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Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time
Curiosity and circumstance often propel individuals beyond the confines of their upbringing, dumping them into unfamiliar, unexpected life situations. Thus was JJ Semple transported into a trial-and-error process of self-discovery, a path that took him from the East Coast Brahman establishment, to France, to a meeting with Gopi Krishna in India. What he found along the way was Kundalini, the biological basis of both science and religion. How does Kundalini come into an ordinary person's life? Is it foreordained or is it a Karmic inevitability? Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time describes the unlikely circumstances that foreshadowed, and ultimately shaped, JJ Semple's Kundalini experience and his life! Says the author, “Before Kundalini, I had not found anything substantial in life — nothing to believe in, nothing to work for. I had no clue that a biological phenomenon like Kundalini existed or that I could arouse it through the practice of meditation. “I wrote this book as a memoir because I wanted to document the difficulties a Westerner faces in getting to the starting point of the self-actualization process. I have Indian and Chinese friends who grew up with meditation and Yoga practices. I had never heard of these practices until I was in my late-twenties. When I finally did, there was very little information extant. That was over forty years ago, before the current proliferation of books and videos on spiritual themes. As for kundalini, I didn't hear the term until well after I had activated it and a force field of energy within my own body — previously unknown to me — swept over me. “Choosing to focus on my journey from birth to maturity has sparked a wholesale discussion on genres — How-To books vs. memoirs. This is not a How-To book; it’s a autobiographical narrative of my journey. If you're looking for more How-To information on the Secret of the Golden Flower meditation method, check out its long-awaited sequel, The Secret of the Golden A Kundalini Meditation Method (2018). B07D9XTGWB "Some readers only want information on the method, effectively bypassing the frequently perilous, and often circuitous, route I took to get there, not to mention the years I dedicated to learning to live with this amazing biological subsystem. What a waste! — not to pass this knowledge on, especially when learning to live with Kundalini demands such a high degree of mindfulness and adaptability. Kundalini is an evolutionary energy capable of modifying DNA in a single lifetime; every aspect of it needs to be documented. “ Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time is not only an eye-opening exploration of biology, evolution, and mindfulness; it's a street level account of finding oneself in the modern world, the definitive tell-all journal of obstacles met and overcome on the path to activating Kundalini. I don't leave anything A childhood accident that robs me of my talents and memory, my battle with drugs and alcohol, my relationships, my slow deterioration and eventual disequilibrium. The young girl in Paris who gave me a copy of The Secret of the Golden Flower (SGF) which led to my practicing Kundalini meditation — the energy cultivation technique — that overhauled my anatomy and metabolism, a wholesale biological retrofitting that opened up a consciousness of unlimited dimension. Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time is a full-circle account of the inevitability of karma and the self-actualization process." JJ Semple shares his many years of first-hand practice with the SGF’s meditation method. Not even Richard Wilhelm, the translator, or Carl Gustav Jung, the famous psychologist, who wrote the original commentary to the sacred book, were able to plumb the depths of these teachings.
210 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2007
12 people are currently reading
43 people want to read
About the author
J.J. Semple
12 books20 followersJJ Semple is the author of six books on paranormal non-fiction, kundalini, meditation, consciousness, alchemy, mindfulness, and human evolution. Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time is his best selling auto-biographical memoir. Tales of the Tinkertoy is his first novel.
JJ Semple's formal education includes studying English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and George Washington University, and a master’s degree in marketing from Hauts Etudes de Commerce in Paris. His personal education involves yogic and paranormal practices and exploration inspired by a wide variety of teachers, writers and philosophers, including Gopi Krishna, Milarepa, Carl Gustav Jung, Leo Tolstoy, Arundhati Roy, Theodore Dreiser, Aldous Huxley, and Lao Tse.
JJ Semple's formal education includes studying English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and George Washington University, and a master’s degree in marketing from Hauts Etudes de Commerce in Paris. His personal education involves yogic and paranormal practices and exploration inspired by a wide variety of teachers, writers and philosophers, including Gopi Krishna, Milarepa, Carl Gustav Jung, Leo Tolstoy, Arundhati Roy, Theodore Dreiser, Aldous Huxley, and Lao Tse.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 29, 2019
Henry Miller meets Gopi Krishna
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?"
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Yoga: Sacred and Profane (Beyond Hatha Yoga)”
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?"
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Yoga: Sacred and Profane (Beyond Hatha Yoga)”
May 21, 2021
This book is very interesting. I was very hesitant to read this book initially. Reason was because, I didn't really understand the approach in regards to what the book was intending to provide insight of.
Once I was able to be immersed into the context of the book, I was able to generate the visuals of Kundalini. The visuals of kundalini was very much a buddhist concept that I was very much appalled in of.
I was appalled because of the ability in which the concept and skill of kundalini provides for a person. This provision. So the speak. For the best way to describe the spiritual service. Is in regards to the reality of feeling what is believed to be true. But. Most importantly. The ability to understand why oneself believes ones own intuition, and trust's the intuition and secure their mind in of the intuitive belief... and engages in uncovering the insight of the intuitive sight of the enlightenment the person is provide. All because of the blessing of Kundalini.
Basically. The secret to the understanding of the Golden Flower. Is the revolving understanding and reality of the Kundalini realm. This book is very much secured in the reality of delving into the lessons, insights, informations, and coherent visuals (intellectual, pictures, or auditory feelings) of the insights in of which is of the person's world. In of the person's own divine Kundalini responsibility.
In summary. To decipher the Golden Flower. The one Secret that is to be uncovered. Especially described in this book. Because. The concept of Kundalini is always exact in of its realm divine concepts. But. Nonetheless. And. Anyway. The method to decipher the Golden Flower. Is in of one conceptual rationalization. Marriage. The only kundalini force.
If you were to really secure your mind in of how all or any of the concepts in the book. You'll realize that Kundalini is revolved in of the ideological life divine divinity and spiritual life of the Sacrament of Marriage.
The Golden Flower. Is the Golden Anniversary. There is no other life factor that instates the divine Blessing of Spiritual Kundalini. The knowing of whom is in your life. And. What your life is responsible in of. OR. About.
Once I was able to be immersed into the context of the book, I was able to generate the visuals of Kundalini. The visuals of kundalini was very much a buddhist concept that I was very much appalled in of.
I was appalled because of the ability in which the concept and skill of kundalini provides for a person. This provision. So the speak. For the best way to describe the spiritual service. Is in regards to the reality of feeling what is believed to be true. But. Most importantly. The ability to understand why oneself believes ones own intuition, and trust's the intuition and secure their mind in of the intuitive belief... and engages in uncovering the insight of the intuitive sight of the enlightenment the person is provide. All because of the blessing of Kundalini.
Basically. The secret to the understanding of the Golden Flower. Is the revolving understanding and reality of the Kundalini realm. This book is very much secured in the reality of delving into the lessons, insights, informations, and coherent visuals (intellectual, pictures, or auditory feelings) of the insights in of which is of the person's world. In of the person's own divine Kundalini responsibility.
In summary. To decipher the Golden Flower. The one Secret that is to be uncovered. Especially described in this book. Because. The concept of Kundalini is always exact in of its realm divine concepts. But. Nonetheless. And. Anyway. The method to decipher the Golden Flower. Is in of one conceptual rationalization. Marriage. The only kundalini force.
If you were to really secure your mind in of how all or any of the concepts in the book. You'll realize that Kundalini is revolved in of the ideological life divine divinity and spiritual life of the Sacrament of Marriage.
The Golden Flower. Is the Golden Anniversary. There is no other life factor that instates the divine Blessing of Spiritual Kundalini. The knowing of whom is in your life. And. What your life is responsible in of. OR. About.
September 2, 2018
Good introduction to kundalini
The book gives perspective on a mans experience with kundalini. The author gives us his account going through the process of awakening kundalini and what followed.
The book gives perspective on a mans experience with kundalini. The author gives us his account going through the process of awakening kundalini and what followed.
April 5, 2019
Author does a useful job is describing how he came to understand a transpersonal experience. Yes Kundalini is real. No words can never describe its reality for a third party.
I know from personal experience.
I know from personal experience.
September 3, 2019
I enjoyed the first third but it started to get pretty boring and lacked substance in the story. I understand it was autobiographical and the guy obviously had one hell of an experience and I liked the fact that the free audiobooks was read by the author.
July 16, 2015
Huh?
I thought I was buying a manual to decipher the golden. flower. A good autobiography but if your looking for deciphered secrets, move on. He had an interesting life but no shared secrets here. I feel duped.
I thought I was buying a manual to decipher the golden. flower. A good autobiography but if your looking for deciphered secrets, move on. He had an interesting life but no shared secrets here. I feel duped.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews