The Spiritual Component of Authenticity

—A Dialogue between Chris Saade and Andrew Harvey

Chris Saade: This key of authenticity is tremendously important. In the 1600s, the mystic, poet, and priest Angelus Silesius wrote, “The rose is without ‘why’; it blooms simply because it blooms.” (Previously, in the 14th century, Meister Eckhart taught on that same theme.) A spirit does not come to the world empty, as an empty page upon which society can write or psychologists can manipulate, and so on. A spirit comes with the specificity of being a rose, or being a small bird, or being a large eagle, or being an elephant, or being a running horse. We are born with a specific nature, an authenticity of personality, gifts and lacks. We either develop what are our givens, or we don’t, but we cannot deny or change their existence. It is so essential to bow down in respect to that authenticity.

Andrew Harvey: What you’re saying is a revolution. There’s a wonderful Jewish story which illustrates this beautifully. A rabbi—let’s call him Jacob—gets to Heaven and is asked, “What have you loved in your life?” Jacob replies, “Oh! I’ve loved Abraham, I’ve loved Moses.” And the Divine says to the rabbi, “Jacob, you weren’t meant to be Abraham or Moses, you were meant to be Jacob. Go back! Do it again!” For this realization to get through to the human race, two essential revelations have to be given. The first is the core secret of evolutionary mysticism: We are here, not to vanish into the Absolute, as the Eastern traditions have tended to claim, nor to be completely material about our lives, as the Western traditions have increasingly celebrated. We are here to marry the paradox of being grounded in a formless, transcendent truth and light while cultivating our unique self and bringing that unique self to its fullest flowering. This is a vision that is only just starting to break upon the world.

Marry the passion you discover when you reclaim and embody your unique self to the passion to serve the birth of a new humanity and you will be borne into a new level of power, energy, and effectiveness. Imagine what could be accomplished by two people loving and encouraging each other to live this most potent of marriages.

One of the major shadows we must look at is what we call the Golden Shadow. We have been taught by our religious leaders—whether they’re Muslim, or Buddhist, or Christian, or whatever—to project our own divinity onto the Prophet Muhammad or onto Jesus or onto Buddha. This has led to a deep self-shaming. We have to take the Golden Shadow back and recognize that everything that we see in Jesus, or in the Prophet, or in the Buddha, lives in us to be claimed or enacted in our own unique way. As Jesus says in Logion 3 of the Gospel of Thomas, “When you know yourselves… then you will know that you are children of the Living One. But if you do not know yourselves, you will live in poverty, and you are the poverty.” Evolutionary love will not be able to be incubated in the current religious, guru, or New Age systems because it demands that people step outside the religious inhibitions of all of the major systems and claim their divinity and do this radical work of marrying the authentic self, rooted consciously in its light-origin to its mission of sacred service.

Chris Saade: Most people look for a “correct” way of being, a “correct” way of being love. They lose the authenticity of their own spiritual embodiment. Self-shaming is, in a sense, a re-crucifixion of the Divine in us.

Andrew Harvey: Absolutely.

Chris Saade: Because, that spirit, that unique, particular, idiosyncratic spirit that I am carrying which needs to come alive and serve the world, is shamed, because it is not what others are.

It’s amazing how many people struggle with this. They can admire Gandhi, they can admire Mother Teresa, but when it comes to their own spirit—their own authentic nature—they succumb to self-shame because their spirit is different from these famous, well-known spiritual figures. The essential part of the transformation we are seeking, this grassroots unleashing of love-in-action, has to come through a profound respect for every individual authenticity and for the sacred task of every individual spirit.

Andrew Harvey: That requires a smashing of the idols. I remember when I was working on the The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, the Dalai Lama said, “Your Buddha nature is as good as the Buddha’s Buddha nature.” He was being playful, but he was also saying, we must produce a book that reveals to people that everything in the book can be done by them. “Enlightenment” doesn’t have to be projected outwards. But very few mystical or religious leaders are really giving that message. The New Age claims to give that message, but then, it defines the authentic life as being peaceful, passive, and gentle, not seeing the negative—all of this nonsense.

Chris Saade: But that’s the same problem; it defines authenticity in one way or the other, rather than allowing freedom to sculpt our marvelous diversity of authenticities.

Andrew Harvey: Yes!

Chris Saade: And we cannot define the authenticity of the spirit. It will define itself differently in each individual.

Andrew Harvey: Right!

Chris Saade: Because some spirits embody like a very peaceful bird, and tend to be very meditative, but some spirits come to Earth like a roaring lion and their role is to become that roaring lion, like the bird is to become the bird. In some people, their spirit is to serve thousands and other spirits are to serve one or two people. This is so important because it is about reclaiming the individual Buddhahood, the Christhood, of every particular spirit. Our authenticity is unique, yet it is indivisibly connected to love. We can only fully understand the nature of our own spirit when we dedicate it to service, for the love of the world.

Andrew Harvey: When millions of human beings truly grasp this, we will be able to create together a new world. The patriarchal systems which have privatized the search for enlightenment as well as the search for love speak of liberation as freedom from the world, the body, relationships, and action. But what the God of evolution teaches, the God that is Mother as well as Father, is that liberation is not just this inner freedom from the world but also the wild and transformative freedom to take on the madness of the world, the difficulty of authentic relationship, so as to become instruments of divine love and its plan to divinize matter in the whole of life. What the evolutionary Divine reveals to us is that you cannot discover your true self only in its relationship to eternal being; you must discover it also as a tool of eternal becoming, as Kabir’s child dancing on the Father/Mother’s burning dance floor, dancing in ever deeper, evermore embracing relationship, and in evermore focused and powerful works of compassion and justice.