An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Direct Path
Andrew Harvey 
(1952–) feels that 
The Direct Path, Creating a Journey to 
the Divine Using the World’s Mystical Traditions
is what his whole life 
had been leading up to. Born in India, educated in England, he became the 
youngest ever Fellow of All Soul’s College, Oxford. He then turned his 
back on academia and returned to India to follow a journey of spiritual 
discovery. This led him to Aurobindo’s ashram, to Mother Meera, to 
Ladakh to learn from Tibetan Buddhist Thuksey Rinpoche, to a vision of 
Christ. Meanwhile he read widely, especially Rumi.
Growing up in India, Harvey had been surrounded by devotion to God 
expressed through different religious traditions, through his Protestant 

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Mystics
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family, Muslim driver, Catholic ayah (nursemaid) and Hindu servants. So 
he was naturally drawn to the teachings of Ramakrishna. Harvey saw an 
inner unity within all mystical traditions and compiled an anthology of 
mystical quotations from the world’s religious traditions, 
The Essential 
Mystics, The Soul’s Journey into Truth
. In 
The Direct Path
he goes further. 
Drawing on those traditions for universal wisdom, he proposes eschewing 
religious teachers and organizations in favour of a kind of spiritual DIY. 
He offers 18 spiritual exercises from different mystical traditions so that 
by following Harvey’s guidelines, readers can create their own path.
Harvey has had various mystical experiences during his life, notably 
these:
I was walking along the sea . . . It was night . . . All at once my mind 
seemed to split apart like a coconut flung against a wall, and I saw with 
open eyes all the fishermen’s boats and the beach itself glitter with bril-
liant white light. I heard the waves singing 
om
as they crashed on and 
on. The experience lasted for about fifteen minutes. Reality, I realized, 
was revealing to me its divine face without a mask, its face of light.
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The second was while he was spending time at the bedside of his dying 
father, a Christian:
After the priest had finished, I happened to look up at the crucifix at 
the back of the church. There is only one way I can describe what hap-
pened then; the Christ on the cross became alive. For fifteen astounding 
minutes, with open eyes, my entire being racked by the glory of what 
I was witnessing, I saw Christ on the cross extending his arms in a ges-
ture of all-embracing, absolute, and final love to the whole of reality.
Wave after wave of divine love invaded me; nothing in any of the 
many experiences of the Divine I had had up to that moment prepared 
me for the volcanic ecstasy and passion and sheer frightening force of 
what streamed into me from the living Christ.
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His work brings the wisdom and practice of many traditions together, 
offering them as a way of finding truth.
These mystics offer an insight into the profoundest of mysteries, and 
their experiences are perhaps the nearest humans ever come to under-
standing the divine.

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