Spirit in Action
Sacred Activism - Andrew Harvey
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will lose this world alone ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeak. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. I'm hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream of as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will lose this world alone ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. Before I tell you about today's guest, I want to remind you about a couple opportunities coming up next weekend. I'll be heading to the Ways of Peace Conference on Nonviolence in the Christian Tradition, the first of a series that will look at nonviolence as espoused and practiced in many areas and by many groups. Lots of wonderful and powerful speakers, including Walter Wink, Rita and Nakashima Brock, Kathy Kelly, and it's being organized by friends for a nonviolent world held at United Theological Seminary in the Twin Cities on October 31st, Halloween Day, which I guess is a type of religious festival. Admission is only $10 for the whole day, and you can check it out at the FNVW.org website or via my website. Also, on the same day and the day before that, October 30th, there's the 13th Annual Body Mind and Spirit Conference at the University of Wisconsin Stout in Menominee. I interviewed one of the Friday speakers, Celine Vega, last week, and today I'll be visiting with Saturday's keynote speaker for the conference, Andrew Harvey. Andrew has written a library full of books on many aspects of spirituality and his captivating immersion in many of the world's major religions and spiritual practices, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and Christianity. His most recent book is Spiritual Activism, a topic of deep passion for him, and it seemed custom-made for this show. He joins us today from his home in Oak Park, Illinois. Andrew, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. I'm absolutely delighted to be with you. I want to give you a little test to get you started out. Do you know what day it is and in which city you find yourself at this moment? Well, thank goodness I'm at home. I've been on a wild tour, and here I am at home with my cats and my carpets and my piece and my Bobber Streisand Records. So I'm feeling great. You grew up, I think, in India. How many years did you spend in India before you fully located some other portion of the world? I was born in India in 1952, and I spent the first nine years of my life there, and these years marked me in the most profound way, because India is a totally sacred world still. It's preserved the ancient traditions. It's preserved the sacred consciousness. That infused me at the deepest level at an early age. I was born into a Christian family, but I had a Muslim driver and a wild Catholic nanny and a Hindu cook, and very early on, I think I understood that there was one divine that was expressing itself through all the religions. And I think having that lesson imprinted at the deepest level of young was what has inspired my work, which has really been a work of universal mysticism. I plunged into all of the mystical traditions. And I think that one of the great blessings of being born in a Hindu country is that Hinduism is spectacularly and uniquely tolerant of all other approaches to God, because it recognizes that the divine is everywhere and can be approached by anyone in the terms of their own particular temperament. This is an amazingly important lesson, I think, and very, very central to the world's health, and it's inspired my whole life. I was also, I think, initiated by India into the drama of the play of light and dark, because although India is a very sacred country, India also has terrible injustices and terrible poverty and terrible suffering, which are on full view. So very early, I understood that the divine work through darkness as well as light, horror as well as joy, and also that the world was a very, very dramatically painful place, as well as a dramatically beautiful one. Being born in the inevitably is to face the pain of poverty. And I think very early on, I understood that if we are going to be truly spiritual, we're going to need to put love into action, spirit into action, because one of the drawbacks of the Hinduism I encountered as a child is that it seemed to me, even at an early age, to be too passive in the face of the enormity of the suffering of the poor and the enormity of the suffering of animals on the streets of India, and the enormity of the suffering of women. So I think very early on, I understood that something was very wrong with this picture. I was brought up in a Christian family of great tolerance and great openness to other religions, but I'm grateful that at a very early age, I connected with Jesus, because for me, Jesus has always been the center of my heart. And although I'm not a Christian in the paid up sense, I truly hope that I'm on the Christ path. And what I find so moving about Jesus is his continual challenge to us to put our deepest experiences of the divine into radical action. And I think that over the years of my life, this deep recognition, which flowered very young in my passion for Jesus, I sang in a choir and I loved singing hymns and I loved the language of the old prayer book. I think that this people of Jesus is really what's flowered in my vision of sacred activism. Although it takes its roots in all of the religions, it remains devoted to the Christ's example of passionate compassion. - Could I have you expound on something a little bit? You say you've been a Christian, you were raised Christian, but one of the things that I know that you did along the way is I think you took vows in one of the Buddhist orders. And I think you've pursued deeply in these other areas. So when you say you're a Christian, I think that's probably not the same meaning of Christian that perhaps my fundamentalist born-again brother Christian, I mean, you've got a somewhat different take on what being Christian is. - Well, I don't actually call myself a Christian that I do hope that I'm on the Christ path. And I make a distinction between the two because for me, all of the different churches are very, very far wide of the essential radicalism of Jesus' His message. I wrote a book called Son of Man, The Mystical Pastor Christ, in which I tried to wrestle with this belief that Jesus as a being was a tremendous social, political, economic, radical because He understood that divine love demanded justice, demanded equality, demanded harmonious living with nature. And my experience of the different churches, both the fundamentalist churches, of course, hypnosis, Catholicism and Protestantism, was that it didn't really live up to the passion and the faithfulness and the extraordinary challenge of this message. So while I've remained profoundly in love with Jesus, I've fallen quite sadly out of love with the churches. And I believe that you can have a very direct relationship with the Christ, the divine love consciousness without having to be a member of any of the churches. And I think the deepest influence of my Indian childhood was, as I've said, this vision that Hinduism gives us of the universal presence of God and the universal access to God. And when I started to have my initiatory mystical experiences, which happened when I returned to endure 25, after being a professor at Oxford and becoming very disillusioned with academia, what I realized from those experiences was that there is one divine consciousness, one light energy, one enormous, all-encompassing power, which has been expressed in different ways through all the religions, but which can be contacted directly. And that made me very hungry to experience the different mystical ways of approaching this great mystery. So guided by the tolerance of Hinduism, and especially by the vision that I met in the work of Ramakrishna, who was a great mystic of the mother of the 19th century, who really proclaimed the unity of all religions and experienced the unity of all mystical paths in the divine revelation, I then undertook to go on a very serious initiatory journey into three main paths. I met an amazing master of Marianna Buddhism in her Malayan Kingdom in the dark, and I took the Bodhisattva vows with him and was enormously moved by the Tibetan Buddhist vision and became deeply implicated in Tibetan Buddhism and co-wrote the Tibetan Book of Living and dying for Sogya Rinpoche and had the grace to meet many great Tibetan masters and to work intimately with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. I also was very, very moved by the transcendent and glorious poetry of Rumi, which helped initiate me into Sufism and to the tremendous vision of the beloved, the permeate Sufism. And Sufism, as you know, is the esoteric heart of Islam and has preserved a universal mystical truth. And in Rumi's poetry, I met that universal mystical truth, and it became the guiding light from my own path into love. When I was 28, I also met a Hindu teacher and was head-devoted disciple for 15 years and experienced in that relationship the passion and the truth of the Hindu Bhakti tradition, the tradition that initiates you through adoration of the divine and the human being into the truth of your own divine identity. Then, when I was in my early 40s, I had the grace to meet the man who has already transformed my life. A man called Father Pete Griffiths, who was a Christian monk living in India, 50 miles from actually where I was born, but who had opened up his entire being to all of the revelations while remaining devoted to Jesus. And in here, I met someone who was being Christed, who radiated the highest consciousness, the highest humility, the highest love, who had a profound love of Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism and Islam, and who realized in the deepest way, this unity of all those traditions, while being able to represent the truth of the Christ path and his being. And that moved me profoundly, and I loved him very, very deeply. And it was meeting him that helped me return to the Christ while holding all of the other revelations very, very sincerely and respectfully, and marrying all of the different initiations within myself. And so marrying, or at least attempting to, the deepest Eastern wisdom, the deepest Islamic wisdom with the fundamental truth of Christian mysticism. And this path gave birth to me in my 40s, I think, to what I would call a universal mystic path, which is centered really on a devotion to the sacred marriage, the union of transcendence and imminence, and on the special devotion to the divine feminine, which became the core of my work. Because I believe that one of the deepest forms of truth that we can approach, and one of the most necessary for us, is to reclaim the full power of the embodied Godhead, the divine feminine, the presence that lives in and out of everything. Because in my own deepest experience, I found that when I connected with the divine feminine, in all of these different revelations, which I have been inspired to by Ramakrishna at the beginning of my journey, what that opened up for me was a universal vision of the glory of the creation, of the sacred divine identity of every human being and every animal. And of the necessity, the absolute necessity, of putting passion at compassion, which is the essence of mother's love, into sacred action. So it was from this reconciling vision of the sacred marriage with special emphasis on the divine feminine that I could find a place to intuit the unity of all of the different revelations and also how they needed to be focused now on the tremendous world crisis, to really breed a non-dogmatic, mystical vision of divine love in action, which has come to be sacred activism, which has come to be the foundation of what I've written about and the hope. With the inspiration of Ramakrishna and other great Hindu masters like Oravindo, and of course my great teacher, Father Pete Krsv, I was really encouraged to be a universal mystic. And that's what I believed to the Rumi was, although you remained a very devoted Muslim. The vision that's coming through in Rumi is of a universal love. And I feel it's this universal mysticism. Which is now focused in sacred activism to provide a vision for anyone who wants it of how divine love can transform our world by inspiring us with the passion of compassion and the strength and the peace that we need to confront our very dangerous crisis and put love and wisdom into action, drawing on all the mystical sources at this very crucial moment. - So Andrew, as you speak, clearly you're speaking from a deep spiritual center, you're speaking motivated by this mystical center of your life. You've written a number of books. I don't know if you ever could ask this. What is your profession? What is your work as you see it in the world? - Well, I'm a spiritual teacher. First and foremost, I work with many spiritual centers all over the world, and I teach in them. I teach in churches, I teach in spiritual centers, I teach in Buddhist centers, into centers, Sufi centers. And I think what I've come to represent is a kind of universal mysticism which can reach out to all of the different religions because through grace I've been initiated into the mystical core of the religions. I'm also a writer and a spiritual director, and I've made documentary films, and I've worn a lot of hats, but I think my deepest identity is as a spiritual teacher, not a guru at all, but a spiritual friend. Your latest book is called The Hope, and I'm all of one-third of the way through it since it didn't arrive until just a day or two ago. But I've already been very inspired by it. It's been great. I took some passages of it with me to the Quaker meeting that I attend on Sunday and use them as seeds for the silent worship that we go into. - I have a great admiration for the Quakers because I think the Quakers have really understood the truth of Jesus' message. In fact, of all the Christian denominations, it's the Quakers that I love the most because they've always been on the side of the poor and of those crying out for justice and that they've been amazing force of love in action. - Well, we tried to do our bit, but in the book, The Hope, you talk about how we're in a moment of crisis in this world, and it's not a moment, it's a period of crisis. Can you say what you think is wrong with the world? What's the problem right now? What is the crisis that's happening? - Well, I think it's very, very much more than a crisis. It is an emergency. I think we're in, what I call in the book, a great death. This death is happening on multiple levels. There is an environmental Holocaust happening which is much more dangerous than most people realize and the scientists of the world are really in desperation, trying to wake people up to the catastrophic results of global warming. We're living in a crisis of fundamentalism when many of the world's religions, at the moment when we need unity or retreating into a very dangerous and very violent form of fundamentalism, we're living dominated by a corporate mindset that is addicted to a crazy domination of nature and is creating a suicidal death machine, that is killing nature and, of course, through killing nature, killing ourselves. You just have to think of the way in which agribusiness is poisoning our food to realize the lunacy of what we're up to. And this corporate mindset has an enormous hold on us because it's addicted to us to an unsustainable way of life and fostered some very dangerous appetites in us of addiction to greed and power. We're in a crisis in which the media is largely controlled by right-wing and very harsh-minded corporations, which means that we're fed a diet of violence, pornography, reality shows, banality, at the very moment when we need the most profound inspiration to gather our forces to go forward, to preserve the planet. And we live in a time in which we are multitasking crazily and have to work incredibly hard to keep our lives together and are inflicted and afflicted by a kind of universal ADD, which I think prevents many, many people from getting to the silent core of their being where they could be armed by divine peace and divine passion. And when you put all of those things together, I think what you have is nothing short of an apocalyptic potential for the extinction of the human race and of a great deal of nature to a hundred species avenging into the dark every day. If we don't change how we are acting in the environment, we are creating an uninhabitable world. This crisis, this emergency, is a manifestation of the deepest level, I think, of a kind of collective, false human self that is des equalized, disassociated from its divine core and from the divinity of nature and divinity of the creation. And now profoundly dangerous. I think many, many people know how serious the crisis is and are deeply traumatized by it and paralyzed in the face of it. But what my book is about, and this is what I hope will really inspire people, is that although I face head on, I think the crisis in the book, and I think it's very important not to deny it until that one's heart be broken open by it, shaft open by it, really. I think understanding this crisis as I was guided to do by my great teacher, Father Beat Griffith, as a crisis not just of destruction, but of creation, of just of death, but of a potential birth of a new humanity, a humanity that has really faced its shadow and galvanized its deepest resources of passion and compassion and action. Facing it like that and seeing it like that as a mystical crisis of evolution has really inspired me. What Father Beat told me in the most extraordinary conversation of my life, which was really the fruition of all of his prophetic experience and his genius, as a great mystic and as a realized human being, was that he believed that just as in all the mystical traditions, those who achieved divine consciousness go through what is known in the Christian tradition as a dark knight and in Sufism's fanard, the annihilation of the full self, so the whole of humanity was going to be and is going now through a communal dark knight, which offers all of us the potential for the birth of a new divine consciousness in humanity. How the divine works is through paradox, through a dance of birth and death, resurrection and crucifixion and resurrection. And I think what is happening now on a major scale in all of the different aspects of this death is that the human full self, this collective full self, the corporate mindset, the addiction to greed and domination of nature is being shattered, is collapsing, is being revealed to be lethal, not to punish us and not to destroy us, but to give us one last and one immense opportunity to face the shadow of the human enterprise, to go deep into the divine truth of our fundamental identity and then to start acting in the deepest way and on the deepest levels in every realm of existence. And if we can meet this challenge in this way, as I profoundly believe we can, because I myself have experienced this challenge like that and have tried to meet it like that and it had very transformed the matriary results in my own life and in the life of many, many of the great sacred activists on the world at the moment, then I think not only can we preserve the world, not only can we save what remains of nature and start living in deep harmony with it, but that we as a human race can evolve to a wholly new level of evolution. So I see the hope in this tremendous crisis in that it is an evolutionary crisis, a crisis which we were probably destined to have because we were destined to grow enormous powers and then to become addicted to them and think that we were divine and that we had control. Now the illusion of that is being revealed, but with the revelation of that illusion is coming a massive, massive mystical and active renaissance, which when you fuse together, the deep mystical with the active can produce a wholly new power on the earth and a wholly new human race and this is what my book is about. It's about that and really much, much more. We're visiting today with Andrew Harvey. His website is Andrewharvey.net and there is also a website called sacredactivism.org. He is my guest today for Spirit in Action. This is a Northern Spirit Radio production. I'm your host, Mark helps me. You can always find our programs and links to Andrew Harvey and my other guests via my website, which is northernspiritradio.org. Andrew is joining us. He's down in the Chicago region, which is where his center is now. He grew up over in India, school and life in England. Is there a place in the world where you haven't lived for an extended period? Antarctica and no, I haven't ever lived in South America. I would love to experience South America. I've never been and I haven't. I've only been to Africa once, but I've been a lot around the world. I've been a kind of no man and I've loved it actually. It's given me a very deep perspective on what's happening. I think if you just remain in the West at the moment, it's easy to be in a kind of bubble about what's going on, but if you travel especially in third world countries, you really do see the cost, the terrible cost of our way of life helps you wake up to what's really going on. I was wondering if we can get specific about some things. Sacred activism, I'm totally with you. I mean, the reason this program is called Spirit in Action is because I believe by marrying those two things together. And my personal vision of it, especially from about a week ago, sitting in meeting for worship, was that as I put down roots, that allows me to be securely rooted and gives me a strength, but at the same time, I'm pushing my leaves, my branches up into the light. And it's the balance of those two things that make my witness in the world powerful. It means that by having deep spiritual roots, I think I can do better things for the world and with the world and in the world. I can be better in the world because my roots are sunk in that place of deep rootedness. I think that's such a beautiful image. It's the image of a tree, isn't it? That's really what every human being now needs in the face of this tremendous crisis is to put roots down into divine consciousness, into the deepest part of the self, into the great peace and the great passion of the divine, so as to be fueled by the wisdom and the energy to go out into this chaos and this darkness and this difficulty with serenity and with equipoise and with deep commitment to sacred action. This is what sacred activism is, and you couldn't have put it more beautifully. I think for me, what I have experienced is that there are two really essential noble forces in the human heart, in the human soul, and these two forces are fires. The first forces, the fire of our mystical passion to be one with the one, and I think everyone has this passion at the core of themselves, whether they face up to it or own up to it or not, it exists as a gift of divine consciousness, which everyone also has. And I think the other noble passion and noble fire is the activist's passion for justice, the passion that arises out of our deepest conscience to see justice done and harmony established with other sentient beings and with the creation itself. And what for me sacred activism is, is the bringing together in the human soul and in the human heart through intense mystical experience and deep and steady and down-home and daily spiritual practice of these two enormous fires to create a third fire. Try not to shout that said something that has really gone to the core of my life, and I think goes to the core of the enterprise of sacred activism. He said, "One day after we have mastered the tides "and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love, "and then for the second time, "humanity will have discovered fire. "And this fire that we are now discovering "in the middle of this crisis is the third fire "that is created of the union "of the fire of the mystic passion for God, "with the fire of the activist passion for justice. "And when you experience in yourself "the union of these two fires, "what that gives you is simultaneously "a deep knowledge of your own divine identity "and a sense of passionately compassionate mission "to help and serve others and the world "and the creation and/or sentient beings "with everything you are and everything you have." This is, I believe, the deepest vision of the Christ consciousness. It's also the deepest vision of the Bodhisattva ideal in Mahayana Buddhism. And, of course, it is the capitalistic vision of Tikkun Olam, the rising up in passion and justice to bring the broken into the hole. And it's been the guiding truths of all of those mystical traditions that have understood that it is not enough just to experience the divine. We have to live the divine. And we have to live the divine as the divine lives, which is in tremendous compassion and creativity and concern for every living thing. Because every living thing is the divine in disguise, is an emanation of the source. This vision, I think, is really essential for our survival now. And as the reason why this crisis is happening, I think, because I think this crisis is the destined birthing ground of this vision on a massive scale. One of the things I've come to believe is that the fundamentalist version of the Second Coming is a radical, literalist distortion of a much greater truth, which is that the Christ consciousness, or if you prefer the wisdom and love consciousness of the divine, is destined to rise, not in the return of one person, but in millions and millions of people, awaken to the depth of our crisis, awaken to the necessity for going down into the divine and up into the divine, and then putting that discovery of divine potential into clear, wise, radical action on every front and in every realm. - You know, one of the things that you say in your book, The Hope, and which I think our society doesn't get, is you had a period in your life where you went inward. You did the mystic journey. You went deep that way. It was only eventually that you learned that you needed to be doing the outward manifestation as powerfully that they had to go together. Can you have one without the other and be fully with the divine? Can you be just mystical and in bliss with the divine? And that's fine, that's the end of your journey. Or can you be outward and just be an activist and doing those good things out in the world, but not have the roots that as I would call them? Do these things work one of these fires without the other? - My own experience is that both mystics, as we know them and activists, as we know them, wonderful people, though they are and inspired beings, so they are not fully evolved in the divine consciousness, because the divine consciousness itself is both deeply peaceful and passionately active. And I think that to really achieve authentic realization, you have to combine a life of profound meditation with a life of committed sacred action. The problem with the new age and the problem with many activists, most of the activists that I know, is that they have succumbed to the narcissism of mysticism and the narcissism of activism. Mystics can be narcissists in that they become so intensely driven by desire to vanish into the light, to be one with the light, that they forget that the light has taken form and that that form is all other human beings in nature and all sentient beings. And just as mystics, I think, as we know them now, are in a way trapped in this narcissistic addiction to transcendence. So activists, as we know them now, are trapped in a narcissistic addiction to doing. That results in burnout, in Messiah complexes, in an unhealed shadow aspect and in a very divisive and sometimes very destructive rage. So both mystics, as we have them now and activists, as we have them now, are missing the fundamental unified force field of the divine that, as I said, is both great peace and great compassion in action. But the great hope, and this is what my book celebrates, is that if you unite the passion of the mystic for God, with the passion of the activist for God, the shadow of narcissism of the mystic is healed by the activist's passion to put righteousness and justice and love into action. And the shadow of narcissism of the activist is healed by the mystics joy and peace and deep sourcing in divine energy. So the great hope is that by bringing these two together within oneself, you heal the narcissisms of both sides and engender yourself with divine grace as a humble servant of divine love and wisdom in action. And that's what my book is really about. It's a practical pragmatic handbook, as you'll see, for how to do this in the core of life and in the core of this crisis, which is absolutely essential because if we continue in an addiction to transcendence as mystics, we will simply not bring the powers and beauties and peace of God into action. And if you continue as activists in our addiction to doing without really paying attention to the deeper sources of being, our doing will be ragged and divisive and destructive, however nobly intentioned. So this fusion is essential for the preservation of the world, but it's also essential, and this is, I think, to deeper, meaning even. It's also essential for the evolutionary quantum leap that we are destined, I believe, to incarnate, which is that I think we're destined to be born as embodied, humble, divine humans sourced by divine love and wisdom. And acting from that love and wisdom in all the realms of the world, not only to preserve the world, but to transform the world and help the divine make of the world a mirror of its own love and justice. I think there's a pretty common fear by activists, and activists specifically who are not sacred activists, activists who are not rooted in that way, of turning control over to a master, turning control over to dogma, to institutions, that when you say, we root our activism in this other thing, I think there's a very common fear that it will be misused by those institutional objectives. Well, I think it's totally justified here. I believe that many activists that I know have been deeply disturbed by the conservatism and the uselessness of religious institutions have been deeply wounded by the utilities of dogma, and really understand that the guru system is a patriarchal system of authoritarian domination. So I'm absolutely in agreement with their analysis, but what activists may not know is that there is a living mystical truth which has been preserved at the heart of the religions, often with great difficulty. I mean, we all know how the Christian mystics were treated by the church, and we all know, many of us know how the Sufi mystics have been treated by Islam. But this mystical tradition which transcends dogma which transcends religion and offers everyone who wants it a direct relationship with the divine is precisely the one that I think activists could be most inspired by. So my work over the last 15 years has been to try and present this universal mystical tradition with the most powerful sacred practices of the various traditions that I've been initiated to. In the great hope that people will see that while the religions and the guru systems and dogma in general are, I think, very often a very deeply retarding and conservative force, humanity still has at its disposal, and as a supreme gift from the divine, what I call the direct path, about the direct connection beyond dogma, beyond religious authority, beyond guru authority, with the divine directly, and it's this direct divine connection that I believe every human being is born with. And I believe that every human being can cultivate this direct divine connection with the four essential kinds of practice that I've outlined in the first sacred law of sacred activism, which are really cool practices that help you calm down and breathe with the great peace of the divine. Warm practices that help you sustain the passion and compassion of the heart through every kind of difficulty. Prayer practice, which helps you stay in constant connection, whatever is happening to you and around you, with the power of the beloved of the divine. And sacred body practices like yoga and sacred dance, which I love and practice, which help you stay deep in the body and experience the divine in the body and make up the body a supple and tender, luminous and strong container for the tremendous energies that are awoken by divine transformation. So my plea to the activists is not that they abandon their analysis of religion, but that they wake up to what I call mystical literacy, that there is a very glorious and rich and deep mystical tradition, which is unbelievably alive at this moment. And actually, more universal and more available at this moment than at any other moment in history. And that they give up their fear of plunging into this direct connection because what it offers them is precisely the wisdom and force and fuel of energy and passion and peace that they most deeply need to make their noble work truly effective. So what are you turning control and direction over to? I mean, I have a sense of this as a Quaker. I know I go into the silence. I listen for that direct voice, the direct path that you're speaking of. And I think the divine directs me. I test that in community to understand it better, but I have this personal responsibility to hear that. So I call that thing that I'm listening to, the spirit or God or the light. I use lots of different names. - So what are you asking that these activists who haven't had that experience? What are they listening to? If it's not, you know, what the church has told them, God said, do this, what are they listening to? Is there, do they start from square one each time? - No, I think what I'm inviting activists to do is to get real about the universal testimony of the great mystics of all traditions, which is that there exists a one mind, one heart, one light intelligence, a bliss consciousness, which is creating everything. This is the universal testimony of all of the traditions and that this is the ultimate reality. And it's been expressed in many different ways, but they all come back to the same thing and they all say the same thing. First of all, I think activists need to really respect that testimony and realize that it's of indispensable value. Then the other testimony of all of the great mystics who have connected with this force, call it God, call it spirit, call it light consciousness, call it what you will, is that if you want to have a relationship with it, you need to do the work. You need to really take up a humble, daily, sacred practice. The universal testimony of all of the mystics, of all of the traditions is that this divine consciousness, that is creating everything and dwelling in everything, is unbelievably and profoundly merciful, and longing to get into connection with you, but you must turn up in a relationship with it to really become conscious of that connection. So activists will need to do what everyone needs to do to become awake, which is to start doing simple, deep, daily, committed spiritual work in the core of our lives. And then they will have the experience and that will change everything. In my experience and in the experience of all the sacred activists I know who are bringing together a profound spiritual practice with radical action, what happens is really extraordinary. What happens is that if you truly commit yourself to a practice and truly accept the testimony of the greatest mystics in the world, the gummies and realm of Christianism, Teresa of Abilis and Mother Teresa, then you will, through the grace of God and through the grace of your innate connection with God because God has given us all divine consciousness as a birthright, you will experience this. You cannot do anything real until you have experienced it, but the wonder is, and the blessing is, that this experience is available to anyone who turns up humbly, asking for it, and who does the inner work to prepare for it. - What's the role of community in fostering this knowledge, connection, study, this learning that you get from the spirit? What's the role of community in your experience or as you think is generally applicable in the world? - Well, I think the role of community is absolutely central for several major reasons. The first is that this journey is difficult and you need real support and true sacred friendship. And ideally a community can provide that. A community of seekers can provide each other with the inspiration, with the help, with the love, with the support, that all of us need to take this very difficult journey but challenges are centrality, ways challenges are ego, challenges are assumed assumptions of the world. The second enormous role of community is that in community, you learn some pretty scolding lessons about your own shadow, about your own impatience, your own self-righteousness, your own rage against people who think differently from you, your own projections onto other people of unacknowledged parts of yourself. And that kind of learning is not something that you can have if you are cut off from community because you can have very great illusions about your own realization and about your own compassion which if you are in a community is going to be tested daily because you're going to really face the parts of yourself that are still uncompassionate, that are still very judgmental, that are still self-righteous. So community access is grinding stone of the full self and enables you, if you are really attentive to what you can learn in community, to slowly transcend that in humility and in devotion and in pick up vision or universal compassion. The third reason why community is absolutely essential is that this great transformation that I'm talking about and that many, many people now see as possible is only possible in and through community. No one can birth the divine human alone. It is a communal act and no one can put love into action without the support of others. And in fact, I think one of the strongest points of my book to hope is that in the seventh floor of sacred activism, I ground the power of this movement in what I call networks of grace. I was contemplating something that has mystified me for many years, which is that Al-Qaeda and terrorists in general and certain fundamentalist group find it very easy to organize and genuinely good-thinking people who really are on the side of justice and are the larger vision of things often find it very hard to organize and remain very individualistic. And it came to me that what is needed now for a sacred activism is to be put into grassroots revolutionary action. Our groups of cells between six to 12 people who meet together in local communities, to pray together, to ensues each other, to choose a project which they then hold each other accountable for and to start working for their deep passion in the world. And I conceive of these networks of grace as being grouped potentially around a profession. Imagine what a group of lawyers could do for people or a group of doctors could do for healthcare or a group of politicians passionate about a particular cause, could do by pulling their resources and networks and passions or around a heartbreak or around a particular cause in a local community. So without that being these communities of networks of grace, we're just not going to have love put into action in sufficiently powerful ways. Part of my vision of what I call the second coming, if you like, or the birth of the new humanity, is that it is precisely not an individualistic birth. It's a birth in relationship. It's a birth in community. And networks of grace have already started all around the state. And on Thanksgiving Day, I'm releasing a global website, networks of grace, which will encourage people all over the world to start these networks. And I'm convinced that if people really see the beauty of what can happen through interconnected creativity, through pulling of resources, through praying together, through really holding each other accountable to get certain things done together, what we'll have is a rising of the love consciousness and the wisdom consciousness in community on a massive global level, which will lead to a grassroots level revolution of love and action. It's a beautiful vision that we have coming. Our guest today is Andrew Harvey. You can find a lot of information via his site, AndrewHarvey.net, or you can go to sacredactivism.org, or you can go to institutesforsacredactivism.org. He is my guest today for Spirit and Action, a Northern Spirit radio production, and my site is northernspiritradio.org. I'll have those links to Andrew Harvey and to my other guests. And you can listen to this program again repeatedly via my website. He's joining us today from Oak Park, just by Chicago, Illinois, which is his center. And the Institute for Sacred Activism is something that you've spawned these networks that you're talking about, Andrew. What kind of specific issues, problems, things in the world are going to be changed, because we have, you know, the national talk right now is about health care, or the national talk is about abortion, or the national talk is about gay rights. What kind of things are going to come out of this, at least as you see it? When you have time to read my book, you see that in my book, I have really tried to answer very specifically what I mean. What I mean is this. I am really asking everybody now to open to the fullness of this crisis, and to take the depth of our danger deep into their hearts. What happens when you do take the depth of the danger of this crisis into your heart, says that your heart is broken, and that you experience radical heartbreak. This is very important, because without this experience of radical heartbreak and the potential flowing out of compassion from that heartbreak, we can't go forward. Then I'm asking people to do a very simple action, which is to get up at 3 o'clock in the morning, to pray peacefully, surround themselves by the spirit in whatever way they understand the spirit, and to ask themselves one question. What of all the causes in the world breaks my heart the most? What of all the causes that I feel about really deeply breaks my heart the most? Because it's been my own experience that when you discover the cause that truly breaks your heart the most, you discover your mission, you discover something that you can devote yourself to. That really will call out your noblest energies and your greatest compassion and your deepest commitment. I feel very deeply about the environment, about gay rights, about women's rights, about abortion, about-- I mean, unless they're about abortion, I mean about the right of women to choose. And about many, many, all of the causes are part of this great death. But when I ask myself that question, what breaks my heart the most, I find that what really does shattered my heart continually is the treatment that we do to animals. So although I'm giving a hope, a universal vision, I do a lot of work for animal rights. My belief is that if everyone turns up in the depth of their heartbreak and chooses one cause, just fight for peacefully and with great strength and great divine power, then we'll have clusters of people fighting for animal rights, clusters of people fighting for true health care. We have all of the different concerns met by different groups of people who are united in a common cause to preserve the planet, but choosing one cause that they're devoting to. I think one of the great temptations is to just look at this crisis and think, my god, there's so much going on. What on earth can I do? What you can do is to turn up in your deepest heartbreak and divert yourself with a network of grace of people that are concerned about your heartbreak and then start working for that, knowing that if you work for health care, you're also helping raise consciousness about animal rights if you work for animal rights. You're also helping people become more compassionate to all beings in general, which will also result in a plea for health care that the most essential thing to do now is to turn up and do something from the deepest part of yourself. I conceive of the networks of grace as the thousand arms of the mother of compassion. They're all united in her burning compassion for the world. They're all addressing different things. But in fact, if everyone turned up in their heartbreak and did join a network of grace, devoted to doing something about that heartbreak, all of the different major problems of the world, environmental, social, political, and spiritual would be addressed and be being healed together from a concerted unified force field of passionate compassion and wisdom. - Can I ask you to say a few more words in the area of abortion? Because I think it's one of the most challenging, moral dilemmas for many of us. Because we're concerned for all sentient beings, and there's certainly a being at least in gestation there, and we're concerned for the woman who is carrying this other being, it seems so distant from a simple solution. So what's the wisdom you can share with us about that? - Well, first of all, I totally agree with you. It's an enormously complex and very sad problem, I think. But I do think that preventing women from having the right to choose is a very dangerous possibility. I think that what is needed is a radical education and the sacredness of life for every human being so that the chances of children being conceived without being wanted or being needed is radically reduced. It's indisputable that in certain cases, the bringing of children into this world without a real family foundation or the real family of a really caring situation is only going to produce more misery and more horror. So that would be my wisdom about it, but really, I think to heal our conflict over abortion, we need to really honor the divine feminine in the sacred, to really educate people about the responsibilities of creating life and to be very certain to protect women who have been raped or brought into crazy situations and who really don't feel adequate to protecting the life that they may have given birth to or have health reasons for not giving birth so that they can also be helped and preserved. This is a complex gesture, wouldn't you say? - There's a lot of complexity to it. Something I said just earlier, you're going to be up in my area soon. I'm up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and you're going to be in Menominee, Wisconsin, which is 30 miles away, presenting at the Body Mind Spirit conference that's happening there in just a week from now. And they can come hear you in person. You're the keynote speaker for that. - Yes, I am, I'm very honored. I'm so looking forward to being able to present my overall vision of sacred activism that that conference is going to be a very exciting event for me. - And I think you'll very much find yourself in a community of people who understand internally what sacred activism is about and what changes they have to do internally and how that ends up being part of mending the world. So I hope people are tremendously inspired by your visit here. I thank you for taking the time. I know you've got such a busy life. - Thank you so much for making this platform available. I'm very, very grateful. - Thanks for joining me for Spirit in Action. - God bless you. - My spirit in action guest today was Andrew Harvey, spiritual teacher, author, spiritual activist and friend to so many. Again, he'll be the keynote speaker at the 13th Annual Body Mind Spirit Conference held at the University of Wisconsin Stout, find the link via my northern spirit radio.org site and show up to hear Andrew Harvey and many more inspirational presenters on October 31st, Halloween in Menominee, Wisconsin, or the day before at the pre-conference session with Kylia Taylor and Celine Vega on the topic Inner Ethics Examining Counter-Transference with Compassion. You can listen to my interview from last week with Celine Vega on my northernspiritradio.org site. Please leave me a comment when you visit. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo ♪ ♪ From our healing ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]