Chapter 8

Celebrate

Celebration

—Andrew Harvey

In a time as dangerous, dissociated, depressing, and depressed as ours, where people are in a terrible funk of paralysis and despair at the exploding world crisis, it is essential to make a radical commitment to celebration. Anyone who wants to live a life of evolutionary love with another person must be radically committed to celebration, because this is the only way to connect the couple to the essential nature of the Father/Mother, the essential nature the Hindus call ananda, “the great bliss.” All the mystics of all the traditions have said with one voice that when you truly connect with the heart of the Divine in its ultimate essence, what you experience is ecstasy and bliss. They also say with one voice that the way to keep that connection vibrant is through gratitude, gratitude for everything—for the whole gift of being alive, for the gift of being a human being with divine consciousness, for the gift of the grasses and the flowers, and the skies and the seas, and the dolphins and the whales and the orchids, for everything including the chaos, horror, and ferocious suffering that are also part of the Holy Alchemy of the One.

In the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, which is one of my favorite of all religious texts, this truth of the essential nature of God and its power to invigorate even in the most disastrous circumstances is given so beautifully: “The Universal Soul exists in every individual, it expresses itself in every creature. Everything in the world is a projection of it and there is Oneness, a unity of souls in one and only Self.” Discover and live the self – I know this now through the grace of the divine – and you will experience a stable grounded peace and a strong and serene joy whatever is happening in the world.

There’s a Hindu story of an old Brahmin, Bhrigu Varuni, who says to his son, whom he loves, and whom he wishes to see awaken before he dies, “Go off and meditate and come back and tell me what you discover.” His son comes down from the mountain and says, “Oh Dad, I’ve got the secret of life. The essence of life is food.” Well, that’s not quite the answer, so Dad says, “Go back, go back, meditate further, plunge deeper.” This goes on for six or seven wonderful answers, which are close to the truth, but not the truth.

Then one day Bhrigu Varuni sees his son come down the mountain and he sees that he’s radiant and peaceful, and the old man’s heart is filled with rapture because he knows his son now knows. He goes up to his son and says, “I know you know, but before I die I just want to hear from your lips what you have discovered.” And his son says, “From the great bliss, all things have come; in the great bliss, all things are sustained; and to the great bliss all things return. This is the highest mystical teaching.”

If you can make this radical commitment to celebration, you will find that the gift of that commitment will be, for you, a direct connection to that all-embracing, all-transforming, all-invigorating joy that is behind all the dance of the world. A wonderful image of this is the image of Shiva Nataraja. In one hand, Shiva has the flame of destruction, and in the other hand he has the drum of creation, but if you look carefully at the statue, you’ll see that his face radiates a royal serene bliss that embraces both creation and destruction, while transcending them. To live from the always flowing energy of this royal bliss is the work of evolutionary love, a work that enables us both to embrace and transcend duality as the divine dancer does. Such a demanding work needs to be fed and sustained by a steady passion of celebration.

There are five kinds of celebration a couple needs to practice effortlessly and seamlessly, with great humor and with great intelligence in the course of their love journey. First, they must celebrate together the gorgeous power and beauty of the Divine. If you want a beloved-beloved relationship with another human being, root it in a constant celebration of a Beloved-beloved relationship with God. Then the great wisdom and peace of that relationship will flood your relationship.

The second celebration that is crucial is to celebrate the wonder of being with another human being who is willing, despite your faults and your craziness and your comic complications, to say to you, “Not only do I love you, but I want to go on a journey to divinization with you to become a being who can radiate the fierce and tender love of God in works of justice and compassion for the world.” This will always remind you of what an extraordinary grace it is to meet someone with whom you can attempt to live this sacred relationship. Celebrating the fact that he or she has turned up in your life will give you the courage to go through all the stresses of actually sorting out the difficulties of the relationship. What greater grace could you be given than meeting a potent beloved partner in the journey to divinization? Celebrate that grace and it will grow.

The third kind of celebration is a celebration of all those things in ordinary life that can so easily become banal. One of the great things that happened to me by living in Paris was that I understood how so-called “ordinary” pleasures can be experienced from the awakened heart as subtle divine revelations. A simple lunch for your beloved can become a form of ecstatic prayer. A walk in the park can become holy communion. Make every occasion you share with the one you love an occasion to celebrate simply the magnificence, the benevolence of the Universe that presents you with the joy of being together.

The fourth kind of celebration involves embracing the chaos, the horror, the difficulty, the agony, the heartbreak of the Divine as well as the ecstasy and joy and bliss of the Divine. One of the things that the couple really needs to celebrate are the defeats, the failures, the difficulties that arise, and the shadows of each other.

You can find your way to celebrate a failure in communication, for example, if it led to both people examining their motives and their shadows more deeply. And if it led to more vulnerability between both people, then that led to a deeper compassion. In celebrating this you are celebrating the fundamental alchemical rhythm of evolution, and it will become more and more obvious to you that God is appearing in your relationship, not just as the highs, but also as the lows, not just as the joys, but also as the griefs, and that those griefs are not blocks, not obstacles, but fierce opportunities for deeper truth and deeper realization.

The fifth kind of celebration is to really celebrate when the power and beauty and evolutionary intensity of the relationship enable you to create something amazing in the world together, to really celebrate the divine blessing of being in a couple that can co-create in this way.

I have very close friends who are like brother and sister to me, and they’ve been patrons of sacred activism. She made a great deal of money in stocks, and he was the head of a corporation who got wise about what corporations are up to and left because he wanted a richer and deeper life. The two of them have joined forces to be potent philanthropists on a global scale.

Whenever something wonderful happens as a result of their generosity, they have a party and they celebrate, not the fact that they’re wealthy, and not the fact that they’ve had the good intentions to do something, but the power of love to really change things. The people who have been helped are invited, and what’s made clear to them is that by being able to help, my friends have been profoundly helped and transformed in their own right. From their wisdom, from their humility, I have learned just how powerful this kind of celebration can be.

Unify these five kinds of celebration in your life and whatever happens to you through sickness and defeat and grief and loneliness and mutual alienation at times, you will find that you will be connecting your whole reality with the Father/Mother through the golden thread of Divine Love and its all-transforming ananda.