The Sacred Activism of Heart Yoga
An Interview with Andrew
Harvey
by Michael Bertrand
Michael Bertrand (MB): Andrew it's great to talk with you once again. You’ve been working with two books: a new one coming out called Heart Yoga, and of course the one on sacred activism--The Hope. So, you've been very busy and trying, I guess, to find some tools for us all to help ourselves face up to what’s going on in the world as it is.
Andrew Harvey (AH): Well, the two books are deeply interconnected. With sacred activism I really try to lay out in as clear a way as I can what I believe to be the great birth happening through the great death that we're enduring. I believe we are living through periods of the dark night of the species and just as the mystics know the dark night prepares a whole new level of divine consciousness, so as we progress through this shattering, this searing and terrible process of disintegration that we're living through, what I deeply believe is that a new human race will be born from it, and that this new human race will be one that embodies divine peace, divine passion, divine love in sacred action on every level of the world.
This is the meaning of the words "sacred activism", and that is profoundly the marriage of the two most noble fires in the human heart and soul—the fire of the mystic’s passion for God and the fire of the activist’s passion for justice. When these two fires come together they birth a third fire, which is the sacred evolutionary fire of the Sacred Marriage, the fire of love and wisdom in action.
It is this third fire that is the heart fire of sacred activism and also of the new ancient yoga that Karuna and I have created. Heart Yoga is the marriage of traditional yoga with sacred mystical practices that enable the light energy of the divine to be born in the body. In my book The Hope I say it's really essential now for everyone who wants to be a midwife of the birth to have four essential kinds of practice in the core of their life: cool practices that calm and unite you with the peace of divine being; hot practices that ignite you with the passion of divine becoming; a prayer practice that can always align you with the Beloved; and—most importantly of all I think for our time—body practices that enable the divine light to descend into the body to empower, illumine and wake up its essential light energies to birth the divine in matter.
This fourth practice is I think the clue for us, because what's trying to be born is a divine humanity that embodies radical compassion in action. Because of my profound belief that this embodied divine consciousness is trying to be born in us I’ve been working over five years in secret with a great yogini—Karuna Erickson—to marry traditional yoga with the light practices of the mystical traditions that can help all yoga practitioners everywhere take their practice to the next level so they can use a renewed, restored, renovated and reinvigorated yoga as the crucible for the birth of the divine in matter at this moment when everything is telling us that unless we birth the divine in matter in our hearts, minds and bodies, we will simply not be strong or illumined enough to do the great work of birth.
If we do, then we can become a conscious instrument of the birthing energies of the Mother/Father and participate in the most glorious and massive transformation that the human race has ever gone through, to take an evolutionary leap into our future destiny which I believe is nothing less than to be co-creators with the divine of a new world.
MB: Well, that's quite a prescription for what we need.
AH: It’s very clear now that we cannot solve the problems with our shadow exploding everywhere from the patriarchal consciousness addicted to power and transcendence.
We now need interconnection with the deepest vision of the mystical traditions, which is the one of the sacred marriage of heaven and earth, heart and mind, soul and body, prayer and action and to let this tremendous vision that's at the heart of all the serious and noble mystical traditions infuse us with its sacred passion, peace and power.
If we can do this, and we can because there are hundreds of thousands of people who realize it and are practicing this at this moment, then we can birth a new humanity. The yoga that Karuna and I have created—one which has behind it all the major spiritual teachers—Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Caroline Myss and all of the major yoga teachers—Shiva Ray, Seane Corn, Rodney Yee, Judith Lassiter—is I believe one of the most important tools of this birth. There are 50 million people now practicing yoga and if they can come to the vision that we have presented in this book of this marriage through using yoga in this renewed way—presented as a crucible of the divine birth in matter—then the possibilities are limitless.
I am also working on a book with Gabrielle Roth to fuse her extraordinary vision of the Five Rhythms that govern the cosmos and the coming of the divine with the five stages of Rumi’s ascent to divine love. This is going to be my way of opening up the sacred dance community with Gabrielle to helping make sacred dance as well as yoga a crucible for the divine birth. This will be the next book—it will make a trilogy that I hope helps people in both the most exalted and most practical ways to start becoming midwives of this birth in the core of our burning reality.
MB: In order for humanity to not go down the drain and take the rest of creation with it, we need to have some sense of the purpose of being here with all the other sentient beings on this planet. We have to transcend this ego-based world that seems to want to force us back into being nothing but consumers and people that don't have their hearts opened enough, and have the strength to work with and from the heart.
AH: Well, unless we do take the enormous menace of our potential extinction as a challenge to go through a radical divine transformation that embodies us as servants of divine love in the world, we will die out. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that none of the problems we are facing can be solved in any way from our existing ego consciousness and our existing addiction to power and holy crazed celebration of materialism, consumerism and a debased vision of science.
If we persist in this addiction to control that governs our actions we will die out and take out a large part of nature with us, leaving nothing but a devastated, smoking, burning world as a memory of our presence on the earth. This would be an appalling tragedy, but most of all would be an appalling waste of an extreme crisis. When extreme crisis hits anyone on the authentic mystical path they know that it’s sent to them by the Beloved as an immense challenge to go deeper and deeper into the core of divine love and divine consciousness.
This extreme crisis that we've manifested through our lust for power and domination of nature I believe is an evolutionary crisis that we were destined to pass through and that is, when understood from the deepest mystical levels, not something to be afraid of or disturbed by, nor something to be embittered or driven into paralysis, despair and cynicism by, but something to embrace so to surrender more deeply to the divine and take up the challenge of the great traditions of the sacred marriage to start embodying that on earth.
If we can see the crisis in that way an enormous hope is born in us. This is why I called the book on sacred activism The Hope. This hope is nothing less than knowing this crisis is a dark night of the species destined to compel us to take a great evolutionary leap forward. When you've seen and known that, when you’ve understood and innerstood it, when you’ve connected the enormous global crisis with the truths of the great mystical traditions that are compelling us to die to the agenda of the ego into the radiance of divine love, then you know this crisis is not the prelude to the end of humanity but actually the birth canal of a new humanity.
So I am urging all mystics and spiritual people and activists who are pursuing justice everywhere to realize what this spiritual crisis really is and to start doing the serious, beautiful, frightening, grueling but marvelous work of calling upon the divine to awaken their minds to illumination, their hearts to sacred rapture and their bodies to divine strength, so that in this unified force field of the sacred marriage we can be born into our divine identity and start working with divine help and divine wisdom to transform our apocalyptic nightmare into a new kind of grace.
MB: What is your meaning when you say the word "divine"?
AH: Well, I have to speak as a mystic and what I mean by it is that everyone is born with an original blessing of divine consciousness. All the mystical traditions proclaim this with one voice, and when you wake up you realize your innate consciousness is radically non-dual with the light consciousness that is creating and engendering all the world. The entire universe is created out of a pulsing dynamic light, love, bliss, knowledge consciousness—Sat-chit-ananda—and everything that exists is a crystallization of this light consciousness in matter. The ‘father’ has been described in the great Hindu traditions as a transcendent light and the ‘mother’ as the shining of that light that is embodied in every single sentient creature, every rock and tree and leaf. The entire universe is a divine manifestation and human beings are the peculiarly privileged locus of that because they have been given, as a primordial blessing from the divine, a divine consciousness which is everyone’s duty on this earth to realize and embody.
I was fortunate enough to interview the Dalai Lama on the day he won the Nobel Prize in Oslo. At the end of the interview I found the guts to ask him, eyeball to eyeball, what is the meaning of life. He roared with laughter, flung his head back and then became extremely focused and serious and said, “The meaning of life is to embody the transcendent.”
The divine is everywhere, it is in everything, and it can be uncovered through a long and arduous journey at the core of every human being. It’s the duty now I believe of every human being to go through whatever they need to go through to realize the truth of this divine consciousness being the fundamental essence of reality and of their being. When they do have that all-transforming experience, they will then be driven to embody the laws of love, compassion and justice of that consciousness in everything that they are, that they think, and that they do.
MB: So your books are trying to point us in that direction and we're not talking about someone going to sit in the Himalayas and studying Tibetan Buddhism for twenty-five years.
AH: No, we don’t have time for that. But what I and a lot of other mystics have become conscious of is that in the horror of our nightmare there is also present a torrential divine grace, a divine life that is descending on us to give us the power, if we want to awaken, at a quite extraordinary level of truth and intensity.
Everything is speeding up in our world including the ability to awaken. So anyone who turns up now and asks the Beloved to be transformed and chooses any of the really authentic paths to that transformation will be given a massive, massive influx of grace. The divine wants the transformation—wants the birth of the divine in matter—and is allowing this crisis to ferment because it knows it is the potentially evolutionary gate into a new humanity. It is time for everybody to wake up to this and do the work and to risk the transformation and start becoming, in their own way with their own resources and passions and from their own religious positions, sacred activist people who are willing to put love, justice and compassion into action.
MB: One of the things that you say in Heart Yoga is that it's essential to dedicate our practice.
AH: Yes. One of the things I learned from Sogyal Rinpoche and from the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan masters that I worked with when I co-wrote the book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is the great truth that the Mahayana represents which is that before you begin and when you end your practice you dedicate all the merits of it to the liberation of all sentient beings from fear and pain and ignorance.
This takes you out of the ego and any self-absorption and give you the real truth of sacred practice and the sacred mystical journey, which is you're not doing it for yourself alone or taking the journey for yourself alone. You’re practicing for the whole of humanity and taking the journey for the whole of humanity.
The greatest mystical practice I know is a Tibetan one—Tonglen—where you learn how to take on the pain of the world and address the pain of the world before the glory, passion, peace and compassion of your own essential divine nature—your Buddha or Christ nature.
Recently I had an absolutely unforgettable experience of the power of this practice. I was in South Africa and I was dying. I had an exploded gall bladder and I knew I was within hours of actually leaving my body. But in that experience I was extremely calm, through God's grace, and I found myself doing Tonglen and dedicating the enormous suffering that I was in to healing the suffering of the planet. The experience of that, when you are in extreme circumstances, is very ennobling and gives tremendous hope because even in that extremity, when you know you could be dying, through the merit of dedicating your practice you also know your pain can be dedicated to helping and relieving the pain of humanity. It is a very powerful practice, the most powerful.
We put this at the core of Heart Yoga because we want our book to be not a book that imposes any more the kind of narcissism and self-absorption that characterizes so much of the new age exploration of mysticism and a great deal of the contemporary practice of yoga. We are serious about Heart Yoga being a principle for divine humanity and we are serious about the necessity of dedicating practice in this way so as to help people out of the pit of their self-absorption and narcissism into realizing just how powerful practice can be as a way of radiating compassionate love energy to the entire world and to all sentient beings.
MB: Right. So as you—and of course all sorts of contemporary teachers—have said many times, the whole point is to get out of the tyranny of the ego consciousness, to let it go and surrender.
AH: Yes, I think yoga is a wonderful way of learning how to surrender. The body is essentially crystallized light energy. I think we know this from all the mystical traditions and we now know it from modern physics. And anyone who starts to awaken begins to experience this in the most radiant way. If you practice yoga knowing that your body is crystallized light energy and bring into your practice the kinds of mystical light practices that we have given in this book, then your surrender is to the essential light consciousness of the universe, the essential divine consciousness that is animating and living in and creating all things, and through the practice of yoga you can realize that surrender leads to ecstatic joy.
In our book we have really devoted ourselves to the five transcendent joys of the Sacred Marriage and these are the joys that will come to you when you surrender in practice to the essential light energy of your body and to the light energy that is trying to empower you at deeper and deeper levels.
MB: Can you quickly outline those five or is that the whole book?
AH: The whole book is the really the unraveling and flowering of these five transcendent joys that we imagine as the five rays of sacred marriage consciousness from the sun. I think if you really want to explore the depth of what we're trying to say, I think you would need to engage with the whole of the book because it took us five years to create this yoga, and a long time to write the book in exactly the way that we wanted to get it out.
But the five transcendent joys are:
So when, through the practice of Heart Yoga, you unite the joy of transcendence with the joy of creation with the joy of love for all sentient beings with the joy of a tantric rapturous connection with all living beings in new and vibrant sacred relationship with the joy of putting all of those joys into sacred action, then you can over time become the divine human, a being living a divine human life on earth consciously and humbly and with great gratitude and commitment.
MB: Presumably in this situation we’re in, this is about the only way we're going to get through this – if enough of us live these truths in a real way.
AH: There is no other way now. I think the depths of the crisis as an evolutionary crisis is compelling us to see that this is our only way through. You can put it like that and it sounds rather grim, but why not put it that here at last are the conditions for a massive transformation of humanity. A crisis we cannot escape united with a coming in of a tremendous vision of divine embodiment which will help us not only to transcend the crisis but to use it as a way of birthing a wholly new kind of humanity which can create with the divine a wholly new way of being and doing everything.
When you look at the crisis from the position of the ego all you can see is horror, terror, madness and the potential extinction of the human race and nature, and all you can feel is terror, despair and doubt. But when you look at it from the calm and lucid passionate self, you can see this crisis is actually a huge terrible grace that is summoning all of us to finally become serious and transformed enough to be co-creators with God.
MB: Your passion and commitment are so appreciated. I know you've gone through many hard times yourself to come to these places that you can live them and share them with us, and we're very grateful to you for this.
AH: I’ve learned to bless the hardest times. It is our deaths that lead to our resurrections and our agonies that lead to our deepest joys, and it is our strippings and burnings that enable us to at last become humble enough to incarnate the divine. So I know from the very harsh and sometimes very frightening and terrifying journey that I’ve been on that there is a great hope for those who see the pain, suffering, madness and unbelievable bewilderment that can happen as gateways into a wholly new way of being and doing everything. I have lived this. It has lived me. And what I'm saying is not said theoretically. I know that for all my flaws and faults and failures and mistakes--and perhaps partly through them—that the divine is living in me in a way that it could not be had I not gone through the ordeals that I’ve had. Each of the ordeals is precious and sacred to me.
Rumi wrote: “The grapes of my body can only become wine after the wine-maker tramples me.” The whole human race is now going through that sacred trampling and those of us who know the secret of the dark night through grace can say to everyone to allow that trampling to press out your own most sacred wine of divine love and compassion, and the passion to put it into sacred action.
MB: I find that the greatest enemy to this in my life is a comfortable complacency that we in the rich west sometimes have.
AH: That comfortable complacency is doomed. The whole world is about to be shaken by a crisis that will make it impossible for anyone, even cocooned and privileged, not to be burnt to their roots by what is happening. Only those I think who have truly surrendered to the Beloved will be awake to this alchemy that the Beloved is asking of us. That is why these great truths of death and resurrection, of the dark night and the new level of embodied power that come from it, now need to be given to everyone because everyone is going to need them.
MB: And everyone needs to have not just a vision of what a true human being is, but as you're offering in your book on Heart Yoga, they need to have experience of it.
AH: Everybody who really is awake to what's happening needs to realize there is one duty before everyone who is awakening and that is to become, as soon as possible, a midwife of the birth that is taking place through this death. Everyone can do it. My work and that of all those who are really serving this birth on the earth now is about giving people the practical tools to do this. If I can begin to do it with all my failings there is nobody who can’t do it if they’re sincere. The Beloved is waiting for millions of sincere seekers to be brave enough to go through this transformation.
MB: And everyone needs to have not just a vision of what a true human being is, but as you're offering in your book on Heart Yoga, they need to have experience of it.
AH: Everybody who really is awake to what's happening needs to realize there is one duty before everyone who is awakening and that is to become, as soon as possible, a midwife of the birth that is taking place through this death. Everyone can do it. My work and that of all those who are really serving this birth on the earth now is about giving people the practical tools to do this. If I can begin to do it with all my failings there is nobody who can’t do it if they’re sincere. The Beloved is waiting for millions of sincere seekers to be brave enough to go through this transformation.
MB: The Beloved. That’s a word we can almost become immune to. What is it? This is something that we experience through practice and surrender presumably.
AH: I don't think we just experience it through practice. I think everyone has had an experience of the Beloved, even if they don't call it by that name. Every time you make love to someone you truly love and experience the union with them in rapture, that is a taste of the holiness and love of the Beloved. Every time you look at a flower and are dazzled by its beauty, that is the Beloved's beauty you are looking at. Every time music awakens you to ecstatic joy, that is a taste of the joy of the Beloved. So Beloved is everything and everywhere and at the core of every experience. Every time you suffer deeply and your suffering takes you to a new level of compassion you are beginning to taste the unconditional compassion of the Beloved.
So I believe that everybody’s had dreams in which the Beloved has taken them to new levels of love. I believe everyone’s had experiences that have awoken them in the core of their lives to the deep joy, peace and rapture that underlie everything, and now I think it is everybody’s responsibility to awaken to the source of that and start adoring, longing and hungering for the Beloved, going through whatever they need to… to more and more embody it.
MB: It's the embodiment that will give people the energy to move through what is ahead of us and what is already happening now in many places.
AH: Yes, without the embodiment—nothing. Without bringing the realization of the embodiment into the cells of the body—nothing. Without realizing that we are not invited simply to speculate about the Beloved in the mind and not just to experience it in the deepest raptures of the heart but actually to embody the transcendence as the Dalai Lama said in a living experience of the presence of God within every cell of our body and in an actual coring out of that experience in sacred action—nothing. Without this the world will die out—and with it all human beings will be transformed.
MB: In Vancouver we're currently having an early spring and there's cherry blossoms everywhere on all the streets. It's the most amazing expression of the beauty and unselfish giving nature of the universe.
AH: Yes. And we have to give that love back, to embody it and put it into action. It isn't hard to grasp. It’s hard to do, but it’s not impossible. All of the great mystics have shown us the way and we have on the earth people who are doing it so splendidly.
Look at His Holiness the Dalai Lama who continues to radiate absolute cheerfulness, joy and compassion, even from the heart of a long genocide. Look at Jane Goodall who with all she knows about the horrific way we are treating animals nevertheless never loses hope, and whenever she speaks radiates the confidence that we can overcome our addictions and start living in peace with the animal race. Look at Nelson Mandela who came out of 27 years of imprisonment not with words of blame or anger but with a whole program of reconciliation that gave South Africa a decade of grace, a decade of breathing, in which it could begin its reconstruction after years and years of horror.
We have on our earth now people who are embodying the transcendence in the most noble way, and there are thousands and thousands of so-called ordinary people who are doing this. I've met many of them—one of the great beauties of the work I do is to be able to meet them. I’ve met young women who are working with widows in India; young men who’ve been seized by the love of the Christ and are working with the homeless; middle aged ladies who suddenly wake up to the horror of the world and start corralling all their friends to help schoolchildren in Africa. The army of the lovers is very great and now it needs to come together. That's why I've written my books, The Hope - A Guide to Sacred Activism and Heart Yoga, because I know that in the world as it is now are millions of beings who only wait for a clear vision with practical instructions and a way of organizing themselves to be able to put into practice a global revolution of love in action.
MB: Thank you, so much, for doing this and for embodying this energy yourself and laying out what you see as some simple paths for us to work with, to be who we can be, and to let the earth and its human population come into where it needs to be.
AH: Thank you too, Michael, for all the work you do.