Jack and Claire Marie Bailey's story is most fascinating.

The plot spans six decades and four countries - Britain, Tibet, India, and Nepal - and the subplots involve the gun-toting Red Guard of China, relentless LTTE-hunting government officials in Sri Lanka, frenzied Hindu fundamentalists in Mumbai and much more. Exactly the kind of stuff Bollywood blockbusters are made of.

And like the typical Mumbai "masala", it has a happy ending too with Jack B being transformed into a baba of tantric love, revered by followers all over the world: a modern messiah who can heal all ills, including cancer and AIDS, by awakening the kulkundalini or sexual energy from the navel to the crown.

The incredible story begins with Jack Bailey at the age of five near the industrial town of Sheffields in the 1930s.

Enter his half-Tibetan, half-English grandfather who recognizes certain signs in the child that indicates he is no ordinary brat.

Indeed, he is the reincarnation of a Rimpoche, one of the Tibetan religious gurus, and the realization makes granddad whisk him off to the monasteries of Tibet where he is put to study ancient religious texts and clean the occasional latrine.

Then suddenly the grooming of the Rimpoche is interrupted by the advent of the Red Guard of China who twice drive out young Jack and his grandfather, the second time for good when the old man dies in a mortar attack.

There's a change in scene and Jack now reaches Dharamsala in India, which becomes the seat of another better known exile, the Dalai Lama, and other Tibetan monks.

One of them, Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche, embraces Bailey as his disciple and guides him in the ancient esoteric Tibetan branch of learning known as the Kalachakra, intended only for "the Ancient Ones who originally descended to the earth from the Orion star system in the 18th millennium".

It adds spice to the story that Trungpa later becomes notorious for his controversial sexual methods of teaching tantra.

To acquire the secret knowledge, Jack trudges to a cave in the Gangotri region, where he spends three years alone meditating.

It is intensely cold and there is no food beyond dried moss and grass and sunlight.

However, there is unexpected company:

"A group of mountain wolves came to visit and watched him from a safe distance for several days. One morning, in a thin layer of fresh snow, was the paw marks of a snow leopard - an almost mythical creature easily identified by its distinctive pug marks. The prints were, however, bigger than a man's, but with an instep similar to a human footprint with toes and what seemed like long thick toenails or claws. These prints were closer to the cave entrance than any of the others, as if the creature had looked in, then gone away.

A Yeti?

Perhaps..."

Days pass and then self-realization dawns.

"Several weeks later, he noticed he hadn't eaten anything from his store, nor collected any moss, fungi or lichen, but he felt no hunger, no desire to eat, but had developed a breathing technique to extract prana from the air. Nor was anything solid - not the walls, nor the roof, or even the floor, nor his physical body. They were energy, and movement, colour, and sound, and when he synchronized the vibratory frequency of his physical body with the walls, he could put his hands and arms through them, or stand inside the solid rock, which was actually a swirling mass of energy...

There were visions too; Apocalyptic visions of the end of the world, and its renewal, and of Siddha Loka, or the Pure Land...

Then samadhi.

The state of consciousness, without the ego, attained through single-pointed meditation - thought stopped, the mind dropped, and awareness no longer in the head but in the heart... the observer and the observed, the knower and the knowing, the watcher and the watched, become one. Dualism is destroyed, separation vanishes, me and it, good and bad, right and wrong, this and that disappear, and only the ever-present and eternal I AM remains.

With that came all-encompassing compassion for, and unconditional love of, and total oneness with, all things..."

When Jack meets Claire Marie, mother of two, suffering from a stressful marriage, bulimia, stomach cancer and the overriding sorrow of looking for a soul mate for 20 years and not quite finding him, there is some instant chemistry.

This is how Claire Marie describes the beginning of their partnership that makes her a tantric "priestess" and the mother of five more children in the process:

"We'd been sitting on high stools in a pizza bar eating a seafood pizza. Jack had just told me what only my doctor knew... and I almost fell off the high stool. Then he said, as casually as dismissing a mild headache, 'I can heal you'.

'How?' I asked.

'By going to bed with you.'

'Oh, I'm sure,' I told him.

Tantra, he had said, was not a religion, more a way of action, and was focused more on the woman than any other religion, and elevated woman more than any other. It was the worship of the goddess in every woman by the god in every man. Five weeks after that, I was healed, and I bought a diary."

Diary Of A Tantric Priestess has just been launched by Pilgrims Publishing, India, with its headquarters in Varanasi, and an impressive branch office in Kathmandu.

Though Claire Marie could not make it to the book launch, Jack was there to sign books ­ televised by several TV companies. A whopping 300,000 pre-publication 'internet subscriber-only' downloads had been sold in the three months prior to the hardback launch, and the publishers obviously hope to see more copies sold.

The book itself promises to be as remarkable as Jack and Claire Marie, but in ways they had not foreseen.

An earlier version of it, brought out by a different publisher in India about five years ago, raised the hackles of the Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal in Mumbai who promptly proceeded to make a bonfire of the book at the Gateway of India.

This time the same group took exception to the cover ­ showing Buddha in an erotic pose ­ and burned more copies in both Mumbai and New Delhi ­ and the book is currently 'on hold' until a new cover is designed.

Diary of a Tantric Priestess ends with the prescription for a nine-day Tantric sex session and a "coin meditation", a psychic breathing exercise good for physical healing and all kinds and spiritual awareness.

In between, it is richly peppered with pithy sayings.

A few samples:

o "It is as easy to stop thinking as it is to stop talking or walking."
o "Between every word, every breath, every heartbeat, and between every thought, is a gap, a space."
o "When you have an emotional problem, you should go deeper into it - not try to resist it. The strength of a thought, or emotion, is in equal proportion to your resistance to it."

Here's the essence of a chapter:

"It was midnight. Jack and I were lying side by side, holding hands, Jack breathing evenly. I tried to match his breathing.

'Jack?'

'Hmm?'

'What did you find out today?' Jack looked at me. 'I called Jaffna from a public phone. The police are concentrating the search for us in Colombo and the airport. We're reasonably safe... for now.'

There was a soft knock at the door. 'Here she comes...' I said. 'Come in,' Jack called. Elizabeth came in. 'I need help,' she told Jack. Jack pulled back the bed sheet.

'Get in,' he said. She did, laying (sic, possibly a Freudian slip) between us. 'Lust dissipates psychic energy,' Jack told Elizabeth. 'But you use lust to neutralise lust, in the same way poison is used to neutralise poison.' Before anything could be achieved with tantra, Jack went on, lust had to be overcome, not avoided, similar to an alcoholic taking Holy Communion...

'First of all you've got to understand what HIV is, what it isn't, and what it does,' said Jack. 'Basically it damages the body's ability to fight disease. HIV doesn't kill you. You can live with it. It's a retrovirus that invades the white blood cells leaving you susceptible to infections and diseases that normally wouldn't kill you but will because your immune system can no longer fight them.'

'Tantra kick-starts the immune system,' said Jack. 'It's thousands of years old, has no adverse side effects, and if it doesn't work at all, you're no worse off. Okay?' 'Okay,' she said. Jack used the Sets of Nine - a series of 90 shallow and deep penetrations... Jack took Elizabeth through the Nine Levels of Orgasm.

Level One: for the lungs: sighing, breathing heavily.
Level Two: for the heart - pulse and heart speeding up.
Level Three: for the spleen, pancreas, and stomach - tightness.
Level Four: for the kidney and bladder - vaginal spasms.
Level Five: for the bones - limbs flexible, almost bent in half.
Level Six: for the liver and nerves - tingling.
Level Seven: for the blood - hot.
Level Eight: for the muscles ­ legs and arms gripping tightly.
Level Nine: for the whole body - orgasm - and the 'little death'.

'Wow', said Elizabeth when she could breathe again. 'There's a lot more to tantra than sex,' said Jack. 'It's about living in the now, being present in the moment, living neither in the past nor the future. Experiencing what is. Being consciously present...

What is meditation? Being intensely present in the now. Pure consciousness. Anyone can learn how to do it, how to stop the mind's incessant chatter and its obsession with past and future, constantly creating fear, pain and suffering, how to be consciously present.

Drop the mind.

Just for a moment.

Then live your life moment by moment.' "