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# 2023-04-06 - Hidden Journey by Andrew Harvey
This abandonment was, I see now, a blessing. It baptized me in
despair; those so baptized have no choice but to look for a final
truth and its final healing, or die of inner famine.
India gave me a mother, then took her away. Years later, I found
in India another Mother in another dimension, and the love I had
believed lost returned. Without that first wound I would not have
needed love so much or been prepared to risk everything in its
search. ... From the deepest wound of my life grew its miraculous
possibility.
... night after night I would dream of playing cards with my mother
and then going out into a night garden to be bitten by a cobra; of
embracing the Dalmatian I had ... as a child only to have it turn
rabid.
> Do you know what this country does to you? It makes you believe
> against your will that at any moment the curtain of what you have
> called reality can part and reveal something amazing, fabulous.
"Why are you here?" I asked him.
"To change my life."
"You believe in Aurobindo's philosophy?"
"Belief is not so important. What is important is experience. I
experience his philosophy."
That made me furious. As we walked by the sea I launched into a
denunciation of the escapism of ashrams in general and the
uselessness of Eastern wisdom in the face of the problems of the
world.
"The world is in its last nightmare, and sweet old clichés like
'peace of mind' and 'the power of meditation' and 'evolution into
divine being' aren't going to wake it up. So-called Eastern wisdom
is as bankrupt and helpless as that of the West--more so, in fact,
because its claims are so much more grandiloquent."
Jean-Marc heard me out with barely suppressed amusement.
"Why don't you just let go of it?" he said.
"Let go of what?"
"The toy you are holding."
"Don't be cryptic."
"You are holding on to horror and tragedy like a child on to its
last toy. It is all you have left, the last rags of a costume you
do not want to give up."
His certainty exploded me into another tirade. "I'd rather die
than be calm. I'd rather die of the horror I see everywhere than
hide from it in some smug yogic catatonia."
Jean-Marc dropped to the sand laughing.
"Oh, my god," he said, wiping his eyes. "No wonder you like Callas
so much."
He imitated my indignant face and flailing arms.
"You see the world as one long grim nineteenth-century opera with
nothing in it but pain and loss. You refuse to imagine anything
but catastrophe."
He started laughing again. "How conventional."
"Stop laughing, damn you!"
"I don't have to stop laughing. YOU have to start. Don't you see
how absurd you are being? Look around you. Feel the night, its
sweetness, the softness of the sand where we are walking. You've
been running from your spirit for years. You must stop. You must
sit down, shut up, open, listen, and wait. Give your soul a chance
to breathe. Never in my life have I seen a performance such as the
one you have just given. The only thing you DIDN'T do is cut open
a vein."
He stood up and put his arm around me. "The room next to mine in
the guest house is vacant tomorrow. Why don't you take it? We
could go on talking and walking by the sea. I could introduce you
to my poetic genius, and we could drink tea in the garden in the
afternoon like old British colonels."
Jean-Marc's gift to me--for which I will always be grateful--was to
live the spiritual life before my eyes with such a happy simplicity
[that] I could not deny its truth. Jean-Marc had given up all
"normal" life for a small room with a badly working fan by the sea
in South India. He had almost no money, no job to go on, no ring
of friends to sustain his choice--nothing, in fact, but his faith,
his few books..., and the sound of the sea. Yet he was the
clearest man I had ever known, spare, joyful, delightfully
eccentric... Nothing interested him less than preaching his mystic
insights; he lived them...
-----
Far down the beach a figure in white was walking in my direction.
As it came closer I saw the figure had a face of blinding
beauty--oval, golden, with large, tender eyes. I had no idea
whether the figure was male or female or both, but a love for it
and a kind of high, refined desire began in me. With a shock I
realized the figure was coming toward me, [and] had, in fact,
walked the length of the beach to come to me. The figure
approached, sat down so close to me in the sand that I could smell
its sandalwood fragrance.
I had no idea what to do. I sat with my head turned away from the
figure. It said, in a soft voice, "Look at me." I turned and saw
its face irradiated by a golden light that was not the light of the
afternoon dancing around us on the sand but a light emanating from
its eyes and skin. It put out a hand and touched my face and then
cradled it.
Leaning against its breast, I experienced the most complete love
for any other being I had ever felt, a love in which there was
desire, but the desire so fiery and clear it filled my whole self
and was focused nowhere.
Still embraced, I asked the figure, "Who are you?"
The voice came back, amused and gentle: "Who am I? Who do you
think I am? I am YOU."
I fainted, and awoke.
-----
From the beginning the courage of what Meera did moved me. There
she sat, a seventeen-year-old girl, surrounded by no ritual
paraphernalia, offering neither discourses nor speeches, only her
presence, her touch, her gaze. She was unlike anything I had ever
imagined as a Master--no white beard or face scored with the
world's pain and wisdom. Yet the authority with which she
conducted herself was complete. She was either mad or genuine, and
nothing in the atmosphere suggested anything unbalanced.
> You cannot transform what you have not blessed. You can never
> transform what first you have not accepted and blessed.
She can be anything she wants, I realized. She can be the storm
and the Face in the storm [a vision the author had]; she can be the
Master, replying simply to the most difficult questions; she can be
the majestic Being at darshan, pouring her soul in silence into
ours; she can be this young girl in the doorway, smiling as we ate
her food. She is entirely free to do whatever is necessary to
break open our hearts.
"Go on loving your friend [who was struggling with mental illness],
whatever happens," he said. "Learn through this to love without
expecting anything. To the Divine you must be prepared to give
everything and ask nothing. With C you can train for this abandon.
The heart must break to become large. When the heart is broken
open, then God can put the whole universe in it."
# Chapter 4
I feel no need to be or do anything anymore.
Her house has only one rule--no smoking. Otherwise people are
free to do what they want, come and go when they want. For the
first time in my life I am free. Ma leaves me alone.
# Chapter 5
Returning to Paris, I felt like a child left on his own in a city
he had never been to before, compelled to improvise everything
afresh. Crossing the street or finding a packet of toothpaste in a
store I had shopped in for years became major operations, requiring
a surreal amount of control. I seemed to be doing everything in
slow motion, like a madman who believes his body is made of glass.
After three or four days I realized I would not be able to leave my
room. I canceled everything I had to do. My mind, my nervous
system as I had known it, was not working any more.
Deciding to do nothing and go nowhere released me to surrender to
what Ma was doing to me. [It took many days.]
When I surfaced, I was exhausted. It was a clear February disk. My
room in Paris gives out onto a courtyard; beyond its walls I can see
the white wall of another courtyard; above that there is a large
expanse of rough wall with great jagged holes in it, where in spring
the birds make their nests. That evening at about six the wall became
alive with a dense cloud of birds. As if at an invisible signal they
all started to sing together with a joy so violent, I gasped. I
heard Ma's voice say: With this wound of beauty I heal your heart.
It was hard at the beginning, because just as I had to learn to enter
and leave states of trance, so I also had to learn, over again, to do
perfectly simple banal things like making coffee or buying groceries.
I had to make lists and instructions for myself as if for a slightly
[developmental disabled] child. Well, I used to say to myself, you
asked for this change. Now you are getting it. Each change had its
amusing side: following instructions in big red letters to make
coffee or feeling overtaken with bliss buying shampoo have their
hilarities.
Each of my senses was becoming sharper. ... The sacredness of every
face, every body, made walking in the streets almost intolerably
intense--a feast of suffering and loveliness, each face suddenly so
near and so poignant. Several times in the Metro I felt myself
overtaken by feelings I then realized were coming from a person
opposite or behind me. Ma was slowly removing all screens between me
and the world around me, taking away all my ways of protecting myself
from its pain and splendor.
Yellow is the color of Saraswati, the goddess of music and poetry...
"You must put this in your book," Ma said suddenly. "I am not
interested in ashrams. I am not interested in founding a movement
for people who do not want to work, who want only to sit around and
think about what they think is God. I want people to work. People
should go on living their ordinary lives. Family life is a very good
place to do my work. It teaches people to be unselfish. I want
people to be strong, self-reliant, unselfish, and to contribute to
the world with whatever skills and gifts they have. I want them to
work--with my light behind them."
Ma said: "What use is it telling people anything? People must be
strong in themselves. What you choose to do for yourself you do
lovingly. I know everyone is unique; what is right for one person is
wrong for another. I say nothing, but my light changes people inside
and helps them discover what they want and need for themselves." She
looked at me directly. "The important thing is to pray and to
receive light. That in itself changes everything."
# Chapter 6
"There is never one moment in which I cannot show you how to find
whatever you desire. The present moment is always overflowing with
immeasurable riches, far more than you are able to hold. Your faith
will measure it out for you; as you believe so will you receive."
# Chapter 7
"To say yes with your whole being," she had said, "yes to everything
that happens, however horrible, makes you free."
"Every human being has to say in the end what Christ said at
Gethsemane: Not my will but your will, and when that yes is said the
doors of Death and Illusion crumble."
... the soul has a power to transform every horror into bliss and
that horror is the deepest friend of the soul because it compels it
to find this power. It is with this power that the Transformation
will be done; it is this power that she is, dying and blazing here,
living her absolute yes through every freakish obscenity; it is
this power that nothing can break, because it is nothing less than
the power of the divine itself.
I realized that all my sexual and emotional confusion, all the
trouble with femininity and masculinity that I had had from myself
and others came from a simple inability to understand what I was
seeing before me now: that the fusion of male and female in a sacred
and radiant Androgyny that is both Father and Mother at once, is the
truth of the Divine Nature and so of ours.
# Chapter 8
"Many people now believe," I said, "that the evil powers are in
control."
"They are not in control. The Divine is in control. The Divine
knows how to use evil."
"Evil imagines it is intelligent."
"Intelligent? Evil is stupid. It understands nothing. It
understands only greed, only cruelty."
"Evil is stupid because it thinks only of itself."
"Yes. Only the Divine knows what to do and how to do it, because the
Divine thinks of all things at once."
> As you awaken, all those you love awaken a little with you. All
> those you love are on the same spiral, rising.
My heart filled with joy, for I knew in that moment that no awakening
can be personal or selfish. Every awakening spreads its power and
light throughout the world.
# Chapter 9
"The Divine does not force the human because it knows the human is
really Itself. The Divine does not do violence to itself."
# Chapter 12
"Everything you think or do," Ma went on, "you must dedicate to the
world in love. Live in the eternal but waste no time. Everything
you do for the love of the world, you do for Me. Everything you do
for Me, you do for your true Self. There is no separation between
you and Me and the world. Now you know that. ... If you use
Knowledge to escape Reality, you are in another prison."
author: Harvey, Andrew, 1952-
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Andrew_Harvey_(religious_writer)
LOC: BL73.H37 A3
tags: biography,book,non-fiction,spirit
title: Hidden Journey
# Tags
(DIR) biography
(DIR) book
(DIR) non-fiction
(DIR) spirit