Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Spring 2020  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "Initiation, Present and Absent" Quest 108:2, pg 28-33

By Richard Smoley

In this context it may be peculiar to start by saying that initiation, in its ultimate sense, may not be available to us in the West today. Yet this seems to be the case—or so one could conclude from Mircea Eliade’s classic study Rites and Symbols of Initiation.

Examining material from primitive cultures, Eliade says that puberty rites are the prime form of initiation. Though they vary from simple instructions about the Supreme Being to intense and painful rites, “it is through initiation that, in primitive and archaic societies, man becomes what he is and should be—a being open to the life of the spirit, hence one who participates in the culture into which he was born . . .  It could almost be said that, for the primitive world, it is through initiation that men attain the status of human beings; before initiation, they do not yet share fully in the human condition precisely because they do not yet have access to the religious life” (Eliade, 3).

Note the link between initiation into a culture and initiation into the spiritual life. They are, in these contexts, identical. But for us today this initiation is not possible, because our culture does not have a collective spiritual life. I doubt that it was possible even one or two hundred years ago, when Christianity was the official religion of the West. Though many forms of initiation still take place, they are private: they are shared only by a small portion of society. The ultimate initiation, which, according to Eliade, is simultaneously spiritual and cultural, is not available to us.

Puberty rites are of supreme importance because all members of the society undergo them. Other forms are intended only for some. One such type is initiation into a secret society or confraternity. These societies are not always secret in the obvious sense: their existence is not necessarily a secret, but certain elements of their teaching and practice are kept hidden from the profane.

The third primary type of initiation involves entering a mystical vocation—in many indigenous societies, that of the medicine man or the shaman. Aspirants may decide voluntarily to take on this occupation, or they may feel that the decision is made for them—they experience a call, often a spirit-induced illness. They have to cure themselves with the shamanic practices that they will later use on others (Eliade, 2–3).

These initiations share a common theme of death and resurrection: initiates die to their former lives and are resurrected into a new identity. This would appear to have been the case in early Christianity, when baptism, applied to adults who had made a conscious decision to accept the faith, was seen as a kind of death to the secular self and a rebirth in Christ (Yarnold). Paul alludes to this idea when he says, “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” (Romans 6:3). But infant baptism cannot be considered an initiation: the baby is too small to know or remember what has been done to it.

Eliade’s portrait of initiation relies heavily on early anthropological reports of primitive cultures. He says little about present-day possibilities and would no doubt have agreed with the opening statement of this article. Yet initiation persists. Is there any form in which it is not purely vestigial?

For one answer to this question, we can turn to the twentieth-century French metaphysician René Guénon, who placed initiation at the center of his system. Actually Guénon would have been chagrined to hear anyone talk about “his” philosophical system, which, he insisted, had nothing to do with him personally and would have had no value if it did. Rather he was expressing what he called tradition.

Guénon gives tradition a specific meaning, which is indissolubly linked to initiation. Tradition is equivalent to transmission: “Etymologically, ‘tradition’ expresses no idea except transmission; when one speaks of ‘tradition’ in the sense we intend, its meaning really does not extend beyond this perfectly normal usage” (Guénon, 56).

Tradition in this sense is a transmission of a certain spiritual influence, which can only be administered to certain individuals who possess the necessary characteristics. This influence, moreover, can only be transmitted in a regular initiatic line, by someone qualified, under specific rites that are designed for the purpose. (Guénon’s frequent use of the term regular indicates the influence of Masonic initiation on his thought.)

Tradition, in Guénon’s view, goes back to a primordial spiritual center. In prehistoric times, access to this spiritual center was open and easily attained, but over time it became more and more occluded. He links this occlusion to the Hindu concept of the four yugas or ages: the Satya, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali yugas. According to Hindu thought (and to Guénon), we are now in the fourth, the last and darkest of the ages: indeed Kali Yuga literally means dark age. Hence his attitude toward modernity, which is the inverse of modernity’s view of itself (at least until very recently). Far from being a time of enlightenment and progress, the present is an age when connection with this spiritual center (which at this point exists in a metaphysical realm only and not in the physical one) is extremely attenuated. In fact it can only be gained through initiation.

Initiation is a link to this spiritual center. This link is both “vertical” (to use Guénon’s own metaphor) in connecting the candidate to superhuman realms, and “horizontal” in extending back in linear time to the primordial age. (The Hebrew name for the Jewish esoteric tradition, Kabbalah, has a similar dual significance.) For these reasons Guénon claims that a valid initiatic line cannot have a historical point of origin: “If the origin of any organization whatsoever is fully documented as the work of individuals whose names can be cited and which possesses no link to tradition, one may rest assured, despite the claims, that there is absolutely nothing initiatic about the organization” (Guénon, 77, 80). He contrasts Masonry, whose Landmarks go back “to time immemorial,” with the eighteenth-century Society of the Illuminati, which was founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 and effectively functioned for only about a decade (Neugebauer-Wölk).

Initiation is an inward connection to the tradition, which is the transmission of spiritual influence. It can only be administered to candidates with certain qualifications. If this smacks of elitism, Guénon replies that initiation is elitist. It can be administered to some and not others. The reason is not a desire for privilege or exclusivity, but the simple fact that some people possess certain characteristics while others do not. As Guénon emphasizes, initiation is not being denied to anyone who could derive any benefit from it.

As for qualifications, “the essential qualification, which takes precedence over all the others, is that of a greater or lesser ‘intellectual horizon’” (Guénon, 93). More specific qualifications often have to do with the conditions of initiation into a particular line rather than of initiation in general. In regular Masonry, according to Albert Mackey’s interpretation of the Ancient Landmarks, “certain qualifications of a candidate for initiation are derived from a Landmark of the Order. These qualifications are; that he shall be a man—shall be unmutilated—free born and of mature age” (Mackey).

 Often these qualifications are understood as deriving from the days of operative Masonry, as an anonymous author in one Masonic periodical believes: “Obviously a maimed man could not do as ‘good work, true work, square work’ as the able-bodied man” (Anonymous). Other disqualifications have to do with impediments to carrying out certain ritual functions: “In most Jurisdictions [the candidate] must be ‘perfect’ with two arms, two legs, two hands and two feet. In some Jurisdictions, if he can conform to the requirements of the degrees, he may lack one or more fingers not vital to the tokens; in others he may not.” Here a physical disability is a source for disqualification because it means that the candidate would not be able to carry out the rites fully or accurately.

For Guénon, “if Masonic initiation excludes . . . men with certain infirmities, this is not merely because those who are admitted used to have to carry burdens or climb scaffolds, as some assure us with a disconcerting naiveté; rather the Masonic initiation could not be valid for such people and could have no effect because of their lack of qualification. The first thing that can be said here is that even if the link with the craft has been broken with respect to outward practice, it nonetheless . . . remains necessarily inscribed in the very form of this initiation, for it this connection were eliminated, the initiation would no longer be Masonic but entirely different.”

Guénon says women are disqualified from Masonic initiation for the same reason. They are disqualified from Masonic initiation, but not necessarily from other types: “There exist forms of initiation that are exclusively masculine, while there are others to which women can be admitted in the same way as men.” In a footnote, Guénon adds, “In antiquity there were also exclusively feminine forms of initiation” (Guénon, 94), but I have reason to believe that exclusively feminine initiatic lines continue to exist in the West today (see Gilchrist).

Other disqualifications for Masonic initiation, according to Guénon, include stuttering, which would indicate more of a mental defect than a physical one (mental defects are disqualifications as well); moreover, “the ritual ‘technique’ almost always includes the pronunciation of certain verbal formulas which must naturally be correct above all in order to be valid, something stuttering does not permit in those afflicted by it” (Guénon, 101). Note the similarity to the instance of missing fingers: again the impediment has specifically to do with the ability to carry out the rite.

Guénon’s discussion of initiation focuses heavily on Freemasonry for at least two reasons. In the first place, Masonic rites and texts, although ostensibly secret, have been publicized well enough so that they are more familiar than those of other initiatic organizations. In the second place, Guénon believes that the initiatic lines in the West have been extremely attenuated since at least the Renaissance. In fact “the only two [lines] that can claim an authentically traditional origin and a real initiatic transmission, however degenerate they may be through the ignorance and incomprehension of the vast majority of their members . . . are the Compagnonnage and Masonry” (Guénon, 34).

The Compagnonnage in France consists of the descendants of medieval craft orders much like those of the Masons (Bayard). Guénon concedes that there may also be “possible survivals of certain rare groups of medieval Christian Hermeticists” but adds that they “in any case were very restricted” (Guénon, 34)^.

Guénon regards the Brothers of the Rose-Cross, known also as the Rosicrucians, as a genuine initiatic line, reconstituted with the help of Islamic initiates after the dissolution of the Knights Templar in 1309. Guénon believes that the Brothers (known especially from the Rosicrucian manifestos, published in 1614–15) functioned in Europe in the late medieval and early modern periods, but he takes literally a legend that after the seventeenth century, they removed themselves to the East (Guénon, 239). I have some reasons to doubt him, although it is not my place to discuss what connection this line may or may not have to present-day organizations that call themselves Rosicrucian. In fact I suspect that Guénon was ignorant of various initiatic lines in the West that did and do still operate, largely for a reason he regards as intrinsic to the nature of these lines: they are not organizations in any publicly constituted sense, and they had no reason to make themselves known to him. He does not appear to have thought of this possibility.

In any event, in Guénon’s view, initiation imparts a certain spiritual influence to the candidate, rather like the Muslim baraka. This influence is itself the initiatic secret: signs, handclasps, words, and the rites themselves are simply its vehicles, and they are ineffective unless they are administered by someone who is qualified. In this connection he notes the use of the mantra in the Hindu tradition. This word has come to be used as slang for anything that is endlessly and mindlessly repeated, but a mantra is not that. OM is perhaps the most famous, but for most people, it is not a mantra in the strict sense. It only becomes a mantra when it is imparted in instruction by a qualified guru. Anyone else who tried to use it, for meditation or any other purpose, would not get the same result; for this reason initiates are often told to keep their mantras secret. “A mantra learned otherwise than from the mouth of an authorized guru is without effect, because it is not ‘vivified’ by the presence of the spiritual influence whose vehicle it is uniquely destined to be” (Guénon, 54). Note again that the mantra per se is only a vehicle of spiritual influence, not the influence itself (Bharati, 111).

For Guénon, the only lines in the West that are even vestigially initiatic are Freemasonry, the Compagnonnage, and certain esoteric Christian lines about which he says very little. One line that he describes as more or less extinct from an initiatic point of view is that of the Carbonari, the Italian guild of the charcoal burners. The Carbonari started as very much like the French societies of the Compagnonnage, but the Carbonari are chiefly known to history through their influence on liberal political movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Guénon believes that by this point they had degenerated into a solely political movement, which for that reason was no longer initiatic, because initiatic organizations operate in the realm of the sacred only and have nothing to do with profane matters such as politics. Masonry, he adds, experienced “a certain degeneration in the same directions, though not carried so far, as that of Carbonarism.” By this he means the well-known role played by Masonry in the eighteenth-century revolutions in the United States and France, and well into the twentieth century.

Guénon’s concept of initiation is selective in the extreme; what then are we to make of the initiations in ancient or primitive societies, such as puberty rites, which are administered to everyone in the tribe, and which Eliade considers to be the most important?

Guénon discusses this issue in regard to the upanayana, the Hindu initiations of the twice-born, the three highest castes in the Hindu system. These are administered to all members of the caste; one does not fully belong to the caste without them. Citing the scholar of religions A.K. Coomaraswamy, Guénon sees these rites not as initiations in the full sense, but more properly as forms of “admission” or “integration” into the caste. He connects this kind of initiation with those of “primitive societies,” the very kind that Eliade was principally discussing.

One can see the error of ethnologists who unthinkingly apply the term “initiation” (the true meaning and real implication of which they evidently have no grasp) to rites that all the members of a tribe or people have access to at any moment of their existence, and particularly when it is a matter of so-called primitive societies. In reality, these rites have no initiatic character at all . . . Naturally these societies can have authentically initiatic rites, even if these are degenerate to some degree (and perhaps they are so less often than one might be tempted to suppose); but, here as everywhere, these are accessible only to certain individuals to the exclusion of others. (Guénon, 155)

Guénon’s view of initiation cannot be reconciled with Eliade’s. For Eliade, the puberty rite is of supreme importance because it is performed on every member of the tribe, whereas for Guénon, this is precisely what disqualifies it.

Nonetheless, one can gain some insight from comparing the two perspectives. Perhaps the most illuminating is the theme of death and rebirth. Both Eliade and Guénon agree that this is practically universal; they even agree about why. Eliade: “Puberty rites, precisely because they bring about the neophyte’s introduction to the realm of the sacred, imply death to the profane condition . . . The experience of initiatory death and resurrection not only basically changes the neophyte’s mode of being, but at the same time reveals to him the sacredness of the world” (Eliade, 18–19). Guénon: “The change that gives access to the initiatic order corresponds to a higher degree of reality . . . Initiation is generally described as a ‘second birth,’ which indeed it is, but this ‘second birth’ necessarily implies a death to the profane world” (Guénon, 172–73).

For both Guénon and Eliade, then, initiation is a death to the profane realm and a birth into the sacred. If so, why should they reach such diametrically opposite conclusions?

Guénon insists that we are living in the Kali Yuga. For him, the primordial center is occluded in our time, and it is occluded for everybody, no matter whether they are French Freemasons or Queensland aborigines. There can be no exceptions. For Eliade, who does not hold to such ideas (or at least not in the same way), it is possible for certain cultures to have retained a collective sense of connection to the “sacredness of the world.” Thus he sees no innate difficulty in initiation proper being administered to everyone in a tribe.

Having said all this, I should add some personal reflections.

Initiate is a peculiar word. In some occult literature, like the Initiate trilogy written in the 1920s and ’30s by the Theosophist Cyril Scott, it denotes someone extremely advanced. And yet initiate means beginner, someone who has just started something.

We might find a clue to this apparent contradiction in Buddhism, which speaks of the novice as a srotapanna, or “one who enters the stream.” The image suggests that initiation opens one up to a stream of spiritual influence offered by a tradition.

Initiation seems to entail three basic levels. They may be conferred in formal rituals—of an organization known or unknown—although I suspect that at least in some cases no ritual, or only the most basic type of ritual, is involved.

The first level could simply be called the initiation of responsibility. It marks a point at which the individual stands forward and freely agrees to accept the task of his or her own personal evolution—in Buddhist terms, entering the stream. Most people, however wise, educated, or successful, have not made any such commitment. They will develop and grow as the random circumstances of life permit. But the initiate at the first level makes this commitment to work upon self-development. In return he or she is, as it were, implanted with a seed crystal that forms the core of the awakening self. Life starts to shape itself around this crystal, purging initiates of the dross of their characters.

This process continues for a long time, years or more likely decades, and probably there are few initiates alive on earth who are not continuing to undergo it. But after the individual has reached some level of maturity, the time comes for a second initiation—the stage when he now takes on the additional responsibility of a task or line of work that he is uniquely able to pursue, such as healing, art, or social action. This is not necessarily an ordinary trade or profession, although it may well coincide with one’s work in daily life. One could call this the initiation of vocation.

Having started on this line of work, the initiate pursues it both for self-development and in service to a higher purpose. Inevitably the individual will make mistakes, will do some things well and others badly and suffer from lapses of judgment or even ethics. But they are all part of the process. If the initiate is made of good material (and the very fact of initiation suggests he is), he will sort through his mistakes and learn the necessary lessons.

The third stage is mastery. This is not a matter of acquiring amazing mystical powers or superhuman capacities. But it does show that the individual has acted upon the responsibility taken on in the first initiation and developed the skills required in the second. He is not necessarily finished with these tasks, but he has acquired enough ability to work creatively and from his own initiative. He is now enabled to stake out new ground and expand humanity’s range of knowledge.

While I am not a Freemason, these stages seem to correspond to the three levels of Blue Lodge Masonry: Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason. Those who have been raised to these levels (as Masons put it) may be able to see the correspondences and even explain some of the mysteries of these stages from details of the Masonic rites.

These three grades still exist in ordinary crafts and trades to this day. Here is how they apply to electricians: “An apprentice is a beginner or trainee who works under direct supervision of a master electrician. A journeyman is trained and experienced and can work on his own under the general guidance of a master. A master originates projects, gets permits for construction and installations and oversees the work of journeymen and apprentices” (Haring). These specifications form part of the National Electrical Code in the U.S., which is used by all states in licensing electricians. Evidently these three stages retain a great deal of practical value.

Is self-initiation possible? The answer appears to be no, at least if you are defining it as Eliade and Guénon have. If you are entering a spiritual stream, it is a stream that already exists and there must be someone to introduce you to it. While many people have had spontaneous experiences of illumination, these are probably better described as moments of awakening or enlightenment.

Others claim to have been initiated on the inner planes. No one can say they haven’t, because no one can make definitive pronouncements about another person’s inner experience. Nevertheless, such cases seem highly prone to self-delusion or fraud, so they are best viewed with caution.

Finally, is initiation necessary for spiritual advancement? Again the answer seems to be no. The range of human experience is too vast, too well endowed with spontaneous awakenings and self-discovered insights, to suggest that formal initiation is always required for progress on the path. For some, it is not only valuable but necessary. Others do perfectly well without it. Why? The answer to this mystery no doubt lies in the uniqueness of the human individuality and the wide scope of circumstances that are needed to help it flourish.

At this point someone may ask, “This is all very good, but what practical value does it have for us?”

The answer, or the beginning of an answer, lies in this fact: many adult men today are not men; they are boys. Many adult women are not women; they are girls. In our society it is possible to go successfully through all the stages of life without maturing emotionally, much less spiritually. An individual can build a house by himself from the ground up, practice as a respected neurosurgeon, or turn $10,000 into $10 million while remaining a two-year-old inwardly.

The reasons for this situation are complex. Consumerism certainly plays a major role. But I think we also have to consider the absence of generally accepted forms of initiation in present-day society. You can be initiated into the culture (that is, you can be culturally literate) without being initiated spiritually. Although you can also be an initiate in Guénon’s highly specific sense, that is rare and is just as likely to make you feel alienated from the wider culture as to feel integrated into it.

This problem is, I believe, more pervasive than one may easily imagine, and lies behind many social problems. The back cover of my copy of Eliade’s Rites and Symbols of Initiation says:

The absence of initiation in our culture has left modern men and women often isolated from each other, from the invisible powers beyond, and from the myths that sustain daily life. The primal soul desire for symbolic rituals pushes youth into substitutes for initiatory experience: gangs, suicide, car crashes, teenage pregnancy, street drugs. These “symptoms” show the unquenchable urge for existential transformation and the need for elders, mentors, and rituals.

This edition of Eliade’s book was published by Spring Publications, which at the time was owned by the archetypal psychologist James Hillman. Thus it is possible that these words were written by Hillman himself.

The words above were written in the early 1990s. In the years since, the situation does not seem to have changed. I believe that the need for collective initiation remains more pressing than ever, but at this point I can offer no suggestions for answering this need that would not seem improbable or ludicrous. Thus I have to end this article not with a solution but with a problem.

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Sources

Anonymous. “The Candidate.” Short Talk Bulletin 8, no. 5 (May 1930); Masonic World website, www.masonicworld.com/education/files/artnov01/The Candidate.htm; accessed Jan. 4, 2018.

Bayard, Jean-Pierre. Le Compagnonnage en France. Paris: Payot, 1977.

Bharati, Agehananda. The Tantric Tradition. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1970.

Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Woodstock, Conn.: Spring Publications, 1995. This book was originally published under the title Birth and Rebirth in 1958.

Gilchrist, Cherry. The Circle of Nine: Contemporary Female Archetypes from an Ancient Tradition. Newburyport, Mass.: Weiser, 2018.

Godwin, Joscelyn, Christopher McIntosh, and Donate Pahnke McIntosh, eds. and trans. Rosicrucian Trilogy. Newburyport, Mass.: Weiser, 2016.

Guénon, René. Perspectives on Initiation. Translated by Henry D. Fohr. Hillsdale, N.Y.: Sophia Perennis, 2001.

Haring, Bob. “Differences between a Journeyman and a Master Electrician,” Chron.com; accessed Jan. 4, 2018, http://work.chron.com/differences-between-journeyman-master-electrician-2158.html.

Harris, Philip S., et al., eds. Theosophical Encyclopedia. Quezon City, Philippines: Theosophical Publishing House, 2006.

Mackey, Albert. “Landmarks.” American Quarterly Review of Freemasonry 2 (Oct. 1858), 230. See http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/grandlodge/landmarks.html accessed July 4, 2018.

Neugebauer-Wölk, Monika. “Illuminaten,” In Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al., eds., Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill, 2005: 2:590–97.

[Scott, Cyril.] The Initiate. London: Routledge, 1920.

Smoley, Richard. “Waiting for the End of the World: René Guénon and the Kali Yuga,” New Dawn, Sept. 19, 2010: https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/waiting-for-the-end-of-the-world-rene-guenon-and-the-kali-yuga.

Yarnold, Edward. The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation: The Origins of the R.C.I.A. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1971.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Art and Science of Initiation, edited by Jedediah French and Angel Millar. See review in Quest, winter 2020.

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Printed in the  Spring 2020  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation:  Hebert, Barbara, "Viewpoint: Initiation into the One" Quest 108:2, pg 12-13

By Barbara Hebert
President

Initiation is a topic of fascination to many. We may reasonably wonder about the basis for such interest. Some individuals may want to receive initiation in order to acquire power or knowledge, hoping to learn the secrets of the universe or acquire psychic or supernatural abilities. On the other hand, perhaps the fascination runs much deeper. It may be because on some level we recognize that, as souls, we are on a spiritual journey and have an inner awareness that there is much more to us and to our journey than simply this physical life.

            Annie Besant writes about initiation:

It means an expansion of consciousness. Initiation itself is a certain series of events through which the man passes; actual events and experiences taking a certain amount of time, not a vague indefinite series of feelings, but actual communications and thoughts and actions gone through by a man out of the physical body, in the presence of a great assembly of the Masters. The result is that the man becomes conscious of a new world, as though some great new sense had been given . . . which opened . . . a new world . . . As a man born blind might know the world by hearing, taste, touch, but if his eyes were opened would see a new world . . . not dreamed of stretching around . . . on every side, so is it with the man who, having passed through the great ceremony of Initiation, comes back into his body, into the mortal world . . . Another world is around him, a new phase of consciousness belongs to him. He sees, where before he was blind. He knows, where before he only hoped or guessed. 

The teachings of Theosophy indicate that our spiritual journey will allow us—or perhaps more accurately, push us—to grow, thus increasing our sense of personal and universal awareness. As we travel the spiritual path, every time we surmount an obstacle, we grow a tiny bit. Eventually these tiny bits of growth combine to bring us to a totally new stage of consciousness.

            Geoffrey Hodson writes:

When we are conscious solely in this . . . material and mortal aspect of our nature, we are temporarily unconscious of both our divinity and unity with God. As our evolution proceeds, we gradually rediscover this lost knowledge of oneness with the Deity. This is the ultimate secret of life. The salvation of man, following his so-called fall, is an ascent into full experience of the fact that God’s image lies at man’s very core.

For the goal of human evolution is the standard of perfection described in Christianity as “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” This implies the attainment of a divine state of omnipotence—or perfected and resistless will; of omnipresence—or perfected and all-embracing love; and of omniscience—or perfected and all-inclusive knowledge. Furthermore, and most importantly, the attainment of this perfection is absolutely certain for every person. 

(Note: Both Besant and Hodson, according to the standards of their day, write in gendered language; however, this language is intended to be inclusive of both men and women.)

 Put simply, initiation, as described in much of the literature, is an expansion of consciousness. This expansion provides a greater understanding, not just from a cognitive perspective but also from an experiential one, of the unity of all beings. It seems to me that the true wisdom gained through each successive initiation pertains to the reality of the essential unity of all life. We are not separate from one another, as we appear to be; rather, we are like the various colors that are dispersed when a white light shines through a prism. We look like different aspects, but at our root we emanate from the One Being.

At this point in our lives, we may understand the concept of the unity of all life intellectually; that is, we have the knowledge in our physical brains, and we believe it. But with each successive initiation, the cognitive component slips away until we fully experience the reality of what it means to be one with all life.

It is difficult to imagine how glorious it must be to experience unity, if only because the personality and the physical brain are not part of that experience. Initiation goes beyond the physical realm into the realm of the soul and ultimately into the realm of the One, thus empowering, even compelling, us to dedicate ourselves more deeply to working for humanity.

When we talk about working for humanity, we are talking about raising the consciousness of all beings. At the same time, as I have mentioned in previous Viewpoints, in order to work for humanity we must work on ourselves. As we change and grow in conscious awareness through observation and effort, we are impacting all of humanity. In one unified whole, any time one aspect changes, the whole must change, even minutely. As each of us makes tiny changes in our consciousness, we are changing all of humanity, even though our contribution is so infinitesimally small that we can’t see it.

With each increase in consciousness, we gain a greater sense of responsibility. More awareness equals more obligation. As we begin to see the world more clearly, we also begin to see our responsibility more clearly. This responsibility ultimately requires self-sacrifice. The self is sacrificed because it disappears. There is no self—there is only one whole. Initiation is giving up the self, bit by bit, until at the final initiation, there is no longer a sense of a separate self; there is only a sense of the One.

Therefore an individual looking toward initiation in order to gain knowledge or power may find it, but perhaps not with the anticipated outcome. What is truly received through various initiations is the recognition of our obligation to serve humanity. The knowledge gained is the increasing experience and awareness of the unity of life. The power gained is the loss of the separate self and all of the personal attachments of that separate self.

As Hodson indicates, all of us will ultimately experience initiations, as well as the expansion of consciousness inherent in them. It will happen at some point. Desiring initiation would seemingly slow the process rather than expedite it. On the other hand, an intentional focus on personal growth while helping others as much as possible would accelerate the movement.

Theosophists are encouraged to study, meditate, and serve. We are encouraged to listen to our own inner voice and use our discernment as we walk the spiritual path. The thoughts expressed here are simply my reflections at this point in time. I’m wondering about yours. What are your thoughts about initiation and movement on the spiritual path?

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Sources

Besant, Annie. Initiation: The Perfecting of Man. Chicago: Theosophical Press, 1923.

Hodson, Geoffrey. “The Spiritual Self and Its Goal of Perfection”; https://theosophy.world/resource/articles/spiritual-self-and-its-goal-perfection; accessed Jan. 5. 2020.

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Printed in the  Spring 2020  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor's Desk " Quest 108:2, pg 2

This issue, on Initiation, has a long article by me on the subject, so I hope you will understand if I use this space to write about something else.

Namely, Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions. It was founded in San Francisco in 1985 by Jay Kinney, then known chiefly as an underground cartoonist (Young Lust and Anarchy Comics). I started writing for it in 1986, and became editor in 1990; Jay continued as editor in chief and publisher.

Each issue of the magazine covered a specific theme (much like Quest). The themes covered a wide range, including the Kabbalah, magic, Gnosticism, C.G. Jung, G.I. Gurdjieff, Freemasonry, Sufism, Hermeticism, and esoteric Christianity. Our best-selling issue was, not surprisingly, the winter 1993 issue—on psychedelics.

In 1998, things began to change. For personal reasons, I decided to move back to the East Coast after eighteen years in California. In addition, the market was getting rougher for small magazines like Gnosis. While finances had always been extremely tight, the bankruptcy of one of the magazine’s biggest distributors pushed things over the edge, and Jay reluctantly decided to close things down. The last issue, published in the spring of 1999, was, fittingly, on the Holy Grail.

As a crowning effort, Jay and I collaborated on a book on these themes: Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions. It was first published by Tarcher/Penguin in 1999. In 2006, Quest Books brought out a revised edition, which is still in print. In 2004, Mitch Horowitz, then an editor at Tarcher/Penguin publishers, brought out a Gnosis anthology, edited by Jay, called The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West.

In the thick of it back then, I didn’t totally grasp Gnosis’s power or importance. At this point, I have published eleven books and have been editor of Quest for close to twelve years. But when I meet people, the thing they most often mention is, after all these years, Gnosis.

The magazine was a remarkable effort, considering that the full-time staff never exceeded four and there was no institutional support whatsoever. Its greatest contribution—formulated by Jay at the outset—was to provide a venue for discussing the Western esoteric traditions that was intellectually serious without being academic. Although we did have some skeptical materialists writing, the basic premise was to steer a middle course between reductionism and credulity. Our contributors ranged from Eastern Orthodox priests to Sufi masters to Satanists, and I took great pride in that fact.

Legally, the publisher of Gnosis was the Lumen Foundation, a nonprofit Jay set up to publish the magazine. With rare exceptions, the foundation didn’t do anything else, so when the magazine ceased publication, the foundation went into dormancy.

So it remained for many years. Last year California’s Franchise Tax Board (the entity governing state revenue collection) decided that since the Lumen Foundation was quiescent, it was time to dissolve it. Which has been done. One condition of dissolution was that any remaining assets were to be transferred to another nonprofit.

 I’m greatly honored that the Theosophical Society in America was chosen as that organization. The chief asset to be transferred was rights to the magazine and the website (www.lumen.org). Consequently, the TSA is now the rights holder to the contents of Gnosis.

To this day, very little of the material in the magazine is available online. The Gnosis website lists all of the issues, but only has one sample article from each one. Nevertheless, print copies of all issues are available from Fields Book Store, another San Francisco legend (ordering details can be found on the www.lumen.org site).

Twenty years later, I find it rather funny to end up as editor of Quest, because even back then, under the editorship of Bill Metzger and my good friend Ray Grasse, it was one of extremely few magazines in the field I really respected. I often opened an issue of Quest and said, “Damn! I wish we’d run that!” I almost never felt that way about any of the other publications.

The circle comes around. I’m very pleased that Ray still continues to write for Quest (for example, his article in this issue). Jay too has been a regular contributor in recent years.

People often talk about the Masters, the conscious circle of humanity, or whatever term you would like to use. Much of this talk is idle. Nevertheless, I’m impelled to say that I believe these beings, whoever they are, had a hand in inspiring Gnosis. I’m glad we can help keep the impulse alive.

Richard Smoley

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Printed in the  Spring 2020  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "Savage Initiation: An Interview with Andrew Harvey " Quest 108:2, pg 14-20

By Richard Smoley

Andrew Harvey has long been a well-known figure in alternate spirituality. Born in India in 1952, he was educated at boarding schools and at the University of Oxford, where, at age twenty-one, he was the youngest fellow to be elected to the prestigious All Souls College. He remained at Oxford until 1977, when a spiritual search took him back to India. He encountered Mother Meera (born 1960), a guru whom devotees regard as the embodiment of the Divine Mother. Harvey extolled her in his book Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening but later broke with her, a process he described in another book, The Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night.

            Harvey’s books—which number over thirty—include The Direct Path: Creating a Personal Journey to the Divine through the World’s Traditions; The Divine Mother; Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ; and The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism. His book Turn Me to Gold: 108 Poems of Kabir, illustrated with photographs by Brett Hurd, was published in 2018. He currently lives in Oak Park, Illinois.

            Harvey spoke at the Theosophical Society’s Olcott headquarters in October 2019, and I had the chance to interview him then. I found him to be a powerful and eloquent yet sympathetic figure, and the interview was more inspiring for me than many I have done. Rarely does one meet a man of such intelligence, passion, and depth.   

Richard Smoley: What do you think of spiritual initiation? How do you experience it?

Andrew Harvey: I’d like to start with the place where I’m most concerned: we’re going through a global initiation. We’re going through the ultimate initiation, because we’re going through a crisis which threatens the entirety of human life and the great mass of nature. We’re going through an initiation of such extremity and severity that most of us are unable to see its true meaning.

Initiations are absolutely central to the different stages of the path and to the different levels of evolutionary transformation. We’ve come to a moment in our history when the depths of life are giving us the sign that we need to transform completely in order to survive.

A new kind of humanity is being born out of the chaos of our time. This initiation corresponds exactly and in detail to the frightening but transfiguring initiation that is called the Dark Night in the great Islamic and Christian and Kabbalistic mystical systems. This Dark Night corresponds to the death process in shamanism. It corresponds to the great revelation of the mystical traditions that the ultimate initiation on the path is dying into life, into truth, into love, into enlightened consciousness.

There is always this death process on the inner journey, and now we’re living this death process, this great initiation, on the outer journey. This is potentially scary, because very people as yet understand that this is part of a great evolutionary transformation and follows the great mystical laws of the inner Dark Night.

It’s very important for the survival of the human race to know three lessons. The first is to cultivate radical humility. We’ve created a complete nightmare out of our hubris of the world. We have to confess that we know nothing about the mystery and that we must open our whole being now—heart, mind, soul, and body—to the mystery to be guided forward.

The second great lesson is that we need to die to the full self that we’ve created out of our trauma, out of the karma of our hubris—a full self that is now devastating the planet and creating a complete, horrific, sterile, disgusting, obscene prison of the entire planet, torturing the animals to death, killing the creation, organizing a system that is destructive to the inner and outer lives of billions of people.

Third, we need to turn to the essential nature of the divine, which is recreative, resurrecting joy. We need to experience, not just talk about, this great joy through prayer, practice, meditation, and compassionate service. This is going to be the fuel of our survival through this savage initiation. If you can stay surrendered in joy and to joy throughout whatever happens through the initiation, then the magic of the Dark Night can work upon you and help you embody the divine; it can birth you onto the next level of the evolutionary dance of the divine in the human.

This is how I see the initiatory structure of our time, and I’m devoting my life to helping people understand this, so that they can meet this outer initiation without fear, without paralysis, but rather in deep, concentrated joy and deep, sacred purpose and mission.

Richard: In what time frame do you think this crisis is likely to occur?

Andrew: Very much sooner than we think. I think we’re heading right into the evolutionary eye of the storm. I think it will be here within the next ten to fifteen years. I think the timescale of the United Nation report on the environment is an accurate one. We have, at the most, ten years. The Kogis give us six years.

The great proof of our lunacy is that facing this unspeakable challenge of climate change, we’re doing so pathetically little to counteract it. We’re nearing a moment of complete loss of control. The Amazon is burning. American democracy is burning. The world economic system is fragile. The trade system is fragile. The whole set of systems is collapsing. There are very few countervailing political and economic movements to give any solidity.

For me, a mystic is a supremely realistic person. A mystic has been graced with the clarity of the real, by the real. The mystic knows that he or she is deathless and that divine reality has never been born and will never die. The mystic is in touch with that divine reality and so has the clarity to see exactly what’s happening. The mystic doesn’t need false hope, because the mystic has divine hope. The mystic doesn’t need to mask the reality of what’s going on, because the mystic knows that what’s going on has a mystery of divine meaning behind it.

Being a radical mystic does not mean having fake hope for humanity. It means being able to meet whatever’s happening with joy and with resolution, to give what you can, to serve in whatever way is most useful, and to turn up with a noble bravado of love in whatever situation arises.

For me, being a real mystic means being a real rebel and living your life in a rebellion of joy and compassion and harmony and passion for God, whatever happens—living a noble life in the fullest sense. The ultimately nobility of soul is now possible to us because we’re living in the ultimate crisis.

So instead of allowing this crisis to paralyze one, it is an invitation to those who love God to burn away the false self in the fire of divine love, to come into a wholly new level of evolution, to gamble our lives away for God, and to cause a hell of a lot of mischief. It’s an invitation to turn up with all the passions of the heart blazing and all the passions of the will ordered and all the passions of the vocation of one’s mission lucid and focused. This is not a time for despair. It’s a time for gambling your life nobly away for God, in God, for the future, for the potential birth of a new humanity.

Richard: Even so, a lot of people are understandably at the edge of despair.

Andrew: I think it’s essential to be touched by that despair. You have to allow that despair to do its divine work, which is to purify you of illusion. We need to despair of our false solutions, we need to despair of any political or economic or fake technological solutions to this extreme crisis, because we need to understand that this crisis is, in its heart, a spiritual crisis. It’s a crisis of the soul, and we must address the roots of the crisis.

Despair bitch-slaps you awake to any fake solution and drives you into the arms of the one real solution—awakening: enlightened, embodied, divine consciousness. This is the only place a new world can be created from. This is the only place in which we can sustain this savage storm of annihilation that is coming our way, thrive within it, and keep serving and loving within it.

Despair is an absolutely necessary rite of passage for any serious soul in this situation. Despair purifies you of your illusions, but the last illusion that you have to be purified of is despair itself, because despair is the last illusion. You need to learn how to despair of despair and how to burn your despair in the acid of despair, so you can come to the great clarity of the real that sees and knows that reality is saturated with divine presence, that knows your own deathlessness and lives the deathless, awake, enlightened, loving, humble, ruggedly serving life, come what may.

That’s the great gift of despair: to get you going deep so that you discover what only despair can lead you to: the great hope that lies at the other end of the greatest despair, the hope that rises from your own realization of your essential divine identity.

Richard: I’m sixty-three—four years younger than you—so we’re of the same generation. I sense that our generation is the field of Kurukshetra on which this struggle is taking place, because there appear to be two sides, and many people are ranged on each one. I feel some hope for the millennials or Generation Z. They seem somewhat more awakened to me.

Andrew: I have great hope for the young. I’ve been meeting some astounding young seekers: people who have had it with religious and economic and political conventions, who realize that we’ve created a potentially terminal world for them. They are not buying the Kool-Aid of the New Age; they want serious spiritual practice along with radical political transformation and sexual liberation. They’re pursuing a new humanity with a great deal of courage and passion, and I salute them. I long to be able to reach them more deeply and share with them what I’ve learned on my journey.

Most of my work now is designed to reach the millennials so as to give them what I’ve learned and what the elders have learned, because they’re going to have to face the potential end of the planet. They’re going to have to rise to it, and I believe they will.

The Dalai Lama has just written an astonishing book called A Call for Revolution, and he addresses the millennials directly. He says, “I believe in you. I’ve met you all over the world. I’ve seen your pain. I’ve felt your pain. I’ve felt your outrage. I’ve felt your lacerating understanding of the bankruptcy of the baby boom generation. I’ve felt your lacerating understanding of the failures of people like myself and others who’ve tried as hard we can to break up the world. I know that you know that we’re in a terminal situation. I know that you are motivated to do great things, and I would like to offer you some suggestions.”

That’s what makes the book so extraordinary. His Holiness is really speaking for the first time about the desolation of our situation, but also about the great hope that he finds in the millennials. That corresponds with the great hope that I’m finding in these astonishing young people. They are throwing themselves into transformation in order to turn this terrifying situation around.

Richard: Well, of course, they’ll be left and we’ll be gone, so sooner rather than later they’re going to have to do that. Just according to the actuarial tables, many of the most obnoxious baby boom leaders are going to be gone in ten years.

Andrew: Right. As my great friend Maurice Bowra used to say at Oxford, “While there’s death, there’s hope.” Yes, there is a clearing coming, but it’s very important for me as a sacred elder to share the essence of what I’ve been able to learn. What the millennials are achieving is astonishing, but they may need a certain essential rigor, an essential focus on inner practice, and an understanding the laws of sacred action. We’ve come to a crisis that’s so extreme that it demands a level of divine wisdom, both in inner searching and in outer action.

Without that level being offered and modeled, the young might very well believe that they would be able to turn this situation around just by goodwill and nobility and certain kinds of action. That’s not going to be enough. It has to come from a truly transformed consciousness, and I think they are half aware of that, but they need their elders to tenderly and compassionately, and with great respect, offer them the practices, the vision, and the evolutionary perspective that they’re going to need to weather the decisive storm of human history.

Richard: You wanted to talk a little about Kabir.

Andrew: I didn’t spend five years of my life on Kabir because I thought what a lovely, sweet poet Kabir is. I spent five years of my life with Kabir because I know who Kabir is through the grace of God. I know that Kabir is one of the two great universal mystical poetic voices that humanity has been given, the other one being Rumi. I know from my own innermost experience that Kabir’s vision of a universal mystical oneness in the whole of humanity and the whole of created life, beyond dogma, beyond religion, is one of the most important visions that humanity has ever been given.

Kabir, unique amongst all the great teachers of humanity, did not want to create a new religion, because he believed that all religions failed to lead to the direct connection of the One. Kabir, unique amongst all mystical poets, did not want to be revered as a mystical poet. He wanted to inspire each person to become the poet of their own sacred existence.

When I plunged into Kabir about eight years ago, I realized that I was meeting the most scalding, the most searing, the most passionate, the most lucid, the most fierce, the most naked, the most honest, human, divine voice I could possibly meet. Something else became clear to me: Kabir, in the streets of Banaras in the fifteenth century, lived through the death and rebirth process that we’re now going through on a global scale.

He was born into this next evolutionary truth. He was born into the complete, embodied, divine human. He was turned to gold. He was engoldened. He was transfigured, and his poetry is the extraordinary witness to that transfiguration process, which, I believe, is now happening on a global scale.

Rumi has returned to intoxicate and illuminate the heart mind of the planet. Rumi expands and explodes the heart truth of God, the glorious, tenderness of the life of God.  Kabir brings in the lacerating and noble truth of the divine experience. The two of them together can give us a convincing and empowering vision of how to put divine love into radical, transfiguring action at a time when we need that vision like oxygen.

For me, Kabir is far more than a poet. Kabir is an initiatory field as expansive as Rumi, and as radical and revolutionary as Jesus. To come through grace into the initiatory field of Kabir is to be exploded from within, free of dogma, free of religion, free of constriction, free of trauma, free of karmic shadow, so as to be able to taste the splendor of divine identity and to be invited to live it in the extraordinary depths of ordinary life.

This is Kabir’s great cry of revolution. It’s freedom from all systems, except the system that is taught directly to the soul in adoration of the One. How amazing! Finally—a liberation from all the patriarchal dominations.

Richard: You’re speaking of something very explosive and energetic on the one hand and very disciplined and focused on the other. How have you integrated these two dynamics in your own life?

Andrew: For me, they’re two sides of the same mystery. For me, the divine is both absolute peace and absolute compassion in a marriage of opposites. The absolute peace is what I would call the father aspect of the divine. Shakti is the great passion of the divine.

I’ve discovered that like, I think, all seekers who are trying to both embody and experience the divine, I need two central kinds of practice. I’ve needed cool practices that can give me direct access to the great peace. I’ve also needed what I would call hot practices that enable me to keep the heart in a state of fiery longing and adoration and passion, so that the golden fire of divine passion can circulate throughout the entire being and start transfiguring the being.

So you’re working on keeping yourself steady and stable in divine peace so that you can open up ever more intensely to divine passion and to the energy that that passion gives you to fulfill your soul’s deep mission.

Richard: That’s very powerful. What you say has to do with purpose, and many people are becoming more interested in purpose, even in the business world.

Andrew: Well, they can greenwash anything, can’t they?

Richard: Yes. That’s the whole point. I read articles asking people, what is your purpose in life? What moves you? In the business world, you’re supposed to say it’s fitting into some incredibly trivial job. That’s the answer you’re supposed to give, and that’s all well and good. It’s worse if you actually believe it.

Andrew: You can’t really have a truly transformative purpose within the current business structure. How could you possibly, since they’re all worshiping a fundamentalism of the bottom line?

They’re trying to apply Band-Aids to gaping, ghastly, gushing wounds, which won’t be staunched by these semihypocritical fantasies. We all know this. Let’s stop pretending. There’s no way we can go forward without a radical restructuring of the structures of human society—political, economic, and otherwise.

We’re facing an apocalyptic climate collapse. We’re facing an apocalyptic economic collapse. We’re facing the apocalyptic collapse of all known systems. That’s the dreadful news, and the good news, because only through that collapse can any kind of authentic divine humanity can be created.

It’s by no means certain that it will be created. But we must gamble everything on it being born out of the ashes of this destruction, because the mystics know that is possible. That’s what I’m going for, and that’s what those who are awake to the evolutionary thrust of mystical reality are going for. What else is there to go for at this moment but the potential birth of the new kind of humanity out of this madness?

Richard: The rhetoric of 100 years ago focused on revolution. Today people are much more skittish about revolution, because the revolutions of the twentieth century made things worse.

Andrew: No external revolution is going to work. We’ve exhausted all of those. The socialist revolution was supposed to save us. The capitalist revolution was supposed to save us. None of those external revolutions could ever have been able to save us.

 We’ve come to a threshold when there will have to be revolutionary, evolutionary change leading to a radical restructuring of all institutions on the planet; otherwise we’ll die out. If you look at the history of evolution in the natural world, you see that it always proceeds not in an orderly way, but by apocalyptic crises. We’ve come to one of those absolutely insane, irrationally disastrous crises, which, from an unattached point of view, is also supreme opportunity.

Those who know this have to go deep into their spiritual lives to discover their deathless awareness. They have to start acting with canny compassion in the world and start witnessing the divine human life as far as they can to inspire others to do all they can, inwardly and outwardly, to dance with the great evolutionary dance of death and rebirth that’s potentially reshaping everything.

That’s what the great ones are summoning us to. Why not embrace that? Be grateful you’ve come to a time where all your illusions and fantasies are not going to work, that you’re faced with this scalding and terrifying truth. You can either be miserable about it or rush into its flames, burn away, become one with the One, and live as a divine human being, giving everything in joy for the sheer sake of giving everything.

That’s liberation, that’s freedom, and that’s what a great horrific crisis like ours can give to those who are sincere and authentic.

Richard: Yes. Ram Dass once said that no matter what’s going to happen, I still have to do my inner work.

Andrew: Even more so. The worse it gets, the more the challenge to the lovers is to stay turned to the divine. In an amazing poem, Rumi says, “The whole world could be choked with thorns, but a lover’s heart will stay a rose garden. The wheel of heaven could wind to a halt, but the world of lovers will go on turning. Even if every being grew sad, a lover’s heart will still stay fresh, vibrant, light.”

That’s the real voice of the beloved speaking to us in this crisis. You say you’re interested in mystical transformation. You’ve been born in the most terrifying transformative period of human history. How lucky you are, because you won’t be able to hide in stupidity. You won’t be able to hide in greed. You won’t be able to hide in lust. You won’t be able to hide in paralysis. Wherever you hide, you’ll be beaten out of your hiding place by the storms of annihilation, so get out and dance in the wild rain. Give yourself over to abandoned love. Give your life for love, and gamble your life away with heroic passion and humble adoration and humor for justice and compassion. Let things fall where they may, because that’s the only way in which you’ll ever taste the freedom of enlightenment.

Richard: What would you suggest that someone do in practical terms?

Andrew: Get one simple practice and do it incessantly in the core of their lives. All of the great mystics in all of the traditions have said there’s one practice that truly helps, and that’s saying the name of God as you truly love God. It doesn’t matter what name you use, whether it’s Hindu or Buddhist or Christian.

Use it in the core of your being, turn to it, return to it, and remember it. Say it incessantly in the core of the core of your being, and saturate your mind and your heart and your body with it. It will give you power. It will give you patience. It will give you strength. It will give you energy. It will give you passion. It will give you nobility. It will give you a pillar of fire in the core of you that you can rely on.

This is not poetry. This is what Kabir knows, Rumi knows. I know this. This is how I practice. I don’t practice the fancy practices. I get down to the remembrance of the name of God. I recite the name of God in the core of myself. I return to that; it fills me with everything I need, and puts me in the way of the grace that teaches me what I need to be and do.

That practice is available to the whole of humanity. Ramakrishna, the great Bengali saint of the nineteenth century, was asked what was the appropriate practice for the Kali Yuga, for this terrible period that we’re in. He said it’s japa. It’s saying the name of God. Just say the name of God. The grace is pouring down on this terrible time to give infinite strength and infinite inspiration to sincere seekers saying the name of God. But don’t believe me, and don’t believe Ramakrishna. Try it; you’ll find out.

The very simple practices are the most important ones. Choose one great mystical practice to practice. Remembrance of the name of God would be the best.

Choose one prayer that challenges you at the deepest level. Choose a really dangerous prayer like the Prayer of St. Francis, which asks you to become an instrument of peace. Think deeply about what it means to become an instrument of peace. It means to be dead to yourself, to your full self. It means being utterly powerless in the hand of God, like a pen that God uses to writes whatever God wants.

Choose a really dangerous prayer and pray that. Choose a sacred, physical practice like sacred dance or sacred yoga so your body can be filled with the energy of divine love, and you’re going to be OK. You’re going to be able to connect heart, mind, soul, and body to the One, and that’s what essential. Beyond religion, beyond dogma, beyond the rest of it, that’s what’s essential.

I hope I’m being of some use to you.

Richard: Yes, this is very eloquent.

Andrew: I’m doing the best I can.

Richard: Over thirty years ago, you first became known to the public in relation to Mother Meera. How do you look back on that situation today? What did it teach you?

Andrew: I look back on it as if I’ve lived through both the illusions and the desires of a whole generation, because I think my whole generation began with perhaps an exaggerated enthusiasm for Eastern religion. That was compounded in my own case because I was born in India, so I inherited the great religious freedom of India but also the great religious addiction of India to the guru system. I had to live that out until it exploded in my face and nearly destroyed my life.

Looking back on that whole terrible, amazing period, I’m extremely grateful for three reasons. First, my experience of the collapse of the guru system pushed me into the most savage and painful and lacerating Dark Night, which lasted ten years. It gave me a comprehensive understanding of the Dark Night process, which I can now share with other people, since I’ve come out the other side.

The second thing I’m grateful for is that if you have truly experienced the horror and the shadow of power, you are given a permanent bitch-slap and a permanent teaching in how not to exercise power falsely. As a teacher who can collect many projections, I have made it my absolute purpose to remain a seeker, not to claim enlightenment, not to be a guru, but to be a friend, encouraging others on an evolutionary journey that goes far beyond any of our capacities to understand.

That experience liberated me from a whole false vision of enlightenment. I’m come to understand and experience enlightenment not as a stable omniscience, but as an entry into an ever-expanding field of divine love and divine knowledge. This happens to be far more accurate than the traditional picture. It’s the true vision that the greatest mystics I’ve discovered have come to.

The third reason that I’m extremely grateful is that having suffered both the stupidity of religion and the shadow of the guru system, I find myself where Kabir says we must be—out in the open, naked in direct communion with the real. Being rooted into this naked communion with the real is the most thrilling experience that one can ever have, because it compels you to become authentic about your experience, claim responsibility for your experience, and live each moment with as much divine intensity and truth as you can.

I could never have done that if I’d continued to project my golden shadow onto a fake guru. I had to reclaim that golden shadow, take responsibility for its gold. So that enabled an engoldening process to begin. It enabled me to come into my true divine awareness and to start doing my own authentic, divine work and inspire others to come into their divine awareness, do their authentic divine work, and become part of a new birth, a new religious mysticism, a universal mysticism that is hierarchical in its understanding of the stages but nonhierarchical in its sharing of the wisdom.

Richard: You say you went through this Dark Night of the Soul for ten years. How did you live through it on a day-by-day basis?

Andrew: The Dark Night can drive you mad and can so lacerate your heart that you can hardly breathe for hours. The real Dark Night is an extremely terrifying and extreme process, as we can see in the world around us.

What I discovered through the grace of Rumi and the divine is that the way to survive in the Dark Night is to have a map of what it means. You have to know that what’s happening to you is actually recusing you from you. You have to know that and to cling to that like a life raft.

I discovered that if you could keep up a constant, incessant stream of devotional prayer in the core of your heart, you could just about stay sane. You would be given the guidance, the dreams, the grace that you need if you just plunged into incessant prayer.

I realized that I wouldn’t remain sane if I didn’t pray all the time. That led to a succession of liberating, ecstatic awakenings, because through your desperation, your whole consciousness becomes saturated with divine presence. In the end that rescues you from a false vision of yourself and baptizes you in divine awareness.

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