JJ Semple doesn’t just wake up one day and say to himself, “I’m going to crack the coded mysteries in The Secret of the Golden Flower.” He starts life in the protected upper echelons of the Eastern Brahmin establishment. When a childhood accident robs him of his most precious talents — music and mathematics — both of which he is particularly gifted in, he succumbs to a long period of misadventure.

Paris 1970, a stranger gives him a copy of The Secret of the Golden Flower. After reading the book, he realizes that through serendipitous happenstance he has stumbled across the only way of correcting the effects of his childhood accident. This book is an extraordinary statement about the inevitability of karma and the obstacles to self-realization.

While Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time is an interpretive companion piece to The Secret of the Golden Flower, it’s also a masterfully composed personal narrative. The author, JJ Semple shares his many years of first-hand practice with the sacred book’s meditation system. One-by-one, he reveals the techniques behind the book’s secrets, providing clear instructions on how to use them. Not even Richard Wilhelm, the translator, or Carl Gustav Jung, the famous psychologist, who wrote the original commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower, were able to plumb the depths of this method.

"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."

~ Dennis Littrell/AmazonTop 50 Reviewer