The Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night, by Andrew Harvey (J. P. Tarcher, October 2002, 352 pages).
I was visiting in Portland, Oregon, this past winter and happened to see a notice for a talk on "Activism and Spiritual Practice" by religious scholar Andrew Harvey. Frankly, if I hadn’t been getting a little bored with placid, rainy Portland, I might not have attended. I have less patience these days for organized religion or, for that matter, any spiritual belief system that doesn’t address the present social crisis of humanity. I’ve generally never been able to get too enthused for spiritual mantras that tell us to focus only on gratitude or "the light"...while millions suffer the poverty of exploitive economics or die in this world’s stupid, endless, and very much man-made wars.
To my great relief, Andrew Harvey’s talk dissolved my temporary Pacific Northwest placidity with a presentation as visionary and galvanizing as any I’ve heard. Harvey urges us to get real about political activism, warning that we face a coming social and environmental cataclysm as potentially devastating to life on earth as any imaginable.
Personally, Harvey has been through a lot, and it shows. Speaking, Harvey’s a live wire of blistering, almost ragged energy...and in his case, it’s perhaps quite understandable. The author of The Sun at Midnight: Memoir of the Dark Night and numerous other titles on Christian mysticism, Harvey was once a follower of Mother Meera, a woman now in her forties who, from her German home, draws thousands to sit in silent awe at her feet, claiming to be some sort of evolved, enlightened being (ludicrously, there are some reports she claims to possess "eighty percent of the powers of God").
As a young, Oxford educated scholar and writer, Harvey once fell under Meera’s sway and helped spread her fame. Over time, however, as Harvey’s own reputation grew, Meera became uncomfortable with her most famous disciple’s open homosexuality. Her solution? Harvey was instructed to drop his partner, Eryk, and marry a woman, then write a book about how the Mother had "cured" him of his sexual orientation. Apparently, being a flexible guru, celibacy or extreme closeted secrecy were considered as negotiable options.
Not surprisingly, the guru’s wishes precipitated a crisis for Harvey. What ensued was a wrenching, painful break from Meera, a story Harvey chronicles compellingly in Sun at Midnight. With the falling out came not only a deep spiritual and emotional crisis for Harvey, but death threats and slanders — even an attempted firebombing of his San Francisco apartment. As he describes, Harvey initially had to believe the declaredly all-knowing Meera was just testing him, engaging in some sort of paradoxical intervention designed to lead him to more fully affirm his sexuality. But no. The Mother just wanted him to cut out all that sordid gay stuff. Apparently, some of Mother’s followers were getting queasy. But in the end it was Harvey who couldn’t stomach what was going on.
Significantly, this "dark night" experience led Harvey to not only personal liberation from the strangle grip of an exploitive cult, but to emerge into a new, far more dynamic and honest intellectual light. He is now a man who dismisses much New Age teaching as endless fluff and denounces the entire guru system as evil and manipulative, a sub-culture dominated by spiritual charlatans who prey on vulnerable, emotionally culpable, often desperate people. He doesn’t hold back either in criticizing what he considers the false comfort and certainty sold in the vast majority of churches; he decries any tepid elixirs of holy reassurance that God will save us, if only we are faithful. It’s a message that does nothing to stop the mass killing and mass poverty.
Harvey now believes the occult or psychic power claimed by the vast majority of guru cult groups has little to do with anything divine. In fact, it is often exactly the opposite. While many New Age teachers rattle on about "vibrating with the light," their real motivations remain hidden and drearily predictable — the acquisition of money and power.
In Harvey’s perspective, the whole guru system is unnecessary. Every person, he says, has the capacity to get into direct, intimate contact with God or the divine, however they may define such things. Forget the intermediaries who claim a spiritual authority greater than your own. What’s interesting about Harvey is that he now extends this direct path perspective to politics and society. Forget authoritarian rule or the wisdom of official classes who know mostly just their own power and weaponry. Nothing less than the direct, awakened, activist democracy of ordinary, humble people can save the world now.
In a world rife with imperial power plays, militarism, and renegade terrorism while aching with the utter poverty of unmet needs of billions of people, Harvey candidly declares his belief that society is on a precipice — one whose survival will require radical, profound transformation at the very core of all our institutions and ideas. If that sounds apocalyptic, you’re right, it is. But, as they say, get used to it. This is no wild dreamer’s hysteria. Perhaps for the first time since nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction were manufactured, many Americans are currently fearing the possibility that something cataclysmic — something much worse than 9/11 — is possible on our own shores. This is also a crisis not easily going away, no matter how many flags we wave or countries we conquer, or, as Harvey would say, how many positive affirmations we do while meditating on our futons.
In a world faced with the rages of power and weaponry, with official classes bent on aggression, militarism, and renegade terrorists whose design is chaos and murder, it will, as always, be the millions of ordinary people who catch the crossfire. For Harvey the seeker of the divine, this is both an appalling and energizing specter. He’s determined now to use his spiritual pulpit to rouse us out of the "coca-coma" of a consumer culture that keeps us all sort of mildly entertained, and also flaccid and largely uninspired. Hypnotized before the fire.
As I watched him speak, Harvey, who was born in India from English parents, struck me almost as a kind of old-fashioned socialist agitator, imploring his audience to take to the streets of their passion, to burn away and topple over every false edifice and illusion, everything that keeps them depressed and passive, asleep or in a state of regression. Harvey is talking total, revolutionary transformation of our way of living on every level. I say, Halleluiah!
I also understand the urgency of Andrew Harvey’s concern. He’s got a disturbing vision in his head of all of us one day sitting around our TV sets, securely ensconced in some neat, fascistly ordered new version of the American dream, munching popcorn in our living rooms while the last trees burn on CNN.
But, of course, it will be our choice whether things come to that.
Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.