Andrew Harvey
(1953 -living) U.S.A.
Academic and mystic
His father, Bernard, worked for Brooke Bond. Andrew, born in India, went to preparatory school in England, followed by Sherborne. He then went to Exeter College, Oxford, to study history but transferred to English literature after hearing a poem by Walt Whitman. He wrote his thesis on madness in Shakespeare, and including Erasmus and 16th-century psychology.
In 1974, at the age of 21, became the youngest-ever fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, he has become an authority on the Sufi mystic poet Rumi, and a scholar and teacher who has studied the world's various mystical traditions. In 1978 he met the young Indian woman who called herself Mother Meera, a self-styled mystic guru. He was her leading disciple for 15 years.
From 1981 to 1995 Andrew taught English and French literature for four months of the year at an upstate New York college. From these earnings he lived in Paris for the rest of the year and also travelled to the East. He had gay affairs, but they all worked out badly. In 1993 he met the writer and photographer, Eryk Hanut, in Paris, and they stayed together.
In December 1993 Mother Meera asked Andrew Harvey to give up Eryk Hanut and marry a woman. This led to a split between the two mystics and in January 1994 Andrew Harvey moved to San Francisco with Eryk Hanut. They "married" in a combined Christian, Buddist, and Jewish service in San Francisco.
"... when I was 41 a huge change happened. I met Eryk Hanute, who is now my husband, and this really occasioned a revolution in my thinking... Meeting Eryk and falling in love and being loved back started to marry my body and my spirit in a very profound way. I thought that this was the grace of my guru, Mother Meera, but when she told me to get rid of Eryk, get married and write a book about how her force had transformed me into a heterosexual I went into a terrible crisis. What I did was to choose human love, because I realized that it had a divine truth."
He developed his own mystical approach which denied the relevance of gurus. He is the author of over thirty books on spirituality, coauthor of the best selling The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and editor of The Essential Gay Mystics. In 1994 Channel 4 television showed the documentary The Making of a Mystic about Andrew Harvey's work. In November 1996, while his father was dying, he had claims to have had a vision in which Jesus of Nazareth on a crucifix in a Catholic Church came to life.
Books:
- A Journey in Ladakh (1983)
- The Way of Passion (1994)
- The Return of the Mother (1995)
- Mary's Vineyard (1996)
- Light Upon Light (1996)
- Loves Glory: Re-Creations of Rumi (1996)
- The Divine Feminine (1996)
- Son of Man (1998)
- Teachings of the Christian Mystics (1998)
- Teachings of Rumi (1999)
- Perfume of the Desert (1999)
- The Direct Path (2000)
- Sun at Midnight (2002)
Quote source: http://www.newconnexion.net/article/01-03/harvey.html
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