The Art of Digesting The Gene Keys

Illustration by Dani Katz

Digesting Big Ideas in Small Bites with The Gene Keys

As a wide-eyed, frothy-faced Gene Keys devotee for almost a decade, you’d think a simple question like: What are the Gene Keys? wouldn’t stymie me as much as it does.

You’d think.

Inhale…exhale…repeat. Here goes…

For starters, it’s a book. A really (really) big book.

As well, it’s “a living energetic field that exists at all times inside you,” and by you, the author Richard Rudd means every single human incarnate. And by living energetic field, he means an intelligent transmission that has this weird, wonderful, and thoroughly mystifying habit of reorganizing reality to confirm its teachings.

The Treasures Planted for Planetary Transformation

It’s also a terma, a Tibetan word that refers to the “treasures,” which the Buddha planted in the causal plane when he reincarnated as a Tibetan shaman named Padmasambhava. Apparently, this was a thing among the Tibetan shamans: hiding termas in various layers of the collective field of consciousness for folks to find during times of great planetary transformation (aka: now).

But, at its most fundamental level, and for our intents and purposes, The Gene Keys is a book. A super, very wonderful book, painstakingly written by a sweet, humble genius named Richard Rudd.

It operates on a lot of levels, this book. For starters, it delineates  each of the sixty-four codons found in human DNA as a pathway to enlightenment. Each of these is embedded with its own unique frequency, a frequency which falls under the following three categories: Shadow, Gift, and Siddhi (full embodiment and spiritual realization). The Keys enumerated in the codons serve as a kind of map that guides the reader to transmute her Shadows into Gifts. This transformation allows us to live joyful, meaningful, open-hearted lives, reflective of our own authentic, individual genius; and to then – dare to dream – integrate and embody the Truth of real-deal spiritual realization by way of the Siddhis.

The Teachings in The Gene Keys

The Gene Keys is also an exhaustive synthesis of every mystical, spiritual and metaphysical teaching and tradition. It is a word nerd’s dream, given all that capital T-Truth pulsing through every stunningly crafted sentence, and each perfectly placed word, not to mention all the spaces in between.

The book clocks in at over 500 dense pages, rendering The Gene Keys the polar opposite of what anyone would consider a light read.

Baby steps, small bites, and lots (and lots) of time to digest.

I’m a fast and furious reader with a voracious appetite, prone to eschewing meals, biorhythms, and social graces while devouring high-vibe tomes with ferocious intensity. But, when it comes to The Gene Keys, I’m like a consumptive waif with a thimble-sized belly, and the metabolism of a giant sloth, able to consume only the teeniest-tiniest of nibbles per sitting. It takes me great, grand swaths of time to digest the words and all the infinite everythings they reference.

The first time The Gene Keys came upon my radar, a shaman – the Australian varietal – read me a passage from the 53rd Gene Key. In this Key, Rudd defines the Shadow of Immaturity as “an aspect of the whole that does not yet realize that it is the whole.” He goes on to explain that much “like a young child, humanity is an organism that is too self-obsessed to be aware of the consequences of its actions.”

While my brain was dazzled by the relevance, given how closely the passage spoke to an article I was researching at the time, every cell in my body started freaking out.

That! That!!!, they all yelled. Read that! Get that! THAT BOOK!! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. MUST. READ. THAT. BOOK!!!

Wild Wisdom in The Gene Keys

Rudd describes his masterpiece as “a wild wisdom, rather than a systematic, logical process…the Gene Keys are more about dismantling concepts rather than adding any new ones.”

As such, there is no practice, no technique, no prescribed approach. Except contemplation.

They’re dense and meaty, these Gene Keys. And so it is that the brain wants to chew on them. Yearns to mull, and gnaw, and obsess on all the nuance and paradox and Mystery – to crack the codes, shatter our illusions of separation, and dissolve into the bliss on infinite Oneness.

As if.

Aside from the fact that the 30th Shadow of Desire has this annoying tendency of driving people insane, compulsive pondering isn’t an effective strategy because, as Rudd writes, “The Gene Keys are a transmission beyond words…” and, thus “…will not yield their secrets to an intellectual grasping mind.”

They’re coy, the Keys. Like a feral cat who slinks away from an outstretched hand, or a direct gaze, the Gene Keys don’t respond well to active pursuit, to overly eager cognitive minds clawing for divine sustenance. There’s only so much concentrated intellectual mulling the Keys will tolerate before the right brain gives up, and taps out – dazed, perplexed, and supremely frustrated with its inability to hack the codes. It may take several lifetimes to even begin to make integrated Siddhic sense of the concepts.

The Practice of Contemplation

At the same time, merely meditating on their essence doesn’t quite cut it either. Given the many layers of multidimensional metaphysical coding illuminated in the tome, one has to work for the treasures hidden in the Keys. We don’t do this by stuffing our faces, or gulping down multiple chapters at a time. We do this by directing our attention their way, and by mindfully musing upon the macrocosmic meaning our gentle gaze allows us to ingest. We do this by way of contemplation.

I nabbed my own copy of The Gene Keys almost a decade ago. Though it is hands-down my favorite ever book (dog-eared, highlighted, and ridiculously marked-up), I haven’t even come close to finishing it. It’s rare that I make it through an entire Key in a single sitting, prone as I am to stuffing myself to capacity after just a few paragraphs, or – very often – a single sentence; thus putting the book aside so I can digest and assimilate the far-reaching wonderfulness I’ve just swallowed, and let the Keys have their way with my heart, soul, mind, and reality before I muster up the courage, the stamina, and the fractal brain-belly space to dive back in for more.

Some books are meant to be devoured, and others are meant to be savored. The Gene Keys is the latter, and then some.