If the world is to be saved then human consciousness must undergo a radical transformation, argues Indian-born author, teacher and mystic Andrew Harvey. He spoke to Roland Ashby about humanity’s exploitation of nature and addiction to greed, and how this ‘global dark night’ is a wake-up call to bring to birth a new consciousness. The interview has been posted in support of a day of interfaith action to save the planet, ‘Sacred People, Sacred Earth’ on 11 March 2021.
RA: You believe the human race and the planet have reached a point of great danger. You talk about this time as being a tragic and terrible moment of our evolutionary history and that we’re in the throes of a great battle. What do you see as terrible and tragic, and what is the battle?
AH: Well, it’s quite clear, I think, that we have reached a point at which all of the projects, agendas and fantasies that we’ve spun out of our collective false self are now totally bankrupt. It’s quite clear that our culture in its desperate pursuit of domination and exploitation of nature and its addiction to greed, has reached a point where it’s not only destroying our world, but also destroying us inwardly. There is a soullessness, a meaninglessness, an apathy, a paralysis, which are as dangerous as the crisis itself.
But I think my work is dedicated not just to waking people up to the extent of the crisis, but to waking people up to the opportunity presented by this crisis. A very great crisis is also a very great opportunity, and what I’ve come to understand from my own innermost experience and from the true mystical traditions, is that what we are living through is nothing less than a global dark night. What happens in the dark night is that the false self is systematically and ruthlessly destroyed, and an opportunity created for a wholly new relationship with reality and entry into divine consciousness.
So I think of this as an evolutionary crisis in which humanity will have to face the destructiveness of all of its shadows and its false self, but I think it also has a tremendous evolutionary opportunity. Because if we can face this, if we can evolve new ways of being and doing everything – and I believe we can – then a wholly new kind of human being will be born, and a wholly new human race will be engendered. That’s what my work is dedicated to: waking people up so that they can go through the process that will empower them to birth the divine in the human and start co-creating with God, a new world.
RA: You’ve called this waking up process sacred activism. How do you define it?
AH: I have two fundamental definitions of sacred activism. One is user-friendly and for the media: when you combine deep spirituality, deep understanding and reverence for the sacred in life and the sacred in the creation with urgent, wise, focused action, you birth a holy force that can transform everything. We’ve seen this holy force in the 20th century, for example in Gandhi’s slow patient overturning of the British Empire; in the extraordinary heroism of Martin Luther King and his avoidance of a massive bloodbath in race relations; and in Desmond Tutu’s and Nelson Mandela’s heroic desire to bring in reconciliation and forgiveness as a way of healing the wounds between white and black in South Africa.
The good news is that if you bring together the best of the mystic with the best of the activist, the fire of the mystic’s passion for God with the fire of activist’s passion for justice, you create a third fire, which is the fire of love and wisdom and action with which, I think, if the human race allows itself to be inspired by this, an enormous revolution can take place.
That brings me to my second definition of sacred activism which is more esoteric and more profound. If these two fires come together: the fire of the passion for God, and the fire of the passion for justice, the third fire that they engender is a quantum leap in power, in energy, in passion. I believe that third fire is actually the evolutionary love fire of the Godhead that created the universe, erupted in the Big Bang, lives as the secret divine presence in everything, and is the evolutionary urge behind the whole unfolding of the universe.
So that I believe that sacred activism is, in its deepest sense, the birthing power, the birthing fire, the birthing passion of a new divine humanity, and that the crisis is actually a crisis designed by God, designed by the evolutionary urge of the universe to force humanity to transform or die out.
But the transformation that’s required now is not a transformation just into divine consciousness; it’s a transformation into divine consciousness in action, and this is where the example of Jesus is so important. I think what Jesus truly came to do was to open up an evolutionary path, and that path is the path of passionate divine love and profound divine wisdom in action, a path that now hundreds of millions, if not billions of human beings, need to take to help the divine birth out of this chaos, out of this dark night, a wholly new kind of humanity and life on earth.
RA: In Radical Passion – Sacred Love and Wisdom in Action you say this is essentially the message of the parable of the prodigal son.
AH: I think the prodigal son is in a way the evolutionary map of humanity. You have the son who gets high on himself, goes and wastes all of his powers in greed, in lust, in self-absorption, in the terrible narcissism that afflicts our culture, and burns totally out, realises that none of these things are going to work. And in desperation and heartbreak, he goes back to the source, back to the father, who is also a mother, and finds not only is he not going to be punished but that his experience has hollowed him out so he is able to receive the true grace, the true generosity of the mercy of God.
That I think is where we are at; we’re at that moment of realising that all of our gains, fantasies and agenda are bankrupt, and that there is only one thing that can help us go forward, and that is divine grace, divine energy, divine passion. But the beauty of the nature of the divine is that that is perpetually offered to us. That’s why I believe sacred activism is the key to the transformation of the world.
RA: In Radical Passion you write that Christ’s most devastating weapon in the war of love was his humility.
AH: I think that the most shattering thing about Jesus is that he was clearly imbued with every kind of divine power, but he never used this power to glamorise himself or make himself special. He was actually saying to the human race, ‘Don’t you understand, you have divine consciousness? Don’t you understand that if only you could do the work of opening to that divine consciousness, you would be empowered with just the powers that I have, and that together, we could co-create a wholly new world.’ This is Jesus’ essential message.
You see this humility throughout his ministry. When he healed people, he nearly always said to them, ‘It is your faith that has made you whole; it’s not my powers alone.’ You can see this humility in the way in which he says to his disciples, ‘You’re not servants but friends. You’re not in a subsidiary hierarchical relationship to me. You’re my friends. I love you. Let’s do this together.’
Above all, you can see it in the Last Supper when he dresses up as a female servant, which is the lowest of the low in terms of his society, and washes the feet of his disciples in one last desperate attempt to stop them projecting onto him the glory that he was trying to give to them.
One of the great testimonies of the Christian mystical tradition is that if only you can truly believe in what Jesus is saying, that we all have divine consciousness, and with God can do extraordinary things in the name of God, extraordinary feats of healing and courage, then everything could be changed.
The essential way of Jesus is the way of radical humility, of radical service to all beings, and that is what has to be kept at the core of the enacting of the Christ consciousness, because if we don’t have that humility, that reverence before the whole of life and before all beings, we will never be able to be empty enough to be continually receiving the grace to be able to give the kind of help that we need to give.
RA: You obviously see Jesus as a mystic, but this is not how he is commonly understood.
AH: Jesus is certainly the greatest mystic of humanity, but he realised the essential role of mysticism, which is not to provide endless entertainment for the psyche, but to provide the foundation of divine consciousness, divine courage, divine understanding, that would give you the chutzpah, the passion to set about doing God’s work in the world, and God’s work in the world is very clear. God’s work is the transformation of all of the institutions and arts and sciences of this world into a living representation of divine love and divine justice.
So Jesus is delivering a tremendous slap in the face to all of the mystical traditions that are escapist, narcissistic and addicted to transcendence. He is also delivering a very, very strong slap to the face of activists who believe that they could change the world simply out of righteous anger. That’s not going to be enough. You’re going to have to have a foundation in divine consciousness, and an openness to divine grace, otherwise your actions will not be widely inspired enough and not go far enough.
Jesus’ whole life is an example of what a true mystical life really is: it isn’t about only getting in connection with the divine; it’s about getting so deeply in connection with the divine that you marry the two sides of the divine nature in yourself – the very great peace of knowing that you are in divine consciousness, and the very great passion of the mother side of the divine to see that every being is protected and that justice is done on every level, and that compassionate harmony is lived out, not only with human beings but with the whole creation.
Jesus is the supreme mystical revolutionary of history, and it’s only when humanity – all of humanity, not just Christians – really takes seriously this enormous fusion that happened in Jesus between transcendent and immanent, mother and father, body and soul, heart and mind, deep, deep prayer and inner mystical practice with very clear, wise, fierce radical action, that we will be able to go forward. Jesus is really the key, I think, to the future of human evolution, just as he has been the key to the real relationship with God.
RA: And his spirit is available to us all through the Cosmic Christ. Can you say something about how you understand the term, ‘the cosmic Christ’?
AH: In all of the great mystical traditions, there has been a revelation of the universe as fundamentally having two aspects, and of the divine as having two aspects: an impersonal aspect, in which the laws of divine consciousness are worked out on every level; and even more mysteriously, a personal aspect in which the divine can be contacted as a sublime universal person who cares enormously deeply for every single being out of the mystery of total love. This marriage of the impersonal and the personal is found in every tradition.
In the Christian tradition, this is known as the Cosmic Christ. And the Cosmic Christ is the great universal creative love force of the universe that is also a mysterious being who is totally in love with each one of his creations, and is able to turn to each one creation with infinite care. Jesus lived the life of the Cosmic Christ on the earth; he showed its passion, its radicalism, its nakedness, its vulnerability, its almost insane love for everyone. And in living that life on the earth, he attained total identification with this impersonal person, and in the Resurrection, he birthed himself into that universal love force, and now he is the personal face of that universal love force.
Jesus is completely alive, both as the impersonal divine and as this shatteringly naked, vulnerable, amazingly beautiful holy person, so that if you awaken to him in devotion, you can have a deeply personal relationship with him.
RA: In Son of Man – the mystical path to Christ, you describe the four stages of the Christ path.
AH: The traditional Christian mystical path has had three stages, and they’re very profound: purgation, illumination and union. What I have done in Son of Man is to extend that, because it’s not enough. In the first stage, purgation, which I call awakening, what happens is that you awaken to your divine consciousness, and through revelation and through deep sacred discipline, you are directly more and more empowered with it.
The second stage, ‘illumination’, is when these powers possess you and inform you and infuse you, and your mind and heart are immeasurably expanded, and you begin the mystery of theosis, the mystery of divine light coming down into the body. There is a great danger at this stage of the path, and that is you appropriate these powers for your subtle ego, and that’s why at the end of illumination, what occurs is that the mystic goes through the equivalent of the crucifixion in terms of their own nature, the dark night that strips them of the last vestiges of their subtle ego, so that the much vaster transcendent immanent consciousness of the Cosmic Christ can be born in them without interference from the ego.
And then you enter the third part of the path, which is union. But in Son of Man, I’ve extended this vision of union to show us that union doesn’t just mean union with divine consciousness in the mind and the heart and the soul, it also means the progressive cellular transformation of the body, and this is very important because what happens in this third stage, I believe, is that the enormous radioactive power that was released by the Resurrection is experienced directly by the mystic, and that the human being is born as a human divine being in which the mind is illuminated, the heart is expanded and the body is subtly transformed.
And this leads to the fourth stage, which I think is absolutely essential for Christians to get real about, because it is what we see so nakedly and wonderfully in the life of Jesus, and this is what I call ‘birthing’. What union makes you is a mother father of divine works, of divine justice, of divine outpouring of those powers to transform this world into the kingdom/queendom.
The tragedy of much conventional Christian mysticism has been its other worldliness. Jesus wasn’t other worldly at all. He was absolutely focused on all of the tragic problems of the growing patriarchy of his time, on the treatment of women, on the claim of the priest to mediate divine reality instead of empowering people, the appalling selfishness of the rich.
It’s very important that the great powers that are experienced along this journey do not become dedicated just to the individual salvation of the person, but dedicated as Jesus dedicated them to the transformation of society. So in birthing in the fourth stage, you become like St Francis, St Teresa of Avila or Hildegard of Bingen, or like any of the great Christed beings. You become revolutionaries of love, overturning the hierarchies and elites of your time by bringing in a wholly new divine energy and a wholly new, transformatory vision of divine justice.
RA: In Son of Man you write that an essential foundation for the four stages is a serious spiritual practice.
AH: It would be very difficult to understand anything I’ve been saying without making a serious daily spiritual practice a priority.
Prayer in all its forms is essential, as is the practice of ‘cool’ and ‘hot’ practices.
‘Cool’ practices such as meditation using a mantra, as in the Jesus Prayer, Centering Prayer and John Main traditions initiate us into the great radiant peaceful awareness that is divine awareness, the peace that passes all understanding.
‘Hot’ practices include the Sacred Heart tradition as practised by St Mary Margaret Alacoque, or meditation on Jesus’ Passion as practised by St Teresa of Avila.
By connecting with Jesus’ passion in this way your heart is opened up immensely to the ‘insanity’ of love that’s streaming towards the human race through Jesus and the Cosmic Christ, and from which you can find unbelievable reserves of courage and fortitude.
RA: That expression, ‘the insanity of love’ reminds me of the 13th Century Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi who writes about the ‘frenzy of love’ God has for us in his poem ‘How the soul through the senses finds God in all creatures’, which you have included in your book The Essential Mystics.
AH: I think he is one of the great undiscovered mystical poets of Christianity, largely because in his youth he refused God in profligate living, had a conversion experience, and then slowly found his way through, like the prodigal son, to an embrace by the father.
His extraordinary poem begins,
Oh love, divine love,
why do you lay siege to me?
in a frenzy of love for me,
you find no rest.
And he goes through the different ways in which love reaches out to us through our senses, in hearing, sight, taste, touch and smell, and that hiding from this love is impossible. The poem is an expression of how deeply we want to experience divine love, but also how deeply we resist it.
It powerfully describes the dilemma that we all face when we come into contact with this love:
Love, I flee from You,
afraid to give You my heart,
I see that You make me
one with You,
I cease to be me and can no longer find myself
Divine love is going to devour the ego and the ego is terrified. But there is something that really tempts us out of that dilemma, and that for a Christian is obviously Jesus, because Jesus is inescapable once you turn to him. He will devour you. The Flemish 14th Century mystic Ruusbroec says that ‘Jesus’ love is a bulimic love’, that it will eat you alive.
Anybody who has the experience of loving Jesus will know that even beginning to love him in a haphazard and very self-absorbed way will break you slowly into the radiant ‘insanity’ of the love that possesses him and drives him to give everything, absolutely everything, for the transformation of the human race, including submitting himself to the most horrible torture and horror of the death of the crucifixion.
And however hard you try to escape the beauty and holiness and amazing power of that love, one fine day it will get you and you will have to turn towards it, you will have to try, with all of your limitations and follies, to mirror it in your own life. That’s what makes Jesus so dangerous. And thank God he is that dangerous because it’s only somebody that dangerous that can wake us out of our terminal narcissism.
This interview first appeared in the December 2013 edition of The Melbourne Anglican, and was later published in A faith to live by – What an intelligent, compassionate and authentic 21st century Christian faith looks like (Volume 2) edited by Roland Ashby. (Published by Morning Star Publishing in 2018). In addition to this interview with Andrew Harvey, it features interviews with 30 other spiritual leaders of our time, including Archbishop Justin Welby, Laurence Freeman, N.T. Wright, Stanley Hauerwas, Esther de Waal, Miroslav Volf, Archbishop Stephen Cottrell, and Bernard McGinn. See: https://morningstarpublishing.net.au/product/a-faith-to-live-by/
For information about the world day of interfaith action on 11 March to save the planet, ‘Sacred People, Sacred Earth’, see: https://greenfaith.org/take-action/sacred-people-sacred-earth/
For more information about Andrew Harvey and sacred activism, see:
https://www.andrewharvey.net/