Where This Book Came From
One day in the mid-oughts, Guruji, knowing of my background in editorial and publications work, showed me an astonishing manuscript called Understanding Sri Chakra Puja. He had composed it more than a decade earlier, but it was never quite finished, he said. Guruji asked me to help him complete it.
The draft, he explained, had been written in 1993-94, with an American woman named Devi Parvati acting as both interviewer and scribe. They worked on the book together until early 1994, at which point Guruji became enmeshed in the minutiae of running the newly opened Devipuram, and Devi Parvati had to return to America. In those pre-Internet, pre-cellphone days, the two soon fell out of touch--and Understanding Sri Chakra Puja was left unfinished.
In the late 1990s, a massive computer crash at Devipuram caused Guruji to lose many of his early writings and other precious documents. Among the casualties was the original manuscript of Understanding Sri Chakra Puja. He eventually found a copy in PDF format and asked a young devotee to convert it back into MS Word. The young man did so, but in the process, many sentences, paragraphs and sections of the document--including many mantras--were either dropped entirely or scrambled out of sequence.
Guruji noticed the problem immediately, but had no time to fix it himself and could find no one else to do the job. Eventually copies of the draft leaked and began circulating among Guruji’s followers in various forms.
But Guruji still wanted to get it right. And that, he told me, is where I could be of assistance.
Reconstruction and Expansion
Over the next few years, Guruji and I worked slowly through Understanding Sri Chakra Puja, gradually restoring its original form. Along the way, I also began assisting him with editing and preserving some of his other writings and lectures. The more I read of his work, the more I felt it deserved a wider audience. I eventually suggested that a selection of his writings should be compiled with Understanding Sri Chakra Puja into a comprehensive selection in book form.
And the seed of the present volume was born.
Gifts from the Goddess includes writings and lectures from Guruji’s earliest (and arguably, most intense and vivid) days of spiritual teaching, while he was still a working nuclear scientist, and continues on to later gems written not long before his death. Among the many rarities in this volume are his powerful writings on the Ten Mahavidyas (“Great Wisdom Goddesses”) of Tantric tradition, a collection also known as the “Lusaka Notes”--works that even lifelong devotees have difficulty sourcing. Here, for the first time, they are presented in their entirety, augmented with later updates and additions by Guruji.
The Quality of Guruji’s Work
Guruji lived very much in the present moment. Once a lecture was delivered, an essay written, a ritual perfected, he did not linger for long in its glow, but immediately moved on to new challenges.
His manner of expressing himself was genuine and original. He was an evocative writer and a natural teacher with a compassionate, compelling and practical message that, I am confident, will genuinely benefit many people on many different spiritual paths. Over time, I came to view him as a quiet but profound game-changer, a true iconoclast, a living exemplar of the ancient archetype of the jivanmukta—the enlightened being living in the world. (In fairness, this is a claim he has never made, to my knowledge. Quite the contrary: “I don’t accept any claims of me being a realized soul,” he once said. “To me, material and spiritual are all the same. There is only one realized soul. That is God. And you are it.”)
For Guruji, it was always about his students, always about teaching and sharing understanding. That ethic and dedication to radical honesty, transparency and accessibility for all exudes from this collection.
Source: Michael Bowden's Indiegogo page
