 Hi everyone, welcome to the 11th episode of We Are Only One. Today it is our honor and blessing to have with us spiritual teacher, a mystical scholar and a luminous being, Andrew Harvey. Please stay tuned for more. Hi everyone, I'm happy to welcome Andrew Harvey, who is a spiritual teacher, a mystical scholar and today we're going to be talking about the importance of sacred activism and we have his book, The Hope. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Andrew. Lovely to be with you. Andrew, I had the hope to me was truly inspirational and I wonder why because I think it's very important to not only do our own work but then to put it into action and walk the talk. There is no true love without action. There is no true spiritual consciousness without profound passionate concern. The kind of visions of enlightenment that we've been sold and peddled by the patriarchal mystical systems have really been ways of addicting us to transcendence, addicting us to the light. This has created a massive dissociation in the spiritual movement and totally discredited the spiritual movement among the activists who just think that the spiritual movement is full of narcissists who do nothing but chant om, sit on their expensive futons and don't give a damn that the world is going through an extreme crisis. But this spirituality that we have celebrated for far too long has nothing whatever to do with the authentic divine, has nothing whatever to do with the vision of the great mystic prophets such as the Buddha, such as Jesus, such as the prophet Muhammad, all of whom were sacred activists, revolutionaries in their own time who really demanded the application of their revelation to the real change of real conditions in the real world. And until the spiritual movement gets real about the necessity of acting from a heightened consciousness and until the activist community gets real about the extremity of the crisis and the necessity to act in this crisis from a wholly new level of awareness, the madness will go on and will get worse and the human race will be destroyed. Sacred activism isn't just some nice new theory like aromatherapy or sacred activism is what I believe to be the birthing force of a new world. That's why I've devoted so much time to it, that's why I'm so passionate about it, that's why I travel 48 weeks of the year because the world is in terrible danger and I truly want to try and share this vision that I've been entrusted with, with as many people as can receive it because I believe the future of the world depends upon it. How would you, I've had the benefit of reading the hope. How would you lead people who are sincerely on a spiritual quest, who've been doing their own inner work but perhaps haven't crossed the bridge into the activism part? How would you lead them across that bridge? How would you, you've read the book, how would you, what would you say to somebody, you meet them all the time, you live in Santa Fe which is full of people sitting on their cushions having vibrant thoughts but doing very little. So what do you say to people about real action in the real world? How would you approach somebody? Okay, well first I'm going to backtrack because I do feel that people in Santa Fe do- No, I'm joking, I'm teasing you. Do help others. There's a lot of wonderful people, yes. But there are a lot of new age floaters too out there. Yes. Yes, this is true. So what would you say to one of those sweetly smiling bliss bunnies who truly believe that vibrations are going to solve everything? I would say that you need to put it into action. Whatever your passion is, whatever moves your heart, I have a distinct affinity for animals which I believe you do as well. And so if there are homeless animals to adopt an animal or to contribute to the shelter or to give of your time or your talent. Well they would say I'm very enlightened just by being in the world, I'm transforming the world. What would you say to them then? Well I would say that's a good start, that you're aware of your own light because I do think that we have a responsibility to be thinking and being mindful of everything that we're sending out in a thought pattern, in a energy consciousness pattern, in our heart. But because the world is at such a crossroads right now, I think it's imperative that we take the next step and become activists in whatever way that moves us. And I think some people just don't know how to do that. One thing that you did suggest which I found very helpful is to gather circles of people together, either common interests and passions or common professions and see how they could help and volunteer and give to people who are in more need than they are. But I find it interesting because that was one thing that I, as I was reading the book, there are a lot of schools of thought that say all you need to do is sit on the mountaintop and find your own luminous being. Well these schools of thought are disastrous. And what has happened in human history is that on the one hand we've had a group of people who pursued the domination of nature, now we're raping and destroying nature, the materialists if you like. And on the other hand we've had the spiritualists who believed that all of this is an illusion and have sat in quite comfortable little cells at the top of mountains which means that the divine revelations, the divine energies don't come in to actually transform the real world. So both have abandoned the true world, the materialists because all they're doing is raping and destroying it, and the so-called spiritual people who have abandoned the real world because they're soaring above it in some fancy other way that they've created out of their own fantasies because the truth is the divine is right here, right, on the earth. The earth is divine, the creation is divine, all beings are divine, all stones are divine, all trees are divine, all animals are divine, it is all a divine creation. And what is essential now is to understand that this divine creation is in terrible danger. The most difficult thing in the world is to awaken people to this terrible danger because our whole culture is designed as a massive soporific, as a huge drug, as an immense distraction to prevent people from getting the courage to wake up. So the first thing that you have to really, really get across to people, and this is very hard, is to really say to people, do you truly believe that not doing anything is going to be an adequate response to the world burning to death in the flames of greed, delusion and ignorance? Do you truly believe that just by the odd prayer and the odd meditation you're going to have enough of an impact to turn up as a human being in human history's greatest evolutionary crisis? Do you really believe that that is going to be enough of a response? If you do, what kind of a drug are you on? What kind of a fantasy are you on? So I believe that it's extremely important to really try and help people wake up. And then what I believe is that it's very important to say, I know what you're feeling now when you wake up because I know the terror and the horror and the madness and the grief and the desolation that come when you realize you're with a vast bunch of psychotics on an almost irreparably damaged earth hurtling towards suicidal self-destruction. I know what you feel like. I feel like that. I feel absolute despair at times. But we are not alone. So the second thing that is very important to tell people is that we have this divine consciousness and its power and its peace and its strength from which to act in wholly unprecedentedly brave ways. And there's no talking about it anymore. Do the work, do the practice. Get down to really, really connecting with your inner divine. And feel that strength. And stop playing the victim. And stop hiding your head like an ostrich in the sand. And stop thinking that you're just small and impotent and can't do anything. Dare to wake up, dare to be brave, dare, dare, dare, because you have this divine power within you. The third thing I say to people is that discovering that you are inherently divine like everyone else and like the whole creation is not enough. Because the divine isn't simply an experience. The divine is a passion of responsibility. The divine is this vast fiery force of love that doesn't just want to revel in the experiences of love but actually wants strangely enough to help and to change and to transform the conditions that we've created by this vast corporate death machine to prevent the destruction of the planet and the annihilation of life. And then I would ask people to really look into their hearts and ask themselves one question. One question that will get them real and stop the fluffing about and the fantasy and the withdrawal and the pretence that nothing is going on. And the question that I beg people to ask themselves is what of all the causes in the world that you see in the burning world? What of all of these causes actually breaks your heart the most? What really gets to you? What gets to you enough so you stop oming and shmoming and doing your little mantras and feeling fabulous about yourself? What gets to you enough to actually shake your being? To really make your heart tremble with outrage and pain and longing to do something? The way I've worked on it in myself is that sometimes I read The New York Times for example cover to cover impact almost every morning because I'm not one of those mystics who believe we have to be tuned but not in touch. I think being in touch is what's being attuned. And I noticed that I can read about many, many things. I read about them with sadness but I can read them. I can read about famine I can read about. I'm afraid to say I can read quite calmly things about gay rights, about women rights. But when I read things about what we do to animals I can hardly finish the paragraph because I feel so, so stricken with outrage and sorrow, immeasurable sorrow that I'm frightened of my own emotions. And that's how I know that my fundamental heartbreak is animals. And that's what reaches me and makes me passionate enough to do something. So I'm really saying to every single human being for God's sake wake up, for God's sake connect with the divine inside you and for God's sake have the courage to let your heartbreak at what's happening in the world and for God's sake have the guts, the passion, the truth to ask yourself which of all of these heartbreaks really, really makes my heartbreak and then do something about it because if you discover your heartbreak, you discover your mission, you discover your passion and you discover the energy, the energy that you're going to have to need because the problem with 95% of people at the moment is that the energy for change, the energy for action, the energy for life has been so horribly corrupted and contaminated by this distraction society, by the illusions of consumerism, by the secret nihilism and anomy and despair and apathy that are being peddled like popcorn in the entertainment business. So what is this energy that you're going to need? You're going to need the energy of divine truth, divine peace and divine heartbreak and you've got to stop when you've identified your heartbreak, really doing it with other people because as the Hopi say, you know, the time of the lone wolf is over. This is not about individual seekers doing sweet little things. This is about a global mass movement of love in action which is our last and best hope. If it doesn't get to the scale that it has to get to, the world will be destroyed. If it does get to the scale that it can, then there is a chance that we'll create the structures that can survive the period of the greatest shattering in our history. This is how urgent I believe it is. I'm ready to go. I'll tell you, a friend of mine said, God is a verb. God is a verb. God is god-ing. Yes, right. I think one of the biggest challenges is motivating people to let go of their complacency and get in their discomfort zone. They're not going to do that. I've been on the look. I've been teaching, pouring myself out for 20 years in America. America is almost a lost cause at this moment. I find so very few people with the sincerity and the passion really to do something. I think Americans on the whole have been almost totally annihilated by fake mysticism, horrifying materialism, deep addiction to comfort, inability to break out of the prevailing insane narcissism of a culture gone psychotic. And it is extremely hard to motivate people out of their apathy. People are sunk and mired, the majority of people, in an apathy that is the single most frightening spiritual phenomenon of our time because it is the final masterpiece of dissociation, a total dissociation from nature, from each other, from the world, from anything that really matters. This is a very serious situation, but I have myself, and I think this is true for many teachers, I have given up trying to motivate people out of that narcissism because it hasn't worked, nothing has worked, nothing has really worked. So now what I have hope in is the intensity of the crisis. The only thing that is going to wake the American people up is a massive financial crisis which will radically disturb the addiction to comfort that now dulls and stupefies millions and millions of people. That crisis is coming, there is going to be an environmental crisis, there's going to be a financial crisis. The foundations of this whole civilization which is in a terminal state of paralysis and apathy are going to be shaken to the core by the divine because the divine I deeply believe has decided that this horrible, disgusting, blasphemous, obscene, terrifyingly stupid culture that we have created out of our ignorance and abandonment of the sacred and exploitation and domination has come to an end. It cannot go on because if it goes on nature will be destroyed and human beings will become worse than the most terrifying, ferocious aliens or animals. It's very, very far gone. So I put my trust in the crisis. No words of any spiritual teacher, Jesus and Muhammad and Kierkegaard and Rumi, nothing can penetrate this narcissism. No human agency can penetrate the sergeants. However inspired the divine is going to shatter it now. The divine is going to break it, the divine is going to rend the whole human fabric not out of judgment but out of the final mercy to wake us up to the absolute lunacy of what we are doing and to really take away the kinds of props and comforts that have led us to sit chewing gum while the forests burn and 95 percent of the seas become contaminated. We have to wake up and we're going to be bitch-slapped awake repeatedly and no teacher can do that but God can do that and God will do that. What is doing then? I think we are seeing the shifting sands in all areas happening and I do believe that they're- We're seeing the beginning of the shifting. We're not seeing the real shifting. The corporations are still totally in power. The corruptions of the politicians are still infinite. We have Newt Gingrich applying for to be the Republican president. After Herman Cain, who was accused of modesty, I mean my lord, you could not invent these people on crack. We have Occupy Movement which has been a wonderful break in the coma that Occupy, they've dealt with very carefully. They've now, you know, they've thrown Occupy off the various lands that they were occupying and who knows how long that will last. So don't please let's fall into new age platitudes about how it's shifting. There are signs but they are fragile and they are very compromised and there are still far, far, far too few of us risking our hearts and minds and lives for the world. So we have got to get going. We have got to stop cheering ourselves up by the tiny little glimmers of hope and start going for the big hope which is us awake acting together in sacred activism to preserve the planet. I don't disagree with you at all. You're a brave woman. But I must say that I do think there are people like yourself, like our show, who have a consciousness, who are out there. Of course there are. And who are doing things to change. All I'm saying is yes, of course there are. You're saying we're going towards critical mass. What I'm saying is there are 20,000 people, if we're lucky, watching this. If I was some charlatan selling a recipe to make yourself rich, fabulous and thin, I'd be on a show in which there'd be 25 million people or 10 million people watching. So don't let's pretend to each other. Right? I agree. Let's get that straight. The second thing is I share your deep, deep, deep love of the amazing people that are turning up. But they are extraordinarily few. And many of them are still not giving everything because they still are in a kind of new age days about the time. So what I say to the people who are already here is, my God, thank you for turning up, but for God's sake, burn hotter, press deeper, give more. Because you are the only ones who are turning up so far in this massive crisis. A lot depends on you. So get real and get going at the deepest level. And to those who aren't yet awake, I don't know what to say because I've run out of things to say to the narcissistic and stupefied American public. I have run out of things because I don't know what will wake us them up. Katrina wasn't enough, 111 wasn't enough, the madness of Iraq and Afghanistan have not been enough. The fact that 40 million people without medical insurance isn't enough, the massive poverty in the black population doesn't seem to be enough. The fact that 5 million children go to bed asleep at night without food doesn't seem to be enough. My God, what will be enough to wake people up to where we are? What will be enough to break us out of this coma? Only God knows and perhaps God doesn't even know. So I don't think it's in our best interests to be too sanguine or too optimistic because that can inject us with false comfort. I don't think we, false comfort is a tremendous enemy at this moment. You have to be strong enough to see things as they are. You have to be sober enough to see things as they are. You have to have the guts to see things as they are. You have to have the divine strength, the divine peace to be able to look out and not pretend that we're in a terrifying radioactive foxhole trying against immense odds to shift the planet before it commits massive suicide. We're in the week when the world powers are meeting yet again to discuss the environment. Last year we know that the most savage amount of emissions ever recorded were spewed out mostly from China and India, but also of course from the States. Terrible, terrifying and unarguable because scientific evidence it's there where not only are we not cutting the emissions, we're increasing them at an incredible rate at a time when we know that to do that puts the climate into freefall. This is like a child knowing that napalm is going to burn the house down and just flinging napalm everywhere in the house. It's insanity. The world governments are meeting. Do you think that they are going to do anything? I was at Copenhagen. I addressed the delegates at Copenhagen and I told them, you are over. I don't trust you. I don't believe in you. I don't believe in the governments. I don't believe in the corporations. I don't believe in the politicians because you know what's going on and you're so addicted to a system, an economic system that you're prepared to do absolutely nothing about it knowing that doing nothing about it is preparing the world for total chaos. So that's the situation we're in. You and I are good people. There are many, many wonderful people out there. We have no power with these people. We have so no power with the corporations. Do you think the corporations were in terrible fear at Occupy? They weren't. They were busy checking their money making love over Liechtenstein, wherever it is. Do you think the politicians were driven by, oh my God, oh my God, there's this huge movement starting, these people really demanding change? I think all of the democratic politicians were thinking about is how we can appropriate the best messages of Occupy for Obama's re-election campaign. It's a very difficult dire situation. And when people say to me, oh, you're so dark, I'm not dark. I give everything. I'm going on, going on. I'm pouring myself out. But I'm not pretending to myself. And I'm certainly not going to pretend to people who are listening because to pretend to people who are listening is a crime. To tell them the truth is the duty of a spiritual teacher. And the truth is that we are a very fragile movement just beginning, we're up against great odds. We have to become a lot more committed, a lot more serious, a lot more passionate, a lot braver, a lot more self-sacrificial in the highest sense to have any real impact. Look at Syria, look at Egypt. Those people on the streets in Syria and Egypt are prepared to pay with their lives. They go out every morning and they know that they might not return that evening. And they care enough about democracy and about freedom and about a new Egypt and a new Syria to actually risk it. Are you telling me that amongst the people you and I both know in America, there are people brave enough actually to go out on the streets and risk their lives? I hope so, but I haven't met them yet. I've met a lot of comfortable liberals, a lot of decent people praying for the animals, a lot of people doing tonglen on the environment, whatever they think they're doing. I've met very, very few people who have the spine and the spunk and the courage and the wildness and the truth to do what it will actually take, which is to start up a movement, a nonviolent movement of love in action, so powerful, so grounded in spiritual practice that it will become a real deep threat to the structures of Kaldiibol. And then God knows what's going to happen, but we're going to have to be at a much greater level of force, power, truth, passion and self-sacrifice to be able to affect the kinds of changes that we're now just blathering about. I'm almost speechless. Well, I hope it's not because I'm just batting you on the head. No, it's a lot to digest and I do feel the truth in what you're saying. I also do feel blessed to know people who have dedicated their lives to a peace consciousness, to work with some native elders who travel around the world, setting up peace circles, and they believe that if 1% of the world's population changes in consciousness, which would need to happen before the change in your speaking of with the active... I think this is an illusion that we can avert the disaster. We don't just need a shift in consciousness. A shift in consciousness is relatively easy. But the question is, which kind of consciousness? If it's the consciousness that I've seen in the New Age over the last 30 years, a lot of people claiming to be enlightened, doing Damol, investing in weapons of mass destruction while pretending to be environmentalists, living the hypocritical consumerist life. If it's that consciousness, which just spouts Sanskrit words and smiles, bliss bunny smiles while the world is burned, I don't give a damn for that consciousness. And that consciousness is not going to get us out of a paper bag, let alone an environmental catastrophe. The consciousness that needs to come in now, radically, passionately, is a divine consciousness of wisdom, peace, passion and action. And it needs to be enormously powerful and strong and vibrant. And it needs to be dedicated to action from the beginning. I'm always very suspicious when people say, what we need is a shift of consciousness. It's not consciousness more that we need. It's sacred awareness with action. Because people can be lulled into a sense of false security by this remark of a shift of consciousness, just because millions of people are talking about karma and watching Oprah and reading The Secret. Oh my God, or Eckhart Toller and trying to become into Presence is not going to be even the beginnings of the beginning enough. We have got to change, we've got to regulate the corporations and deregulate them, I mean. I mean regulate them and make them transparent on every level. We have to alter the relationship of the corporate power and money to politics. Otherwise, we're just the best democracy money can buy. It's a ludicrous fantasy that this is a democracy when it's all controlled by corporate money. We have to really make the media responsible and start teaching us and informing us about what's really happening instead of stupefying us with reality shows and celebrity trivia and trash. We have to really make sacrifices so that the poor can have decent housing and so that 40 million people can have medical insurance. Do you think a shift in consciousness only? No, we have to have passionate, divine consciousness in divine action which is organized and coherent and focused and demanding. So until I hear that, I am not going to be taken in, I've heard it all. I'm bored to death to death, I want the real stuff. That's what my life is dedicated to. I'm not telling people that a shift in consciousness is going to be enough. I'm telling them everything is at stake. You need to plunge into divine awareness. But don't get lost in just thinking that being awake is enough. It's not enough. You have to be awakened in action and you have to get together and organize. You have to realize that if we don't organize together, we will simply give the dark destructive forces the whole world to do with whatever they want because one of the things that characterizes the dark and the destructive forces of our world is that they're phenomenally intelligent, they're brilliantly organized, they have all the money, they own the media, they own the newspapers, they can make whatever information they want available. You're not up against just crazy, difficult people. You're up against totally brilliant people who are totally organized and who are ferociously ruthless in their pursuit of power. So until you really get that and stop being sentimental and stop being self-picking and stop being bliss bunny and start realizing that the one hope the human race has is through a fusion of compassionate, compassionate divine consciousness, radical action and radical organization of alternative ways of being and doing everything that work together until you realize until we have that on the earth, we're really continuing to slide towards total disaster. One percent is not going to be enough. We're going to have to need at least 20 or 30 percent of the world to start saying a very dramatic no to what's going on and to have in their hearts a very passionate yes about what they want to build and to agree on what needs to be built. I addressed Occupy Vancouver and they're wonderful people and I have the highest admiration for the courage and the sweetness and the depth of what is emerging, has emerged in Occupy movement. But I said to them, if you believe that not having leaders, not electing leaders transparent to the whole and not having a concrete set of demands and not having a coherent organization is going to be of any use against the massed forces, brilliant and ruthless and energetic of the cold structures of evil, you are out of your mind because there's not a single example in the whole of human history of a movement that has changed history, that hasn't had to accept some of the facts of power. So get on with it. Let's try and imagine this organization, these demands, this coherence in a sacred way so that we can get going and really mobilize. That was my message to Occupy and I hope that that will happen. I don't see it happening yet. I'm patient rather and I'm not deluded. I'm not in a state of delusion nor am I miserable because not being deluded actually releases a lot of sacred energy. So there's a way in which talking about the 1% and raising consciousness and doing these beautiful rituals and everything can actually dilute people and make them comfortable and stop them getting desperate enough to do the deep enough work to be effective enough. I want people to be desperate and I want them to, in that desperation, connect with the divine and I want them to get going. I need that and everyone needs that. The world's sacred activist movement is not one that is rooted in any sense of comfort. It's rooted in a tremendous fragility and heartbreak at the world, tremendous confidence and faith in the inner divine and a tremendous responsibility that has to really become global now for the world to have a chance. In your book you say, I'm trying for our readers, how to get organized. I understand that we need to be as motivated as the opposition, if you will, if you have to be as strong and organized and trusting in the divine to lead the charge, if you will. Well, the hope is really a manifesto of hope. I've been very fierce, but the ferocity is the other side of a great hope. I think ferocity is essential because it clears away the illusions and you can't base true hope on any kind of illusion. True hope is born on the other side of comprehensive despair and disillusion. When you have lost all your illusions, you're left with one final reality and that is the divine within and that's where the real hope is. So what my book is about is about really asking people to look at the situation, to see its atrocity, but to also see that there's a birth taking place potentially, there's a birth of whole new technologies that could get us off our addiction to oil, there's a tremendous mystical birth taking place, there's the availability to the whole human race of marvelous technologies of mystical transformation, there are movements that have been celebrated such as in books like Blessed Unrest, all over the world of protests and now of course there's Occupy. So there are real signs, fragile but real, of this new birth. And what are you going to do to become a midwife of this birth so that you can really become effective instead of just keeping the death machine going? And I say really that there are five kinds of service that need to be joined together in every human life at this moment when all of life is threatened, the service to the divine. By whatever name you know, it doesn't matter. Just love the source and let the source infuse you and guide you. The service to yourself, you have to realize that to be effective in a situation like this, you're going to need to be spiritually strong. So have a real spiritual practice and get real about it because as Marian Woodman said to me, she said, going into this crisis without spiritual practice like walking into a forest fire dressed in a paper tutu. So get real about it. Stop, flower, flower, and stop grazing in different traditions. Start doing some real practices that can really transform you. You've got to be psychologically strong because the world is going to be rent and there's going to be madness and chaos and suffering on an unimaginable scale. So how will you stay loving and hopeful and joyful? Get dealing with your own shadow. Get dealing with your own addiction to comfort, your fear of standing out, your wundalogy, your self-pity, all of it. Get working with it so that you can be one of those who will stand radiant in the middle of the madness. Get working on your physical because the world has got aids, the environment has got aids, the, well, our water is being poisoned. How will we be strong enough to contain the divine energies needed for the birth unless we've got strong bodies? So those practices are essential. The practices of self-love, self-care and the non-narcissistic sense as an instrument of the divine. The third kind of service is to be really aware that we are all in this together. The whole human race, Republican and Democrat, black and white, gay and straight, are now in a terminal evolutionary crisis. We're all in it. We're all in the same crazy boat of meat. And what we really need to be able to work is real honor and respect even for those people that we can't stand the policies or their actions. We must preserve at the deepest level our sense of the inner divinity without masking the atrocity of what they're up to so that there can constantly be a flow of wisdom and love and compassion and help from our hearts to their hearts and opening up dialogue. The essential aspect of this third kind of service is to realize that we're also in a world that is a massive concentration camp for animals. We have created a worldwide Auschwitz in which we are completely torturing the animal world to death. We're destroying the habitats. We're destroying whole herds of elephants and tigers and lions. We are monstrous and it is time that we turn to our animal relatives and ask forgiveness and transform all our ways of treating them and all our appalling neglect of them and all our absolute arrogance because we're just engendering a tsunami of black karma that's going to wipe us away. The fourth kind of service, and this is the one that is essential, I believe for everybody, is to think global, to be aware of this great death that's happening and then the birth that's happening within it and your role to be a midwife, but to also act locally, not just to have these grand big ideas, but to put them into real practice in the real world, in your real community because there's not a single community in America which is not suffering horribly at this moment. I mean, Santa Fe for all of its liberal opulence has an underclass of very depressed, very economically distressed people. So of course there's New York anywhere in the States. What are you doing for the animals? What are you doing for the people? What are you actually doing with all of this fancy talk? And it means nothing until you're doing something. So then find your heartbreak and really start organizing what I call networks of grace. Networks of grace came to me in a dream vision. I saw the name, bought the domain name. And I realized that what is needed are groups of cells. Al-Qaeda works through cells. The right wing organizations work through cells. We believe that just oming and shmoming and sitting and having potluck dinners are going to change this. We've got to get organized. We have to get organized. And certainly we're not going to get organized internationally before we get organized locally. So through the internet we can connect networks of grace which are cells of between six to 15 people who are grouped around a heartbreak or a passion or a profession. And we're doing something about a local pain and suffering with local resources and are really kicking us in the radioactively mischievous way, encouraging each other and sustaining each other. And through the linking up of networks of grace all over the world dedicated to different causes we're going to have on the earth a global movement of love in action. And without that we're not going to have anything. So I'm going forward with that. And the fifth kind of service is to really make your social, political, economic, sexual, emotional choices congruent with what's happening in the world. So those five kinds of service anybody can do if they have the goodwill. But they have to have the goodwill and they have to have the inner strength and they have to realize how damaged we all are by the culture that we are in, how much of a slave we all are to its demands of consumers. And it's very difficult, but it can be done and we can help each other to it. Well, I think you're helping a lot of people right now perhaps take a different look and a more realistic look at how numb we've been in a lot of ways. In every way. There's not one way in which we haven't been numb. No, and it's time to break free of that. And that's hard for people to kind of step into a different world from a world that they've been in without, I think, dissociation, you said, is very key. Well, it's very, very hard, especially when you have a new age bizarre, a new age market which sells fake spirituality which is another kind of soporific and drug. I mean, the situation is very difficult because of course you have the official culture, if you can call it a culture, which is just selling the lies of the faded and failed American dream, which is over. And you have a so-called religious culture, you have the fundamentalists raving on about how God wants you to be rich. Supposedly they read their gospel since they consider it the unmistakable and irrefutable truth. Jesus doesn't seem to be talking about prosperity a lot in the gospel, not in the gospel I read, but to them it's all about how Jesus loves you and wants to make you rich and powerful. This is insanity. You have the fundamentalists in Islam and in Judaism and so they're all part of the psychosis. And then in this country you have the enormous corporate nonsense of the new age which has just sold prosperity consciousness, cheerfulness. There's a brilliant book that I read recently by a man called Chris Hedges called The Empire of Illusion which he really, really laser blasts the new age for its complete spiritual bankruptcy and inability to really motivate people to do the kind of radical work that they need to do to transform really. And he says that what eugenics were to the Nazis, eugenics was the physical training that would perfect the master race. Positive thinking is to our collapsing world and the new age has sold the pap of fake positive thinking, fake manifestation, fake, fake delusion on every level to people offering them instead of the radical, authentic, difficult, painful, wonderful, amazing path of authentic transformation, instant fixes, instant solutions, instant fantasies, another missed opportunity. So it's very hard for people at this moment to find authentic spiritual leaders, authentic spiritual information, authentic activists doing authentic work in a world that is almost totally dominated by theater, media, illusion, fantasy and denial. But they can and they must because everything's at stake. I have a slightly different take. I believe that people waking up that is the first step and then they take the leap into the action. I don't feel that all of the soul searching and seeking is necessarily a narcotic and it stops there. I think there are people that take that path and then do dive in and I will say that your book, The Hope is very inspirational and it helped me see different ways I could organize the community that I live in to help that be a part of. And I think going to people's heart and what moves them. So searching can be just as narcissistic as everything else. You've met people who've been soul searching for 30 years and wonderful houses overlooking canyons. They've been soul searching with this guru, that guru, that swami, they've been to Bhutan. They've been, what have they actually done? Soul searching, you can search your soul and then you have a Jungian analyst and then you read the latest Buddhist person comes to Bhutan, you have all the words. It can be an endless narcissistic game without a commitment from the beginning to put what you discover about your own divine truth into practice. This is, I think, what we now know. We've had a so-called spiritual movement which has been hailed by the New Age corporate mafia as the revolution in consciousness, which of course it isn't because if it were, we wouldn't be in the rubbish that we're in. We've had this hailed as the revolution in consciousness but what has it actually done? How many animals have been rescued because of it? How many shelters for battered women have been raised because of it? How many millions of poor people have been fed because of it? How many environmental devastations have been stopped because of it? How many thousands of people have been motivated to go onto the streets to end the corporate domination of the world because of it? Not many, none, hardly, very few. So let's get real. Soul searching and praying in loving circles and it's a very wonderful beginning but it's nowhere near an adequate response to what we're in. It is pathetic. It has to get much more serious and focused. I agree with you, I agree with you. And what is inspirational about my book isn't that it's like so many of the books out there which to me are just Western trash. I'd rather read pornography than most of the spiritual teachers at the moment because most of them are telling lies to get loved and to get rich and to get sell copies. What I hope is inspirational about my book is that I am not lying. I'm being as naked as I am now but I am being as naked about the joy that I have in the divine and the joy that I see in the lives of the people who are turning up who are realizing how extreme the crisis is but nevertheless giving everything and I'm being naked and honest about the kinds of massive strength and inspiration that can come to you if you're prepared to do the work but if you're not prepared to do the work there is nothing that anybody, Jesus and the rest of them can give you, nothing. And the central fantasy of our culture is that you can just read this and Andrew Harvey, The Hope and you've read Deepak the week before and there's Carolyn Mace next week that you're going to read and that you're actually making any spiritual progress. You're not making any spiritual progress you're just furnishing the summer cottage of your dilapidated mind. You've got to start doing the deep inner work really getting down naked with God getting into bed with God and making love with God so that God can God you and reveal God in you and you've got to get very serious about the way you're living and contributing to the death machine because we're all colluding with it we're all keeping it going and many, many people who we could both say were soul searching are heavily invested in destructive companies are heavily you know all the whole madness and you've got to get serious about making your life congruent and then you really, really have to start risking your comfort by stepping up and witnessing something that will not make you popular and really doing something about it and you're going to annoy many people if you do and you're going to face loneliness and ostracism and anguish but you'll be in great company you'll be in great company you'll be in the company of the saints and mystics and prophets and all the ones who've really given their lives to shift the world. So let's have a call to courage a call to wild courage and stop feeding people the pabulum that they seem to want to need. I still have a shred of a hope that the New Age corporate mafia which has been selling this garbage for so long and making mega millions out of it has been doing so from a cynical manipulative belief and that the people out there really don't want it and want something a little bit more ennobling than the secret as the final truth of the mystery of the universe God in hot pants giving you whatever you want what ludicrous fantasy. I hope that actually out there there are people who truly want the authentic mystical transmission and want to do the real work and want to get forward. That hope is getting thinner day by day but I'm clinging on to it and I'm going to donate my life to it as well as going on and going on giving everything I have because that's the only human divine response. I wonder if you could lead us in a prayer or meditation in closing out. Yes, I'd be happy to. Thank you. What I found is that the most powerful force in the universe is the force of the motherhood of God the radiant love force that is streaming from the light and creating everything. So what I would ask you is to imagine the mother above your head in whatever form you imagine her. Imagine her surrounded by golden light and imagine that light pouring from her hands down through your skull. Imagine it opening the whole of your skull turning your brain to gold. Imagine it pouring down now opening your third eye in the middle of your forehead and opening that so that it radiates like diamond. Imagine it pouring down into your throat. How beautiful that gold light pouring from the mother. Imagine it opening the center in your throat the red rose center so that red rose opens like a fragrant pungent flower. Imagine the light now going down into your heart and washing away all the clouds around your heart so that your heart blazes like a sun. So the gold light is pouring down, down, down because love flows down. Love flows down, flows down. And your brain is a golden brain and your eye is a diamond eye and your throat is a rich red rose open and your heart is a blazing sun. And now take that light down. Let her pour it down into your stomach so your whole of your belly center becomes a massive heap of golden wheat, a rich heap of golden wheat, pungent and beautiful and you feel its balance and its richness at the core of yourself. And then take that light down to the bottom of your feet and give up all of the struggles and pains and agonies of all of your past lives to that healing power. And now the whole of you, body, heart, mind and soul, genitals and spirit, all of you, all of you is infused by the golden light of the mother and very humbly but very grandly and very deeply and richly. You now know that you are the child of the father mother. You are the embodied divine child. You are the drop, a drop of the ocean of divine presence. And now, knowing who you really are, make a dangerous vow, make a vow to really face where we are, to ask for the courage to stop being in denial, to ask for the courage to see the way in which your lifestyle keeps going the madness and to ask for the courage to have your heart broken and to have your true radical heartbreak and mission revealed to you so that you can go out armed with this joy and matured by the grief to become a sacred activist, to change this planet now. All hail and praise to the divine mother that despite all we do, continues to love and infuse us with her grace. Thank you, Andrew. I have to tell everyone that I have tears in my eyes throughout this whole conversation and I know that you are, I feel the fire of your heart in my heart and I feel your passion, lighting of flame in my tushy to get going at a deeper level. Thank you very much. Thank you. My pleasure. So everyone, I'm sure this has shaken and ruffled a few feathers and that's important right now at this time, this critical time. And if you want to find out more about Andrew, his site is www.andrewharvey.net and this book, which is full of hope and truth, sacred truth and sacred fire and sacred passion. It's called The Hope, A Guide to Sacred Activism. It's a blessing. My blessing. So, can I have a five minute break and go for a little walk and come back? Yeah, sure. Then we can do some roomie.