January/February 2003 Featured Stories
A Mystic for Our Time
An interview with Andrew Harvey

by Miriam Knight

Andrew Harvey is a poet, writer, scholar, and probably the preeminent mystic of our day. Over the past 25 years, this brilliant, passionate man has had deep spiritual apprenticeships with leading Christian, Hindu, Sufi and Buddhist teachers. It is the synthesis of these different mystical traditions that informs his work, and he brings great authority to some 30 published works. His compelling messages resonate deeply within one’s heart. Space permits only a taste of our fascinating conversation. We are truly fortunate to be having the opportunity to hear him speak in Portland this February.

MK: Andrew, what I found most compelling about your work was the synthesis of so many different spiritual paths, and how they lead to the direct man-God connection.
AH: Yes, well the truth is that at the heart of all the great mystical traditions there is this understanding that there is a direct connection; a connection beyond words between the individual soul and God. Once you realize it, this connection is a source of tremendous joy and passion, strength and energy. What has happened in the religions and in the mystical systems is that this basic connection has often been clouded over, by hierarchy or the creation of elites, or of a savior figure between human beings and God; and in the case of many of the mystical systems, by the insistence on the adoration of a mediator, the guru. What I discovered is that it is absolutely essential to go beyond the forms, the dogma, the gurus, the priests, to the direct connection, because if you don’t you get stuck in the divisive stuff of the different systems and don’t ever get to the pure connection, which is so transforming and invigorating.

MK: You were a brilliant scholar and the youngest fellow at Oxford’s All Souls College, but you were born in India. How did that affect you?
AH: It was a tremendous blessing because it was a naturally sacred, open, religious world. From a very early age I realized that all religions were, in essence, one, and that although some religions claimed exclusiveness, their claims were idiotic because there was only one God and many, many different approaches to that one God. So I was lucky to grow up having that image of unity and tolerance at the core of one’s being.

MK: At the age of 25 you had a kind of break down and went back to India for a year. How did that affect you?
AH: I had a series of very profound mystical experiences, which completely shattered everything that I had ever understood about reality. It made me aware that what the Hindu scriptures were talking about the nature of the self. The eternal divinity of the creation weren’t poetic metaphors but living experiences of consciousness, so I plunged into an exploration of several major mystical traditions.
I went to Ladakh, a Himalayan kingdom and met an old Tibetan master, a great mystic who initiated me into Buddhism. He radiated enlightened energy and convinced me that it is possible to live this very different mystical and practical life.
I plunged into Hinduism at the feet of a guru called Mother Meera. I lived in Paris between 28 and 40 and studied Sufism and the poetry and philosophy of Rumi with a great French Sufi called Eva deVitrey-Meyerovitch. At the age of 36 I had the first great awakening of the path when you understand that everything is one with divine consciousness. I described this in a book I wrote about Mother Meera called Hidden Journey, which became an international best-seller and made her very famous.
I also returned at the end of my thirties to Christianity, that is to the Christ path, because I met a Christian mystic in India called father Bede Griffiths, who showed me that it was possible to live the Christ path while being open to all the other mystical traditions.
But when I was 41 a huge change happened. I met Eryk Hanute, who is now my husband, and this really occasioned a revolution in my thinking. Up to then, like many mystics, I had tried to live separated from the body in the light, in the transcendent. Meeting Eryk and falling in love and being loved back started to marry my body and my spirit in a very profound way. I thought that this was the grace of my guru, Mother Meera, but when she told me to get rid of Eryk, get married and write a book about how her force had transformed me into a heterosexual I went into a terrible crisis. What I did was to choose human love, because I realized that it had a divine truth. What then followed was a year of pain, horror and suffering that I describe in my latest book, Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night. The grace of this period is that through the destruction of my dependence upon Meera, and through the revelation of human love and the divinity of human love I came absolutely to recognize the radiance of the direct path and the direct connection.

MK: Where has this taken your work?
AH: I’ve been able to draw upon this both terrible and revelatory experience, and develop a whole different set of tools to help people in this very dangerous time. In the last 10 years my work has had four different but related aspects.
In one of them I have written altogether five books on the great Persian mystic poet Rumi, because I believe Rumi’s work is coming back to inspire people to plunge into the cauldron of divine transformation and love. My work on Rumi has been an attempt to help people get to the great mystical teaching and philosophy that underlie it. I believe that Rumi, like Jesus, is one of the great alchemists of agony, and that we are living through an agonizing time. Here is one who in his own life transmuted great suffering into transcendant illumination and I think we are being plunged into a time in which we are going to be asked to do the same thing.
The second is that I have really gone into a huge exploration of the divine feminine – what the mother aspect of God truly is: all-tolerant, all-embracing, all-loving and a huge force for radical change. Implied in this vision was a critique of the New Age, because although the New Age has succeeded in opening up many new spiritual atmospheres, it has also focused on private well-being rather than the great political and social and environmental questions that are now tormenting the world. I wanted to show that the force of the divine feminine is really a radical and revolutionary force that demands that we become not merely mystics but also activists. Because mystics on their own, sitting on their futons will be chanting mantras when the last tree burns down, if they don’t become more practical and concentrated on the world. And activists will be burnt out by the real difficulties of working in the world if they are not fed by mystical strength. So in this second part of my work I really try to paint a new revolutionary picture of the divine feminine to inspire people to do something about changing the real world.

MK: What about your return to the Christ path?
AH: That was the third aspect of my work where I looked again at the whole Christian tradition. I was convinced that the versions of Christianity that I’d been given were watered down and that there was an authentic Christ path that needed to be reclaimed by the West. I brought together all the modern historical criticism about Jesus, which is brilliant, and reveals that Jesus never wanted to be described as the son of God, to create a church, but wanted to liberate people into their own direct connection really came to understand how profound and radical and transfiguring the real Christ path truly is when you detach it from all the fantasy, elitism, misogyny and homophobia that the church is.

MK: And what was the fourth aspect?
AH: About three years ago I produced the book that all of this was leading up to called, The Direct Path. In this book, I give the story of my road to the direct path and a whole vision of the different stages of the evolution of the spirit and the soul and then I give 18 major practices from the different traditions that I had been initiated into, and some others, that I believe really can help people get into the direct connection. I really tried to explain the practices very deeply from within my own inner experience of them so that people could see that in this sacred technology there is now an extraordinary source for transformation. I believe that the most important thing that the teacher can do now is to teach practices that can help people empower themselves with divine love so that they can really experience for themselves the truth of their divine consciousness and the great energy that flows from it.

MK: I feel you have a great sense of urgency about this.
AH: I see the whole world poised on the brink of an overwhelming crisis, and I see millions of people without any kind of inner structure and without any way of connecting with the divine, and quite frankly this terrifies me. The direct connection is there; over thousands of years the mystical traditions have developed these overwhelmingly powerful and empowering technologies of transformation which can be used by ordinary people in the course of ordinary lives — if they’re prepared to do the work.

MK: You had to go through a very long process of seeking and self-examination. Is there an easier way?
AH: Many millions of seekers prefer the simpler truths, but they are not going to work in the crisis we’re going into. This is a time to be quite tough and sober minded about what it will really require to turn around the history of the planet.

MK: What do you see as the divine plan?
AH: To wake humanity up; compel it to accept responsibility for the terrifying things that it has done; claim the empowerment of the direct path; and then help it reconstruct the world in a completely different way--to recreate God’s kingdom here on earth.

Andrew Harvey is the author or editor of over 30 books, including Hidden Journey; The Return of the Mother; A Journey in Ladakh; The Essential Mystics; The Son of Man; The Direct Path; and co-author of the bestselling Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. His latest book is Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night, published in October 2002. He will be speaking in Portland February 8th & 9th. See Calendar of Events.