Jeff Carreira: You and I were both friends with Dorothy Walters before she passed, and for our issue on poetry I wanted to speak with you about her. I first encountered Dorothy through her book Unmasking the Rose.

Andrew Harvey: Great book. I edited that book with her.

Jeff Carreira: That book had a profound impact on me, partly because I had experienced a very powerful Kundalini awakening, and her book helped me understand what had happened to me. Then, some years later, when the spiritual community I was part of collapsed, I reached out to Dorothy and we began a friendship because she helped me understand something I now firmly believe: that my entire spiritual path since that Kundalini awakening had been guided and fueled by Kundalini itself.

I would love to know how you first met Dorothy. How did your relationship with her begin?

Andrew Harvey: Well, it’s a wonderful story. I was forty-one or forty-two when I was invited to the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I gave a very wild, over-the-top, under-the-bottom class on Rumi that became something of a phenomenon.

I kept noticing this very sweet, very humble person sitting near the front of the class, and sometimes she had tears streaming down her face. During office hours she came to see me and said, ‘I’m a poet, and I’ve written some poems secretly, quietly, and I would love it if you would do me the honor of reading them.’

To be perfectly honest, my heart sank a million miles. If you knew how many dreadful poems I’d been asked to read over the years, you would have great sympathy for my soul. But of course, because I’m British and a gentleman, I said, ‘I’d love to read them.’

We had a lovely conversation, and afterward I sat down and began reading the poems. I was absolutely astonished because I realized I was in the presence of a great mystical poet, someone who had found a completely modern language for ancient truths and ancient passions.

And the following week I asked Dorothy to come back, and I said to her, ‘Dorothy, these poems are astounding. You must continue writing, I beg you. And you must publish them. They’re absolutely unique. Totally original. They have a completely authentic voice, and there isn’t a false note in them. They’re amazing. I love you.’

And that was the beginning of our extraordinary friendship, because she had never shown her poems to anyone before, and it took enormous courage for her to show them to me. I’m deeply honored that I was the first person to truly see her and recognize her gift, because from that moment on I did everything I possibly could to help bring her work into the world.

We became the dearest, most passionate, and most tender of friends. She was one of the great friendships of my life. I honored her. I loved her. And I learned enormously from her because she was immensely wise.

Her own profound and enduring Kundalini experience, which lasted from around the age of fifty until her death at ninety-three, became subtler, more refined, and more sensitive over time, and she became a touchstone for me. Whatever I was doing in the world, whatever I was writing, Dorothy was the one voice I most cared to hear from because I knew that she knew.

We shared a friendship of the deepest kind on every conceivable level.

Jeff Carreira: You referred to her as a mystic poet, and that feels like such a perfect description. And of course, you yourself have translated Rumi and written poetry as well.

Andrew Harvey: Yes, and I’ve also translated writers such as Angelus Silesius, Hadewijch of Antwerp, and other major mystical poets, because part of the adventure I’ve been engaged in throughout my life has been to help bring back those tremendous ancient voices that feel especially relevant to the horrific evolutionary crisis we are now living through.

Jeff Carreira: When I hear the phrase ‘mystical poet,’ I think of someone writing out of the direct experience of divinity, out of genuine union with the sacred. And I would love to hear you speak a little about how you yourself would characterize a mystical poet.

Andrew Harvey: What characterizes a mystical poet is an absolute absorption in the deepest divine experience and a passionate desire to convey its fragrance, its aroma.

Mystical poets understand that the actual experience of union with the divine is beyond words. It goes far beyond names and forms because it is so intimate, so extraordinary, so passionate, and so extreme. But they also know that if they steep themselves in that experience, like a teabag in water, then through divine grace they may be given words capable of helping others who have had similar experiences to remember and renew their own deepest connection with God.

So a mystical poet is someone attempting consciously to do the impossible: to convey the intimate intensity of union with the divine. And they do so with their entire being—their full personality, their deepest richness, everything they have understood about life, and everything they have understood about language—in an attempt to communicate the glory of authentic inner experience.

Jeff Carreira: I love that you use the word ‘remember,’ because as I’ve traveled further along the spiritual path, I’ve come to feel more and more that the discovery of the ineffable is actually a remembering. It’s as though these deeper truths are embedded in the ancient history of humanity—perhaps even in the history of the planet itself—and that spiritual awakening is, in some profound sense, a process of remembering who and what we truly are.

I would love to hear you say a little more about that.

Andrew Harvey: I think it’s actually quite simple. We are born with the original blessing of divine consciousness. But that blessing becomes shrouded by convention, by society, and by this fanatical, exclusive belief in reason and science. As a culture and civilization, we’ve lost touch with that deeper connection.

At the same time, there are now hundreds of millions of people awakening to the need to re-establish that connection because the world is becoming terminally insane. It’s filled with violence, confusion, and madness. And many people instinctively understand that reconnecting with the mystical dimension of life can give us the strength to remain steady, sane, alive, and even joyful amidst the horror and chaos erupting all around us.

So what you call remembering may actually be even more than remembering. It is reconnecting with an essential dimension of our nature that has been hidden from us for far too long.

And when we read great mystical poetry with an open heart, we suddenly find ourselves remembering experiences we ourselves have known—moments of profound love for another human being, moments of ecstasy through music, moments when we were overwhelmed by the majesty and beauty of nature.

What mystical poetry does is help us recognize that those experiences are not random or accidental. They are signs of a tremendous awareness within us, a gift longing to be born and expanded until it becomes, in the deepest sense, normal—the very core of our lives rather than merely a few isolated moments of grace.

Jeff Carreira: That’s beautiful and Dorothy is such a beautiful example of a mystic poet.

Andrew Harvey: She’s the greatest mystical poet of the twentieth century. She is also the greatest American mystical poet. And one day, I believe, that will be fully recognized.

Jeff Carreira: I didn’t have the opportunity to meet her in person until she was ninety-one years old. I spent an afternoon with her, and what amazed me was that even at ninety-one, in declining health, she still radiated a profound passion for life and an unmistakable joyfulness.

Andrew Harvey: Yes.

Jeff Carreira: In our meeting, we found ourselves resonating in a shared recognition of the wonder of Kundalini and the wonder of life itself. It was deeply inspiring to encounter someone at such an advanced age who was still so fully alive, so innocent, so open, and so excited by possibility.

It feels to me that the antidote the world most needs today is precisely that kind of vivacious love of life.

Andrew Harvey: Very much.

Jeff Carreira: Would you say that quality can generally be found in all mystic poets?

Andrew Harvey: There are some mystical poets who are stark, fierce, and ferocious, like Kabir, and there are others, like Rumi, who overflow with ecstasy and joy. I think Dorothy actually embodied both dimensions. There are poems of hers that are absolutely fearless in confronting the agony and the repeated deaths that accompany authentic mystical transformation. But there was also within her an endless source of profound joy arising from her deep Kundalini experience.

And that experience wasn’t confined merely to consciousness. It was embodied. Her body itself was being transfigured, continually remade by these soft, pulsing, radiant, blissful Kundalini energies. That gave her an extraordinary hope that this terrible crisis humanity is moving through could also become the birth canal for a new humanity—one irrigated by these energies and awakened through their joy and creativity to co-create with God an entirely new way of being and living.

That vision has also been central to my own work and one of the many reasons Dorothy and I were so deeply connected. We were both experiencing this radiance inwardly. I was writing and speaking about it in my books, trying to help people align themselves with this birthing process unfolding in the midst of so much death and collapse. Dorothy, meanwhile, was living it in the most exquisite way imaginable, both through her poetry and through her extraordinary writings on Kundalini.

Her book Kundalini Wonder is, in my opinion, by far the greatest book ever written on Kundalini because it emerges from forty years of incredibly subtle, intricate, and clear-minded experience of this immense evolutionary force—an energy now awakening in hundreds of thousands of people beyond the control of the established religions.

As you know, Dorothy and I also created many videos together about this process, and if people watch them, they will encounter this extraordinary woman speaking with astonishing simplicity about immensely complex experiences. And that simplicity was the mark of true mastery. Dorothy was a master, but she was also humble, loving, and deeply tender. Through that presence, she touched hundreds of lives.

Simply being in Dorothy’s presence was to be touched by truth at a profound level. She was unforgettable.

And honestly, I do not feel she is gone at all. I know she is no longer in physical form, but her presence remains vividly here because of the depth of the love we shared. When you share that kind of love, death is not an ending. It becomes the beginning of a deeper and more inward relationship. She has remained with me, and she always will.

Jeff Carreira: There’s one poem of Dorothy’s, from her collection The Kundalini Poems, that I intend to include in the article and that I would love to read to you and hear your response to. The poem is called The Solitary Ecstatic.

The Solitary Ecstatic
Don’t surrender your loneliness
so quickly.
~ Hafiz

Hafiz, do you know what it is
to be utterly, totally alone?

To be visited again and again
by those elements
that some call God
and still no friend
to share with, tell what is happening??

No one near
to hear your story
extend a welcoming hand?

Sometimes even God
is not enough.
Sometimes the loneliness
and something called rapture
are all you have.

Andrew Harvey: That’s an amazing poem, and I think all authentic mystics recognize the truth within it.

One of the subtle agonies of the mystical path is how difficult it can be to convey these experiences to those who have never known them directly. And perhaps another agony reflected in the poem is something Dorothy herself experienced deeply throughout her life. She was an exceptionally loving person who never fully found the beloved in human form. I think that longing occupied many years of her life, but it was also a longing she gradually learned to accept as part of the sacrifice required for the extraordinary realization she had been given.

I suspect that longing also fueled the intensity of her poetry, because in some sense all of her poems were written to an imagined human beloved—and when you read Dorothy’s poetry, she makes you that beloved.

There’s a profound paradox at the center of this poem because it acknowledges the extreme solitude that belongs to the authentic mystical path, a solitude one ultimately must accept, since in the end it is the alone meeting the Alone. And in our culture, there are still so few people who have genuinely awakened to the deepest mystical truth of reality.

In acknowledging that solitude, Dorothy is also sharing it with all the others who experience it, drawing them into a hidden community of solitary lovers and, in some mysterious way, easing the burden of that loneliness. Because you begin to realize not only that solitude is part of the price of mystical awakening, but also that there are people all over the world whom you may never meet who nonetheless know exactly what you know. And your heart fills with compassion for them.

And that first line from Hafiz—‘Don’t surrender your loneliness too quickly’—is profoundly important because our culture is fundamentally a culture of distraction. It endlessly attempts to lure us away from the painful yearning for fulfillment through union. But if you allow yourself to be distracted from that longing, you may miss the supreme experience of your life: the recognition that you are one with the One.

And that is where the rapture in the poem’s final lines comes from. The suffering and solitude become redeemed and transfigured. They initiate you into a relationship with the Beloved that does not necessarily erase your human loneliness, but instead opens you into a vast awareness of all the relationships that solitude itself can reveal—the relationship to creation, to the rain, to the faces you encounter in their divine beauty on the tramway, to everything.

Because ultimately, it is all God.

And so the tragedy of being alone becomes the ecstasy of being alone with the Alone in rapture. For many mystics, that is the deepest truth of the spiritual journey.

Jeff Carreira: That is incredibly well said. And I love the way you are connecting your life’s work with Dorothy’s life’s work, because it creates a beautiful opportunity for us to speak about your most recent book, The Magdalene Revolution.

I myself began a journey with Mary Magdalene about a decade ago. I was raised Catholic, so Mary Magdalene was always a figure who fascinated me. And I also deeply loved The Cloud of Unknowing, where she is mentioned very prominently.

Andrew Harvey: Yes she is, very beautifully and profoundly.

Jeff Carreira: I write novels as well, and I wrote Mary Magdalene into one of them. The novel centers on that fascinating period between her encounter with the resurrected Jesus and her reunion with the apostles. I found myself imagining what she might have been thinking and feeling during that extraordinary span of time when she was literally the only person on earth who knew Jesus had returned.

I happened to come across your new book, The Magdalene Revolution, while looking into your recent work online, and it resonated very deeply with my own journey. Dorothy helped me understand that Kundalini had been guiding my awakening for many years. And once I realized that, I began to feel a divine feminine presence—an awakened energy—within myself. Over the past few years, that presence has become increasingly vivid, leaving me with an ongoing sense of relationship and connection.

What moved me so deeply in your book was the way you articulated the divine feminine and its reemergence—or perhaps its longing to reemerge—within human culture.
And just now, as you were speaking about distraction, I found myself thinking that sometimes it almost feels as though our world has been deliberately designed to distract us from that deeper connection.

Andrew Harvey: Completely, yes. Because the last thing those in power want us to discover is our divine identity, let alone the process of divinization that the divine feminine makes possible. The world wants us enslaved to its madness.

Jeff Carreira: Can you say a little more about your own recognition of Mary Magdalene as a harbinger of an entirely different spiritual possibility for humanity?

Andrew Harvey: That’s a wonderful question. I was raised Anglican, and as a boy I had a treble voice and sang in church. I can still vividly remember a beautiful stained-glass window of Mary Magdalene in the garden opening her arms to Jesus. As a child, with my heart opened through singing, I sensed there was something absolutely extraordinary in the relationship between this radiant God-man and this equally radiant, loving woman. I didn’t yet understand what it was, but I believe that image and that feeling entered very deeply into my soul.

Later in life I became profoundly devoted to the divine feminine. As you know, much of my work has centered on that mystery. I wrote extensively about it, and although I once had a female guru who ultimately proved not to be an authentic guru, loving her as an embodiment of the Divine Mother opened within me a tremendous experience of the embodied feminine.

Then I began reading the Gnostic Gospels, where Mary Magdalene is portrayed very differently than she is in the canonical tradition. In the Gnostic texts it becomes clear that she was something far more than simply the Beloved Disciple.

The Gospel of Philip says that she was Jesus’ koinonia, which means consort. And that insight began opening me to the central vision of my book: that they came together in a sacred union, that they were married, deeply in love, and that their love itself formed the foundation of his mission.

She came to help him give birth to the new creation by saturating him with her glorious feminine power, grounding his incarnation fully in the world.

About twenty years ago, I led a pilgrimage to the south of France, and we visited the cave at Sainte-Baume, where Mary Magdalene is said to have spent the last thirty years of her life. When I entered that cave, a tremendous peace descended upon me, and I felt her presence very strongly.

Afterward, I read the Catholic Church’s traditional description of what she had supposedly been doing there. It portrayed her as penitent, grieving her life, longing to die, praying to be released, and so forth. And honestly, I wanted to scream, because that was clearly not what had happened in that cave.

I felt outraged. And as I was walking back down the valley, I turned to look once more at the cave. For about a minute, I saw her as this tremendous blazing tower of golden light radiating throughout all of creation.

I had no idea what to do with such an overwhelming vision, but I knew immediately that what I was witnessing revealed something essential about authentic Christ consciousness. She was far more than simply a consort. She was the embodiment, the incarnation, of the Divine Feminine, destined to unite with his incarnation of the Sacred Masculine in order to bring forth the glory of a sacred marriage upon the earth—a marriage of transcendence and immanence that is itself the source of all true evolutionary transformation.

After that experience, I carried the vision with me for twenty years while I was occupied with many other aspects of my work. I wrote numerous books, launched the Sacred Activism project, and continued developing the different dimensions of my teaching. But I could never turn away from that vision.

Finally, in my late sixties, I realized I might at last be ready to write this book. But honestly, it became the most difficult and painful book I have ever written because it demanded everything I had learned and everything I had ever understood.

But I was led by her from revelation to revelation to revelation, and the process required silence. It required being shattered again and again, praying, waiting, and surrendering. In the end, through her grace, all the pieces finally came together.

So for me, this book is not merely a book. It is a sacred text that I have been entrusted to offer humanity at this moment in history.

Because the key to our possible transformation lies in learning how to use this horrific death process we are now moving through as the means to reclaim the most glorious vision possible of who we truly are.

And the vision offered by authentic Christ consciousness is the vision of the sacred marriage: the complete union of the highest transcendence with every detail of embodied human life. It is also the vision of a divinized sexuality that reunites body, soul, heart, and mind so completely that we are no longer condemned to live fragmented and divided lives, but instead can live as unified, holy, humble, and majestic human beings directly connected to the evolutionary energies of the universe.

We are living in a culture that has become a wasteland created by a masculine consciousness profoundly dissociated from the feminine. But if you unite the highest qualities of the masculine—the luminous, clear, ordered, and penetrating dimensions of masculine consciousness—with the luscious, passionate, tender, vibrant, body-loving, and sexually transformative powers of the feminine, then what emerges is a unified possibility of lived human-divine experience.

That union becomes the birthing force of a holy new humanity.

And this, I believe, is what Jesus and Mary came to reveal to us. But they were unable to transmit the fullness of that revelation because Mary was written out of the story, reduced to a prostitute, and her true presence diminished, degraded, and even desecrated.

So the work I attempted to do in her honor was to restore the fullness of the divine feminine and reunite it with the fullness of the divine masculine, showing that the journey of authentic Christ consciousness is ultimately the journey of incarnating this sacred birthing force.

Because if we fail to do that, humanity simply will not survive.

That is why this message is emerging now, at precisely the moment it is most needed.

Jeff Carreira: Now I’d like to ask you a more personal question.

Very recently, I had a powerful experience of encountering and confronting a feminine goddess presence that felt as ancient as the earth itself, and that presence has continued to remain with me over these past weeks. I’ve come to realize that she first entered my life during my Kundalini awakening twenty-five years ago, and that Dorothy, in many ways, was helping prepare me for a deeper union with her. My love of Teresa of Ávila was part of that preparation. My fascination with Mary Magdalene was part of that preparation as well.

And the message I received was that everything I create from this point forward must be built upon the foundation of the inner goddess.

What strikes me is how deeply that resonates with Dorothy’s poetry and with everything you are saying about Mary Magdalene. It leaves me with the strong sense that there is a feminine spirit—a feminine essence—that is seeking to be reborn.

Andrew Harvey: She is being reborn. She is being reborn.

She is forcing her way back into the world because humanity now has only the faintest chance of surviving the madness it has created through its dissociation and spiritual insanity. But paradoxically, she is also being reborn through that very madness, because the darkness itself has created a kind of collective dark night of the soul.

People are no longer merely entertaining sentimental ideas about the feminine. They are beginning to realize that without the restoration of the full majesty, power, beauty, grandeur, passion, and transformative force of the Kundalini—of the life force in its most divine expression—humanity will not survive.

And that is precisely why this is the moment in which the feminine can return. She returns when she is most yearned for, most longed for, most desperately needed, and most deeply grieved.

That is what is happening now.

Don’t you feel it?

Jeff Carreira: I think that when I was with Dorothy and when I read her poems, I could feel the vibration of that energy. Even at ninety-one years old, she was still practicing ecstatic dance every day, simply allowing that energy to move through her.

Her physical mobility had diminished over the years, but she could still surrender herself completely to the ecstasy of that force and allow herself to be carried by it.

Andrew Harvey: Yes, sometimes simply moving her hand would fill her with greatness because those energies had become so deeply soaked into her being.
Dorothy was one of the first people I have ever encountered who was truly being born into the next stage of divine humanity. And I believe that is the ultimate purpose of this entire process.

In that sense, Dorothy became a living sign of what happens when you allow the divine feminine to take hold of you completely—to possess you, shape you, initiate you, and transform you progressively over time. When you become irrigated by these extraordinary energies, you gain access to an entirely different level of vitality and consciousness. You begin carrying a living, embodied hope within your own being.

I always saw Dorothy as proof that the vision held by myself and other evolutionary mystics—that our present crisis is not only a crisis of death, but also a birthing crisis for a new divine humanity—is real. I encountered the living reality of that possibility in her. She was radiant with it.

And what made her so extraordinary was that she remained utterly uninflated by her experience. Her realization was so deep that it made her humble. She never proclaimed herself to be anything special.

She was, in many ways, the masterpiece of Madame Kundalini, yet she gave all the credit to the goddess because she understood that, in the deepest sense, she herself did not exist separately. She was simply a wave arising from the returning sea of the divine feminine.

Jeff Carreira: That is beautiful. And so perhaps one final question.

If people are beginning to experience this awakening of the goddess within their own lives, how would you encourage them to approach it? What would you suggest they do to participate more consciously and fully in this birthing process that has already begun?

Andrew Harvey: Well, the first thing I would urge people to do is to read Dorothy’s work, because there is no greater guide to this birthing process than Dorothy. The experience was so deep within her, and she possessed the extraordinary gift of simplicity.

If you have an open heart and are beginning to undergo these kinds of experiences, read her poetry and her remarkable book Kundalini Wonder. In them you will find both profound inspiration and practical guidance beyond anything you might imagine.

And you will need that support, because these experiences can be deeply bewildering. It is important to understand that they do carry meaning, and that there are ways to accommodate them, relax into them, accept them, and ultimately find the courage to be completely transformed by them.

That would be the first thing I would say.

The second thing is that once you begin feeling these birthing energies, it becomes essential to develop a serious mystical practice. Otherwise, these forces can genuinely destabilize you.

But the practice does not need to be complicated. In fact, simplicity is far better.

I would encourage anyone moving through this process to find an image or embodiment of the Divine Mother that speaks deeply to them. Perhaps it is Mary Magdalene, perhaps Mary the mother of Jesus, perhaps Kali, perhaps Durga. Whatever form resonates with your soul, cultivate a relationship of devotion with that presence.
Speak the name of God inwardly in the core of your heart, and engage in a sincere practice of remembrance of your essential identity. Gradually, the mirror of the heart becomes clearer, and reality itself begins revealing its sacred and divine magic to you.

The third thing is to truly honor and love the body. Free yourself from all the terrible conditioning patriarchal religions have imposed—the idea that the body is somehow the source of illusion or that sexuality is inherently fallen.

Instead, honor the body as the living temple of the spirit. Nourish it. Exercise it. Dance. Express yourself through the body and within the body with delight, tenderness, and deep love.

If you do these three things, then together with the Kundalini energies, you become, in a sense, the midwife of your own birthing process.

Jeff Carreira: That is very beautiful. Andrew, I really want to thank you for speaking with me today. It’s been beyond delightful.

Andrew Harvey: And bless you as well. Bless your entire journey, and bless the beautiful work you are doing to bring Dorothy back into the awareness of the world.

I truly believe Dorothy’s great recognition is now approaching. I only wish she had lived to witness it directly, though in another sense I know she sees it now. I imagine her dancing with Kabir and Rumi, free at last from all the limitations and infirmities of old age.

Those of us who knew her will always remember her as one of the most astonishingly gifted beings we ever encountered.

And I’m deeply grateful that you had the opportunity to be touched by her presence. I’m equally grateful that you are helping to bring her work forward again so that many thousands more people may taste the wonders we ourselves were privileged to experience.