FromThe Direct Path (c) 2000 by Andrew Harvey. Reprinted with permission of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Cover photograph by Michael Kenna. Cover design by Andrea Thomas. All rights reserved. For on-line information about other Random House Inc. books and authors see randomhouse.com Buy the book from Amazon.com and help support GraceOnline.

What is attempting to be born, I believe, through the agony and terror of this extremely dangerous but also extremely creative and fertile period, is a new humanity, one that is in direct and unmediated contact with the Divine, free of the divisiveness, body hatred, and bias toward transcendence that disfigures all the inherited patriarchal religions, and so is able at last to inhabit time, the body, and the earth with ecstatic consciousness and a passionate and radical sense of responsibility toward all living things.

It seems to me (and to increasingly greater numbers of people) that all the major religions have failed in one essential task -- the reducing of human anxiety and aggression through the instruction of human beings in their essential divine nature. Each of them, in different but fundamentally similar ways, controls believers and claims to broker the relationship between the believer and God in ways that both subtly and blatantly keep the believer from claiming the full range of his or her innate divine powers.

The guru system too -- as the epidemic of scandals over the last thirty years in all the major mystical transmission systems makes clear to anyone honest enough to confront the facts -- also disempowers the seeker in a subtle way: Worshipping another person as divine can seem a means to realize your own individual divinity, but in the overwhelming majority of cases it just re-creates ancient patterns of dependence and old habits of giving away one's own power to another. It is also clear that almost all those currently claiming to be enlightened -- and therefore beyond karma and criticism of any kind -- are nothing of the sort; they are using an ancient and sacred language of mystical truth to justify ways of getting rich, accruing personal power and acting as "stars" in what has tragically become a kind of international Hollywood star system.

If there isn't a vast raising of human consciousness very soon and on a scale that influences all major political and environmental decisions, nature and thus the human race are in danger of being destroyed.

What this failure of the traditional ways of reaching God means is that the sacred energy now being released in a worldwide opening to the Divine cannot reach its full expression because it is being siphoned off into inadequate systems or exploited by unscrupulous gurus for their own very temporal purposes. A potential birth -- on a gigantic scale -- is being, or is in danger of being, aborted. This is potentially disastrous, for as I and many others now believe, if there isn't a vast raising of human consciousness very soon and on a scale that influences all major political and environmental decisions, nature and thus the human race are in danger of being destroyed. The future of the entire human race may depend on whether large numbers of the human race can now take the Direct Path into claiming humbly their divine humanity and acting from it in order to preserve the environment and see that justice is done to the poor and starving and depressed. What is needed on a large scale, I believe, is an army of servant-warriors for peace and justice, an army of practical visionaries and active mystics who work in every field and in every arena to transform the world.

Christ's real teaching was not, as the church has claimed, about worshipping him as son of God; it was an attempt to transmit to everyone else the intimate, direct, totally transforming relationship he had himself realized with God.

This is a radical vision, of course, but it is not a new one. Christ's real teaching was not, as the church has claimed, about worshipping him as son of God; it was an attempt to transmit to everyone else the intimate, direct, totally transforming relationship he had himself realized with God, an attempt to empower all beings with their own human divine identity and to begin a mystical and political revolution. The ancient shamanic cultures (as we can see from the remnants of them that survive in the Aboriginal and American native peoples) believed that all beings were entitled, by virtue of being born into this world, to a direct relationship with the Source, and they developed elaborate and poignant rituals for every stage of life. Early Hinayana Buddhism had no time for the elaborate master worship that so infused the Mahayana schools; the Buddha made it clear that he was not a god and that all who wanted enlightenment as passionately and pointedly as he had wanted it could have it if they were prepared to give, suffer, and work enough. His dying words, after all, were "Go and work out your own salvation, with diligence."

Most of the schools of Judaism have stressed the necessity of going to the Divine directly. Even in Hinduism, which has extolled and worshipped the guru concept, there have been many sects and movements profoundly critical of all intermediaries between the human heart and its origin. The Direct Path, then, has always been known and followed by a certain part of humanity. If many religions and mystical systems have played its significance down, it is because the Direct Path is inherently radical. After all, if everyone is able to be in unmediated contact with the Divine, to be taught in the terms of their own lives directly by the Divine, then what need is there for a priest class, monasteries and temples, or gurus? And if everyone is in the highest sense equal before God, then very soon the idea that the historical Christ proposed -- that people should also be equal in society -- becomes unavoidable and the whole hierarchical system of patriarchal cultures and religions is menaced. We are now being strangled to death, I believe, by these authoritarian systems that no longer have any rationale or spiritual innocence; it is time of the revolutionary energy of the Direct Path to be released and Christ's and Buddha's vision of a free, empowered humanity to be born at last. On that birth depends the future.

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