Andrew Harvey - Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening

Reviewing Andrew Harveys book is like formulating an opinion on Revelations and the Gospel of St John simultaneously... He gets as near as anyone could to describing slide into the vortex of God

Monica Furling, The Literary Review

This is not a book written to draw the spiritually curious towards one cult or another; the teacher is a gate and means to God, in whose majesty the writer in the end dips and plunges like a dolphin in the sea... Wonderful, extraordinary stuff, and so beautifully written that it seems a crime not to bring it to the notice of others

Ann Wroe, The Tablet

Few writers can communicate this most difficult of subjects. Mr Harvey does so with a clarity and beauty of expression that makes his book worth reading even by those who will be sceptical of what he describes. Best of all, he is not a proselytiser, much less a saint... His story is that of every modern man longing for enlightenment, stumbling, worrying and just occasionally glimpsing what he hardly dares look for.

The Economist

He describes a universal hunger for union boldly, wittily, exotically. He achieves what Milton never did he makes holiness attractive.

The Birmingham Post

Astonishing and gripping and memorable... The story he tells here is to most people quite unacceptable, so I admire his skill in treating and his courage in publishing it.

Peter Levi, The Spectator

A Journey in Ladakh
The Direct Path

One Last Mirror
Burning Houses
The Web

Winter Scarecrow
Masks and Faces
Evidence
Homage to Tourkaram
The Fabius Poems
A Full Circle
No Diamonds, No Hat, No Honey
Loves Fire: Recreations of Rumi
Speaking Flame: Recreations of Rumi

(with Anne Pennington)
Macedonian Songs
Blashe Konesky: Selected Poems
The Golden Apple

(with Iain Watson)
Victor Segalen: Steles

Andrew Harvey is a poet, writer, translator, filmmaker and teacher, and the author or editor of more than 30 books. He was born in 1952 in South India, where he lived until the age of nine, when he was sent to England to be educated. He attended Oxford University and, at the age of twenty-one, became the youngest Fellow of All Souls College in its history. In 1977 he returned to India and immersed himself in its culture, philosophy and spirituality. He has since travelled widely and now lives in Nevada. His most famous book is Journey in Ladakh.

Hidden Journey

A spiritual awakening

Andrew Harvey

WATKINS PUBLISHING
LONDON

eISBN (Kindle): 978-1-78028-195-7

Version 1.0

This edition first published in the UK and USA 2011 by
Watkins Publishing, Sixth Floor, Castle House,
75-76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QH

First published in the UK by Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd
Published in paperback by Rider, an imprint o Random House Ltd

Text Copyright Andrew Harvey 1991, 1993, 2011

Andrew Harvey has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers.

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Printed and bound by Imago in China

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

www.watkinspublishing.co.uk

Heart, you are lost: but theres a path
From the lover to love, hidden
But visible. Worlds blaze round you.
Dont shrink; the paths hidden, but yours.

RUMI

I approached near unto hell, even to the gates of Proserpina, and after that I was ravished throughout all the elements, and I returned to my proper place: about midnight I saw the sun brightly shine.

The Golden Ass, APULEIUS

FOREWORD

When I was beginning to write Hidden Journey, I had an extraordinary and life-transforming conversation with my great friend and Rumi translator Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch in Paris. I described to her what I wanted to write and what had happened to me in my mystical initiation into the divine feminine and she listened, attentive and beady-eyed. When I finished she said, with the bluntness and panache with which she said everything, The Sufis say there are essentially two journeys on the real path. The first journey is the hidden journey to God, the journey to an awakening to divine light consciousness. This journey is finite and ends with awakening experience in which you know that the divine light that is appearing in and as everything is also your essential self. The second journey then begins. This journey is infinite and keeps on expanding in all lives and all realms. What you have been describing to me is your experience of the first journey. And this is what you must write about.

Then Eva paused. There are three things you will have to respect in your writing, or you will fail and just add to the many delusional tracts out there. First, you will have to be as naked and transparent as you are able about the facts and twists of your own biography and nature that have shaped your ego. Second, you will need to be as precise as possible about how the journey unfolded for you, noting exactly and precisely the progression of experiences that led to your awakening as the divine self. Third, you will need to find a language at once poetic and realistic to describe each of these experiences, without false exaltation or poeticizing, so that people through you can begin to have some taste of their own inner radiance and its miraculous possibilities.

Then she laughed hoarsely but not unkindly. You are going to need luck, she said. Writing what you want to write will be the hardest thing you will have ever done. Pray constantly to be inspired. The reward for going through whatever you need to go through to complete this task will be that the entire experience of your first journey will become a permanent inner possession. A hidden diamond at the core of your being that time and your own failings will not be able to destroy.

Evas voice haunted me during the difficult years of writing Hidden Journey in Paris, America and India. The first draft was hundreds of pages longer; in one last brutal revision I honed it down to the book that exists now. The hardest aspect of writing Hidden Journey was that I had no modern models that I could refer to; I had to invent its reality as I went along, attempting to be as faithful as possible to the authentic experience of what I had been given to transmit. This took a courage that frequently deserted me and had to be reclaimed again and again through meditation, prayer and an ever-deepening surrender. By the time I had finished the book, I was myself different, as Eva had predicted; the truth of what I had first lived and then struggled to describe had, through the Mothers grace, crystallized in me permanently.

What I understand now in my late 50s is that everyone takes the first journey, the hidden journey, in the unique terms of his or her own karma, personality, need and destiny. I took the journey with Mother Meera, someone I believed then to be a divine incarnation. Through this projection, which was rooted in the complexity of my own childhood and spiritual destiny, the first journey was able to be completed. I was born in India and saturated early in Indias vision of the motherhood of God; I had a difficult relationship with my own mother and needed to find an idealized divine mother to be able to survive the wounds of my childhood and to believe in the divine feminine; a passionate and sublime non-sexual love, such as the one I lived with Meera, was the one kind of devotion that could help me soar free of my terrors of commitment. Although I now see the experiences I recount in