Normal Gets You Nowhere by Kelly Cutrone (ereader for android .txt) 📕

are going around in circles, She continued. They don’t want to change. And I need your help.

“There is nothing I can do to help you,” I heard myself saying aloud, almost desperately. “I cannot help you. Look at me. I can barely help myself! I don’t even understand why we’re all still alive. Why don’t you just flip this, like you did Atlantis?” (If you have time, look up Atlantis and Lemuria . . . fascinating.)

At this point in my life, even I knew no one truly wanted to be Divine. Look around. Human beings like to have one foot with God and the other with darkness; we like to spend our days saying, I’m such a nice person, let me help you, and our nights thinking, Let’s get fucked up. I want more money. Mmm, this tastes good! Most people want Divine beings to do the spiritual work for them—that’s why they give their religious institutions money, so their rabbis, priests, or swamis will pray for them. It’s the same reason we elect politicians—so that others can set the laws and govern us and we can go about our business.

But again, I’m not asking you to do what everyone else is doing, or what’s normal.

The voice spoke to me again. Of course you can help, it said.

And then things got worse.

During the next few hours, I would be made to physically experience the pain in the hearts of humanity, as if Amma were saying to me, Do you want to feel it? and then laying me down naked on a wooden bed, binding my arms, and cranking up the pain with a wheel—crank, crank, crank! It was like a primitive torture chamber of empathetic consciousness.

At one point, in a state of pure desperation, I called a friend in India, a sage I’ve turned to in many moments of spiritual tumult throughout my life. He didn’t seem alarmed by my tears. “You’re in a state of Divine feminine,” he told me. “You’re seeing the world through eyes of God—it’s almost like you have God’s consciousness inside of you.” (Obviously, I don’t believe in this whole thing about humility and not talking about one’s spiritual experiences. Woo hoo, don’t ever equate yourself with God! Well, why wouldn’t you want to equate yourself with God? The highest thing you could say about yourself is that you recognize there is a Divine source of energy living inside of you that wants to express itself.)

What I learned that night can be summed up like this. We have been programmed in this world to accept the suffering and devastation of other beings on an epic scale, not just around the world, but in our own fucking backyards. We are all suffering, and suffering deeply in our hearts. And our chaos, confusion, pain, and unfulfillment are manifesting outwardly in devastating ways. We know that Mother Nature can’t hold us the way we’re behaving with her, overusing and abusing her resources. We know the world is becoming a more violent place. Yet we continue in the dance of repetition—we refuse to evolve as a species. A long time ago, someone said to me, “Insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results.”

It just so happened that Eleanor knew this too. She was the First Lady in the time of the Great Depression, and she had more than one answer. She called on all young Americans to show compassion and leadership (yes, she even called on men to exercise their Universal Motherhood!). In her autobiography, she wrote:

The future will be determined by the young and there is no more essential task today, it seems to me, than to bring before them once more, in all its brightness, in all its splendor and beauty, the American Dream, lest we let it fade, too concerned with ways of earning a living or impressing our neighbors or getting ahead or finding bigger and more potent ways of destroying the world and all that is in it.3

By the American dream, I do not believe Eleanor meant three SUVs and a McMansion. I believe she meant the fundamental right of all beings to pursue their intuitive dreams and their best selves, and an equanimity and compassion of spirit. Eleanor, like Amma, had faith in the power of the smallest acts of individual compassion to change the world and humanity. She was not apathetic, even as the world seemed to burn all around her. Eleanor also wrote:

I learned . . . while I was groping for more and more effective ways of trying to cope with community and national and world problems, that you can accomplish a great deal more if you care deeply about what is happening to other people than if you say in apathy or discouragement, “Oh, well what can I do? What use is one person? I might as well not bother.”4

That night in my hotel room, Amma took Eleanor’s teachings even farther. She wanted me to know—to feel—that the world’s pain was not just starvation or homelessness, that we are all holding pain in our hearts. Like rats in a lab, many of us have just figured out, through cheap entertainments like the mall, meds, and men, how to navigate around and ignore the deep dark corners in our minds and bodies.

After several hours of empathetic, excruciating exploration of the suffering of humanity compliments of Amma (literally), I collapsed on my back on the bed and fell into a deep sleep, prostrating myself in a state of humility, acceptance, and even gratitude for this wild, strange trip I’d been taken on. I knew I’d received a rare gift and a powerful teaching. I mean, I know I’ve said the truth hurts, but this was ridiculous!

I awoke the next morning in quite a state; in my delirium, I actually put on a red shirt—the first time I’ve worn color in years. I left my boutique hotel in downtown Toronto and caught a cab to the airport Sheraton, where Amma was hosting her