The first time I saw Andrew Harvey speak, during one of Shiva Rea’s teacher trainings, he delivered his appeal for listeners – for all of us – to engage in activism from a grounded place of sacred passion with such fire that I thought he would combust right in front of our eyes. He has been kindling and stoking the fire of sacred mysticism for his entire life, an ongoing study in the integration of a love of the divine with our everyday lives. He is a translator and interpreter of the mystic passionate writings and life of the Sufi poet Rumi.
Many people know Harvey through his numerous books, which include Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night, Teachings of the Christian Mystics, Teachings of Rumi, A Journey in Ladakh and The Divine Feminine, and he coauthored The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Born in India, he was educated in England, attended Oxford and returned to India on the journey of his lifelong spiritual quest that has transcended dogma to culminate in a synthesis of tradition and action. Harvey sees spirituality and mysticism along with a call to action and activation as the solution for the current crisis we are facing in the world today. To these ends, he is currently working on a book on sacred activism and developing a curriculum and institute for sacred activism.
Felicia M. Tomasko: People describe you as a mystic. How would you define what a mystic is and the role of a mystic in the modern world?
Andrew Harvey
Andrew Harvey: A mystic is someone who has a direct connection with the divine, beyond dogma, beyond religion, beyond concept. I believe everybody is a closet mystic, because when you wake up to your own inner divinity, you wake up to the inner divinity of everybody and of every sentient being. So I know that within every human being there is a spark of the divine consciousness and this is the universal testimony of all the mystical traditions.
The Upanishads say the Atman, the individual soul, is Brahman, the eternal spirit, so the individual soul is one with the eternal consciousness. In Christianity, the soul is referred to as a favillidei day, which is the spark of God. And when I was working with a group of Tibetans on the book I co-wrote with them, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, we used to chant in between trying to get minutiae of Tibetan philosophy right, “My Buddha nature is as good as the Buddha’s Buddha nature.”
This testimony that at the core of everyone lies the divine consciousness waiting to be experienced is crucial for the future. We’ve created an increasingly violent, desolate, meaningless, desperate world out of our mistaken belief that we are separate beings. This terrible belief – that is profoundly untrue – is the root of growing devastation that we see everywhere. The healing of this devastation can only come from two linked things: our universal mystical awakening to the innate divinity of human consciousness, and a wholly new kind of sacred action born from that consciousness.
FMT: How did this lack of consciousness begin?
AH: For divine consciousness to incarnate itself, it had to lose itself. The individual being who was created to lose itself in divine consciousness was also shrouded by the ego or what we call the false self in Sufism. In Sufism it is said that we are separated from our deep self by 72,000 veils of illusion. In order to incarnate, the divine travels through those 72,000 veils, which are, of course, different aspects of itself. In order to experience our innate divinity, we have to go on a tremendous journey through those veils, which we can do through grace and deep spiritual work. This game of hide and seek with itself seems to be at the core of the divine’s plan for the universe. And it’s a very dangerous – and exciting – plan. Because if we do not wake up to this innate divinity, we will destroy what the divine has seeded in us for the transformation of ourselves and our world.
FMT: It’s gambling with the highest stakes. The divine is betting everything.
AH: Yes, the divine is betting everything out of supreme love. Supreme love creates all of the world, yet it cannot command beings to love it back; it wants to be loved for its own sake.
In creating and inseminating the human race with divine consciousness, the divine took an enormous risk of being abandoned, rejected, forgotten and humiliated. History has shown that humanity has to a large extent, abandoned, rejected and humiliated the divine.
This abandonment and rejection of the divine does not exhaust divine love nor the operations of divine grace. Let us look at the parable of the prodigal son. The prodigal son abandons his world and his generous father, to go off in a fit of independent pique and destroys his life, or comes close, in an orgy of selfish greed and addiction. In the despair that follows, he remembers his father and goes back. The reunion with the father after the depths of shattering is more intense, illumined, tender and humble. I see the whole of humanity going through this story right now.
There will be those that will die in the pit of addiction. There will be those who see that a desacrilized world and life are utterly doomed; they will then undertake the journey back to origin, back to the divine, and be inflamed by passion to act in very wise ways to save the planet.
FMT: What about people who feel the divine has forsaken and betrayed them?
AH: That is a complete illusion. The divine cannot forsake anyone because the divine is living as a spark within everyone. When you wake up and see the divine light, you see that the whole universe is radiating from that light. All matter is frozen light and all beings, good and evil, are pillowcases stuffed with light.
The idea of being abandoned by God is just that: It is an idea, a concept born out of a very incomplete knowledge of the divine. It can only be healed by radical knowledge of gnosis, of mystical illumination. When you take the path to that illumination, you realize that it is not God who is abandoning you. By retreating into your ego, into your self-concern, into the agendas of your illusory fantasies about life, you are abandoning God.
God is always here. God is always available. God is always extending infinite love. Rumi says this with characteristic brilliance:
The wine of divine Grace is limitless.
All limits come only from the fault of the cup.
White light stretches from horizon to horizon.
How much it fills your room depends on the windows.
Grant a great dignity my friend, to the cup of your life.
Eternal life has designed it to hold eternal wine.
Rumi is making clear what all the mystics of all the traditions discover: divine grace is always flowing. And as Ramakrishna said, “The winds of grace may be always flowing, but we forget to hoist our sails.”
FMT: Since the stakes are so high, the divine is asking for its heart to be broken.
AH: I think the heart of the divine has been broken again and again since the beginning of time. To undertake the adventure of incarnation is to invite radical and terrifying heartbreak. Anyone who comes into contact with the Mother side of God has come into contact with what Jewish, Christian and Sufi mystics call the heartbreak of God at our forgetfulness of the divine, our maltreatment of the sacred, our brutality towards each other – at our insane cruelty.
FMT: How can someone open the door to their closet mystic?
AH: There are three essential ways to open the door to the closet mystic: A discipline of meditation which enables you to experience the divine sun of consciousness behind the passing clouds of thought.
A discipline of prayer which enables you to experience the rapture of being able to commune with the force that your deepest self is in touch with.
And a discipline of service in which you express what you learn from meditation and prayer in real work of love in the world.
Those three disciplines of meditation, prayer and service, done with great humility and faith, are invitations for divine grace to take away “the me.” Over time, the innate divine nature is revealed; when it is revealed, everything is changed and a wholly divine nature of consciousness, power, generosity and passion are installed in the human being.
FMT: How do we get ourselves out of the massive heartbreak and violence in the world today?
AH: The first thing we need to do is be extremely real, radical and honest about where we are. My great mentor, Father Bede Griffiths, told me at the end of his great life, that he’d come to believe that there were three possible scenarios for the future. This was in 1993 and he was talking about the next 20 years.
Either we will wake up very fast and change everything recognizing the horror of what we’ve created and bring about a heaven
on earth, which is extremely unlikely. Or we will continue to be hopelessly addicted to a dissociated vision of the world, and in all the attendant greed of power and in this addiction, we will destroy everything. He felt that this was more likely, but still unlikely given the presence of divine mercy. The third possibility, and this is what he believed would happen, is that humanity would pass through a great and tremendous death that would mirror the initiatory deaths in the mystical systems that prepare not the end but the transfiguration of the human being.
This initiatory death is known in all of the mystical systems: the shamanic systems, in Mahayana and Hindu Tantra; it’s known as annihilation in Sufism and it’s known as the dark night of the soul in Christianity. This initiatory death is actually a burning down of the false self of the ego’s identifications, separations, fantasies, illusions and agendas. It is a devastating process which demands enormous courage.
At the end of this process the phoenix of divine consciousness rises purely and splendidly from the ashes of the burnt and incinerated false self. What seems like horror and death and cruelty and madness and destruction reveals itself by the supreme paradox of ruthless mercy to be radical healing and radical liberation.
I believe this is happening: We are passing through an initiatory death on a major scale. Just as the mystic has to pass through the dark night to become humanized, so the human race has been brought, both by its mistakes, and also by the hidden logic of its own evolutionary passion, to a moment, where it will have to transform to die out. Where, in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, it will have to choose between suicide or adoration.
You can see this choice in two ways. You can see it in a frightened, scared, extremely depressed way, or you can see it in a joyful, impassioned and thrilled way, knowing that the fact that this choice has appeared in history means that this tremendous crisis is also a tremendous opportunity.
The first thing to see is that we’re going through not just a scientific or technological or political or even psychological crisis. In its essence, it is a mystical crisis. The crisis stems on the one hand from the our abandonment of the sacred and on the other hand it stems from the necessity of an evolutionary process that is taking us and will take us through an initiatory crucifixion into an extraordinary resurrection as divine being. Once you have seen that, something in you is humbled and inspired.
Once you have allowed that steady inspiration to take over your whole being, you need to do two things: You need to plunge deep into sacred practice, spiritual practice, mystical practice; and you need to start doing something that reflects the urgency of your compassion.
FMT: This is where service comes into play?
AH: Service is the only possible response to a world in chaos that is falling apart in every way.
FMT: In the face of so much difficulty and destruction how can one person’s efforts begin to make a dent?
AH: The truth is that any action, done from a profoundly open and compassionate heart, has an effect, through divine grace, far greater than anyone can ever imagine. For example, you might find yourself in a queue in Safeway, and because you really want to extend compassion and you feel full of love, you spend time with the person serving you. You don’t know that that person has decided to commit suicide in the evening, because his or her life has reached an impasse. Your few words of ordinary courtesy change his or her decision. You never know that, but what you’ve actually done by just chatting with a smile could very well be saving a life. The world is full of examples like that.
FMT: Many people feel hopeless.
AH: One of the ways the ego keeps us in its thrall is by massively depressing us. As long as you are trapped in the ego and the false self, however intelligently, this crisis is going to look hopeless, dark and dense and terrifying. That is the real reason why without a profound mystical revolution, without a real mystical awakening, this crisis is going to drive us into madness and despair.
Once you step out of the confines of the prison of the false self and the ego, with all of its false hopes and false illusions and false agendas, you stand in the eternal light of divine love and the flow of divine grace. When you are that eternal light and flow you know there is always the possibility of giving love and exercising compassion that can subtly shift the situation.
If you stay in the false self and the ego, all that you will see in the world around us at the moment is a nightmare exploding. If you step out of that vision into the vision of the eternal heart, what you will see is that this extreme and terrifying process is a stage in an evolutionary unfolding of God’s divine plan for human transformation. That won’t reduce absolutely your fear and you will continue to cry and tremble and sometimes want to die. But, what it will give you, over time, is a calm and fervor, and a supply of deathless energy that will enable you to go on going on with joy.
FMT: This idea of going on with joy is needed by people doing activist work. I see so many people who are trying to make change in the world but really are doing it from this place of anger.
AH: The mystics and activists are probably the two most sensitive groups of people. But I think that both mystics as we know them and activists as we know them are not at this moment as helpful as they may be, and that’s putting it gently.
Many mystics I meet are addicts of transcendence. They believe that only the light is real; the world is ultimately just an illusion;
and human relationships and the body and all forms of politics are somehow dirty and fallen. This view, which is backed up by a great many of the patriarchal mystical traditions, is an absolute catastrophe for the world at the moment. It means that those beings who are in partial contact with the absolute, are not letting that contact inform real, wise, tender, compassionate helpful action in the real world. They’re using that contact as a kind of heroin to sign off from the real world. They’re making the mystical ecstasy and bliss and peace the final drug instead of the support for compassionate, just, transformative action.
Activists are motivated by tremendous righteous passion for justice; I think that’s at the noble core of everything that they do. The problem with many activists I have met, and I say this with great humility, because I admire them, is that many are still in an unhealed, divided, angry consciousness, which condemns others. This perpetuates, through that divided consciousness, some of the very problems that are destroying the world.
Just as mystics are addicted to being, activists are addicted to doing. The mystics do not always act with enough generosity out of the depths of their wisdom. The activists do not always ask themselves the three crucial questions that a truly mystical sacred activist should ask:
- What is your prime intention in doing this action?
- How does this action express your unconditional love for all beings?
- And what is the goal of this action in the evolutionary unfolding of humanity?
Activists are addressing the major problems of this upheaval from an impassioned but limited consciousness. This limits their response and the power of their actions. Only those actions blessed by the divine, infused by divine compassion, inspired by divine wisdom, only those actions can really transform a situation as dark as this.
The beauty of sacred activism is that it brings together what is best in both the mystic and the activist: the mystic’s fiery passion for God, and the activist’s fiery passion for justice. What is born from the fusion of those two great ennobling fires is a third fire that is love and wisdom in action.
When that fusion takes place in a person and that third fire is born, the addiction of the mystic to being is healed by the activist’s passion for action.
The activist’s passion for doing is healed by the mystic’s bliss, peace and understanding of the eternal protection for being.
FMT: You need them both.
AH: Yes. And in the birth of this third fire, is the great hope.
FMT: The great hope uniting the best of both of these ways of being in world.
AH: Yes; it is realizing that they need to fuse together to be effective. The divine truth behind the mystic’s passion has created the major religions, built Chartres and the pyramids and burns in the work of both Beethoven and Rumi. The passion for justice
is the divine truth at the heart of activism because justice is one of the holiest names of God.
The activist’s passion for doing is healed by the mystic’s bliss, peace and understanding of the eternal protection for being.
If you bring these partial enactments of the divine truths of both positions together, you have the birth of a nuclear fire of passionate compassion in wise lucid action. This is the force that could transform everything. The fusion of the two fires, the mystic’s passion for God and the activist’s passion for justice can transform the horror and darkness of this situation and take the whole of humanity into the next evolutionary stage in which human consciousness and divine consciousness will work in co-creative and glorious ways to transform the Earth and create justice and harmony.
FMT: What is the role of righteous indignation?
AH: I think that’s one of the most important questions you could ask. What I feel at the moment is this: The patriarchal mystical systems have demonized anger, because they are terrified of the potentially deranging force that it can unleash. But they’re also terrified of the ways in which outrage can lead to a fundamental readjustment of society. At this core, the demonization of anger is a refusal of the transformational powers of the dark feminine since true holy outrage can unleash in a way that restores balance and transforms society.
If you aren’t angry at how the environment is being destroyed and how we’re being governed by corrupt gangsters, how the corporations have no controls on their greed-inspired action, if you aren’t angry at the fact that billions of people are living on less than $1 a day, you aren’t human. If your anger masters you and drives you into hatred, you aren’t human either. What is needed is what the Tantric feminine mystical traditions give us, and which Jesus exemplifies: a way of using the energy of outrage, transmuting it by dedicating it to the divine for purification into fierce compassionate energy that sustains constant action.
Look for part two of the fiery, passionate interview with Andrew Harvey in the December issue when Harvey discusses practices for unleashing the sacred activist in us all.
For more information about Andrew Harvey, visit: andrewharvey.net.
Felicia Tomasko has spent more of her life practicing Yoga and Ayurveda than not. She first became introduced to the teachings through the writings of the Transcendentalists, through meditation, and using asana to cross-train for her practice of cross-country running. Between beginning her commitment to Yoga and Ayurveda and today, she earned degrees in environmental biology and anthropology and nursing, and certifications in the practice and teaching of yoga, yoga therapy, and Ayurveda while working in fields including cognitive neuroscience and plant biochemistry. Her commitment to writing is at least as long as her commitment to yoga. Working on everything related to the written word from newspapers to magazines to websites to books, Felicia has been writing and editing professionally since college. In order to feel like a teenager again, Felicia has pulled out her running shoes for regular interval sessions throughout Southern California. Since the very first issue of LA YOGA, Felicia has been part of the team and the growth and development of the Bliss Network.