#812 - Russell Brand & Jim Breuer

Russell Brand (0:01)

I know you guys are banging into your coffee.

Joe Rogan (0:07)

And we're live, you're jumping into swamps in English royalties homes.

Russell Brand (0:12)

This is how I like to be introduced, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

You gotta be very careful when you get into those sort of predicaments.

Russell Brand (0:18)

There's a beheading around every corner once you mess with the royal family's private swamps.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

Yeah, especially if you're doing it for some sort of a psychedelic purposes. You're trying to like elevate yourself by freezing yourself in their cold, swampy waters, freeing yourself.

Russell Brand (0:34)

If you're embarking on a journey of personal shamanism on royal territory, yeah, your life's in your hands. Your life could shrivel up as quickly as my sex organs did in that particular predicament.

Joe Rogan (0:45)

It's definitely an added element.

Russell Brand (0:47)

Yeah, it is.

Joe Rogan (0:47)

You have to consider it.

Russell Brand (0:48)

It's not a place to go for pride. But as soon as I like, yeah, as soon as I was sort of submerged in it, that's what like, you know, because even though it is just in this case, just an example of me, a man simply jumping in a cold lake, and I do have a tendency to over poeticize the mundane experiences of me every day life. But why not? What else are we going to do while we're here? It did make me think we are living on narrow lines, narrow train tracks of existence, never to have heard myself go, oh, oh, an animal noise, oh, I'm capable of that. So sort of almost like an anti-orgasm, like a negative orgasm.

Joe Rogan (1:22)

If you repeat what you would before, what you said before you got on camera, how it represents the subconscious and that going into the murky depths.

Russell Brand (1:29)

I thought you'd like that, mate. What it is, is in fairy stories, myths and religion, a person, if you're not into him already, you are reckoned you'd well love, is a man called, an American scholar called Joseph Campbell, who was a cultural mythologist. And he studied various religions and folk tales and found corollaries and comparisons and consistencies and sort of said that where there are consistencies, there's truth. If there's some Icelandic myth and it's telling basically the same story or some African story or some Native American story or some daft Celtic folk tale, why are human beings dislocated all over the world coming up with the same stories, coming up with the same experiences? Well, often in these stories, the forest is used as the unconscious. Not only the forest represents unconscious, often in mythology, and you know, when a character has to go into the woods, that means you've got to go into yourself, you're gonna have to go into new territory.

And also under the water, similarly also represents unconsciousness. And what's interesting about an audio is like not only ancient mythologies and old stories, but also personal dreams. If you yourself have a dream, like this is where the work of Joseph Campbell in the Sex with a Worker, Carl Jung, that dude, he like he noticed that people in their personal myths, Joseph Campbell said, dreams are private myths, myths are public dreams.

In people's personal dreams, they come up with images, archetypes and stories that can also be found in fairy tales, you know, just someone asleep, goes, oh, I was just walking, and I went into the woods, and I met this old woman in the woods, and she told me that everything was going to be okay. And then she put up a hood, and when she took a hood down again, it was my mother's face. It's like people were inventing their own myth, like, because of course, all culture is created by consciousness. So on some level, it's in us, it's in us individually.

Joe Rogan (3:12)

Yeah, Joseph Campbell's work is amazing. And when you do look at all the different stories and how they coincide, and how many similarities they share, it is really interesting to see what are people trying to accomplish with these archetypes? Like what are they trying to sort out? Because it seems like that has to be something. Lessons passed down to children, lessons passed down to other people so they can learn things without having to experience the woods themselves.

But then there's also some sort of archetypes that they're sort of defining the reality around them in a very similar way all over the world.

Russell Brand (3:41)

I suppose what I reckon, Joe, is the more diverse our culture, like you know, it's weird, isn't it? Because we experience on one level globalization and homogenization, where culture, through corporatism, is coming uniform throughout the world. But also there are many, many, many disparate experiences. But on some level, as human beings, if we're anatomically as similar as we are, perhaps it's safe to assume that we're psychologically comparably similar. Like, you know, even though you and I are sort of different body types or whatever and look sort of at a glance, kind of, we're both ultimately got the same organs, we're running in pretty much the same way. Or perhaps we have the same psychological palette. So throughout the world, people are, everyone's having a very similar experience of being human, the anxiety of not being good enough, the fear of death, constantly looking for something in the outside world that's gonna solve the problems, that's gonna answer your questions. And like, in a lot of these ancient texts that I've mostly got at through Joseph Campbell, or, you know, Hinduism for Beginners, that's normally my entry point. I, like you, am an autodidact, self-taught person. That's one of the things I like about your podcast, is that you can hear, oh, this is a person educating themselves and continuing to educate themselves through life. Well, like, one of the things that I picked up in that is, like, in them very, very ancient texts, there are people that, the same way as in our, like, in our time that's defined by science and technology, there were times where people defined themselves through meditation and experiences in consciousness.