Customer Reviews

Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening

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Having read some of Andrew Harvey's later works, I was interested in this autobiographical account of an earlier period in his spiritual development. Harvey was born in the only place that could have matched his romantic spirit and spiritual imagination: India. At the age of nine, he was sent to be educated in the very different environment of England. Feeling abandoned by his parents and struggling with his own homosexuality, Harvey grew up to be a depressed college professor who one day decided to chuck it all and return to the land of his birth, in search of... he wasn't sure what. As a Christian with little background knowledge of Hinduism, I found Harvey's relationship with Mother Meera a bit problematic--but recognizing my cultural bias, I decided to read the book with an open mind. I found myself deeply moved by the story, recognizing in it my own struggles with spiritual surrender. Harvey's experiences may seem unusually intense to some readers, but those familiar with Harvey's work will expect nothing less from what they know to be an intense and passionate personality. This poetic book reveals the root of much of Harvey's thought that will deepen and mature in his later Christian writings.

The first half of the book is a real adventure as the author seeks spiritual fulfillment. The second half tends to drag-on as he takes the reader through many of his effulgent experiences.

The story is about the authors experiences with Mother Meera, however She steals the show. I had never heard of her before but for me her authentic power shines through everything that is written in this book. If read with a genuine search for the truth it can change lives for ever.

After you read this book, you must read The Sun at Midnight, in which Harvey completely renounces what he has so passionately advocated here. I have the sense that both books are a form of spiritual exhibitionism. In his later book, he comes to realize how much he was projecting onto Mother Meera. But even reading this book, the careful reader can see that most of what Ma (as he calls her) says is actually not even said by her. A typical conversation with her goes something like this:

Ma sits and looks at her hands. Her eyes are aflame. Her head glows.
Andrew says, You want to tell me that I must love you even more.
Ma: Yes.
Andrew: You want me to know that you have been sent to change the world.
Ma: Yes.

Well, gee, whose ideas are these anyhow? The projection is there for anyone to see.

And so is the narcissim of the author, and if anything, it actually seems to get worse when he renounces Meera. He seems to think that his suffering because of her demand that he leave his lover is on a par with the crucifixion of Christ.

I have tried to winnow the wheat from the chaff in reading Harvey, because he is a skilled writer and also has studied and experienced a great deal of mysticism. What I garner from this book is an imaginative understanding of what it would be like to worship God-made-flesh. The attempt to think that this obviously human person here before me is at one and the same time Divine, an incarnation of God, makes me consider what the 12 apostles might have felt. Or did they?

At the time of his denounciation of Meera, Harvey believed that she had actually been practicing black magic and witchcraft upon him and all her followers. You won't find any hint of that here, but knowing it as you read will give a different color to everything in the story.

Mr. Harvey's writing is intelligent, genuine, poetic and intriguing. He has the rare courage to expose his imperfections and personal demons. He reaches out to all denominations.

His focus is on the holy woman, Mother Meera.

I made the pilgrimage to Mother Meera and can testify that I encountered a small glimpse of the paranormal experiences that he encountered. While his were far more theatric, my experiences validated his. His book becomes more helpful and valuable with each re-reading. Also highly recommended - Journey in Ladakh.

I really enjoyed this book a ton, but its message should be taken as only a small part of Mr. Harvey's spiritual journey since he eventually left Mother Meera (something that seemed unthinkable if you read "Hidden Journey")because she was intolerant of homosexuality. (This is certainly an aspect of an "enlightened" being which I totally don't understand! ) Still, this is a fascinating and unique story, and very well written.

I love the detailed and specific ways in which Andrew Harvey writes about his experiences on a spiritual journey which appears to be aided by his guru, Mother Meera: but see the later autobiographical work, Sun at Midnight, to get another perspective on Meera.
One of the refreshing features of both works is his extreme honesty about character defects, one of which is the tendency to overly dramatise situations; in Hidden Journey, he quotes in depth from a Frenchman he meets on a beach in southern India who makes sharply critical but also very amusing remarks about Harvey's tragic, operatic take on life. But it is this, plus a developed literary style, which makes his writing so readable (better than most novels I've read); and, to put it bluntly, we all have defects: and perhaps we don't see our own as clearly as Harvey sees his; and, to get metaphysical about it, it is by forgiving the faults we see so clearly in others (the mote in the brother's eye!), that we begin to release our own.

Reading this book inspired me to leave India and make a bee-line for Mother Meera's darshan. I wasn't disappointed. Harvey's made a u-turn since; well, I guess that's his gig. This book's still worth a look. As for Meera, five years on and I'm still glad I made the trip; my life is definitely better for her presence in it.

Hidden Journey reminds me of the Joan Osborne song "If God Were One Of Us." It tells the story of Andrew Harvey's nine years of spiritual growth while a pupil of Mother Meera, an woman who claims to be an incarnation of God on Earth. He meets Meera at the Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry at the end of 1978 when he is 27 and she is 18. She has been brought there by Mr. Reddy, an Indian who had been seeking the Mother Goddess his whole life and discovered Meera when she was an 11 year old servant in his in-laws' home.

The book is more about Harvey's mystical journey, but people interested in Mother Meera will also find the book useful. He describes her silent meetings with followers (darshan) where she first holds the devotee's head in her hands and then looks into their eyes, supposedly imparting her grace in this process. Also her early life in India and Thalheim Germany are presented, but in a very subjective way through the practice of Mr. Harvey.

Since Mother Meera is silent during her public appearances, much of what we learn of her is from question and answer periods that Harvey held with her in private. However, even these are presented basically as leading questions by Harvey to which Meera agrees. The other method that Harvey uses to reveal her thoughts is through Mother Meera's voice in Harvey's head. He presents Meera as being able to communicate with him telepathically and many discussions in the book, presented in italics, are of this nature.

Another large portion of the book is devoted to the mystical gifts of visions and dreams that Harvey gets from Meera during his spiritual progress. Many of them are of glowing radiances, golden glows, and other lights. While these and other unusual occurences present a very lively and dramatic view of the mystical path, I found them repetative and skipped over a lot of them.

The book does present how an average human being with a fair share of personal problems can make spiritual progress through mystical practice. However, although Harvey made lots of progress, one gets the idea that he still has a way to go.

This reviewer is aware of the authors current equivocation about the book but believes that whatever private agreements or disagreements he and Ma may have is their personal business and do not belong in the review. The book speaks for itself as it was written.
I have looked at a sampling of his other autobiographical works and find that this one far and away outclasses them all. The others might as well not even exist in my mind. The author is a very curious and intense thinker and cannot resist the spiritual smorgasbord that this planet has to offer.
The author was born and raised in India and had in my view the great good fortune to have been guided to Pondicherry while attending Oxford classes as his first real immersion into a spiritual quest. There he joined other meditators from the Aurobindo ashram at Aurobindo's tomb.
After his meditations:
"Two nights before I left Mahabalipuram I was strolling at midnight along the moonlit curve of beach to the hotel, when all at once my mind split apart, like a coconut thrown against a wall, and everything, instead of being deliciously and warmly outside, was now inside. The wind was inside me and the sea pounding and the sand under my feet, and the whole wild softly pulsing creation was singing with one voice OM distinctly and unmistakably, a resounding horizon-to-horizon curling, vibrant, rich OM that was sounding within me. It took whatever scrap of mind I had left to remain standing, to stagger on. There was a complete separation between whatever consciousness I was now in, seeing and reveling in this vastness, and my body tottering on the sands, barely able to hold what it had been given. I had flowered far above and around and beyond my body and was connected to it by only the most fragile of threads, only just strong enough to drag it forward, like a piece of driftwood. I had enough mind left to gaze at the hulls of the boats around me, at the nets lying on the sands, at the sands themselves, at my feet; everything was still in its old shape, but shimmering with a soft milky light. I remember, absurdly, blinking again and again to see if the vision would go away, but the roaring OM went on, and the light kept breaking from my feet and the sands around them."

He also met Jean-Marc Frechette, someone who spent a lot of time laughing at him and whose "gift to me--for which I will always be grateful--was to live the spiritual life before my eyes with such a happy simplicity 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 to, no ring of friends to sustain his choice--nothing, in fact, but his faith, his few books of Claudel, Rene Char, and Aurobindo, and the sound of the sea. Yet he was the clearest man I had ever known, spare, joyful, delight fully eccentric..." Jean-Marc had a sophistication that made for strong bond of fellowship. Later Jean-Marc would be the one to introduce him to Mother Meera (Ma) at the early age of 17 just as her guardian presented her to the public in 1978 at Auroville. (Now she now lives in Thalheim, Germany) She was born enlightened.. Because of his strong academic background and powerful ego, it took about 12 years for his awakening which is richly detailed in the book. The author became a friend of the family, specifically Mr. Reddy, her guardian and her friend and helper Adilakshmi.
"It was early evening. Darshan had been unusually long--two hours. Jean-Marc, I, and an American were standing outside the door of Meera's apartment putting on our shoes.
The door opened with a sharp clack. Still in the brilliant red sari she had worn for darshan, stood Meera alone. All around her, as she stood there gazing at us with a passion I had never seen before on her face, was a blaze of Light--white diamond Light--all the brighter for being in the darkness of the doorway. I began to tremble and perspire. The Light streamed from her; her skin was a deep fiery gold; her eyes blazed, vast and abstract, like two bonfires in the darkness. The Light was of the same pure, piercing whiteness that I had seen in the vision Aurobindo had given me the year before. I gazed at it around Meera, hardly able to believe what I was seeing. That it emanated from her and not from any other source was unmistakable; beyond any doubt I was seeing with open eyes the Divine Light and Meera burning in it.
We all three saw the Light, simultaneously, together, and were unable to move or say anything.
Slowly, with profound tenderness, Meera turned to each of us and transformed herself before our eyes. She turned to Jean-Marc and became immediately the Goddess of his inner dream--warm, sensuous, smiling, her head tilted slightly. She turned to the American and seemed to melt, visibly, into another shape--to grow taller, older, to become hieratic, and grave with the majesty I had seen in her when she appeared to my inner eye as the Queen of Heaven. Then she turned to me. Her face seemed to detach itself from her body and swim, burning, back and forth in the air before me. There was nothing but her face. I did not know whether it was separate from me or within me; all sense of distance was obliterated. The Light became more and more intense, so bright that it took all my strength to go on looking into it. The face was smiling--not gently as it had to Jean-Marc but with a tigerish, exultant smile, a smile of absolute triumph. She gazed deep into my eyes; my whole body filled with flame. In the seconds of that gaze I was only my eyes and this Fire.
The three of us had, as if in a dream, raised our hands to salute her. Meera became "herself" again and raptly saluted us each in turn. The humility of this gesture pierced me even more deeply than the glory of the smile she had given me. She was saluting, I realized, the divine Self in each of us. "You, too, are this Light that I am," her gesture told us. "You are Me and I am you and we are inseparable forever."
Then she bowed her head and closed the door quietly."
This is powerful stuff and the book is filled with such descriptions, particularly closer to the end. He recounts many personal dialogs he had with Ma and became her personal English tutor when she moved to Germany.
"I know in a poem everything would go beautifully and quickly. But real processes are not quite like that. There is a lot of crisscrossing and staggering and sheer error. You make an advance, then you fall back and hit your head on the floor again. You have a run of exquisite, perfect days, and then you repeat all the old rubbish. It takes time to get the hang of it. It's a little like playing a complicated piece of music. You have to practice bits of it at a time, over and over again, with discipline, then slowly put it together and play it all through several hundred times until it becomes as natural to you as breathing in and out, or taking a leak. Ma's is a revolutionary method and works fast. But don't think it is easy. Even if the Divine Light is beaming at you, sometimes you feel, I just can't take any more of this. I want to go out and get drunk. The ego holds on to its pleasures, its silly doomed pleasures, with a tenacity that would be touching if it were not so deadly."
In the book he clearly credits Ma as his inspiration and spiritual mentor and attributes his progress to his association with her, but she says:
"Humanity must work for that [evolutionary] leap. Humanity must become conscious. Aspiration is everything. Aspiration and work. My help is always given, my help and my light. But humanity must work....Humans want God to do everything. Humans have to do something."
He gives a hot log analogy of the value of a guru. "St. John compares the soul to a log of wood that has to be first penetrated by the fire and then consumed in it. The log is initially always dank and dirty and has first to be prepared by the fire before the Fire can enter it." Then he relates this to his personal experience.
"The Fire is a mirror in which all the cruelties and subtle madness of the ego are seen, with no possibility of evasion or consolation. I lived again through my long betrayal of Her, all the ways I still looked to use or evade her, the grief of my sexual and creative life, the sullen hypocrisies I had cherished in myself.
Throughout this agony I could never forget everything I knew of Her Mercy. I knew a power as loving as hers would never wound except to heal; would never strip me unless to clothe me in richness and splendor; would never make me cry out again and again in grief unless the death this brought was to prepare an infinitely wider life."
Meera makes no claims of exclusivity, in fact, "There are others who are also doing divine work....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....The important thing is to pray and to receive light. That in itself changes everything."

Andrew Harvey, having regained his senses somewhat, writes of his period of blind devotion to Mother Meera as follows:

"I'd been so battered as a child and so disappointed in love in my twenties and thirties that I thought the only relationship with any hope was the kind of exotic, intense, subtly sadomasochistic relationship I had with Meera."

Meera, Harvey said, fulfilled his desire for the perfect parental relationship which his own mother could not provide. (Mother Harvey packed Andrew off to boarding school when he was eight and he just couldn't take it.)

Concerning Meera and gurus in general, Harvey writes:

"A lot, perhaps most, of those we now call 'enlightened gurus' are nothing of the sort. They are not divine or divinised beings at all, but extremely powerful occult manipulators, who through certain kinds of spiritual exercises have attained certain siddhis, or powers, which enable them to dominate the minds of others. They masquerade as 'gods' giving 'experiences' and doing 'miracles'. Mother Meera simply wanted me to remain her devotee and to go on using me, and her lies prove she is not enlightened (to say the least)."

Harvey continues:

"I believe that we are at the end of the guru system and that its current abuses disqualify it from the business of serious spiritual transformation. The next five years will see a blizzard of financial and sexual scandals which I am certain will make this point painfully clear even to those who now believe implicitly in the guru system and are prepared to fight dirty to preserve it."

Harvey, who was instrumental in setting up Mother Meera's ashram in Germany, now has some misgivings about these 'places of devotion'. Ashrams, he writes, are "lunatic asylums, filled with jealous and needy people."

Andrew Harvey has made it clear in a number of books and articles that he now regards Mother Meera as nothing more than a charlatan. Harvey is, of course, only one amongst many millions of Westerners who deceived themselves into believing that a guru or some other charismatic figure from the East possessed the solution to the mystery of life and its problems. In retrospect, Harvey's book is useful inasmuch as it warns us against adopting this silly belief as well.

Another book which is extremely useful for this purpose is 'Feet Of Clay: A Study Of Gurus' by Anthony Storr

And watching the BBC documentary 'The Secret Swami' which investigates accusations of child sexual abuse levelled against the Indian guru Sai Baba won't do you any harm either.