Lapis Magazine

An Interview with Andrew Harvey on Activism

Andrew Harvey discusses with Lapis editor Ralph White his experience of the Divine Mother and his views on the dangers of gurus. He also argues that an authentic spirituality can never be mired in narcissism but must instead take service to the world as its primary ethic. We need a mystic activism that fuses a contemplative awareness of the divine with an impassioned devotion to justice, the environment, and the alleviation of suffering.

Born to British parents in India in 1952, Andrew Harvey at nine was sent to England to begin his education. At twenty-one, he was elected the youngest Fellow in the history of All Soul’s College, Oxford. But academic life began to feel hollow to Harvey. Sick at heart, he abandoned what he had come to see as “the concentration camp of reason”, and returned to India to look for a spiritual path.

There, he studied Hindu mysticism at the ashram of Sri Aurobindo and with Tibetan Buddhist master Thuksey Rinpoche, drawing on the latter experience for his 1983 book A Journey in Ladakh. He returned briefly to Europe, but a lingering dissatisfaction haunted him.

Back in India again, Harvey formed a relationship with a seventeen-year-old Indian woman known as Mother Meera, whose followers still believe she is an avatar, a divine presence in human form. Harnessing his articulateness and devotion, Meera made him her spokesperson, and for nearly fifteen years he spoke and wrote eloquently on her behalf. As he became her most important evangelist, he developed an obsession with Meera which he would later characterize as a dangerous blend of misguided spirituality, eroticism, orientalism, and a “subtle sadomasochism”. Harvey is gay, and as Meera fought his efforts to come out with increasing fervor and bitterness, their estrangement grew.

In January 1994, he made a final break with Meera. A writer and radical mystic, Harvey now lives in San Francisco, where he teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His new work, The Return of the Mother, critiques the role of the guru and eloquently develops his view of the sacred feminine and the Divine Mother.

LAPIS: I know you’ve remarked elsewhere that it’s a tragedy that so many people who are on a mystical and spiritual path tend to ignore the great social, political, and environmental issues of the age. Could you elaborate on this?

AH: Well, what I’ve been saying in my work recently is that many of the mystical traditions that come down to us were formed in the second stage of the development of humanity, which I call the patriarchal stage. And this stage is characterized by a dissociation from matter, from the body, from sexuality, and from nature. Essentially these traditions are about evading this world, escaping from it into another world-achieving release, nirvana, moksha. This whole emphasis on not being present in the body, not blessing sexuality, and not honoring nature has in fact aided and abetted a kind of ignorance and denigration of the world that is now destroying it. So it’s not that mystics have ignored the world-the training mystics have received has encouraged a vision of the world as illusion, as maya, as fallen, as rancid with original sin, which has meant that people haven’t been given the tools to enter the world with fully embodied love. And that’s why it’s so important now-not important-but crucial that we find again a vision of the sacred feminine, that we bring back into full frontal consciousness the powers and the gnosis of the divine mother. Because it’s only through understanding the motherhood of god, the mother-side of god, that we can understand how to re-enter our bodies, and time, and light, and nature, and discover what we really are, which is divine children given these bodies in this time. We’re not meant to escape from them, but to enter them completely; we’re not meant to get out of being here, but to arrive here. The soul hasn’t come here as a kind of punishment; the soul has come here to complete its understanding of the universe through embodiment. And it’s when this radical reinterpretation of the whole mystical enterprise gains currency that the true mystical force, which fuses understanding of the sacred laws of reality with a passionate commitment to compassion and the action of compassion in every arena of society — when this fusion takes place, then an entirely new force, which is the mother force — will enter the world. This is what I’m dedicated to trying to help.

LAPIS: In your latest book, The Return of the Mother, you describe a vision you had of flames and fire emerging from the divine mother’s heart and you saw five sacred passions. The fifth passion was for service, so perhaps you could elaborate on the role of service and action.

AH: I would like to begin with my sense that the mother herself is in perpetual service. She is serving with the utmost and most impassioned imaginable humanity and tenderness absolutely every being equally in the entire universe. So everything, from the ladybug to the whale to the fern to the dolphin, everything is cradled by her and in her and attended to by her. Coming into contact with the mother is coming into contact with the immense force of love that is dedicated to the happiness, serenity, strength, and the well-being of absolutely every being. The real lover of the mother is not a master but a child, in love with the mother and with all of the mother’s creation dedicated in selfless love to try and help everything achieve unity and peace. So that’s the first point: that the connection with the sacred feminine is not real unless it is connected with the mother’s own passion for each being and a passionate commitment is born in the heart to serve absolutely everyone and everything. Secondly, there is no such thing as real love unless it is put into action, unless it is made real through action. All the greatest messengers of liberation to humanity have made this clear. Krishna makes it clear in the Gita, Christ makes it clear again and again and again — especially in the Sermon on the Mount and in the great passage in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, when he makes charity and the real service of other human beings the insoluble guide to who is really in contact with God or not. And the great Mahayana mystics have stressed the necessity of enacting compassion in this world, in their great idea of the Bodhisattva. So I think it’s clear that all the noblest traditions, however marred by patriarchy they might be in other ways, have had at their core a vision of service as being the real sign of whether someone is on the true path to enlightened love.

In a time like this, when the world’s very existence is threatened and we may have only twenty years in which to solve or begin to solve the problems that otherwise will become insoluble, there is absolutely no excuse for anybody on a spiritual path not to take totally seriously the passion of the mother, the service of Christ, the service of the Bodhisattva. One should try to enact service not merely in terms of their own private life, toward their friends and their family, although that’s where it must begin, but make a commitment to understanding what is actually happening in the world, in the corporations, in pollution, in the population explosion, and to dedicate themselves to a series of political choices that could end these disasters. What’s really needed I think is political, mystical activism, and why it needs to be all of those things at once is this: A political activism without mystic depth will simply not be able to stand the wear and tear and burnout of trying to fight for truth in an arena as corrupt and polluted as the one we will confront. A purely mystical approach will run the dangers of narcissism and quietism at a time when the healing through action is desperately needed. And only a fusion between them and a hands-on political application of that vision can give us the power, the strength, the stamina, the tireless intensity that we’ll need to turn this situation around. Service is not an optional extra, service is the core, the end, the goal of the whole spiritual enterprise. And it has never been more clear than it is now that only through service in all of its forms, including the service of truth and justice in the political arena, most importantly justice to women, justice to homosexuals, justice to animals, justice to forests, justice to the whole natural world-only through the application of this can the world now be saved and preserved. What do you think?

LAPIS: I agree. I think that sounds certainly right.

AH: And I’m absolutely sick to death — I have to say this — I’m sick to death of those so-called new age gurus and masters and adepts who are going around saying nonsense. For example — I won’t name him — X says that anybody who thinks that nature is sick now is themselves brain sick. Or that the crisis that we’re living through is in some sense a part of the divine plan and all we have to do is sit on our futons and pray. That is absolute nonsense. And it’s dangerous and cruel and deeply destructive nonsense, because we are not passive participants with the divine in this experience. We are co-creators, co-participators with the divine, and to co-create with the divine means that we take responsibility for ourselves and our actions. To take responsibility for ourselves and our actions at this moment means looking at how we have brought ourselves to a point of suicidal frenzies, suicidal violence, suicidal self-destructiveness and how we are in process of absolutely annihilating nature. Anyone out there who is saying that this is in any sense an illusion, that this is in any sense part of the divine plan, that in any sense we’re going to be saved from ourselves by direct divine intervention or some avatar or some light from Mars or some star suddenly appearing in the constellation of Ceres is deeply crazy, I think, and very unhelpful. It’s time that their quietism and their vanity and their signing off is exposed for what it is: something as sick as the system that they are supposedly trying to help us get out of, but with which, in fact, they’re in secret cahoots with.

LAPIS: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I take as a very legitimate perspective that of the Worldwatch Institute which says that we have twenty or thirty years to change this thing around, otherwise, in ecological terms we’re going to be in an irreversible position of environmental degradation.

AH: If we don’t do it within the next twenty years, it’s not that the world is going to end immediately, it’s that we’re all going to wish that it would end because we’re all going to be living in a hospital so degraded and stinking that it will be uninhabitable.

LAPIS: Yes, it’s been a long-time source of frustration for me at the Open Center that it’s so difficult to get people to come down for social, political, and environmental programs. Most people remain largely focused upon the inner journey, the psychological and spiritual, which too often gives very little sense of connection to larger social and political issues.

AH: The idea that there is such a thing as an inner journey without an outer journey is so false. The inner journey is a journey to a place where you discover that inner and outer are one. And that love embraces all things, especially the service to other beings. I’m afraid that the spiritual journey that most people have been on has been a high form of narcissism.

LAPIS: Yes, the standard critique of the so-called New Age by the mainstream establishment is that it is narcissistic, and I think that we have to grant that there’s some element of truth to it.

AH: I’m not criticizing the New Age from the mainstream point of view, I’m criticizing it from what I hope is the appropriate mystical point of view, because I think that we see in the lives of Christ, Buddha, and Rama Krishna what a really achieved mystic is-not at all someone who just sits and contemplates the image of light, but someone who tirelessly devotes themselves to implementing the laws of love and justice in the world. This balance between sacred love and sacred action is actually the essential mystical life, and what the New Age is proposing as the essential mystical life isn’t that-it is actually upperclass escapism.

LAPIS: Yes. For me, a holistic view involves an equal concern with both the inner and the outer worlds, and in so many cases we only have half of that.

AH: When the sacred heart is open, the outer world is known as shining within the inner world, and the whole world and everybody’s suffering in it and every injustice is felt as being one’s own suffering and one’s own injustice. So it’s not that the real mystical journey doesn’t take you to a place where you are free from pain and the pain of others, it takes you to the place where you’re strong enough to be able to stand the pain of others and to really see it without consolation and then to devote yourself to really working to help it.

LAPIS: OK. I want to look for a moment at some of your ten sacred suggestions, also included in your latest book. The fifth suggestion is to dissolve forever all schisms and separations between sects and religions. In the light of that, do you think that it’s possible for holistically-oriented people to engage in a dialogue with the fundamentalist movement that is so politically powerful in the US and in so many countries now?

AH: Well, I think that the fundamentalism all over the world arises out of panic at the catastrophe that we’re facing and that people desperately want false certainties and it’s going to be extremely difficult to unhook people from them. I don’t know how you can have a serious dialogue with fundamentalists-they refuse to budge from their positions, they misread their own texts, they have been horribly brainwashed, and this applies not just to the religions but also, of course, to followers of most gurus. They are in a state of hypnosis, they want certainty, and they will cling to it often by violent and corrupt means. I do think it would be wonderful to start some kind of dialogue, but would they attend? Would they understand? The problem with fundamentalism is that it almost excludes by definition the mystical point of view, because as soon as the mystical understanding has awoken, it’s quite obvious that there’s only one light here, one energy, one love-it’s been given many different names, but it’s fundamentally nameless and formless and spaceless and timeless, and it’s all one. But unless somebody’s had that mystical perception, and really understood its implications, how can the dialogue begin?

LAPIS: Well, good question.

AH: We’ve had the example in Rama Krishna’s life of someone who went through all of the disciplines of all the religions and proved in the laboratory of his own being that there was no fundamental difference with the goal that they were all going towards. He said to imagine the mother cooking a white fish for six different children. Each of them wants the white fish cooked in different ways, they each have different palates, but the white fish is the same. This is the unalterable truth, this is the truth discovered by Rama Krishna, by Rumi, by Kabir, by Lao Tzu, by nearly all of the very greatest mystics. But it’s a truth that is still to penetrate the human mind and unless it does penetrate the human mind and heart in the next twenty years, we’re going to kill each other.

LAPIS: Following on from some of that, very close to the conclusion of The Return of the Mother you say that there are dark forces that want the human experiment to fail and the world to be destroyed and that these dark forces are “everywhere more and more powerful, subtle, deadly, and ingenious” — a perception I share. I’m wondering if you could speak more about what you’re referring to there and how we might respond to those elements.

H: I think the first thing we should do is to admit that they’re there. One of the most corrupt things about the New Age is its moral relativism. How on earth could we deny the existence of an evil force in the universe after a century which has included the creation of a neutron bomb, Hiroshima, Cambodia, the construction of cities that are mind-annihilating ghettos of destruction, and the creation through television of an all-powerful media that mostly sells trash? So on every side we see the work of very dark forces. Satan has been declared dead in a horrible irony at the very moment when the dark forces are at their most powerful. I think it’s also time to recognize — and this is very disturbing to many people — that a great many of those people who are pretending to be spiritual leaders and spiritual gurus and spiritual popes are in fact not on the side of the divine transformation at all. This is a very, very extreme form of evil, which hardly anybody is willing to understand and look at. The great mystical traditions, especially the Sufi, Hindu, and Christian, have always been very clear about that because we don’t see evil, we don’t recognize evil. We have been corrupted by moral relativism that refuses to admit that it’s there, and in the spiritual world we’re very, very ignorant about occult power, that’s given all these dark processes a fantastic opportunity to flourish all over the world and in every arena. The only way that I found that I can bear the pain of waking up to the extent of the corruption, the cruelty, and the danger, is by reaching myself deeper and deeper and deeper in the inner experience of the love of god, of the love of the mother. And that inner experience can only be had through a really profound and simple prayer and through the continual practice of adoration and meditation in service to other beings. So that as you wake up to the extent of the danger, to the extent that want you to jump out of the window to commit suicide in a desperate moment, the only solution is to root yourself more and more in the love of god and to see that the love of god is a force of all kinds of guidance and protection. One of the things that I’ve discovered in the last two years is the extent and the power of the protection that is offered to anyone who tends to the divine, especially the divine mother. So I urge absolutely everyone to tend to and turn to the divine mother, confident that she wishes the total dissolution of these evils and confident that she will protect and guide and embolden and encourage anyone who turns to her in love and in need. It’s been my very, very deep experience that this is so, and I’ve been amazed at the extent of the protection that each of us can have — and the guidance — if we are humble enough to ask. So the evil is immense, the danger is immense, but the protection is also immense. If we as a human race are humble enough now to turn to the divine for guidance and for protection, amazing things could yet happen. Amazing possibilities could yet be born, but this turning demands a very radical look at what is going on, at the darkness of it, and a very radical understanding of the nature of the sacred feminine. This is why I’ve written The Return of the Mother.