Andrew Harvey
Utne Reader
Andrew Harvey is one of the most eloquent, flambouyant and
complex of contemporary spiritual writers. Poet, novelist,
autobiographer (A Journey to Ladakh), and anthologist, the
Indian-born and Oxford-educated Harvey has walked and written of
Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, and Christian spiritual paths, while
cleaving to a vision of what he calls the Sacred Feminine he
cultivates a style that bears all the passion and quirkiness of a
latter-day Oscar Wilde in a quest for oneness with the Divine.'I'm a recovering guruholic,' says poet, novelist, lecturer, and
spiritual autobiographer Andrew Harvey with a laugh. It's shorthand
for the journey he's taken since ceasing to be a devotee of the
Indian-born and German-based spiritual teacher known as Mother
Meera, whose followers are convinced she's a divinity in human
form.
Harvey's 1991 book, A Spiritual Awakening, illumined his
then-passionate discipleship to Meera with all the icy fire of the
high tradition of mystical writing; A Journey in Ladakh
(1983) recounted an earlier discipleship, to the Tibetan Buddhist
master Thuksey Rinpoche. (Harvey also collaborated with Sogyal
Rimpoche on the popular Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,
published in 1993.) Today, however, he tells his fellow spiritual
seekers that 'we've got to get out of the guru box,' and he speaks
and writes for 'a direct, unmediated relationship with the
divine.'
It's a simple credo from a complex man. Born in 1952 in India of
an English mother and a part-Indian father, Harvey became, at 21,
the youngest-ever Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Life as a
flamboyantly brilliant young scholar who wrote confessional poetry
and threw fabulous parties masked deepening spiritual pain, and in
1977 he returned to the country of his birth as a pilgrim. It was
the beginning of a journey into Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism--and
into 'the guru box' and out.
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?'