Guy Spiro: Andrew, I usually like to start by asking people to briefly tell us their story. How did you get to be who you are? I know from looking at your website you’re like me in that you do a lot of different things.

Andrew Harvey: Yes. I wear many hats. I’m a mystical teacher, I’m a writer, I’m a speaker, I’m an activist and I am someone struggling to understand my nature and the nature of reality. So I am a Seeker. I am all of those things and I suspect everyone is. I think we are all trying to bring our lives into some deep unity.

GS: What got you started?

AH: Well, I was born in India. When I look back on my life (I am now 56), living in India was a huge blessing, an unbelievable blessing. Being born in India meant being born into a sacred world and a sacred culture and into a way of life that in the early ’50s was still very quiet, very serene and powerfully beautiful. I had, through that birth, a kind of initiation into a divine world. That divine world was here, and god was around, and I think that never left me. But when I went to England at nine years, I was plunged into the Western mind, the Western educational system, the Western vision. One part of my mind and heart closed and another part was educated by that. I became a professor at Oxford in my early twenties and won a very exalted prize academically, but went through a series of breakdowns that convinced me that this model of the world, this mindset, was doomed and was creating a very destructive world. So I went back to India and there had a series of mystical experiences which really deranged my whole understanding of everything. Because I understood at that moment that I understood absolutely nothing about reality.

GS: Deranged in a positive sense.

AH: Well, yes. But it is a very difficult thing to absorb that you are completely ignorant, especially if you fancy your intelligence. If you are an Oxford professor at 21, one of the things you are addicted to is your own brilliance.

GS: I can only try to imagine.

AH: So it was a huge fact to find that I was nothing very important and that there was this enormous reality and that I was part of that reality and blessed by that reality. Because that is what a mystic discovers. That set me on a mystical journey which is still continuing to humble and break me. I am trying to talk about it in all the ways that I can because I feel this is an age that really needs the healing and the guidance that only mystical wisdom can give. I think we are in a very difficult time. We need the highest wisdom and the highest love to guide us and we need to be in contact with it.

     So I am trying to be in contact with it and I am trying to radiate what I learn and what I feel and I am trying to truly help others to get in contact with it in the terms of their own unique temperaments and ways of life. I believe that we all have a direct connection to the divine and waking up to it is the clue to our self inspiration and the transformation of the world through loving, compassionate action.

GS: Its funny, I am 56 as well and I’ve said many times that had I been born in India, they would have known what to do with me. Here it was sink or swim.

AH: I understand that completely because I have been teaching here for a long time and I have seen just how appallingly annihilating and damaging this culture can be. It’s a very difficult culture to survive in the soul.

GS: And yet, when the iron bird flies, right?

[Editor’s note: Padma Sambhava, founder of the first Tibetan monastery, c. 800 AD, is quoted as saying:

     “When the iron bird flies, and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the World, and the dharma will come to the land of red-faced people.”]

AH: Exactly! This is great paradox of America. I think one of the reasons I live in America is that I feel America, just as India, is a marriage of extreme opposites. There is extreme craziness, extreme greed, extreme madness, extreme imperial ambition, extreme delusion. But there is also absolutely extraordinary people waking up, trying new things, thinking new things, inventing new things, going for a new world in the middle of all this chaos. India has the same extraordinary marriage of paradoxes because it is both the most corrupt country imaginable and the most violent country and the holiest country. They have a lot in common psychically and that is one of the reasons why I feel so at home in America. Because I see America going through a death and rebirth process.

GS: Where else do you go directly from a George W. Bush to a Barack Obama?

AH: I felt it was a direct divine intervention. I speak as a mystic. The country was in a dark psychic spell, loosing hope, being paralyzed, waking up to the fact that we all had to largely abide the near creation of a fascist regime.

GS: Came close.

AH: The Republican gangsters really broke all the sacred contracts of this country’s spirit and soul. My god! It was a very dangerous moment and it is not over. I don’t think the powers that went as far as they did to enslave the republic will stop at anything. So we really have to support Obama and pray for him and the divine protection. And try to help him in every conceivable way.

GS: And buy him some time!

AH: And buy him some time. I just pray that the divine did not involve some more smashings before he comes in because I think we are in such a fragile state. But this is a birth process, however terrible it looks. We are being forced to look at the shadow of the republic and forced to look at the shadow of the human in the great all encompassing world crisis. I think we are all going to be brought to our knees and forced together to be wiser, kinder, more generous and to really start working together because that is the only solution.

GS: One of the things that you hear about America from people all over the world, is that it is such a young country and such a young culture, and that is true. Yet, it is also the oldest Aquarian country.

AH: Oh, that is true. But I think it is also a very old country in terms of the blood that it has on its hands. A country that is born, after all, in the genocide of the Native Americans and the African Americans, then the genocide of the animals and baptized in the genocide of the environment, and in between dropped the atomic bomb, is a nation that has to look at what could be called a very long shadow and very ancient shadow.

GS: There could be some paradoxes here.

[laughter]

AH: It has all the paradoxes, but that’s also why there is hope, because in such deep manure you can grow a very great rose. I think if America can wake up to the depths of its shadow while still preserving its optimism and its energy and its hope and its trust in god—which is also something that unites so many Americans—and why don’t we just get over the religious differences and believe at this very late moment in the history of the world that we all believe in the merciful, loving intentions that guides the universe and that will guide us if we start getting humble enough? Does that make any sense to you? Don’t you experience this merciful intelligence in your own life?

GS: Well, absolutely. What I usually say is that, in a sense, there really is nothing to accomplish. There is only to realize what is.

AH: Yes. And then to act naturally out of that place. Because when you realize what is, you realize simultaneously that everything is eternal and that everything is being broken and that everything is dying. From the first realization comes an abiding joy because nothing is being born and nothing will die; this is an eternal myopic. But on the other hand, it is also an embodied sacred reality that is dying. So there is a tremendous heartbreak that comes, and with the realization with what is, and a tremendous joy. And they mingle together to produce a being that is in love with the world, in love with divine love, in love with others and therefore inevitably someone who acts from a place of wisdom and love in the world to give as much help and tender support and tender encouragement as possible. You see this in the great saints of all the traditions, you see this in people alive and here now. Like his holiness the Dali Lama, who radiates the kindness of a living enlightened tender being in the middle of a hellish situation and has done so for fifty years.

GS: I think a large part of what is going on in the world is the paradigm shift due to the age change. The way I usually put it is that the old paradigm was the lower self surrenders to a higher self. But the new paradigm is that you realize you are your higher self.

AH: Exactly.

GS: It amounts to the same thing, but the approach appears to be different.

AH: Well, you can’t realize completely you are your higher self except by tremendous, repeated acts of surrender of the lower self. Because the lower self has to go through multiple deaths before it gets anywhere near understanding even the fringes of the higher self. You have to cross over to the higher self through a crucifixion of the full self, and this is what the world is doing at the moment. This is a mystical process. And it unfortunately processes through an understanding of your own shadow and the connections of your shadow with the shadow of this death machine that has destroyed the world, and that is a very painful business cause you have to learn how much you are polluting through your vanity, through your consumerism, through your ambition, through your hunger for cash, through your hunger for security through your xenophobia, through your addiction to the destruction of the planet. This is tough work, but you have to do it if you want to get real about being real in the world as it is now, and loving everyone as much as possible, and going forward in what you have to help.

GS: I am actually pretty optimistic.

AH: I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic. I am realistic. I do not believe that anybody knows, including god, what will happen. I think there are very frightening and terrible and menacing forces that really threaten future humanity from within and from without, and I think there are enormous forces being born on the earth of great illumination, and wisdom and love and compassion and profound desire to change everything. There is going to be an enormous surmount of these forces. It is already here in terms of an exploding reality. We are living in an exploding reality and things can go any way. In the ideal situation, the world would wake up very fast and start dedicating itself to a new energy policy, to restructuring the financial structure of the world so the poor can be fed, through a destructuring of the whole industrial death machine that is killing the environment, so it can be dismantled so more humane and balanced life can be possible in harmony with nature.

     That would be the ideal picture. But the reality is it is not going to be like that. It is going to be enormous, enormous struggle between these opposing forces which are secretly linked. Because the birth is happening in and through this death and it is going to take everything, and all the courage we have and all the humility we have to align with the forces of this birth. We have to get real about that. I don’t hope in the human in us, I hope in the divine in us. And I know that I am and everyone else is gifted by grace, pure grace, with divine consciousness and I trust that that divine consciousness that is within me, that is in you, that is in absolutely everyone, that is in everything, in every rock and every spray of sea water and every dolphin and every sublime mountain, everything that is in all the world, that divine conscious will find its way to us, to illuminate us, to give the intelligence to start building a new world in the debris of the old.

GS: I am betting on the light.

AH: I am betting on the light, because the birth is happening. I think if you look around at the world you see great chaos and terrible, terrible suffering and the deaths of all known agendas and structures, but you also see the birth of astounding things. You see the birth of an ecological, scientific approach to nature which reveals the necessity of cooperation with nature on every level. You see the birth of enormous new technology that could potentially exist in harmony with nature. Fuel technologies. We’ve got to devote enormous resources to this. You see the birth of the universal mysticism that is going beyond the religions to create a vision of the oneness of humanity and the oneness of the father/mother and the love and the service of all living things that would flow from that sacred understanding. You see the birth of great disciplines of the sacred body in yoga and in reiki and in these amazing new physical disciplines from the East like Tai Chi. These are extraordinary gifts that are coming to the human race. The birth is happening! The holy new consciousness is born into a great country of revolution at the moment which includes a revolution in sexuality, a revolution in understanding of the true body, the body transformed by the soul, the embodied soul that is the authentic body. These great mysteries of evolution are being revealed right now to the human race in the middle of a great death. So we know it’s true. We know it’s real. We just have to go on choosing it and living it in the most decent, humble way in the core of our lives. And be led by it as it births itself in us. I think we just have to give into this process and just love it and do the best we can. And be activist of the heart. Which I call sacred activist. And my whole vision now is about this sacred activism that is born from this consciousness that is the necessity to be broken up and the necessity to fall in love with life and serve life naturally from a heartbroken, joyful heart.

     I think there are a lot of us out there. I travel around this country and I see an awful lot of people who really know how deep the danger is we are in, but also know this is a tremendous opportunity to wake up, to get humble, to get together and to start loving life and get beyond all the materialism and consumerism that is threatening our existence.

GS: Well, crisis and opportunity.

AH: Yes! And the bigger the crisis, the bigger the opportunity. As my grandmother says, never waste a crisis, especially an extreme crisis. It is a very holy time and I think that so many people are waking up to that. We just have to know how to keep ourselves strong, calm, loving and grateful through a terrible time. Because terrible times are what enables you to get really close to enlightenment. That’s one thing I have learned on my journey.

GS: Everything being cyclical, what I usually say is that when times are the darkest is when it is time to start partying.

[joyful laughter]

AH: What a great idea! That is what India has always known, isn’t it? I mean that is what you learn in third world countries. My god, they are not miserable. It is when you come back to the West addicted to success and money and power that you feel so miserable. I never feel miserable in India, because amid all the horror and chaos, there is such incredible permitment to joy.

GS: You are going to be doing a weekend at Yoga Now. What will you be doing there?

AH: What I will be doing is sharing my vision of the divine embodied soul, of the real meaning of the body, and my vision of the visceral tenderness that is born in the body. How different linked meditations, both of body prayer, yoga and mystical visualization help you create the tantric body that births the divine in the human. I will also share my vision of how this sacred body naturally expresses itself in sacred activism, in a loving, compassionate service of all sentient beings, through choosing a mission that helps the birth of the divine in the human. That is an ambitious program for a day, wouldn’t you say?

GS: That ought to be enough to fill the time between 9:00 and noon, anyway.

[laughter]

AH: Yes. Well I think you should go for it, you know? You have to work at getting it right. The wonderful thing about teaching all over the country, as I have done, is that you can get an awful lot into a short space if you can make contact with people. That’s part of the wonderful thing about being alive at this moment, don’t you think? Is that we can have complete insane and noble conversations because we are in an insane and noble situation.

GS: Oh in so many ways, it is a toy store of a life time.

AH: Yes. Because you get to go through it all!

GS: I can’t think of another time I would rather be here than now.

AH: Because you see that you can really do something meaningful.

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Andrew Harvey is a renowned and distinguished mystical scholar, Rumi translator and explicator, poet, novelist, spiritual teacher and writer, and architect of Sacred Activism. He will be holding a workshop at Yoga Now Gold Coast, 742 N. LaSalle, Suite 201, Chicago, IL 60654 on Saturday, February 21, from 1:00–4:00 pm. See the advertisement in this issue for more details.

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