I am one of eleven children, and that made for a lot of fun I tell you, though I don't envy my parents grocery bill from back in those times in the 60's and 70's.
I did good in school and was awarded a full scholarship to UC Santa Cruz, where I attended for two years studying Music and Recording. I would have gone on, but my desire to be a monk was very strong, so I left college and joined the Hare Krishna Hindu Sect in 1979 and began my Vedic Journey.
Hare Krishna is very strict and erudite. You learn the classical scriptures really well if you're paying attention, which I was. I learned a ton of Hinduism, and travelled to India four times in the early 80's.
When I first joined, the leader, Guru, of our area, Berkeley California, made me his personal servant and secretary. From this position I was always involved in leadership, management and preaching. I got very good at selling others on the ideas of Vaisnavism. I learned a lot, and this came in handy later when I started working with Jyotish, which is rooted in the same classical scriptures as Hare Krishna is.
I married in 81 and had two kids by 1985. In 1986 I met computers for the first time in the form of a job at a computer store. My sales experience from Hare Krishna days got me in the door though I had no computer knowledge. Soon I was very learned in computers.
In 1988 I decided to change my name, because Wurst means meat in German, and I was a devout vegetarian (still am). Also I wanted a name closer to my faith, so Das Goravani was born. Loosely the name means "Servant of the Golden Teachings".
It was 1986 too that I first made contact with the Omnis programming language at a seminar being given to introduce computer store salespeople to Omnis. I fell in love with it at first touch. I literally picked it up and didn't drop it to this day some 33 years later.
For a few years I made business software for newspapers and Yellow Page phone books and some various accounting projects. In 1993 however, at the age of 33, I picked up a book on Vedic Astrology and fell in love with it right away. I had had my chart read a decade earlier, and was fascinated, but I never took up astrology until this time. On the same day that I started studying Jyotish, May 27 1993, I also began my program, first as a learning aid, then later as a serious program for others to use.
Soon after starting the Jyotish program for myself, it became apparent to me that there was not but one super basic program on the Macintosh for Jyotish, for use by astrologers and students. So I decided to make a commercial program out of my own, and thus began "Goravani Jyotish Software". It took me a couple years before I was ready to sell copies of the program.
I stayed on programming the software year after year. I continued to raise my kids, have a relationship with my spouse, and be a part of the wider devotee community, but my main focus and love was the software. It was my identity, my business, my all. It engulfed me. The years passed and my kids grew. I achieved success with the software in that I was making a living at it, with it. There was some travel involved, but mostly I was working at home.
At first there was "Goravani Jyotish", which ended with Version 2.5, which still lives on today, still runs on Windows, and is still loved by MANY. Later, as the language I was using grew more capable and complex, I too made a more capable and complex version of my Goravani Jyotish, and called it Jyotish Studio. That remains my program to this day, Jyotish Studio. The goal of it is to make the main features of Jyotish available to Windows and Macintosh computers, make it fun, beautiful, and an adventure. As far as I am able, that has been and remains my focus.
Along the way I wrote two books, one of Jyotish and one on the Karakas or Significators of Jyotish, both still sell on Amazon, which I remember as a small books only website back in it's beginnings. Jyotish Studio remains compatible with modern computers of both types and is used worldwide by a wide range of individuals.
The decades have passed, I've grown older, my kids have kids, and I'm still working on the software and website. When I started out with it there was no internet, now of course the web rules the world. Things have died down from the earlier days, but Jyotish, and the software, are still my life.
Das Goravani
Nov 1 2019
Portland OR USA
From my readings in the software:
"They make excellent scientists, astrologers and doctors because they accept bitter truth and can deal with it"
"interested in factual science and astrology "
"Ability in astrology is indicated."
