To relish the sweetness of divine love is the soul's deepest desire. By revealing Sri Radha, the brilliant hidden gem in the treasure chest of India's sacred texts, Bhakti Shakti beckons you to escape from the drudgery of the mundane to find absolute love.

Ornamented with pearls of wisdom, Bhakti Shakti serves as a guiding light to claim your spiritual identity, experience the joyous state of your pure spiritual self, and progress toward deeper intimacy with the Divine.

Following her award-winning Wise-Love, in which she shed much light on the ancient bhakti tradition, Pranada Comtois now reveals bhakti's best kept secret, the divine Goddess Radha. Another name for Radha is Bhakti Devi, or "Goddess of Divine Love."

There has perhaps never been a better time for this secret to be revealed - that Radha is truly love personified. As the old song goes, "What the world needs now is love sweet love." In the Upanishads, India's great storehouse of spiritual wisdom, it is said, "The one became many to expand the ocean of love." In other words, the Supreme Consciousness divides itself to enjoy loving relationships, and the first expansion is Radha. We too are parts of that Supreme Whole and thus we exist only for love. Isn't love what we all seek?

Radha is known in the bhakti texts of the Vedas as the "pleasure potency" of the Supreme. There she is said to be identical with that supreme powerful. The bhakti tradition is possibly unique in that it accepts a feminine counterpart to the Divine and even ascribes to her greater power than that of the supreme deity. One of her names in Sanskrit is Mohini, "she who brings the greatest power under her own power." This of course is the power of love, that benign force which none of us can resist.

As the first goddess, Radha is the source of many other forms of the divine feminine, such as Durga and Kali, who are better known in modern culture. All her expansions, though, ultimately serve the same purpose of promulgating the pure joy of spiritual love.

The goddess of divine love invites you to claim your spiritual identity in the world of love beyond the fetters of matter. To evolve from darkness to light, ignorance to truth, misery to joy, requires more than a casual effort, but being compassionate, the goddess has devised for us an easy means.

In Bhakti Shakti, we'll explore our own nature as well as our relationship with the primary shaktis, or energies, that are embodied as goddesses. We'll uncover a confidential shakti hidden deep within the Upanishads and Puranas known as bhakti-shakti, the energy of divine love.

In Indian thought, there are two main schools of philosophy and related spiritual practice that revere a goddess as supreme, although they view ultimate reality differently. These goddesses are Durga Devi (or Durga Maa) and Sri Radha. In these pages we'll see how these goddesses work together to help us evolve from the drudgery of the mundane to the joyous spiritual state of the realized self.