I was born and grew up in Prague, Bohemia, a land filled with alchemical memory.

Walk across Charles Bridge at dawn and you can almost hear the whispers of Rudolf II’s court. Seal of God’s Truth diagrams, coded manuscripts, failed experiments and successful breakthroughs. Prague was once the center for Western alchemy.

This region has always attracted seekers of truth. Even before the alchemists, Jan Hus, a priest and rector of Charles University in Prague, stood in this city and preached opposition to dogma and corruption. Not to destroy religion, but to restore its authenticity through its realignment with the ultimate truth and purification of its teachings. Truth before authority. Integrity before conformity. And he paid the price.

The Catholic Church tricked him into coming to Konstanz under the false protection of the council, to defend his teachings. When he arrived open to defending his teachings, they arrested him and burned him alive. For the next eleven years, Bohemian Hussites have risen and crushed five consecutive Pope’s crusades under the banner of The Hussite’s Cup.

In that sense, Bohemia has long been a laboratory of transformation not just alchemical, but spiritual and philosophical. I didn’t understand this fully as a child. But later in life, during my deepest journeys, the same journeys I describe in The Why, How, and What of Existence, I noticed something: the symbolic architecture of alchemy mirrors the architecture of awakening.

Alchemy was never only about turning metal into gold.
It was about turning consciousness from ignorance into clarity, from separation into Love.

And that’s why I’m writing this.

Lead to Gold

The Ego Self to The Supreme Self

Classical alchemy begins with lead: heavy, inert, corruptible.
It ends with gold: radiant, incorruptible, pure.

In my book, I describe the same process internally:

• I am not the body
• I am not the mind
• I am not the name, biography, trauma or memory
• I am not even that thinking that I am not
• I am the timeless conciousness behind it all: Sat–Chit–Ananda

Lead is the self we think we are.
Gold is the Self we actually are.

The alchemists weren’t deluded; they were poetic.
Where I say Supreme Self, they said Gold.

The Furnace

Life as the Heat of Transformation

Alchemy requires a sealed vessel, intense heat, and time.

So does awakening.

Every heartbreak, loss, mental collapse, identity crisis. Every moment that feels like “too much”, is the fire that softens the rigid ego. In The Why, How, and What of Existence I call this “the gate-less gate”: the shattering of the identity so that Love can reveal itself. What occultists called Crossing of the Abbeys.

The fire (Shiva) doesn’t destroy us.
It reveals the part of us that can’t be destroyed.

Life is the alchemist.
Experience is the furnace.

The Philosophers’ Stone

The Universal Solvent = Love

The Philosophers’ Stone was said to:

• transform base metal into gold
• heal all wounds
• awaken the soul

To modern ears this sounds mythic — until we translate the symbol.

The true Stone is Love.

Not romance or sentimentality, but the force that dissolves the illusion of separation. During one of the most pivotal dialogues with the Supreme Self, the message I received was simple and unmistakable:

“It’s the Love, it’s the only one worth following in life. There is nothing like that one. It’s the only one we have.”

The alchemists believed the Stone healed everything it touched.
So does Love.
Everything else is secondary.

The Great Work (aligned with the core idea of my own work)

Alchemy’s Magnum Opus = The Why, How, What

Alchemy called the full journey of transformation Magnum Opus — the Great Work.

In my terminology, it breaks into three necessary parts:

Magnum Opus	My Framework
The Purpose	Why; realizing our true nature (Supreme Self / Sat-Chit-Ananda)
The Method	How; the life journey that purifies perception (Samsara)
The Result	What; liberation into unity, bliss, and Love (Moksha)

I didn’t model my structure on alchemy, but the parallels are undeniable.
Transformation always follows the same geometry, no matter the culture or century.

Why is it a Wheel? As you can see in the picture below, the Why becomes the What in the moment of realization.

The Androgyne

Wholeness Beyond Opposites

Alchemy ends with the Rebis, the androgyne: the union of masculine and feminine, light and shadow, matter and spirit.

This is not gender commentary; it is metaphysics.

In the final chapters of my book, I describe how true awakening is not escaping duality but realizing that duality was always an appearance inside unity.

The alchemist creates the Androgyne.
The mystic realizes the Self.
The neuroscientist might talk about hemispheric integration.
The psychonaut experiences ego dissolution.

Different vocabularies, same destination.
Wholeness. Oneness. Unity with the Divine. Realisation of the Self. Atman = Brahman. Christ Conciousness.

The Holy Grail

The Grail Quest = Awakening from Forgetfulness

There is one more symbol that belongs here: the Holy Grail.
Historically, the Grail isn’t a “thing” to be possessed; it is a state of consciousness accessed only by those who have become inwardly pure enough to recognize it. In Grail literature, knights are defeated not by stronger warriors but by their own blindness, fear, pride, or doubt. The quest is inward.
This parallels alchemy, and awakening, perfectly:

The Grail is the cup of infinite Love
Only the heart free of illusion can drink from it
The knight who seeks possession fails
The one who seeks truth succeeds
The Grail, the Stone, enlightenment: they are three costumes for the same realization:
What you seek is what you already are.
The quest is not toward something outside you, it is the stripping away of everything that hides the Truth.

In that sense, the Grail is not found at the end of the road.
It is revealed when the seeker disappears and Love remains.

It is revealed when the seeker disappears and Love remains.

Prague, Alchemy, and the Modern Seeker

Maybe it’s no accident that someone born in Bohemia, the world’s historical alchemical basecamp, ended up obsessed with transformation. Maybe the old furnaces never stopped burning.

The real Great Work isn’t in laboratories anymore.

It happens through self-tranformation of the self into The Self.

Any moment that turns ignorance into clarity and fear into love is alchemy.

Every human being is already an alchemist, whether they know it or not.

Because the oldest project in history is still underway:

We are turning lead into gold, turning separation into Love.

That is the true Magnum Opus.
That is the real Stone.
That is the real reason we’re here.
That is how the Holy Grail is revealed.
That is how the inner Light shines through.