, us here on Earth (you remember from school)—in a Milky Way the size of Europe our solar system would fit inside a single teacup somewhere in Belgium. He paused for my amazement, which I duly offered.
    But really what can you say?
    “Ooh, a teacup.”
    “Blimey, Belgium.”
    “Cor, it makes you think, doesn’t it?”
    Then he added, clearly sensing I was at a bit of a loss for words, having just been reduced to a dot on a speck in a teacup in a continent: “Russell, there are 400 million KNOWN galaxies in our universe.”
    I’d been looking through a telescope at Jupiter (or what we call Jupiter; it