Angelo Druda (AD): As you know, we live in an age of crisis. It’s global warming, health care meltdown, these are difficult times. With The Tao of Rejuvenation, what I did was, I wrote the prescription for the times. That’s fundamentally what I did for The Tao of Rejuvenation. And in order to write the prescription for the times, I turned not only to present times information about rejuvenation but I’ve also turned to the past… to our ancestors. Some people may not know that we are all actually the inheritors of a great tradition that specializes in bodily rejuvenation.

Several months ago, 60 Minutes did a show on what they are calling the ‘longevity gene’. The ‘longevity gene’ is essentially the body’s regenerative chemistry and the 60 Minutes piece was about the fact that modern scientists today actually feel that they are on the brink of unlocking this ‘longevity gene’. And there’s a substance that they are very interested in right now and the feel that this substance is the secret or an elixir that will actually allowed the body to secrete this ‘longevity gene’. The substance, some people will know, is called Resveratrol and is being sold today. And in the piece of 60 Minutes you could actually see these scientists standing in front of their high-tech equipment and they were very, very excited about the fact that they felt they were like close to unlocking the so-called ‘longevity gene’ in the human body. If you see the piece on 60 Minutes, you might be inclined to think that this is all very modern and very scientific.

But the fact is that our ancestors knew about these things many, many years ago. Our ancestors knew about this ‘longevity gene’. They called it Soma. They called it the body’s regenerative chemistry. So it’s actually nothing particularly new. It’s actually something quite old. And in writing The Tao of Rejuvenation, I turned to ancient traditions on body rejuvenation. You can go back to ancient Taoists. Ancient Taoists had people who completely specialized in body rejuvenation. They specialized in keeping people alive for long stretches of time. You can go back to the Yogis who practiced in the area which is now Kashmir in India. They had people who specialized in life extension – rejuvenation.

Even the early Christians had people who specialized in rejuvenation. Some people would be familiar with the Essene Gospel of Peace. The original manuscript for the Essene Gospel of Peace is now in the Vatican Library in Rome under lock and key. Some people think the Essene Gospel of Peace is actually Jesus himself instructing his disciples on rejuvenation.

We also have these wonderful traditional medical systems that come out of the East, the traditional medical systems of India, of Tibet and China. Within these medical cultures, there were people who specialized in life extension… in longevity.

And so I turned to our ancestors. I turned to those traditions in creating The Tao of Rejuvenation – in writing these prescriptions for the modern times – And I took the most pertinent information and laid it out for the modern reader in a clear and a concise way so that people can actually understand the principles that the ancients used to extend life, understand those principles and also begin to incorporate them into their own life. So The Tao of Rejuvenation is my prescription for this modern time.

Vice President Al Gore, some people know that Al Gore likes to say that the planet has a fever. We are in a kind of “Fire and Balance” time. We are looking at Global Warming. These kinds of conditions require a balancing approach. This is how oriental medicine is actually practiced; we embrace the phase we tend to avoid. So The Tao of Rejuvenation is that prescription and it includes all aspects of life practice that actually allows this regenerative chemistry to awaken.

I also include in there some of the modern teachings of the great healing master, Adi Da Samraj. Adi Da Samraj was a master who was deeply interested in the matter of life extension. And it was Adi Da Samraj who laid out this beautifully concise approach to how to unlock the body’s regenerative chemistry. In the 70s, Adi Da Samraj did a very concentrated study of this whole matter of body rejuvenation.

If we look at the earliest written documents that we know about, which are the Vedas. And if we go back to the Rig Veda, the earliest book in those documents, the authors of the Vedas are talking about a magical substance that they call “Soma”. And this Soma heals disease, it promotes long life and if you look at those poems of praise to Soma, it’s even producing happiness and ecstasy. These are the descriptions of Soma. Over the years of their history, they have all kinds of adventurers and scholars who have gone off in search of the Soma trying to determine what was this substance that the ancients were using to produce these profound effects of rejuvenation. It was in the 70s that the great healing master, Adi Da Samraj, said the Soma actually does exist. Some people think, well, it is just a myth. Well, I thought it was a myth for a good part of my life. Adi Da Samraj has said, No, the Soma actually does exist except that it’s not actually out in nature. The Soma is something the body will produce. When all the functions of the body are properly cultivated and raised to their highest degree of functioning, and the endocrine system will produce this Soma. That, in a nut shell, is what inspired me to write The Tao of Rejuvenation. I laid out all the principles of how the ancient practitioners and some modern practitioners… because the book includes modern lessons that we’ve learned, how do they unlock this regenerative chemistry in the human body. How can we get the body to secrete this soma? That is what this book is about and the principles are there for anyone to pick up and read.

SM: Wow, Angelo. I haven’t heard you speak about your book. But hearing you speak about it, this is exciting. I, myself, I have heard of the word Soma and yeah, where is the Soma? Where can I get it? And what you are saying is, the Soma is actually already part of my body and if I can rejuvenate my body to the point that it’s working properly, then the Soma is activated?

AD: Exactly. I mean I started writing this book, shortly after I started practicing oriental medicine. I had a small clinic in Melbourne, Australia. And a woman came to me with a chronic disease – a long-term chronic disease. And she had tried everything to reverse this disease and rejuvenate herself and it had not worked. And so she had come to see me. That’s how it is when you practice alternative medicine. People usually try all the obvious things first, then they come to see an alternative medical practitioner. And she was lying on my treatment table and I was there and I was new to this practice, and I was writing a prescription. And then almost as an after-thought, I decided to put my hands on her body, and do a form of “laying-on of hands” or touch massage or whatever you want to call it. And I just my hands on her body and I tried to open up to the universe and invoke and draw on the great healing power in the universe and light itself and put it into her. And while I was doing this, there were suddenly a shudder on her body and she shook on the table. She coughed a few times; this was a long term chronic lung condition. And then her color changed, energy levels shifted, and she got up off the table and she was better. She called me an hour later and said, “I don’t know what you did but I’m healed. It’s gone. My energy is getting better and better every moment.” What impressed me about that moment was she was at a dark moment in her life. Her health was way down. Even then, when the body is apparently sick and ill, even then, this regenerative chemistry in the body, the potential, is there. And the potential is there to be awakened. Whatever occurred in my office on that day awakened this regenerative chemistry and her body was rejuvenated in matter of minutes and hours. That moment made me a student of rejuvenation. That moment was the moment I became deeply interested in the subject. When you begin studying rejuvenation, you find out that these kinds of spontaneous healings and dramatic healings, are actually quite common. Or more common than we might expect. We all know that you can have a flu in one moment then suddenly you can get better. We tend to take that regenerative chemistry for granted. But ancient practitioners very clearly and strategically and methodically went about observing the processes that open up and awaken this regenerative chemistry.

So, it was at that moment that really began the study of rejuvenation for me. I have seen these kinds of dramatic awakenings of the body’s regenerative chemistry now many times since that time. And I also include some of the more interesting and dramatic examples of rejuvenation in the book. They are there really to inspire us, and to let us know that the body’s rejuvenative chemistry is quite profound. And if we learn to do the right things, we can start unlocking that regenerative chemistry to preserve health and well-being. You can turn to these ancient traditions and they all had their examples of great life extensions and they have examples of people that lived very long lives. They all have their examples of dramatic healings and this was at the time when we didn’t have this high-tech medical safety net. I mean in those days, they needed to get this right or you were dead at 40, which was the average age that a Chinese peasant passed away. The average life style for a Chinese peasant was about 40 years of age. So this regenerative chemistry is very profound. The Soma can be awakened in all kinds of ways. And the book lays out – what are the principles, what are the practices that will actually allow this regenerative chemistry to waken and be quite powerful.

SM: I am a long time fan of being healthy, eating healthy and here in The Blue OK we try to eat very healthy food. And the idea that I could actually cause this soma in my own body to begin to rejuvenate and regenerate my life, this is very good information and I’m sure that everyone who is listening today feels the same way. Angelo, is there something in this book that we can give people a little bit of a taste of… something they could apply before they get the book. They want to go… we can tell them later where they can find your book but is there something practical advice you could say to the audience that might help them begin this process of rejuvenation?

AD:  Let me lay it out as simply as we can. In this circumstance here today, it was Adi Da Samraj who summarized the process of body rejuvenation as a process of purification, rebalancing and rejuvenation. When we talk about purification, we are talking about a process that involves the blood in the body. And so, when a person learns how to rightly cultivate the blood, they can add years of health to their lives. When the person learns how to rightly cultivate the autonomic nervous system which is what rebalancing pertains to – the autonomic nervous system. When you learn how to cultivate your autonomic nervous system properly, you can add years of health to your life. Rejuvenation pertains to the endocrine system. So, when you learn how to properly cultivate the endocrine system, you can add years of health to your life. Let’s talk about the blood a little bit because the blood is that circumstance that is directly impacted by diet. So diet absolutely. This is a food body, food is going to have a dramatic effect on the health of the human body. I lay out in The Tao of Rejuvenation book the two principles of the right cultivation of the blood. The first principle of the right cultivation of the blood is blood purity. Keep the blood pure. And this directly impacted by what we eat. If you eat toxic food, then toxins are deposited in the blood. If you eat pure food, then you minimize the amounts of toxins that coagulate and concentrate in the blood. So good food will produce blood purity and within the circumstance of good food, I point to organic raw greens as the basic food for the regenerative diet. No regenerative diet can be truly effective unless there is a high concentration of the organic raw greens.

Nowadays, we know about people taking in large quantities of raw greens in the forms of these green smoothies. Victoria Boutenko has written books about this and is educating people about the virtue of raw greens and taking them in the form of a smoothie. What is so good about those raw greens? They cleanse the blood. They cleanse toxins out of the blood. They cleanse the inflammatory substances from our own immune system; our body’s own inflammatory system will secrete inflammatory substances into the blood. These organic raw greens are natural blood cleansers. There is nothing that promotes organ degeneration more quickly than inflammation. We now know that heart disease, what ultimately destroys the human heart, is the body’s own inflammation system. So you want to cleanse these inflammatory substances out of the blood in the regular basis.

So blood purity can be achieved through right diet and it doesn’t just have to be raw green smoothies, our ancestors used herbs. Before the time of antibiotics, our ancestors used right combination of powerful herbs to clear the blood of inflammation, infection and toxicity. And I give some blood cleansing herbal formulas in the book. There are recipes there.

So this is the most basic approach to unlocking the body’s regenerative chemistry is blood purity. To keep the blood pure, eat a right diet. It’s very simple. It requires some discipline. No one is going to truly live a long and healthy life if they are using an abundance of junk foods and depositing toxins in the blood. And the blood thickens, it doesn’t flow properly and the possibility of strokes, embolism and obstructive cardiovascular disease increases. So, this is the first principle of the right cultivation of the blood – blood purity.

The second principle of the right cultivation of the blood is ensuring that the body is producing an abundant quantity of blood. And I talk about this in The Tao of Rejuvenation. You want the body to produce abundant blood. So that the blood can fill out the circulatory pathways, the blood is rich and pure and is going to nourish all those cells. But keeping a strong blood flow in the body is probably our best offense against cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular degeneration. Ensure that the blood supply is abundant. And the wisdom in this area really comes from oriental medicine, comes from Chinese medicine specifically.

The founders and creators of Chinese medicine discovered, hundreds of years ago, herbs that were beautiful blood precursors. In other words, when the body took these essential oils in that the herbs contain, the body would just turn those oils into blood. It allows the body to produce an abundant blood supply.

So I turned to oriental medicine for that. I lay out some of the recipes and formulas that I give. Some of these recipes are known mostly to the practitioners of oriental medicine. They are not so commonly known, I put them in the book, laid out the recipes, and fundamentally, if people do nothing else, except periodically use the right foods to purify the blood and the right herbs to purify the blood, and they use herbs that allow the body to produce an abundant supply of blood, you are taking a giant step towards unlocking the body’s regenerative chemistry.

That’s stage one as Adi Da Samraj describes it. Purification of the blood, cultivation of the blood – it’s absolutely critical. Anybody can do these things. If you start to increase your consumption of these raw greens, you are beginning the process of purifying blood. You are promoting health and well-being.
So that is just one aspect and I laid that out in the section relative to the blood. I also point out that the blood has always been associated with longevity. The myth of Count Dracula. I mean the count has living from century to century. How was the count doing it? He’s living on… he’s subsisting on a very strange diet of blood and sex actually. Sexuality can also be a regenerative practice and I talk about that in the book, too.

So the blood, the right cultivation of the blood, anybody can do it. It’s very basic. You just have to know and acquire the right ingredients and you can begin that process. You want to move on to the matter of the right cultivation of the nervous system in the matter of rebalancing the nervous system, I turned to the yogis of North India for this information. Nowadays, we discovered scientifically that every heart in every species comes with a particular pre-programmed set of beats. In other words, the human will get several billion beats and when those beats are used up, then the heart will shut down.

This is something we discovered scientifically last few years. Ancient yogis knew about this a thousand years ago. They understood that if we could slow the heart rate, then we are going to get more time for those pre-programmed amount of heart beats. So yogis developed all kinds of practices… breathing exercises. And as a young kid I always heard about yogis being buried and they are unearthed. They were entombed and then they came out weeks later and they were completely fine. This points to the fact the yogis learned how to slow the heart rate through the rebalancing of the autonomic nervous system. They could slow their heart rate and extend their life. So I talked about all of those practices and laid them out in a way that people can start to apply without becoming a yogi who is about to be entombed. That’s not the point.

Relative to the third part, rejuvenation in the endocrine system, I also turned to the oriental medical systems for information there. Because our ancestors know systems really discovered what I see is the perfect endocrine fuels. They found the herbs and the substances in nature that when you take them into the body, they feed the endocrine system. Endocrine system, of course, is producing all the growth hormones that are so necessary for life.

And I include recipes in the book, too, in this whole area of rejuvenation, how to properly feed the endocrine system. So I laid it all out. People can do a little bit of this. They can do a lot of it. The ones who get the greatest results are the ones who will learn to cultivate the body in each one of those phases. And then people can get tremendous results and prevent a great deal of disease and distress that’s totally unnecessary if we just learn the information which has already been given to us by our ancestors. It’s all there.