EDGE Miami

"The question of, ’Who am I?’ is [answered with], ’I’m John Doe, and I’m from Connecticut, and I’m white, and I’m Protestant, and my parents worked in a bank, and we lived in Hartford.’ That’s your biography, that’s you ’Who I am.’ And yet, that’s a bullshit answer! It doesn’t explain who you are. It doesn’t explain where you came from. It doesn’t explain a single thing about how you came into being. That person is in the closet about who they really are. That person has forgotten and gotten completely disconnected about who they really are. We are all in the closet, not only on that really deep level, but on a daily level about how you’re really feeling. You know, like, your husband comes in and you really fucking resent him for how much money he makes, but you’re, like, ’Congratulations on your raise!’ Meanwhile, you want to kill him! You hate him! You judge him for how much money he’s making. That’s just one level [of your existence]. That’s how closeted we are. We’re all in the closet about so many things!"

Nutter’s book argues that we stay in our closets out of fear. Inside the closet it’s secure and familiar; outside... well, who can say? It might be dangerous. But would Nutter adopt the evolutionary biologist’s view that human beings come pre-loaded with fears about exposure and individuality, or would he say that those fears are learned?

"On a day to day basis, the fear is one of pain," Nutter says. "There’s a tremendous amount of pain that we’ve made, that we’re not aware that we’ve made. It’s nobody’s instinct to say, ’What is the source of that pain? Where does it come from? Ouch!’ We all carry a tremendous amount of pain with us every day, and the first tunnel you have to walk through is feeling all the painful stuff inside of you. The second one is about responsibility, because when you can blame the world, credit the world, for how you are feeling, you aren’t responsible. You have a lot of power in that powerlessness. ’When my husband chooses to love me, I feel love. When he mistreats me, then I feel bad and unimportant.’ On the one hand, you are powerless, but on the other hand at least you don’t have to do [anything]. And there are different concepts of responsibility, and none of them exist."

It might be worth pausing here to note that in his book, when Nutter says that something doesn’t exist, he defines existence as the quality a thing has of still existing when you are not thinking about it. If that thing only exists in your thoughts - the idea, for example, that a hot guy finds you unattractive and that’s why he didn’t call you - then the moment you no longer keep that idea in your thoughts, it vanishes: it was never real to begin with. As Nutter says more than once in his book, "How the hell would I know what someone else is thinking?"

"The only responsibility that exists in the entire cosmos is for yourself, and the only thing that you are responsible for are your thoughts and your emotions. That’s it!" Nutter declares, and then continues with, "We are terrified of what that means. Once you decide that it’s you, that’s a very tough moment. Every moment of your life, all the energy that you’ve spent blaming and crediting - ’Look at the Republicans! Look at what they’re doing! Look at what my father did to me! Look at what being gay did to me!" - that all has to stop. It is such a tremendous effort to get that juggernaut to turn, and experience it every day, all day [learning how to take responsibility for my own emotional state] and some of it is painful. I have to say, ’It is not those people who are... whatever. It’s me.’ It’s really hard work, but walking through it, I’ve realized that the worst thing in life isn’t pain, even if that pain results from abuse. It’s the powerlessness. Walking that difficult walk every day, the reason it’s worth it is, at least I’m in power [over my own life]. As long as I continue to say, ’So and so thinks this about me, such and such thinks that,’ I am powerless... and it’s not even true."

Indeed, this habit of projecting our own thoughts onto others is a major underpinning of The Way Out, and a habit Nutter sees as essential to break for anyone who wishes to enjoy true freedom. But this line of thought leads to some very unfamiliar and - to the Western mind - unsettling places. Nutter asserts that the love, hate, approval, disapproval, or whatever we feel from others is in fact our own love, hatred, and so forth. So what do any two people ever have to offer each other?

"That," says Nutter, "is such a great question. Other people allow us, by their presence, the activation of an aspect of ourselves. I have a relationship with someone I wrote about briefly in the book, named Sagee. Sagee and I have a very deep relationship. We are constantly evolving in so many new incarnations that it’s unbelievable. The number one thing that we do is we take responsibility for our own thoughts and emotions - that’s the number one quality to our relationship. By doing so, we can heal our pain in the process that the other person activates. Early on in our relationship, I had a lot of pain over [the thought that], ’He doesn’t think I’m sexually attractive.’ And I was so angry with him about this. I could always see proof of it [even if such proof didn’t really exist], for probably a good year and a half - until I realized, ’He doesn’t think that. I think that.’ Then, when I released that and stopped thinking that, suddenly I felt love for myself. When I’m with him and all that love is radiating through me, it’s aimed at him; it lives because he’s there; and that’s the part of me that he brings up. We are experiencing our own individual love together, but each one of us is simply a conduit.

"I think that people are afraid of this," Nutter continues, "because it really does destroy, permanently, what’s thought of as romance, which is this wonderful idea that someone else is going to bring you your treasure. That’s a scary thought because, ’Oh my god, who are we without romance?’ But the fact is, it never existed in the first place. So in a way, it’s [a matter of] coming into a much greater reality, so that who you are with that person when you’re both in a state of love, is you are able to experience things together that are loving, happy, growing, exciting - together. There is a [power] to the fact that there’s always more than one person involved; the power grows, the love grows. You activate each other’s love, but it’s still yours. At the end of the day, no matter what’s going on with the other person, you don’t ever have to stop loving them because of something that they did. He and I do that with each other all the time, because when one of us comes into a painful spot, we’ll just sign off: ’I’ll talk to you in a few days, once I’ve gotten my shit together and stopped blaming you for whatever it is.’ The other person is a way to help activate your love and let it grow, and that’s the most beautiful gift in the world."

So, given all the thought he’s put into these issues and the effort he’s put into living through his spiritual and philosophical struggles, has Nutter come to a conclusion about what it all means? That is - does he have an answer to that age-old question about the Meaning of Life?

In fact, he does: "Being happy," he says.

That’s it? That’s the meaning of life: to be happy?

Nutter elaborates: "The reason I say that is, when you’re happy - and happy can mean lots of different things to different people - but when you are feeling great, and you’re in love, the reason for being alive is answered. Happiness is its own answer. When you have forgotten what it’s like to be happy, when you have forgotten what it’s like to be sitting there in a state of love, enjoying everything that you’re doing and enjoying life and everything around you, then you have the question: ’Why am I here? What’s the point?’

"Once you’re feeling even a tiny drop of the most wonderful emotions that you’ve got there inside of you - and happiness is just a general word to describe it; what I think is more accurate is to say, when you’re feeling your own love so that you feel happy and you feel beautiful - there is no question. The question goes away."

Of course, not every day or every minute can be filled with that sort of happiness or well-being; too much happens in life, and the human emotional palette is too broad for happiness to be infinitely self-sustaining. Nutter shares a story about a time that should have been happy, but which was fraught with grief and exhaustion. "I would wonder, ’What is the point?’" Nutter admits. "But, having felt the point, I knew I would get through it. The point will come again when those [happier] emotions come back." In time, Nutter found his way back to serenity, and when he did, he says, the moment was one of, "Ah, of course. These questions of ’what is the point?’ are only questions when you’re in pain. Happiness is its own answer, but the road there is answering [the question], ’How am I?’ and trying to be as real with yourself as you can possibly be."

This is not a religion for Nutter - at least, not in the sense of a scripture or a dogma being needed. "The reason I am not part of any group or religion is, all of them, eventually get down to ’It’s either our way or the high way. If you don’t meditate like we do, you’ll never make it!’ It’s such a bunch of bullshit." Nutter offers this anecdote as illustration: "For a long time I had this idea that if I didn’t meditate long enough, I wasn’t being a good boy. I turned mediation into a doctrine, and something that I desperately needed to do, and then I realized, ’That ain’t the fuckin’ point!’ It’s getting there into a state of awareness of everything that’s beautiful inside of you and all the opportunities and inspiration, the genius that’s all around you, that’s the point. I don’t even do meditation now. I’ve dropped mediation, and now I do something that’s much more wonderful. If you go do what you’ve been told to do ten times a day because you’ve been told it’s ’spiritual’ - why not go buy your SUV and your fuckin’ McMansion at the same time? It’s still doctrine!

"Listen," Nutter sums up, "people who are happy are not violent. They do not destroy the natural environment. They don’t need to. People who are happy see life and love everywhere. Everywhere! There’s no world war with happy people. We should just give a hit, say ten tons, of really good Indian A over to the Palestinians and the Israelis and let them have twenty four hours, even if it’s a drug trip, of feeling really happy, and we’d see a radical change over there." For that matter - as Nutter adds as an afterthought - "We need it over here."