Andrew Harvey is one of the most eloquent, flambouyant and complex of contemporary spiritual writers. Poet, novelist, autobiographer (A Journey to Ladakh), and anthologist, the Indian-born and Oxford-educated Harvey has walked and written of Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, and Christian spiritual paths, while cleaving to a vision of what he calls the Sacred Feminine he cultivates a style that bears all the passion and quirkiness of a latter-day Oscar Wilde in a quest for oneness with the Divine.

'I'm a recovering guruholic,' says poet, novelist, lecturer, and spiritual autobiographer Andrew Harvey with a laugh. It's shorthand for the journey he's taken since ceasing to be a devotee of the Indian-born and German-based spiritual teacher known as Mother Meera, whose followers are convinced she's a divinity in human form.

Harvey's 1991 book, A Spiritual Awakening, illumined his then-passionate discipleship to Meera with all the icy fire of the high tradition of mystical writing; A Journey in Ladakh (1983) recounted an earlier discipleship, to the Tibetan Buddhist master Thuksey Rinpoche. (Harvey also collaborated with Sogyal Rimpoche on the popular Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, published in 1993.) Today, however, he tells his fellow spiritual seekers that 'we've got to get out of the guru box,' and he speaks and writes for 'a direct, unmediated relationship with the divine.'

It's a simple credo from a complex man. Born in 1952 in India of an English mother and a part-Indian father, Harvey became, at 21, the youngest-ever Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Life as a flamboyantly brilliant young scholar who wrote confessional poetry and threw fabulous parties masked deepening spiritual pain, and in 1977 he returned to the country of his birth as a pilgrim. It was the beginning of a journey into Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism--and into 'the guru box' and out.