I just finished recording the Prologue for Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time — Audiobook version. When I started recording the audiobook, I found myself in a quandary; I wanted listeners to be able to get right into the narrative, but there was the prologue, this — to my mind, at least — useful bit of information that situates my Kundalini experience in a larger context. What to do with it? I decided to stick after the last chapter.
In a printed version, it's easy for the reader to skip over, come back to, and generally peruse the contents of a book before deciding whether an introduction, a foreword, or a prologue is worth plowing into. Not so with an audiobook. The listener is stuck with the order in which the work is recorded. Lead off with a prologue or other literary aside and you may lose the listener in the first paragraph. Given the vagaries of attention spans and tastes, it's hard enough when you start with the narrative, much less a well-intentioned interpretation of what the listener is about to encounter.
In any case, I learned my lesson — a by-product of the Audiobook experience — and I solemnly vow never to write another book with a prologue. Nevertheless, I enjoyed debating with myself so much, I decided to include the Prologue here for those who may not have read it:
Prologue
There’s an accident. A seven-year-old boy is rushed to the hospital. His parents spare no expense: the best care, the finest doctors, and soon life is back to normal. Months later, however, when he returns to school, there are ominous signs, such as the sudden erosion of his cognitive abilities. Can there be a link to the accident? No one, including his parents, believes so. Yet the signs are unmistakable. At first he just feels different. Gradually, however, he watches his body change — his looks, his abilities, his personality, every part of him — until as a teenager, he realizes he’s no longer the same person. Only after years of failure does he discover a secret resource within his body that enables him to understand how the accident affected him.
I am that boy, and I still have trouble believing there was a link between that accident and my subsequent implosion. But a link there was. My conscious mind tried to suppress it. Yet, as I grew older, more concerned about my health and the direction of my life, I started to investigate. I read many books, tried many remedies, and talked to many wise people. All to no avail. It took me more than thirty years of Yogic practice to discover the hidden capabilities of my body.
The early part of my life is a catalogue of failures. None of these anecdotes is meant to shock, discourage or offend. Like parables, they illustrate how dysfunctional behavior takes root when the body’s natural symmetry is disrupted. At first, my future seemed bleak — like so many others searching for redemption. Malcolm X was a pimp; Saint Peter renounced Jesus; Milarepa was a murderer. Did those acts disqualify them from redemption? On the contrary, their most shameful acts were turning points.
By telling my story the way I lived it, with all the warts and blemishes apparent, you will understand how, amidst all the uncertainties of life, against all odds, I was swept out of a desperate situation and handed the means of attaining self-knowledge. For my story is your story. You possess this power.
My story begins at birth, or, more accurately, just before conception. We are all perfect at that split-second moment before conception. Of course, like a building before the foundation is laid, at that moment our beings are only blueprints. These blueprints — the numinous plans laid out for our substantiation — are perfect. At the moment of conception — the moment the egg is fertilized by the sperm — the body begins to take shape. It’s the moment when, were we able to stand over our perfect blueprints, we might wonder if they can be executed as designed. That’s the job of the Life Force. The Life Force has many names: Kundalini, sublimation, Tantra, alchemy, serpent power, primordial energy, cosmic power, Qi, Reiki, and Primal Spirit. Until the moment of birth, the Life Force controls our substantiation. The moment we are born we become conscious and our natural life force becomes inactive. After we’re born, something always seems to interfere with our continued growth. We get sick, accidents occur, we become addicted, we grow older, our bodies break down. It’s not that things can’t happen while we are in the womb, they can. By and large, however, our time in the womb is peaceful. But after we are born, the frequency of interference increases because that’s when we start doing things to ourselves. That’s when we bring our will, or lack of it, to bear. That’s when the serious damage is done.
Most of the time we just go on living. What else is there to do? That’s the irony of the Life Force: just when we need it most, it becomes dormant. If only the blueprint could have been realized without interference—the operative expression being realized without interference. By that I mean without some stimulus altering the growth process.
There are two types of stimuli: those under our control and those beyond our control. For example, most birth defects are beyond our control. They occur in many ways, from genetic imperfections to externally induced toxic chemicals to harmful vaccinations to illness or addiction in the expectant mother’s body. The pathology of stimuli outside our control is beyond the scope of this book. Not being a pathologist, I don’t know much about them. I do, however, know about the stimuli under my control. I’ve explored them at length during the struggle to return my body to its original symmetrical state.
The stimuli under our control are the substances we ingest, the ideas we adhere to, the influences, forces and conditions we subject ourselves to, the addictions we form, the choices we make. From the moment we’re born, any one of thousands of stimuli — within or out of our control — can alter our growth, assuring degrees of deviation from the blueprint for our unique bodily substantiation.
If it’s under our control, we are responsible. In any case, responsible or not, because of the nature of life — its accidents and its addictions — we are at risk of deviating from the plan for our perfect body. It happened to me.
Yet while it was happening, I never stopped yearning for the perfection I’d lost. Why? Because intuitively I sensed I was becoming someone else, someone other than whom I was meant to be. Of course, I didn’t realize I was growing away from my perfect body. In fact, I didn’t know I possessed a perfect body — one designed for me before my birth. Now that doesn’t mean I had short toes and two heads, it simply means I was not the individual I was meant to be. The degree of deformity is determined by the toxicity of the stimulus.
I know it’s hard to believe. You may say: Who cares? I’m fine the way I am. As with everything, the degree of caring is relative. But suppose you realized you were growing away from your perfect body. How much would it bother you and how much effort would you expend to remedy the situation?
I submit that if it bothers you and you want to remedy the situation, then you are already on the path to restoration, the path of self-knowledge. There’s one thing about self-knowledge. Once you’re attracted to it, you’ll be driven to delve deeper. And you will find it. Not just in dribs and drabs, but in the form of a science, an empirical science based on the study of the human body, your body. It took me years to discover that a science of empirical self-knowledge actually existed. I now realize that I was looking for empirical self-knowledge all my life, even in my most self-destructive moments. Once I got a taste of it, I wanted to learn more. I acted compulsively, determined to go to any lengths to repair the damage to my being, the damage done by my accident. Luckily, my discoveries led me to a means of activating the Life Force, the only way of correcting the damage done by my accident.
• • •
This book is also about healing. It begins with the injury that rendered my perfect body imperfect. There’s a lot to be learned from imperfection. Believing you’re perfect, you see yourself as The Standard. Imperfect, you are intuitively drawn to perfection and search for it everywhere.
In 1972, when I was thirty-four, a stranger handed me a book called The Secret of the Golden Flower. It was a serendipitous moment, my introduction to empirical science and the beginning of my healing process. I didn’t realize it at the time. In fact, I put the book away for over a year. Sometime later however, I picked it up and began practicing the method of meditation in the text. At first I thought I was wasting my time.
Three months into my practice, however, my body started changing. Profound psychological and mental changes occurred as well, but the bulk of the transformations occurred in my physical body. Moreover, once the transformations began, my body took over on its own. How can the body take over and effectively transform itself? Very simply, I had aroused a power within myself known as Kundalini. Friends to whom I described my experience — the ones who had the patience to listen — humored me. They granted me some sort of spiritual epiphany, but cautioned that it had really only happened in my mind. I told them no, my body was being torn apart and rebuilt. I told them Kundalini was potent enough to accomplish this metamorphosis, like the crab that sheds his shell and grows a new one. What do you suppose their reaction was?
You’ll find out in the chapters ahead. But first I want to describe some of the far-reaching implications of my experience—just to give you an idea of the power of perfection, because Kundalini is perfection. That doesn’t mean a person who awakens it is perfect. Far from it; he or she is still a fallible man or a woman. But should a person submit to Kundalini, over time its power is capable of restoring that individual to a pristine, perfect state.
It happened to me. After activating the Kundalini-Life Force, I was able to see the blueprint of my perfect body and compare it to my altered state. Amazingly, the Life Force recognized my deformity and immediately began to correct it. I witnessed it slowly reshape my body to the exact proportions in the blueprint.
So how does Kundalini heal the body? By using the body’s own communication network—the nervous system. For example, suppose you saw halfway through a tree branch. The branch continues to live, but compared to its undamaged counterparts, the sawed branch begins to wither. Leaves fall off, twigs and branches turn brittle, and eventually the limb dies. Trees, you see, have no means of revitalizing damaged limbs. They don’t bother with them; they merely grow new ones. Unlike trees that simply grow new branches, we humans have no limbs to spare. We do, however, possess a mechanism for regeneration — Kundalini.
I was like a tree with withering limbs. Fortunately, I learned how to revitalize myself. It’s a method I call Golden Flower Meditation (GFM), a system I developed after numerous readings of and experimentation with The Secret of the Golden Flower, a book I call The Empirical Science Bible. Practicing GFM resulted in the awakening of my Kundalini-Life Force.
Now I’m not the only one interested in neural revitalization. Doctors and researchers are, too. That’s right, my empirical research, performed on myself over the last thirty years, has led me to a crossroads with traditional medicine. With one difference: I take an inside-out approach while traditional medicine takes an outside-in approach.
Before I go into the differences, I want to tell you what researchers have accomplished. It will help you compare the two approaches. The research I refer to began with the problem of chronic pain. Do you know what doctors call chronic pain? RSD, or reflex sympathetic dystrophy. And it dates back awhile.
In the October 10, 2005 New Yorker article by Jerome Groopman: “During the Civil War, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell served as a surgeon for the Union Army and treated soldiers wounded by bayonets, sabers and bullets. Some continued to complain of severe pain long after the injuries—typically an arm or a leg—had healed, and Mitchell noticed that these men had other symptoms in common: burning pain, accompanied by swelling, redness, and temperature fluctuations in the injured limb.”
The same New Yorker article fast-forwards to 1946, “Other physicians adopted the term causalgia to refer to a pain syndrome that occasionally developed in a limb after an injury or a medical procedure.” Still later in the article, Harvard Medical School Assistant Professor, Anne Louise Oaklander explains, “Patients with RSD were often dismissed as being neurotic, self-serving, or somatizing. Then you meet them. You realize that they are reasonable people, and you see them in clinic periodically and it becomes clear that this is not a psychiatric disorder.” The article concludes, “When one of her RSD patients fails to improve with medication, Oaklander considers a surgical option which entails implanting an electrical stimulator in the limb or near the spine to send benign impulses at regular intervals along the injured nerve. Once the stimulator is implanted, the patient can turn it on or off by holding a special magnet over the skin, and some eventually find they no longer need to turn it on. Thousands of people have received stimulators, though complications, such as infection and electrode malfunction, are common.”
And that’s the difference between outside-in and inside-out. A foreign object implanted under the skin, the electrical stimulator works from the outside-in. Using the body’s own hidden resources, GFM works from the inside-out. It activates the healing power of the Life Force, which, in turn, repairs the damaged members by sending vital energy throughout the nervous system. Through meditation the nervous system is stimulated such that the natural chemical substances of body are recombined and used for healing.
So — and this requires a leap of logic — if I could see the original design for my body and it was perfect in every way, there must be some sentient agency that created this design. And even though my growth took a detour on account of my deformity, the blueprint continued to exist in some ethereal computer-memory-like storage, waiting for the day that I might learn of its existence and find a way back to it.
Happily, GFM, the method of meditation I practiced, restored my deformed body to its original state, and, in so doing, proved both the existence of the blueprint and the restorative power of the Kundalini-Life Force. This sounds an awful lot like Intelligent Design, doesn’t it? A permanent blueprint of our beings and a mechanism within the body capable of restoring it to its intended state. It sounds like it, but is it?
First of all, I feel uncomfortable even discussing Intelligent Design (ID), especially against today’s backdrop of socio-political controversy. As soon as one utters the words Intelligent Design, people roll their eyes. It’s a concept that needs an overhaul. Trouble is, it’s already had an overhaul. Its antecedent, so-called Creation Science, was even more controversial and a lot less credible, especially in scientific circles. For the sake of argument, however, let’s take a dispassionate look at ID. The problem is not really that ID is inherently ludicrous or silly; it’s merely that instead of trying to prove it, its proponents have attacked the basis of the scientific method, thereby alienating the entire scientific community. Instead of looking for evidence to prove their theory — and that’s all Intelligent Design is, a theory — they attacked evolution, saying that life is too complicated to be explained by science. But because they could offer no proof of their own theory, ID remains just that — a theory. So why does this particular theory provoke such an uproar? Well, it’s really social politics, isn’t it? The ID proponents who attempted to force schools to replace the teaching of evolution with Intelligent Design were perceived to be playing politics.
If it weren’t for this political maneuvering, ID as a theory should pose no threat to anyone. Its proponents, if they wanted to prove their theory, would spend their time searching for empirical proofs, not trying to discredit or impugn other fields. After all, Gopi Krishna himself declared, “There would be no intelligence in us if there were no intelligence in the universe.” The difference between Gopi Krishna and today’s proponents of ID is the former investigated ID empirically.
Following his lead, I uncovered additional empirical evidence of Intelligent Design. My inquiry, however, does not constitute a repudiation of evolution. In fact, the two are not mutually exclusive. I didn’t use either “scientific rationalism” or “divine inspiration” to investigate Intelligent Design; I used GFM and personal observation, techniques of the empirical Life Force scientist.
Don’t take my word for anything I say; I don’t want you to. I want you to find out for yourself. For Kundalini is not something that can be observed in a Petri dish or isolated by medical experiments or psychological testing. The power I discovered is systemic. It works with the rest of the body functioning around it. And if it worked for me, it will work for you. That is, if you approach it correctly. What is the correct approach? This book explains my approach in detail. I don’t leave anything out. By the end of the book you’ll have learned from my mistakes. In fact, you’ll be an expert.
So does my experience validate Intelligent Design? A suitable metaphor might be a computer game a child plays for many years. Over time he masters the game, until it becomes boring. One day, an older, more experienced friend tells him about a secret code that opens up new levels of complexity. When he uses the secret code, the new features challenge him and the game becomes full of wonder again. Does he reflect on the designer who foresaw his gradual loss of interest? Or does he accept his good fortune and move ahead?
I have accepted my good fortune and moved on, secure in the knowledge that science and ID are not mutually exclusive. My experience with The Secret of the Golden Flower showed me that there is a dormant Life Force in our beings. This metaphysical entity — the Primal Spirit as it’s called in The Secret of the Golden Flower — is a reflection in us of Nature’s undivided entirety.
It is as real as the physical sub-systems of our body: the digestive system, the nervous, the respiratory, the cardiovascular systems. Although it exists side-by-side with the body’s major physical systems, it can only be activated through the techniques of highly refined meditation methods like GFM.
I realize a postulate like this attracts skepticism, and that’s normal, especially since its actuality lies beyond the material world. That’s why I use the term metaphysical, because it lies beyond the physical; it cannot be seen or touched.
When we dig deeper, however, we discover that life is loaded with unresolved mysteries. For instance, we were not able to see the endocrine or lymphatic systems with the tools of early medicine. We had to wait for more advanced technology. So it’s important not to put limits on science because what we designate today as reality will be different tomorrow. Why be so eager to say: show this Primal Spirit to me now, or admit it doesn’t exist?
Unfortunately, we can’t go out and purchase a gadget for awakening the Primal Spirit. To apprehend it, we must master the secret meditation techniques revealed in this book. Once activated, however, the Life Force heals the physical systems of the body. In fact, there’s a little understood cause and effect relationship between the physical and metaphysical. Physical actions, such as diaphragmatic deep breathing, control of heart rate, and the other secret techniques mentioned throughout this book activate the metaphysical entity, which, in turn, restores the physical systems to their optimal states.
Activating the metaphysical entity (Primal Spirit and Life Force are other names for this entity) pays dividends in the form of bodily rejuvenation. Instead of slowly dissipating our energies over a lifetime as individuals who ignore the Primal Spirit do, those who activate the Primal Spirit spark a rebirth, a release of pure Life Force energy throughout their beings.
Whether you believe me or not cannot be resolved by debate. Debate puts dabblers on the same footing with adepts, like Talk Radio — a modern Tower of Babel, a cacophony of ignorant and intelligent voices that ultimately drag the intelligent voices down to the level of ignorance.
The fact that I can see my original design and it is perfect means to me that an unseen sentient entity in nature created it before my being came into this world. As someone who has reactivated this Life Force entity and watched it rejuvenate my body’s physical systems and restore my symmetry, worshiping it is the furthest thing from my mind. I want to understand it, to make it available to others.
My guiding purpose, therefore, like that of the child with his newly enhanced game, is to revel in my discovery and let its wondrous power continue to help me evolve. At the same time, I feel bound to tell my story to those interested in empirical knowledge, particularly, those readers looking for information on activating the Life Force in order to take advantage of its extraordinary restorative healing powers.