Human alchemy—that's what this book is all about.
—N. K.
On March 15, 2001, during a beautiful spring afternoon, my heart stopped beating, and I died. Literally. Living a life of addictive excess had caught up with me. As paramedics and doctors furiously worked on my dormant heart, my life—or what had been left of it—drifted away.
Once upon a time I'd been a well-known New York night-club owner caught up with all of the self-destructive ego candy that that world had to offer. From the late eighties until the mid-nineties, I'd been the young, Ivy League–educated owner of several of the hottest and hippest nightclubs in Manhattan and Southampton; these were much-publicized hotspots that were frequented by A-listers like John F. Kennedy, Jr., Tom Cruise, and Brooke Shields. It was heady stuff for a middle-class kid from Queens. I was written up in the tabloids as “New York's Youngest Nightclub Owner,” while the flamboyant George Wayne of Vanity Fair included me on his list of New York's “50 Most Fabulous People.”
But it was all fool's gold. That type of life comes at a very high price; it's your classic, boiler-plate Faustian deal—and the devil always gets his due. Several years of glamour and fun were followed by several years of addicted hell that had led to my almost demise.
I Thanks to the feverish efforts of those above-mentioned doctors— and after over an hour without a heartbeat—I was able to pull a Lazarus. But I wasn't out of the woods just yet; I was in a touch-and-go coma as I clung to life via a respirator.
My god, what had happened to me? I had gone from the bright lights of the dance floor to the harsh lights of the intensive care unit, where I laid with tubes and catheters shoved into every orifice of my body. Glamorous it was not.
But just how did a nice kid like me from an honest and hard-working family wind up such a broken mess? And, more importantly, how did I—and how can anyone—heal?
Well, any challenge can be an opportunity for growth. Death— either physical or metaphorical—can begin the alchemical process of transfiguration, the most powerful type of spiritual transformation.
After my post-coma resurrection, I was desperate to better understand the universe and my purpose within it; I guess that a near-death experience will do that to a person. I would go on to embark on an amazing and transformative journey as I discovered— almost by chance—the way of ancient Greek mystical philosophy, a powerful wisdom tradition that embraced the notion of death as rebirth; in fact, Plato even described philosophy itself as a form of “death before dying.”
But what does that mean? What I learned was that the Greeks had discovered a method that can allow a person to “die before dying”—in effect, to shed the biological skin and achieve an expanded level of noetic awareness that can then lead to personal transformation—all without having to take dying to the literal extremes that I had.
Plato had even used “breaking the bird free from the cage” as a metaphor for the soul transcending the physical body via the holistic mind-body purification of philosophy.
These were very new and shocking ideas for me: that philosophy was originally conceived of as a holistic way of life meant to purify an individual towards transcendence—that, indeed, Greek philosophy embraced a metaphorical death as a rejection of the illusory physical world and movement towards a more profound experience of a deeper level of reality.
I had always mistakenly thought that philosophy was some sort of dry intellectual endeavor, an arcane obsession with semantics, written in impenetrable language in dusty texts that were housed in the bowels of some university library. To be honest, I had perceived philosophy as something dead, not very vital.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
The lived practice of philosophy as purification—as, indeed, a way of life—had been originated by Pythagoras (with a little help from his friends, the Egyptians and Babylonians). And in what came to be known as the Bios Pythagorikos (the Pythagorean way of life) a healthy mind, body, and spirit were nurtured with rigorous physical exercise, a strict diet, daily meditational walks, and lessons on ethics and character, as well as deep contemplative meditations on math, music, cosmology, and philosophy.
But because philosophy has been hijacked by crypt-keeper philosophy professors, instead of staying the province of actual philosophers, this vibrant soul of ancient Greek wisdom— much to our detriment—has been lost. Alas, in our narcissistic, YouTube culture, most people are more inclined towards self-absorption than self-reflection. But that's exactly why we need the long-lost depth and soul of Plato and Pythagoras—perhaps now more than ever.
How Plato and Pythagoras Can Save Your Life is my very personal effort at resurrecting the long-lost soul of Platonic philosophy at a time when, I believe, our society needs it most. It not only chronicles my journey of transformation, but also brings to life the powerful insights of the Greek mystical philosophers in a way that I hope is clear and accessible.
Even though I intend to make Pythagoras and Plato come alive and be accessible to anybody interested in living a more meaningful and more aware life, I won't reduce their wisdom to fortune-cookie philosophy. I can't; I can't reduce their method of transformation into bite-size fun. Don't get me wrong: the journey is a blast, but it is a journey. In other words, there are no shortcuts.
But, luckily, what Pythagoras and Plato did was give us a road map for that journey of consciousness expansion and personal transformation. In my efforts to honor that original road map, I'll explore and examine some of their core ideas (as well as some relevant background info and current scientific research that might actually validate their ancient worldview). I also include experiential exercises, at the end of most chapters, intended to help the reader go step-by-step on this cosmic journey.
What will you discover? Perhaps, as the Greeks had discovered, that there's more to the world than meets the eye; if you're lucky, you might even catch a glimpse “behind the veil.”
And if that happens, then not only will the way that you experience the world change forever, but the way that you exist within that world will change as well. Because with that shift in perception comes a shift in being. And then— presto!—alchemical transformation can manifest as a personal reality.
What you might also experience (as I did), as a fortuitous byproduct of this transformation and newfound expanded perception, is a much happier and much more meaningful life.
And you know, that may not be such a bad thing.