NONFICTION - April 28, 1991

HIDDEN JOURNEY: A Spiritual Awakening by Andrew Harvey (Henry Holt: $22.50; 253 pp.). c,8.5,pl Andrew Harvey gave up a promising career in Britain--he was the youngest fellow in Oxford University’s history--to return to the India of his childhood memory: the “asphalt and jasmine” smell of the night when his mother left for a party; the fragrance of roses open by her bed when he crawled into it in the mornings. Harvey’s subsequent “spiritual awakening” with a “divine mother” he meets in India--an attractive young woman who helps him hear “the hum of creation”--reads almost like satire from Salman Rushdie or Adam Zameenzad. Harvey, however, is well aware of his own susceptibility to Islamic fundamentalism (his real mother abandoned him when he was 6). The beauty of this book lies in his enduring faith in his “divine mother,” not because he believes she is uniquely divine, but because she helps him discover his own divinity, his own inner worth. As one of her friends tells Harvey, “Mystics are not special human beings. Each human being is a special kind of mystic.”