Direct Path to the Divine

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review of Direct Path to the Divine -

Andrew Harvey returns to his boyhood mysticism

 

One night in India when he was six years old, Andrew Harvey relates in

his bold new book, the family cook taught him that God can appear

anywhere, anytime. His parents were out for the evening so his nanny let

him have his dinner on the balcony. Afterwards, the kindly, alcoholic

cook sat on the ground beside Harvey and played a drum ecstatically.

Suddenly, the man stopped, set his drum aside, and knelt to touch his

forehead to the floor. He explained to an amazed Harvey that he was

thanking God.

 

"And you think God hears you?" Harvey asked.

 

The cook was astonished. "God is the moon. God is the garden. God is

you. God is me. God all around. God always seeing. God always listening.

All you need to do is to whisper and God will hear."

 

Harvey's upbringing in India, where many religions and many strands of

spirituality coexist, bred in him a deep faith in what Keats called "the

holiness of the heart's affections." The author of the best-selling "A

Journey in Ladakh" and "Hidden Journey" believed he could experience the

sacred in what he loved and the acceptance and kindness he encountered

from a vast array of characters, from the Hindu cook to holy men to the

Muslim driver to his own Protestant parents, affirmed that this was so.

 

India also bred in Harvey the sense that the divine could be present in

nature--he could see the sacred in the sensual as well as the

transcendent. At nine years old, Harvey, was shipped off for an

education in England, where, at 21, the gifted student was elected a

fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, England's highest academic honor.

Before he was locked in the "dark refrigerator" the English public

school system, he remembers feeling God's presence in the wild beauty of

peacocks dancing at twilight in a bramble-choked, snake-infested field

behind his Delhi house. Long before he read Shakespeare, this rapturous

image of beauty emerging from chaos has became for him "a sign that the

Divine threads all of the Creation with its secret splendor."

 

But spiritual longing led Harvey to abandon a promising career in

academia to search in India and other countries for a guru. He thought

he had found a true divine master in a young Indian woman, Mother Meera.

Yet, in 1993, Mother Meera, urged him to leave his new love (and current

husband) Eryk, get married and write a book describing how her divine

force had zapped him straight.

 

The prolonged crisis that followed caused Harvey to question everything

he had believed to be true.

 

Harvey's new book is an affirmation of his boyhood belief that everyone

has the ability to contact the divine. He begins "The Direct Path"

(Broadway, 320 pages) with a call to spiritual revolution. His mystical

faith had been blasted open by his disillusionment with a mentor who

would ask him to abandon his lover for her teachings. Harvey's

soul-searching to become a rallying cry for all of us to free ourselves

from the limiting religious systems and unscrupulous gurus. Harvey

paints a vision of a direct path, "free of the divisiveness, body

hatred, and bias toward transcendence that disfigures all the inherited

patriarchal religions."

 

"I had, for the sake of my own inner survival, to refine, deepen,

purify, and esentialize everything I had learned about mystical

reality," he writes. "I had also to face and in the most unsparing way

all my illusions about myself and about my own inner search."

 

Harvey follows with the fruits of his long self search, a rich

compendium of exercises described with beautiful clarity and simplicity.

His advice is uncommonly practical and balanced. He cautions readers to

embrace the centuries' old wisdom of traditional religious practices,

from the Buddhist precepts to Tantric lovemaking to a Taoist laughing

dance.

 

Indeed, what stands out most about this book is not Harvey's fervor and

passionate lyricism, but his generosity. He writes not as a guru but as

a spiritual friend eager to share the tools that others have shared with

him. This book's learning and friendliness will encourage many others to

claim their own power and possibilities. Harvey extends his experience

and his learning like a light, showing us that there is nothing to fear

and that the sacred is indeed close at hand.