A Great Book To Introduce Kundalini Philosophy

The book has been a best selling book on Kundalini and the Chakras for over ten years. It is obvious that it has been well received by thousands of readers world-wide, who have benifited from the publisher's approach. I am the artist who conceived the book and painted the paintings over 25 years ago, which are part of a much larger chakra lexicon that I established in 1979. I hired and educated Mr. Selby under contract with my Chakra Science Formulas so that he could rework my original manuscript "The Sacred Wheels of Light" into a commericalized book for the publishers in a time the Wellness markets were in their infancy. My voice is not reflective in Mr. Selby's penmenship, but is seen in the body of illustrations of orignal Chakra oil paintings that speak for themselves. For the advanced students who find Mr. Selby's approach self-efacing and trite, please embrace compassion to the novice market that is learning about this complex philosophy and requires a generalized course of kundalini and chakra education. The publishers have been enormously successful!

Zachary Jay Selig

Amazon.com couldn't create a score low enough for this trash

By the time I had finished the introduction of this book, I found it hard to believe that the author is in fact a Princeton graduate. (Maybe a legacy?) Not only is this book mediocrely written, but it is also a heap of pseudo-scientific huey passed off as "supernatural" biology, for which reason alone the book could deserve the lowest possible rating. Selby admits in his long autobiographical aside that he was caught up in the Far Eastern philosophy craze that swept the U.S. in the late 60's, without which his life was spiritually bankrupt. This is an flaky "self-help" book worthy of all the negative stereotypes that befit the several clueless authors in the genre.

But what is worse about this book is that you will be dumber for reading it even with respect to understanding the mystical concept of Kundalini and Chakras (which should actually be transliterated "cakras") that it alleges to teach. Selby's interpretation draws upon numerous sources of questionable accuracy such as Alan Watts, dubious forced analogies of Jungian origin, and the psychobabble of several people even less credible on the topic - some of whom don't write about it at all but Selby would like to think otherwise. Some of his explanations are sprinkled with various references to authors so remote from Indian metaphysics that his book at times reads like an essay randomly spewed out by The Postmodernism Generator
(...)with a marginally more cohesive thesis.

Did Selby ever bother to read the Sat-Cakra Nirupana or Paduka Pancaka to learn from the source what an Indian wrote about the "Chakras" in Laya yoga? Had he even cracked the spine of a copy of the Sushruta-Samhita, Kshurika-Upanishad, or Hathayogapradikpa for an elaboration of the so called "energy channels," he might have learned that there was more than the seven "Chakra" concept floating around in the vaguely Hindu spirituality he espouses. But Selby, a therapist and not a scholar, would rather make tenuous and out-of-context comparisons to other entirely unrelated primitive cultures stylistically reminiscent of theosophical claptrap because real scholarship guided by critical thinking takes infinitely more time and energy. This book is an insult to the thousands of men and women who have earned, for their hard and sincere efforts to produce factually correct and quality work on Hindu religion, only a tiny fraction of the money that Selby will make for selling his poorly researched misinformation to aging hippies and rebellious teenagers.

An utter piece of garbage whose date of discontinuation of print should be celebrated.

Kind of a misleading title.

I bought this book thinking that it focused only on kundalini awakening. I was a bit disappointed that this is not the case. In a sense it does, in that it teaches you how to open up your chakras so the kundalini can awaken within you.

As a Chakra meditation book, it isn't bad. The exercises are simple and the author does introduce the reader to some new teachings that I haven't seen in other books.

Another good book to add to your human energy field library.