Ancient claims of soldiers acquiring increased mental acuity, response time, and strength have been verified by retired scientist Robert L. Peck using his translations of ancient documents and modern scientific knowledge. Peck notes how history records the source of the superior warrior's inner power as being a mystical elixir known variously as chi, ki, haoma, soma, amrita, ambrosia, living waters, etc. For millennia this transformational fluid has been assumed to be some unknown intoxicating or psychedelic drink or, more recently, pure myth.
Peck's breakthrough was his realization that this ancient elixir is the same as today's hormones. The elixir consists of self-generated steroid hormones followed by neuropeptide hormones. "Knowing the effects of the hormones and a few of the inner methods of stimulating their production, Peck was able to decode ancient writings describing strange methods for generating the elixir." Coding of the instructions was obviously necessary to keep the information out of the hands of one's enemies and gave the impression that the elixir was an intoxicant drunk during a secret ritual. Secrecy prevailed even as the method was introduced into the civilian world by religious or early marital arts groups. These groups were heavily persecuted and largely disappeared during the 5th century, and their secret knowledge of controlling inner metaphysical powers was suppressed by rising institutions.
Since that time, the prevailing view has come to be that the individual is only a programmed, mechanical machine. This very limited view was threatened by the work of the Nobel Laureate Otto Loewi who discovered that the flow of hormones, which although only simple chemicals, had unexplained powers of changing the physical body. The research that followed resulted in a mega pharmaceutical industry able to reproduce many of the ancient claims with synthetically administered hormones. As Peck notes, however, there is currently no money spent on developing the original method of controlling one's own hormones.
In his recent book, Controlling Your Hormones, Peck provides details of the elixir/hormone and the decoded translations of three ancient documents which describe the method of controlling inner generated powers." These documents all state that the method must be kept secret. However, at a time when the modern pharmaceutical industry is disseminating a great deal of information about hormones, to withhold the ancient secret practices about individual hormone control would be morally wrong even if very politically incorrect.
Robert L. Peck spent most of his professional career researching and publishing in the field of energy conversion and storage. He formed a research lab supported in part by a major oil company to develop an inexpensive system to convert common heat into electrical power for which Peck was issued a number of patents. He started the Personal Development Center to explore ancient descriptions of the control of metamorphic energy conversion processes within the human body. During classes at the Center his middle-class American students volunteered to participate in many experiments to verify several of the ancient claims such as increased human response times as widely demonstrated within the Martial Arts.