Sacred Awakenings Series: Andrew Harvey
Produced by The Shift Network, hosted by Stephen Dinan
Many thanks and blessings to our volunteer transcriber, Maureen Ferreira
To listen to the full audio, register at http://www.sacredawakeningseries.com
Stephen Dinan: My prayer for this call is that we really blend in our own hearts and open our hearts to this message that Andrew carries about activating the Sacred Fire of the mystic in us and marrying that with the Sacred Fire of the activist who is passionate about justice. I think that is one of the most important messages of our day and Andrew carries it and speaks to it so beautifully. For the folks who didn’t get a chance to read his bio. Andrew has a remarkable background. He was an early prodigy in the academic world, teaching at Oxford, and then went on to write dozens of books in virtually every major mystical tradition. He’s been exposed to some of the great leaders of Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, Christianity and he has synthesized these in very unique and beautiful ways, both in his life and in his written work. He’s taught at places like Oxford, Cornel and the California Institute of Integral Studies. He has been the subject of a documentary on the making of a modern mystic. Perhaps his most important life work has been coming recently as the Founding Director of the Institute for Sacred Activism which will be the focus of today’s call. Andrew, Thank you so much for joining us here today. Why don’t we start with what put you on this path to become a sacred activist and offering this work and teaching in the world.
Andrew Harvey: Well, fundamentally, I think we’re living through a great death which is a great birth. And the great death is obviously a death at every level of the human pretensions and the human ego and agendas and it’s a death that is really radically threatening life on earth. But this death is a birth potentially for all those who allow it to break their hearts open to reality and allow in the space that is opened by that radical heartbreak the two noblest fires of the human soul to be fused. What I have uncovered in myself and I think all sacred activists know this, are these two sacred fires, and they are the sacred fire of the mystics passion for God which has burned in every revelation which has erected the pyramids and blazes in Beethoven and Rumi and in all of the great sacredness of humanity and the great passion for justice. Justice is one of the noblest names of God and the great passion for justice has been at the birth of democracy the birth of women’s rights, the birth of animals rights of gay rights, all of the great movements of liberation that have tried to free human beings from the shackles of injustice and oppressive systems. What happens when you fuse these two great fires together is that you are born into a dimension of love and wisdom in radical action because you are fused with the two sides of the nature of god, the side that is in boundless peace and the side that is in boundless passionate action. And when those 2 sides are fused in you, you yourself are born as a divine human being, a sacred activist capable of being a tender and humble instrument of Gods immense passion to transform the world into a living mirror of love and justice.
Stephen Dinan: What is the connection between what you’re saying and the reemergence or reclaiming of the sacred feminine?
Andrew Harvey: Well I think that this is the great message of the mother to us at the moment and the message has fundamentally, three radical components. The first message is wake up to the embodied godhead and see that everything that lives is holy sacred and absolutely holy, saturated with the divine light, every rock, every fern, every dolphin, every whale, every sentient being is a manifestation of the mother shakti, the mother light. The second message is that when you do connect in this way, with the universe as an absolutely sacred manifestation of divine love and wisdom in action what arises in you is a burning tender communion with all things a tender exposure to the great bliss of life and the great horror and heartbreak of life that are both sides of the mysterious alchemy of the One as it works through reality to transform it. And the third great message of the mother who is the supreme great activist since she is the embodiment of everything from the divine light and as the agent of love of the divine light is that once you have awoken o the sacredness of everything and once you have allowed your whole being to be permeated with this tender burning communion in joy and in pain with everything, then there is only one thing that you can do with your life which is to put what you know requires radical action on every level. So when these 3 messages of the divine feminine really take you over, what they do is birth you through the mother force into becoming one of her divine children on the earth doing her divine work wherever you are to birth a new world.
Stephen Dinan: Such an important message for our times and I am wondering on a really personal level what are the practices on a day to day basils that you find really provide the sustenance, the kind of bodily emotional, bodily, spiritual sustenance that allows you to do this kind of work in the world?
Andrew Harvey: Well the first thing I would say is that without sacred practices daily on a profound level you have absolutely no hope of doing it because it’s a massive work. The work of birthing the divine in matter in your body in your heart in your mind cannot be undertaken without sacred practice. The second thing that I would say is that it must be a holistic and integrated practice and in my own book, “The Hope, Guide to Sacred Activism”, what I have discovered and laid out for people is a four pronged approach that I think everyone needs now to really embrace to become strong enough to do this work. The first kind of practice that everyone needs is cool practices that calm you down that give you a connection with the divine peace and the divine silence and the divine wholeness. These cool practices are practices of witnessing consciousness of saying quietly a mantra of the name of God in the heart. There are many of them and Buddhists’ are marvelous at them. They are perfectly tuned practices that enable you to be steady and calm through everything. The second kind of practices I think everyone needs are heart practices, because what is causing this massive terror and horror and madness in the world is a fundamental dissociation from love, a dissociation from connection from that kind of burning communion that the sacred feminine offers. So it’s essential to know how to keep your heart alive and juicy and compassionate and vibrant in the middle of this exploding hell. So the great heart practices that I have found valuable are the great Sufi mystical practices of uniting the heart with the beloved Christ practices, uniting yourself with Christ consciousness and the great Mahayana Buddhist practice of Ton glen which enables you to work in the most extreme situations by taking on the pain of the world and giving back to the pain of the world the wholeness and vibrancy of your Divine Consciousness. I have just had an experience of this because I have just been very close to death myself. I had an exploded gall bladder in South Africa and nearly died, but what I discovered through that experience as I was going through it facing death fully, is that I was able to offer up the pain that I was in to the world because I had been trained by the great Tibetan masters that I studies under and there was an enormous sense of empowerment and hope even in the middle of my body falling completely apart and facing the possibility of, the imminent possibility of my death. So I really do know that these kinds of heart practices work in the most extreme conditions to keep one able to alchemize suffering so that it becomes a portent for transformation The third kind of practice is prayer practice, because there are times when things get so dark and difficult that you can’t do either the cool practices or the warm practices the heart practices but you need to have a very potent, very vibrant, direct prayer practice that when you can do no other kind of practice aligns you with the Beloved so you stay in the steam of divine grace and you stay in the stream of divine power. The fourth practices that is something that I have awoken to is body practices, because without an increasingly supple and divinized body, you just have no hope of being able to be strong enough in situations as dire as ours. And over the last 5 years I have been working on a new yoga and my new book on it is going to come out in May. It’s called “Heart Yoga, The Sacred Marriage of Yoga and Mysticism” in which the wonderful yogi Karuna and I have actually married together the deepest mystical roots of traditional yoga with practices that enable yoga to become the crucible of the divine transformation and I have also been working with Gabriele Roth to marry her amazing vision of her Five Rhythms with the Five Stages of Rumi’s path to divine love and empowerment and service. So if you can fuse together in the core of your life, and you must now, I think to become an authentic sacred activist, a practice that aligns you with the peace of God, practices that align you with the passion of the heart of God, with the practice that enables you to continue speaking out to God in the middle of great suffering, with a constant subtle profound working on the body to keep it more and more open to divine energy and divine healing. If you can fuse these four kinds of practices in the core of your life then you can become, over time and with divine grace, wise and steady and calm and empowered and able to go through whatever you have to go through with the kind of subtle grace that you’re going to need.
Stephen Dinan: That’s an incredibly beautiful vision and I’m wondering …. You have studied so many different traditions, and what you’re describing is very much a fusion of different traditions and lineages. What do you see as some of the unique gifts of the East and some of the unique gifts of the West that are being married together now in a kind of a new global spiritual fusion if you will?
Andrew Harvey: For me the unique gift of the East is that it has kept alive through everything, this tremendous secret of divine identity, the tremendous secret of our fundamental identity of the deepest level of the divine consciousness. This is an inestimably precious gift. The great gift of the West is its urgent sense of history unfolding a secret pattern of divine intention. An evolutionary gift if you like and what I think my work is, is a fusion of the understanding of the Eastern traditions of divine identity with the western knowledge that history is potentially the unfolding of the great mystery of the embodiment of the divine. And the precedence for this vision in the Twentieth century which saw a great explosion of what I call evolutionary mysticism precedence in the work of the course of the greatest mystical philosopher Sri Aurobindo, also in Jean Gebser and also in the work of Ken Wilber and in the work of my great teacher and beloved B Griffiths and I think it’s this evolutionary mysticism that fuses together the deepest understanding of the sacred identity with the profoundest sense of an unfolding in history of the divine embodiment that we now need to be able to birth the divine in the human and work with the divine to transform the horror that we are experiencing into a potential field of grace that can birth a new world.
Stephen Dinan: I know you’re launching a new organization called “Networks of Grace,” or at least a website. I wonder, can you speak to the important role of community or Sangha in the process of creating a global network of sacred activists.
Andrew Harvey: Well, I think that if there is a fourth message of the sacred feminine it is that you cannot hope to do this transformation alone because the vision of being alone is itself a kind of patriarchal fantasy. None of us are alone, were all totally interconnected. The universe is a web of interconnection. One of the reasons that it took me so long to write the guide to Sacred Activism is that only at the end did I really come to understand the way in which this global revolution of love in action could be organized and what happened is that I had a vision. In the vision of what I call “Networks of Grace” and I was meditating on Al Qaeda and the great success of the terrorist organizations and certain fundamentalist organizations which lie in their employment of cells of between 6 and 15 people who live together, support each other, pray together, work together for what they imagine to be, wrongly I think, a sacred cause, and it suddenly came clear to me that this is what the global movement of sacred activism, needed. The creation of cells of 6 to 15 people united by heartbreak or process or profession or a cause that could come together to pool their networks of connection and their passions and their deep love of the world and work together in local situations with a global consciousness just to start healing the planet. When I wrote this vision out, I remembered the conversation I had with Deepak Chopra, who is a beloved friend of mine, and Deepak completely understands the necessity for this interconnected action. He says it is very like what happens when a caterpillar spins a cocoon. In the cocoon the caterpillar dissolves and what wakes up in the grey grunge of that dissolution are what are called imaginal cells that then cluster and constellate together to create in the cocoon, the body of the butterfly that is going to break out of it. So I see networks of grace as the imaginal cells that are going to constellate in the midst of the devastating chaos of our time to constitute the body of the divine humanity that is going to be born out of it. And I am happy to say that there are now 40 or 50 “Networks of Grace” all over the world that are working. The website is up, http://www.networksofgrace.org and it’s really having an immense response because everybody who is awake at this moment knows three things, that we cannot do it alone, that we all need each other at the very deepest level and that when we come together in synchronistic synergistic action, tremendous new powers are given us and tremendous new insights are give us and I am convinced that through the spreading worldwide of cells of networks of grace that we are going to see a global revolution of love in action.
Stephen Dinan: How do you see this global revolution of love in action beginning to shift our societal structures of politics and you know, because there is the deep awakening on individual level and then we actually need to reformulate how we do business. I am curious to know how you see that unfolding.
Andrew Harvey: I think my honest answer is that I don’t see the structures now giving up power at all easily. I think they are lethal, demonic structures of radically dysfunctional and crazy visions and I think that what is going to happen unfortunately is that they won’t be transformed without being shattered. So what I believe that what “Networks of Grace” are about is not changing or shifting the existing structures but preparing for the great shattering of the existing structures, which is going to come quite soon I think, and calmly beginning the work of the birth as the corporate and political structures of our world fall apart.
Stephen Dinan: Perhaps a different way to look at that is how do you see the emergent society that forms out of the nuclei of these “Networks of Grace”? What do you see that really looking like? What is your vision for the future planet?
Andrew Harvey: Well, I think that we have to face that our future planet is going to be a very devastated one whatever happens because we simply have not listened to the enormous tragedies that have tried to wake us up. So I think that were going to have to face that were going to be rebuilding and birthing the new world on a very devastated planet. But I think that with the power of the sacred feminine, with the power of the fusion of the two sacred fires with the power of calmly working in “Networks of Grace” we will discover a wholly new way of being and doing everything which will be very down home, very local, living very simplified lives and working with whatever we can in a very extreme and chaotic situation. It’s too early I think to predict what kind of society will emerge from this, but I think that we can say three things about it. First that it will not have the crippling corporate structures that now really condemn our world to destruction. Second that it will be local economies working in local situations to keep life going in extreme situations and thirdly that people who really engage in this kind of work will radically rediscover the power of the sacred in ordinary life, the power of the sacred in friendships, power of the sacred in new communion with animals, power of the sacred in the deep loving work of people who are committed to the work of the birth can do.
Stephen Dinan: If you could speak also to the necessity for some of the playfulness and joy and some of the lighthearted qualities that are….We can get kind of heavy in looking at all the…. collective breakdowns, but I also know that there is a joy and playfulness that you often share and humor which is I think a key part of this.
Andrew Harvey: Oh I do to. You know in my book I lay out what I believe to be the 7 laws of Sacred Activism and the last law and in some ways the most important is the law of joy. When you connect with the sacred, especially when you connect with the sacred feminine it’s not just the heartbreak of the world that you connect with it’s the great pure wild sweet joy of the mother in endless creativity. And one of the most important things that I think I have discovered is that for myself and I think many Sacred Activists are discovering is that this revolution cannot be done from shame or guilt or from heartbreak alone or from a sense of “Oh my God, Oh my God”, it has to be done out of the deepest sources of divine joy, and one of the great ways in which joy expresses itself is through play. If you can find the way to transform your deepest and most serious work into a form of prayer that is also play, then you connect with the ultimate secret of the divine which is that it is at play in the universe. And so play is not something that is just relaxing and reinforcing and reinvigorating. Play actually gives you access to a wholly new realm of wisdom without which you are lost in a situation like this because one of the ways in which, what you can call the dark forces, keep us prisoner is through despair and what joy and play liberate you to is to the freedom of the divine to express itself with absolute truth and fun and ecstasy even in the direst circumstances.
Stephen Dinan: I love that and I have also just loved it when you let that playful part of you shine through because you are quite hilarious when you let yourself be.
Andrew Harvey: We know hilarity, in the old Christian mystical tradition, is one of the signs of sanctity and I think one of the things I have known from the grace that I have had of meeting some of the supreme teachers of the world is that they always have a mysterious combination of profound seriousness and profound lightness of heart and obviously one wonderful example would be the Dalai Lama. No-one knows more about the horror of our times than the Dali Lama. He’s lived in a massive genocide which has been ignored by the world largely for 50 years and yet you cannot spend 2 minutes in his presence without him flooding you with his laughter and joy and I think that in that mystery of fusion of the opposites is really the source of the ultimate power.
Stephen Dinan: Before we open the lines for some questions, I would love for you to share some information about an important launch event for the Institute of Sacred Activism that is coming up this summer and share a bit about that.
Andrew Harvey: Last year a group of 40 people and I created a global curriculum together in four initiations. That was an immense experience and that curriculum is now being created. This year what I want to do is create a template of an experience that can take people over 5 days into the depths of the birth that is being opened up to us into the depths of the shadow that is also exploding everywhere so as to unite them both in an experience of divine empowerment. I have taken as my model the ancient mysteries of the ancient world which basically have three rhythms; first a kind of glorious emersion in the divine, second a descent into the depths of the shadow and third a marrying of the light and the shadow in the mystery of divine embodiment. This initiation, this template, I hope will become a global template that will enable people all over the world to be given exactly the kind of inner information they need to become tender instruments of the divine. It’s going to take place in a park. It’s going to be between 18 and 24 July 2010 in Oak Park. Information about it is on my website http://www.andrewharvey.net and I am really passionate about this template because I think that if we can really procreate together, and initiatory mystery of truth that can be a template to help people wake up all over the world and give them the fundamental vision of the sacred marriage and of the birth if possible, the fundamental tools to confront the shadow and transmute it and to become conscious of it and then a marrying of both in the divine human then what we have possible is the real information for the real birth. So I just beg everyone who is listening to come and participate in this and to help me and themselves co-create a true vision of sacred activism.
Stephen Dinan: Fantastic!
Andrew Harvey: It’s not really a workshop. The time for workshops may really be over, what we need now is a radical process of initiation that can really help us confront all the different aspects of the situation that were in and teach us not to be afraid and to go through that confrontation without fear because in my own experience and in the experience of hundreds of thousands of others the marriage of the opposites of joy and agony creates an extraordinary new opportunity.
Stephen Dinan: We now have a change for those how have questions for Andrew.
Participant (Deborah): I am a brand new fan because I have never heard it put the way you put this work, the words that you use and the energy that you put behind it. I am one of the first year seminary students at One Spirit Interface. In a little over a year I am going to be an interface minister. As we look forward to the birth, shift, and transformation where do you see our role in that? We are a group of seminarians and of course we are in that process to make an impact. Is there a special way that we can do that?
Andrew Harvey: I think it’s absolutely essential work you’re doing because what I discovered on my own journey is the essential unity of all the mystical traditions in their understanding of the divine identity and the responsibility for creative work and service that arises from that identity. So I would say to you, congratulations on having discovered this great vision, go forward into it, but make sure that you link the deep work of bringing together all of the mystical traditions with the profound work of putting what you come to understand about the inner divinity of humanity into radical action. So always connect mystical awakening with awakening to the real world and to the responsibilities of putting love into action. So from the very beginning of your ministry I would always make it absolutely clear that when you wake up to the oneness of reality you also wake up to the responsibility of putting that oneness into wise clear focused action in every level of your life which means really letting heartbreak at the world guide you into becoming a sacred activist and doing what you’re discovering your true being is.
Participant: Excellent! Thank you so much Andrew.
Participant (Christopher): I’m moving to Denver in a couple of months from a small town in Colorado and I don’t know many people in Denver. I am very, very excited with your thought about these small cells of people. I wondered if you would have one or two specific thoughts….
Andrew Harvey: Yes, I do actually. I spend a lot of time in Denver. I would beg you to get in touch with St Paul’s Church in Denver and to really connect with the people there because they have been a great champion of my work and you will find them very receptive to this vision and so I would go to that Church and connect with the teachers there and the preachers there and with the people there because they have a very large vision rooted in the vision of the Christ which is ecumenical and all embracing and I think you would find them a wonderful group to start working with. They have been exposed to this vision and they really have run with it and I think you would find yourself among great friends.
Participant: What part of Denver is this church?
Andrew Harvey: I am not quite sure because my sense of geography is vague but it’s in the centre of Denver. Just look it up.
Participant (Margie): Prior to the call I had this great heartbreak where I cried for about 10 minutes nonstop. And when you spoke those words I felt my heart totally broken open and it feels like…. It feels very personal before I get called to action. It feels like such a fragile place that there is a sense of some of the old still clinging on. Before I get to practices what do you do in such an extraordinarily fragile sensitive place of your heart just being broken open?
Andrew Harvey: I think the first thing you do is just exactly what you have done, acknowledge the fragility. The second thing you do is to realize that this fragility is holy. The third thing you do is to start working with this fragility with the divine beloved directly in the kinds of practices I have outlined, the cool practices, heart practices, prayer practices, body practices. What you will find if you really work tenderly and seriously with them is that what you think of now as fragility is in fact the birthing of a new kind of strength, a strength that is not of the ego, but of the sacred heart of the divine consciousness. And when you discover that you will be immensely overjoyed and it will give you the strength to actually put what you’re coming to know in heartbreak into action. But at this moment what you must do is to do the practices, to work with them and to bring yourself into the recognition of this fragility as a holy source of a new kind of strength. And when you discover that really you will be able to move forward with astonishing rapidity and allow your heartbreak to be a door into the heartbreak of all the suffering in the world and through that discover your own particular mission to address that heartbreak. What I would advise you to do perhaps in a weeks’ time is to get up at about three o’clock in the morning and feel the heartbreak you’re feeling and then to ask yourself one question. What of all the causes in the world that I see need real help at the moment, what of all these causes breaks my heart the most? If you can connect your personal heartbreak with the universal heartbreak then you can come to understand what you can do from this new position. What you will discover when you ask yourself that question is that there are one or two causes in the world which really are insufferably painful for you and when you discover those causes you will discover the causes that you can now devote yourself to doing something real about from a place of the new fragile power that has been born in you.
Participant: Your words mean so much to me. I feel so much better. I have been on a path not knowing what my cause is and those words just help me to know that the truth and just hearing your words is strengthening that’s coming. I feel like a new person. Thank you from all of my heart.
Andrew Harvey: Thank you for having the courage to let your heart break.
Participant Question (Theresa): Hello Andrew. This is the first time I have heard you speak and I am incredibly encouraged … much of what you have talked about has been true to my own experience and so my question for you is about the heartbreak at birth, the initiation process …. My experience is that there is a lot of resistance to that initial death that we must go through, or, the need for it to happen and I find that I have been greatly affected by the example of Christ in offering the resistance and as a result, his death process was three hours as opposed to days and days on the cross. So my question is: What are the ethics in trying to either usher in this process or help people actually to have the courage to allow their hearts to break and go through that death in order to get to the new vision?
Andrew Harvey: That’s a very beautiful and profound question. My own feeling is that if you have the heartbreak too early without being strengthened in your divine consciousness, the depth of the heartbreak can totally shatter you which is one reason why we are all so terrified by it. So the first thing that people really need to do who glimpse the possibilities of the massive initiation, is to start connecting in sacred practice to the Divine Joy, to the Divine Peace, to the Divine Silence, to the Divine Ecstasy and the deeper you can connect with the Divine Joy with this great blessing of Divine Consciousness, the more strong you will become so that when it is your time to be broken open, you will know that you are in a divine mystery and you will know that your feelings of terror, fear, grief and shatteredness are not to be afraid of but to be accepted and lived through rooting yourself in the strength of the Divine as you live through it. You cannot have this initiation, you cannot endure this initiation and you cannot survive this initiation without first strengthening yourself in every way to become able to endure, bear it and be strong enough to go through it and also to know ….. The other thing that I think is important is to really, really turn away from all the false mysticism that are being promulgated in this great age of denial that say that you don’t have to go through this to be become awake or divine is absolute rubbish. Every great mystic has died into life but every great mystic who has died into life has had the courage to die into life because they know that life is actually killing them to rebirth them. So it is very important as you prepare to allow your heart to break open to connect with the great masters of the alchemy of heartbreak and the greatest master for me is Rumi so if people can plunge into the depths of Rumi’s tremendous poetry and allow that poetry to infuse them with strength and power and passion, they will be given everything to go through it. And of course, the other great master of this alchemy of heartbreak is Jesus. So, if you can really align yourself with this process through these two masters of divine love, you will find that you will be guided by love through everything.
Participant: Thank you. That was incredibly helpful.
Stephen Dinan: So, we have had a little taste of the mystic fire burning in people’s hearts;
Andrew Harvey: Oh, it’s wonderful to hear people grapple with these things … such profound and difficult things. I am very moved
Stephen Dinan: Is there anything that strikes you to really help people take what you’ve shared in this call and put it into action in the coming weeks and months?
Andrew Harvey: I think it’s very important to start doing something exactly where you are right now and I would really beg people to read the book I have just written in which my vision is really laid out very clearly ….. as clearly as I can get it, called “The Hope - Guide to Sacred Activism.” At the beginning I talk about ten things that you can do right now and I would really like to suggest three of them to everybody.
First is that it would be wonderful if everybody gave up a meal a day and dedicated what they would spend on that meal to actually helping the hungry in the world. There’s are marvelous organization called, “Buddhist Global Relief” which is being run by a great friend of mine, Bikku Bodhi, www.buddhistglobalrelief.org and any contribution that you make, even as little as five dollars will help far more than you can imagine.
I think the second thing I would suggest to people is make a commitment today, even if you are having financial difficulties to tithe between 5% and 10% of what you earn to a cause of your choice. Tithing is one of the great sacred laws of the world and you will find that if you do tithe between 5% and 10% of what you earn to a cause, you will feel immensely more empowered. I tithe to the cause of the white lions because that is what I care about most deeply.
The third thing that I would really suggest to people is to make a profound attempt to turn to your life and the people in it and to look around at your life, your friends who are grieving or ill or looking for a job or in real financial difficulty. Commit now to ringing one of them up and asking him/her what you could actually do to make the burden easier.
So, those are three very simple things that you can do right now and make a commitment to doing and you will find that if you do commit to giving the money that you would spend on a meal a day to an organization like Buddhist Global Hunger Relief which is really helping all over the world and if you can really make a commitment to tithe and choose one cause that you would really love to see flourish and if you can truly, in your own life, start reaching out to the friends that you know who are really going through difficulties and ask what you can do to help, then you will really be on the way to becoming a sacred activist and to the joy, power and peace that comes from it.
Stephen Dinan: Thank you so deeply for the call today and the depth and power and beauty of your lifework. It has been a source of deep inspiration and opening for me. Sometimes it has really called me out of my little shell and into deeper action and to a deeper relationship with the Divine … Thank you so much for that blessing Andrew.
Andrew Harvey: My great pleasure Stephen. Thank you for the work that you are doing and thank you for the Being you are.
Stephen Dinan: Perhaps before you drop off the call, I would love you to say a prayer for all of us on the call as well as invoking for the world …something that is from your heart.
Andrew Harvey: Well, I would just love to quote Rumi because I think that Rumi is always in prayer and this is my favorite poem …
Passion burns down every branch of exhaustion
Passion is the supreme elixir and renews all things
So don’t sigh heavily, your brow bleak with cynicism and boredom
Dare to look for passion, passion, passion, passion
Run my friends, far away from all futile solutions. Let divine passion triumph and rebirth you in yourself. Imagine a world, my friends, in which we let the divine passion triumph in ourselves and then work through that passion together in networks of grace to start a global revolution of love in action. That is the world that is being offered to us by this tremendous crisis and by the Divine and may we all have the courage and the peace and the energy and the love to enact that passion in reality now when everything is at stake. Amen.
Stephen Dinan: Thank you Andrew