Kinetics Magazine February 2010 pg2

I am profoundly honored to share with you this month's featured interview with Andrew Harvey. Over the past twenty years I had the enormous pleasure of interviewing all of the most influential spiritual leaders of our time, from Marianne Williamson, Wayne Dyer, and Deepak Chopra to Louise Hay, James Redfield and Dannion Brinkley (that turned out to be especially meaningful)! Yet, I cannot say that any of those conversations were as potent or compelling as this one with Mr. Harvey.

Perhaps this conversation is particularly significant because of the precarious period in which we're all presently living. Perhaps it is so noteworthy due to the timely essence of the subject matter. Or perhaps it is simply the charm and deep wisdom of Andrew Harvey, himself. He certainly has a way about him - a way of expressing breathtaking visions of hope in complete sentences. Sentences filled with poignancy and prose that ignite the imagination and spur the spirit into action.

Mr. Harvey has written over 25 books, yet his latest, The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism, was the first one to capture my attention. In this profound spiritual manual, he offers us the greatest hope of all for transforming reality into a triumphant call to action through the marriage of the physical with the mystical. It is an elucidating, step-by-step manual for global salvation. The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism has been called, "a blueprint for a better world" and I most definitely concur. As Andrew Harvey delineates the concepts of Sacred Activism, they become a global initiative designed to save the world from its downward spiral of greed, pain and self-destruction.

Included in this divine volume are The Seven Laws of Sacred Activism, designed in simplicity and love, to guide each one of us to help elevate the globe above its present state of crisis. Mr. Harvey also writes eloquently on what he calls, The Five Forms of Service, and The Ten Things You Can Do Right Now.

If you only commit to reading one good book in the year 2010, I urge you to read The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism, Andrew Harvey's latest and grandest contribution to the world. Please do it for yourself...do it for the planet.

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Kathryn: Good morning, Mr. Harvey, and thank you so very much for your time this morning.

Andrew: Oh, you are more than welcome. Thank you! How did you find my book?

Kathryn: I loved it! I am embarrassed to tell you that I was not familiar with your work before I received a copy of your book, The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism. Yet, I must tell you that reading your words make me cry, they literally bring tears to my soul. I swear, your message is just so gorgeous, and the way you write is exquisite.

Andrew: Thank you so much for saying that, and I am so happy to get the message out there because I don't really feel is it my message, it feels more like something the Divine has given me to share.

Kathryn: I'm positive that is true. Now, I'd like to go back to the beginning of your life for those, like myself, who may not be acquainted with you. I know you grew up in India, during the fifties. What was that like...was it magical, was it miserable?

Andrew: Well, I think India is at the core of my life, and growing up there as a child is really the reason I am doing the work I'm doing. India gave me three great revelations very early in life. First, that God in One; beyond all dogma, and all religion, there is only one light shining through the different colored panes of all religions. India gave me the revelation that reality is a marriage of opposites - a marriage of ecstasy and agony, beauty and horror, the light and the dark. Because it is absolutely impossible to be born in India and not see the devastating suffering and not feel it at the deepest level. And because I have a little Indian blood, through my father, India also gave me a rootedness in eastern traditions as well as western traditions. So my life has been a life that has attempted to bridge the two traditions and to create a universal mysticism that takes into account both the extraordinary understanding of eastern religion of divine identity - divine consciousness as being everyone's birthright and the great impulse of western tradition which reaches towards an evolutionary unfolding of human destiny.

In my twenties, I found in the work of Sri Aurobindo, the great Hindu evolutionary mystic, a way of reconciling these two opposites. Then, in my forties, I met the great teacher of my life, Father Bede Griffiths, who had really found a way to bring Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism together in the depths of his spirit and to unfold an evolutionary vision of human development from the depths of an understanding and experience of divine identity.

Kathryn: So, Father Griffiths was a Catholic priest?

Andrew: He was a Catholic monk, and I think for many people, he was probably the greatest Christian mystic of the twentieth century. And still, his work is not nearly as known as the work of Thomas Merton. He was, in certain ways, even more adventurous than Thomas Merton. Father Griffiths lived in an Indian ashram for forty years, of his own creation, and he had successfully married all of the opposites within himself. By the time I met him, in his middle eighties, quite clearly embodied the Christ and was living a very humble, but very incandescent and radiant life. Even at that time he was speaking of the true nature of the crisis we are going through in that it is a death leading to a birth, a crucifixion leading to a resurrection. This is an immense evolutionary crisis destined, if we can cooperate with the divine impulse behind it, to birth a divine humanity. This vision of Father Bede's, because he was able, at the deepest level, to communicate it to me and to show me its truth by the power and radiance of his personality, it has been the vision that has governed all of my work. It is truly the vision at the heart of sacred activism.

Kathryn: So, are you saying that Father Griffiths felt that this was our destiny, that we had to come to this point of crisis in order to rebirth as a divine humanity?

Andrew: Well, I think the danger of coming to this point was probably inherent in the very nature of our creation, in that we were given free will. That free will obviously means freedom to deny, to destroy, to annihilate and to rebel. It also means the freedom to evolve the most extraordinary powers, either in union with God or in rebellion against God. Unfortunately, we chose to evolve our extraordinary powers in radical disassociation with nature, ourselves and the Divine consciousness. But, the Divine is absolute mercy, and can turn even rebellion into a source of deeper transformation.

Kathryn: Oh, yes, I so agree. But do you think we made that choice consciously or that we were basically programmed and subliminally corralled in that direction?

Andrew: I think we made that choice because after all we were given many messengers, and many avatars, and many great saints who constantly cried out to warn us against what would potentially happen if we did it. Yet, the lure of power and the lure of domination of nature, and the lure of extravagant control was so great that we could not resist it. However, there is a kind of mercy in this that we have to see clearly now. You see, this choice has become suicidal and matricidal, in that it is killing our Mother, the Earth. So, if we can look at the devastating nature of this choice it can expose us to the full range of our shadow. If you can make the full range of your shadow conscious, you then have an extraordinary source of wisdom and compassion. And with that you also possess the impetus to go on a really deep, transforming journey to become one with God.

Kathryn: Andrew, your answer leads me to ask you something I've often asked leaders, in the spiritual community, over the past twenty years. Now, I must admit that I've never received an answer that fully satisfied me, and I am so hoping you'll be the one. So, here it is: Having come from God, as individuated sparks of Divinity, why is it that we chose to come to Earth to recapture our perfection? Why do we have to go through all the suffering and darkness, the reclaiming of the shadow in order to remember who we were from the start?

Andrew: I think it is part of God's huge, vast, complex, mysterious game with Herself/Himself. I believe that all creation is a deliberate act of self-limitation by the Divine to express Itself. The Divine is coming back to Itself through all of the different unfoldings of forgetting of the creation as a vast and terrible game, and we are in it. That is really the deepest explanation for it. It's the explanation at the core of all the great mystical traditions.

Kathryn: Thank you so much for that, Andrew. Your answer is exceptional food for thought. You say in your bio that you became disillusioned with the system while you were at Oxford, please tell me more about that time in your life.

Andrew: Yes, well I was born in India, and came to England at the age of nine and went through the concentration camp of English private education (laughter). I quickly became an overachiever and became a professor at Oxford at 21.

Kathryn: Wow...that's takes being an overachiever to an all time high!

Andrew: I know...well, then I became radically disillusioned by the cult of irony and the total lack of interest in spirituality. You see, I was beginning to awaken and I found absolutely no help, no response and no true sacred friendship at Oxford. This left me extremely depressed so at the age of 25, I returned to India to drink deep of the sources of my childhood.

Kathryn: Were your parents spiritual?

Andrew: Yes, they were decent, ordinary people who had faith. Yet, they wouldn't have considered themselves mystics, and I think I was destined for a mystical journey which is always a more complex, and problematic thing. So, upon my return to India I experienced a series of overwhelmingly mystical experiences. These served to convince me that the western intellectual paradigms really had nothing to help people enter the deepest strata of consciousness. The kind that was then becoming available to me. So, that started me on an intense mystical search that led me to Ladakh where I met a Tibetan master. From there I was led to the feet of a young Indian woman, Mother Meera, to whom I became a devotee. That led me to plunge into Sufism in Paris, where I began to live, and it led me into a deeper exploration of all the mystical traditions. More and more mystical experience caused an awakening, at age 36, where I saw the entire universe vanish into divine white light. At that point, I realized, beyond thought, that all things are created from the Bliss Consciousness, and that completely changed my life. But there were still many revelations to come, and many ordeals to come because I believe that kind of opening experience is just the beginning. First, you have to ascend to the Light. And then, you have to descend from that experience and marry that experience with your thoughts, your actions and your body so that you can embody or incarnate that experience. Of course, that is a very difficult journey and it is the journey I've been on for twenty years. It is the journey out of which my vision for sacred activism comes.

Kathryn: Indeed, that is a tremendous journey, and it also appears to be another part of the answer to my earlier question. We're all on a journey of descent from the Light in order to integrate it fully into the sacred acts of everyday life. This might well be what is required to be completely enlightened.

Andrew: Yes, that's what God is doing in the universe, flinging out Divine Consciousness into its seeming opposite, matter; so as to awaken Divine Consciousness in matter.

Kathryn: It feels as if the Divine is saying, "You think you're enlightened, well try this next experience!"

Andrew: Yes, and the vision of enlightenment we've been given is only a partial one. Nobody becomes completely enlightened, there is no such thing. What happens is that you enter an enlightenment field in which you make very great progress. But also in which is set very great challenges. The challenge is, how are you going to marry the enlightenment awareness with every political choice you make, with every economic choice you make, how you treat the cashier in the supermarket, how you love your pet, and how you respond to the suffering and the injustices of the world.

Kathryn: That makes me think of a conversation I had one morning with my daughter, Alysia, who is in the Public Administration Masters program at UNLV. She is passionate about politics, and was becoming very impatient with me as we bantered back and forth over the last Presidential election. I finally told her that my foundation was spiritual and I did not want to argue with her over politics. She retorted, "Mother, you cannot call yourself spiritual without being deeply political as well."

Andrew: She is absolutely right! And it is time for the whole so-called spiritual world to stop making the distinction between the two. If we are not concerned with political choices, if we're not concerned with economic choices, if we are not profoundly worried about the power of the corporations, and the power of the politicians to really stymie real action on climate change, real action on poverty, real action on nuclear proliferation, real action on the complete barbarization of our culture by corporate owned media then we are simply not taking up the challenge that Divine is setting up for us to incarnate the Divine on every level and to transform the world. And to make the world a living mirror of God's love and justice.

Kathryn: You are absolutely right and that was so beautifully put, Andrew! Indeed, I will never forget the depth of my daughter's words that day.

Andrew: Well, sometimes our children are our teachers...

Kathryn: Yes, and with six children, I live in a very large classroom. You know, something else in your book struck me in the same tremendous way. You say that it is our communal shadow that is now destroying the world and that we are all basically culpable for what is going on around the world. That struck me because I think most of us are just sitting in our own little worlds, tending our little plot of land, taking care of our families, going to work everyday and trying to be good citizens. Certainly, we don't think we're doing anything wrong, and in no way do we feel we are adding to the global misery. But, when I read what you said about the communal shadow, my mind froze, for I realized that it was true. And we all need to wake up to that fact. If we're not doing something to solve the problems, we are essentially contributing to them.

Andrew: Yes, we all need to wake up to the fact that we are colluding in a death machine. We are living in a culture that is radically dysfunctional, and is addicted to an exploitation of nature that is devastating the planet. We appear to be totally unable to make serious decisions to stop these lethal activities and we're all benefiting from it in the West. We all take planes, we all drive cars, we all pollute. While we are all plagued by denial and disillusion, and a pervasive cynicism about human nature and the world. Yet, we continue to hide our heads in the sand. It is time that we realize how deeply entrenched we all are, however sweet or however righteous we think we are, in a system that is now threatening the very life of humanity along with the whole of nature. So, it is time to wake up. It is very difficult to wake up, but the advantage of realizing that you are colluding, with a death machine, is that your self-righteousness dies. Finally, you realize that if you can make your own shadow conscious, then you can help other people work with theirs. Moreover, you can do so from a position of unconditional compassion and skillful understanding. In the last fifteen years, I have become aware that the world is on a terrifying self-destructive course. But there is also an answer as to how we can go forward. That answer is in bringing together the two most sacred forces in the human psyche.

First, we have the passion of the mystic, for God. This is the passion that burns in all great revelations and in all the great religious civilizations. And then, there is the passion for justice which is the power that has fueled all the major transformations in human society. When you bring these two things together, experience them together, fuse them together, you actually birth a force on Earth of love and wisdom in action. This is the force I call, Sacred Activism. I am convinced it is this force that is the great evolutionary fire force that can birth a new humanity out of all this chaos. The deep meaning of the chaos, and the destruction, and the menace, and the horror we are seeing all around is destined to help us fuse together- in the core of our being - a passion for the Divine, and a passion for justice for all beings. When we do fuse this together, and start acting from this force, many miracles will happen and many miraculous changes will be made easy for us. We will open an entirely new avenue of radical, divine human evolution.

Kathryn: Your message speaks very loudly to me. Personally I am acquainted with so many lovely, genuinely spiritual people who are concerned yet, fundamentally ineffectual when it comes to working towards much needed change.

Andrew: This is something real that the entire spiritual movement has to look at very carefully. I think, unfortunately, a great deal of what is quite wrongly called, the New Age, is basically spiritual narcissism or spiritual materialism taken to an orgasmic, dark, final conclusion. So many of the people who claim to be spiritual are actually using meditation and mystical experiences as a kind of heroine to seal themselves off from authentic involvement with the agony of the world. So it is very important now that people who are spiritual wake up to the pain of the world and see the necessity of doing something about it, from a sacred consciousness, and start organizing themselves. This is my proposal for that: I have started a massive global website called, Networks Of Grace (www.networksofgrace.org). I proposed that people who are deeply concerned about the world, and wish to birth the divine human, come together in networks or groups of about 6-12 people to start working together on causes that break their hearts, really filled them with pain and hunger for change.

Kathryn: Why did you choose to keep the groups at 6-12 members.

Andrew: The great success of terrorism and some of the right-winged fundamentalists groups has been that they work in cells. Between 6 and 12 members, you can have real intimacy, real mutual help, and mutual transparency. I also believe that people in ordinary lives can work with 6-12 friends quite easily, quite soon. So, when you work in a cell-like structure, in your own local community, and you connect what you are doing through the website with all the other cells that may be working in the world, on the same kinds of problems, you can build an extraordinary source of energy and power and interconnected passion to effect real change.

Kathryn: Well, thank you, Andrew, now I know why I decided to have six children. Obviously, I was creating a cell for passionate power to change the world! I knew there had to be something grand to that number! (Laughter) But you've actually got more than fifty of these networks around the world now, right?

Andrew: Yes, and they are proliferating everywhere. People are very excited by this vision. They realize that this great transformation cannot be done alone, and it is not meant to be done alone. We are meant to do it together, with the Beloved. And we are meant to get going, and get organized, we're meant to get vocal and powerful. I was in Copenhagen for the Climate Change Conference as a part of a group of spiritual world leaders. Copenhagen was a disaster because, as everybody now knows, the climate is in freefall, the environment is in a radical state of disarray, and yet, the politicians of the world, backed up by the corporations, are prepared to do very little about it.

Kathryn: Andrew, not only are they prepared to do nothing about it, but half of them are denying that global warming and climate change exists.

Andrew: You're right!

Kathryn: And many ordinary, innately good people are so overwhelmed with everything coming at them on a daily basis, with all of the misery and war in the world, they're willing to believe the propaganda and simply look the other way.

Andrew: Yes, this is unfortunately a conscious and demonic decision by certain oil and coal companies to throw millions into radical, conscious disinformation to confuse people at the very moment we need concerted action. It is a totally cynical ploy to bamboozle people so that the oil and coal companies, who know that their days are limited, can squeeze as much profit out of the dying Earth as they can. It is terrifying.

Kathryn: This is terrifying. So, what was the final outcome of the meeting in Copenhagen?

Andrew: Well, the spiritual leaders of the world realize now that we cannot look to the politicians for our transformation, and of course, we cannot look to the corporations to suddenly have a massive change of heart. What we have to do is mobilize global goodwill, and we have to mobilize a global grassroots revolution of love and wisdom in action. The good news is that there are millions of people waking up who are willing to do something about this. Through the internet, and other forms of modern media, we have extraordinary ways of mobilizing people. So, all is far from lost. What the situation requires is that people stop being in denial, stop choosing radical paralysis and disempowerment, stop pretending that they don't have real power and start organizing. It is time to start making all of our voices heard in a way that compels our politicians and corporations to start doing something.

Kathryn: I'm in love with your idea of keeping it small and making it a grassroots movement for change. Most people I meet really want to make a difference, but they have no idea of where to start because it is all so huge and appears so overwhelming.

Andrew: We start in our local communities. We start with our fundamental heartbreak. When people ask me what they can do, I tell them to get up at 3 AM and ground themselves in peace and divine hope, and ask yourself this question: out of all the causes in the world, which one breaks my heart the most? When you discover what breaks your heart the most, you've found your true mission in life. You've found the one thing that you can do, by throwing your passion into it, to make a real difference in the world.

Kathryn: I do so understand this. My husband and I have a non-profit organization called, The Twilight Brigade/Compassion in Action, that teaches volunteers to be at the bedside of dying veterans. These men and women are often alone at the moment of their transition, from this world to the next. Unfortunately, after all they've sacrificed for our freedom, many times they come back from war with ravaged souls. They live with demons who alienate them from everyone they love, and alcohol oftentimes becomes their only source of dubious comfort. So, in their final days there is no one left in their lives to help them make their passage home. Our volunteers are angels of mercy in those final hours. And quite appropriately, my husband actually started this work in the late nineties with five other very passionate friends.

Andrew: Oh, this is absolutely wonderful work! Thank you and your husband for this incredible work.

Kathryn: It is wonderful work and we are very proud of our volunteers. And what you are doing thrills me because I know that what you are saying is true. With just six to twelve people working in unison, for a shared vision, we can make an incalculable difference in the world. City by city, with that kind of mobilization, you can quickly blanket the world with that kind of love and compassion.

Andrew: You know, one of the great discoveries of all the mystical traditions has been that when you act from great compassion and deep interconnected wisdom, the Divine - that is compassion and interconnected wisdom - blesses your actions and give those actions the tremendous, miraculous power of transformation. This is what we all have to align ourselves with through this enormous crisis. If we don't, we will die out. If we do, we will transform ourselves, and transform out planet. I believe the greatest contribution turning to the divine within can give anybody, who wants to make radical change in the world, is that it introduces you to and inundates you in the Divine Joy. One of the great temptations of a crisis as vast and as painful as ours is to succumb to desolation, despair, paralysis, and profound horror. Yet, when we turn to the Divine we discover there is a joy beyond time, a joy way beyond what we call light and dark. It is a tender, ecstatic, calm, radiant joy we can experience in the very core of our being. It can give us enormous energy to go forward. It's essential for us to connect with the joy of the divine within so that we can find this galvanizing, passionate, beautiful, and gorgeous energy to be able to do the great work that's been assigned to us. So, it's imperative that everyone goes on this mystical journey to keep this joy alive through inspiration of every kind - the inspiration of friendship, the inspiration of loving animals, the inspiration of adoring nature, the inspiration of loving the holy activists on the Earth like the Dalai Lama, who keep us inspired in the madness.

Kathryn: I so appreciate what you have to say, in your book, about the Law of Joy and how very important the joy of play is in our lives.

Andrew: Yes! You see, if we think of our activism as dour and dark, as an imposition or something we have to do, then our activism will have a sour edge and not come from our deepest sources. But if we think of our activism as an aspect of our own divine consciousness, an ecstatic and compassionate play in reality, then it frees us up to dance with God. And it makes our activism a beautiful dance with God. In turn, that frees God to flow through our activism with a dynamism and ecstasy that is not possible if we are approaching it out of guilt and shame.

Kathryn: Oh, that is so beautifully put. You also write about the Deep, Great Bliss being the ultimate reality. I just love that because as you know, truly spiritual people are blissful and filled with such magnificent joy. It's almost as though a pervasive and childlike sense of innocence and play possesses them, although they are very much aware of everything that is going on in the world. And when we lose that joy, we lose the ability to make the important spiritual transformations that are so necessary.

Andrew: And when we lose that joy, we lose the greatest source of power and energy available to a human being, because we lose our connection to the fundamental nature of the Divine, without and within.

Kathryn: Well, Andrew, this was a stunning interview, and I am in total admiration and appreciation of your passionate work. I promise you that I am personally going to do everything I can to see that as many people as possible read your amazing book.

Andrew: You know, what I hope the book is, is not only an exalted vision, but a very practical how-to book; how to get all this on the road. I hope people coming to the book will get, not only the largest and most inspiring vision possible, but also the practical tools necessary for realizing it in the core of their everyday lives. That why I wrote this book, and that's why it took me so long to write it. I had to live it out in all of its details. I feel very confident now that what I am offering is not something that's just another inspirational book, but is really a handbook and a guidebook for the revolution of love in action.

Kathryn: Well, there is no doubt about that. You have been more than successful in creating that. This book could truly be the scriptures of the New Age. If everyone could live by your words, we would transform the world in no time.

Andrew: I think it would be pretty, bloody difficult, but it would certainly have a chance!

Kathryn: I definitely think it could happen...I do. Okay, I am an eternal optimist, but I do firmly believe in your message and its ability to transform the prevailing consciousness from one of pessimism and doom, to one of everlasting love and hope. Thank you again, Andrew, for this marvelously inspiring conversation.

In closing, I'd like to share with you the Ten Things We Can Do Right Now from, The Hope: A Guide To Sacred Activism, by Andrew Harvey.

Listed below are the ten things Andrew Harvey encourages you to do right now to start to align yourself with the power and hope of Sacred Activism:

1. Write down one thing that has made you feel grateful to be alive today.

2. Now write down, without thinking too much or editing yourself - just "off the top of your heart"- ten things you would say are sacred to you.

3. Think of someone who has hurt or betrayed you, and make a commitment to work on forgiving him or her.

4. Read a short text from any of the world's spiritual traditions that inspires you with the love-wisdom of the prophets and mystics who know God directly.

5. When the text you have chosen starts to light up your spirit, pray a short prayer that aligns you with the pure deep love that is longing to use you as its instrument in the world.

6. Make a real commitment to a spiritual practice. If you don't have a practice, start with a simple meditation.

7. Strengthened by prayer, practice and inspiration, turn now to your life and the people in it. Everyone, especially in a time like ours, has friends who are grieving, or ill, or looking for a job, or in real financial difficulty. Commit now to ringing one of them up and asking him or her what you can do to make the burden easier.

8. Make a commitment to skip one meal in the coming 24 hours and send a check for the money you would have spent on it to a reputable organization dealing with world hunger.

9. There are people around you who are suffering. Make a commitment to find out who they are and what they need, and invite six of your friends to make a commitment with you to start supplying it.

10. Make a commitment today, even if you are having financial difficulties, to tithe five to ten percent of what you earn to a cause of your choice.

These simple, loving and conscious suggestions are easy steps we can take to make the world a place where peace and oneness become our living reality. Please explore all the remarkable ways Andrew Harvey can teach you to how to serve the world as a Sacred Activist. Click here to purchase this miraculous book now.