Andrew Harvey on Becoming the Light During the Dark Night

For four decades, Indian-born British scholar and mystic Andrew Harvey has been preparing for this moment in history. He’s written more than 30 books on topics including spiritual masters such as Jesus and Krishna, Rumi, yoga, Buddhism, and recently Mary Magdalene (the subject of his forthcoming book, The Magdalene Revolution: The Return of the Sacred Feminine and the Birth of Radical Equality). In that book, he presents Mary Magdalene as “a female Christ who completes the sacred marriage of divine masculine and feminine.” Earlier this year, Harvey’s Shift Network online course, “From Darkness Into Light: Rising in Sacred Action to Transform the Forces of Destruction and Birth a New Humanity,” brought together like- and light-minded teachers, including Mirabai Starr and Matthew Fox, in galvanizing talks and practices. In a conversation with contributing editor Karen Brailsford, including a follow-up call to him in the Himalayas, Harvey reveals how he’s been personally, radically transformed—and how we can transform as well during these challenging times.

Karen Brailsford: You foresaw the current state of the world. 

Andrew Harvey: Prophetic vocation is a wonderful and terrible thing. You have to be prepared to suffer very deeply and to give your life to the message you’ve been given to share. I’m in the happiest and deepest part of my life, and I am willing to try to help people face the apocalypse we’re in. Some of us who have been initiated into the great mystical traditions have been through their own dark nights, have seen the horror coming, and have dedicated their lives to trying to warn people. We have not given up. We have learned a great deal, and we have accumulated a lot of maps and practices and visions. We’re ready to help. But it really depends now on whether people are ready to listen. I’m presenting the tools and everything I know the world needs at this moment.

KB: You possess a fury, a rage, and a passion about what’s transpiring.   

AH: If you’re not furious, outraged, and wildly angry in the deepest sense about what is unfolding, you have no hope of getting through such an intense crisis. I’ve been in America for 40 years because I knew America would decide the future of the planet. I’ve been trying to help this country claim its moral and spiritual responsibility. I hope to God that America has enough people who care enough about democracy, decency, and compassion and who begin to resist and potentially risk their lives for the future—because that’s what it’s going to take to have a future.  

What I am doing is seeding a vision of how even this terrible period that is coming could potentially be a birthing ground for a new humanity. Birthing such a race requires the understanding that there could be a deep, divine meaning to this global dark night, which is to strip us to our depths so that we can rediscover who we really are—both human and divine—and come together in a worldwide, passionate revolution of love in action to save ourselves and live in justice and harmony with the environment. Great suffering can drive people insane and make them even more cruel. But it can also inspire, galvanize, and energize. 

KB: Are you hopeful the latter will happen?  

AH: The hope I have is in the Divine in us, in the vision I and others are presenting, and in the power of practices that I know work from my own experience. The hope I have is in the depths of the crisis itself because it seems that’s the only way people will wake up to what is really at stake here. And waking up is the only path to survival.  

KB: Don’t we first have to recognize our mutual divinity? 

AH: Let’s get real about what divine means. Divinity means dignity. If I truly think of you as divine, I am going to treat you with care. If you’re hungry, I will feed you. If you’re homeless, you can sleep on my sofa. Even if I don’t know you, I respect you. Divine means stepping in to help people who may be going through terrible things that I may also go through soon, because everyone does before the fat lady sings! Divine means justice. It means treating people with real eyeball-to-eyeball, hands-on compassion. Not because they’re brilliant or beautiful or rich or white or Black. But because they are creations of God. 

That’s the only way the human race can possibly survive. We won’t be able to heal the multiple cancers of the soul if we don’t get back to utter simplicity: one God beyond name and form. Everyone is Its child. The whole of nature is radiant with Its glory. We’re on the earth to pay attention to justice, harmony, and compassion and to create structures that support the whole of life. End of story. The only way through this is to accept where we are. We have to allow our hearts to be broken, our minds to be humbled. We have to let all the light-and-love rubbish blaze to ash so that we have a far more rigorous, far more humble vision of what the Divine really is.  

The hope is that we’re coming to a place where there is no choice. That has to happen before any chance of real transformation is possible. This revolution of the Divine Mother is very clear. It’s saying, “You must transform now and see that the climate is in free fall, that there are billions of people starving and living in repulsive conditions, that nobody is caring about the children being blown up in Gaza, and that in the Sudan 25 million men, women, and children are threatened with hunger, which has been made worse by the United States withdrawing aid.” The Divine Mother is out of her mind with pain and fury. She’s saying, “If you don’t transform now, you will create a situation of such horror for everyone else—and of such agony and horror for yourself.” 

“You will find that the Divine will come rushing toward you to give you visions of strength, power, truth, peace, and courage that you have never imagined.”

KB: Can you describe your 10-year dark night of the soul?  

AH: That’s when I woke up from my trance and realized you can have all the light in the world, but there are people who want to destroy that light. You see the corruption, the insanity, the cruelty, and the way humanity has created systems that keep Black people impoverished and humiliated, that keep the poor tortured, that keep whole worlds in subjugation. And once you see it, you can’t escape it. It’s not losing your money or having a bad date. When you’re in a real dark night, you’re praying all the time not to be overwhelmed by agony. It is an incineration, an annihilation of your whole sense of identity, of everything you think you know. And the great gift is that you get to know you know nothing.  

I was a professor at Oxford at 21 and brilliant in the world’s eyes. I thought that because I was so smart, I was in control and that I could understand anything from books. Only the dark night could have saved me from that because it knocked me off my feet and silenced me. It brought me to my absolute depths of utter disbelief and despair and saved my whole existence because I was no longer trapped in the old fool who thought he was something. 

What the dark night teaches you is that there’s only one power. The dark night is where the hope is, the most hopeful in human life, because it’s the one experience that will actually get you truly loving your enemy. You will see yourself in every suffering human being. There’s nothing they’re going through that you have not been party to yourself. And you will do everything you can to see that it never happens to another human being again. 

KB: Because it’s all about oneness.  

AH: Yes, but not this rubbish that they talk of in the New Age movement. Their oneness is marzipan oneness. Oneness is when you directly feel the agony of another human being. You’re not just one with the light and the splendor and the sweet concepts in religion. Becoming one means being with those dying of famine, suffering with the woman wrongly incarcerated, and being outraged for those who are abandoned and marginalized. 

If you still think that sitting on your porch drinking an expensive tea, muttering a mantra, and feeling a vague oneness is going to help in any way, compared to the visceral unity you need to have with every suffering being in a crisis like this, you are already lost, and it’s going to be very hard to wake you up.

KB: What message do you have for our readers?   

AH: Please turn to the real guides. They’re not the ones that you’re being sold. Some of them are fine, but all of them are compromised because they’ve created brands that have stopped them from telling the full truth. It wouldn’t have been good for their brand and their bank balances. I’m not claiming to be Jesus or the prophet, peace be upon him! What I say to people is: Stop being in denial. Prepare to be completely gobsmacked with pain, fear, horror, and despair. Yet do not despair, because if you use that experience to go deep into divine practice in whatever path you are on, you will find that the Divine, in whatever name you experience the Divine, will come rushing toward you to give you visions of strength, power, truth, peace, and courage that you have never imagined.  

Plunge into spiritual practice. Love your friends. Do try and wake them up to what’s happening. If you really love them, stay concentrated on being as patient, brave, and focused as you can. How deeply peaceful you need to be, how constantly attentive to others you are, and how absolutely humble you’ll have to be may contain the secret of your own survival.  

KB: Four days before our first conversation, you experienced what you call the biggest disaster of your life. Can you describe what happened? 

AH: I’ve been through many dark nights and have had very profound mystical experiences in my life, but nothing like this. This was the definitive experience for me. I feel completely different. I feel installed in a calm, blissful, divine awareness, and it’s embodied and peaceful.  

On May 6, I wrote the preface to my upcoming book on Mary Magdalene. I had finally found the courage to say what I’d been wanting to say throughout the book—that we’re living in the time of the Pentecost of Mary Magdalene. I ended the preface by writing that we’re now being called to be singing flames of that Pentecost. I was elated and joyful, and then I went out to breakfast. I came back to find my condo devastated by fire and my beloved cat Jade dead. It was as if I lived literally the descent of the flames that purified, cleansed, and rebirthed everything. It was confirmation at the deepest level of the book that I had written and the path that I’ve been on. 

The next five to seven years will determine the future of humanity. The flames of a very powerful new force are descending. What will seem like horror and chaos is actually preparation for the kind of rebirth I am now living. What this experience has done is confirmed two things: the destruction that is coming is terrible and unavoidable and will look like the end to many people. But it won’t be the end because it’s perfectly designed to burn away the false self that’s creating all this tragedy and horror, and out of it will come a new humanity. I’ve just lived it.  

KB: Does having lived it make you an even more impactful teacher? 

AH: You can teach the map of this dark night rebirth process, but until you have lived it, it is a map with words. It’s no longer a map with words for me. What I hope to be able to do is to model the new being for others so as to give them hope to go through whatever they have to go through to become one with the One. My teaching now is all about helping people to use the blessing of an extreme dark night to die into life, to simplify their lives, to dedicate themselves to radical service and sacred activism, and not to be terrified of what will seem so terrifying and be so terrifying. To realize it has a divine meaning, which, if they can surrender to it with gratitude, love, and hope, will rebirth them in a way that will completely astound them.

KB: Are you now astounded? 

AH: Oh, yes! I’m astounded with gratitude. Every single day I experience overwhelming gratitude to have been on this journey and despite myself, through grace, to have arrived at this place in which I know truth.   

KB: Can you comment on the huge interest in Mary Magdalene right now? 

AH: Mary Magdalene is coming back because what is absolutely essential for our world and the only hope for its survival is a massive absorption of the full power, glory, passion, peace, and radical, intense call for justice on every level of the divine feminine. The birth that is being offered us through this global dark night is the birth of an embodied divine human being. There can be no embodiment without the full return of the divine feminine, the full return of Mary Magdalene to the heart of the revelation.

The revelation that Jesus and Mary came to birth together is far greater than any religion. What they modeled is the path to becoming a divine human being in your own right. They didn’t come to be worshipped. They came to install a path of transfiguration, to show us how it’s done and what it’s for. How it’s done is by surrendering your entire being to love consciousness. That creation in transfiguration of the Divine must happen to create a human being who is capable of giving everything they are in sacred action, inner and outer, to help birth a new humanity and a new world. That is the Magdalene revolution. 

The book is designed specifically to reveal the truth of the Mary Magdalene revolution and also to help the reader integrate that truth for themselves, to birth themselves as a divine human being in and through the fiery and tender grace of Mary Magdalene.    
 

Andrew Harvey is a religious scholar and teacher of mysticism who has written more than 30 books. His next book, which will be published in February by Hay House, is The Magdalene Revolution. He’s the founder and director of the Institute for Sacred Activism, advocating the fusion of mystical knowledge with compassionate action to address global crises. Visit andrewharvey.net.

This article appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Spirituality & Health^®: A Unity Publication. Subscribe now.