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Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually Awakening people. There have been over 325 of them posted so far. And if you’re new to this, go to batgap.com Bat gap. You’ll see them all categorized and organized in several different ways under the past interviews menu, and you’ll see a number of other things there, including a donate button. This show is made freely available to whoever wants to watch it, but it’s made possible by those who support it financially who feel inspired to do so. I am really pleased to have as my guest tonight, Andrew Harvey, I have been aware of Andrew and very much appreciative of him for many, many years now I probably read it’s my first reading of one of his books might have been 20 years ago. And Andrew and I, it’s very funny, we’ve tried about five times to set up this interview and various things have happened. There have been snowstorms there have been travels. One day, we were about to do it and a squirrel showed shorted out the power lines in my neighborhood. So we were without power that day. So but we just kind of kept taking it in stride. And we figured that you know when the time is right, it’ll happen. And apparently the time is right. That is right. Yes. And unless we both suddenly get abducted by space aliens or something in the middle of this interview, I think we’re gonna pull it off
Andrew Harvey: entirely possible. I have prepared as many protections as possible, but you can’t be sure of anything.
Rick Archer: Yeah, you should be wearing the tinfoil hat actually.
Andrew Harvey: Well, I prepared my space speak. To me, I love you. That’s
Rick Archer: great. Let me let it read a little bio of Andrew. And this is a very short synopsis because there’s a lot to say about him and he’ll be telling us more about himself as we go along. But Andrew is the founder and director of the Institute of sacred activism, an international organization that invites concern people to take up the challenge of our contemporary global crisis crises by becoming inspired and effective agents of change. Sacred activism is a form of compassion in action that is born of a fusion of deep spiritual passion with wise radical action in the world. The large scale practice of sacred activism can become an essential force for preserving and healing the planet and its inhabitants. Andrew Harvey has taught at Oxford and Cornell University as well as at various colleges and spiritual centers throughout the world. He has written over 30 books. His website is Andrew harvey.net. So what we’re going to do in this interview, Andrew and I agreed is, first we’re going to sketch his spiritual history going back from when, you know, when it first began, I guess and, and touching upon all the significant milestones, which would probably include his disillusionment with academia. His time with mother Mira, his time with father being Griffiths and, and probably many other things. And then we’re going to spend a quite a bit of time focusing on his current passion probably will be his passion for the rest of his life, which is sacred activism. He’s written a book here, which I’ve been reading called the hope, a guide to sacred activism. So we’re going to talk about what that is. And there’ll be all kinds of, I’m sure, deep metaphysical considerations, but they’ll also be many practical points and things that people can apply in their own lives. So Andrew, where shall we start?
Andrew Harvey: Wherever you want, I’m your slave.
Rick Archer: So as I understand it from reading and listening to interviews with you, you are something of a child prodigy. You were one of the youngest, if not the youngest person to be a professor at Oxford. Is that not correct?
Andrew Harvey: Well, I was at that time the youngest person ever elected to the fellowship at All Souls College. That’s what I was told. That was a very strange thing to beto because it was supposedly a great elitist honor, but it turned out to be a tremendous education and vanity futurity, breed madness, the world and eventually I long to get through.
Rick Archer: You’re just in your 20s At that point, were you?
Andrew Harvey: Yes.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And had you already become spiritually motivated or Were you were you thinking that, you know, intellectual life was the way to go?
Andrew Harvey: Well, I was born in India, born in India and spend my whole childhood in India was itself a spiritual initiation. Everything in my life comes from that. Because I was born into a sacred world, a sacred culture. I was a child, a Protestant parents, but I had a Hindu cook and Catholic nanny and Muslim driver, as a child. So I was part of this seething, gorgeous spiritual world that’s in here. So very early on, I learned that God is in everything and everywhere, and all the religions are just refractions of one central mystery, just that light coming through different windows. So my whole life was soaked in India from the very beginning, then I’m had to go to England at the age of nine, which was like being shoved into a refrigerator. And then I had to have a life in England, which was absolutely nothing to do with what I had ever experienced in India. And I lost my faith in religion who became a Marxist because I had a crazy history teacher who was absolutely magnificent. So I became a rebel. And then I got to Oxford, and then I overachieved frantically and got this literary prize. And then I realized, Oh, my God, the world up here is really as sick as I thought it actually would be. It’s full of crazy people doing crazy things, because, and also meeting people from the highest levels of government from the highest levels of the intellect. And with a few wonderful exceptions, most of them were certifiable. And when you’re young, you have very piercing eyes,
Rick Archer: certifiably crazy, you mean,
Andrew Harvey: certifiably crazy.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Andrew Harvey: So it was a complete disillusionment, on so many levels, I’d lost India, I’d come to England that had indeed taken from me, I had really become a kind of intellectual rebel on many levels that have come to deliver achieved, I was in the Sanctum Sanctorum in the golden house at the end. And I was desperate because I was seeing an empty world run by madmen. And from very early on, I realized that Western civilization was headed for disaster. These people were the people running it, my God won’t be faced. And at that moment, I decided when I was 25, to go back to India, not to go into an ashram not to take on a Sanskrit name, but to try and survive the level of disillusion that experienced the disillusion with academia, the distribution with powerful distribution with God and solution with the games power, they were so frightening to me. And I could see where they ended up and evil, Trivial Pursuit. So I was desperate to go back to the sources of my child’s faith in that Indian wartime to remember what I had known beyond concept, the sense of unity with everything, but I wasn’t looking for God, I was deeply skeptical. And then on that return, when I was 25, I have a series of mystical experiences which just cleaved my mind open and keep my heart open assured me that that is an eternal reality, and nothing else is finally real. And that, to experience that and to body that, as far as you can, is to go with life. So I had to change everything prior to you. Imagine my whole career, my vocation who I was, it was a huge capitalism, and I didn’t do well, nobody does well, with those kinds of capitalism. I lived a split life for a long time between the academic world the creative world, and my own deep mystical world, because I was scared and actually confronting living. But then when I was 35, I had a major breakdown that took me back to my den good. And that began our deep.
Rick Archer: So what precipitated these spiritual experiences because going to India doesn’t guarantee having a spiritual experience by any means.
Andrew Harvey: No, but I think, looking back on my life, and what I have done with my life, and with my work, I think, I was meant to be born in this life because it made me from the very beginning of my journey, a bridge person because I was born to English parents, though my father had a stroke of Indian blood, but in India, so India formed me but I had the Western education To unite with the Eastern temperament. So that has determined to go through to my work. So I feel that I have been prepared by being born in India for an opening which flowered when I was in transit when I made the decision to go back to
Rick Archer: what sorts of experiences were those?
Andrew Harvey: was the first really amazing one was when I went into a Dream Vision and had the music of the spheres, I can’t put it any other way, the most ecstatic imaginable music and then experienced an impulse from the center of the Godhead telling all the souls of a singing rapturously that they were having to incarnate embody now, and then the music changes to be a music of incredible, painful longing, the longing that Rumi describes the longing of the heart to rejoin at source, and I experienced both of the primordial depths and then found myself being ejected from that glowing singing the mass and falling into my own body and incarnated here right now. So I experienced something which has taken me years to understand that something of the process of coming in from the source carrying this like consciousness, but also going through this tremendous descent into this very difficult medium.
Rick Archer: From your description, it almost sounds like you experienced or remembered the process that sent you here to this planet, you know, you’re part of this group of souls, and it’s time to come down and you know, yeah, interesting.
Andrew Harvey: We’re all part and we’re doing the work that I’m doing. And there are many of us. We’re all part of a very broad rich cohort of souls, who I believe have chosen to come and do the most grueling, but most potentially amazing work in the middle of this vast evolutionary crisis. We’ve chosen this, it’s task three, we have been preparing for for lifetimes. Here we are, in all our ragged maths but difficulty can really be of help, because this is Showtime. Any help? That’s really as
Rick Archer: well as the saying goes, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. Right.
Andrew Harvey: Yes, and thank God there lots of others doing it also, that it’s an amazing job. Because it brings together your whole life and everything you’ve ever learned, and everything you’ve ever experienced, and encourages you to gamble your whole life, to try and make a difference, because you can see exactly just how dangerous things are and how much it depends upon hundreds of 1000s of us really being willing to gamble our lives a way forward into this great shift, as
Rick Archer: you mentioned, being torn for 10 years or so, between the the spiritual dimension that you are awakening to and the, I suppose the, you know, ordinary dimension of academia and professional practical life and so on, that you had trained and were
Andrew Harvey: Yes, wanting to my own passion, passionate sexuality, all kinds of, there are many things in all of us that draw us away from the kind of ruthless concentration that reveal mystical transformation requires, you can’t be transformed by the fire of the Divine passion unless you’re prepared to go into that fire. And you can’t go into that by asking around and playing games with that, but because that will scorch you and burn you, you can only enter it directly nakedly and surrender to it and allow it to do its tremendously difficult, potent work on you. But getting to the place where you are truly, truly decided to that work takes the exposure of all kinds of different illusions that belong to your company personality, and I had a whole slew of them for everybody. I have the illusion that being a real artist would heal the pain that I experienced. So that would be an honorable, noble thing to do. And it is, but a real artist can still be ignorant of the nature of reality, and therefore the art will be limited in its power to heal and transform others. I’ve had the illusion that a certain kind of celebrity would also give me the joy and happiness that I’d sort of signally failed to find in my own life. And I pursued that that fell apart in ways that made it obvious that was madness. So I’m so glad I lived those illusions and I’m so glad they all fell apart. I have the illusion to the end my own personal romantic life, I would meet the old transforming or transfiguring lover because the first off If I fell in love with this tree stand on disorder, which is a dangerous thing to do with 13, because it gives you extremely extravagant ideas of what love is supposed to be. And of course, that kind of mad projection can only lead to heartbreak, despair, betrayal, and I drank deep into those things. And I’m glad I did. Because when I was in the middle of my 30s, I was on my knees, nothing was working. Although everything seemed to be working, nothing was working for me. And I was finally ready to actually plunge into the truth, transforming fire and give up the gains of my mind and the fantasies of my heart and my career vocations and my plans, and just realize I was so sick, and I needed help. And only help that would come, you’d have to come from Greece itself, because I gambled in the casino last or had to come from somewhere outside because
Rick Archer: there’s one region point or did you reach a point where you had no choice but to fall into that fire? I mean, people sometimes say to me, they say, oh, you should just like plunge in, give it up, you’re holding on to your ideas, and so on and so forth. But I can only do what I can do. I’m just speaking from experience. And, you know, if I heard some people like yourself, say they went through things that are that are so excruciating, and transformational, that they could, you know, had to hang on for dear life. I’ve never quite gone through anything like that. But maybe you get to a point where you have no choice, you know, or is it like Frodo, you know, you still you almost have to be pushed in, because you’re never going to do it yourself.
Andrew Harvey: You know, just before we began, you were talking about your dog, and you took it as a look of such love and affection on your face. You don’t know yet what you would be able to do for your dog out of love. You don’t know yet if you haven’t experienced the dark night, what you’re prepared to do out of love the beloved, you’re prepared to burn in the fire that beloved and burn away and have your illusions exposed to yourself and being dragged across broken glass. Simply because you’ve discovered something that’s greater than yourself, which is your love. Created by the Divine One from the beloved of the universe, that is the universe. That’s the great discovery that changes everything. That’s the discovery that is awoken in the core of the mystical life. So it’s not courage that gives you the courage to do the work. It’s love. It’s love. Insane. Love breeds love and beyond any possibility of expression words, but love because of direct, naked experience. Does. Lets
Rick Archer: I’ve heard you say that pretty much everybody has to go through something pretty intense, you know, some dark night of the soul period?
Andrew Harvey: They’re very lucky, yes.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, yeah, do you do you perceive that the intensity of that the difficulty of that varies from one person to another according to their makeup, their karma, whatever, and for, for some, it will be like getting dragged through broken glass. But for others, it might be a relatively smooth transition.
Andrew Harvey: I don’t think Dark Knight is ever a smooth transition, it won’t be the Dark Knight if it is,
Rick Archer: and it’s compulsory, everybody has to go through a dark night?
Andrew Harvey: Everyone in the end, we will have to go through a dark night because the divinization process the process that transforms a person from a human being filled with light to a divine being in human form, is the death process of the dark night there is a death rebirth path. That is the central path of civilization. And it goes through always the annihilation process. And that’s why it’s so dangerous and what is so exciting and what is so sobering about the authentic path, and this path is the truth of shamanism. vegetariana Buddhism the truths of Christian mysticism, it’s a core part of its evolutionary path. So one of the things that my work has been very concerned about because I have lived through the dark night process and I know that it leads to immense blessing and immense opening and immense empowerment but my God, you have to know the map otherwise you can get unbelievably lost and because I was given them that by great teachers and because my experience led me to confirm the truth of that heritage map from the great mysteries legacy for us and now when I’m so concerned to do is to give people the map because we’re going in to a global dark night. in which all human illusions are going to be fueled away by the acid, extreme chaos and extreme suffering. And without knowing the sacred meaning of this global dark night will be threatened by madness and terrible destruction will have madness and destruction anyway, but the threat threatened by terminal matters. And Chairman, district.
Rick Archer: Yeah, let’s talk about that on an individual level first, and then take it to the collective level. You mentioned the word danger dangerous on the individual level, is there a survival rate for going through the dark night is it like, you know, 50%, make it and 50% Don’t and what happens to those who don’t, or
Andrew Harvey: I don’t know. But I suspect that there are many people in asylums and houses for the mentally challenged, who how actually in caught in the middle of a very, very difficult dark night process whose minds has been exploded by trauma or some terrible event, and who are actually seeing fragments of a new interlinked reality that have no container because no sacred information, no practices with which to work, so as to be able to contain what happens in a dark night, which is, on the one hand, you’re open much more deeply to the dark forces to the shadow, and its most lethal, horrific, terrifying form, so that you can truly get real about what’s happening. And on the other hand, you’re also constantly opened by revelation and by grace to much deeper knowledge of the transcendent, conscious civically minded. So the dark night of doing this one hand stretching to embrace the dark, and the other, stretching you to embrace the fullness of your divine personality and trying to create a container in that process is very difficult, but it’s known how you can that’s why the information that I’ve been trying to give in all the different books that I’ve written in the mail is in the way I teach about the importance of this process. And the capacity that we have to survive this process is really, I think, sacred, because the whole world is now going through this process. And we won’t be able to get to the next stage of our evolution, but we don’t accept the price and really waking up to the depths of the shadow of darkness within us. So let’s work on that. When the lights but not used the right to bypass those steps and pretend they’re not there because they’re exploding in a radioactive everywhere threatening the future. Great.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, being doing this show, you know, and it goes out to a lot of people and we people get in touch with us who are going through stuff that is blood curdling, I mean, and in many cases, they don’t, somehow, well, I guess, if they get in touch with us, they figured out that it’s some kind of spiritual emergency, they’re going through some sort of Kundalini awakening or something. But, you know, for some people, it’s extremely incapacitating and frightening and difficult, and they don’t know where to turn or what sort of help to get or anything. So
Andrew Harvey: well, there are many thank God spiritual dimension systems. There are people like my friend, Dorothy Walters, who has a website called Kundalini splendor, who herself has been through a big Kundalini awakening, and who helps people in the goodness of her heart because she is an expert in this. So it’s very important that we create systems of support. Because if you really sit back and consider what we are now facing as a human race, you and I and everybody the potential end of the whole adventure, because it’s quite clear that all the solutions were proposing are failing horribly, to address any serious problems in any real serious way. By 2048, there have been no fish in the sea. This is official scientific data. We’re headed into a storm of global climate change, which we’ve done staggeringly little to prevent. And we’re keeping floating a completely fake economy, which is about as flimsy as Bolsover in bail. And the combination of all of those things ensures something devastating, which is already updates to so many people but is bound to get worse. So we need to prepare the deepest level for them. Biggest evolutionary shattering that we have ever gone through. And we need to get much more serious about it much more different ramifications much more profoundly embedded in deep sacred practice, and much more active to get to bring in solutions that we may not have much time left over. That’s, I see very.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I’ve had a sense since the seven days that something like this was coming down the pike, and you probably have to, and many other people have, and, you know, it’s taken some decades, but it seems like it’s getting fairly close. I don’t know if you have any sort of a sense of timeline. But I did. I did hear you interview, an environmentalist guy from Arizona, I forget his name. And, and he was saying that, you know, given the rate at which methane was releasing in the Arctic now, and in a sort of a vicious circle feedback loop. You know, we could be seeing dramatic changes in climate over the next decade that, you know, even the most dire forecasters were putting off 100 years.
Andrew Harvey: That’s it. This is real. And I cannot imagine that in the next 10 years, we won’t see a series of cataclysm that will bring us to our knees. And what happens then, depends on how we prepare now.
Rick Archer: Yeah, you know, I’ve always felt, though, when I, when I contemplate this sort of thing, that nature abhors an imbalance and the positive thing, some some positive things are rising up to kind of meet the challenge. Do you agree with that?
Andrew Harvey: Absolutely. There is a birth taking place in and through this death right now on the planet, this conversation as part of it, there is a birth I believe that by holding a new kind of humanity, of humanity that is consciously divine, and dedicating its sacred powers to restoring balance and harmony and justice for all beings on the earth. I believe that there’s a mass movement of people being awakened by this chaos, that is slowly coming together. But I see that mass movements in the fragmentary stages, I see the urgency of the situation. And my job is to say to people, don’t let any kind of complacency about this mass movement, not wake you up to how much faster it now has to go, how much more coherent, it has to be, how much better organized it has to be, and how much more embedded in universal sacred principles, it has to be, to have a hope in heaven of reversing the immense tsunamis of dark destructive power, this announced threatening the whole of humanity in the future. Yeah, turning to waste. And we can’t be complacent about the people coming up and evolving. We’ve got to see the time is running out. And we’ve got to press our evolution with great intensity, focus, and express a passion for justice in real action all over the planet, to prevent the forces that are clearly hell bent on driving us over the precipice of extinction. From having that pleasure. That’s not going to happen without a mass movement of beings with the bed with love and wisdom into real action in a non violent, sacred activist revolution. That’s not going to happen as that happens.
Rick Archer: Yeah, just carry on with this point a little bit more. And, for instance, in the past year, there was a since 1990, there’s been a 35% decline in violent crime. There has been, you know, certain diseases that have been cured, are eliminated to a great extent. Now, nourishment in the world has dropped from 19% to 11%. Since 1996 point 7 million fewer kids under the age of five are dying each year compared to 99. So there are things like that that are happening. You know, the world is better educated, better fed, healthier, freer, more tolerant in many ways. But as you say, that is not to diminish the
Andrew Harvey: well you could also argue that Syria is an obscene cancer in the middle of the world. These people are dying and
Rick Archer: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s what I’m saying. It almost seems like a polarities are becoming more extreme.
Andrew Harvey: Yes, that’s absolutely right. But we can’t count on the polarity of the light. Just emerging. The time is converging so intensely that another level of authenticity and seriousness and focus and organization and training is I believe, absolutely necessary. because we’ve been very narcissistic, about our spiritual practices in the movement that we both come from very self absorbed about our goals. They’re cut off in many ways you can see it’s all over the page, from the deep agony of what the world and the animals in the environment and the fishes, and most people are actually going through. And it’s time to get over that karma, narcissistic surrender to the Divine to do everything, because everything’s in divine order. This is madness, when we’re actually in a vast evolutionary crisis in which the whole human enterprise could go up in flames within the next decade, if a major push down from the deepest levels of sacred consciousness isn’t put into practice soon.
Rick Archer: This is good. We’re getting into the whole sacred activism thing now. And it’s a certain point later on, I’m going to drag you back to your, your history, but let’s just pursue this the way it’s going. So you just alluded to those of us who’ve been on the spiritual path for a long time, decades, maybe. And there, there’s definitely been a narcissistic, indulgent quality to it for many of us. Just, you know, sitting on it sitting on our butts and enjoying bliss. And I’m sorry, what are you saying? No, I’m sorry. You said,
Andrew Harvey: I shared that I Oh, yeah. Not something I feel exempt from analyzing something I know to be true. But all of that,
Rick Archer: right. And many people in the spiritual realm, myself included, have felt that all I really have to do is, you know, this spiritual practice. And then by virtue of my very existence, I’ll be radiating waves of positivity, which will change the world. And it’s up to other people to sort of work on all these superficial levels and try to change things. So I don’t think you would concur with that attitude.
Andrew Harvey: Well, I understand that because I’ve said, I understand the temptation to that, the seduction to that. But that is, of course, outrageous inflated vanities. And once you unmask that shadow in yourself, you really really with Shane’s, you could have thought that a few experiences over many years and some kind of decent practice gives you the right to think that you’re more special than other people instead of actually taking the place and the looming Lebanon concerned about is how you can help other
Rick Archer: well, you know, you read stories in Yogananda, and masters of the Far East and all that stuff about these Yogi’s in the Himalayas, by by virtue of whom the world is not blowing itself up just because they have this kind of influence. And so people sort of they think of themselves in that light.
Andrew Harvey: Day, they’ve gone through the whole death rebirth process, where people who think like that, like the Eau de, are just the beginnings of the beginnings of the beginnings of that process, thinking like, we all do, because we’re entitled, inflated beings created by a narcissistic culture, that we’ll get it so fast, we will come in late and so fast, we’ll get the runway as if that was it doesn’t depend upon anything, but the rigor of our intention and the depth of our passion and the fortitude that we need to actually goes through the path and the real knowledge about the authentic path and not the illusory. This this the price of authentic awakening, and very few people in our movement, have been prepared to take that real journey or pay that bill price, because it’s not glamorous, it’s humiliating, and it destroys any potential that you might ever have been a guru or an omniscient being. Because God flattens you, the closer you get to God, so that you can never play any of those lucrative power games.
Rick Archer: Now, we’ve sort of touched on, we’ve touched on the idea of spiritual people thinking they can just be have the desire to influence by virtue of their spirituality. But on the flip side, there, we’ve all seen instances of activists who are who don’t have the spiritual component who are just acting out of anger and self righteousness and, and, you know, even shooting people or killing people sometimes. So I think you and I would both agree there needs to be an integration of the spiritual with the active and so so how do how would you approach both people, the spiritual people who don’t think they need to do anything and the activists who think that spirituality is a lot of woowoo?
Andrew Harvey: Well, I try and say to them, the evidence of the great systems of understanding the nature of the universe to great mystical systems is that there is one reality and that it dances in opposites on every level that is well being reality. So it’s a marriage prophecies, and that a human being can never realize their fullest potential, unless they marry at great depths, their will, and their being the HA knowledge of the nature of reality. And to be a complete human being, you need to be able to marry the power of your mission with the depth of your heart and the depth of your way of being. And that I find is actually an exciting way for people to start thinking about it. Because from that you can turn to mistakes and say, Your Gnosticism is your obsession with the transcendent aspect of God is the only reality the light is the final reality and all the creations of the light are an illusion. That’s not true. All the creations of the light are crystallized light, and so therefore, completely sacred. And the fact that they are frail and vanishing does not make them any less holy, it makes them more holy. So what you and I are here to incarnate is the fullness of the Divine that is both being and becoming, please, and action. That is the key to authentic realisation, cooking what you’ve come to in the depths of meditation in the depths of your house Rapture. Putting that sacred burning wisdom into action record of your life completes your Realization and makes you a secret agent of the transforming evolution, the will of God. And to the activist, I would say, I completely, absolutely love and honor what you are doing turned up from the depths of your conscience and you’re risking your lives and you’re giving your energies at a time when so many people are in such a coma of denial, or so apathetic. But what I noticed because I spend a lot of time with you. So often, you’re very close to paralysis and despair, burnout. And I understand why because you’re facing intolerable madness and pain and chaos, with very few resources, and a world largely in the stupor of denial about the situation that you’re trying to help. But you must understand when I say this to you are someone who is both a mystic and an activist, that the only way that I can continue to do the work I do, which is travel, wherever I’m asked to stand up for the truth of this vision of sacred activism, and help and encourage whoever else is trying to do work in an exciting way to ground this person. I can only do that when because I do practices around the essential being, because it’s so damn hard to do any real work in this completely insane. Some of my practices, the practices, I found the most effective and the practices that are the sacred act. And the prayer that you’ve discovered what I discovered, just continue to set up with joy, if I ground myself, and my essential self concept, thought and offend sources peace, energy, that I mean that something they get, they really know that they need another level of energy. And what I’m trying to open up to them is that this level of energy is waiting for them inside themselves to be unleashed by simple practices done in faith integration, which will work towards towards those who should work towards their
Rick Archer: great, we’ll talk about those practices a little bit later. To the first group of people that you mentioned, I I always like to point out that if we actually think about even what science has told us about what we’re looking at here, what the world is, we can’t help but marvel I mean, you know, consider your consider your fingernail and what’s going on just in that in terms of the the intelligence that is governing every atom, every molecule, every cell, you know, and then just kind of realized that wherever you look, however far you extend it, you’re not going to find a place in which there isn’t an amazing miraculous phenomenon taking place displaying immense infinite intelligence. So your point about you know, the world not being an illusion, and actually being a state stationed at the station of god of the Divine science and science helps us see that.
Andrew Harvey: Yes. We’re one of the reasons I actually admire Dawkins, I don’t believe a word of Dawkins atheism, obviously. But he’s a wonderful writer. And when he writes about the wonderful sciences, he actually writes like a mystic, and I’m going to summon up my courage to write a cheeky letter about it, but it’s very moving, because science can reveal and is revealing And so much of what the mystics have been talking about forever the the secret relationship between the observer and the observed that everything is in a darkness of consciousness. Even scientists are now beginning to begin to think about consciousness because so many very strange phenomena inexplicable without a governing field, which can only be consciousness, still pretending that they don’t want to deal with that, but they will have to, and it will reveal many secret words an amazing moment.
Rick Archer: So let’s say a spiritual person, quote, unquote, just hears this and says, yes, you’re right, I should get off my butt and try to do something it would almost seem like anything one tries to do is is so minuscule compared to the immensity of the problems, for instance, you’d like to help the white lions in Africa. And that’s a wonderful, laudable thing to do. But you know, what percentage of the world’s problems are represented by the problem of the white lions in Africa? It’s like a grain of sand on a vast beach. So do you ever? How do you address that that doubt,
Andrew Harvey: I don’t doubt the doing anything in love is going to be powerful. I know that the mystic power of one person handing a sandwich to a homeless person in true love is a power that in the end defeats evil in the world, I know that. So I do what I can with my resources as a way of modeling to others, what they could do with similar kinds of resources, then you could start campaigns to be people they could start to do houses in Kashmir after the floods, they could work with the cause that they know is very sacred, and notices very sacred to them, like the white bands are to me, and give that energy to those not expecting to change the world immediately. But modeling dignity in extreme situations, modeling, turning up and doing what you can with what you have for what you believe in. And if more people did that, this situation would be changed quickly. So we’re not called any of us to save the world. Personally, this isn’t a Hollywood film in which you just turn up and suddenly because you’re in everything, genuinely, dictators yield, that power. The Corporation’s decide to withdraw all of their sociopathic tactics and give everything to the poor. No, no, no, this is a very difficult very long struggle that you’re going to be invited into. And you need to get real about what it requires the kind of in
Rick Archer: do you feel that
Andrew Harvey: Am I reaching you? Am I saying things that mean something to does that mean? That like, Am I speaking the truth etudes?
Rick Archer: Oh, yes, it is. And you’re absorbing it as best I can. And also trying to think of the perspective of people who are listening and what they might be asking. And of course, there are how many now 33 People listening and those listening now are welcome to send in questions through the forum on the upcoming interviews page. But meanwhile, I’ll keep asking them. So you know, the word save, I’m sure selfless service, it’s usually translated as, and a lot of spiritual people do like to do save as they like to, you know, serve in some way,
Andrew Harvey: rather than say that this is radical, social, political, economic work done in what I call networks of grace, because if you read my book, the hook, it ends with a chapter about how you can actually organize yourself to be part of a network, it can have much more power than individuals that join it can truly come together to sustain each other, pray with each other, give each other joy. And this is the only way we can organize a worldwide movement that cannot be destroyed, because it’s linked as far as we have the internet for as long as we have the internet. So these networks of grace, that are appearing all kinds of different ways, and what they really are asking people to do is to create groups of between five and 15. People who meet together and pray together and love each other and create sacred friendships, and then choose to work for causes they feel very passionate about in their local communities, pooling all of their resources. Amazing things can be done like that. And when people come together like that, they find a source of meaning and a source of joy and a source of support, which God knows they’re going to need If they’re going to try and do something, we’re not gonna do it alone, we’re not going to do everything, we’re going to turn up and make groups and record to actually take responsibility for the mission that I believe is seated in each of us. And that responsibility has something very much I found to do with how you answer the question. What breaks my heart the most in reality? And I found that when I talked to people who said, What should I do, I say to them, get up at three o’clock in the morning, go through a practice of grounding yourself in peace and serenity in the joy of God, and then look around at the world and all of its madness and chaos and agony. And dare to ask yourself one question, what about the craziness, the dynamic stay actually breaks? My heart knows, because if you really answer that question, with the fullness of your mind, the fullness of your heart, and the pain and love of your whole being in your body, you will find the mission that you will find energy to go on survey because that heartbreak that you allow yourself to experience, that moment will open you to a fountain of passion that lives inside you. And that’s the great gift of heartbreak that deep is that it makes you really see that unless you do something to improve, so much heartbreak, you are truly not yet mastered. What you know, is happening. For me that heartbreak can actually face the range of animal abuse, which is why I honor the white lions and try and help people get to the revelation that they enshrine the majesty of sacredness is blazing with nature, you can see it most clearly. The ancient tradition talks about the end of the world potentially coming when they are no longer on the earth because they carry this immense power of Revelation. This is something that’s been known for 1000s of years. But the whole point is to really feel the depth of what we’re suffering, to turn up in groups to get over The Heirophant fantasy of taking down a single hand to turn up to address the one thing that makes your heart the most broken, and to do it with urgency and sincerity. And imagine millions of people turned up they would all be doing into gangs of radical service, which would really mean that there was a many, many unarmed Buddha of compassion, Christ, passionately working into Linky in the world, which is, I’m convinced the only way that we can go forward.
Rick Archer: Why three o’clock in the morning,
Andrew Harvey: because that’s a time when the madness of the day, and it’s boiling quiet. And it’s also a time the mystics of all the traditions now this this is the time in veils between your human self and your Divine Self. And in the silence of that hour, you can make enormous spiritual progress in prayer. But you can also make enormous psychological progress. If you wake up at that hour and really ask yourself the testing questions. Could you be clear enough peaceful enough? To stand the answer?
Rick Archer: I have actually found myself over the last couple of years that I wake up around that time and I can’t go back to sleep then if I want to, I have to get up and go meditate in the other room. And then after I’ve done that for quite a while, I will go back to sleep a little bit more, because I couldn’t quite go through my whole day having gotten up at three in the morning. But it’s
Andrew Harvey: that time. I love that.
Rick Archer: Oh, totally. It’s the most silent time of the day, you know,
Andrew Harvey: and the mind naturally falls into the lake of silence.
Rick Archer: Yeah. These networks of grace I think you called them is that’s, I think, a term you’re using for the thing you’re trying to organize? Or would you also extend that out generically to, you know, all kinds of people who are collaborating with one another in various ways?
Andrew Harvey: Yes, that’s just my word for it. And I’ve got a particular form that people do love that particular perform. But there are other ways that this is happening. I think the paradigm of the new humanity is the paradigm of deep cooperation and collaboration. No one has the complete answer. The gurus obviously doubt the religions of this kingdom. There’s no such thing as omniscience there is such thing as awakening. But awakening makes you understand, you know, nothing. That’s what awakening is that you that you’re prepared to learn. And you’ll be given the information that you need to grace so you stay humble and stay alert and listen and grow and that is a feminine vision of how awakening needs now to to propagate. It has to be I believe in this very sacred group of sacred Families that encouraged each other’s awakening and support, putting that awakening into action. So you have cells that have both personal and spiritual support, real fantasies, friendship, and cells that plan. Naughty mischief is the peaceful, radical action. This is the way I think that we can go forward, bringing her mind body and soul the transcendent in a deep breath and political practice, practice, practice together.
Rick Archer: I once heard it said, who coined this phrase, but if you want to get something done, give it to a busy man. And so the reason I say that is, you know, what would you say to people who say, you know, I’m already stretched pretty thin, I’ve got my job, I got my kids, I’m so busy. I can’t really take on any projects. But I assure I care about the world, but boy, somebody else is gonna have to do it. Because I’m I’m just really maxed out.
Andrew Harvey: What I’d say to him or her, I said, God, I understand. I get it, it’s terrifying how much you have to do just to put food on your on your table, and nobody’s going to help you got to do the whole damn thing yourself. By getting the couch. It’s a complete nightmare, and you’re exhausted. And you’re also scared. Because if you’re taking anything that I’m saying, seriously, there will be no word for word children have so much meaning they are working so hard for if you don’t model to them a way to stand up that can have dignity, but also focus and also be effective in trying to prevent the policies that now destroying the environment, creating and fostering race, creating horrific poverty and lack of job opportunity, this has got to be addressed, you can’t hide your head, in the sand, you must. So I have a proposal for you, that you really get up earlier and just pray and meditate to God in any way that you choose any God any way that you choose, but just connect and ask for the energy not just to spend your energy on what you have to do with the energy also, to start working with other like minded like hearted parents must be very alarmed for the future. So working together to do something to try and prevent the kidney machine from creating a vast desert of blood and misery.
Rick Archer: You know, I might add to what you just said that, you know, based on what you were saying half an hour ago about the the sort of very trying times that are on the horizon for us all that putting yourself in the stream of higher consciousness and so on, I would say is the best way to make sure to enable you to ride through those times, you know, relatively unscathed, you won’t.
Andrew Harvey: Don’t don’t set it like that. Because we don’t we’re not on Oprah. We don’t have to tell people that transcendental consciousness is all bliss and peace because it isn’t. If you’re in what authentic oneness, you’ll also be in authentic oneness with the pain and the heartbreak of the world that should be able to stand it because you’re held in peace. So the most important thing is, as you say, and you said it so beautifully. I’m being cheeky. You said it so beautifully. When you said there is no other way to ride the waves, this group won’t be unscathed, because what’s coming down is going to skate everyone. It’s going to be terrifying to see the last of the lines in 15 years, if you don’t stop whatever they’re doing, everything they’re doing as far as they’re concerned, it’s good to be terrified to see the millions on the streets because the refugee problem is going to get worse, etc. I don’t have to go on. And we’re going to have to know how to be strong enough to be able to stand the level of repeated and repeated and repeated heartbreak, which will also be necessary to keep us dignified and human and able to respond. And that means we will have to really go for enlightened consciousness because it’s the only one that’s strong enough adamantine, clear enough self clear enough to remain calm, sane, focused, passionate, compassionate, in every single eventualities. How ever dreadful. Yeah, what’s it’s about to me?
Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, you said earlier on that. If all hell starts breaking loose even more than it already is, and people haven’t had don’t have a clue as to what’s happening. They’ll just they’ll just think oh my god. The whole the world is just going totally crazy and I with it. But if you have a kind of a broader perspective that actually something really profound is happening. It’s it’s kind of like you I’ve heard you and others like Elizabeth Taurus use the example of the caterpillar, you know who finds himself turning to mush. And thanks, oh my god, I’m turning to mush. But it’s a necessary metamorphosis that’s taking place. And it’s just you have to go through the bush stage to get to the butterfly stage.
Andrew Harvey: Well, you could put it in another way, which is really where I am at now, you could say, looking around at the world as it is with all these madmen in charge and these completely insane consumerist, to corporations running everything. And the billionaires clearly dictating policy of every kind. What possible outcome of this madness is that except extinction, because they’re not paying attention to climate change. They’re not paying attention to the cries of really important environmentalists or ecologists and scientists who say that we have to change almost everything to have a hope in getting through the crisis. That completely insane with green.
Rick Archer: Some of them are paying attention to climate change. You’re saying, hey, great, the Arctic ice is melting more places for us to drill,
Andrew Harvey: right? Doom, capitalism is nearly blank. But this is really important that people see it that world ensures our extinction. So we have no option who have seen that or woken up to that, to try and do whatever we can to create an alternate reality together soon. Because seeing the devastation of that power, and what will result if it continues its unfolding. How what else can we do, what else could would be a dignified response? What else would be human, but try and surely find out what it is you’re here on the earth to help, and then to get strong enough to choose to do something real, so that you can model to your fellow human beings, how to turn up in joy in extreme circumstances as your last good, potentially, to
Rick Archer: this next question has a sort of a David and Goliath theme to it. But you know, some people might think, you know, all these spiritual people that are talking about, you know, the being able to change the world through sacred sacred activism and all, they are just this tiny little handful, then they’re these huge multibillion dollar corporations and these huge military, industrial, you know, powers and so on. And are we joking, again, oh, how can we work in such small numbers? And was so? So, so few resources, hope to have any kind of significant impact on these huge, you know, powerful, powerful things? So what would you say to that one?
Andrew Harvey: Well, the impact is not going to be on the powerful corporations, the impact is going to be on ourselves and on the people who are influenced by us. The truth is that the corporations are going to create a situation in which they are smashed to smithereens, the whole economy is smashed, the world is going to fall apart. So what people who are inspired by the vision that I’m giving them are not working, because they think they’re going to change the corporate system. They’re working, because they know the whole system is coming down. And there has to be viable, beginning cells, beginning alternatives, when everything becomes insane, to show people that there are alternatives, ways of being and doing everything that are beginning to grow, we’re not going to have an alternative system in place while this system collapses, the most we can hope for now, is that there are many, many groups of devoted people turning up to try new kinds of solutions so that when things collapse, they’ll be vibrant, they’ll be alive, they’ll be inspiring to be groups of people will be attracted to them. That’s how the human race is going to continue. It’s going to continue.
Rick Archer: Do you think that as things do collapse, as the sort of the pace of this transformation, quickens that people who are I don’t know what term to use, but who are sort of spiritually oriented sacred activists or whatever, we’ll find that there is, just as the sort of the collapse accelerates, they’ll find an acceleration of the kind of sustenance from within kind of an upwelling of greater and greater energy and grace and whatever.
Andrew Harvey: I think they would if they do the work, I don’t think that just feeling to church is something you can just buy in a weekend in California. To prepare, you’re being fooled. There is a great evolutionary impulse coming from the center, I believe in source. And that evolutionary impulse is saying Either you transform or you die out, here’s the transformation. It has to be putting love and wisdom into action on every level for all sentient beings, the transformation of the institutions and arts and sciences and ways of being and doing everything very fast, either that transformation, or it’s curtains for you. So go for it, I will support you, if you choose the transformation that is the one that is in our evolutionary next stage. And that is the transformation of birthing the divine in human and enacting that birth, in radical acts of justice and compassion that truly alter the balance of power in the abusive systems and follow completely so that we can begin again in a new way. What else can we do? What else could possibly work with this?
Rick Archer: So would you agree with this way of putting it that those who choose to engage in some sort of sacred activism to apply whatever wisdom and spiritual awakening they have gained in some compassionate or humanitarian or practical way, we’ll be given more. In other words, if you just sit on it, it sort of stagnates. But if you throw it out there and do what you can with it, then then you’re supplied with you know, yeah, if the gods say Okay, boys, we got to live on here. Let’s give them more juice.
Andrew Harvey: Yes, exactly. It’s the wind in Ruby says that it’s the wind that is held up to the real warrior in the reign of bliss. It’s the whiner meaning it’s the whiner. Truly knowing that, with all of your flaws, and faults and Follies, you’re turning up, you’re giving your all that actually is what makes somebody the most happy people are made happy by celebrity or fame or they’re not, they’re made happy by turning up in the fullness of themselves and going on a great adventure. And it doesn’t matter whether you make it or fail. What matters is that you turned up with the fullness of yourself, because that’s the way you taste the excitement of life, the thrill of life, the glory of life, and then die, maybe an abject failure in a ditch but with a smile on your face. Because you know, you took all the dice or everything that you’ve been given, and you flung them with both hands on the board of life and you play your hand fold the one you love the most the divine beloved one amazing joy.
Rick Archer: And I think that by doing that, you definitely diminish your chances of ending up dying in the ditch.
Andrew Harvey: You don’t know
Rick Archer: You don’t know. But
Andrew Harvey: somebody I know died on the cross, which would be worse.
Rick Archer: It’s worse in the ditch.
Andrew Harvey: It was pretty up there as far as enlightenment, you have no idea where the game is going to take you. And what you look at the Hasidic Rabbi’s, there’s wonderful wonderful men who danced to the ovens they didn’t know when they were studying the Torah with their last act, would be dancing and singing as they go to the ovens to encourage all those to dance and sing with them so that they could understand that there was something that the Nazis couldn’t take from them ever, the deathless truth of the soul? How would they know that their lives would have to come in a in that kind of witness, but they seize that moment. And they carve that moment in the heart of the ones who witnessed that and who were baptized in a truth beyond the world through that amazing experience?
Rick Archer: Yeah, there’s a beautiful story in your book, about the woman in South Africa whose husband and son had been tortured and burned alive by some guy, and then and then she’s in the, in the courtroom and you want to tell that story a little bit that kind of plays
Andrew Harvey: Killer of a story a way against everything that I’m trying to say, because as you know, Desmond Tutu, Mandela brought in the reconciliation stuff, and that men confronting the victims with the tortures and in this case, this amazing old black woman, with the man, literally the doctor barbaric, who had personally tortured her husband. The judge turned
Rick Archer: and she witnessed it, didn’t she?
Andrew Harvey: She didn’t witness it, but she knew that it had happened. And I think in the case of her husband, she did witness it.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Andrew Harvey: So there she is asked by the judge, what would you like to say to this man who has cost you so much suffering? And the first thing she says to him is, Doctor, I would like it if you told me when you tortured my son because nothing remains to me. And I would like some dust from the place where he was tortured to death. That was the first thing And then she says Dr. Vivonne I am an old woman and I have lost my child and my husband. But I have a great deal of love in me left to give. And I would like to give it to you. And I would like you to visit me as my son twice a month in my shanty so I can give you this. And she started to walk towards him supported by other black women. And as she walked towards him, he fainted, because she wanted to hug him wanted to hug. And he fainted in the whole courtroom saying, it said America Amazing Grace, because the force of that unconditional forgiveness, that mercy that she took from him and then the unbelievable. Christ like offered, just give him who needed it so desperately. Because otherwise why would he have done these terrible, terrible things to give into that force that was on display or just struck in the beginning and the Like buttons. That’s the first video. If we connect with this, five, to nine passionate truth that lives in us as our essential truth. That’s what is our true nature. It’s the good nature and the nature of nature, the flame of the heart and the peace of the mind coming together in a mighty presence of true love.
Rick Archer: That’s a beautiful story.
Andrew Harvey: But it happened I think.
Rick Archer: Yeah,
Andrew Harvey: in life, it can happen. If you are in that state of blood when you act from it. This takes beyond anything that you could ever imagine will be affected because it’s not you acting it’s love acting in us through you. And when love itself acts like that it has a huge force of blessing and transformation. This isn’t bocce. We’ve seen it in history we’ve seen Gandhi could shift the whole situation in India, we’ve seen how Martin Luther King could create a moral framework which prevented a civil war breakup when the whole question of civil rights erupted as it had to we’ve seen amazing beings like the Dalai Lama model Rigpa and unconditional compassion. So we know that things can shift it, if someone’s brave enough to turn up in that level headed the total commitment to the balance of great peace, great passionate conviction.
Rick Archer: And we know from the examples you just cited, that one individual if that individual is sufficiently on fire with with love, can can be a catalyst for huge social change. So that kind of addresses the point I brought up earlier like you know, what can I do? I’m just one little guy. And you can imagine and then as you said, if we can assemble in groups and start you know, having this kind of influence as a larger network and then why not change the world?
Andrew Harvey: I know why not. Put your passion into practice Why not face your heartbreak realize the world is potentially ending get real about your responsibilities to love and get rid of to about how you can’t possibly be happy in the world of God reacting unless you’re truly doing something how else could you be happy because all that you will ever think about yourself is that I did very little when the world was burning, and my life the lives of my children and grandchildren were at stake How can you live with yourself as you have to live with yourself as you crossover with the stores take the great gift of the situation like as its extremity. Make champagne of lemons and throw your life away in a sane way to do as much as you can before the fat lady sings or thinks the torch to the whole of reality and
Rick Archer: the hugging saying Oh it says I’d rather wear out this body than rust you know?
Andrew Harvey: Yeah. Absolutely. My actual experiences honestly been the more you give the more energy you have. The more you up, the more you can affect change. The more you actually given to do, the more you can do, because you’re learning through the spirits on wisdom on how to balance action with contemplation and peace and retreat, and you’re learning a new dance rhythm, which makes you very powerful and very peaceful and feeds you doesn’t deplete you. This is why it’s sacred activism, we cannot have an activism that just exhausts and burns people out, it has to be fueled by the sacred sources, so it can be sustained during this great evolutionary nightmare. And we’re going through
Rick Archer: let’s talk about how to sustain it. Let’s talk about practices a bit. I know you have a whole thing about hot practices and cold practices and all that. And to segue into that, I want to just pose a couple of questions that came in from the live viewers. The first one doesn’t have too much to do with what we’ve been talking about. But there’s a second one which gets into kind of like ways of developing a more enlightened consciousness. And then that can lead into your your whole thing about the different types of practices you advocate. But the first one is, what is his position on cause and effect in relation to reincarnation and experiencing suffering in a given life because you were the perpetrator in another incarnation? So like, we were talking about the Nazis, for instance. And so if if you inflict harm on others in another life, do you believe that you somehow reap the that karma in this one or another one,
Andrew Harvey: I think you cannot be that meat and mathematical about karma, which is such an unknowable mystery. And I think when people explain karma in that way, what they’re often doing is sanctioning their lack of conscience about the pain that people are experiencing the injustice. Vivekananda was once presented by a group of factories who said, Well, I don’t know why you’re getting so upset about this famine. It’s that common to stop. And Vivekananda said, maybe it’s your comment, feel their pain and feed that. So whatever the nature of karma, and nobody actually knows how karma works, your responsibility, same pain, seeing injustice, is to turn off the karmic challenge that you’ve been given by seeing it and actually do something. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Good point. Okay, and that will segue a little bit more into practices. But question came in from Justin. He said, what are his thoughts on psychedelics? And can they be implemented spiritually?
Andrew Harvey: I think anything can have a deep spiritual effect if you’re in spiritual consciousness. And I certainly know that psychedelics can open a door to essential reality. But you cannot rely on them to keep that door open or to take you dominantly into the room that that door is showing you the way into, because in order to keep that door open, and to live in that room of 100, unity with experience, you’re going to have to do what everybody has to do, which is to get down on their knees and do serious daily practice, and go through the torments of the ordeals the dark night, and be born by Grace itself through a natural and very demanding process of transformation into your Divine Self. So wonderful to use psychedelics as a way to open the door. But watch out because the shadow of something so delightful is at the pinnacle addictive. And you can find yourself pushing that door open again and again, instead of doing the serious work of keeping that door and going across, it’s their shows to live in the room of your essential issues.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I interviewed Stanislav Grof, a few months ago, and he’s done plenty of serious work in addition to having done a lot of psychedelics, but I got the sense, you know, at the age of 84, he had this sort of subtle lament that he had glimpsed marvelous things which he hadn’t been able to make permanent or stabilize.
Andrew Harvey: You can’t make anything permanent or stabilize it without the most vigorous in a mystical discipline, it is simply impossible. Because level of concentration on essential reality that you need in your mind, in your heart, to stay in enlightened consciousness is simply not possible except through years of intense, tender, focused training.
Rick Archer: So what would that training entail? I know you advocate various types of practices that people you recommend for people?
Andrew Harvey: Well, I think let’s keep it simple because if people want to read the book, they’ll see my screen, but I would really like just to say, there are three essential forms Practice for every human being. If you can find one in any category that truly helps you experience the essence of these practices, and really using them to go into your life, you will find your whole experience deeply measurably. The first is that no one can get anywhere near that essential self or their identity, the divine identity, except through meditation, you’re going to have to go through a discipline that enables you overtime to steal your mind. So you can experience the spacious, alert, calm white consciousness than divine light consciousness is actually manifesting your mind. Otherwise, you’ll be condemned to being trapped in your mind thinking that’s your whole identity. The second kind of practice that is absolutely essential is heart practice, to practice devotion. So that your heart and stop being a narcissistic, self absorbed, terrified of suffering, and allow itself to fall in love with the splendor and the magnificence and the glory and the madness and the beauty and the wild, wild passion of the Divine Beloved. And so that through that allowing yourself to fall passionately in love, you can experience the vastness of the Divine heart that you actually have within you. And so, instead of being terrified of facing the world’s pain, instead of being terrified, risking yourself and reelection, instead of being terrified, and paralyzed by what you have to face in the world, you can actually be strong enough to do what you have to do, and not be defeated because your heart has been grown by devotion to become capable of loving through everything. And the third kind of practice is so important for this time, because one of the great strengths of the New Age movement and if you can move embracing the New Age movement very often, but one of the strengths of the New Age Movement is that it really called for a celebration of the body and said Enough with the body hatred enough for the dualism about the body and many wonderful and some crackpot modalities were invented. So everybody was trying to stay strong enough to serve in a time that this needs a passionate and energizing sacred body practice. And that’s why we’ll talk yogo when I joined with the dakini, wonderful uranium dakini when Erickson and we married the great life practices with conventional yoga asanas, and sequences so that people could actually experienced yoga as a transforming transfiguring force. And I’m working on a book with a great sacred dancer. But I should say odd now, to bring the dance community to this realization because I discovered like many mystics have discovered that when you do a physical discipline, that mystical intensity, the soul and the body come closer and closer together and you realize the unity at a much deeper level. And that gives you a great deal of passion and a great deal of energy and the power to do. So, choose the mind stilling practice that really works for you choose the devotional health practice that really works for you find a sacred physical discipline like sacred dance or sacred yogo, or five star, the five rhythms what are called Reiki, find something that will enable you to experience your body as a sacred temple, bring them together in your life, and you will discover a whole new level of join me in power and presence and energy level energy you’ll be given direct access to a whole new level of energy which will change the quality of your life.
Rick Archer: Good point. Good points.
Andrew Harvey: Rich…
Rick Archer: Sorry, go ahead. You know, we’re finished,
Andrew Harvey: just said richly because the lights will come on the engagement of the heart will reality has happened but beloved will help you you will be given something much more tenderness and joy in the course of your life and the core of your life. So this is an amazing experience but you have to be willing to pay the price you have to be willing to do the work you have to be willing in the end diet tonight is gonna keep anything back it’s going to demand everything but once you get so much it’s beyond any words to describe. The body is even touched it like I don’t even touched it will tell you the same thing. That’s why Rumi is so ecstatic. That’s why the diamond Dama is smiling. That’s what Mother Teresa had this great joy that she was suffering so much. You must get to know that because you’re gonna need actually in the configuration that’s everywhere.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and you know, I’m prompted to I also add, I live in, touching upon your point about the body, I live in a community where, you know, 1000s of people meditate, and many have been spending hours a day for decades sitting in meditation. And a lot of these people, you know, their bodies are just falling apart, they have, they just have problems, they can’t. They’re having all kinds of health difficulties. And, you know, they were led to believe that meditation supposed to make you really healthy, but they neglected to exercise their bodies. I mean, it’s one of the most obvious things, but there’s a saying that sitting is the new smoking, you know, see, you have to actually get your heart pumping a little bit and, you know, be physically fit and healthy, to a reasonable extent
Andrew Harvey: and love being in your body. And also during the sexual element, transform sexuality, that’s what gets the bodies juices flowing. So they can be filled with the energy of love and action. That’s the key, the tantric Qi. And there is, I have evolved a three part practice, which is actually really helpful for people I find they say it is. And it’s so simple, you get up in the morning, you do 15 minutes of image with meditation, when you just watch your breath, and you allow your mind to do then you do 15 minutes of saying the name of the beloved by whatever name you love the beloved with devotion in your heart, just say the name, loving the mystery, without expectation, just with devotion. And then for the last 15 minutes, put on some dots, music that rocks your world. And I’ve got all kinds of suggestions. But whatever really speaks to you sometimes it could be Dropbox, dance music, it could be Beethoven’s dance music is great cosmic dances. Great masters, you know, the darkness is the central experience of duality. Why not Tina Turner, why not? Something that truly makes you connect with the ecstasy and pain of like, put it on and dance what you’ve experienced in the first two practices into your body and empower your body. For the day. People are doing these three, and they tell me I do. And they It’s an amazingly beautiful, energetic, simple workout for the whole being. And over time, it results in you turning up in a much more authentically passionate, and with sometimes a rather sweet but kickass attitude.
Rick Archer: It sounds like a great routine.
Andrew Harvey: Yeah. Yeah. So helpless in this situation. What’s so amazing is when you really do the practice is simple practice. Like once I’ve suggested you discover how powerful they are. Because grace will just put them in place without you. It’s time for us to turn up in this simplicity need waiting with the Great, that’s golden milk on our throat. Right.
Rick Archer: Now if I may, let’s move back to your personal life. Because I feel free to take me off into into other things if you wish. Most of it Yeah. And actually the first time I became aware of you I was a when I read a book about your time with mother Mira. And later on I read journey to Ladakh many years ago. But and recently preparing for this interview, I listened to some recordings. And I liked kind of where you ended up with your attitude toward mother Mara, you know, because you know, you’re with her. And then there was a rather difficult breakup, so to speak. But you can’t you seem to now primarily feel gratitude and appreciation for what you gained from that episode in your life, even though you’ve moved on to other things. And towards the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned you had a breakdown about the age of 35. And I think then you went with another marriage. So let’s go from there.
Andrew Harvey: Well, if I may, of course, at age 35, my world fell apart. And I’d already met at age 28. Okay. I think 18 And I’ve been amazed and very deeply moved by her because of purity and the quality and the power coming from and the fact that she talks in silence very much because I knew I needed to be taken out of my mind, which is two brilliant, turning in a million directions to deal with somebody who complete simplicity, radiating great power, silence that was huge. And I went back to be with her and had a very intensive awakening through my devotion. And that changed everything. Because at the end of about two years of deep meditation and presence in London, I have a vision of the whole universe vanishing into light and reappearing, soaked with light conditioning and really seeing essential reality in Everything has been created, essentially, including myself and everybody else. And then what happened was is that she wanted to separate from the man I was in love with. And she told me in the kingdom of the Mother, the sector’s which completely floored me. And I realized that she couldn’t possibly be the Divine Mother, however, awakened enlightened, she was in certain parts of herself. And I know, I knew I had to stand up and tell the truth of God. That being said, because so many people have come to the whole adventure because of the book I wrote. And at that moment, hell broke loose, because she chose to lie about me never having said that, and then I was attacked in the death threats. And you can read about the whole soldier ghost saga in the book I will call some midnight. But what I’ve come to is that when you think about somebody who’s had a massive effect on your life, both good and bad, you have to marry justice and mercy. To be awake in that situation. So after many years of prayer, I came to a position where I could say, I was so grateful for the years that I had when I was in a state of being evolved to the moment that I could see the Divine Knight manifesting everything. I’m so grateful for that projection, because it enabled me to do some very serious work. I’m not grateful for the craziness, the injustice, the lying, the madness that then visited three horrific is from the NICU because me and my husband, I’m not grateful for that, because that would be to condone the abuse. However, I am grateful from a mystical point of view for the horror, that that experience because it sprung me free of the addiction of the group 16, it baptized me directly. It’s my direct connection with the Divine. It got me radical about the nature of power in all of the existing world systems and how lethal and dangerous and full of corruption. They are, it woke me up, got me going, and really enabled me to do the work that I’ve done since. So when you turn the situation and all of those different angles, you get a very rich statement, which I hope that was, I forgive her, I know exactly what she did. It was unconscionable what she did, I can give her I’m grateful for the time I spent with her. But I’m also very aware of that level of abuse of power that she’s enacting. And the fact that it’s epidemic in spiritual circles, it’s not only among Americans doing it. It’s a whole slew of news and many celebrity teachers doing that, and worse, and it’s time that we had a real discussion about the levels of abuse of power, including abusive account power, which I experienced.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I just had to take down a couple interviews recently, that I had done because the the people that I had interviewed were sort of going off in directions, or I was discovering things that they had been doing and are doing that just didn’t feel like I wanted to be a part of promoting. But you know, one thing I would say about Mother Mira and many other gurus is that, however enlightened they may be to what in whatever way to whatever extent, they, they still seem to have to be a product of their cultures to a great extent, and to their their upbringings. And they don’t totally break free of that.
Andrew Harvey: That’s true, that’s very important. But I think that what really needs to be understood about gurus is something actually more scary. And that is this. When you go through the big awakening process, towards the middle, or towards the middle to the end of the process, you’re given great powers, you can see reality. And you can influence people and charisma grows, and maybe even you get the power of healing or the power of computing. I’m missing, all loving and all protective. If at that moment, you choose to exercise those powers for power. You actually sink closer than you ever were at the beginning. You can sign your soul to the fantasy the illusion that you might get very rich, you might write all kinds of bestseller books, you might have a following minions, but you will never ever realize the divine in nature because you cannot. Because until at that moment, when you’re given those powers. You make the choice to dedicate them all to that divine Come What May whatever happens to you in the course of that definitely because there are all kinds of examples of people who don’t end up well, who dedicated their whole lives to the divine right Jesus, like so many of the great heroes. If you really give yourself like that, then you will be rewarded by the revelation of your divine identity. But that revelation is not given cannot and will not be given for those who choose to exercise their powers, the power and not from. And that’s the great insight that the Spiritual World Needs. Because a lot of people who are revered as missing gurus or enlightened gurus, or great masters are actually people who are manipulating those powers for their own benefit. And that production.
Rick Archer: Can you think of any contemporary exceptions to that tendency?
Andrew Harvey: Oh, yes, absolutely. For me, the Dalai Lama is not, is in a category, all of a sudden, it’s quite obvious to me and I have had the honor of being with him many times, it’s quite obvious to me that he’s in the deepest and most grounded in human consciousness that he is truly loving, and that is absolutely doing this room of selfless passion, of compassion. And he’s shown through so many years when he’s been under such scrutiny. I would say that he models many things, including the ability to say he’s wrong. Maybe he changes his mind, oh, my God, when every he never plays into the notion that he’s the enlightened one. And he, everything he says is true. He says, I don’t know. I used to think this, but now I think that he’s in more flexibility before mystery. So I would definitely say,
Rick Archer: one thought that came to mind as you’re talking about your breakup with mother Mira is I know you’re a cat owner. And if you’ve ever seen a mother cat, when the kittens get to a certain age, she starts behaving really nasty towards them and hissing and hitting them and the kittens are like, whoa, what’s going on? You know, but they it drives them away. But it’s in the bigger picture. It’s done out of love. The kittens need to go out and become cats on their own, in their own right. So I don’t know whether mother Mira orchestrated that thing intentionally or whether she, whether it just sort of happens in the play of the Divine, but it seems like it was just what you needed in order to kind of move on.
Andrew Harvey: I very much judge you orchestrated intentionally. What I believe is that the real mother used her as a tin opener tool for me. And then again, when that was turning the context contents into teen septic right, that I needed to be released from an illusion that helped me see through the way in which brilliant people with powers can manipulate a whole rhetoric of Enlightenment during snappy but effective temporize. The solos, this happens in spiritual circles. This is the power of many gurus. Look at the scandals that have erupted over the last 3040 years what we’ve seen is gone on behind the sanctified holes. It’s unbelievable. When you add to that the scandal of the Catholic Church, surely we must now have a more adult discussion of what enlightened power truly consists of.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I want to ask you about father being Griffiths. But before we get in, maybe we should go right into him. But that’s
Andrew Harvey: a wonderful secretary because there is somebody do, who had immense mystical power. But he lived totally humbled totally, absolutely simple life radiating humidity. So to be his friends and to love Him as my husband didn’t to be taught by Him. And the way that I was taught by Him was not only a revelation, it was an instruction at the deepest level, how to continue on the path as humbly as that because if you didn’t model that you were off the knowledge you are betraying something that the sacred there was no the truth of divine now because he
Rick Archer: was he pre mother mirror or post mother mirror for you.
Andrew Harvey: He happened towards the end of mother. Okay, so I met the truth as the lie was ending.
Rick Archer: And since some people, many people may not have ever even heard of him, say a few things about him so as to introduce him to my audience, and maybe people would like to go out and get his books if he’s written books or whatever.
Andrew Harvey: Well, Father, Ben Griffiths is by anybody’s real. Imagining one of the two most important Christian mystics in the 20th century. First is John Smith, who the end of his life open to the east but died very soon afterwards. And the second is father being different. So in the middle of his life in his 50s, went to India and spent the next 35 years of his life truly integrating at the deepest level, his mystical Christianity with Hinduism and Buddhism, and created a whole series of Absolutely extraordinary books which he wrote with unbelievable elegance and simplicity, who, for example, the, to the center, the new vision of reality, the marriage of East and West. But even more important than the vision that he gave us was actually his own living, burning presents, because when I met him, at 85, he was going through a mystery, a mystery of Transfiguration, he was being transformed in heart, mind, soul, and body. And he knew this, and he knew that this was the central mystical secret of the Christian path and its source of great knowledge of the next stage of evolution. So he wasn’t just a brilliant mystic who could write he was somebody who was in the fantasy of great transformation, he could speak from that founders, with the simplest, most humble eloquence. So if you want to see him directly, go to the film, a human search, which you can find on the internet, go to the 45 minute session that he gave on the sacred feminine when he talks about this transformation the body and allow His presence in the beautiful simplicity of the words he says to penetrate just so you’d be amazed at what your upstream somebody really is filled with tender, brilliant risk for certainty. Someone who knows, that
Rick Archer: was called a human search, human search.
Andrew Harvey: The other one is a form of the sacred feminine. Yeah,
Rick Archer: I’ll try to find those and link to them from the page. This interview that we’re having Sacred Feminine beep Griffis? Okay, I’ll link to those people find out more about it. A couple of questions have come in. Here’s one from curry bow, he says, or she I’m not sure if it’s a man or woman? How can one? How can one have a fixed image of what sacred activism should look like? Shouldn’t one have a flexible view rather than a fixed mindset of how things should unfold?
Andrew Harvey: Oh, yes, I think what my job was to produce is clear a map of what and to look at the mystical systems teaching on how you act sacred themes, Jain, bring it together, because I believe the more information we have, and the more rigorous we apply the rigorously we apply that information, the deeper and richer the transformation is going to be. But if you read my book, you’ll see that there are many different kinds of sacred activism, I wouldn’t have opened up networks of grace and I have not believe that sacred activism will have a life of its own, it will be as creative. But it was very important to define certain things about sacred activism. Because otherwise you can go at such an important task without the right information, without the logos that come from studies and mystical traditions. And that can set you back from truly being able to incarnate and vibrant expresses in your own way.
Rick Archer: Good. Here’s another good, this is a good question. I’m not sure the name of the person who asked it. But here she says, Does grace only show up when you’re doing these intense practices only during sacred activism? Is there no room for grace to be present while enjoying mundane, everyday joys such as hiking and camping in nature? Spending time with one’s friends singing in the choir? Does every moment have to be about saving the world?
Andrew Harvey: No, no, no. I love what she says. No, I think Grace is actually what’s always appearing. And Grace is smiling at us and a flower grace is the laughter and the challenge with good Starbucks. And if you look at my book, you’ll see that really, one of the things I stress endlessly, and it’s just to myself and to my own activist friends is we have to do this work from joy. It’s got to be joyful, and how do we preserve joy in our lives by really constantly inspiring ourselves with exactly the kinds of things that you’re just describing the mundane, happy, simple things that give us but you will need to really take on a serious spiritual journey if you want to experience the higher transforming levels of grace because they are so astounding that they can’t really be revealed until you’ve shown yourself sincerely willing to receive them and able to receive them because some of the ways in which grace can appear at the higher levels of the pub can be overwhelmingly painful, overwhelmingly ecstatic and unrealistic, spirited crucible to hold that race. By practice, you won’t be reproduce. So, believe me, I’m not saying don’t enjoy life, enjoy life, but also really take the mystic seriously when they say there is another life within this life, which will give you access to a bliss that will make even all these beautiful joys seem small, and go for that. Because if you can go to that, and if it can become real to you, you’ll be able to not only love your life with a deeper love, and all the modalities and the manatees and ordinary flavors, you will also be able to do your whole life is a manifestation of that joint action, you realize the sacred purpose of your life, find your most amazing joy available.
Rick Archer: I appreciate your emphasis on the fact that, you know, there is the practice and some sort of spiritual discipline has an important role to play. Sometimes people accuse me of emphasizing that merely to justify the fact that I’ve been doing spiritual practice for almost 50 years. But I, you know, it’s like, and then there are people who say things like, all you have to do is realize that you’re already enlightened, and then you’re enlightened, you know, are the ordinary everyday perception is is what it is, you know, just accept that and stop searching. And I just feel like, they’re kinda like, missing the boat. So
Andrew Harvey: yes, they’re missing the reader, but then they’re not, unfortunately may not have had the really towering, crushing, gorgeous, terrible and amazing experiences. So what they think is the last step was actually the beginning of the intermediary journey, it’s not the last. We that’s one of the things that happens when there’s typically mystical traditions, I’ve been lucky enough to study several of them, especially in the Tibetan tradition, because Kuru, for Sophia, the benefit of living and dying, one of the things that’s incredibly moving about the Tibetan tradition is how precise it is about the dangers of thinking yourself enlightened and how many levels you have to travel through from their observation before you get anywhere near true for the wife. And we need those kinds of charities in those kinds of rigors. Because otherwise, people get trapped in very binary experiences, things that finished the path and never unfold the full potential of what they could be.
Rick Archer: I heartily agree. Do you think there is any such thing as full final awakening? Or do you think that there’s always the next horizon?
Andrew Harvey: I always think, no, I think that that is a patriarchal funding, I think there is definitely a moment of entry into the Enlightenment field, when you have access directly to divine consciousness into divine information. And in a sense that that moment, you do know everything, because you do know that everything is made up like that is to know the essence of reality. But what you also know is that you’re in the hands of a vast transforming revolutionary love, which will take you from deeper and deeper integrations of that knowledge into the core of your mind, and body. And that process is endless, can never end because the transformations of love. Infinite because love it.
Rick Archer: Are you speaking from your own experience here? Did you under did you sort of have a watershed moment like that at some point? And never said?
Andrew Harvey: Yes. Yes, yeah. Yes. Because you’ve come to know by the immensity of what you’re in love with it, you could never incarnate all of it continue to expand, it becomes larger, which may be your destiny, but it’s going to take you a few million incarnations, Goddess, God knows what.
Rick Archer: So then that would conflict with the notion that once Enlightenment is attained, there are no more incarnations?
Andrew Harvey: No, I think you are able to choose your incarnation at that moment. And you probably choose something that would enable you to evolve even more. I believe. The Dalai Lama, for example, 14 births ago had achieved a level of Enlightenment which is dignified most people. But something in his great, great heart must have chosen to the edge come back again and again and again to the world and develop final powers of unlimited compassion, because under extreme difficulty and suffering could help him move on because maybe he made
Rick Archer: so it sounds like you’re giving me a kind of a both end answer, which is good. I mean, you’re saying that yes, there is a final Enlightenment there is some superlative level of achievement or realization. But, paradoxically, there’s continuing refinement and deepening and all and so on, for all eternity, even after that,
Andrew Harvey: and even that may seem a very limited realisation later on when you have completely different Ways of absorbing and receiving. So, it’s an entry into the miracle. But the miracle continues to expand and explode in ways that you don’t know until it’s happened. That’s why the greatest mystics tell us and they all tell us this, from Lao Tzu to the Buddha, to Jesus to the great, Nicholas cruiser wrote a book called holy ignorance, they all say that the only form of divine knowledge that can stand the test of time is the knowledge that knows that you ultimately nothing. Because you’re known, has been purified in desire to over explaining the mystery. And the mystery itself has come to live in you and you’ve been so awed by the constant fusions and outflowing some miracle of grace and transformation. Finally, you’ve been silenced. Face it with absolute radical humility on your one. Wow. That’s the entry.
Rick Archer: That sounds like a good stopping point. I’m loving can do any better than that.
Andrew Harvey: I wish I was there all the time. But I do know it’s real. And I know that the less than I claim to understand about the divine, and the more I surrender to the mystery, the more joy I have, and the more effective my actions are. Because finally you can give up everything and let it lead you like?
Rick Archer: Well, you just, you just provoked another question. And he said, I wish I was there all the time. Do you feel that there is a stage of Enlightenment, which from which you can’t regress what you can’t lose?
Andrew Harvey: I do. And I think there have been very few people at that level that I truly believe someone like Ramana Maharshi was,
Rick Archer: right.
Andrew Harvey: All the people who stared at him in full public view for 40 years said, This man never wavered from a level of kindness, compassion, clarity, luminous power. Yeah. But that’s incredibly rare.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And he was living a life, which didn’t place a lot of relative demands upon him. You know, he wasn’t being
Andrew Harvey: he lived the life with the most terrible sacrifice. Can you imagine being in that state of awareness being up on a mountain where you have nobody to bother about? You’re one with the one coming down and being groped at all your life being a kind of miracle in a cage. They must that was agony. It is a sacrifice of pure love so that we can see what enlightening beautiful. Yeah.
Rick Archer: And he kept it real. I mean, he worked in the kitchen. They did, you know,
Andrew Harvey: completely ready to jump vegetables at four o’clock every morning. Yeah, he didn’t know anything. He never asked money for himself. He left to sandals. I mean, that’s it, if you want to see it, there it is. That’s what it looks like that level of mastery, majesty, simplicity, purity, holiness, and complete lack of an absolute purity of teaching. This mean, everything’s consistent in his teaching. And it’s very universal. And he left. And he’s still the first is still around.
Rick Archer: It’s true. He really created a wave that’s still rolling around the Earth.
Andrew Harvey: Absolutely. God, if you go to his ashram, there’s no doubt that is there. There’s no doubt that, you know, he was dying there. yogo magic. And one of them said, don’t leave us. And he wanted his last words, where would I go? Where would I go?
Rick Archer: Reminds me of something that sage taught. Well, Ababa once said, people asked him do you sleep and he said, What would happen to the universe if I slept?
Andrew Harvey: When you when you think of these kinds of beings, you have to feel pretty small about evolution so far. That’s why it’s so important to have these sacred standards in our world not to worship everything. But for example, to choose your mother to have the develop the inner senses that can actually make you so humble in the presence of such amazing presence and beauty that you always know what you still have to work on to be as completely transparent as what you’re seeing. And I met before, it was a similar kind of being. So it’s very hard. I love what I’m doing and I’m on To the progress I’ve made, but having those two in your hotline puts everything that I think sometimes about myself into a very, very simple perspective. And that’s wonderful, too distracting.
Rick Archer: I really Yeah. You just broke out and brought up a very important point, which warrants extending this a couple more minutes, which is humility. I mean, you just brought up three examples, Dalai Lama bead Griffiths, and Ramana Maharshi. We’ve also discussed earlier about gurus who get carried away with themselves, or spiritual teachers, which almost seems to be the rule rather than the exception. And so it would seem to me that humility is the is the key to preventing that from happening, and how do we develop it?
Andrew Harvey: Well, humility is the sign that you’re realized. If you realize you realize that everything that you’ve ever thought about yourself is a complete fiction, including the fact exist as a separate important identity. That’s the most flattening realisation of all completely incinerates vanity and illusion.
Rick Archer: Is there anything we can do to intentionally culture humility?
Andrew Harvey: Oh, god, yes. That’s what you practice in practice as you practice the adoration of the one practice, truly surrendering your practice trust, you practice service of the one in humanity, and you practice Shadow Work, constantly committing yourself to unveil your dark motives, you’re crazy tantrums, or neurosis, your addiction to power. And slowly if you do all of those things with a great deal of focus, you will have a chance at the chance of the chance of developing something beginning to look like that’s my experience, I think that it’s very hard to begin to contemplate how vain and how proud and how narcissistic our minds and habits are guys. So when you start to realize just enemies, you have to get used to this humility that you notice the essential truth, your approval by which you have to face and yourself in the world and others to go through that. Make it conscious, because that part of your being humble
Rick Archer: will also say that the universe kind of conspires to make us humble, you know, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And it may not happen overnight. Obviously, it might take lifetimes to have happen. But it will happen. Yeah, it will happen. And I mean, would you carry I love talking to you so much. It’s hard to stop. But would you agree that there’s there’s a sort of we talked earlier about an evolutionary force or trajectory, that ultimately the universe is is sort of, it has our evolution in mind, so to speak, and, and will continue to orchestrate circumstances and situations, which, as painful as they may need to be, which will bring us to higher and higher and higher expressions of the Divine.
Andrew Harvey: I think that’s one side of the universe. I think the other side has exactly the opposite intention of completely undoing all the work of evolution. So just as the one has to say, it’s the ultimate light, which is the final reality, but when it manifests, it manifests with the light and the dark and then both colony. So if you wake up to the great evolutionary like the bones to birth a new world, you’re also going to wake up to the great power of darkness that wants to destroy all hope and possibility of that new world. And then you’ll understand a lot more about what’s actually happening in the world, which is the people who are consciously implying or unconsciously instruments that are causing terrible suffering, and need to be addressed, but from a sacred, conscious, loving action.
Rick Archer: But a house divided against itself cannot stand so might not know it might not be then the bigger picture that light and the dark are both components of God are of one greater wholeness southern so even the dark ultimately has an evolutionary purpose.
Andrew Harvey: Yes, it does. But it is so dangerous that it’s only when the light comes with deep shadow work to understand and integrate the dark into itself, the potentially on deposit the dark Ka’bah and its destruction. After all, we have nuclear weapons and biological weapons at our disposal. Jung said the whole humanity now hangs by the psyche of man and that psyche is a threat by thread. That thread is fraying. So you have these vast powers obstruction in the hands of people who are at a very narrow body A crazy level of evolution that’s very scary. It’s not something that we can think lightly about, we have to react to it, because that’s part of the evolutionary challenge to react and bring our creativity, bring our compassion, but bring our souls and hearts and minds and bodies in action, to create a way that can transform that good. dullness between being and becoming, doing the masculine attachment and the feminine, committed passion, they have to be united in a being that is capable of holding the horror and the great love and the great joy in one embrace. And then living from that fullness of life, expressing that in sacred action. That’s the new divine human that is, I believe, the kind of human being that is being awoken and hundreds of 1000s. us. And we need to really be in really training for that emergence, because time is running out for the powers of Doctor destroying this clearly overwhelming, intense, and we’ve got to get real about that. Because this birth depends upon us turning up consciously, with it working consciously, with its laws and suggestions and mysteries and sacred training, it won’t just happen. It can’t just happen, we have to choose it, we have to be brave enough to do the work, we have to risk it we have to give Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to be transformed by it. Because the divine doesn’t work, except through the sacred Free Will offering you what mean that you have to have the courage to prosper. Because what the Divine is about it is establishing the primordial love relationship through which you can learn how to involve yourself again and again. And again, if you stay in the flood of love.
Rick Archer: Good. That was a very inspired little, little statement there. I should probably wrap it up at this point, because we’ve been going for about two hours. But I hope we’ve given our viewers and listeners a taste of Andrew Harvey,
Andrew Harvey: Please write to me and tell me how you feel about this. Because I’m not just speak, it’s lovely to speak to you. You’re a lovely person you speak to you for hours. But we’re having this conversation to model sacred conversation between two adults, love and respect to each other’s position and knowledge. And what will be lovely as if people wrote to me about how they felt about this conversation.
Rick Archer: Great. Yeah, I’m sure there’ll be all kinds of comments on YouTube. And also, if I link to your website, is there a place to contact you through the website there? It’s on my website, so people can contact your email address or a form to fill out or something? Okay, great. And up
Andrew Harvey: to no, because we can’t talk in a vacuum, we guide me to Mr. Murphy tune what I’m saying, because so many spiritual teachers make the mistake of not listening to what people are saying about what they’re saying. So they don’t have the chance to actually tune into and listen to points of view that they may not have thought of. We’re all struggling, including, and especially the teachers that are winning your wisdom, your health,
Rick Archer: too. Yeah. And some of them actually intentionally isolate themselves because they don’t want to hear it. And, and that you know where that goes. So we can all use constructive criticism. You can. Yeah, as a matter of fact, sometimes people accuse me of
Andrew Harvey: strategy, praise, Doom. Yeah. Comments in terms of criticism, that’s such a wild idea of our culture. Why not send a message that not second to me, but when somebody does something wonderful, I send them the most glowing message. Great, you gave a great talk. It’s fabulous, what you said, rich people, both both. But doing difficult work out. Trying to keep saying and make sense of the time of complete lunacy and collapse. That’s, it takes guts to do this work and you’re bound to fail. Because evolution is so mysterious, but at least you’re tuning up to your full mind and not prior to trying to give them instruction. from a position of humility, sharing the laboratories fruits with those into the virtue of that, to me is what I learned from my great teachers how to do this work on the ground with other people giving away everything knowing that in giving the work yourself, God, I’m giving you joy.
Rick Archer: Well, you are a life well lived in progress very much and you I’m sure you often have the feeling that you are an instrument, you’re just an instrument of the Divine and, and you want that. And you want that instrument to sort of just be as effective as it can be, you know, to have the maximum to make the maximum contribution that it can make. Yes, yeah.
Andrew Harvey: But I also know that I have no idea what that would be. Because sometimes, you know, in a culture like ours, we think in terms of money and power, and millions seen you, but that’s all horseshit. That’s the illusion, being sat in a room in South India. He influenced a lot of science by changing the life and spirit of Rupert Sheldrake, children a great discoveries in the way in which science is done through his love of big differences relationship with him, he changed the whole Interspiritual movement that goes with Wayne Dyer’s wonderful friendship with him. And he changed my life and the whole vision of sacred activism and Christian mysticism I’ve been privileged to give. So one person turning up with the fullness of their well being can actually have a subversive effect on the transformation of our whole culture.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and you never know what effect you might be having. I mean, a lighthouse. Oh, doesn’t know how many ships it might be saving from hitting rocks, you know. It just shines. It’s light. And,
Andrew Harvey: and then Amazing things happen by just turning up and doing your doing your devotion and public devotion state. That is how people change.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, thank you so much, Andrew. I’m glad I’m so glad that we finally got around to doing this. And I’m sure we’ll meet some time. And we’ll do another one sometime. And
Andrew Harvey: Introduce our animals to each other.
Rick Archer: Yes. Well, I don’t know if your cats would like my dogs very much.
Andrew Harvey: She’s quite sophisticated. She’s still the center of attention, she’ll be back.
Rick Archer: So let me make a couple of general wrap up points. I’ve been speaking with Andrew Harvey, as you know, by now, if you’ve been watching this interview, and as usual, as always, I’ll be creating a page on batgap.com for this interview, and it will contain links to Andrews website and some of his books and this thing we were talking about, about beat Griffith, the human search and sacred feminine. So I’ll try to find that and link to it. And, Andrew, it’s very easy to get a hold of through his website. And he offers all sorts of programs that you can participate in which also you’ll find details of on his website.
Andrew Harvey: videos for free too, because I loved I feel it’s so important that people can have things free. There’s lots of stuff.
Rick Archer: Yeah, me too. I mean, that’s the way that was my founding intention with this, this thing that I’m doing is that let’s let’s make it freely available. And if anybody really appreciates it enough, they’ll donate something and hopefully it’ll become self supporting that way.
Andrew Harvey: Yeah, I totally agree. Thank you for doing
Rick Archer: and so speaking even more generally, the as I mentioned, the beginning Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing project and there have been hundreds of interviews so far. So if you explore the website, you’ll see them all categorized, and you can see what ones we have upcoming under the upcoming interviews. Menu. There’s a place to suggest guests all sorts of things just explore around the site you’ll see it all so thank you for listening or watching and we will see if an excellent oh I just also want to mention this an audio podcast and almost as many people if not more listened to it and audio as watch it in video. So check that out too. So thanks for watching. See you next time.
