Eat Cray Love
Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

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so sad today

Eat Cray Love

I'm a seeker, but I'm scared of what I might find. What if the truth is insanity?

I'm kind of on a quest for truth, but not really. Like, I'm a seeker, but I'm scared of what I might find. Many of the 'signs' of a spiritual awakening—changing sleep patterns, sudden waves of emotion, changes in eating habits, increased sensitivity, loss of interest in extroverted activities, a desire to break free from life-draining jobs and toxic people, a compelling need to find one's purpose, tingling in the head, racing heartbeat, changes in sexual desire—are exactly what I've experienced during periods of acute anxiety or depressive episodes. What if I can't emotionally handle the truth? What if the truth contains multitudes and some of those multitudes are horrifying, like a bad DMT trip? What if the truth is insanity?

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Before I got sober, my drinking and using were what you might call a low-grade quest for god. Actually, they were a high-grade quest for god. I ate shrooms in fields and peyote in the forest, looking for light. I read Buddhist, Hindu, and American self-help books, fucked up on vodka, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I believed that spiritual 'experts' would have the answer.

After I got sober, I stopped looking to snake oil salesmen, gurus, and psychics for help. But there is one woman who I go see every Summer, when she travels from her home in Kerala India to America. Her name is Mata Amritanandamayi, otherwise known as Amma.

Amma is a revered guru, global humanitarian, and to some, a living saint. Embodying the goddess, or mother-figure, she has given hugs to over 34 million people across the world: a practice that began at a young age, in response to the suffering she witnessed. At the time, it was unheard of in her village that a woman would touch or be touched by strangers. But Amma felt compelled to perform this radical act, and as word traveled of her spiritual gifts, a following grew around her.

Since then, Amma's charities have fed over 100 million people per year in India and 100,000 meals per year internationally. They provided $1 million dollars in relief to the Japanese Tsunami and $1 million for Hurricane Katrina. They have built 100,000 homes, and provided $60 million in free healthcare. In response to the Hindu notion that suffering is a result of one's own karma, Amma has said, "If it is one man's karma to suffer, isn't it our dharma to help ease his suffering and pain?"

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The first time I went to see Amma on her US tour, I was like, Get me away from these assholes. The event was at a ballroom in New York City and I was surrounded by thousands of her disciples: earthy MILFs, shady yoga bros, white people wearing saris, all waiting to receive a hug, or as it's called, "darshan." At an event celebrating compassion, these people didn't seem very nice to each other. They were snippy and uptight. They were saving seats. Also, I thought the giant bazaar at the entrance to the event selling Amma books, Amma socks, Amma dolls, Amma paintings, Amma jewelry, Amma oils, Amma soaps, Amma chocolates, was fucking weird.

But about 20 minutes into watching Amma hug, my judgments were disrupted. Suddenly, in my head, I heard the words: God loves all the children just the same wherever they are on the path. It was really weird. The words weren't coming from the music, which was in Sanskrit. They were coming from inside me. What happened next was even weirder. A surge of palpabale euphoria began to coarse through my body. It didn't stop until the following day. I was like, Oh no.

As a lifetime anxiety sufferer and hypochondriac, any unexplained change of state scares me: even a very good one. I always assume that I am either dying or going insane. This feeling was so strong that I wondered if i had been dosed. It was a feeling I had only ever known on opiates, or really dopey ecstasy: a peace so palpable that it was not the absence of negativity, but its own entity.

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The thing was, I wasn't on any drugs. In fact, I had just gotten sober a few months before. But I didn't know how to interpret these sensations without the language of drugs. I didn't know how to interpret a positive, let alone blissful experience, as simply being alive. Ten years later, I sometimes still don't.

Since that first experience, I have gone to see Amma every year. Occasionally, I bring friends and loved ones. Some have felt what I felt, looked at me tearfully, and nodded. Others sat in the balcony eating doughnuts and checking their phones, like, whatev. I've never felt a desire to "convert" anyone, only to share an experience and maybe make sense of my own through the experiences of others close to me.

Every year with Amma is always a little different. One year, while basking in her heroin-y glow, the thought came to me that maybe I should volunteer. At Amma events, there are always opportunities to do service, like washing dishes or preparing food. But as quickly as the thought came, I dismissed it. I didn't want to kill my high. About an hour later, I literally 'o.d.'d' on Amma's vibe. I got severe vertigo and had to go home in a taxi. That was the year I realized that spirituality isn't about feeling good all the time, untouchable, sequestered on a lotus. It's about helping people. Since then I usually volunteer at Amma's events selling baked goods.

Another year, I went to see Amma in a state of anger and fear. There was an older dude with whom I had a professional falling out, who had begun harassing and threatening me. Convinced of my righteousness, I felt only hatred for him—and the hatred was consuming me. But as I sat there, watching Amma hugging human being after human being, I saw—for a brief second—the innocence in each person. Like, I saw everyone as a child. And I saw myself as a child. Then, I saw him as a child.

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A few weeks ago, I told a very new age-y friend of mine that I was going to see Amma in Los Angeles. My friend said that she didn't like Amma. When I asked why, she said she thought that Amma sucked the positive energy out of children's ears. She said that Amma was a spiritual vampire and that the positive energy of her presence was energy that she sucked out of her followers.

I was like Oh no. I mean, my friend is someone who believes in alien implants. She's not exactly Aristotle in her empirical methodology. But at the same time, my own experiences with Amma are not quantifiable either. The sensations I've experienced have always remained enigmatic. So what my friend said made me curious.

I spent the next 24 hours googling everything negative I could find about Amma. I really tucked into it, got consumed, the way I might around a celebrity death or a scandal involving someone I know. It felt weird giving Amma the 'Gawker' treatment. But I also got off on it, the way we can get off on any compulsion. I found claims of false mysticism. Claims of misappropriation of funds. I found Amma allegedly sleeping with one of her swamis, while devotees on her Ashram were instructed to be celibate. I found accusations of murder and abuse.

Faith and doubt are really weird things. Like, it seems really easy for a lot of us to get into faith—not always in a god or a typical guru—but in our Kanyes, Elizabeth Warrens, Steve Jobses, Kardashians, Beyonces, or whomever we venerate. Also, for a lot of us, it's really easy to get into doubt: at least superficially. Doubt can be really fucking fun, especially when it's the kind that is meme-based and doesn't destroy the fabric of everything you thought you knew and make you go insane. Like, as long as the doubt isn't too deep—as long as it isn't the bad DMT trip doubt—it's cool.

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Some of Amma's followers literally worship her as a god incarnate. I never felt quite this way, perhaps because I was raised a Jew and taught to never idolize god in one human form. Maybe I was scared of "going all the way" with my faith in her—that I would see a truth about the nature of human suffering, my contributions to it as an American, that would cause me to "go crazy" and be unable to participate in my life as I knew it. Maybe that would have even been a good thing?

Whatever the case, I see her as a human being—one who is spiritually elevated, yet not above error. There is god in her and she helps me see god in me, but she isn't a god. And since she isn't a god, I don't need her to be perfect. I don't need her to be real or fake, terrible, or evil. She can make human mistakes. She can make ugly ones.

I don't think that my experiences with Amma are the result of the power of suggestion. I think they are the real deal. But whether or not they are placebo, mystic, or somewhere in between, does it matter?

If I were to leave my life, move to Amma's ashram in India, become her devotee, I would need to know. I would have to block out any naysayers, build walls against my 21st century propensity to dig dirt, and vehemently defend what cannot be defended with science: only by the human heart. But the ability to walk in the not knowing is, perhaps, another form of knowing. And the truth is that I like the way magic feels, whether or not it is real.

So Sad Today is a never-ending existential crisis played out in 140 characters or less. Its author has struggled with consciousness since long before the creation of the Twitter feed in 2012, and has finally decided the time has come to project her anxieties on a larger screen, in the form of a biweekly column on this website.