Snowlion (www.snowlioncanada.com) and Tina Petrova (www.tinapetrova.com)

present . . .

Sacred Activism

with

Andrew Harvey

(www.andrewharvey.net)

During this introductory talk his new book Andrew Harvey will present his vision of the contemporary world crisis in both its desperate and its positive aspects.  He believes that its central, fundamental, and most urgent meaning is to call us all to a new way of being and doing in the world, the way of Sacred Activism.  Sacred Activism is the fusion of the most profound and most grounded mystical knowledge, stamina, and peace with focused, wise, radical action in order to support life, preserve the environment, ensure human rights, protect all animal species, and transform the political, economic, and cultural systems that engender war and ensure the continuation of obscene and devastating poverty. 

Topics to be discussed also include:

• Five kinds of service that need to be fused together to create Sacred Activism. 
• Seven Laws of Sacred Activism
• Holistic sacred practices that Sacred Activists will need to ground themselves in, in order to become strong, calm, courageous, and wise enough to remain centered, compassionate, creative, and active in extreme and difficult situations
• How to create a Network of Grace (i.e. a community of sacred activists) in Toronto

Biography

Andrew Harvey was born in south India in 1952 where he lived until he was nine years old. It is this early period that he credits with shaping his sense of the inner unity of all religions and providing him with a permanent and inspiring vision of a world infused with the sacred. He left India to attend private school in England and entered Oxford University in 1970 with a scholarship to study history. At the age of 21, he became the youngest person ever to be awarded a fellowship to All Soul’s College, England’s highest academic honor.

By 1977 Andrew Harvey had become disillusioned with life at Oxford and returned to his native India, where a series of mystical experiences initiated his spiritual journey. Over the next thirty years he plunged into different mystical traditions to learn their secrets and practices. In 1978 he met a succession of Indian saints and sages and began his long study and practice of Hinduism. In 1983, in Ladakh, he met the great Tibetan adept, Thuksey Rinpoche, and undertook with him the Mahayana Buddhist Bodhisattva vows; later, in 1990, he would collaborate with Sogyal Rinpoche and Patrick Gaffney in the writing of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. In 1984, Andrew Harvey began a ten-year-long exploration and explication of Rumi and Sufi mysticism in Paris with a group of French Sufis and under the guidance of Eva De Vitray-Meyerovitch, the magnificent translator of Rumi into French. In 1992, he met Father Bede Griffiths in his ashram in south India near where Andrew Harvey had been born. It was this meeting that helped him synthesize the whole of his mystical explorations and reconcile eastern with western mysticism.

In 2005, in the historic Santuario de Guadalupe in Santa Fe New Mexico, Andrew Harvey delivered his vision of the contemporary crisis now confronting us in today’s world and its potential solution in what he has termed “Sacred Activism,” which he sees as the culmination of his life’s work. This extraordinary occasion was made into a documentary film by the Hartley Film Foundation and is available on DVD at www.hartleyfoundation.org.

Andrew Harvey has taught at Oxford University, Cornell University, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The California Institute of Integral Studies, and the University of Creation Spirituality as well as the at various spiritual centers throughout the United States. He was the subject of the 1993 BBC film documentary The Making of a Modern Mystic and appears also in Rumi Turning Ecstatic and The Consciousness of the Christ: Reclaiming Jesus for A New Humanity.
Andrew Harvey is Founder Director of the Institute of Sacred Activism. He also has a spiritual counseling practice in Chicago and is available for spiritual direction via phone.

Praise for Andrew

"Every age has its teachers, who keep the eternal truths alive for all of us.  And when a generation is very, very lucky, it encounters a teacher so illumined that the words he delivers must be illumined as well.  In the case of Andrew Harvey, the light he sheds is like a meteor burst across the inner sky.”

-Marianne Williamson, author of Everyday Grace

“Andrew is a genius and an inspired visionary who has the ability to interpret the meaning and significance of the chaos and patterns of change that are redirecting the compass of our contemporary culture. Andrew is a spiritual, intellectual, and cultural mystic whose passion is to awaken people to a new and essential empowerment in this world: sacred activism. He has defined and grounded the route, the means, and the way individuals can and should respond to the chaos and rapid changes that now characterize our contemporary spiritual and cultural life. Andrew's research reflects his superb academic background as a professor at Oxford and his passion clearly reveals that his soul is on fire with a grace that comes from the Divine."

-Caroline Myss
Author of ANATOMY OF THE SPIRIT and SACRED CONTRACTS