Normal Gets You Nowhere Read online

  Article 7. All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

  Article 8. Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

  Article 9. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

  Article 10. Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

  Article 11. (1) Everyone charged with a penal offense has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense. (2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offense on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offense, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offense was committed.

  Article 12. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

  Article 13. (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

  Article 14. (1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. (2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

  Article 15. (1) Everyone has the right to a nationality. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

  Article 16. (1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. (3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

  Article 17. (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

  Article 18. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

  Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

  Article 20. (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. (2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

  Article 21. (1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. (2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country. (3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

  Article 22. Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

  Article 23. (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

  Article 24. Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

  Article 25. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

  Article 26. (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace. (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

  Article 27. (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

  Article 28. Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

  Article 29. (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible. (2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society. (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

  Article 30. Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

  In fact, I could fill this entire book with the names of great women who understood that, true to its title, normal gets you nowhere. For example, Margaret Sanger, who fought her whole life to bring women reproductive freedom via the birth-control pill, or Rosa Parks, who on a fateful December day in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 could not take being normal one more second and exploded like a phoenix, saying, to paraphrase: “Go fuck yourself. I’m not riding in the back of the bus anymore!” Or the former slave and antislavery activist Harriet Tubman, a fucking badass who not only saved herself from slavery, but, operating out of a house not far from where I grew up, helped about seventy other slaves escape, always armed with a revolver. Later in her life, when she had brain surgery to repair damage done by an injury from her slave days, she refused anesthesia and i
nstead literally bit a bullet while they cut open her skull. If that’s not a Divine being, I don’t know what is!

  These women are the real deal—incarnations and aspects of the Universal Mother who embody a true and ancient femininity that is ruthless and compassionate, fierce and loving, and the necessary counterpart to any masculine force, as well as being absolutely memorable—and we’re not doing a good enough job teaching our daughters, and all of humanity for that matter, about these heroines. I want to hear people under forty talking about Eleanor Roosevelt. I mean, not in one recent speech, press conference, press release, nightclub, or news article have I seen or heard her name uttered! We need to pay these women the homage they deserve by continuing to fight the battles they started. Or at least we can make a shrine to them in our homes. In my new country house, I’m dedicating an entire wall to representations of the Universal Mother from every culture and belief system.

  Because I believe a little of each of these extraordinary beings lives inside each of us, in our own souls—and the time has long since come for us to find and activate it.

  In fact, I believe this force is demanding to be expressed in our time. I believe I was meant to take from Eleanor, and to pass onto you, a reminder of what it looks like when the feminine expresses itself in full on this earth, in all its compassion and tenacity. Luckily, the Divine Mother’s not choosy; she’ll pick anyone who will work for Her!* I could feel myself being initiated as a student of human rights for Her purposes. And let me tell you something, if you think your boss is bad, you should try working for Her—she is one relentless bitch, she will give you lashings, and by the way she has no HR department.

  Part III: Welcome to Universal Motherhood (Almost Everything Comes from a Mother)

  It was Saturday evening, and my mind was already blown out. It had started with the Norman Rockwell acid trip with Ava and blossomed into a robust afternoon of human rights education; frankly, by dinnertime I was just happy to be back at my cottage watching TV.

  I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that I was scheduled to fly to Toronto the next day to join Amma and her swamis (who are like monks; they’ve set aside worldly pursuits to devote their lives full-time to the service of the Divine). In fact, I knew in every fiber of my being that these experiences would be directly connected. Before even boarding my plane to Toronto, I felt separated out from the world of human beings, like I was lying in the lap of the Divine Mother, helpless but to receive Her teachings. As if to confirm this, after landing in Toronto, I hit the town with a few friends, and everywhere we went, I saw fragments of Amma’s name in street signs and advertisements. AMMA, the letters on a billboard would say, or J’ama, a café sign would read. It got to be so ridiculous that I started taking pictures.

  By the time I returned to my hotel room later on, I felt on top of the world. Maybe this would be a proper and relaxing vacation after all. I was happy to be away from work, taking a much-needed break in the presence of one of the world’s greatest living gurus. I proceeded to undress and get into bed, as I would on any night.

  Suddenly, I was seized by a feeling that translated in my head into a clear female voice. I knew immediately that it was Her, the Divine Mother, and that she was speaking to me as Amma. She said she wanted to talk about the state of humanity.

  You realize that this evolution has been going on for over ten thousand years, She said, offhand and casual, almost as if saying, “Hey, you got a second? Can we have a chat?” People 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 retreat. I knew it was going to be a big day, just like it had been a big night. I had barely gotten through the front door when the voice came back.

  Now, this is important, are you listening? I want you to feel MY response to the suffering, it said.

  All of a sudden, in my hands, my shoulders, and every other part of my being, especially my heart and eyes, I was overwhelmed—drowned, consumed—by love and compassion. Standing inside this unremarkable Sheraton in Canada, all I could see was beauty all around me. If this had been a sci-fi movie, my eyes would’ve been shooting laser love beams that instantly disintegrated people’s pain. It was such an intense feeling that my mortal body, which is not in a state of pure love and compassion, had a hard time physically accommodating it. I ran into a fellow devotee who had come to see Amma with his wife, and their love was palpable.

  “You seem like you love each other so much,” I said.

  He nodded. “She’s my goddess. I even bathe her feet in milk and ghee.” (FYI, that’s the way Amma’s swamis bathe her feet.)

  I thought to myself, This is true Divine love. For the second time in two days, I started crying hysterically, overwhelmed to see there were people still living like this in what often seemed like a hopeless world. As I made my way into the hall, I was vibrating with so much love and compassion that I physically ached.