Our founder
The forming of this organisation, Living Fire, is the result of many life times of spiritual practice, culminating into the opportunity for a single Soul to open new possibilities for humanity through the advancement of teachings.Having lived, as all Souls need to, through most of the ordeals and beauties of existence as a human, eventually a deep compassion grew inside a young man from The Netherlands.
Following a faint but strong attraction to further deepen this compassion, he went through a disruptive spiritual awakening before he started his active studies of meditation, western astrology and the many teachings of the world's wisdom traditions in general, later followed by intensive training in Raja Yoga and the Theosophical teachings of Alice Bailey.
It must have been around late 2019 or early 2020 that while sitting in meditation with some friends, this young man clearly heard a loud inner voice call him by a Sanskrit name: Māntrikadeva. Over a year later, remembering the experience often in the mean time, he realised this had been the discovery of his Sanskrit name, as is a common sign of advanced development in his Yogic lineage.
Not long after, Māntrikadeva stepped into independence from his Yoga Master, Śrī Ajīta Mahārāja gradually bringing him back to his own initial spiritual roots and experiences. After a few years of exploring these, for a while partly in collaboration with spiritual friend Vādāsana, this culminated into an experience of spontaneous initiation into Masterhood.
From now on, Māntrikadeva, who was raised by the name Maarten Goddijn, started to publicly use his spiritual name, along with the newly obtained title (Swami) and order name.
He now went by the name Swami Māntrikadeva Giri.
Out of the ruins of earlier — and looking back perhaps still a little too premature — attempts to set up a school to start sharing the Light, and an intense but brief romance with the field of interreligious/interspiritual work, the idea for Living Fire started arising in late 2025, as a new, much more complete & matured expression of his teachings.
Māntrikadeva as a teacher
Having been shaped in previous lifetimes largely through artistic and political pursuits as a person, Māntrikadeva’s spiritual teachings gradually took form through a powerful drive for strength, autonomy, and independence. At the same time, they are marked by a remarkable inventiveness, resourcefulness, and a wide inclusiveness that embraces the full spectrum of existence — from spirit to form.
Combined with deep compassion and a profound sensitivity to perceiving energy patterns, further deepened through his Master’s insights into the true nature of directing pranic energy, this shaped the foundation from which the teachings of Living Fire emerged.
