The Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night [Hardcover]

Andrew Harvey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 10, 2002

Andrew Harvey's celebrated book Hidden Journey chronicled the Oxford scholar's departure from the materialistic doctrine of Western academia to his embrace of mystical Christianity. Shortly after Hidden Journey's 1991 publication, however, Harvey experienced a schism with his then-guru that created shock waves throughout the spiritual world in which he is a leading mystical teacher.

Sun at Midnight is the story of Harvey's efforts to pick up the pieces of his life, his faith, his marriage, and his sense of relationship to the Divine after a split that sent him reeling into depression, crisis, and fear for his life.

The book is based on the Christian concept of the "dark night of the soul," whereby a part of oneself must die for a truer faith to be born. In "seven acts," Sun at Midnight tells the story of Harvey's break with the discipleship to which he had previously devoted his life; his struggle to understand whether those years were wasted in blind fantasy; his ultimate realization of the all-redeeming power of love; and his revolutionary leap into a new, more direct relationship to the Divine.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When this memoir-cum-love story begins in 1993, Harvey, a celebrated mystic and translator of Rumi, is 41, deeply in love for the first time and passionately committed to his Indian guru. In an earlier memoir, Hidden Journey, Harvey recounted his spiritual awakening at age 27 under the tutelage of Mother Meera, "a Divine being come to earth to guide and save humankind." Now life seems good: Meera has sent him his lover, Eryk (or so he believes), and the wounds of his youth are healing. But though Harvey has been Meera's spokesman for years, it turns out he has misread her. Suddenly she orders him to leave his beloved and publicly reject homosexuality. Enter the "Dark Night"-a year of tortured self-examination, endless tears, serious illness, death threats, suicidal thoughts and eventually a paradigm shift. As Harvey comes to believe in the beauty and truth of his love for Eryk, he realizes that Meera is expressing her fury through black magic. Ultimately Harvey renounces all gurus, advocating direct access of the individual to the divine. The "Sacred Androgynous Child of the Father-Mother," he concludes, is born through human love and love for the divine "in the fiery dark womb of tantra"-a philosophy also developed in his other recent books, including Son of Man. Harvey's writing can be overwrought at times. Nevertheless, his story is gripping, and he provides compelling reasons to take evil seriously and to distrust individuals or organizations who claim to control the path to the divine.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Andrew Harvey is an internationally acclaimed poet, novelist, mystical scholar, seeker, and teacher. He is the author of more than thirty books, including Son of Man, The Direct Path, Hidden Journey, The Way of Passion, The Return of the Mother, and A Journey in Ladakh.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher; 1St Edition edition (October 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585421790
• ISBN-13: 978-1585421794
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #989,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Exhibitionism, June 3, 2004

By 

Evelyn Uyemura (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night (Hardcover)

As another reviewer said, the introduction, on the stages the soul must go through on the way to union with God, is excellent, one of the clearest expositions on the Dark Night of the Soul I've ever read. The Dark Night is not just depression, and it is not something that can be avoided or an unfortunate turn of events. It is the proximate cause of fuller awakening, the process through which the already-spiritualized ego now comes apart, to allow something better to take its place.

But the story that follows does not qualify as a true Dark Night, though it was certainly painful and humiliating. The evidence that it is not the death of Harvey's ego is the self-absorbed story of his love for Eryk Hanut. Yes, it is amazing to fall in love. And yes, sex with someone you love deeply is awesome. But graphic descriptions of homosexual love are not to everyone's taste (nor would equally graphic descriptions of heeterosexual love seem called for). And the idea that your love and marriage is a Tantric revelation that is part of God's plan to save the planet is, well, it is ego-inflation, not ego-death.

The level of detail here is amazing--every twitch, every conversation, every up and down of the roller-coaster ride of a new love affair, every anxiety attack, every act of vomiting, every kiss--it seems like both spiritual and sexual exhibitionism.

If it's true that those who say don't know and those who know don't say, then this book says far too much.

I like Harvey, and I am reading his other books, and there is a certain fascination in this close observation of himself. But I don't think it is a sign of healthy transcendance of the ego-self. (Leaving Mother Meera, though, probably was a wise step. And his warnings about the danger of gurus and the possibility that spiritual powers possessed by humans may be driven by evil is also worth thinking about.)

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unflinchingly Honest, January 17, 2003

By 

Stephanie Marohn (Sebastopol, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night (Hardcover)

What an honest and startling account of the journey known as the dark night of the soul! In Sun at Midnight, Andrew Harvey once again takes us into unchartered territory with an unflinching look at the soul-shattering experience of learning the terrible truth about his guru, the woman he thought was an embodiment of the divine feminine and who had become famous through his writings about her.
Harvey tells of his descent into the dark night as he is stripped of all that had been his life for decades; the agony of realization; and the slow and painful ascent back into light. The personal detail he relates makes this book a page-turner, as he and his future husband forge a greater love amidst death threats and harassment from the cult surrounding his former guru.
Through his journey, Harvey is brought closer to and develops a direct relationship with the Divine, in contrast to the intercessionary model of the guru system. From this experience arose his book, The Direct Path. In Sun at Midnight, we learn the details of how he came to be walking that path, and it is a compelling story, with all the elements of a good novel: drama, a gripping plot, well-written scenes, and great dialogue. And it even has a happy ending!

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Andrew's Sun, October 28, 2002

By 

Shannon Nielson (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night (Hardcover)

Andrew Harvey is an expert teacher, communicator and storyteller and in his new book "Sun At Midnight" he fuses all of these talents and infuses his grand spirit to take us on an intimate journey through his experience into, and ultimate release from, the occult reigns of the Guru mirage.

In "Sun At Midnight", Pandora's box is opened and what is released from that box of secrets can never be shut back in again. As a spiritual pioneer Andrew Harvey exposes the false God (or Goddess in this case) behind the Guru system and also reveals the false face of the "not so" New Age movement. As a man Andrew bares his heart and shows the world, through his passionate and beautiful relationship with his husband Eryk, that true love really does conquer all.

On my longtime tour as a Seeker I have often been intrigued with the Guru idea and I found that this book opened my eyes and saved me from the potential of wasted years projecting my ideal of God onto a mere mortal rather than experiencing the reality of Divine Love in my heart. Although filled with spiritual lessons, "Sun At Midnight" is not only a teaching book but also an intensely interesting (and often frightening) true story rich with human courage, suffering, divine guidance, miracles and true love.

This book is a MUST-READ for anyone ready to know the reality behind our modern spiritual circus and will serve as a guidebook for all those seekers ready to migrate through the dark night, and into the light, of Divine Truth. VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.