However, I was struck by a very different side of him.
Despite all his superficial fame and vanity, he comes across to me as someone with some pretty deep understanding of what it means to live in the present without much of a mask to cover his true self.
In spiritual practice we work to break down our ideas of what we think our "self" is, to let go of our concepts and ideas of what we/others/things are. Eventually we might rise up out of these ashes as our true, genuine, unhindered, unrestricted, uncontained self. The more we let go of ourselves, the more we can become our true selves... Weird but true!
What I see in Russell Brand is someone who lives in that genuine flow of moment-to-moment. He doesn't claim any significant spiritual understanding, he talks a little about yoga, devotion, and the Bhagavad Gita, but to me his real teaching comes from his actions. He just lives it - is it.
A few months ago I saw this interview with him on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' programme. He absolutely runs riot with the presenters! They get embarrassed, nervous, they can't control him. It's hilarious! The way I interpret this is that because he has no mask of self - he is authentically just himself - he can run circles around the interviewers who have assumed massive personas, role masks, ideas of who they are (it being US TV probably even more so than anywhere else). If you've ever met someone who has absolutely no mask, who isn't playing a "role", you'll know it can be quite disconcerting.
Interestingly I met a psychiatrist the other day who also (perhaps unusually) had a strong mediation practice. He likened the onset of a psychosis to an inflation of the ego followed by a catastrophic collapse. Without the proper support structures, understanding, and control in the body-mind of the sufferer, this spontaneous ego collapse leads to terrible problems. However, the ego has nonetheless collapsed, and the sufferer experiences an awakening, a view of the limitless true nature of the universe (i.e. what we're working towards in Zen).
In the case of Russell Brand, his seeing through the self-construct seems to have come when he was a drug-addict, through taking acid (see this interview). He now sees his past addiction as a spiritual problem - he was trying to fill a hole, find a way out, find something beyond the suffering of the world. We can all relate to that. The only thing the Buddha taught was the way to end suffering.
So it's true, you can wake up to the reality of who you really are in a number of ways. But without the right intention, support of a teacher, and eyes-wide-open understanding of what's happening, it can, at best, lead to a beautiful insight which becomes a slowly fading memory, and at worst, to psychosis.
That's why we put in those hours on the meditation cushion - to let go of our "self" to become truly ourselves. And it may be to get there we need to go through a controlled total break-down!
