|
Andrew Harvey was born in south
India in 1952 and lived there until he was nine-years-old, a period he
credits with shaping his vision of the inner unit of all religions. He
left India to attend private school in England and later studied at
Oxford University. Harvey became the youngest person to ever be awarded
a fellowship to All Souls College, England’s highest academic honor. In
1977, he returned to India to begin his spiritual search. He has since
lived in London, Paris, New York and San Francisco and has continued to
study a variety of religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and
Christianity. Harvey broke ties with the guru establishment in 1994 and
since then has devoted his studies and writing to explaining the direct
path to God. He lives in Las Vegas with his husband, writer and
photographer Eryk Hanut.
phenomeNEWS: Andrew Harvey is a very prolific writer, over 30 books
now if we have the right count here, he has been writing about
spirituality, for quite a few years, who knows how many lifetimes. The
most current book is The Direct Path: Creating a Personal Journal to the
Divine Using the World’s Spiritual Traditions, but today we’re going to
focus on the divine feminine, something that Ger and I have been
speaking about with a lot of our guests because we recognize that
there’s something going on. People are opening up to the feminine
personality, the Goddess and the divine nature of the feminine. We are
very pleased and happy to welcome to our program today Andrew Harvey. Hi
Andrew! ANDREW
HARVEY: Hello. I’m delighted to be with you.
You have such an interesting story to tell
about your childhood and the divine so let’s start at the beginning.
Well I was born in 1952 in
India. And my father had some Indian blood. I spent my entire childhood
in India. I feel so blessed that that happened because having a
childhood in India was being introduced very naturally to the sacred
because Indian life is permeated with and saturated by the sacred in
every conceivable way. I was born to Protestant parents but I had a
Catholic nanny. I had a Hindu cook who was a terrific drunk but very
pious and I had and amazing driver, very thin, needle thin, who was a
Muslim. He used to get out of the car and kneel and do his prostrations
to Mecca while we were shopping.
So from a very early
age I realized three really essential things. I realized that all the
religions were different expressions of the same path. I realized that
the true way to worship God wasn’t separating yourself from life but
worshiping God right in the core of life, just as everybody around me
was doing. And I realized that I myself had a great passion for the
divine quite naturally. It was something I always had, something that
was always brimming up inside of me. My love poems I wrote at six were
love poems to Jesus, but I never thought that there was only one way to
the divine. I knew from the very beginning that the vision of the Divine
Mother that the great saint Ramakrishna gives is like being a Bengali
housewife, trying to cook a great big white fish for different children
and realizing that in fact you just cook the white fish in different
ways for different palates and that all the religions are just the
different forms of cuisine. That was something that was very, very clear
to me from the very beginning. So I think having had an Indian childhood
prepared me in the most extraordinary way, really for the spiritual
flowering that’s been my life and which I hope will always be my life.
And how eclectic it all was that you were
exposed to all those different traditions at such an early age.
Well yes, but you see the
great genius of Hinduism has always been that it embraced all paths to
God. Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita says, “All paths lead to me.” And
authentic Hinduism has always opened itself to every conceivable way of
embracing the divine. So in India it’s natural to say, for example,
Jesus is a very, very great yogi and so is Mohammed. It’s very natural
to have this eclectic embrace of the divine. Hinduism itself is very
eclectic with all its different gods who are really different
manifestations of the Divine.
From a very early age, the
Divine Feminine entered my life as this all-embracing unity, as this
sense of the infinite potential of all of the different paths. And that
is a tremendous blessing because it saved me from any kind of
fundamentalism. It saved me from any kind of belief that there was only
one way of doing things and it opened me up to the play and the joy and
the human and the vitality of the real mystical and spiritual paths,
which the Indians are so marvelous at representing. Indians take their
religion extremely seriously. They will so enjoy it. They celebrate,
dance, have wonderful festivals. They love to sing. They love to
worship. And that sense of loving to worship and enjoying worship never
left me. We can tell. We can feel
the joy in you now in your speaking. It’s great fun to experience that.
Yes, I think that’s a very
important word, fun, because we tend in the West to think that religion
is something heavy, ghastly, grim, involving dreadful penitence and
pouring yourself out onto stone floors and begging for forgiveness. And
that is not at all what I experienced as a child. There’s one wonderful
festival called Holi which is a child’s dream because in Holi you get
into old clothes and spray paint at each other. And this symbolizes
Krishna’s ecstasy. So from a very early age I realized that. And of
course the ceremonies in the temples are not at all dreary. They’re full
of music. They’re full of color. They’re full of perfumes. They’re full
of ecstatic chanting. All of this gave me an idea very early on that the
true aim of divine worship is what is called in Sanskrit ananda,
ecstasy, joy, bliss. And I’ve never lost that. I’ve always believed that
the real purpose of worship, the real purpose of ceremony, the real
purpose of going to church or to a temple is to infuse yourself with the
bliss of God and to become strong in that bliss.
Ummm. We agree.
Of course now we’re in a
period of time when we need more than ever to be strengthened by
inspiration and bliss and the power that comes from them both because,
as all of us know, life has changed dramatically since September 11th.
The most important thing that anybody can do is to turn their whole
being to the sources of deepest inspiration. As the night gets darker,
we must burn more hotly. As the disasters thicken, we must dance more
passionately for God. And I’m so grateful that India, from a very early
age, has always given me that sense of sacred passion and sacred joy.
Did your parents feel the same way too?
They loved their religion.
They were Protestants but they were totally open to Hinduism and
Mohammedism. They were very, very open people and remain very open
people. So I don’t think they had the same sense of rapture in India,
but they had a tremendous respect for India. Quite honestly, I’ve been
born in India many times and being born in India this lifetime was a
combination of many, many different journeys, I was destined to have a
link role. I was destined to have a Western identity and a Western
education but an Indian heart and an Indian soul, to try in my work to
bring together the great mystical insights of the East with the
tremendous evolutionary and progressive visions of the West.
And that really has
been my work, to bring together the two sides of the world’s brain,
especially with the work that I’ve done in books like The Return of the
Mother, which in many ways is my most important book. It’s a book in
which I try and resurrect the Divine Feminine in all of the great
mystical traditions. It’s in paperback by Tarcher which is very
thrilling to me because I poured everything I ever knew from my Indian
background and all the other mystical disciplines I went through to try
and bring back the Divine Feminine in all of its passion and power and
glory. I’m convinced it’s only if we really do turn to the Mother and
only if we do bring her back that we can have what I call the sacred
marriage, the fusion of masculine and feminine, transcendent and
imminent, action and prayer, heart and mind, body and soul; that fusion
that will engender a wholly new humanity in us and awaken us to divine
love and action and make of us great revolutionaries of love before it’s
too late. We really need to become empowered on every level by
inspiration and by the sacred passion to change if we’re gong to turn
the very dark situation that we’re in around. But I’m convinced we can
and I’m convinced that even this darkness is part of a divine plan to
wake us up. And it has. It sure
has. Well it
might go on waking us up because the last thing we must do is fall
asleep now. It’s time to take the tremendous challenge of September 11th
and stay very alert and really do whatever we can to transform ourselves
in whatever ways are necessary to be adequate to the great task of
birthing the new humanity which I’m convinced is being given to America.
You know who else had a lot of bliss and
passion was Rumi.
Yes.
And you’ve written a book on that too.
I’ve spent 20 years
plunged into Rumi. I first discovered Rumi in my early 20s when I was a
don at Oxford and he just simply took the top of my head off. I had no
idea what I was reading but I knew that it was earth-quaking and I
plunged into study of Rumi with a great Sufi mystic in Paris called Eva
de Vitray Meyerovitch who was the world expert at the time on Rumi and
was the first person to translate him into a European language.
And I’ve written
one prose book, The Way of Passion, but I’ve translated him and
recreated him in four other books, including one for Shambhala which is
called The Teachings of Rumi. And I consider Rumi to be, with the cosmic
Christ and with the Mother herself, one of the supreme guides to the
mystical renaissance that’s trying to get born in the rubble of our
time. He is such an amazing figure, somebody who combines the soul force
of a Buddha with the philosophical intellect of a Plato and the
extravagant literary gifts of a Shakespeare. This is a unique phenomenon
and it’s part of the richness of our times that he’s coming back so
sensationally to inspire so many different kinds of people, in fact
people on every conceivable path. I think the clue to this is that he is
very open to perhaps the most important aspect of the Divine Feminine,
the aspect of the fire of love, possessing human beings. He writes about
being possessed by love, giving your whole life over to love,
surrendering to the glory of the passion of love, with such overwhelming
intensity and such beauty of imagery that all lovers of all kinds can
respond to him. He’s not a philosopher only, he’s a lover and a poet and
he speaks of the path with an infinite poignancy and vulnerability and
naked honesty and plangency and wild, wild
hunger. It’s shattering and really does open everybody.
It gets so deep into your heart and soul,
you just feel it.
I think you do. Even more
than just feel it, I think there’s this way in which when you’re really
listening to Rumi you know at some level you’re listening to the deepest
news about yourself. It’s as if your own deep voice was finding the most
amazing and wonderful and glorious expression and that you were
listening to your own deepest self sending you news of yourself. There’s
something uncanny in the initiatory intensity of Rumi’s work. It’s as if
the divine itself in all of us is speaking to all of us through it.
Wow… that’s pretty beautiful right there,
Andrew. It’s
because I’ve been saturating myself with the power and the joy of Rumi.
I’ve had the great good fortune of making a film about him in his own
city, the city in which he spent the majority of his life, Konya in
southern Turkey, some two years ago.
Really?
We went there and shot the
film in the city and, in fact, I actually read some of his poems on
immortality standing by his grave which was an extraordinary experience.
And I nearly got the giggles because standing there, reading the poems
about immortality next to the grave, I suddenly realized that he was the
least dead person I would ever, ever encounter. There was such
overwhelming power coming from the grave, it was like standing in the
wake of a huge flow of volcanic lava, so much power, so much joy, so
much passion just streaming from the grave itself. It was a very moving
moment, one of the great moving moments of my life.
Oh, yes. He was probably giggling right
along with you. I
hope so. I think that he may be giggling but there’s a tremendous
suffering in his heart and in the heart of all of the great teachers of
humanity at the moment because of the great suffering that Islam is
going through. And if anybody can help us get a vision of the real Islam
it’s Rumi, because what the terrorists are doing and claiming in the
name of Islam is a complete blasphemy. And Rumi really shows us, I
think, the ecumenical embracing mystical loving democratic side of Islam
which is really the truth of what the prophet is trying to get across.
So it’s important for a lot of reasons now to turn to Rumi, not just to
inspire us but to really remind us of the truth of that great religion
and not to get lost in the hysteria against it but to go on and really
encouraging the moderate Islamic mystics and clerics, to make a maximum
impact in their world and steer people away from disaster.
Truly.
So important, isn’t it?
Yes. It’s vital.
It’s vital at this moment
because the great danger to the future is fundamentalism of any kind.
It’s not just the Islamic terrorists that are fundamentalists.
Unfortunately, part of the Hindus now. It’s of course, the Christian
fundamentalists who are saying the most bloodthirsty, dreadful things
about Islam. Very inaccurate. It’s essential now to go beyond
fundamentalism in any form.
And this, again,
is why the Mother, I believe, is so important because if it’s true and I
believe it is, that the motherhood of God is trying to initiate the
whole human race into divine unity and into the passion to transform all
things, that comes from a deep, deep understanding and inner standing of
that unity. And if it’s true that the Mother is the source of all the
different revelations, as I believe she is, all of the different paths,
then perhaps the greatest symbol humanity could unite is the Divine
Motherhood of God. And in that power and in that grace and in that
atmosphere of total compassion and total love of nature and
relationships and each other and whatever our race or color or status or
sexuality, in that experience, we could find a wholly new degree of true
loving friendship between ourselves. A whole new degree of passionate
commitment to sacred action on every level, to save the planet
before it is destroyed and to save nature and
particularly to see the poor are fed and to see that people with AIDS
get the material and the help that they need. All of this could be done
so beautifully if the human race really acknowledged the Mother.
And that’s why I’ve
spent so much of my time in my work and my life and my passion on trying
to bring back the Motherhood of God. Not just because I love her and
worship her and have felt her grace in a million ways in my life, but
because I know if humanity has any hope of surviving, it’s going to be
under the aegis of the sacred marriage, the vision of the wholeness of
the union between the Father and the Mother, between transcendence and
imminence, between compassion and the heart and passionate action in all
the arenas of the world. And this unity, this marriage, can only be
celebrated if we have the bride back in all of her splendor. For so many
centuries the bride has been kept a prisoner in the cellar with a black
tape put over her mouth, pinned to a wall and unable to speak and unable
to witness her beauty and derided and degraded. Now is the time to bring
her back out and to worship her and to see that the depth of the
marriage is realized in ourselves and to go forward from that depth into
all the different arenas of life. It’s never been more important to do
this because if you look at the current situation with cool eyes, you
realize that what we’re witnessing is a clash between two matricidal
visions of the world. The Islamic terrorists are absolutely matricidal.
They are prepared to blow up innocent human beings in the service of
their philosophy. And it’s no joke that Mohammed Atta refused to have
any women at his funeral and didn’t want any women even to visit his
grave. There’s a real loathing of the feminine in all its aspects – as
life, as relationship, as sexuality, as the body – in terrorism. There’s
also a tremendous destructiveness and hatred of the feminine in the
policies of the corporation. Their willingness to strip mine nature,
their willingness to put greed and exploitation beyond any kind of
choice of living in harmony with nature. And there’s a great rage
against the feminine in Christian fundamentalism, in our whole way of
life. We have to examine that and have to exorcise it, have to go beyond
it and have to really find the way to the sacred feminine in us.
Otherwise, we are going to be part of this great death dance. That would
be a disaster. Andrew, do you
think that’s why there have been more sightings and visions of Mary?
She’s been coming back…
that’s what my husband , Eryk Hanut’s book called The Road to Guadalupe,
is so brilliantly exploring and it is having a wonderful reception. It’s
really exploring the first great Marian apparition which was in 1531 in
Mexico City when she as a dark, Aztec woman appeared to a very poor
Aztec man and really revealed the essential passion of the mother to
bring all of her children together. And in the last 150 years, from the
1830s onwards, Mary as the Mother has been appearing all over the world.
She’s very often been appearing in tears. She’s been appearing to do two
things. It’s very clear if you put all the messages together, that their
function is dual. On the one hand, she’s giving a completely
unambiguous, naked, fierce, extremely agonized and extremely clear
warning to the whole human race that if we go on living in the way that
we’re living, in a deep secularized way, turned away from God, turned
away from each other, choosing greed and the craziness of ambition and
the craziness of exploitation over harmony, then we will die out and
take most of nature with us in a death dance of unimaginable suffering
and agony. She’s made that very, very clear again and again and again.
But being the Mother
she’s not just simply frightening us, scaring us, warning us, trying to
really wake us up by all means possible. She’s also giving us the way
out. And again and again in the messages, she’s making a very clear and
simple way out available to everybody. She’s saying the way out is
really through three linked things: through turning to the Motherhood of
God in whatever form you really deeply imagine it and to the
Motherhood’s compassion and to the Motherhood’s unconditional love and
asking to be possessed by it, through deep prayer, deep prayer to the
Mother. That really does bring down the grace of the Mother and through
love in action in the world, through really making it a fundamental
commitment to one’s life. Not just to experience the love of the Mother,
not just to experience unity with all beings and with nature, but to
re-orient your whole life to reflect that, to vote to reflect that, to
make the economic choices that you make in your life to reflect that, to
make your food choices reflect that, to make everything that you do
reflect the vision of the Mother. If we can as a race do this, she’s
saying, then there’s tremendous hope. But if we can’t, we are really,
really on a suicidal, self-destructive race to the end of time.
And I think Mary’s
messages are all real. She has time and time again given us indications
that have been proven by history. We’re in a period of total danger,
just as she prophesied and just as she prophesied, so many people are
turning to the Motherhood of God and are very willing now, I think,
ready to do the inner work to embrace the mother. And I think out of the
appalling situation, all kinds of new movements and new kinds of
charities and new kinds of working in the world, new kinds of desire to
save and honor the planet will be born. But we must really work to see
that they are born. And with her grace and with her love in our hearts,
they will be born. And I’m convinced of that and that’s what I’m
dedicating my life to trying to make happen.
Wow. Amazing… what about the interest in
the Black Madonna?
Well I think the interest
in the Black Madonna is absolutely crucial because, very simply, what
the Black Madonna does is bring together two of the aspects of the
feminine that have been traditionally kept apart or even ignored. The
Black Madonna I think of as the symbol in which Virgin Mary meets Kali,
meets the dramatic, destructive, wild goddesses of the East, Kali and
forms of Tara. And in the Black Madonna you have an all-encompassing
symbol of the divine feminine that doesn’t edit out the drama, the
wildness, the fury, ferociousness, the grandeur of destructiveness, the
rage against illusions, the rage against cruelty and injustice that is
also part of the sacred feminine.
I see the Black Madonna as
having fundamentally three different aspects brought together in that
image and which concentrate it and which are the source of its enormous
power. On the one
hand, the Black Madonna is the queen of transcendence. She is the
darkness of the void from which even the light is born. She is the final
mystery which is drawing all things into deeper and deeper union with
it. She is the deep, doubling darkness of Dionysius Areopagite, she is
the formless void at the beginning of the Rig Veda in Hinduism, she is
the darkness of the stream of light... she is the transcendental
mystery. The
second way in which the Black Madonna really intoxicates us is that she
represents the queen of Tantra, the queen of tantric nature, the queen
of all the dark, fertile, gorgeous processes of nature. Many times in
ancient times, the Black Madonna was worshiped by women who wanted to
give birth. And so she presides over tantric sexuality, she presides
over nature, she presides over the wheat fields, she presides over all
the fertile glowing processes that bring growth.
And the third way in
which she really mobilizes our passion is that she presents what I call
the burnt woman. She is the tortured feminine, she is the angry
feminine. She’s the feminine that’s been wounded and humiliated, the
humiliated feminine. And she stands there in all the dignity of her
pain, witnessing that dignity, refusing to be broken, but wearing the
badge of her suffering to remind us of how brutal so many of our ways of
acting are and how brutal we are in the ways we mutilate the feminine,
in our relationships, in our attitude to nature, in the way in which we
condone all kinds of policies that go on raping and destroying nature
and go on sending the species off into the dark.
So the turning by many
people to the Black Madonna at the moment is a turning to the source of
transcendent power that she is. It’s a turning to the tantric vision
that she’s trying to bring through of total interrelationship and of the
consecrated sexuality and of a great, great celebration of nature and of
the creation. And it’s also a decision, a commitment, to see the shadow
of our actions very clearly, to have them made available to us. And have
our own pain, our own secret pain at having the feminine in ourselves so
mutilated, made available to us so that we can claim it and work from
it. Such an enormous symbol and it’s having an overwhelming impact and I
believe in many ways it will be the real symbol under which the recovery
of the Divine Feminine will go forward. It’s no chance that the legend
of Guadalupe is the Black Madonna, after all, she is black. She’s not
the blue-eyed Caucasian Heidi of so many representations. She’s a
sensual, vibrant, powerful, black woman who is clearly a sexual being,
who is powerful in every conceivable way and who will not be put in any
kind of patriarchal box. And this is crucial, because if there’s going
to be a sacred marriage between the true sacred masculine and the true
sacred feminine, the bride must be allowed to be completely herself. She
must be re-imagined in all of her different aspects, her creative
aspects and destructive aspects, her angry aspects, her serene aspects,
they must all be there.
And that’s what I try
to do in my book, The Return of the Mother, bring back all of the
different visions of the mother in all of the different mystical
traditions so that we can have enough information, finally, to turn to
her in the Black Madonna and really see how all of these powers are
operating. I’m convinced that we’re in the crucible of transformation
now, of the Black Madonna and that it’s going to be very hairy but we
will get through if we allow her to do this great birthing work in us.
Magnificent. In a lot of our interviews
they have mentioned the feminine principle returning. There’s more
interest in the goddesses and the goddess energy and in the compassion
and the different elements, the different qualities.
The reason why I am so
passionate for America, why I stay here and why my teaching is here, is
this: I believe the Mother-Father is trying to birth a wholly new
humanity, a humanity that’s going to finally be embodied love on the
earth and really use its technological and biological and industrial
skills to work in harmony with it to create a wholly new kind of world.
I believe that’s what’s in the mind of the Heart Mother and the Heart
Father. And I believe that this birth can only take place in democracy
because in democracy and in the Western world at the moment, there is a
real turning towards the Mother as you described. There is a growing
awareness that the body is sacred. There’s an awareness of the value of
freedom, of individuality, of recognizing the power and potency of the
feminine and of seeing the blessing in all of human variety and
diversity. There’s all this tremendous skill that we have. And only in a
democracy can we really bring all of these skills to bear upon creating
a free world and that’s why I see an enormous movement, a movement which
is really passionate to put mystical insight and knowledge into
practice, which is really hungry to be initiated by the Divine Mother
into her dimension.
I’m going to open up the
whole vision of the return of the feminine in the context of the sacred
marriage and in the context of a tremendous revolution of love that’s
trying to take place on the planet. I’m going to really show how
gorgeous and powerful and transfigured the world could be if this
revolution was allowed to take place and I’m going to try and give the
kinds of practices, the kinds of helpful daily practices that enable,
whatever the path they’re on, to come into more and more empowering
contact with the Divine Mother. So there’s quite a lot on my plate.
Oh, there sure is.
It’s very important work.
And there’s so many people now who realize how important it is. There
are so many wonderful beings on the planet who are doing this work of
bringing the Mother back. I’m not at all unique. I’m part of a whole
movement and I’m thrilled to be part of this movement because I think
it’s the clue to our survival.
You must have been reading my mind. We were just going to ask you, what
kind of daily practices do you do and what do you suggest that we can
do? We’ll I think
it’s very important to have a humble daily, no-nonsense practice. I
think that its absolutely impossible to live in the world if you don’t
put yourself in the way of inspiration by really opening your heart. So
what I say to everybody is please, please don’t fool yourself. Develop a
daily humble practice. I’ve written a book called The Direct Path, in
which, in the second part, I give the 18 most transforming sacred
practices that I myself have found from all of the different traditions
of the world. I explain them in great, calm detail and in such a way
that anybody with good will can do them. These are the ones that operate
on every different level of the spirit and really, really work. You see,
we’re very lucky, in one way, because we have all of the sacred
technology of all of the mystical systems poured out at our feet. If you
go to the Sounds True catalog, for example, you can have teachings of
very specific practical kinds from Taoists and Kabbalists and Christian
mystics and Buddhists. This is tremendous because it enables anybody who
wants to make a really serious spiritual practice tremendous access to
all of the different ways of doing it.
So what I say to people
is this: fundamentally a serious practice has two kinds of practice. It
has cool practices that enable you to calm down in the middle of great
stress, that bring the peace of being to you. And these cool practices
are image-less meditation, breathing meditation, kinds of visualization
that stress peace and calm and very often, chanting can help you calm
your whole being. You have to find the cool practices that really work
on you and of course meditation itself, just sitting and witnessing your
thoughts. But you don’t just need cool practices because if you just
have cool practices, you’ll chill out too much and you’ll be, as my prep
school headmaster used to say, to heavenly to be of any earthly use. So
you also need what I call warm practices. These are fundamentally
practices of the heart. The kind of heart practices that I do are saying
a mantra of the name of God in the heart. This is a very passionate
practice if you say it with your whole being. Doing a meditation of the
heart as being filled with divine fire is incredibly powerful, to try
and keep your heart inspired and open and naked and vibrant.
So I say to people,
please explore different practices because not everybody will be infused
by the same practices. Explore cool practices and explore warm practices
and then choose three of each, say, that really work for you in every
circumstance and keep trucking. Don’t ever, ever give up.
The most important
piece of advice about practices was given to me by my Tibetan master and
he said three absolutely earthshaking things that have really helped me.
First of all, he said don’t treat meditation as a kind of gymnastics. It
is not about achievement. It is about alertly letting go and staying
transparent to the moment. Then he said the most wonderful way of
meditating that he’d ever found was to imagine that you are, when you
meditate, a great lump of butter left out in the sun. Just let the sun
of your essential nature come in and warm you and you will melt away
into your deep self and feel the spaciousness and the generosity and the
peace and the glowing truth of your deep self. And then he said
something which is so important and people tend to forget. It’s just
that the results of practice are very rarely felt within practice
itself. You think you’re having not a particularly inspiring meditation
session, but then later in the day you find yourself suddenly being much
calmer, much clearer about something. In other words, don’t look for
sensational experiences in practice. Don’t look for suddenly diving into
peace and deep, deep quiet. Of course, that can come. But don’t expect
it. Be aware that as you practice daily, day in and day out, that what
you’re doing is really cleaning the mirror of your heart so that reality
can reflect itself much more clearly. And you will absolutely,
certainly, see the results of all the practice that you do in a greater
degree of calm, in a greater degree of precision, in a greater degree
concentration, in a greater degree of compassion in your life. I think
those three pieces of advice are very important for people. Because they
really do stress the necessity for practice and really do show how it
actually works and how best to do it.
But don’t expect an outcome. There will be
outcomes, but don’t have expectations.
Not in the practice
itself. It will happen afterwards in your life. Again, ever since I’ve
said this to people and passed on this wonderful piece of advice, you
can’t imagine what a relief it is because then instead of always looking
for results in your practice, you start to really look at the way in
which the texture of your whole life has changed, which is the whole
meaning of practice. That’s very
true. It opens it up more. We’ve realized that since we’ve been doing
more, being more consciously aware of our spiritual practice and living
it, breathing it, working it and doing it daily.
Exactly. In my travels,
I’m giving what I consider to be the five most powerful Mother practices
that will help anybody if they truly want to be in constant connection
with the Motherhood of God so that the fusion of Father and Mother and
transcendence of heart and mind and soul and body and action and prayer
can happen within them.
Excellent. You’re just so interesting to talk to.
Thank you! I’m delighted
to talk to you. I think this is just wonderful moment, don’t you?
Oh, it’s magnificent!
We’ve had all the masks
peeled away and that’s great because here we are facing each other and
there’s so much work to do and there’s still time to get it done, but we
really must mobilize everything now in a very inspired, calm, hopeful,
joyful way.
Knowing that the Mother will help us if only we help ourselves by
turning to the sacred feminine, to be infused and inspired at every
level. Absolutely! We are going
to continue with cleaning the mirror of our hearts. We just love that
phrase. I think
we all do. I need a lot of cleaning too. I think that’s the most
important thing, is to be humble on this path and to realize that we’ll
be working until we take our last breath. It’s very important just to
keep trucking. So we get out the
cosmic Windex and we work on that!
Yes, indeed.
It’s been such a delight having you teach
us more about what we need to know. I have another question. How can you
maintain being spiritually connected when you live in Las Vegas?
Las Vegas is a wonderfully
spiritual city. You’ve got to see it with the eyes of love and you see
all kinds of spiritual things. For example, it’s fun, which is a very
spiritual quality. Fantastically unreal. It’s very honest about it’s
dishonesty. Most cities are very dishonest about their dishonesty. Las
Vegas. What you see is definitely what you get.
And, it’s playful!
And it’s playful. It’s
such a relief. My work is so intense and so serious that it’s actually a
great relief to live in a very silly place.
It’s got its other side,
of course, but the great thing about Las Vegas is it’s surrounded by the
desert. So it has this overwhelming powerhouse of energy around it. You
can be in the desert and surrounded by ageless peace.
There’s a praying altar right in front of
Caesar’s Palace.
Yes and also the Divine Mother as Mary is appearing there in a small
Mexican house in a very run down part of Vegas. The statute is weeping.
Many quiet miracles have taken place. Nobody’s making any money from it.
It’s an authentic vision. There is a lot going on and there is a
tremendous spirituality. We tend to take spirituality too seriously. Fun
and joy are also part of it. Play for goodness sakes!
We like the fun and joy part of it.
The Mother is bringing
ecstasy, she’s bringing joy, she’s bringing dance, she’s bringing
celebration. God knows Las Vegas is good at all of those things.
We like to have fun.
I think that the great joy
of the Mother will be when we have fun in doing justice, have fun in
feeding the poor, when we have fun in housing the poor. And the greatest
fun in life, after all, is to give in such as way that really changes
the situations of others and really protects the animals and protects
nature. That’s the greatest fun of all. Think of it. What fun we would
have if we lived in a sane and generous world.
You’ve given us so many wonderful pearls
of wisdom. What last pearl would you like to leave with us today?
Believe in the Motherhood
of God. Really find your own way to make connection with that
Motherhood. Learn to open in love and to see all of reality as a
manifestation of the Divine and to love all of reality with a great
sacred passion and commitment to protect all beings and honor and guard
and celebrate all beings.
Beautiful. Thank you so much Andrew.
Andrew Harvey’s website is
http://www.andrewharvey.net.
|
