Andrew Harvey

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Today Harvey lives in San Francisco with the French photographer Eryk Hanut, to whom he was recently married (he cites Mother Meera's opposition to the same-sex union as the beginning of the end of his relationship with her). He is focusing on the Christian mystical tradition, partly because, as he puts it, 'I've come to see that the human mandala is incomplete without combining the peace and serenity of the Void--the Eastern contribution--with Love and Charity.'

Not that Harvey is any fonder of the church than he is of gurudom. 'The institutional church has been a disaster,' he asserts. 'It's as if it had been created to block the path to Christ--Christ as mother, as the sacred androgyne. The Christ who said, You must have the same relation I do with the Source: a wild, burning, sacrificial love.'

Harvey insists that by 'unmediated' spirituality he doesn't mean solitary seeking. 'You absolutely need a community spiritual friends and guides,' he says. 'The guru thing is different--it is adoring a human being as God. It keeps people infantile, it keeps them slaves; it siphons off the sacred energy that needs to be poured into social justice and politics.'

And for Harvey, the need to pour out that energy is as urgent as any divine message. 'This is a terminal civilization,' he says. 'We have perhaps twenty years to find a new way of being in the world. Yet there is one light, one love, and it is here, now, creating everything. It should be easy to communicate with it. Why do we give our power away?'

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