“When Yogananda describes the first sighting of his guru, to a westerner the sincerity of his adulation is almost obscene.
We only love so wholeheartedly and uncynically in adolescence, or when we revisit that hormonal tundra in juvenile adulthood.
I was in my own storm of idiocy, my own adolescence beaten thinly almost into middle age, on a trip with a woman who I blindly adored, who I had ill-advisedly appointed as a Custodian of My Heart – one last throw of the dice.
We Who Look for God in Romance are Doomed.
Your idol will fall and you will be too bereft to pick up the pieces.
After a disastrous holiday where the delusion we had impulsively projected shattered and left just the bare bones and broken hearts of us, I ran into Jimmy in an Indian airport.
I knew Jimmy Mulville already, he works in TV and he doesn’t drink, like me.
I’d once overheard him say,
‘I wanted to live an autobiography, not a life,’
and instinctively plagiarised it in my own autobiography.
He was with his wife and three of his four children navigating an airport.
I was at the carousel with my paramour conducting an introduction with the stink of argument still on us.
Later on in the flight, Jimmy ambled over and gave me a book he was reading, Robert Johnson’s Inner Gold – a Jungian account of mentorship, how we ‘give another our gold to carry or hold’.
Gold in this metaphor being, I suppose, a symbol of Our Highest Self, Our Truest Intention, The Aspect of Us that is so beautiful it is too much for us to hold alone.”
“Asking someone to mentor you, as I have said, is a simultaneous acknowledgement of vulnerability and admiration, and even in the most secular and occidental context bears a trace of Yogananda’s euphoric sincerity.
No one wants to be rejected by someone they admire and who knows they’re vulnerable.
But after my holiday my old method of redemption through love was still giving me a good battering.
If you’d asked me at the time what the problem was, I would have instantly blamed the woman I was going out with.
Now I know the problem was my unreasonable, unconscious requirements.
I asked Jimmy for Help,
He agreed to Help He.
I told him about the melee that was my relationship and he was always able to ‘hold it’.
Meaning that my problems never fazed him –
The last thing you need when opening up your heart is for the person you’ve appointed to blanch or gag.
He pointedly never offers unsolicited advice, instead meeting my enquiries with his own experience.
There is a Great Power in this.
Some of the things he has said landed as perfectly in my mind as the first maxim of his I plagiarized:
‘Being Human, is a ‘Me Too business, we’re all in the mud together’
or
‘Next time you see the signpost that points in the direction of a destructive relationship, don’t go in that direction.”
“Perhaps Young Men like me go awry because
nobody can hold them.
I don’t mean embrace, I mean in a parental sense, like parentheses, to ‘bracket’ them, to stand as a dam either side of the wayward lash and unmovingly emit care.
The only authority I ever knew was negative.
Either inefficient or corrupt.
This is the consequence of living with false ideals in a materialistic society.
The authority that I give to Jimmy is sacred, I know he is flawed but I am not consulting with the flawed part of him I am consulting with the part of him that is willing in spite of his own numerous obligations, work, and family to provide loving counsel for free.
I believe this relationship becomes a conduit for truth, divine truth.
That needn’t mean it’s all chocolates and roses.
There’s a fair amount of ‘suck it up’ and ‘face your fear’, but it is Truth.
Perhaps we can take Truth to mean the timeless, the universal.
Things that will not erode and fade, qualities I need to live the life I have moved into.”
Excerpt From
Mentors
Russell Brand
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