The mystical, the mythical, and the mysterium, the realm of cosmic forces remains enigmatic. We may project our human perception onto the unknown or completely reject it. What we don’t know scares us. Fear of the ‘other.’ It may be easy to dismiss mysticism as a way of the ancient ones. Yet, our mythical and mystical musings remain alive today through literature, poetry, music and yes, through video games and shows like the Game of Thrones and Harry Potter! There is no separation.
The lines between interviewer and interviewee become blurred as we shed our skin with a modern-day mystic: Andrew Harvey. We recorded this conversation a day after a poetry reading by Andrew, here in Toronto to celebrate the release of his latest book, Turn Me To Gold: 108 Poems of Kabir. Andrew brings in his energy and ecstatic presence as he shares his vision of sacred activism – in response to our meaning crisis or what he sees as a massive transformation of consciousness. Andrew was born in South India in 1952. He was educated in England and studied at Oxford University. By 1977, he became so disillusioned with life at Oxford, he returned to India where a series of mystical experiences initiated his spiritual journey. Andrew has studied under many sages and saints from different traditions. He is the author of over 40 books and lectures internationally.
Highlights:
- The Mystical Experience of Writing Kabir Poetry
- Problems with New Age Spirituality
- Message for Young Seekers and Sacred Activists
Resources:
- Turn Me To Gold: 108 Poems of Kabir by Andrew Harvey
- Pandit Kumar Gandharva sings Kabir
- Grounded Spirituality by Jeff Brown
- A Call for Revolution: a Vision for the Future by Dalai Lama
Listen:
A poem inspired by this episode
Full Transcript
Andrew Harvey:
How lovely to be addressing you. How did you enjoy last night? How did it register in you?
Thal:
It was amazing. I felt the poetry, your presence, and your energy and you know, I come from a Sufi background so I was sitting there, I was like, yeah, this is what I already know but felt it.
Andrew Harvey:
Exactly! Isn’t that wonderful? That to me is the exact response because we do know this, it is our reality and all the great ones like Kabir, they just wake up this knowledge within us. Kabir is not trying to be a guru, he is trying to empower us with our own authentic awareness because he knows that everyone is secretly divine and has all of this knowledge. That’s what I tried to do. I’m not, I couldn’t. What a boring thing to be a guru. My God. Terrible! What a waste of time where you can have all the fun in the world with people like you. Right. What did you feel?
Adrian:
We were just talking, I am really raw right now. I mean from last night something happened where to me, you mentioned lion a few times the imagery of a lion and you were the lion last evening. You roared with that power. I felt like the lions in the room all heard it. We heard the cry and a part of me is kind of waking up to this realization of we got to act. You know there’s a sense of urgency and I love the energy that you are bringing.
Andrew Harvey:
Act from sacred consciousness. Act from that vibrant wholeness within. You will be a lion in your own way. Everybody’s lion is different. There are tender lions. There are soft lions. There are wild lions. It is finding your own and unique inner lion, isn’t it? Yeah. I just do me, my big Me and then hope to wake up the lions in the room. I’m training the special forces.
Adrian:
You’re definitely doing that.
Thal:
I want to share something with you before we start. I think it was two years, almost two years ago or a year ago when you were on a podcast with Tami Simone, “Sounds True”.
Andrew Harvey:
Yes.
Thal:
Yes. I was going through one of my many dark nights of the soul and I’m just right in the middle of the interview…
Andrew Harvey:
You’re a good Sufi.
Thal:
Hopefully. Right in the middle of the interview. You said one of the prayers that I have always utter in my practice, which is “show me things as they are”. Then you said that that’s from one of your favorite teachers, Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. The moment you said that…It hit so hard with me that I just wept. I had to stop the podcast and I wept for like 30 minutes, so just wanted to share that.
Andrew Harvey:
What a beautiful… You know, one of the things that hurts me the most is the way the Prophet is seen in the West. When you get a glimpse of a glimpse of a glimpse of who the Prophet is, how could you not weep for half an hour?
Thal:
I love him, you know, he’s like…
Andrew Harvey:
Oh God. Of course.
Thal:
He embodies the Divine Feminine. Like his teachings were all about the Divine Feminine…
Andrew Harvey:
Absolutely…he says paradise is at the feet of the mothers. You remember?
Thal:
Yes
Andrew Harvey:
Paradise is at the feet of the mothers and the first phrase in the Quran is about Rahman Al-Raheem. Both come from Rahm, the womb. God is mother first of all in the Quran and it’s impossible to read his life without being stunned by his tenderness. Look at the story of the cat. You know that wonderful story…he only has two tunis and his favorite cat is sleeping on one of the arms and he cuts off the arm of his tunic so as not to wake up the cat. ‘Adab (graceful comportment) is feminine. ‘Adab is entirely about tenderness and courtesy and respect and reverence. Those are feminine virtues and until you know that you know nothing about Islam.
Thal:
The most people who misunderstand Islam are Muslims.
Andrew Harvey:
Wahhabis have no idea about the Prophet. If they could meet the Prophet he would be out of his mind with suffering about what they’ve made of his revelation.
Thal:
I believe that 100 percent
Andrew Harvey:
And you can’t imagine why all the Great Sufi mystics have been so desperately and deeply and profoundly in love with him because they know that he’s the complete human being. No other teacher was a husband. No other teacher would have said that I love women, perfume, and prayer. That’s a complete man.
Thal:
Yes yes yes…
Andrew Harvey:
A complete guy! He loves women. He loves sex.
Thal:
Yes he did…
Andrew Harvey:
The beauty of celebrating with another being and perfume, the mystery and beauty of the world, and then prayer of course it’s the last one. It’s the ultimate one, but nobody lived as a complete life as the prophet. There’s never been as a complete life as him.
Thal:
I believe that. Thank you.
Andrew Harvey:
You know that. That’s why you’re a Sufi. You’re so lucky to love the Prophet so much. What a life? So terrible! His life.
Thal:
So misunderstood…up to this day…
Andrew Harvey:
Oh God, yes. You know that he is still available to those who love him…you never see him but you can…some people see him, but I’ve never seen him, but I have felt him…
Thal:
I felt him…Some people see him, some people see him like even in like during the day, you know, and have conversations with him, but
Andrew Harvey:
I’m looking forward to that particular…
Thal:
Me too… I am looking forward to it.
Andrew Harvey:
So glad you like that…that is such a blessing.
Thal:
I’m just happy to be talking to you today.
Andrew Harvey:
Me too. But people always say to me, why do you say peace be upon him? Are you kidding? I would never talk about the prophet without honoring Islam in that way…it will be very vulgar. People have no conception of this. The ‘adab (good character) you need towards the holy ones.
Thal:
The holy ones from all traditions.
Andrew Harvey:
Yeah, but he would be the first one to say that. He said it again and again and again in the Quran. Nobody loved Jesus more than the prophet. Nobody loved Isiah, Moses, and Noah and all the great ones. He says there are 100,000 teachers who have no names who are great prophets and great saints. Women, men of all religions, shamans. It is much more than a religion, Islam. It’s a vision of integrated wholeness. It’s the most balanced vision ever given humanity. It has shadows, obviously. I mean homophobia, misogyny, and all the rest of it, but they were not his shadows
Thal:
These are the shadows of dogma.
Andrew Harvey:
And the boys club and all the rest of it…
Thal:
I hear ya…
Andrew Harvey:
Rumi doesn’t have those shadows. The Great Sufi mystical saints don’t have those shadows.
Thal:
That’s why they were killed someone like Al-Hallaj was killed by the orthodoxy.
Andrew Harvey:
Yeah. All. Can you imagine what happened with Rumi? Can you imagine? They were freaked out. He started dancing with this old man in the middle of Konya after giving good speeches and quoting from the Quran. They thought he’d gone completely crazy or even worse. Finally they had to face that he was radiant with God. You know? Absolutely. That’s always the way, isn’t it.
Adrian:
Andrew…I feel like we want to do this in service of Kabir, right? I mean this is one of the major reasons why we feel so excited and grateful that you agreed to come on. And this is just the beginning of your book launch, essentially, and last night, I mean, what we experienced with the poetry, I mean, it was so moving. I am still raw from that experience…still processing.
Andrew Harvey:
When you say raw, I love that word. What you mean by raw? What does raw feel like inside you? You know right now, let’s have a conversation. I’d love to. This is not me talking about Kabir, I want to talk with you. In the Kabir field.
Adrian:
To me raw are new feelings. So it’s feelings that I’m not familiar with and there is an element of fear, like what is this? I’m confused, but it’s making me tune inward and try to hang onto it, try to be curious. And so that’s raw sensations in my body and these feelings that are all commingled. You know, it’s hard to put words to it that that’s raw for me. It’s pre-language.
Andrew Harvey:
It is pre-language, why do you need to put words to it? Why do you need to? That’s the danger of trying too soon to get clear, not allowing the radiant confusion to breed its own revelation. To change one. It’s just like falling in love, isn’t it, with the person. It’s scary when you meet someone you can’t avoid you can’t categorize, you can’t not love, and you know that once you’ve made that commitment to love, it’s going to change your life. It’s not just going to change your mind. It is going to change your heart, your body, your whole trajectory. And that’s what happens when you meet someone like Kabir.
Adrian:
It feels naked. That’s the other word. Yeah. You mentioned that last evening…is to shed the costumes to shed the house, the houses and to walk in the open.
Thal:
Even the process of us making the podcast is really about coming out in the open. I’m waking up from my own journey where, you know, I went into the comfort of dogma for a few years and it just didn’t work because it wasn’t who I am and I was never that before. Adrian is coming also from his perspective. A more secular perspective, you know, and he’s waking up to the mystic in him. That’s what I see and you know, we belong to a generation that’s, you know, confused.
Andrew Harvey:
Well, how could you not be confused? Everyone’s confused at this moment because we’re in the moment of trauma and terrible chaos, and terrible suffering. The possibilities of human extinction are real. How could that not be radically confusing? If you trust at the deepest level, that radical confusion can give birth to the new, a wholly new level of tenderness and vibrant openness and communion, which is a source of tremendous meaning and joy.
Thal:
What we’ve been doing after every episode…I’ve been writing poetry. I would say all my life. More recently I’ve been sharing them through the podcast after every episode, and I told Adrian this three days ago, I told him I feel naked whenever I write a poem, I feel naked and I’m okay with it now and it is what it is…
Andrew Harvey:
Don’t you think being naked is the greatest possible gift you give to anybody.
Thal:
That’s true.
Andrew Harvey:
That’s the greatest gift.
Thal:
It is also being alive.
Andrew Harvey:
alive. When you think about how you make the greatest friends of your life, it’s not by being brilliant, it’s not by being perfect. It’s by those moments of heart, rending fragility and expansion that suddenly snares another heart. Right?
Thal:
Absolutely.
Andrew Harvey:
That’s it. That’s the whole of life.
Adrian:
Yeah. Do we want to get into it, right?
Andrew Harvey:
Yeah. We are into it. Just keep this in the podcast. I love this because this is our field. You know, I can see your beautiful faces. I can see how much you are so alive and how much you are in pain, at what’s going on, and how much you are not just resting in that pain, but really wanting to understand beyond words beyond concept what this pain might mean. For me, what this pain is the pain of childbirth. It’s the pain of birth. It’s what happens to a woman when she gives birth is monumental. It’s being possessed by this birthing force that looks, from a man’s point of view, and I’ve seen it so many people give birth, looks like she’s being torn apart, but she’s not being torn apart. She’s been given the supreme privilege of being a gateway for the birth of a new being, and this is what’s happening in all of our psyches at the moment. Everything we think of as real, it’s being dismembered, it’s being burned down, not to punish us, but to release us from these terrible, horrible dominator paradigm structures which are quite clearly annihilating life, so we’re being born into life and that’s a scary, confusing process, but if you stay with it and trust and surrender and listen to the voices of the ones who really know this process, then something amazing gets born in you and with that, the passion to change, everything gets born in you. Together. We can do this.
Adrian:
Thank you, Andrew. Thank you for that. I think. I think we’re both actually really wanting to hear how how you got drawn to Kabir to begin with. We know that in writing it was quite the experience. You lived with him. You mentioned multiple times that you were living with him. He was inside of you.
Andrew Harvey:
I’ve loved Kabir all my life. I’m 66 years old now and I met Kabir first when I was 25 in Benares the city where he lived, which is called Varanasi now, but I can’t help calling it Benaras because for me the word Benaras means something exotic glorious and it is like an unfolding of purple silk, Benares. A very holy word and it’s a very wild, holy, gorgeous, terrible, amazing city, which is like a naked representation of every kind of opposites in life. I went there first when I was 25 and I was overwhelmingly grateful to be in a place as mad as my own psyche. I just recognized finally that there was a place on earth as gorgeous and crazy as what I was beginning to understand. The mystery really is… So I was out of my mind with joy and I used to go in the early morning to the temples and sit there and just look and breathe everything in. The perfumes, the smells, the amazing adoration of people. One day I was there and this old man came in this beautiful old Saddhu in rags but with the face like an eagle, and he started to sing and I can’t begin to describe singing, but it wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t manicured. It was wild singing wild, holy gorgeous singing. The whole place shook.I plucked up my courage after he finished and I said, “what were you singing?” He spoke broken English and I speak some Hindi. Between my broken Hindi and his broken English, we communicated totally because we were in the space. He said, I am singing, “my beloved.” I said, “who is your beloved?” “Kabir! Kabir! Kabir! How can you sing anything else but Kabir when you’ve met Kabir. Kabir changes everything. Then he translated for me what he was singing and he was singing the song, “the beloved is in me, the beloved is in you as life is hidden in …(inaudible) rubble your pride my friend, and look for the beloved within you.” Just those words pierced me and I realized, oh my God, I have not heard of Kabir but that began a passionate search to find out everything about Kabir. I read everything in different languages. I speak French and Italian and German and some Hindi. I read all of the amazing new books that were coming out on Kabir that are incredible work done by, especially by two great women scholars, Charlotte Vaudeville, who wrote the most astonishing book on Kabir. Every single aspect of Kabir’s genius is explored by her with razor clear, deeply radical, wonderfully precise scholarship. Then there’s this other wonderful woman translator, Linda Hess, who has exactly the same degree of excellence in her work, but who also plunged deeply and mystically into the Kabir tradition and spent a lot of time with one of the greatest Kabiri singers, Kumar Gandharva, and if you’re listening out there, go on to Youtube, get hold of Kumar Gandharva. He is simply the greatest singer that India has produced in the last hundred years. He’s left, unfortunately, but his voice remains. So I plunged into Kabir from a scholarly point of view, from the translations that were coming out. Robert Bly is magnificent translations, a lot of Bly in there. He’s not really being very faithful to Kabir, but he did a marvelous job of bringing the perfume of the Kabiri spirit, but at the time I was obsessed with Rumi and I still remain obsessed with Rumi because Rumi was my first intense beloved. I just. I’ve never gotten over Rumi. I spent 40 years writing books on Rumi, recreating Rumi, going to Konya, plunging into the depths of Sufism, and Rumi is such an amazing universal poet. He is the other great universal poet with Kabir and the two of them are brothers that you can’t compare Everest and Kanchenjunga. They’re both supremely great mountains of brilliance and beauty, so I didn’t get around to really confronting my passion for Kabir until about seven or eight years ago when it suddenly became clear to me that the reason why I hadn’t done any deep work on Kabir because I myself wasn’t ready. You have to be ready for Kabir because Kabir is so fierce, so demanding, so real. I had to become real before or half real before I could dare to step into attempting to transmit him in English and then something quite dramatic happened in my life, which is I went through one of my periodic fits of bankruptcy, so because I’ve lived a pretty wild life as a teacher, I haven’t been user-friendly. I’ve tried to tell the truth because I know I’ve known for 20 years that we were in an apocalyptic situation. If you’re teaching in America, that’s the last thing people want to hear. They just want to hear everything is fine and it’s all going to go well. It’s not going to go well. We’re gonna have to die to be reborn and in this time I was compelled and it was one of the great graces of my life to go to live in a log cabin in Arkansas and I paid $300 a month for this log cabin and I thought more of my friends thought, oh my God, Andrew is now going off the deep end and we’ll never see him again. He’s a brave madmen, but bye bye Andrew. But in fact, what happened with that, that was the best thing that ever happened. I lived in simplicity with the deer and the hills of our Arkansas and the wonderful raw non-religious people who are just the best people you can possibly imagine. I was grounded and earthed in a way that had never happened to me before. I was humbled, radically humbled. At that moment he could enter because I’d been bashed enough, battered enough, reduced enough, humbled enough to be able to hear the unmistakable intensity of truth in him, and then something absolutely extraordinary started to unfold is that I really started to dream about him, to feel him around. I realized that in meeting Kabir at that time in my life, I was meeting the very, very best of myself. That the very, very best of myself would now be honed and deeply transformed by this encounter with this lion of truth. It was the most thrilling experience of my life. It unleashed an immense torrent of creativity in me because I started to write as Kabir. I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of poems in Kabir’s voice with my voice mingling his. I haven’t printed them and haven’t published them because I wanted my first offering to be about him because it would be an act of monstrous arrogance even for someone like myself to come out with my Kabir poems without spending time on really presenting the genius that gave birth to whatever I was able to say in this field, and what happened was that when you commune at that level of passion with a great being, you enter into the most intense, imaginable, sacred friendship with that being. This is known in all the mystical systems. The Catholics call this the communion of saints, the Saints are not in Heaven or whatever heaven is. The saints are all around. They’re still alive, they’re vibrant, and if you commune with a saint out of a particular deep love for that saint that saint will start to appear to you, talk to you, give you directions, guide you, you know them from within you. This is a tremendous mystery, but it’s a mystery that mystics of all traditions have experienced. And what I experienced was Kabir became my friend myself, my voice, my heart, and it was very scary sometimes because you can’t approach the field of Kabir without being exposed to yourself. And all of us have so much further to go. And when you’re in the field as clean and as incisive as the Kabir field is… You’re faced all the time with your corruption, your stupidity, your sloth, your vanity, in my case your desire for celebrity, all the stuff that swirls around in every human psyche, befriending someone like Kabir means that you cannot anymore befriend your own darkness. It becomes intolerable to you. There’s a real sacrifice involved when you come into this kind of field. But the rewards for making that sacrifice is so astounding because not only does he pitch that view and hits you over the head, he also got an arm around your shoulder saying, I know what you’re going through. I’ve been through it. It’s terrible facing who you really are. But you’ll discover through this facing who you really Are! That will make everything worthwhile. This was a most extraordinary process and out of that came my book, Turn Me To Gold and it couldn’t have come in any other way. I wasn’t ready to do it earlier on. I had to be cooked by Rumi, to be ready to be eaten by Kabir and I had to go through in solitude in that log cabin, this turbulent astounding relationship with him to be able to be guided by him to present the book in exactly the way that the Kabir field exactly wanted as a musical symphony in four parts that could open up all of the different aspects of the field to divine embodiment. It was an amazing journey. It’s not over. I’m just beginning a new journey now going out talking to people like you about the journey, that’s a new extension of this field. Does make sense to you? Does it ring true?
Thal:
I’m just thinking also about something that you had mentioned last night when you were talking about the book and about the two energies that are mentioned in the Sufi tradition, which come from the Divine name, which is the Jalal energy, which is the energy of awe and breaking the ego and the Jamal Energy, which is the beauty and the tenderness, which is Rumi, and that’s where you were cooked for you to get ready for Kabir as you had mentioned. I just want to relate or mention the role of poetry and the role of poet as medium and what does that mean to you?
Andrew Harvey:
Well, what does it mean to you? You are a poet. I want you to hear what it means to you.
Thal:
Everything! I feel that poetry and the poet are mere mediums of energy. It’s like the connection between the sacred and the profane, the connection between the transcendent and the imminent. It’s only through poetry that we can contain the ineffable.
Andrew Harvey:
Yes. How beautiful? I can’t speak after that, but I think that we’re in a time where religious dogma no longer captures us. I think we are in a time when people telling us what to do and how to do it, laying down laws is frankly horse manure to us because we’ve seen how many of those laws are not Divinely inspired but manmade and very crippling and I think we’re in the time of the birth of the universal mysticism that goes directly to the source that once the skinny about reality that once the essential disciplines but doesn’t want to be contained in any one dogmatic context and poetry is by definition non-dogmatic. It’s personal. It’s born out of the depths of the unique personal ecstatic experience, especially when it’s mystical poetry, and because it’s personal it transcends dogma, because it’s personal it speaks directly from the enraptured heart to the enraptured heart. It speaks above all the language of love and the language of love is the language which we are all, whether we are atheists or non-atheists or wiccans.
Thal:
Whatever the label is?
Andrew Harvey:
What we’re famished for is that language of love and every humanbeing when they hear Rumi is thrilled because Rumi speaks as an ecstatic lover. Anyone whose ever known how love expands you will hear in Rumi, even if they don’t understand the kind and the vast of love that Rumi speaks about, they’ll know, oh my God, this guy is a lover and I have a lover within me, and I want that lover to grow because I know that lover is the best of me and the most noble of me and the most wildly deeply intelligent. Pardon me, much more intelligent than my brain.So poetry has that unique power to take us into the field beyond good and evil that is love in all of its majesty and power and beauty. That’s why poetry, mystical poetry now is coming back in such intense way because we’re being guided into a universal mysticism whose heart isn’t laws and dogmas, but burning rapturous, incisive, vibrant, violently beautiful and pure poetry, so the great new texts of the new universal mysticism will be the great mystical poets, will be Rumi, will be Kabir, will be Hildegard of Bingen, and Hadewijch of Antwerp.
Thal:
William Blake.
Andrew Harvey:
William Blake, absolutely…and Rabiah. These are the great sacred, humble prophets of this new universal mysticism. This has always been known in the great sacred cultures. In India there are the Sanskrit Brahmans who love to quote the text, but what did the people of India love? They loved the songs of Kabir. What does the shopkeepers sing? They sing the upanishads. They sing Kabir because they want the raw pure naked, they need it because they’re living very difficult lives and sometimes it’s threatened lives and talking to them about the upanishads is not going to help them. What will help them in the most visceral way is that raw pure, absolutely bare poetry of a great mystic like Kabir. Who is their buddy. They can feel him go through everything that they’re going through and still goes through and they can vibrate with that. So you if you’re in India, in Benaras, for example, I remember one morning relatively recently going to the shop around the corner where I used buy my soap with this wonderful old woman and we became great friends and she in the morning would sing me Kabir. She was a very poor and she would tell me, you know, Kabir has helped me live my life. I know that everything is God. I know I have no money. I may not have money for my evening meal, but because of my singing of this magnificent holy brother of mine that is Kabir, I can get through anything. She told me that and that’s what so many people experience. Poetry has that divine gift.
Thal:
I was just listening to the late Mary Oliver, I think she just passed away two weeks ago or three. She said something about the role of religion. She said, well, religion is there to remind us that we cannot rely on our will but then the dogma comes in and flattens out everything and reduce it and it’s reductionistic much like a very staunch secular view is also reductionistic. Anything that is one side of something is reductionistic and…
Andrew Harvey:
Poetry is all sides altogether.
Thal:
Exactly. Exactly.
Andrew Harvey:
In a human experience that is non-judgmental that accepts all the pain and all the joy. That accepts all the struggle.
Thal:
The paradox of life.
Andrew Harvey:
The great mystical poets are our best friends, they are the best friends you could ever have on your life journey.
Thal:
It’s where I go to when I feel alone. It is my world. I love it. Mystical poetry.
Andrew Harvey:
Well you know that you’re not alone when you are sitting with Rumi or Kabir. These guys have been through everything. They’re with you right now and they will give you the consolation, the wisdom you need. In Iran, you know, they love Hafiz most of all. They say Hafez is the greatest of all the poets, even greater than Rumi.
Thal:
He’s powerful.
Andrew Harvey:
What they do when they’re feeling miserable or alone or in front of a very difficult judgement, they pray and they open Hafiz. They’ve discovered that it is some kind of an oracle.
Thal:
I actually do that trick too.
Andrew Harvey:
I do it with Rumi and Hafiz and it never fails. They are there present completely as a complete divine human beings, speaking intimately to us, and they can help us in ways that even the greatest scriptures can’t help us.
Thal:
I believe that…
Andrew Harvey:
It’s all about friendship now you see, I think that when we really understand as human beings what friendship is capable of, what great friends can feel and do and experience together.
Thal:
Sacred friendship.
Andrew Harvey:
We understand the full glory of what the poets ask because truly they are our deepest secret friends.
Thal:
In fact, that is one of the main messages within the Sufi tradition. The sacred aspect of friendship and communion and sisterhood and brotherhood and all of it.
Andrew Harvey:
Isn’t that the deepest meaning of Shams and Rumi’s relationship? Nobody really understood their relationahip. Some thought they were physical lovers. That’s not true. Some foods that they were just buddies. That’s not true. Some people thought they were master and disciple. That’s not true because they were each master and each disciple. All of those previous definitions vanish when the true glory of friendship appears because they clearly loved each other, heart, mind, soul, and body. It was total love, but it was love that vibrated from the depths of the heart and included the whole field of the being. That’s friendship and we we’re just beginning to begin to begin to begin to understand what friendship can be.
Thal:
The tip of the iceberg,
Andrew Harvey:
How wonderful, yeah. This is what awaits the human race if we can only stop committing suicide and matricide. It awaits the revelation of universal mysticism, the revelation of fundamental bond of sacred friendship between all beings gay, straight, lesbian acrobats, drunks in the street. Who cares? They’re human. They’re alive. They are our friends potentially.
Thal:
It’s fear. It’s ego. It’s, ah! These are the things that need to break.
Andrew Harvey:
It’s fear because you might suddenly find yourself embracing a dirty old drunk by the side of the street as your long lost brother that would scare you, but that’s truth. Jesus is talking about the same kind of love. He says, “greater Love hath no man than the man who lays down his life for his friends.” That’s the whole meaning of the mystical path to lay down your life for your friends so that your friends can taste the splendor of God through the life you lead and come into their own unique splendor and live it out with their own unique joy and then you can encourage them in that they can tune you and you can tune them and a lot of fun is had by all. We’re frightened of joy more than anything else. You know that’s what’s so scary. People say that they are scared of suffering, but if you really look deeply into yourself, what you’re really scared of is love and really scared of joy.
You might find yourself loving all kinds of unlikely people, even people who you before you thought were your enemies or just having mad destructive views. You might suddenly find yourself feeling overwhelming compassion for Trump, for example, which will deeply annoy some of your liberal friends. It’s actually part of the geat beauty.
Thal:
It is part of the paradox.
Andrew Harvey:
It is part of the paradox, but it doesn’t mean you hate him. You oppose his policies but it does not mean you hate him because you see the pain behind all the madness that can destroy the planet, but it doesn’t mean you have to hate him. Why should you hate him? Hate the policies, do everything you can to unnerve those policies, but never find yourself in the place of hating any humanbeing because they are still, however battered, the image of God. You have to keep that as a lover of God … that truth.
Thal:
Keeping in mind our listeners, I’m thinking when we’re talking about this type of energy and being sort of possessed with this radical love.
Andrew Harvey:
Yes, yes! I love that…possessed by this radical love. She speaks as a poet. That’s why poetry is so important because you said it in a phrase. That’s the intensity of being, isn’t it?
Thal:
Thank you. I have to say it. I’m going to say it today, sometimes it’s my own fear and you know how I’m perceived by others that I sometimes have to tone down that side of myself. Working with Adrian, right now, I’m slowly not going to tone down that down anymore.
Andrew Harvey:
This is the time of the empowered women. We need women like you to speak fearlessly, to sing out your truth. I need it. Every single man, however, evolved on this planet, needs to hear the voices of wild, empowered holy women. Be one of those. Don’t be frightened. I will tell you a story, which is one of my favorite stories, happened to me when I lived in Paris. I had a great friend. She was a Countess and she was a Coke addict, unfortunately, but she was the most luminous, wild, fearless person I ever knew. She was in her seventies and I was in my thirties. We were inseparable and she would take me to these glamorous dinner parties. Her favorite thing was to go off into the bathroom, smoke some coke, and come back to the table and tell everybody the truth about themselves at the table. Appallingly truthful.
One day the whole of France was sitting around this table. I mean the President was there, Yves Saint Laurent was there. It was a very grand party. She had known them all their lives, so she knew what a corrupt load of wankers they really were those people. She went from one to the other and she just said, you have been so selfish and narcissistic in the way… Look at the world, it’s burning because all you’ve wanted is power. She was possessed by sacred rage. It was tearing her apart. She went around and then the guy next to her who happened to be the head of (inaduble) said, “Helen, you are too much.” She quick as a whip said, “patron and you have never been enough.”
Thal:
Those words were used as a form of abuse, really. “You are too much.”
Andrew Harvey:
She was not too much. She was agonizingly struggling to be totally real. She was on a quest for total authenticity and that made her to me heart-rendingly beautiful and a great, great teacher and I didn’t judge her. If I had been inside her mind, I would have been dead 30 years before. It was amazing that she was alive with what she knew and she loved me passionately. I loved her passionately. Seeing the way in which somebody who is possessed of radical love is treated made me really make the choice that I would never, ever silence my passion. You have to choose the passion of the truth and you have to let the chips fall where they may because what you’ll discover is that the real people will come to you.
Thal:
I am already seeing that…
Andrew Harvey:
If you have five real friends in this world who are authentic, that’s everything. You don’t need 100 acquaintances. You need those five and they can’t come to you until you’re completely real yourself or trying to be. That’s the great truth. You know that, don’t you?
Thal:
I do, actually.
Andrew Harvey:
Yeah, so everybody out there who is frightened about being their real selves. Stop it! It’s time to tell the truth. It’s time, do it with dignity, do it with courtesy, but do it because even when people resist you, if you do it with force of your whole personality, you will shift something in them and three or four days later or maybe five years later, they will shift. At this time we can’t afford not to be radically passionate about life because the world is being destroyed and we have to speak up and we have to be ragged and we have to call people to account. We have to most of all call ourselves to account and we have to engage together in the sometimes painful, difficult, uncomfortable process because we’ve all got to get much more honest, much more real to get going together. Just do whatever we can to stop the human race. Committing suicide and matricide.
Thal:
We’ve done the physical destruction, the environmental destruction, destruction of ideas, and now it’s our psyche that we need to salvage.
Andrew Harvey:
Well, Jung said the history of humanity is hanging by a thread and that thread is the the thread of the psyche. Well, that thread is fraying and now tiny little bits are left and the frays altogether, the world’s finished. Every animal will die. Every plant will die. We will die. The seas by 2049, the major scientists say, will have no, no fish in it. I was talking to a very important, I wish I could say his name, but it was a private conversation last week. He’s probably one of the world’s leading scientists with the men’s (inaudible) and he said that the recent report of the UN, which said we have 12 years is not true. We have seven years and a lot of information is being deliberately kept back from the public, the powers that have control over the the information are terrified that when the public really knows what’s really happening, there would be madness and riots on the street. That’s where we really are. We’re about to go through a massive 50 gigaton burst of methane from from the melting Tundra in the Arctic, which has been keeping back a lot of methane gas and it’s now warming up and it’s going to release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than has been released since the beginning of the industrial revolution. We have no idea what’s this going to mean? This is very sobering, but my belief is that we don’t need to be paralyzed by this. We need to be activated by this and not by rage, but by joy, by love for everybody, our friends, our family, animals, and that love has to be experienced in rawness and then lived in sacred action. That’s why I’ve devoted my life to what I call sacred activism, to help people experience this deep, embodied, passionate, raw love that is divine love for each other and for everything, and then realize that love is not completely real until its become active.
If you weren’t doing this podcast out of pure love, you wouldn’t be real. You’d still be having emotions and indulging in your emotions, but you have put yourself out there so bravely. That’s sacred activism, that’s stepping up that’s saying, not in a bossy way, saying that we care and we want you to care and we want to hear how you care. We want to help you care more and so that we can care more so that we can come together more to do more together to really wake the human race up and give people hope and energy in a time of despair so that instead of being paralyzed by this exploding crisis, we use it in the deepest sense to get real, get down and get going. So there’s a huge birth taking place and we’re part of it. You and I and the people listening to this are a part a bit, and we can do this together.
Adrian:
Can you talk more about radical embodiment because it is a thread that I’m hearing in Kabir’s poetry and what you’re saying right now, this is not intellectualizing our way out of the mess it is.
Andrew Harvey:
That’s what created the mess.
Adrian:
It is not an ascending path. It sounds like it’s a dissent. It’s coming down.
Andrew Harvey:
It’s both.
Adrian:
What I was just going to say, what I heard last night when you were talking was to experience the ecstasy, but to bring that into the ordinary life and that sort of that downward energy, bringing it into the body and through our actions is how we’re going to be able to get get through to the next, to the other side of this evolution.
Andrew Harvey:
That’s so beautiful. I’m so glad you heard that because what’s happening in a lot of New Age spirituality is that we are using the ecstasy as a drug to leave being here to get out of being here and to go to some other where this is disembodied ungrounded spirituality. It’s actually a higher form of narcissism and it’s very dangerous because it’s using the highest experience for not the highest ends, the real way as it’s been shown us, by the great prophets and the great embodied divine mystics such as Jesus and the Prophet, peace be upon him, and Rumi and Kabir and other great women masters like Teresa of Avila. The real way is to allow yourself to experience that ecstasy, and be taken to the source of life itself that is ecstatic love and ecstatic joy and then through opening completely allow that ecstasy and that joy to irradiate your mind, to come down into the depths of your heart and open your heart completely to its presence in every living thing and every flea and in every stone.
The ecstatic light is actually the source of everything. Everything is crystalized light energy and this is what quantum physics is discovering now, so science and mysticism are revealing the same paradoxical, amazing reality that everything is energy, light-energy, then, and this is what the embodied mystics tell us, the great masters of embodiment and Jesus is one of them, and the Prophet, peace be upon him is another and Kabir is another. Then it needs to come down into the depths of the body itself because the body is secretly crystalized light-energy also in experiencing that in the depths of your cells, grounds you, makes you strong, makes you powerful, makes your love real and that love cannot be completely real and completely the embodied until it is acted on in a passion for justice and in a compassionate passion of love towards all beings.
Not just human beings, but animals, insects, everything. That’s the complete human divine experience and that’s the one that is struggling to be born against immense odds on the earth and actually our crisis which seems so horrific and is so horrific, is perfectly designed to be the birthing canal of this because nothing else could possibly work in our situation. When you’re in increasingly that state of radical love embodied in the mind and embodied in the heart, embodied in the body and embodied in real sacred action based on your own deepest talents and your deepest abilities. You don’t care whether somebody is a Muslim or a Hindu or a Christian or an atheist. You don’t care whether they agree with you or don’t agree with you. You all you see is that the world is dying and that you need to put love into action in your own unique way with your great heart friends and that that’s the only game in town.
That is the most important possible thing that you could do with your life at this moment. When you get that, it actually gives you enormous joy and peace and strength and passionate energy. Even in the middle of all of this despair, so you instead of being somebody who gets despairing and paralyzed and adds to the problem, you become someone who takes water to the thirsty, who can go to visit a friend who’s going through a massive depression because they feel that they can’t do anything and say, don’t be fooled by the fact that the world may be ending. Don’t let that depress you. Don’t let that stop you discovering who you really are. Join me. We’ll do it together. I’ll help you get catch flame with eternal joy and we will do something fabulous together and we’ll make creative projects together and even if it all goes and it might, we won’t have wasted our lives because we will have lived our lives in joy and peace and resilience and passion and really found meaning and above all have loved each other, truly.
Thal:
In a way that’s piercing through the veils to get to the gem…living that way. When we are talking about sacred activism and spiritual bypass in the New Age movements. It’s also important to recognize that there is a lot of problematic things happening within activism too.
Andrew Harvey:
What would you say they were?
Thal:
Well, it’s the sacred aspect is missing.
Andrew Harvey:
What does that lead to in your opinion in activism?
Thal:
A lot of reactionary behavior and a lot of ego inflation.
Adrian:
And not acknowledging the shadow or integrating it because that is where the gifts come from. I mean, we talk about the light coming out of the darkness. But if we don’t acknowledge it, if you don’t even talk about it, then we’re being very naive about the situation.
Andrew Harvey:
And we’re in a way indulging in self-righteousness and making ourselves feel good by denouncing other people. You know, the traditional mystics have had the shadow of wanting to go off into the light and not be here in relationships and responsibilities to the real world. That’s been the shadow of all the patriarchal mystical systems. The activists as they’ve evolved have had the shadow of self-righteousness, of blaming others, of wanting to feel above the others because they’ve got the real skinny and everybody else is just hopelessly deluded. Both are afflicted by profound kinds of narcissism and very dangerous kinds of narcissism. The danger of the mystics narcissism is that it is drained this world a bit sacred significance. It’s demonized the body. It’s made relationships part of illusion instead of the place where we learn so many wholly and important truths. It’s made a world in which animals are treated as inferior to us because we’re supposed to have the superior consciousness with the disastrous genocidal results that we see.
That’s the responsibility of those mystics who got addicted to transcendence, but the activists have also got a tremendous responsibility for the darkness of this situation because instead of really staying humble and loving and compassionate while pursuing just courses, they have been very often beacons of ego-ridden jostling amongst themselves and also deep self-righteousness so that they put off people who would otherwise want to join them. Who would want to be somebody who is self-righteously demonizing and denouncing every other human being that doesn’t agree with them. Every normal human being knows that that’s not the way so activists are their own worst enemies. The amazing thing is, and this is where sacred activism is so important, is that you if bring the best of the mystic, which is the passion to unite with God, it’s source of reality together with the best of the activist, the passion to uphold the truth of justice, which is a noble holy passion and don’t deny activists that they do have that.If you bring them together, then you have a whole truth. You have people who are deeply grounded and rooted in the sacred, humbled before the sacred, deeply aware that they need to constantly vigilantly work on their selfishness, on their self-rightousneess, on their desire to demonize others instead of recognizing others as aspects of themselves and you have people committed to putting the sacred into living wise, focused radical action. And that’s the new kind of human being that’s been born now, and it cannot be born either through the old mystic way or through the old activist way, but it can be born through this mysterious fusion that happens and we’ve seen it work. Gandhi was that kind of person. Gandhi’s genius was that he didn’t demonize the British. He knew exactly how dangerous the British were… I come from an imperial family. I was born to an imperial family, I have got the scars on my psyche to prove it, so I know how dangerous the British were…
Gandhi’s genius was to say to the British, I honor you, I don’t hate you. I just think that you’re not living up to your own deepest principles because you’re telling us that you’re the apostles of democracy and freedom. Whereas the democracy in India and where is the freedom in India? So that was amazing because the British would have been a lot more comfortable had Gandhi been demonizing them all the time. He made them deeply uncomfortable because he held up a mirror to them of their own deepest principles. And then very tenderly said to them, I honor these principles, they’ve changed my life, but where are you acting on them? And he then brought in a whole extraordinary system of the profound sacred activism, which was called Satyagraha, soul force, which was a commitment to nonviolent resistance. It wasn’t just sitting passive and praying.
They would go out in the streets and risk their lives, but they would never fight back because they knew that fighting back could activate tremendous violence and that violence of any kind would lead to more violence. Over time, this astounding practice unseated the biggest empire, the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. So it works. We’ve seen it work. We saw it work too with Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King said to the whites, are you crazy? You’re supposed to believe in Jesus and you’re treating your black brothers and sisters like worse than dogs. He said to the blacks, I know why you hate the whites, but the way through is never the way of hatred. We have to love our white brothers. Both resisted him until they realized that he was holding the mystery of the authentic Christ consciousness. That’s why Martin Luther King has been such a source of inspiration and that’s why America hasn’t yet there may still descend into a bloodbath because Martin said to both sides, we’ve got to go forward to honoring the truth of love in action. We’ve seen it work in Poland with Lech Wałęsa, nonviolent resistance fortified by deep spiritual strength works to unseat terrifying difficulties if it’s put into practice by people who are disciplined, humble, constantly working on their shadow, and constantly constantly opening up deeper and deeper to divine love. This is the only thing that can work in a situation like ours for the simple reason is that the dark has all the power. If we get violent and crazy, they’ll just shoot us in the streets. They will get rid of us in a second. Why wouldn’t they but if we rise from the depths of our truth together, loving, even the perpetrators and the tyrants, even extending love and hope and possibility to them, constantly saying to them, why do you choose this miserable lust for power when you could be living the life of the illumined heart? Why do you choose your Malibu mansions with their fortresses when you could actually be dancing with us in the dance halls of ecstasy? Why do you choose a narrow life rooted in selfishness when you could live the life of expansive truth?
Thal:
Andrew, you bring up so many important issues that are at the heart of what’s happening nowadays. I don’t even know what to say but there are so many things that are charged out there. As we’re speaking, people are having twitter wars, Internet wars, on the issues that you brought up. I think part of the path is shadow work, not I think, it is part of the path. Shadow work includes also the psychological aspects. In a way it’s the merging of the psychological and the spiritual. We have to recognize, too, that people do carry their individual traumas and if people don’t address those individual wounds then they create some of the thickest veils and it’s just wallowing in narcissistic wounding and just perpetuating…
Andrew Harvey:
Haven’t you done that yourself?
Thal:
I have and that’s where I’m speaking from.
Andrew Harvey:
I think it’s important to say that yes, I think you we all are attempted, like you said, you had this period of dogma.
Thal:
Exactly.
Andrew Harvey:
That is because you were wounded and you needed certainty and you needed to get out of your wound too soon.
Thal:
I needed clear answers and it was a comfort.
Adrian:
We were just saying this morning that at the time was a shield for you, protected you, but it became your prison. There has to be a time that we are ready to let go of the shield.
Andrew Harvey:
Maybe that is what you’re feeling too in this rawness, you’ve had the shield of secularism and now that’s going. We all have shields and they’re created out of our trauma. There is this amazing teacher. I hope you know him. His name is Jeff Brown and he’s just about to produce this incredible book called Grounded Spirituality. And Jeff has an extraordinarily rich and detailed and profound vision of how we really need to pay attention to the traumas and the physical blocks that make us addicts of certainty that is disembodied because otherwise we will never get to a place where we’re just human beings, ragged human beings in an endless process, helping each other through love and through communion grow in this amazing experience. It is divine human life, but that takes a lot of work. It is painful to confront the pain of the past and it’s very humbling journey.
Thal:
I also want to mention that we need to recognize that what we’re talking about is not reaching a perfected states. That we will still care about the little things in life and that that’s part of the path. It’s okay to want the finer things in life and that’s okay too…It doesn’t mean rejecting everything.
Andrew Harvey:
Oh no, that’s part of the patriarchal separation too, isn’t it? It’s more than that. We are looking for wholeness, not perfection, only the Divine is perfect. As Jesus says, you know, as someone is trying to praise him. He says, oh, stop it. You know, my righteousness is as rags before the Lord. If you don’t know that about yourself, you know nothing and it makes you pompous and the secret guru trying to lord it over others and that’s catastrophe. In fact, those failings or what we call failings keep us human. When you suddenly want to get crazy and angry at somebody and you stop it, I hope, but then you realize, oh my God, I’ve got to be vigilant on this side of myself and I’ve got to explore more the wound that comes from this.
Thal:
Yes, there goes my anger. There goes my jealousy. There it goes like these things don’t go away. It’s part of being human.
Andrew Harvey:
Yeah, but you do get modest with some of them and you do get really clearer and clearer indications of where they come from on the torment of your past, and that is the beginning of liberation because instead of indulging them, you can look at them compassionately. You could even have compassion for yourself getting angry because you realize that that was because you were locked in a room, or your mother abandoned you, or you were treated like garbage. So you can be the mother to your own self and slowly, slowly those bursts will get less and more and more controlled. You will have, not in a patriarchal way, but in a wave of compassionate restraint of the dark in yourself, and this is a phenomenally, that makes you really happy when that starts to happen and that’s the great advantage of living to an older age. You will think, oh yes, I’m not condemned to be me all the time, I can expand this. I don’t have to act as I did in the past. It can be changed.
Thal:
When I tell some of my friends, I actually can’t wait to grow older. I’m hoping that some of my neuroses will diminish as I grew older. Hopefully.
Andrew Harvey:
And they may become more fruitful. It wouldn’t probably diminish, but you’d be able to be more compassionate towards them.
Thal:
Sometimes it feels like when will this go away? When will this anger go away?
Andrew Harvey:
Anger is not wrong, it is, part of patriarchy has be to say that anger is always wrong. Anger is sometimes the sacred passion in you waking up. It’s conscience speaking. It’s saying, this has got to stop without transformed anger. We can’t go forward if you’re just angry. We demonize, but if we’re not angry, we can be very passive in the face of massive injustice. The trick is to find sacred anger. Jesus was angry at amazing moments when the moment when he overturned the tables in the temple, but his anger was a gift to those who were doing that garbage because he was saying to them, is this what you’re going to try and do? Sell God in the temple? Are you out of your minds? He was trying to help them. He was trying to reach them. He was not trying to kill them. He was trying to break through that complacency and they agreed to reveal the possibilities of a much larger life. I’ve seen the Dalai Lama wildly angry. I mean, you may find that amazing because the Dalai Lama is so beautiful and so, but the Dalai Lama has sacred anger. Every great teacher has to have sacred anger and every great human being has to have it, but it has to purify the sources of that anger, so it becomes the anchor of truth and not the expression of neurosis.
Adrian:
That’s the title. Turn Me to Gold. The transformation. The dark with the goal emerging from the dark.
Andrew Harvey:
The great discovery of the path of embodiment is that it isn’t the light alone that does the work. The dark is also sacred. Your lust is sacred. Your anger is sacred, not as they are in their raw state, but as they will be. When lust is turned into a passion to communicate and to reach out, and when anger into a clear voice of truth, calling people to sacred action, that’s the turning to gold so you don’t reject things because you can’t get rid of them. You can amputate these things that belong to you because the light and the dark meant to dance inside you. What you can do through increasing experience of light is strong in clarity so that you will know the difference in your lust between the lust for power and the deep passion to reach out and communicate and you’ll choose the second, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it gives you more joy and it doesn’t end in suffering and that is a very subtle operation, but it can happen, but it has to happen through being compassionate to yourself.
You have to be compassionate to why you are so wounded in some ways, but you have not got to have idiot compassion and just say, well, I was wounded so therefore I have absolutely every right to be as angry as I want. You’ve got to start working with your anger and neither reject it nor embrace embrace it, but work with the mystery to transmute it into golden anger, the golden anger of Rumi, the golden Anger of Shams, the golden anger of the Prophet, peace be upon him, the golden anger of Jesus, the golden gorgeous lion anger of Kabir, my God, that majesty of Jalal, isn’t it?
Adrian:
I’m mindful of time and I want to make sure that you get a chance to share. We’re mindful also of young listeners, young seekers out there. I mean, right now we’re talking to a living legend and elder, you know, is there anything that you feel is really important that they hear right now? You know, the young generation, the next generation of activists that you would like to get across.
Andrew Harvey:
I think the most important thing that I could say to you is that the most single important thing that you need is a simple daily spiritual practice because you’re going into the most profound crisis that humanity has ever faced. I believe in you. I believe in the strength in you. I believe in the courage that you have. I think you are amazing, but I want you to be shielded by deep spiritual knowledge. I want you to be balanced in the depth of yourself because you’re going to need that knowledge and that piece and that strength so much because there were many defeats before, great victories and you need to be able to endure those defeats without losing your hope, and you can only endure the defeats that are inevitable because this, the people in power, the dark forces in power and they are dark.They are not going to yield easily.However, right you are…however, beautiful you’re actions are. They going to hold onto power and they are going to be very unscrupulous and contribute to a great deal of suffering. So prepare yourselves without being afraid and know that if you do deep spiritual practice in faith, you will be given unimaginable strength and unimaginable power and over time your deepest impulses will become realized and you will be the pioneers, wholly new way of being and doing everything. If you want the most beautiful possible statement of this, read the Dalai Lama’s new book, which is addressed to you from the holiest man on the planet and the wisest man on the planet who’s really lived through everything. It’s called a call for revolution and it’s a magnificent statement of everything I’ve just said. He says it from the authority of his absolutely amazing life and he says it with such humanity and such belief in you.
I share his belief. The other thing that’s very important, I think now is to realize that it can only be done by all of us together. You need us and we need you. You need to listen to the old ones who’ve been through a great deal and who have certain marvelous things to share with you. I know you must think our generation is catastrophically self-absorbed and I don’t blame you because the baby boomers so signally failed you, but there’ve been some of us who have known this throughout this long orgie of greed and we’ve been fighting in the trenches. Sometimes I’d say very painfully and unsuccessfully for a long time, but some of us have come to a place of resolution and real joy and real knowledge and we have priceless things to share with you and what you have to give us is you. Your beauty, your intelligence, your passion, your incredible desire to change this world and between you and us, we can help and then stick the world wake up. Don’t abandon your elders and don’t go with the boring old elders who think they know anything. Go with the elders who are really on fire with love and wanted to give you the very best of what they know in the very best way because we all are ready to serve you, to help you to be at your feet, to give you everything we know, because we know you’re going to need every bit and what we know to go forward and be the pioneers of the new.
Thal:
Uh, wow. Thank you so much.
Adrian:
Thank you so much. Thank you. Bless your soul.
Andrew Harvey:
Well, I’m here and I’m not the only one, obviously. There are lots of us out here who are absolutely crazy about you and want to be of help to you and want to learn your language to be of help to you because we were brought up in a different language and are prepared to listen deeply to find out how we can translate what we know into ways that you can get, but we’ve learned timeless truths and it’s cost us our many nights of pain and heartbreak. Don’t waste our suffering because it’s born this in us and we want to give it to you because you are going to go through even greater suffering and you will need it.
Adrian:
Thank you for paving the way. I mean just to activate, to break the inertia to get things going.
Andrew Harvey:
That was my job. That was the job of our generation. There are many of us on the planet now and we’re ready to help and it was a terrible job because it’s been the most appalling suffering. Seeing my generation conspired with the death of the planet through greed and vanity and the New Age garbage and all the rest of it, but it has woken some of us up and it has given us absolute resolution to continue until we die as sacred activist. I’m not retired. I’m not giving up even if I’m in a wheelchair, I’ll be speaking truth to power. There’s one nun and I met who’s 95 called sister Rosa. Oh my God.
She’s in a wheelchair and she lives in Ohio and every time everything goes bad in Ohio. Sister Rosa wheels herself to wherever it’s going bad and she talks to the cameras and she just lays it on them. You cannot imagine she’s not giving up. I’m not giving up. I’ll be there until the end with you, so will all of us who are like me and who really know that everything is at stake now, but also everything is possible in an unimaginable way.
Thal:
May we be ready to receive.
Andrew Harvey:
And may we be ready to listen and ready to truly hold all the young in our arms and really instead, not from a position of superiority, but from a position of deep compassion.
Thal:
From a position of mutuality?
Andrew Harvey:
Yeah, we need each other. Yeah. I’m bored to death with the baby boomers and most people between 35 and 70 seem to be dead at this moment. They bought into the corporate mess, so the people are going to really shift this. There are some amazing people in their forties. I must say who are waking up, but it’s the young who are going to carry the horror.
Thal:
I am actually 37.
Andrew Harvey:
You know what I’m talking about. They bought the let’s go out and make money and eat, drink and lets marry. Everything’s ending. We can’t do anything. Let’s just sit in our yachts and watch the world burn. This is a sick and decadent response and I have nothing. There’s nothing you can do with those people except hope God bashes them on the head with a saucepan.
Adrian:
The bitch slap,
Andrew Harvey:
Of course God is capable of that, so some of them may wake up and be amazing radicals soon. You never know anything can happen, so nobody’s left out of our embrace, but the chances are slim in the cases of most of the people, but the younger in this state of confusion and despair, which is a very fertile state for true transformation. Now we need to really give them everything we can to help encourage that and the poetry of Kabir and the poetry of Turn Me To Gold and the poetry of Rumi will be such a wonderful way to do that and music and dance, which are the traditional ways anyway, because the Bushman used that. I think young people are much more likely to be inspired by poetry and sacred music and sacred dance, sacred physical activity like sacred yoga than they are to be by people pontificating them about religious platitudes and dogmas. They know all that stuff is horse manure. They want the real stuff. They want the real experience and some of us who are not yet in wheelchairs who can actually help them arrive there. So count me in.
Adrian:
You can dance in your wheelchair too. So that’s fine.
Andrew Harvey:
I know I can. I know lots of people who do actually.
Thal:
Can you recite one of Kabir’s poems as a closing?
Andrew Harvey:
Absolutely. What shall I do? I will recite the first poem I ever heard from him, which is still my favorite of his poems actually. Whenever I try to look for a poem in my book, it hides from me. This is Kabir’s game you see. It’s such an incredible poem. Oh, so beautiful. This is for all of you young people. I hope you. I hope you can hear it in such a way that you realize this is truth speaking and this is your truth. This is what if you take the path humbly, you will found out I found this out and I was crazy as a loon when I was young and didn’t believe in anything but life brought me to my knees and I opened my heart to the beloved. The beloved took me to awakening, so if it’s possible for me. It’s possible for you. Go for it.
The beloved is in me and the beloved is in you. As life is hidden in every seed, so rubble your pride, my friend, and look for him within you. When I sit in the heart of his world, a million suns blaze with light, a burning blue seas spreads across the sky. Life’s turmoil, falls quiet. All the stains of suffering wash away. Listen to the unstruck bells and drums. Love is here. Plunge into its rapture. Rain’s poured down without water rivers are streams of light. How could I ever express how blessed I feel to revel in such fast ecstasy in my own body? This is the music of soul and soul meeting, of the forgetting of all grief. This is the music that transcends all coming and going.
Kabir is not escaping into ecstasy. Kabir is embodying that ecstasy and then living out a life of profound, beautiful service to all beings grounded in that joy. There is a way to stay in that joy, my dear friends, even in the middle of the crumbling and burning up the world. Find that way. You’re going to need it, and if you find that way and act from that, miracles will happen. Just wait and see.
Adrian:
Thank you so much, Andrew, to be continued.
Andrew Harvey:
I hope so. You’re beautiful people. I’m honored to be with you. Thank you. God bless you.