Says the publisher, JJ Semple, “Individuals looking for hookups or paying for porn are often the very ones searching for relief. There are many Maxes out there, regular guys looking to subjugate their urges. This is literary fiction masquerading as erotica. Hats off to Terrell for exploring a taboo subject in a realistic manner.”
More about Kundalini and JJ Semple
https://www.kundaliniconsortium.org/
https://amzn.to/3UEVZnc
Says the publisher, JJ Semple, “Individuals looking for hookups or paying for porn are often the very ones searching for relief. There are many Maxes out there, regular guys looking to subjugate their urges. This is literary fiction masquerading as erotica. Hats off to Terrell for exploring a taboo subject in a realistic manner.”
More about Kundalini and JJ Semple
https://www.kundaliniconsortium.org/
https://amzn.to/3UEVZnc
From Self-Indulgence to Self-Realization
Superficially, it might appear that Near To Me, My Love does not fit in with the other titles published by Life Force Books. That is not the case. I’m going to read a letter from one of my readers.
Hi JJ Semple,
Just bought your book on seminal retention and higher consciousness. I am struggling to save the seed as you instructed as in my dreams I have sex and I wake up with wet sheets sometimes spills a little prostatic fluid sometimes a lot sometimes semen. Please instruct me. What should I do? Should I meditate more? Is it my diet? Is it how I am sleeping? I masturbated to porn for almost 10 years before.
Thanks,
Tom
Tom’s letter tells us two things. Tom is both an addict and a seeker. Nothing new there. Lots of people are. There are lots of Toms out there, individuals who are both seekers and addicts. Both can be true.
I don’t claim to be capable of straightening out people’s lives; I’m only a writer with a lot of life experience. My books are riddled with both the mistakes I’ve made and the insights I’ve had‚ the latter largely due to Kundalini. What I can do is explain how I’ve dealt with urges that might have morphed into addictions, in some cases, and did in others. If that makes me a credible authority, it’s entirely due to Kundalini and my life journey as a seeker.
Tom’s letter highlights the struggle between two urges, both of which concern the role of sexuality in daily life. I receive letters and emails like this all the time. In many ways, I find them more compelling than any fifty claims of enlightenment I’ve heard at kundalini gatherings. And yet when you choose to write or publish books about the struggle, they call it erotica. Well, I’m starting a new genre: thoughtful erotica.
It’s interesting that in examining the lives of persons like Tom and myself, the addiction element is always way more advanced than the seeker element. It seems the former must, by definition, give birth to the latter— the profane to the sacred, self-indulgence to self-realization.
I’m talking about all kinds of addictions and how and why they affect people who struggle with them.
“The problem is we don’t have a good grasp of what addiction really is. Is it a behavioral anomaly or a disease? Until now, we’ve tended to separate addictions into two categories, one behavioral, the other substance-based. But what if all addictions: those in the substance category that we term diseases like cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs and those in the behavioral category that we term moral failures like gambling, eating, shopping, or sex all stem from the same type of brain activity?”
“Overcoming Addiction” JJ Semple - The Kundalini Consortium - November 11, 2013
Addictions don’t happen in a vacuum. They are to a degree the result of individual choices. I’m not saying that there are no facilitators or enablers, for instance, the pharmaceutical companies and the doctors who helped foist the Fentanyl scourge on largely unsuspecting members of the public.
“To break an addiction, we need a technique that doesn’t rely on the voice in the back of the head, the conscience as some call it. But, you say, that’s impossible because you just said the sexual addict is unable to obey any moral imperative. Is there a treatment the addict can self-administer? And, if there is, why would he choose it?
“The harder he works to satisfy the urges that rouse him, the longer he continues to evade admitting his problem, the less he’ll be looking for treatment. But if he gets to the point of admitting and wants to take control of his own destiny, to avoid entering the system and its enforced treatment programs that include: therapy, medication, prison, sterilization, and castration, there is sublimation. A process whose side effects are wholly positive and whose cost in dollars is zero.”
“Overcoming Addiction” JJ Semple - The Kundalini Consortium - November 11, 2013
In modern society, it’s easy to indulge one’s self. The lure of porn on the internet is easy to succumb to, easy to wile the hours away doing nothing but—.
There are so many temptations we begin to view them not as what they are, temptations, but as fun we should not be deprived of. Pleasures we should not be denied. I’m not talking about “Thou shall nots.” This is not Bible study or a faith-based religious diatribe. I’m not asking you to believe in something. You must challenge everything you see, hear, or feel.
I know. You’ve heard it all before. Why bother, you ask? Leave me alone. Let me indulge. It’s a free country.
And that’s okay for 80% of the population: the majority who are not interested in self-realization, don’t understand it, and wouldn’t try if they did.
And yet I persist because these things are not trivial. Suicide may be illegal but there are many ways to kill oneself that are not illegal. They’re the things that contribute to lung cancer, emphysema, liver disease, heart failure, stroke, and quite possibly dementia. Here’s what Gopi Krishna had to say.
“At the present time, allowing for different constitutions and different types of men, also different degrees of vigor, we can say, with the ancient masters also, that perhaps twice a week to once in two weeks would be a safe measure for indulgence in the sexual act. This is of absolute importance for those who would like to awaken the Serpent Power. Their proneness to sex desire must be under stern control. The least weakness, the least tendency to erotic desire, the least breach of discipline can be attended by gravest danger.”
“Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man” - Gopi Krishna
Many books have been written about kundalini; we know how it operates in theory; we just can’t prove it’s actually happening.
I’ve documented my kundalini experience in six books. I’ve read many accounts. Only one account matches mine in so far as the physiological symptoms experienced after ejaculation, and that is Gopi Krishna’s, and here it is:
“On one occasion, after months of abstention, I prematurely had a contact with my wife. The next moment, because the energy did not come up to feed the brain, and I was in an expanded state of consciousness, I seemed to sink into a pit of horror and terror, so much so that I thought that if nothing happened to me to save me from this terrible situation, I would die. The same thing happens to the insane. Uncontrolled sex, overindulgence in sex makes us more prone to hysteria and neurosis and psychosis.”
“Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man” - Gopi Krishna
What does Kundalini have to do with erotica? Near to You, My Love, a book I recently published by author Cliff Terrell—a book that describes in detail the tribulations of a regular guy with an overstimulated libido as he is drawn to and begins to practice energy cultivation techniques.
Near to You, My Love is a pilgrimage—one man’s search for self-realization, his struggle to overcome the temptations. Without realizing it, Terrell’s protagonist becomes a prisoner of his libido. How can someone so under the thrall of sex, a person with self-realization proclivities reconcile these two seemingly irreconcilable tendencies?
Near to You, My Love is a Bildungsroman, defined as the “class of novel that depicts and explores the manner in which the protagonist develops morally and psychologically” as well as, in this case, sexually. We watch him evolve from a “sex addict” into a discerning, disciplined professional as he faces an array of personal challenges at the same time his country struggles with war, civil rights, and the sexual revolution during the turbulent 1960s.
It's what makes Near to You, My Love a study in overcoming erotic impulses. One spoiler from author Cliff Terrell: “I dreamed up a mind, a body, and a soul, wrapped them up, and called them Max Mazur. A not untypical example of a person who embodies the middle of the last century. If you’re squeamish about sex you might want to avoid Near to You.”
Max does not find God. Near to You, My Love is not a morality tale. Max is not a surrogate for some faith-based creed; he’s a logical and rational skeptic who undergoes an awakening that leaves him striving to be more than the hand biology dealt him.