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Prologue
Prologue | Reviews | Order
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"Besieged by financial and marital turmoil, Mark Vale meets a group of contemporary alchemists who take him on a bewildering journey outside his comfort zone, teaching him how to transform confronting situations into golden opportunities. He is astounded to discover that the biggest impediment to this creative process is everything he has learned before. The more he lets go of what he thinks he knows, the more he is taken over by an inner wisdom that begins elevating him to higher and higher levels of creative ability. His initiation into magic appears complete when he manifests a massive financial windfall, but it soon becomes apparent that his material success will not be enough to hold his family together. With his world seemingly crumbling around him, Mark embarks on the ultimate quest to uncover what it takes to manifest the precious things in life that money can’t buy."
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"My name is Mark Vale and the one thing I can safely say about my life is that it has never been dull.
When I was growing up in Africa, every young boy kept a pet mole snake. Mole snakes are harmless little animals that, like their mammalian namesakes, live underground feeding on insects and grubs. Apart from being blind, their unique feature is that their head is indistinguishable from their tail. You really have to look carefully to tell which end is which.
All my friends had a mole snake. They were so easy to come by. You only had to turn over a rotting log or dig up a fallow vegetable patch and there, more likely than not, would be one of these dual headed, giant earthworm-like creatures wriggling haplessly about. Yet, no matter how diligently I searched, I could never find my own pet mole snake. I was the only seven-year-old boy within a hundred miles who didn’t have one.
Then one day my luck changed. I was looking for a ball that had bounced into a corn patch in our back yard when my eye caught sight of something coiled around a stalk of corn. A mole snake! Forgetting about the ball, and with my little heart beating with joy, I knelt down and put my hand out for the snake to climb onto. Up close, I noticed there was something odd about this particular mole snake. For a start it was out in the open, and it was larger and less opaque than the other mole snakes I had played with. But it had a head where its tail should have been and it was the same dark colour. I just took it to be a big daddy of a mole snake.
This little fellow wasn’t as obliging as the mole snakes I was used to. It turned away from my hand and began slithering across a broad corn leaf towards another stalk. Not wanting to let it get away, I grabbed it gently around the middle and picked it up from the leaf. Before I knew it, the snake turned around and bit my thumb. It hardly hurt at all, but I got such a fright that I flung my arm up in the air, sending the small creature flying across the sky into our neighbour’s yard.
Because mole snakes are non-venomous, I didn’t feel anything except disappointment that I had lost my precious find so quickly. When you’re seven years old, though, you don’t hold on to disappointment for long, and I was soon kicking the ball around without a care. It wasn’t till later that morning that my thumb began to throb. By lunchtime I was in real agony. When I explained to my father what had happened his face went white as a sheet. He looked gravely at my mother, who had also turned pale, and said three words in a barely audible whisper: “Gibbons Burrowing Adder!”
I had heard of two people that had been bitten by burrowing adders. Both were adults. One had died. I don’t know exactly how a burrowing adder’s poison attacks the human physiology, but I can report first hand on its effect. There is basically only one word to describe it: pain!
The horrible thing about being bitten by a burrowing adder is that there is no antidote. You just have to tough it out. They say that if you die from the bite, it’s not the venom that kills you, it’s the shock from the pain. For the next forty eight hours my thumb felt like it was being hit by a giant sledgehammer every three seconds. I didn’t stop screaming for six hours, after which time the pain became so intense that I left this world, where pain is only an aspect of life, and drifted off to another world where pain is the only thing there is.
My parents say I was unconscious for thirty-six hours, but let me tell you, I remember every moment of that living hell. I was on fire, kept awake by devils branding me all over with red-hot pokers. And my thumb, always my thumb, constantly throbbing as if it was a pain magnet drawing in every conceivable kind of agony from throughout the universe.
Obviously I survived, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this, but there are those who say that the experiences from your early life form a template from which all your later experiences emanate. I for one tend to agree with this premise. All my life I’ve had a consistent experience of picking things up thinking they were one thing, only to be shocked at how different they actually turned out to be. As is the case in the story I am about to tell, where, many years later in another part of the world, I innocently picked up a golf club, not realising that my life would never be the same again."
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