The Point
of Life
is
to Embody
the Transcendent.
EmBODYing compassion
is - BEING LOVE in a body.
The following is a transcript that comes from excerpts of a talk given by Architect of Sacred Activism, visionary, author and mystic Andrew Harvey where he speaks of one of his experience of sitting with Dalai Lama where at the end of the interview he asks him about the Meaning of Life.
Do all you can
With what you have
In the time you have
In the place you are
Do all you can.
I can't think of a more beautiful and simple definition of what I am dedicating my life to at this moment, which is a vision I call Sacred Activism. But I am not going to define Sacred Activism for you. I am going to tell you stories .. stories from the depths of my life .. stories about experiences that changed my life, and made me crazy enough to take planes in the middle of the night so I can come and speak to people like you.
In 1998 I was invited by Elle Magazine to go to Oslo to interview the Dalai Lama on the day he won the Nobel Prize. And I think of all the marvelous things that happened to me in my life, being alone with him, for two hours in a small white room in this Norwegian Hotel on the day, this epical day, when he was going to be awarded the highest honour in human race, was perhaps my happiest and most extra-ordinary day. I have meet his holiness before, but on that day we sat for two hours in this room and talked about everything, talked about Tibet, talked about violence, talked about the environment, talked about the enormous world crisis.
Even then he saw quite clearly it was going to get worse and is going to challenge human life and human extinction. And I never forget one moment in the conversation, he lent across and he said "People must understand that we are not in a crisis, we are in an emergency”. At the end of the two hours, he got up and he said "I am so sorry, but I have to go and get the Nobel Prize now, so we really must stop talking."
So I looked into his eyes, these amazing eyes of this amazing man, absolutely amazing to be in a room with him is so extra-ordinary because of his incredible humility and tenderness and attention to you, you feel magical, you feel part of it, you feel that this wonderful being is giving you his total attention to you.
So I got up and he got up and I gazed into his eyes and I plucked up my courage and I said to him:
"I will never be alone with you like this and especially not on an amazing day like this, so your holiness - WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?"
His holiness who has one of the most famous laughs in this world, flung his head back and roared this beautiful, multi-foliated and polyphonic laugh that went up and down in every known register and all seemed to shake with this laugh and suddenly he brought himself into himself and he became immensely concentrated like a laser beam and he seemed to shake with divine power and he looked at me very very seriously and he pointed at me and he gazed deep into my eyes and he said:
"The point of life is to EMBODY THE TRANSCENDENT".
And as he brought his hand down I felt this flame of power go up and down my body and I knew beyond thought, beyond words, that what I being given was not simply the key to life, but I was being given that key by somebody, who knew the truth of it and who was living it and who found out that the deepest source of the deepest happiness comes not from connecting with divine love, not just from feeling divine peace, not just by having a few mystical experiences in between gambling on the stock market, but actually plunging into a life of transformation and coming to that miraculous moment when he knew that the Buddha of compassion was living in him, and using his arms, and his legs, and his eyes and every thought to really reach out to all human beings everywhere to bless all human beings at all moments and all sentient beings at all moments for ever and ever because he had come to the moment through the divine grace when he was EMBODYING compassion. BEING LOVE in a body.
Even an English-man couldn’t talk at that moment, and he saw that I was completely overwhelmed by the majesty and the beauty of the moment, and he said, ‘you know what we're going to do’, and I said ‘No’, he said ‘you and I are going to take five very quiet minutes and we are going to walk from where I am sitting now, you are standing now to the end of the room.. actually it was about 30 yards, it was a very small, little room, but it had a long corridor, so he took my hand and he looked at me and he and I walked very slowly to the door, and then in the door, he let go off my hand and he said very tenderly, he said ‘Good-bye my dearest friend.’, and I was like, I meet him twice, but I knew he wasn’t making things up, he was speaking out of unconditional love and on the day when he was going to get the Nobel Prize, he didn’t go back into the room; he stood by the door and I could see him as I walked down that vast hotel corridor, just standing there, radiating, radiating... love - towards me.
So not only had he told me the secret of life, he showed me, by what he did and how he did it, what it means, to be somebody, who lives divine love... That was a huge clue to me.
- Andrew Harvey on Sacred Activism
- Andrew Harvey on Sacred Activism
>> Now that you've read the transcript, please visit the Youtube Link to listen to the talk from Andrew Harvey directly and also to appreciate the significance of human voice, which conveys much much more than just plain text. . Click here to listen. My heartfelt appreciation to Roya J. for assisting with transcribing.
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| Photo from Tiger Temple, Thailand |
In his recent book, Heart Yoga: The Sacred Marriage of Yoga and Mysticism, co-authored with Karuna Erickson, Andrew Harvey goes on to describe the experience further as:
In the weeks and months that followed, I found myself returning again and again to that moment of parting and to the Dalai Lama's answer. Nothing could have surprised me more, I realized. If his holiness had said, "The meaning of life is to enter the Transcendent," or even "become One with it," I would not have been so strangely and marvelously disturbed. What he had said, however, was that it was necessary to embody the Transcendent.
My own experience, up to that moment, had been of the overwhelming power, glory, and bliss of the Divine Light. Now, I was being gently challenged to go beyond that awareness and somehow to bring the light down into my skin and bones and action. I was being asked to embody it and become, I now clearly saw that his holiness had become, its humble living, breathing, grounded, utterly real and utterly authentic instrument. As I started to take in, in ever deeper ways, what his holiness had said to me, I also began to uncover both the depths of what I came to call my addiction to Transcendence, and the psychological, biographical, sexual, and spiritual reasons for it.
How can you ever hope
to know the Beloved
without becoming
in every cell
the Lover?
Em-bodying the Transcendent is Be-coming just like That.
~ Rumi
# Related:
* You may also download the video: Andrew Harvey on Sacred Activism
* Sacred Activism: Our Path to Wholeness
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