HIGHLIGHTS
(full interview follows)"At a time that is as dreadful and challenging as this, the greatest courage we need is to plunge into our Divine nature and start to live it out with its fearlessness and truth and passion for justice on every level and in every realm of the world."
"This narcissism and these shadows that afflict both the activist and the mystic can only really be healed when the fire of the mystic’s passion for God is united with the fire of the activist’s passion for justice to form a third fire, which is Divine love and wisdom in action.""This radical transformation of human nature...can only take place when people really risk the death into life, the dark night of the soul, the stripping and burning down of the agendas and illusions of the ego."
"What is called for is a wholly new level of power. And this power does not belong to the ego, it cannot be wielded by the ego, it cannot be streamed by the ego and it can only stream through someone who has died into life."
"Because we have not been allowed to believe in the holiness of our sexuality and in the holiness of the desires of our love, many of us have given ourselves over to mindless promiscuity which makes the birth of the authentic tantra impossible...
"The sexual meaninglessness of the gay world is now a kind of epidemic where people pretend to be living wildly liberated lives, but are in fact living lives in which energy is being leaked off at every level, in lives without any authentic connection."
"All these years of sexual, so called sexual liberation, haven't really gone down deep enough to heal the self-loathing and sense of isolation and sense of meaninglessness and sense of desperation that, unfortunately, we as homosexuals have inherited."
"The very people who need the direct connection with the direct Beloved, beyond dogma, are prevented by their own wild and completely justifiable rage at religion from using the pain that they have been through to help them plunge into an authentic spiritual path."
"Gay people, in their search for their legitimate rights, come across as
spoiled and entitled and consumerist in their vision of reality instead of
placing their claiming of these rights in a much larger, more powerful
context."
"If you follow your heartbreak, what you will find at the core of the heartbreak is a fountain of burning and deathless passion that will never run dry."
"The more we see gay people emerging with this kind of broad generosity of soul and wild commitment to transformation and profound love and compassion for all beings and justice for all beings, the more the fears of the straight community about gay people will be healed."
"As victims of separation and victims of division and as victims of unbelievable cruelty, it is up to us to really manifest the kind of compassion, the kind of all embracing understanding and the kind of commitment to love that will truly transform others. Take the darkness we’ve been given and transform it into golden light."
Click below to read MyOutSpirit's entire interview with Andrew Harvey.
A Third Fire
Rev.
Tom Cummiskey for MyOutSpirit: Your new book is called THE HOPE: A GUIDE
TO SACRED ACTIVISM. Between war, the economic downturn and the difficulty
of ongoing struggles for equality, justice and human rights around the world,
it’s a challenging time to be hopeful. Where do we find the strength to
hope?
Andrew
Harvey:
We find the strength to hope that is not threatened by external circumstances,
when you discover the truths of the truths of all the mystical traditions that
all say with one voice that at the core of every human being is Divine
Consciousness and that the meaning of life is to uncover and embody this
consciousness. Rumi says this most
beautifully I think when he says,
“The
Wine of Divine Grace is limitless. All limits come
from the faults of the cup. Moonlight floods the whole sky
from
horizon to horizon; How much can it fill your room depends on its
windows. Grant a great dignity my friend to the cup of your
life. Eternal love has designed it
to
hold its eternal wine.”
That poem is six lines only and comes from his work the
Mathnawi, but it contains the essence of the essence of the instruction and
revelation and experience of all the traditions that the wine of Divine grace
is always pouring in every event. In pain as well as in joy, in chaos as well
as in order.
There is an alchemy of grace going on at every moment and that you
can come to learn this and the great boundless unconditional mercy that
is prompting it, the great unconditional love that is sustaining it, when you go
on the mystical journey and really experience the beloved inwardly.
The “whole sky” he says is flooded with
moonlight from horizon to horizon, and what he is referring to is the
experience that comes on the path. And it comes to Hopis’ and to Yamamami’s and
Buddhists and Hindus and Christians and those of us who are independent
mystics. And when you have polished the mirror of the heart enough and you have
the experience that the entire universe is actually a manifestation of blazing
Divine white light--the moonlight--that all the stars and nebulae and all the
creations of nature are all energy condensations of a light consciousness which
is the Divine bliss, “knowledge awareness consciousness,” and that which is the
original blessing of the core of every human being. And how much you can experience this depends
as he says, on the windows of your room.
If you have a room without windows this torrential light cannot come
in. If you have a room with only
dogmatic windows, the windows will be narrow and will only let a little of that
light in. But if you really pursue a
wholehearted, whole soul, whole spirited, whole minded mystical path of a
universal nature then one day with the grace of the beloved you will have a kind
of Phillip Johnson house with glass walls, and this light, revealing the sacredness of everything revealing the
holiness of the whole in nature your own essential union with the Divine nature
and the core of consciousness will flood your whole being and you will realize
the truth of the last two lines, “Grant a great dignity my friend to the cup of your life. Eternal love has designed it to hold its eternal
wine.”
So the great hope is that enough people will take this
tremendous journey inspired by the mystics of all traditions at this terrible
time and uncover the radiance and passion and power of the Divine Consciousness
and start enacting it. The other great
hope I think is linked to that. And that
is, that all those who discover this consciousness, discover and uncover that
its essential nature is love.
I once asked the Dalai Lama what is the meaning of life?
And he threw his head back and roared with laughter, “The meaning of life is to
embody the transcendent.”
To bring this great consciousness down into your mind, soul
and body and to start acting with the full passion, the full wisdom, the full
generosity, and the full tenderness and the full compassion of your whole
nature in reality to embody transcendent love consciousness in acts of
justice. This is the source of a very
great hope because when you do start working directly with the Divine
consciousness you are given the blessing of the Divine and some of the
extraordinary miraculous power of the Divine. And this extraordinary miraculous
power can effect very great and very surprising and very mysterious change even
in terrible circumstances.
Robert Kennedy said in 1966, "Each time a person stands up for
an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against
injustice, he or she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other
from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a
current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
And Jesus in
the Gospel of Thomas said, “Those who are united with the will of God can move
mountains.”
So I think
those two different facets of the same Divine revelation at the core of human
nature are what gives me hope.
Pythagoras said, “Take courage for human nature is Divine.” And at a time that is as dreadful and
challenging and menacing as this, the greatest courage we need is to plunge
into our Divine nature and start to live it out with its fearlessness and truth
and passion for justice on every level and in every realm of the world.
MOS:
How do you explain the difference between activism and Sacred Activism?
AH:
I have a great admiration for all those who stand up for the craziness of the
world. I have a great admiration for all those who realize that we are on a
suicidal death trip and want to reverse as quickly and as urgently as possible
all the various addictions and undo all the various systems of evil that are
destroying human beings and nature. But
I have come through my own experience to understand that both mystics and
activists, as they are now, have serious and limiting shadows.
The
mystic shadow is an addiction to transcendence, an addiction to the light—a
forgetting of the responsibilities of mystic consciousness to compassion and
justice, and to cherishing and sustaining the real world. So many mystics, especially in the new age,
use their mystical experiences as a kind of “subtle heroin” to sign-off from
responsibility to the burning world and justify their obscene passivity and
addiction to bliss experiences as great wisdom, which is great blindness.
Many
of the activists I know, and I admire their nobility and their fierceness and
their commitment, are also in their own narcissism and shadow. This narcissism
and shadow expresses itself as a divided consciousness which is very often
rooted in anger but projects the unacknowledged shadow of the activist himself
or herself onto the demonic other, and that leads very often to messiah complexes,
great outrage, offending others by brutal condemnation of them, and tragically,
despair and burnout, in the face of the very exhausting task of transforming
the world so hell-bent on destruction.
So
what I’ve come to understand is that this narcissism and these shadows that
afflict both the activist and the mystic can only really be healed when the
fire of the mystic’s passion for God is united with the fire of the activist’s
passion for justice to form a third
fire, which is Divine love and wisdom in action.
And
when this third fire is ignited, the shadow of the mystic is healed by the
passion of the activist for justice. And the mystics’ temptation to passivity
and the mystics’ temptation to go off into the light and forget the
responsibilities of the world and not to put love into action are healed by the
activists’ passion for just action. And the activists shadow of divisiveness,
of burnout, messiah complexes etc is healed by the mystical wisdom and peace
and deep, deep union with the Divine and deep union with the sources of
strength the Divine can provide.
So
this third fire breeds a new kind of activism.
It breeds an activism that flows naturally and profoundly, and wisely,
from deep sacred consciousness, deep alignment with the beloved, deep surrender
to the will of the beloved, and deep opening on every level of the being,
(heart, soul, mind, and body) to the light and truths of the Divine and to it’s
mysterious will of transformation in reality.
An
activism like this has four main characteristics that make it pliable and
supple to the Divine will and to the Divine power and to the great, great
strength of the flow to the being from the Divine.
The first
characteristic is that it roots itself in sacred practice. It really takes seriously the truth that is
enshrined in all the mystical traditions, that what makes an action in the end
most profoundly effective, both inwardly and outwardly, is the truth of its
compassionate intention and the wisdom that prompts it.
The second
characteristic of such an activism is that it truly surrenders its actions to
the will of the Divine love and the hunger for transformation in our world, and in so
doing it becomes wise, patient, generous, and compassionate, and feeds directly
from the power of the Divine so that it never runs out of energy. This is very important.
The third
characteristic of Sacred Activism is that it really takes shadow work seriously. Both the activists and mystics I know suffer
from a lack of grueling and rigorous shadow work.
Mystics
tend to want to drop the shadow and just think of the Divine as the light,
whereas in fact, the Divine is a dance of opposites of light and darkness given
what we call good, what we call evil, chaos and order. And without really embracing what we call the
dark side of the Divine, you can never have an integrated experience of the
One. And activists that I know very
often project their own failings and their own unacknowledged shadow on others
thus condemning others, dividing themselves from others, and producing a
rhetoric that is so harsh that it puts off the very people that they want to
persuade.
A
very good example of this is the way that the environmental movement, for all
its just knowledge of how we are destroying the planet has failed to arouse the
world because it uses very often a very divisive and very angry rhetoric. And
another example is the animal rights.
PETA’s philosophy is magnificent, but its practice has alienated
millions of people who truly love animals but are outraged at the violence of
the tactics that PETA uses. So, without
this kind of grueling shadow work in which everyone who does it comes to
understand that he or she is a conniver and a polluter in the destruction of
the planet, and someone whose secret thought forms keep alive the systems of
cold evil that are destroying the planet--without realizing that we are all
implicated in this--the truth of unconditional compassion cannot be born. And,
the skillful means of understanding the deep motives of others without
divisive judgment cannot be engendered so that the deep ways of
transforming yourself and others cannot take place. So that is the third condition of Sacred
Activism.
The fourth
condition of Sacred Activism that is really important is that it understands,
at the deepest level, that suffering and ordeal and the smashing of the ego’s
agendas and illusions play an enormous part in the will of the Divine to create
an instrument worthy and clear enough to be an instrument of this energy and
will in reality.
Very
often nowadays, mystics are addicted to what I call “Mysticism Light,” the
marzipan mysticism of this grotesque New Age, which refuses to acknowledge the
necessity of a death into life that all the authentic mystical traditions talk
about. And activists tend to assume, that just being right about the systems of
cold evil will secure in the end a victory over them. Both the contemporary mystics that are
addicted to a totally fake cheerful vision of the Divine, and activists who are
addicted to reason and a clear-eyed vision of justice as being enough, are
deluded--because the only thing that can transform the way in which we are being
and doing everything, is a radical transformation of human nature.
And
this radical transformation of human nature as all the great pioneers of Divine
human being have shown us from Jesus, to the Buddha, to Rumi, to Ramakrishna,
to Teresa of Avila, to all the great mystics of our time, can only take place
when people really risk the death into life, the dark night of the soul, the
stripping and burning down of the agendas and illusions of the ego, and risk it
in such a way that they surrender their will to the Divine and go through
whatever is necessary for them to be clarified and purified of their false
agendas as to be born into the power and radiance and ego-less service of the
Divine self.
This
is very important not only because it enables a human being to go through a
quantum leap of transformation, but because, and this is crucial for our
understanding of how activism of this kind can work in the world at this
moment, this purified ego, this ego in the service of the self, the being that
has been through this death and has been resurrected in this Divine life, is a
being that can be flooded with the powers and wisdom and compassion and energy
and passion for just action that belongs to the love of the Divine and so can
be enormously more effective than any activist who has not been through such a
transformation.
An
activist who has not been through such a transformation may very well be highly
effective, with great intelligence, highly decent, and a very brave
person. However, an activist who has been through this transformation is
someone far more powerful. He or she is
a Divine human being surrendered to the will of God, used as an instrument of
the will of God, radioactive with the grace of God, and filled with the energy
and power of God.
And I think that given the enormous challenges of our time – a
time in which the whole of humanity is threatened, and a time in which, in our
addiction we may have destroyed the whole of nature – what is called for is a
wholly new level of power. And this
power does not belong to the ego, it cannot be wielded by the ego, it cannot be
streamed by the ego and it can only stream through someone who has died into
life—someone who has gone through the dark night of the soul, into the
experience of the resurrection of Divine consciousness through the death into
life.
This kind of activist, this
kind of being, is what we need—warriors of peace, great armies of these kinds
of activists to do the work that can now, in these extreme circumstances,
preserve the planet.
MOS:
In Buddhism, a spiritual warrior who achieves enlightenment and comes back to
help others achieve it is called a bodhisattva. Christianity has its
saints. In Shirt of Flame,
spiritual gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender activists are called “Sidhe,”
after the high faeries of Ireland. But whatever the label, we can all
effect change in many ways. Where do you
see in the LGBT community our need to acknowledge our shadow and even though we
all have an individual shadow, what are some of the most pervasive collective
shadows of our community?
AH:
Well, I think that the deepest shadow is that all of us in the gay community
are still deeply stricken at very profound levels by the patriarchal religions’
hatred of homosexuality. That in each of
them, in Islam, and in Judaism, and in Christianity, and unfortunately also in
certain aspects of Buddhism and Hinduism, we have been condemned as disgusting
and crazy and obscene.
When you add
this condemnation of homosexuality to the general way in which all the
patriarchal religions have condemned the body, demonized sex, then, what has
been created is a vast internal shadow which breeds self loathing, shame, rage
against the body, hatred of ones sexuality, and a kind of perpetual secret despair. This shadow is immense and very destructive,
and in my experience can only be healed by a very profound experience of the
Divine feminine and the Tantric glory that that opens up. The blessing of the body, the blessing of
sexuality, the blessing of the whole of nature not as an illusion or as doomed
or as fallen, but as a manifestation of the splendor of the creator, the
splendor of the Father/Mother. That is
the first thing.
From
this shadow stream four aspects of the gay community that I think need to be
addressed very strongly, now.
The
first aspect is that, because I think that because we have not been allowed to
believe in the holiness of our sexuality and in the holiness of the desires of
our love, many of us have given ourselves over to mindless promiscuity which
makes the birth of the authentic tantra impossible. People tend to veer between Puritanism and
pornography, without anything in between.
And the sexual meaninglessness of the gay world is now a kind of
epidemic where people pretend to be living wildly liberated lives, but are in
fact living lives in which energy is being leaked off at every level, in lives
without any authentic connection. I’m not being moralistic about this, I am
just pointing to the dereliction of the work of authentic energy that results
from this concentration on meaningless sex.
I
think another aspect of this shadow is that in the gay community there is an
epidemic of meth and crack addiction. And what is this epidemic—but a
manifestation of profound self-loathing. It is absolutely terrifying to me, the
amount of gay men and women I know—mostly men, who are ruining their health and
ruining their hearts and ruining their minds by plunging in despair into
addiction. And the extent of this addiction makes quite clear to me that all
these years of sexual, so called sexual liberation, haven’t really gone down
deep enough to heal the self loathing and sense of isolation and sense of
meaninglessness and sense of desperation that unfortunately, we as homosexuals
have inherited.
The
third shadow, I believe, that really needs to be addressed in the gay community
is that the great majority of the gay people I know have suffered very deeply
in their lives but the great majority of them, because of the secret shadow of self
loathing have never used their suffering in deep enough ways to transform
themselves. This hatred of religion,
which I can completely understand in most gay people, because after all, the
patriarchal religions have done this terrible dirty deed on us, as we’ve
mentioned, has unfortunately prevented many gay people from understanding the
crucial difference between religion and mysticism, between the
patriarchal dogmas of religion and the incredible and all transforming power of
the mystical traditions.
So,
the very people who need the direct connection with the direct Beloved, beyond
dogma, are prevented by their own wild and completely justifiable rage at
religion from using the pain that they have been through to help them plunge
into an authentic spiritual path, so as to be able to discover the Divine consciousness
that lives within them, the holiness of the Mother aspect of God--the
sacredness of their deepest selves, which would be the most profound source of
healing.
I
think it is very important now to address the shadow in the gay community and
it is very important that those of us who are gay who have taken extensive and
intensive journeys into the Divine self to say to all of our gay brothers and
sisters, “Stop being hung up on the craziness of the religions--we know
that. That is given! Turn to the great mystics, turn to the
enlightened ones, and take courage from them, and know that if you go on a
journey like theirs, what you will uncover is the great treasure of the Divine
light consciousness that lives within you.
What you will discover is that you are holy and blessed and filled with
sacred energy at the deepest level and this will change your life!”
The
fourth great shadow of the gay community and this I think is very serious and
is a result of that primordial self-loathing and self rejection that comes from
this interjection of the madness of the ways in which gay people have been
thought of through history. It’s
astounding the apolitical nature of the continuing gay movement. It completely astounds me that so few of
my gay friends who are so passionate about sexual liberation care anything
about the liberation of the poor or the liberation of the animals who are being
tortured to death or the liberation of the forests from the fires of our greed
or the liberation of the seas by pollution.
You would have thought that living through AIDS, living through
millennia of oppression, living through our own sufferings of the stings and
ferocities of patriarchy would have given all of us a much sharper, much more
radicalized sense of the oppression of power of all kinds, but this is not the
case.
The
hedonism, the crack addiction, and the sense of inner alienation that stems
from that profound primordial shadow has also made most of the gay people I
know very apolitical and unconcerned with the fate of the world and unconcerned
with the political destiny of our culture and unconcerned in any way with any
form of activism, and this has of course led to a massive disempowerment in the
gay community, and must now be addressed.
One
of the things that is very depressing to me as a person and as a teacher, is
that I have been writing for 30 years as an openly gay mystic, and now for 10
or 15 years as a gay radical Sacred Activist, and nobody in the gay press has
bothered with the work that I have done, and no one takes seriously the works
of other enormously prophetic and important gay teachers such as Matthew
Fox.
So
that the people in the gay community who could reach out to gay brothers and
sisters, and say, “For God’s sake, let us use our pain, and our passion and our
hunger and our desire, and our understanding, to become warriors of justice and
peace and compassion in a burning world,” the very people who could give the
most inspiring message that they themselves wrestled out the depths of their
lives, are not given any prominence, or any help from the gay media, which
itself keeps going all of the negative images of homosexuality and feeds the
shadow appetites created by that shadow I described. This has to change.
MOS:
So, we need to have billboards in the gay community featuring mystical
traditions rather than the usual cigarettes, designer clothing and vodka! I think too, that the level of concern in the
community has been primarily focused on rights and marriage and equality in the
workplace. Are there things that could have been done differently within a
spirit of Sacred Activism?
AH: Well, I think that if the gay community were
true Sacred Activists I don’t think that they would be so completely obsessed
with the issues of gay marriage and equality in the workplace, important though
they are. I think that they would put
these issues in the context of claiming complete dignity so as to be a
voice of radical transformation in the real world. I want everybody who wants to be married to
be married, and I totally support gay marriage, but if marriage keeps going
bourgeois arrangements, and smug contentments and self-absorbed individualistic
living as it so often does, it cannot be the foundation for the kind of radical
transformation that we now need. And
equality in the workplace is extremely important, and protection of human
rights is extremely important, but they are only the means to the end of
becoming fully empowered citizens with a fully distinctive voice that serves
justice.
So
I feel that the importance of Sacred Activism for gay folks is not to make them
feel that they have been wasting their time on these causes, but to ask the
question, are these causes enough?
What do you feel about the burning down of the environment? What do you feel about the fact that 2
million people live on less than a dollar a day? What do you feel about the fact that women
are still oppressed all over the world? What do you feel about child
prostitution? What do you feel about the
almost total domination by the corporations by our government and of all forms
of the media? These are the burning
questions. And what I am so disappointed
by is that gay people, in their search for their legitimate rights, come across
as spoiled and entitled and consumerist in their vision of reality instead of
placing their claiming of these rights in a much larger, more powerful
context.
MOS:
I think about this happening on a small scale. I’ve heard of a gay bar in
Houston, which every year raises thousands of dollars for a local public school
for supplies and books. It’s a small gesture, but it assists in realizing that
there is life beyond us and it establishes a connection to the greater
community.
AH: Well yes, and it sends a marvelous message to
a community that is frightened of gay people, a message which says, “We are
human beings and we care about you! We
are not just asking you to tolerate our wild sexual habits and to let us be
free and let us marry, and let us have equal rights; we’re not just doing that
because we want those things, we’re asking you to give us those things, because
we want to be fully empowered to be of help, to serve you and be compassionate
citizens with you and to be your brothers and sisters.” I think that sends a healing message to the
community, and the more that gay bars, and gay businesses, and gay movements of
all kind can have this all-inclusive, all-embracing compassion, the more power
that they will have in the world.
MOS:
What does that vision mean for already-established organizations? For example, I
could see LGBT community centers evolving into something new. Should our
community centers become hosts for what you call Networks of Grace?
AH:
Let me explain what Networks of Grace are first. I think it is important that
people have a very clear idea of why I am grounding my vision of Sacred
Activism in what I call Networks of Grace.
Networks of Grace are cells of between 6-12 persons who group around a
heartbreak, a profession, a passion or a local cause, who meet regularly, to
pray together, to infuse each other, to share each other’s suffering and joy,
and to hold each other accountable for real work, real action, real service in
the real burning world.
I
had this idea because I was meditating for a long time on what I think is one
of the great questions of our time: “Why is it that the dark and the despotic
and the evil and the demonic find it so easy to organize, and why is it that
the good and the well-meaning are so often so naïve, so disorganized, so
lonely, and so unwilling to get together with other people of like mind to do
something real in the world. And I
studied the organization of terrorists, and the organization of certain very
fierce evangelical and right wing organizations, and I realized that the core
power of both terrorist and right wing organization comes from their cellular
structure—being organized as cells.
Why,
I thought, can’t those of us who truly want the birth of the Divine humanity
not come together at this moment in unpretentious, synergistic, and mutually
supportive as Networks of Grace (these are the words that came to me,) so as to
sustain each other, to help each other, become instruments of Divine love
together?
Then
I remembered a conversation that I had with Deepak Chopra when he describes
what happens to a caterpillar when it dissolves in the cocoon, as the gunge
gets gungier, and as the whole body of the caterpillar starts completely to
decay, what wakes up in the gunge and actually feeds off the gunge what are
called imaginal cells, and when they constellate together, they create the body
of the butterfly which actually breaks out.
And then, as if by a flash of lightning, I saw that Networks of Grace
could be those imaginal cells that when they constellate together all over the
world could create the body of a new Divine humanity that breaks free of this
cocoon of greed, despair, and paralysis, meaningless living and addiction that
is now threatening everything.
So
on Thanksgiving Day this year, my Institute of Sacred Activism is going to
release a global network of Networks of Grace, a global website, so as to
enable people of all persuasions, and of all passions and all heartbreaks, and
all professions, to start forming these all over the world so that people can
start empowering themselves for radical change: spiritually, intellectually and
emotionally so as to really start a grassroots revolution of Sacred
Activism.
I
think it would be absolutely wonderful if the gay community could start in
whatever way that was natural to it and in whatever circumstances that they
find themselves, creating Networks of Grace, Networks of Grace that would have
essentially four functions specifically tailored for the gay community.
First
of all the people who met in those Networks of Grace would really pray and
meditate together beyond dogma, and so to begin to get in touch with the Divine
beloved, the Divine consciousness that is the source of the universe, the
source of all revelations, and the source of human consciousness. This is
crucial because as we’ve already discussed it’s because people are not in
connection with this great shadow of self-rejection that is still threatening
everything.
The
second thing that I think these Networks of Grace could do is to really help
gay people uncover this shadow that we’ve been describing together—really start
listening to each other’s distraction, listening to each other’s struggle with
addiction, listening to each other’s constant battle with despair,
self-rejection, self loathing, as well, so that there can be a really deep
exploration of these things, without shame, without judgment.
In
my experience, and I’ve actually participated in gay Networks of Grace like
this, when people begin to be honest about the amount of self loathing they
have, it does not lead to gloomy talk, but similar to most Twelve-Step
meetings, it leads to great hilarity and to great compassion. This is very important because the gay
discourse at this moment is unbelievably banal and trivial. It is so important in this Network of Grace
that a much deeper level of shameless, naked, confessional, and honest
conversation occur because from that, great truths can be born and great compassion
can be engendered.
The
third thing that gay people really need to start doing is to look for ways to
get together to develop new and broader, richer tactics to secure the rights we
need, and to go forward in this great battle for gay marriage in a much larger,
much more inclusive context. And
I think this is very important to start in these groups a conversation about
how to do so and to find ways to reach out to the greater community in ways to
start to heal the community’s fears and in ways to make the community aware of
a compassion that spreads to all people and all animals that really educates
the community of the real goodwill and the real desire to help that is in gay
people.
And
the fourth thing that these Networks of Grace should really, really address is
other real causes that go beyond gay causes, which the Network of Grace
encourages the people who are in it to address.
For example, you might have a gay network of grace surrounding animal
rights. A lot of gay people I know have
a very deep passion for animals partly because we don’t have children, and I
myself am a great lover of cats and I could imagine a gay network of grace that
would deal with the problem of feral cats in the neighborhood, that would work
with prayer together, that would work with the shadow together, which would
work on getting an a more inclusive all embracing vision of the gay community
out to the community at large but that would also specifically focus on a
cause.
One
of the things I have said in my book, and I really believe it, is that the key
to finding your mission in this burning world, is to ask yourself the question,
“What of all the causes that I care about really breaks my heart the
most?” Because, if you follow your
heartbreak, what you will find at the core of the heartbreak is a fountain of
burning and deathless passion that will never run dry as Rumi says. When you find that fountain of deathless and
burning passion you also find an incredible empowering source of energy. So I
would encourage all these gay Networks of Grace not merely to be dealing with
the gay shadow and the gay pain and the gay rights issue, which are of course
extremely important, but also to focus on causes of global concern in a local
way.
If
all of these different four aspects are brought together then there is
tremendous possibility for Networks of Grace to elevate and educate and inspire
and ennoble and absolutely focus the tremendous energy and passion and
suffering and understanding that is in the gay community on the real
transformation of the whole world that is really struggling, in this nightmare
of death, to take place.
MOS:
And I think too that it is so critical that Networks of Grace form in the gay
community. I could join another organization, similar to the cause, but it
would not provide that inner healing that we are talking about. It will not lead to that transformation not
only for that heartbreak, but for that inner transformation as well.
AH: And who can understand each other better than gay people? And who can speak to each other more honestly than gay people? And who can really share the real sufferings that what we go through and the real victories of gay people? It would be a wonderful next stage for the whole gay liberation movement to be a movement that liberates not only gay people but others through coming together and sharing this deep wisdom and healing and the pain and devoting their energy to not just gay rights and issues but to those issues now that are threatening the whole life of the planet. This is the next step of the whole gay liberation movement I believe. The next step must be one of Sacred Activism, or the suffering we’ve been through, all the wisdom we’ve acquired, will be wasted in the meaninglessness of our addiction and in our alienation from the world.
MOS:
I agree that in the gay culture,
identity is important to a degree, but then we have to go beyond that identity
to transform that. So in what ways is a
gay identity helpful and sometimes unhelpful?
AH:
Well I think that a gay identity can be an enormous gift because I think that
all gay people have to, very early on, face the fact that they are different.
And that can be an enormous initiation into the suffering of all those people
who are afflicted under patriarchy: women, the poor, animals, and it can breed
a very deep compassion for all beings and it can be an enormous help in
authentic transformation.
The
other aspect that I think can be very, very helpful for one’s transformation as
a human into a Divine human being, is that very early on, a gay person has to
choose the authenticity of love over power, because they are given a choice.
Either you are going to pretend not to be gay, and get the goodies of a culture
that despises who you truly are, or you are going to risk being
authentic about what you truly desire and what you are truly hungry for, and
face the contempt and the sometimes ruthless destructiveness of that
culture. If you can choose love over
power at an early age, you can begin the extraordinary transformation from a
human being into a Divine human being.
So,
in those two ways, the way the pain and suffering of being different can
initiate you into a much deeper and unconditional compassion for all beings who
suffer in the same way, and choosing love over power, it can give you very
early on in your life, a very enormous sense of your own potential strength,
the strength of love, of the absolute holiness and necessity of love
and prepare you for the great courageous transformations that all those,
straight or gay go through on the journey to Divine being.
I
think the potential shadow of a gay identity is that you can confuse your
essential identity with your homosexuality. I don’t believe that in the end that we have
any final identity except that of the Divine consciousness. So whether you are straight or gay, to
confuse your essential identity with your sexuality is a tremendous
mistake. One’s essential identity is the
Divine-self itself. So the danger of
over-identifying yourself is that you limit the power of your Divine
nature. It’s an understandable
limitation when you’ve been so pressed for so long. But I for one have never
thought of myself as only and totally gay.
I’ve thought of myself as a human Divine being who expresses its human
divinity through my art, through my creativity, through my capacity for
friendships, through my love of cats, from the way I adore roses, and the voice
of Maria Callas, the music of Bach, and also of course through my
sexuality---and it’s a gay sexuality. But the essential self that
is expressing itself in all of those ways completely transcends any kind
of identification or any kind of description, or any kind of limitation.
MOS: And it’s easy for anyone, gay or straight,
to over-identify with their culture and to buy into it to an extreme.
AH:
Right. So somehow we have to evolve, we
must now evolve as an extension of the heroism of the gay liberation movement
of the 60’s and 70’s, a new gay mystical language that says to all gay people,
“Your sexuality is powerful, and noble and holy just as heterosexuality is.”
But both gay people and heterosexuals have to go beyond these narrative
positions of who they are to discover who they essentially are—and that
is the Divine in human form.
Once
this is recognized, we start acting from that innate divinity, whether you are
gay or straight, in ways of extreme, all-inclusive, unconditional compassion
and with a great passion for justice. And I think the more we see gay people
emerging with this kind of broad generosity of soul and wild commitment to
transformation and profound love and compassion for all beings and justice for
all beings, the more the fears of the straight community about gay people will
be healed by the very splendor of their [gay people] presence and by the very
truth of their nature, and by the very effectiveness of their actions. It calls not for a rejection of the more
narrow rhetoric of the past, but for a widening of it by the mystical
revelations of the traditions and by the call of Sacred Activism to answer this
agonizing situation by radical commitment on every level, to be and do what you
must be and do to be of real help.
MOS:
We have to go deep within and work on our own healing transformation in order
to shine throughout the world as who we truly are.
AH: This is what I am trying to model in my own
life. I don’t stand up as a gay teacher-- I stand up as a teacher—who is
gay! Just as Carolyn Myss and Marianne
Williamson are straight, I am gay! But I
am not defining my teaching as gay; it’s a Divine teaching, I hope.
MOS:
Exactly—your teaching does not carry any labels or orientation…it’s for
everyone!
AH:
It’s for everyone! It’s for straight
people, it’s for dogs, it’s for animals it’s for plants it’s for stones, it’s
for the air, the wind, the fire, it’s for the threatened seas, it’s for
everything. I never pretend not to be
gay. If it ever comes up I express it naturally, I always talk about my marriage
and my husband, and all that, and I have never and will never allow anyone to
define me in a way that defines the revelation that is trying to come through
my work. Because it does not just belong
to the gay community--it has a very deep message that I’ve tried to give
in this conversation to the gay community. But I hope that Sacred Activism
transcends black and white, gay or straight, Buddhist or Hindu, and speaks to
every single human being at this moment and says, “For God’s sake, claim your Divine
truth, claim your Divine identity, go beyond the dogmas, go beyond the
separations, work out your salvation with diligence and start humbly serving
all beings, and start doing something real from your heartbroken sense of the
real worlds burning to death in the real world to turn the situation rapidly
around.”
MOS: You said by Thanksgiving your Institute will
be launching the Networks of Grace website.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if gay community centers around the world could
be meeting places for those who are interested in animal rights for instance,
or other burning issues?
AH: Yes! It is very important to say to the gay community who have a gay Network of Grace on animal rights—work on all the gay issues we have described, but you can also work with straight Networks of Grace on animal rights with great joy! There cannot be any more exclusion, because in that exclusion you keep going sadly, the separations that cause all the suffering.
MOS: Right, Right, It leads to separation and people
wondering, “What are those gay people are doing over there?”
AH:
Right. Have a gay focus because that can
enable you to work at great nakedness, to understand and also to heal the
shadows we described, but when you work, work with everybody who
cares. Work with everybody, even
sometimes with Republicans, why not? If
they care about animals, work with them. And many of them do. We have to be strong enough to go beyond all
our categories and dogmas and separations, otherwise we simply are going to
keep them all alive in ways that quite now are killing the world.
But that
doesn’t mean we don’t attend to the necessary healing that the gay community
needs, it just means that we do not make that attention to our healing an
excuse for separating ourselves from others.
We’ve got to lead the way forward.
As victims of separation and victims of division and as victims of
unbelievable cruelty, it is up to us to really manifest the kind of
compassion, the kind of all embracing understanding and the kind of commitment
to love that will truly transform others.
Take the darkness we’ve been given and transform it into golden
light.
thank you for sharing this. i find so much truth in here is hard to put into words. mindless sex, or "cosmic masterbation", if you will, has never lifted anyone to a higher level.
i have seen with my own eyes in the gay community just what you are saying...the entitlement, the celebration of promiscuity, the utter lack of association between love and love making. complete disrespect for the values of others while claiming victimization as others disrespect their values. it's a road that leads nowhere.
classic narcissism. "it's just a matter of mind over matter," my best friend tells me..."if you don't mind..they don't matter."
how cute. but the fact is...they DO matter, and if you don't mind then you live with the consequences you validate yourself. you cannot denegrate and belittle others and then complain about a lack of respect from them.
truth, openess and compassion...yes...LOVE..is the only hope we have. we must love them as we love ourselves. short of that...we'll always be just what we are.
love and respect work...i know from personal experience.
much love and hope. pj
Posted by: pennyjane | September 18, 2009 at 07:24 PM
I think Andrew Harvey doesn't really know about the incredible work lesbians do in the world. Heavens, lesbians are at the forefront of animal rights activism.
Harvey himself comes off as sort of a cult leader, and on his website, he does not say he is gay. You can't reach him directly by phone or email, it's through his agent, so he never answers emails, and I have never seen him anywhere near lesbian and gay community events. So a lot of his whining about shadows in the gay community are based on his rather aloof and elitiest nature.
He has some interesting things to say about the divine feminine, except when real lesbians question him about this, and then he launches into the weird about mothers and motherhood. I think he is a little bit kooky, but oh well, he can be a loveable eccentric.
Posted by: KT | September 19, 2009 at 08:50 PM
Pennyjane I don't think you are fair to him. I personally saw him speak at places that other spiritual teachers would never consider (like programs for homeless gay teens involved in sex work).
Posted by: nina c. | September 26, 2009 at 04:07 PM
hmmmm.....nina, are you sure you are speaking to me? i thought my post was rather supportive of mr harvey's comments. if i wasn't clear, i apologize. i think mr harvey made a whole lot of sense and i was glad to read it.
much love and hope. pj
Posted by: pennyjane | September 26, 2009 at 04:28 PM
Sorry. I meant KT.
N.
Posted by: nina c. | September 26, 2009 at 05:32 PM
Thanks to all who have commented. Toby Johnson's comments from yesterday (10/11) are wonderful and profound--but I only see them on the shortened page on MyOutSpirit.com. May they be added here as well?
Rev Tom
Posted by: Rev Tom Cummiskey | October 12, 2009 at 07:06 AM
A wonderful statement by Andrew Harvey: Spirituality not as rejecting the world, but as saving the world.
The natural evolution of consciousness leads us to understand the human religious impulse to be not about adhering to strict purity taboos and rules and restrictions, especially about sex, OR about believing in certain mythological doctrines, but about living in such virtuous ways that the problems and suffering in the world clear up in the course of evolution itself AND that human beings come to understand the world's mythological heritage as metaphors, not dogmas, that are clues to the nature of consciousness and of our oneness with "God." World changing, world saving, world serving activism flows naturally from the realization of who we really are at the level of spirit.
The goal of gay spirituality, I think, is to find for ourselves--and to assist other gay people to see--how our homosexuality can be understood as a clue and an operative practice to experiencing that oneness with "God." The goal of the spiritual life is to experience being in heaven now. Meditation and spiritual practice serve to reveal this transcendental reality; they transform experience so that the world DOES appear and BECOMES heaven now. For gay people spiritual vision sees how the styles of gay life can be perceived as--and thereby transformed into--clues to heaven.
Gay spirituality, for instance, sees that a frivolous whimsy of gay life, like drag (from Radical Faerie-style genderfuck to stage drag and serious female impersonation, from Halloween costume to personal effeminacy) resonate with age-old myths of androgynous, bisexual gods and cross-dressing shamans.
Gay patterns of free and anonymous sex resonate with the mystical poetry of the Sufis and of, specifically, St John of the Cross whose poem "On a Dark Night" is about discovering that the man he has had anonymous "park sex" was Jesus--for all of us, mystically, we are Jesus and Avalokiteshvara and God-incarnate to one another, and should behave so!
The gay encounter with AIDS in the last decades resonates with myths of asceticism, voluntary suffering, mystical substitution and self-sacrifice for the salvation of others--by both the "victims" and the caregivers.
Talents of gay personality, like style, design and artistry and, perhaps even more important, sensitivity, compassion and drive to service, show us the virtues we can and should cultivate for our spiritual growth. Our gayness gives us a perspective on life and cultural convention; we understand the world, other people's lifestyles AND religious tradition from over and above; we should strive to be visionaries and world-transformers. Our attraction to same rather than opposite potentially makes us less distracted and obsessed with duality; we are blessed, if we want to be so, with clues to nondual vision.
The work that Andrew Harvey is doing is so important because it demonstrates--both to the gay world AND to the world at large--the evolution of religion and spirituality. This is line with the great tradition of homosexual and gender-transcending prophets, seers, idealists and spiritual guides. And Harvey reminds us that our spirituality must resonate outward from us to save the world. This is where the evolution of consciousness is taking us all as Earth/Gaia wakes up and we all see heaven now. And, I think, it's a gay thing to point the way.
This is how we, as gay people, give good service by being openly gay AND by transforming what it means to be gay so everybody understands us not as sinners but as saints. This is how we become saints. Spirituality IS self-fulfilling prophecy IS activism in service of humankind.
Toby Johnson, author Gay Spirituality: Gay Identity and the Transformation of Human Consciousness
http://tobyjohnson.com
Posted by: Toby Johnson | October 15, 2009 at 12:25 PM
“The Wine of Divine Grace is limitless. All limits come from the faults of the cup. Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon; How much can it fill your room depends on its windows. Grant a great dignity my friend to the cup of your life. Eternal love has designed it to hold its eternal wine.”
I love this paragraph
is so inspirational!!!
kat
Posted by: Katie | November 04, 2009 at 06:10 AM
I love this paragraph
is so inspirational!!!
Posted by: kamagra | August 12, 2010 at 10:48 AM