by Bob Banner
See also, About Andrew Harvey
I first read Andrew Harvey’s translations of Rumi years ago, and then it was his The Way of Passion (about Rumi) which just blew me away, especially because most, if not all, the material came from his spontaneous discourses at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. His love for Rumi, for God ecstatic consciousness and awakening was and is contagious. Then it was his collaboration with Sogyal Rinpoche on The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying that kept my intellectual passion alive. I even took a workshop with him at Spirit Rock years ago where I was struck by his passion, by his breaking into song and poetry and tears when he was reading certain mystical literature. He allowed us to read our own poetry or passages that revealed our being touched by the divine. And then there was the documentary I screened called “Sacred Activism,” featuring a workshop with Andrew Harvey. This definitely helped me see the importance of fusing the spiritual with the activist side of myself that I had been struggling with for decades. And when I heard that he was going to be doing an all-day workshop on Sacred Activism at the IONS Conference, I made my plans.
He has gone from guru to being in therapy and now very concerned that not much is really changing when it comes to the world crisis. Especially recent years – things have gotten worse, not better, overall. His main message today is how to fuse genuine spirituality and its mystical knowledge, passion and ancient lineage with the fire of social justice in the activist realm. The fusion of the fire of Spirit and the fire of social justice can become a third fire that can be as “explosive as a nuclear bomb of love.”
There have been many rifts between various groups no matter how inclusive they are under that grand umbrella called “Progressives.” We reported on the healing of the rift between businesses and environmentalists in our report on BALLE in the last issue. The rift between farmers and environmentalists is another one, and we reported on the Death of Environmentalism where there was an attempt at a fusion between labor, energy and environmentalism to the anger of many environmentalists. And then the rift that is being addressed here, between the spiritual and the activist folks.
To Andrew Harvey, if this rift is healed, it will indeed become a large force, a third fire, as he calls it, which can actually be effective.
The New-Age spiritual/mystical impulse has stagnated to remain in the realm of consciousness and God. New-Agers’ strength is their passion for God, for union with God consciousness, an impulse for moral values, focusing on an interior life of peace, good will and truth. But Harvey frequently ridiculed New-Agers for their callous disregard for anything that deals with reality, their total denial of the Shadow. Not just denying the Shadow but also going so far as to deny that the Shadow even exists!
Activists’ strength, on the other hand, is their passion for social justice and their need to DO something in order to change the numerous injustices in the world as well as many crises that are at the forefront: the American deficit, climate change, destruction of the environment, resource depletion, peak oil, etc. Often their weakness is the anger that compels them to action. However, righteous anger is essential and healthy, especially s when many sectors are telling us it is not okay to express anger. There are times when we need to express anger.
There are also times when we need to allow that intense energy to transmute us into more compassionate beings. Some of our anger fuels divisive elements that pit “us against them,” demonizing the enemy, which often backfires.
The whole point of this discussion is that the politicos and the mystical folks need to heal their respective shadows so that their fusion will result in a third fire that can genuinely be a force of effective action in the world.
Harvey emphasized the point that there is no movement that is effective making any serious changes by New Agers following their navel-gazing bliss or activists bashing their heads against a reality that ruthlessly fights back or, worse, seduces us to imagine we are making strides [see the story about greenwashing here ].
A constant theme at the workshop was one of “being of use.” If the spiritual folks are not much use, then their paradigm needs to be dissected and exposed to the light. If the activists are continually repeating the same actions and going nowhere or their solutions are emanating from the same mind set and getting the same results, they too need to uncover the underlying reasons why things are not working.
As you may surmise, the rift is not going to be healed anytime soon, especially since, as Velcro Ripper states in Shawna Galassi’s article in this issue, most activists associate spiritual with religion and don’t want anything to do with religion. This reminds me of the joke Vanda Mikoloski made at her appearances in SB and SLO: “I’m not sure most of you have heard of people who consider themselves spiritual but don’t want the religion. But have you heard of people who have religion and don’t want the spirituality?”
In my experience of bringing the spiritual as well as the political to the community, not much has been fruitful. At the film screenings, I often show spiritual, enlightening films as well as the political, issue-oriented, disturbing films. Each of the audiences seem to be in their own choir. So when people criticize me for showing films to the “choir,” I ask them: “which one?” Last month I showed “War Made Easy,” and two nights later I screened “Living Luminaries.” Two totally different audiences.
There seems to be more and more choirs, especially due to the fact that there are more and more issues to deal with. In a culture or civilization that is in total breakdown, everything needs to be changed. Everything.
And perhaps there is good reason to get entrenched into each camp or choir. I mean, you do need to focus on the issue, and that takes time (and you may not have the time or wherewithal to discover a potent interior life), but the question always comes down to “be of use” and “be effective.” The activists clearly don’t want to see metaphysical films and the spiritual people certainly don’t want to be “engulfed with negativity” by exposing themselves to revealing documentaries on social justice issues. But the fusion would take the best of each and truly be of use.
One of points Harvey makes most passionately is that sacred activism needs to be birthed by a broken heart. This broken-heart-feeling might be the key to bridge the two choirs. In the breaking of the heart, one truly discovers what it is we feel compelled to do, what is our purpose. But it takes courage to sit with a broken heart, feeling the pain of the world and what it has become and what specific issue aches you to your core. This may be reminiscent of Joanna Macy’s work with activists. What surprised me about her work is that within a few moments of allowing ourselves to FEEL what our activism really entails, many of us would simply sit and sob and sob, finally feeling the depth of what we were trying to do by changing the structures, changing consciousness, creating a new world. And all of that starts empowering us more and more. The same thing with Andrew Harvey’s work. He spoke of an exercise to do at 3am. Wake up, sit up straight and begin to allow yourself to feel the pain of the world. Often a specific issue will come up, whether animal rights or the environment or the media or working with children, etc. When the pain aches so much with that specific issue, you will know that’s what breaks your heart and that will be your key to fuse the domains of spirituality and activism.
Bob Banner publishes HopeDance and he can be reached at info@hopedance.org .
About Andrew Harvey
Andrew Harvey was born in south India in 1952 where he lived until he was nine years old. He left India to attend private school in England and entered Oxford University in 1970 with a scholarship to study history. At the age of 21, he became the youngest person ever to be awarded a fellowship to All Soul’s College, England’s highest academic honor.
By 1977 Andrew Harvey had become disillusioned with life at Oxford and returned to his native India, where a series of mystical experiences initiated his spiritual journey. Over the next 30 years, he plunged into different mystical traditions to learn their secrets and practices. In 1990, he collaborated with Sogyal Rinpoche and Patrick Gaffney in the writing of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. In 1984, Harvey began a 10-year-long exploration and explication of Rumi and Sufi mysticism in Paris with a group of French Sufis and under the guidance of Eva De Vitray-Meyerovitch, the magnificent translator of Rumi into French. In 1992, he met Father Bede Griffiths in his ashram in south India near where Harvey had been born. It was this meeting that helped him synthesize the whole of his mystical explorations and reconcile Eastern with Western mysticism.
Andrew Harvey has taught at Oxford University, Cornell University, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The California Institute of Integral Studies, and the University of Creation Spirituality as well as at various spiritual centers throughout the US. He was the subject of the 1993 BBC film documentary “The Making of a Modern Mystic” and appears also in “Rumi Turning Ecstatic” [at the HD FiLM Library] and is the featured presenter in “Sacred Activism” [also at our FiLM Library]. He is Professor of Sacred Activism at Wisdom University www.wisdomuniversity.org , and Founder Director of the School of Sacred Activism which will be offering its first programs in early 2008.
Andrew Harvey on Sacred Activism
Andrew Harvey, Oxford scholar and visionary, believes that our survival depends on Sacred Activism, a fusion of profound mystical awareness, passion, clarity and sacred practice with wise, dedicated, radical action. This fusion, he warns, may be the sole key to preservation of man and nature.
Harvey envisions what he calls “The Seven Heads of the Beast of the Apocalypse” as:
• population explosion
• environmental pollution
• religious fundamentalism
• proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
• separation from nature through technology
• corrupt conglomerations that own and create mass media
• societies that multitask, which makes it “impossible to concentrate on our divine nature.”
A grim list, until Harvey counters with the Seven Stars:
• the current world crisis that compels us to strip away false agendas and “to look deeply into the shadow of humanity”
• the emerging technologies of wind, solar and hydrogen power
• the birth of the Internet, a popular, affordable global means of communication
• the mystical revolution of the past 20 years
• the rise of compassionate non-violence as envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, and evidenced in the collapse of the Berlin wall
• the return of the “Divine Feminine,” which is reflected in the growing recognition of mankind’s interconnectedness
• the birth of “divine humanity,” or the growing belief that God is within each of us.
Harvey counsels, as he dances from theme to theme, that the five ways to become a “mystical activist” are:
• to serve the divine, to make a space for God in your life
• to serve yourself, so that you will be grounded in reality
• to serve others
• to serve your local community
• to serve your global community.
He believes that each individual can become a mystical activist by “becoming conscious at every level and conscious of all choices.”
In turn eloquent, threatening, exuberant, enlightening and spiritual, Andrew Harvey draws the audience in through his fervent belief in the “Divine Mother,” the mother of all beings, and he calls on each individual to “burn like her with meaning, strength, joy and sacred passion.”
Reprinted from Spirituality & Health magazine.
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