Andrew Harvey - Radical Passion: Sacred Love and Wisdom in Action

Other Books by ANDREW HARVEY

Heart Yoga: The Sacred Marriage of Yoga and
Mysticism (with Karuna Erickson)

The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism

A Walk with Four Spiritual Guides: Krishna,
Buddha, Jesus, and Ramakrishna

The Return of the Mother

The Direct Path: Creating a Journey to the Divine
Using the Worlds Mystical Traditions

Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night

Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ

The Essential Mystics: Selections from the
Worlds Great Wisdom Traditions

The Essential Gay Mystics

The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi

Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening

A Journey in Ladakh: Encounters with Buddhism

Copyright 2012 by Andrew Harvey. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712

Cover photo by David Sutton of Sutton Studios
Cover design by Suzanne Albertson

Permissions begin on .

Many of the pieces in this collection were previously published. For several of them, the original capitalization of nouns and pronouns has been retained.

Radical Passion: Sacred Love and Wisdom in Action is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Harvey, Andrew, 1952
Radical passion : sacred love and wisdom in action / Andrew Harvey.
p. cm.
Summary: Radical Passion, the culmination of award-winning author Andrew Harveys lifes work, explores the catastrophes of our current times and celebrates the ecstatic hope and divinity that is possibleright now and in the futureProvided by publisher.
eISBN: 978-1-58394-512-4
1. Spiritual life. 2. Religions. 3. Harvey, Andrew, 1952 -Authorship. I. Title.
BL624.H3443 2012
204dc23 2012012223

v3.1

To Matthew Fox
prophet, mentor, heart-friend

Immense gratitude to Janet Thomas for her wonderful vision and for seeing it through; to Emily Reed for her editing sensibilities and the tenacity and faith she brought to this book; to my good friend Nancy Steinbeck for her brilliance and support; to Emily Boyd and the team at North Atlantic Books for their meticulous attention to the complexities of putting this book together; to editor Jennifer Eastman for creating consistency, insisting upon accuracy, and being patient with my writing eccentricities as all these pieces were compiled; to Jill Angelo whose loyalty knows no bounds; to Charlene and Tony Marshall for their dignity and example of true love; to my Arkansas family, Frances and Mike Cohoon; and to all the friends and colleagues who contributed to Radical Passion and whose works inspire and enlighten our lives.

Wherever I travel in the world, people who respond to the message of love in action that I am giving ask me, When will it happen and how?

The it, of course, is the great catastrophe (or series of catastrophes) that more and more of us are feeling is now inevitable. I point out, as gently as I can, that we are already in an apocalyptic situationone that is worsening spectacularly, month by month. A global financial elite, drunk on greed and desire for total control, manipulates the banks, markets, media, and all political parties. The gap between the tiny handful of the rich and the billions of destitute or deeply struggling human beings widens daily. Nothing real is being done to address the now lethal menace of global warming. Our food and water are increasingly poisoned. Ninety percent of the sea is polluted. Many of our crucial individual liberties have been so drastically curtailed that the foundations of a global fascist state are now visible to all those with the eyes to see. Hundreds of animal and plant species are vanishing every month, in the largest continuing extinction event since the last ice age. What more evidence should any awake human being need to show that we are in extreme danger and must respond comprehensively and urgently before spreading disaster becomes irreversible extinction?

Perhaps the most alarming, even devastating, aspect of this unprecedented crisis is the denial, apathy, and paralysis of the great majority of the human race. In the time of our greatest danger, we are at our most hapless, distracted, and narcissistic. The promise of the Arab Spring is leaking away into the brutal, toxic swamp of religious and power politics. The Occupy Movement, for all its global courage, is being deeply hobbled by the self-interest of the corporate media. To occupy the future in time, the movement needs knowledge, patience, resilience, and an interminable spiritual persistence if it is to help birth the global, grassroots revolution of love and wisdom in action that is our last and best hope.

As for the various religions, mystical systems, or New Age philosophies, they are mired either in fundamentalism; meaningless brutal repetition of outworn dogma; addiction to transcendence; or the kind of obscene, magical thinking that prompts Ahmadinejad to believe that plunging the world into war will bring the Twelfth Imam and legions of New Agers to expect, on the turning of the Mayan calendar, to be whisked away from our mad, burning world on ships of rainbow light.

The reason I still have hope, as I approach my sixtieth birthday, is not because I believe the human race is going to find a technological, political, or economic solution to this devastation. I do not believe in the potential transformation of the existing corporate nightmare; I do not believe in the magic of technology; I do not believe in the ability of a corrupt and greedy political class to deconstruct its own power. I do not believe in the spiritual depth and sincerity of the great majority of religious and New Age leaders, or in their capacity either to tell the truth about what is happening or to galvanize human beings to react urgently and wisely to it. Our inherited notions of salvation, redemption, and enlightenment are as dissociated and ineffectual in this immense evolutionary storm as our continuing tragic obsession with perpetual growth and technological wizardry. Nothing undertaken from our current level of consciousness will now work. This crisis is the destined graveyard of all human isms: all religious, political, and economic agendas, fantasies, and projects. The grandiose mask we have constructed for ourselves out of our demented narcissism is being stripped from our faces to reveal us as we areterrified, lost, and helpless before a global agony of our own making.