Harvey

“There is a horrific way in which people use spirituality to sign off from the ordinary decency of the heart… If you’re not capable of being gracious and recognizing the pain another person is in, you’re not a spiritual practitioner… My father… trusted absolutely, surrendered, and prayed every day. He had never told me any of this, because men don’t talk about that sort of thing. I realized that I’d been roaming the world, looking for sages, and there had been a real sage right there at home, reading the Daily Telegraph, and I had missed him. But I didn’t miss him in the end...

On the Sunday before he (My Father) died, I went to church. It was the Feast of Christ the King, and this roly-poly Indian priest gave a simple sermon in which he said that Christ is the mystical king of the world, not because of his miracles, but because he sacrificed everything and he loved and believed beyond reason. When the priest had finished speaking, I looked up at the crucifix, and it came alive.

There was this torrential flow of molten fire between Jesus and me. I can only describe what happened as: he took a knife and slashed open my heart. I felt I was going to die, because of the ferocious violence of his love. It was ecstatic and blissful, and it was terror itself. I saw Jesus in his glory, but still with the wounds, because the awakened state contains the shattered state. You’re not sprung free of wound and heartbreak; rather, they are deepened but contained within a vaster consciousness.

Then I went outside, and there was this desperate young man with no legs and no arms, and I looked into his eyes and saw the same Christ that I had seen on the cross. I lifted him out of the puddle, gave him whatever money I had, and made sure he got some help. As I was staring at him, I heard this terrifying voice say, ‘You’ve been playing with your mystical experiences. You have used your grace to inflate your own ego, to write books, and to become famous. Don’t you understand that this is obscene? You must do everything you can to speak up for those who have no voice and to rouse people to divine service. You have to give yourself over to that.’

It was scalding. I felt seen, stripped naked, but also inspired and empowered…

All mystical systems are addicted to transcending this reality. This addiction is part of the reason why the world is being destroyed. The monotheistic religions honor an off-planet God and would sacrifice this world and its attachments to the adoration of that God. But the God I met was both immanent and transcendent. This world is not an illusion, and the philosophies that say it is are half-baked half-truths. In an authentic mystical experience, the world does disappear and reveal itself as the dance of the divine consciousness. But then it reappears, and you see that everything you are looking at is God, and everything you’re touching is God. This vision completely shatters you.

We are so addicted, either to materialism or to transcending material reality, that we don’t see God right in front of us, in the beggar, the starving child, the brokenhearted woman; in our friend; in the cat; in the flea. We miss it, and in missing it, we allow the world to be destroyed.

The mystics as we know them will be praying as the last tree is cut down. They are junkies of ecstasy and bliss, and they’re hooked into the iv of their own self-created mystical experiences. There are too many bliss bunnies running around, presenting the divine as a kind of cabaret singer in hot pants, available for any kind of fantasy you may have. Then there are the activists, who are noble and righteous and give their lives to their cause, but they are divided in consciousness. They demonize others and often burn out. Neither mystic nor activist balances transcendence and immanence, heart and mind, soul and body, presence and action.

If sacred activism becomes a normal way of functioning, there will be more sensitivity, clarity, and wisdom, and less divisiveness. If people differ, they will be willing to go through a process of consensus, and once a decision is reached, their hearts will be united. We have seen glimpses of this. Martin Luther King Jr. was able to turn large numbers of civil-rights activists away from violence and toward reconciliation and peace. Many African Americans thought he was crazy at first, but he convinced them by personal example and indefatigable commitment. The same is true of Gandhi. Many Indians thought he wasn’t standing up to the British. And some Tibetans believed the Dalai Lama was soft on the Chinese, but they’ve been convinced by his example.

All divine visions are hard to embody. They require hard work. You have to keep looking at your own shadow — and sacred activists have two shadows: they have the shadow of the mystic, longing to escape into the light and leave the world behind; and they have the shadow of the activist, which is full of denunciation and divisiveness and anger. But if you examine those two shadows long enough, something amazing happens: the mystic’s shadow gets purified by the activist’s, and vice versa…

I wouldn’t be so disturbed by the mystic’s addiction to transcendence if I didn’t know something about it. I have felt that shadow in myself that says, Only God is real. The rest is illusion. It comes from a psychological desire to escape the complexities of my past. On the activist side, I understand how easy it is to project my own failings onto others, to demonize … I understand the temptation of anger. I am a passionate person, and passion’s shadow is anger — ferocious and lacerating. Though I feel sacred activism needs the power of anger to fuel its work, we also need to purify and transmute that anger.”

~ Andrew Harvey is a renegade in the world of the sacred… Harvey attacks the guru system as corrupt, using his own former teacher Mother Meera as an example. His openness about being gay has rattled many in the largely closeted religious world, and he has even taken the Dalai Lama to task for his stance on homosexuality. Harvey has little patience with what he calls the popular “vulgarization” of ancient spiritual traditions, from yoga and Tantra to Buddhism and Christianity. He says, “A lot of people prefer the marzipan mysticism of the New Age,” which predicts that a change in consciousness will occur by “good vibrations…

One night, after his parents had left for a dinner party, six-year-old Andrew sat on the balcony and watched as their inebriated cook played a small drum until he was drenched with sweat, then began to chant in a strange tongue. Intrigued and frightened, young Andrew asked the man if he was all right. The cook explained that he was thanking God. “God is everything,” he said. “God is everywhere.” It dawned on Harvey then that “I could be with God directly and talk to God directly whenever I wanted to.” He also concluded that each person in his multicultural house was worshiping the same God.

Harvey spent his school years in England, eventually attending Oxford University…In 1977 he left Oxford to return to India and found his way to the remote Himalayan region of Ladakh, where he met Tibetan Buddhist sage Thuksey Rinpoche… Along the way Harvey became an ardent follower of Mother Meera, an Indian woman he heralded as an incarnation of the divine. He broke with her in 1993 after she asked him to forsake his male lover. (This point is disputed by Mother Meera’s supporters.) Since then Harvey has denounced her and other gurus as phonies more concerned with money, sex, and power than with matters of the spirit.

Shortly before his father’s death in 1997 Harvey had a mystical experience of Christ that renewed his fascination with Jesus and Mary. He took a provocative look at Jesus as a radical mystic in Son of Man (Tarcher) and explored the divine feminine in Return of the Mother (Tarcher).

Having encountered the limitations of both gurus and romantic love (he is no longer with the man he married in 1994), Harvey is devoting himself to melding spiritual disciplines with activist efforts in order to promote peace and justice. He calls the concept “sacred activism” and envisions “an army of practical visionaries and active mystics who work in every field and in every arena to transform the world.” His vision is wildly ambitious and at times feels both messianic and apocalyptic."

~ Interview by Andrew Lawler, Sun Magazine

"...Everyone whose eyes are open knows the world is in a terrifying crisis. As many of us as possible need to undergo a massive transformation of consciousness and to find the sacred passion to act from this consciousness in every arena and on every level of reality. It is my deepest belief that only Sacred Activism – the fusion of the deepest mystical knowledge, peace, strength, and stamina with calm focused and radical action – can possibly be of use now. A mysticism that is only private and self-absorbed leaves the evils of the world in tact and does little to halt the suicidal juggernaut of history; an activism that is not purified by a profound spiritual vision and psychological self-awareness and rooted in divine truth, wisdom, and compassion will only perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve, whatever it’s righteous intentions. When, however, the deepest and most grounded mystical vision is married to a practical and pragmatic drive to transform all existing political, economic, and social institutions, a holy force and power of wisdom in action is born, a force and power that can re-fashion all things in and under God, and bring humanity, even at this late desperate hour, into harmony with its self and original nature. This force of Sacred Activism I believe will be the source of the birthing power that humanity will need to create a new world from the smoking ashes of the one that is now passing away.

Hildegard of Bingen, a great Sacred Activist of her time, wrote; “Humanity, full of creative possibilities, is God’s work. Humanity is called upon to assist God. Humanity is called to co-create with God.” These words by the great 12th century Christian woman saint challenge us all, whatever our religious or spiritual belief, to do three linked things: to uncover our own divine nature through prayer and meditation, to attune our hearts and will to the will of God for the transformation of the earth, and to devote and pour out all our God-given life energies in creativity, service, and justice-making so that divine reality can be increasingly embodied in the world.

And let all of us who see the seriousness of our contemporary situation, and also the extraordinary possibilities of a new order join together as Sacred Activists to do all we can with all we are and have to transform the crisis and the world."          ~ Andrew Harvey