This was a process, over time, but here’s an example.

It was my first puja, Diwali 1991, in Cabella, Liguria, Italy. I was staying in a bar/pension in the town square. At some point, I’d mentioned to my friend and brother Ian Paradine that I could get a book published about Sahaja Yoga.

In those days, newspapers would pay a lot of money for serial rights, for example, they paid Bloomsbury something like £400,000 to serialize a book Walking Tall, by Simon Weston. He suffered 46% body burns was while sitting in a middle deck of the Sir Galahad, a crowded troopship while waiting to disembark, when it was hit by an Argentinian Exocet missile. On living through sheer hell, despite having been a failure up to that point, with his face unrecognizable and after 96 reconstructive operations he transformed himself into an admirable, extraordinary human being.

When I worked at Penguin, they had published a diet book, that was re-named by Penguin’s CEO, The F Plan Diet. It was similarly serialized and went on to sell millions of copies.

In both cases, the newspapers advertised the serializations on television.

After just over a year practicing Sahaja Yoga, I was convinced that Shri Mataji’s teachings would transform the world in very short order.

Despite the fact that I was assiduously meditating twice a day, and thunderstruck at the changes manifesting in me, I had little understanding of Sahaja Yoga and no idea as to who Shri Mataji was.

I had recently met Michael Wilkins, a Cambridge educated engineer, and it was he who told me about Cabella in northern Italy where Shri Mataji had a house. He said he had just attended a puja there. This was a term I’d never encountered before. I was intrigued when he explained that the weekend was life changing for him. I just didn’t begin to understand what he was telling me. “You do know who She is?” he asked.

“She’s God!”

I was profoundly shocked for I had been a devout atheist for some thirty three years and this statement rocked me to my core. I was thus confronted with the contradiction between my beliefs and the utterly incredible changes I had experienced by following Shri Mataji’s guidance on meditation. I decided there and then that I would go to Cabella for the very next puja which was to be a week or so’s time.

Cabella, in the Borbera valley, in the foothills north east of Genoa, was a cold place in early November. I wore a Schott black leather A2 bomber jacket, black jeans and boots.

I wasn’t initially impressed by the yogis I saw there. I asked myself what I would have felt had I chanced upon this village, seeing Western men and women dressed in colorful Indian clothing? And men dancing with other men, women with women? I’d never danced with a man in my life and wasn’t about to start now. My wife at the time was convinced, based on her experience of book publishing that bad behavior would be a natural ingredient in such a gathering. She was wrong.

I was in full reactive mode. My ego and superego were in overdrive, all the things I didn’t like flashed before me but while what I saw was off-putting what I was experiencing deep inside, a depth of bliss I’d never known before was for me, a life-changing experience.

When Shri Mataji appeared, on the Friday and Saturday evenings, the ecstasy I experience in Her presence was beyond anything I’d known before.

I have little memory of what She said in the spontaneous talk She gave just before the puja itself on the Sunday but sitting in a big blue circus tent in the proximity of hundreds of men from all over Europe, mostly in meditative silence for what seemed like hours that passed in minutes was something I’ll never forget.

I had originated several million selling books up this point in my publishing career, for example, when I was on the verge of being fired at Penguin books - they’d had thirty five sales directors in their fifty year history, thus the average life expectancy was around eighteen months. By the time I’d been there a year, it wasn’t only my paranoia that told me I was being measured up for the chop. But, I asked a thirteen year old boy, a neighbor’s son to write a book on how to solve the Rubik’s Cube and showed him how to graphically illustrate a solution from any random start point. The book sold several million copies, was translated into forty seven languages, topped both the UK and USA bestseller lists, and by some magic, some catalytic process, suddenly all the changes I’d made in Penguin’s sales structures that should have worked and hadn’t, as if someone had suddenly flipped a series of switches, clicked into operation and I was fireproof.

I was certain I could do the same for a book on Sahaja Yoga. In my head I planned how I would go about it. I’d convince the deputy managing director and head of non-fiction, David Reynolds, to experience the magic of Sahaja Yoga for himself, so he would have complete confidence in putting a book together, and similarly for Ruth Logan, our rights director, who would sell newspaper serialization rights.

At 3am on the Monday morning following the puja, I was awakened by Ian Paradine’s voice in the street outside my room. I had to be up and on a bus to Milan airport at 6am, so I wasn’t pleased to be awakened at that hour.

He said, “Shri Mataji wants to see you.”

I was astonished and thrilled. I hurriedly dressed and we walked up the steep hill in the chill morning air to Shri Mataji’s house.

We were shown into Her room, there was something like a dozen or more people there as well as Shri Mataji. One was Patrick Hughes, an American, Paul Wynter, (I noted subsequently that the check used to buy the house in Cabella was proudly framed in Paul’s mansion in Wales.)

I sat and listened as the people, in turn, spoke to Shri Mataji and listened to what they said and Her replies. We were all sitting on the floor, Shri Mataji in a chair.

I had badly, irreparably damaged the cruciate ligaments in my right knee, playing rugby when I was fifteen in Belfast. I was unable to sit for any length of time without extreme pain and discomfort, and at one point, I moved my legs from the left side of my body to the right. In doing so, there was a point when both my feet were pointing directly at Shri Mataji, and a couple of the yogis yogis present dived at me, as this was apparently a very disrespectful thing to do, something I didn’t know at the time. Shri Mataji smiled and said to the divers, “It’s OK, he doesn’t understand.”

That was certainly true, and indeed it was only during the weekend that I came to truly recognize Shri Mataji’s divinity. That being so, as I listened to the to and fro of the conversations, I knew for certain that I would never in my life speak in the manner and tone of some of the people speaking to Her. How could you be in a room with an incarnation and speak to Her in the tones in which they addressed Shri Mataji?

At some point, Shri Mataji turned to me and said something along the lines of “I understand you could get a book published on Sahaja Yoga? How might that work?”

I explained my plan and She told me to go ahead.

Paul Wynter, who flew back on the same plane as me to Heathrow airport, drove me into central London in his Land Rover and dropped me off in Shaftesbury Avenue, the southern side of the square that demarcated the area called Soho, in which I’d worked for four years. I knew it to be the Mooladhara chakra of London, and as such, it was a small space of enormous creativity, Mozart had lived and composed there, Karl Marx too, while researching and writing in the nearby British Museum what became Das Kapital, Paul McCartney’s offices were next to ours in Soho Square. Ronnie Scott’s Jazz club was a few doors down from where I worked. The downside of this was that it was also the red light district of London - I’d noticed that negativity always attacks the innocence.

To my astonishment, as I walked up through the streets to Soho Square, now, in the light of what I’d just experienced in Cabella, the atmosphere was eerily satanic, it felt as though as I was walking through the Gates of Hell.

As soon as I could, I implemented my plan.

My colleagues knew that I’d been doing Sahaja Yoga for more than a year, and although I hadn’t proselytized it to them, some had noticed the changes in me. Liz Calder, a cofounder of Bloomsbury and one of the great fiction editors of her time, who’d discovered authors such as John Irving, Anita Brookner, Salman Rushdie and Julian Barnes, published Booker Prize winners such as Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje as well as Nadine Gordimer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature after Liz published her. Liz approached me and said that she was very stressed and had seen the changes in me. She asked me if I would show her what I was doing. I drove up to her flat in North London, showed her Sahaja Yoga. Liz arrived at work about 7am every morning and a couple of days later, on my desk was the photo of Shri Mataji I’d given her and note saying, “Thanks, but this isn’t for me.”

I wasn’t confident at giving Self-realization and so I took David Reynolds, who would be the commissioning editor for the book to a yogi’s offices near the Thames in Battersea and he gave David Self-realization and showed him how to meditate at home.

I took Ruth Logan, our Rights Director, to the Spiro family home in Flask Walk, Hampstead, since she lived not far away from there in North London, and they gave her Self-realization and also showed her how to meditate.

The whole thing blew up in my face in a way that although disappointing, was amusing too.

I asked David how he was getting on with the meditation. He was by nature a cynical fellow and said, as an obvious put down, that he’d tried it with a photo of John Lennon and It hadn’t worked.

Ruth’s response was the polar opposite. She was an intelligent woman, had a good degree from Oxford, and brilliant at her job, but she was living in a ghastly trap, with a man she didn’t love and although I didn’t know the details, for some reason she couldn’t get out of it. Suddenly, after a couple of days meditating, her prison door was sprung wide open, as if by magic, and she was suddenly free to leave. She stopped meditating immediately because she found it to be too powerful!

As Shri Adi Shakti and Shri Mahamaya, I knew that had She wanted to, Shri Mataji could have overcome all potential obstacles and caused the book to be a huge bestseller. But was the English Sahaja collective, less than a thousand souls, capable of dealing with hundreds of thousands of people wanting to learn Sahaja Yoga?

I could see however that Shri Mataji had chosen to give me a lesson, one that was to be repeated numerous times - She wanted to show me that my ego, my conditionings too, needed to be very much reduced. It was surely something extraordinary and exceptional, beyond human understanding that She would make this a priority over the potential success of a book and the ensuing explosion of interest in Sahaja Yoga?

Fortunately, it was easy for me to understood that the lesson was a necessity, a prerequisite to for my spiritual progress.

And my recognition of Shri Mataji, as Shri Adi Shakti and Shri Mahamaya has never wavered nor have I experience doubt in the the thirty years that have passed since.

Jai Shri Mataji!