Customer Reviews

Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time

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4 star:		(4)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm not familiar with The Secret of the Golden Flower, which is the book that initiates Semple into meditation, but I did read one of Gopi Krishna's books some years ago. It was either Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man originally published in 1971 or Kundalini: The Secret of Yoga published in 1972.

Gopi Krishna wrote about the awakening of Kundalini as a powerful force that almost killed him. Semple's experience is in some ways similar. Indeed in some ways it seems patterned after Gopi Krishna's experience, especially in how powerful and scary the awakening was and how long it went on.

I have practiced yoga for 34 years and have spent many hours in kundalini meditation. I have never had anything but agreeable experiences during that time. But that is not surprising. Gopi Krishna's and Semple's experiences are highly unusual. I would not give up kundalini meditation for fear that something untoward might happened to me.

But putting kundalini aside, and some of the other things that Semple concerns himself with in this narrative, such as Intelligent Design versus biological evolution or the nature of prana or the distinction he makes between what he calls material science and empirical science, let me say that this is a superbly written memoir. Semple's narrative command might invoke the envy of a best-selling novelist. And his facility with the language, his ability to effortlessly (or so it seems, without effort) to find just the right word or expression to make his story vivid and engaging for the reader is highly admirable. Furthermore the prose is polished and very nicely edited. The book is pleasure to read and it reads fast.

Even though the book is obviously a memoir or an autobiography with some names changed I felt very strongly that this was an excellent work of fiction. I am not disputing Semple's story in any way; rather I am in admiration of the way he develops the first-person, present-tense narrative, the way he picks and selects details, adventures, and significant others so that the tension is maintained throughout the story. He begins with himself as a child who is accidentally impaled with a three inch long and somewhat thick splinter in his foot. For a reason that remains inexplicable to the very end of the book, Semple does not tell his parents or the doctors about the splinter still in his foot. He suffers a lot of pain. He goes on to believe that the splinter destroyed the symmetry of his body and caused him to lose his math and musical ability. It is only with the beginning of his meditative practice and the awakening of kundalini that Semple starts to regain his symmetry and his sense of body wholeness. The reader however may come to believe that Semple's problems had nothing to do with the splinter, rather more to do with his propensity for self-indulgence, particularly as he enters his twenties. As a teen he is an indifferent student in private boarding schools, a privileged child who doesn't even bother to get "gentleman's B's" while blaming his lack of academic achievement on what the splinter did to him. As a young adult he is given to sex, jazz, alcohol and drugs. The crucial moment in his life comes when he gives up all his bad habits, rents a house in a small French town and alone reaches a climax with what he sees as the life force (or kundalini: he uses both terms interchangeably). However while kundalini seems to be racking his body and mind, the reader may suspect that it is the 15 days of fasting, ten of which contained sleepless nights, that brought about his anguish.

The glimpses we get of the women in his life are very interesting. I especially liked Margo and Martine. Semple has the novelist's gift for dialogue and quick description through which these women come to life. Curiously the last two women, Gloria and Donna, are not characterized at all. Well, Gloria is a waitress who is apparently very good in bed, but that's it. Donna, he tells us in passing, he married; and then later in passing, he mentions that he has a son. Nothing more is said about them.

This inconsistency of focus is necessary in a book that covers so many years of a man's life. However Semple maintained what I thought was a beautiful and perfectly balanced pace up until Chapter "14--Relapse." Suddenly the temporal pace becomes inconsistent. Some indefinite time has gone by, and on page 125 he says he has a wife (apparently Martine and not Donna, who comes later) and a successful business. The reader wonders when all this happened.

One other curious thing I must note. Semple includes two charts showing a "Comparison between Interrupted and Uninterrupted Growth" by age from his birth to age 63. The "interruption" occurs at age seven when he gets the splinter. The interrupted growth continues lagging behind a hypothesized normal growth until age 63 when he goes on a raw food diet and becomes "the being" he was "destined to become."

In today's book marketplace it is not easy to say whether a certain story should be told as a memoir or as a work of fiction. This is an excellent memoir, but I think, strangely enough, that it might have been more powerful as a work of fiction. Many readers will be skeptical (as Gopi Krishna learned!) to the idea of a prolonged and anguished "kundalini rising" taken as objective fact. However if presented as a fiction the possible distraction caused by the reader's skepticism disappears and the story gains in psychological power. Fiction is a way of conveying human psychological truths that sometimes cannot be expressed in a nonfictional way. As I used to say to my students, "What could be truer than fiction?"

This was a very interesting, unpretentious read about how an experience in kundalini can change someone's life. It starts with the author's childhood physical problems and relates how these change after he discovers the backward flowing method in a Chinese text call "The Secret of the Golden Flower." The claims of how this energy can affect the body might seem incredible, but you're left with the feeling the author is simply relating what happened to him. There's not a lot of the New Age dogma you would find had this book been written by many other people.

It will leave you wondering if he told you everything you need to know to try it, because it seems so easy. It's a little unclear how one would know their are doing it right, maybe you will know it intuitively. I still hope I can gather the discipline to try the 3 months of practice mentioned in the book.

JJ Semple captures his life as a jazz musician in Paris and his experiences with the powerful life force, kundalini. Semple interpretes an accident as a child that distorted his growth as the catalytic event that brought him to the life changing occurrence as one with an aroused kundalini. I like the very honest way in which Semple retells his life with such openness and candor.

His time with the spiritual/physical altering force of kundalini is well documented and gives much food for those looking for more detail on this esoteric but increasingly revealed phenomenon. Semple writes in an informal and highly readable manner, so the book is an enjoyable read.

First, I've read both "Deciphering the Golden Flower" and "The Backward Flowing Method". While I think that the best thing would have been a second edition rather than a second book, I think the first book is the better of the two. You can read my review of the second book here at Amazon.

From reading the gloss I thought I would skim through the tale of his life to get to the meditation techniques, but it was such an interesting tale and well told that I read it all. The description of the changes he went through is described very viscerally. Its a short book and an easy read, I didn't read it all at one sitting but I read it as fast as my 50 hour work week allows, and then jump right into the second book.

Why not five stars?

If you want to use the book as a practical guide - which you can - it begs the question - has anyone else done this and succeeded? Neither the first nor the second book answers this question. Second, the transformation that both he and Gopi Krishna describe is quite unpleasant, though ultimately rewarding, and the notion of a one way trip through "that" is not a decision to be taken lightly.

As someone who has studied a lot of Taoist meditations, I'm left with the belief that there are a lot of other techniques in the Golden Flower method (which I've only examined briefly online). FYI, only a few lines of the the text of the Golden Flower method are in this book.

I've read enough medieval Chinese texts in translation to know they can be completely opaque and confusing. However, I think that there are intermediate steps - and that what the author has done is 'skipped forward' to the end, which is why he had such a rough ride. There is no doubt that he has found a very important piece of the puzzle, but I'm left doubting that the whole puzzle is solved even if the last step is known.

As I read the book, I told myself - okay, the experiences the author described are all interesting, and believable; but this book is after all about his PROCESS of realization, and ultimately consummation of an esoteric, largely secret method of meditation. The question is - can his achievement be replicated? I told myself, I will write a fair review once this happens. And the other day, it did.

The Golden Flower meditation is another name for the Microcosmic Orbit meditation. It is where you run energies along the meridian that circumnavigate the front and back of your body. As you do this, blockages at various points along the ren mai and du mai open up, allowing even more qi to flow into and around your body. This starts a process of restoring the physical and energetic bodies back to a pristine state, and thereby initiating an actual, internal, alchemical process of healing and cultivation of the self. Injuries are healed, the mind becomes clear, optimum health is realized.

The reverse breathing method was a well kept secret of Taoist masters for thousands of years, and one needs only to troll the internet to read countless stories of miracles and superhuman feat that such practitioners have achieved in their lifetimes.

With these aims in mind, I try, as best I could, to squeeze in some serious meditation time into my daily life. I am fairly sensitive to energies, having studied Qigong and Reiki for a number of years, BUT the one thing I had never been able to feel is the fabled rise of energy up the spine. That is, until a few days ago.

Picture a long balloon, and imagine air being suddenly blown into it. That was how it felt like. At last! And then a few breaths later, I felt a strong pressure on my forehead, like someone pressing his thumb and rubbing it downwards from my hairline to my nose. That's perceptible energy flowing along the orbit - up the spine, and down the front of the body. At long last!

JJ Semple's book reads like an Old World romance movie. I am surprised by how good a writer he is. The book brings to mind images of smoky Parisian cafes, beautiful yet mysterious women, countryside charms that are remote and of another world. Somerset Maugham himself could have been sipping tea with the author at some point, debating the finer points of writing and breathing, with Anais Nin listening in from the next table.

Read this book together with the other one the author wrote. In his second book, he goes into detail about the meditation itself, and so both books are companion reading. These are really two of some of the best books on energy meditations that I've read. The market is flooded with meditation and energy practice manuals, but most are so cluttered with confusing and complicated methodology, that one gets the impression the authors wrote them that way just to impress upon readers how good they are. I find these books a turn off; I don't have any patience for them.

Keep the meditation simple, and direct. JJ Semple's books are refreshing, and honest, and he doesn't hold back. I got his books back in 2008. It has taken me the better part of a year and a half to do what I did, not inclusive of course of all the other energyworks I had done. That's not very long at all, considering the scope of such a practice. What JJ Semple did can be replicated. And that is the truest test of a teacher; when you can coach a student to be as good as you are. What's more, as a bonus, he is a great writer, and the books are a delightful read by themselves. Five stars.

JJ Semple shares his experience of Kundalini awakening in this book. Being a great writer, the book is easy to read and follow, and is full of good tips for those going through the Kundalini process, or interested in it.

This is not the 'end all-be all' of Kundalini books. So while being an interesting and inspiring personal story, Semple never had a teacher and his method isn't fully complete. (TIP: Keep the tongue up!) For a more complete method, and an interesting awakening story as well, check out Path Notes of an American Ninja Master by Glenn Morris, who also uses Chi Gung to awaken Kundalini but actually knows what he is doing. All in all though, a worthwhile read.

I attended JJ Semple's lecture at The International Alchemy Conference, held at the Palace Station in Las Vegas in October, 2008.

JJ Semple, author of Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time and The Backward-Flowing Method: The Secret of Life and Death, was one of the most fascinating speakers at the Conference. His talk was called Activating the Life Force. I immediately went and brought the book at the exhibtor's table.

JJ uses a special meditation called the Golden Flower Meditation or GFM to raise Kundalini in a safe, permanent fashion. According to JJ, GFM effectively transforms the practitioner's body, improving health and extending one's lifespan. It also cures all illnesses.

Golden Flower Meditation awakens Kundalini and ignites the Life Force energy that revitalizes the entire nervous system. In turn, this starts an autonomic self-healing process. Thanks to GFM, all disorders related to neural damage and nervous are susceptible to self-treatment.

Someone asked JJ how old he was. I never take nutritional or psychic advice from people who are obese, or health tips from people who look contagious. JJ is living proof to his claim that awakening Kundalini improves health and extends one's life. He answered he was 70 years old.

Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time is Semple's memoir about his 1973 Kundalini awakening and is a how-to book. I highly recommend it since JJ is sincere about helping people live a long, productive life. And he's living proof the method he found works!

Until reading this book, I had very little knowledge of Kundalini. Semple cleverly explores his journey and awakening, explaining his "discoveries" along the way. Written in an autobiographical style, one takes the journey along with the author through trials, tribulations, failures, achievements, self-awareness and reflection. Many written journeys of the nature are not as honest and full of self-discovery as Semple portrays, opening up his knowledge and soul to the reader.

Intsead of reading like a narrative lecture, as many self-study books do, Semple allows the reader to enjoy each of his experiences with detailed memories and entertaining dialogue along the way. This is a must-read for anyone seeking greater knowledge of spiritual awakening, or someone merely searching for a captivating story resulting in powerful discoveries.

This is a memoir...no secrets were deciphered at any time...granted it is a fast and easy reading the title is completely misleading. Only when you reach the epilogue that you find a hasty 6 point list, which ultimately recommends you "For reference, buy a copy of The Secret of the Golden Flower". Mr. JJ we read that book and were hoping for you to DECIPHERE...

Here I do not intend to write a clever synopsis of this book, you can read the other reviews listed here in Amazon for that but I wanted to relate a personal experience...I had the honor of coincidentally meeting JJ Semple, the author of "Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time" at the Raw Spirit Festival in Sedona AZ, USA where he presented a talk on Kundalini Activation. I say coincidentally because I did not know of him nor of his scheduled talk, however, I was at the time listening to another speaker and serendipitously Mr. Semple arrived and sat down to my right awaiting his time to address the group. I decided to stay and hear what he had to say and I was very excited to learn of his experience with permanently activating Kundalini. This was just what I needed to hear as I had been doing meditation and PranaYama breathing exercises for many years yet never could put my finger on understanding awakening Kundalini until hearing JJ Semple's sharing on the subject and later reading his two books, this one as well as "The Backward-Flowing Method: The Secret of Life and Death" and listening to his Diaphragmatic Deep Breathing CD. With these tools Mr. Semple has indeed simplified a seemingly complex and esoteric practice...Kundalini Activation. Since this time I have found it easier to remember the breathe not only in meditation but also in carrying out routine activities during the day. This in turn initially led to decreasing the amount of food intake as I was experiencing more energy from the breathe and in addition feeling less stress and more peace in my work. Through awareness of the breathe using the techniques JJ Semple has brilliantly devised one can lengthen their breathes and lower their heart rate which are key to longevity as well as quite the mind for meditation, not to mention the Kundalini Activation that I also look forward to achieving permanently so that Prime Spirit can once again take total control of consciousness in me through the sexual fluids from lower spine to brain and lighting up my nervous system like a string of lights on a Christmas tree. Mr. Semple's proposed 3 months to activating Kundalini will place me at Christmas and what an awesome gift that will be but I'm already enjoying some of the fruits even now. Much gratitude is extended to JJ Semple and Gopi Krishna and other Kundalini pioneers making way for our journeys.