John White, author of fifteen books, including The Meeting of Science and Spirit and What Is Enlightenment?, has long studied the kundalini phenomena. In the following essay he examines the relationship between sex, consciousness, and kundalini, journeying to the heart of erotic mysticism. Touching on the modern challenges psychology and philosophy face in the context of kundalini experiences, he focuses on Gopi Krishna’s influence and his thoughts on the evolution of consciousness. Exploring Gopi Krishna’s writings and legacy, he probes the ultimate question: Is kundalini the biological basis of both religion and genius?
Sexuality and spiritual experience have traditionally been linked in the literature of mysticism. Religious ecstasy seems strikingly similar to erotic excitement in the accounts of saints and holy people who have spoken of enlightenment—knowing ultimate reality or, in their usual term, God—in language that resorts to sexual imagery. Such images, they said, were the best they could find to describe an otherwise indescribable experience. Such terms as rapture, passion, union, and ravish occur frequently. St. Teresa recorded that she felt stabbed through and through by Christ’s spear. Madame Guyon wrote that “the soul ... expires at last in the arms of love.” St. Francis de Sales spoke of sucking heavenly milk from the breast of God. Likewise, the poetry of Sufi and Hindu mystics is highly erotic.
Orthodox psychology tends to smugly dismiss such language as the products of aberrated minds whose main trouble was repressed sex, causing a regression to infantile behavior. But conventional psychological interpretations could be wrong. Why? Because in an ironic turn of events, a physical linkage between sexual and spiritual experience is emerging, and it promises a major upheaval in Western psychology. From this emerging view, sexuality is really unexpressed or unfulfilled religious experience.
Notice that term religious experience. The common element between it and sexual experience is consciousness. The states of consciousness experienced by lovers in union and mystics in God-intoxication are states in which the usual sense of self as a separate, isolated, lonely individual is dissolved. The individuals are no longer locked in the prison of ego, no longer in conflict with the world because of a socially conditioned image of who they are. Lovers sometimes attain this momentarily during orgasm, and afterward universally regard it as one of their most cherished experiences. It has a sacred quality, as if they had contacted something greater than themselves, something at the wellspring of life itself, something that transcends the merely human and takes them into a higher state of existence.
Mystics, of course, experience this with greater frequency, intensity, and duration. Some of the greatest have declared they are constantly in that state of mind, although to outward appearances they are simply performing their daily activities.
Try to imagine that: working, eating meals, driving the car, and doing everything else with the same sense of cosmic wellbeing you’ve felt at the peak of lovemaking. It’s not just exquisite pleasure or intense passion. It’s actually beyond emotion. It’s tranquil, peaceful, serene, without any worries or cares, without attachments to status, fame, or wealth, without fear of failure or even death. None of our usual hang-ups and concerns. No anxiety. No past or future. Just pure being, pure consciousness, here and now. And all the while, everything necessary for living goes on. Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed because you no longer relate to reality in the same way. It is a new state of consciousness—not fleeting as in orgasm, but permanent—erotic mysticism.
That would be foreign to our range of experience—even to our whole culture—and we lack the language to describe it well. But we have hints and glimpses of it given to us in the sacred writings of various religious traditions and revered spiritual teachers. Moreover, they tell us there are techniques and disciplines that can be systematically employed to alter consciousness toward that state. Meditation is an example of such a discipline. Yoga is another. So is tantra, which, in some traditions, uses maithuna or ritual sexual intercourse for developing the psychosexual experience to religious heights.
In view of these facts, orthodox psychology ought to drop its illusion of knowing more than those poor, mixed-up mystics—whom it labels as cases of infantile regression—and recognize that there are realms of experience about which it is pathetically ignorant.
This, in fact, is happening. Because of rapidly increasing interest in consciousness research, psychology is being challenged in many directions. What transpersonal psychologist Abraham Maslow called “the farther ranges of human nature” is being considered more thoughtfully. Psychic phenomena, meditation, altered states of consciousness—the data from studying these are causing psychology to seriously examine ancient concepts and traditions of what Robert Ornstein, in The Psychology of Consciousness, calls “the esoteric psychologies.”
The essence of the esoteric psychologies that so challenges Western psychology is precisely what lovers and mystics have discovered to varying degrees for millennia: humans have a potential for expanded awareness that can radically change their lives and transform them to the roots of their being. We may taste a small measure of that in moments of sexual ecstasy, but there is so much beyond the experience that, compared to it, orgasm is just a pale show.
So we find ourselves in the fascinating position of discovering new dimensions of the psyche—dimensions that could bring a tremendous evolutionary advance to humanity. If the nature of higher consciousness could be widely understood and experienced, there would undoubtedly follow a societal transformation around the globe.
That is why research in this area is so important. That is why I offer this essay summarizing the viewpoint of the Indian yogi-philosopher-scientist Gopi Krishna, who maintains that the language of sexual mysticism is to be understood literally and that it holds fundamental significance for psychology. There is, Gopi Krishna maintains, a direct physical linkage between sexual and spiritual experience. Ram Dass expressed the idea in the original title of Be Here Now, which was From Bindu to Ojas. As he explained it: “Bindu is sexual energy and [ojas] is spiritual energy, and it’s the transformation of energy within the body through the conversion of a form of energy ... it’s called the raising of kundalini...”
This ancient yogic concept, recorded in literature and oral tradition, is becoming widely known in the West as people such as Ram Dass and Shirley MacLaine speak and write about it. But the most important voice among them is Pandit Gopi Krishna, who died in 1984 at the age of eighty-one. He brought a marked degree of good sense and insight to the field of esoteric/New Age studies. I knew him personally, having interviewed him in Zurich for four days in 1976 and on several later occasions when he came to America from his home in Srinagar, India. I also read with deepest interest his dozen-plus books on the subject of kundalini, beginning shortly after his first—an autobiography entitled Kundalini, the Evolutionary Energy in Man—was published in the United States in 1970. I was deeply impressed by the man, not only for his obvious erudition and clear thinking about this most profound human experience, but also by his character—his honesty, kindness, and humility. All these marked him in my judgment as a sage.
“Pandit” is an honorific term meaning “learned man,” so Gopi Krishna should not be thought of as a guru. He said clearly that he sought no followers, accepted no disciples, and made no demands for asceticism. Rather, his mission was to arouse interest in the nature of evolution and enlightenment, and to do that he wanted coworkers in scientific and scholarly research, not devotees. Most important, he said that the truth of his observations about a potent biological link between sex and higher consciousness—which he claims is the motive force behind evolution and all spiritual and supernormal phenomena—should be tested using the principles, methodology, and (insofar as possible) technology of science.
The essence of his claims is threefold: first, he has discovered that the reproductive system is also the mechanism by which evolution proceeds; second, religion is based on inherent evolutionary impulses in the psyche; and, third, there is a predetermined target for human evolution toward which the entire race is being irresistibly drawn. Whether humanity will arrive there or extinguish itself is another matter—one that Gopi Krishna says is the fundamental motive behind his efforts to demonstrate our “divine destiny.”
Kundalini is the key term in Gopi Krishna’s theory of evolution. Coming from ancient Sanskrit, it means “coiled up” like a snake or spring, and it implies latent energy or potential to expand. Gopi Krishna often translates it as “latent power-reservoir of energy” or “psychosomatic power center.” Kundalini, he claims, is the fundamental bioenergy of life, stored primarily in the sex organs but present throughout the entire body. This potent psychic radiation is normally associated with the genitals for simple continuance of the species by providing a sex drive. This is what Freud called libido (although the Freudian conception is strictly psychological and lacks the energy tie-in to physics and biology Gopi Krishna is pointing out).
However, Gopi Krishna says, kundalini is also the basis for the attainment of a higher state of consciousness. The kundalini energy can be concentrated in the brain to produce enlightenment and genius—higher mental perception. Its potency is our potential. Such a state, if widely attained, would mean a new species of humanity, a higher race. Thus, kundalini, the bridge between mind and matter, can be the evolutionary cause of creation as well as procreation. It is, Gopi Krishna says, the evolutionary energy and mechanism operating in the human race.
Kundalini is traditionally symbolized in Hindu, Vedic, and tantric texts as a sleeping serpent coiled around the base of the human spine, indicating its close relationship with the sex organs. The concept is not limited to Indian literature, however. It has been described in the ancient records of Tibet, Egypt, Sumer, China, Greece, and other cultures and traditions, including early Judaism and Christianity. The Pharaoh’s headdress, the feathered serpent of Mexico and South America, the dragon of oriental mythology, the serpent in the Garden of Eden—all are indicative of kundalini, Gopi Krishna maintains.
The source of the “serpent power” is prana, a primal cosmic energy outside the electromagnetic spectrum and other forces known to official Western science. However, many prescientific and unorthodox scientific traditions have identified a life force from which other energies and paranormal phenomena are derived. Acupuncture calls it chi, the Greeks wrote of ether, Christianity terms it the Holy Spirit, Wilhelm Reich named it orgone, and Soviet psychic researchers have their “bioplasma.” Carl Jung said there are more than fifty synonyms for prana or prima materia in alchemical literature. (Dozens of other terms can be given, as I show in my 1977 book Future Science.) Apparently these are different labels for the same basic energy—or aspects of it—that permeates living organisms and is the source of all vital activity, including thought, feeling, perception, and movement. It especially focuses itself in the sexual organs, where the kundalini process begins.
Gene Kieffer, president of the Kundalini Research Foundation, has elaborated on the notion of prana as life energy. In a personal conversation, he told me: “The most powerful motivating force of life, as Freud has shown, is sex and the pleasure drawn from the sexual act. Similarly, the most powerful motivating force to draw humanity onto the evolutionary path, according to the traditional concept of kundalini, is ananda, a Sanskrit word meaning ‘bliss.’ This highly extended state of consciousness, permeated with an extreme form of rapture, is said to be possible only when the consumption of prana by the brain is greatly enhanced.”
How can it be enhanced? As I mentioned, spiritual disciplines are the key. In a New York Times article, Gopi Krishna pointed out that sublimation—raising up—of sex energy is the basic lever of all spiritual disciplines. But, he said, “the all-inclusive nature of sex energy has not yet been correctly understood by psychologists. In fact, the very term reproductive, or sex, energy is a misnomer. Reproduction is but one of the aspects of the life energy, of which the other theater of activity is the brain.”[1]
Surrounding and permeating the gross tissues of the body, Gopi Krishna writes in The Dawn of a New Science, “a living electricity, acting intelligently and purposefully, controls the activity of every molecule of living matter. It carries the life principle from one place to the other, energizes, overhauls and purifies the neurons and maintains the life-giving subtle area of the body much in the same way as the blood plasma maintains the grosser part.”[2]
That vital essence is extracted by the nervous system from surrounding tissue in the form of an extremely fine biochemical essence of a highly delicate and volatile nature. In humans, this essence, existing at the molecular or submolecular level, especially focuses itself in the sexual organs, where the kundalini process begins.
There is a subtle but direct connection between the brain and the organs of generation via the spine, Gopi Krishna maintains. The spinal cord and the canal through which it runs serve as the avenue for transforming sexuality to spirituality. Through certain techniques known and practiced since ancient times, the kundalini energy can be aroused and guided up the center of the spinal cord ( sushumna, in yogic terminology) to a dormant center, called the Cave of Brahma (Brahmarandhra), in the brain’s ventricular cavity, the site of the entryway to the seventh chakra. (I’ll explain that term in a moment.)
This “living electricity” or “superintelligent energy,” as Gopi Krishna sometimes calls it, is an ultrapotent, high-grade form of bioplasma—concentrated prana. But the techniques for controlling it are extremely dangerous. They are equivalent, figuratively speaking, to letting a child play with a nuclear reactor, and should be undertaken only under the guidance of a proven master of the spiritual tradition being followed.
The nature of the chakras in yogic physiology is not clearly agreed upon by modern interpreters—so be careful of accepting dogmatic pronouncements by spiritual teachers and New Age commentators. For example, author Sam Keen and psychologist Robert Ornstein feel that the chakras are strictly metaphoric, lacking in any physical reality. Scholar Joseph Campbell likewise regards them as merely psychological teaching devices—merely concepts. Others such as M.P. Pandit, an exponent of Sri Aurobindo, and William Tiller, professor of materials science at Stanford University, maintain that chakras exist in the “subtle body” of man, sometimes called the astral or etheric body, and influence the physical body through the endocrine system, with which they correlate at a nonphysical level of existence. Swami Agehananda Bharati, chairman of the anthropology department at Syracuse University, declares kundalini to be a lot of “claptrap” and “latter-day nonsense.” Gopi Krishna, however, says that chakras are nerve plexes—major ganglia along the spine, observed directly in the body through clairvoyance by ancient yogis.
There are said to be six major chakras along the cerebrospinal column, but the location of the seventh chakra (termed sahasrara) is disputed. It has been identified by various authorities as the pineal gland, the pituitary gland, and the anterior fontanelle. Gopi Krishna, however, says it is the entire brain itself. In a letter to me, he wrote, “The seventh centre in the brain is not actually designated as a ‘chakra’ but as ‘sahasrara’ in the Tantric books and ‘Usha-Nisha-Kamala’ in the Buddhist texts. It is often shown surrounding the head in the statues of Buddha, more or less like a cap. In this sense, ‘sahasrara’ refers to the cerebral cortex and, in fact, the whole of the brain. This is obvious from the fact that once Kundalini enters into the Brahmarandhra ... the whole of the cranium is illuminated and a new pattern of consciousness is born.”
From its repository in the reproductive organs, a fine stream of living energy filters into the brain as fuel for the evolutionary process. As the energy moves upward, it passes through various chakras along the central channel of the spinal cord into the topmost, the brain. This does not happen in every case. In fact, it is quite rare for the kundalini process to be carried to completion. But the genetically ripe person to whom it happens experiences a golden-white light within his or her head. Apparently this is the same light that is visibly seen by people as the aura or halo around saints and highly evolved sages.
The flow of kundalini into the brain has been described by mystics as “ambrosia” and “nectar,” giving rise to exquisite sensations similar to those of orgasm but surpassing them by many orders of magnitude. The sensations are felt most intensely above the palate in the midbrain and in the hindbrain in a descending arc parallel to the curve of the palate. This is known in yoga physiology as the sankini, the curved duct through which the bioplasma passes into the brain.
Kundalini is at work all the time in everyone, and is present from birth in mystics and seers, but in most people there is only a “dripping” rather than a “streaming.” This upward streaming, which is a biological restatement of what Freud apparently meant by the term “sublimation of the libido,” explains the source of an artist’s or an intellectual’s mental creativity. Beyond that are those rare people whom Gopi Krishna calls “finished specimens of the perfect man of the future,” such as Buddha, Jesus, and Vyasa. In them we see “an incredible combination of factors, both favorable heredity and cultural readiness, which produced those who, endowed with a superior type of consciousness and in possession of paranormal gifts, amazed their contemporaries with their extraordinary psychical and intellectual talents which [ordinary people] ignorant of the Law [of evolution] ascribed to special prerogative from God.”[3]
Variations in the size of the energy stream determine the intellectual and aesthetic development of an individual, with geniuses having a comparatively larger volume of bioplasma streaming into the brain. The wide variation in types of genius depends on the particular region of the brain that is irrigated and developed. Thus, through certain occult techniques and spiritual disciplines, an individual of normal intelligence can accelerate the evolutionary process to attain the stature of an intellectual prodigy and beyond, to genius. This concept directly challenges current notions that intelligence is basically determined at birth by one’s genes.
Prana, the fine biological essence, is not in itself consciousness. It is only the means of nourishing our consciousness-receiving equipment, the nervous system—the body’s link with universal consciousness. During the kundalini process, the entire nervous system undergoes a microbiological change and is transformed, especially the brain. The result of a fully awakened and developed kundalini is both perceptible changes in the organism and a new state of consciousness, the cosmic consciousness of mystics and enlightened seers. This vital awareness of unity with God, Gopi Krishna says, is the core experience behind all the world’s major religions, and is the goal of all true spiritual and occult practices. Humanity has an innate hunger for this state of paranormal perception. Moreover, bountiful nature has provided the means of achieving it: kundalini, the biological basis of religion and genius.
This is the “secret” behind yoga and all other spiritual disciplines, esoteric psychologies, hermetic philosophies, and genuine occult mysteries. It is also the key to genius, psychic power, artistic talents, scientific and intellectual creativity, and extreme longevity with good health. (An age of 120 with unimpaired mental faculties was commonly achieved among the ancient illuminati, Gopi Krishna says, and an age of 150 is quite probable in the kundalini-altered future.) But if improperly aroused, without right guidance and preparation, kundalini can be horribly painful and destructive, even fatal. Unsustained by a sensible, healthy manner of living—meaning regulated and balanced, not ascetic or orgiastic—kundalini can turn malignant and become the source of deteriorating health, terrible bodily heat and pain, many forms of mental illness, and even sudden death. In physiological terms, the pranic stream has gone astray into one of the two side channels of the spinal cord (the left side being called ida and the right side pingala in yogic physiology).
The pranic stream, Gopi Krishna says, is affected by “every shade of passion and emotion, by food and drink, by environment and mode of life.” It is altered by desire and ambition, by conduct and behavior and, in fact, by all the thousands of influences, from the most powerful to the slightest, that act on and shape life from birth to death. Thus the need for balanced, moral living is based on biological imperative.
There is another condition, too, even worse for humanity. Kundalini-gone-astray has been the cause of evil geniuses in history, such as Hitler. However, in such cases the kundalini energy has been active since birth, as with all geniuses. Their lives are usually so filled with difficulties that the kundalini energy can become malignant if the finer qualities necessary for psychological stability have not been made a part of their upbringing. Lack of these finer traits constitutes a built-in safeguard of nature that bars the unstable individual from access to higher levels of consciousness. This moral dimension is what distinguishes seers and sages from psychics and gifted intellectuals who are otherwise quite ordinary.
Knowledge of kundalini, Gopi Krishna says, is the only real means of preventing further Hitlers. It is also the best means of preventing history from ending in either the bang of nuclear holocaust or the whimpering slow death of an overpopulated, starving, resourceless planet. “The only way to safety and survival lies in determining the evolutionary needs and in erecting our social and political systems in conformity with those needs,” he maintains. His writings envisage a new structure of human society, a new social and political order to enable the entire race to devote itself to the development of the powers and possibilities latent within.
All reality is governed by one mighty law that is simultaneously biological and spiritual: Thou shalt evolve to a higher state of consciousness via the kundalini process. This law of evolution, Gopi Krishna says, can be objectively demonstrated in people with unquestionable proof using the techniques and technology of science: “The awakening of kundalini is the greatest enterprise and most wonderful achievement in front of man.”
That is a vast claim, and most neurophysiologists and psychologists will probably regard it as simplistic, if not crackpot. After all, others from both East and West have talked and written about kundalini since earliest times. But Gopi Krishna, who makes clear that he has only rediscovered an ancient tradition, was also a man of science. In that regard, he says something that has not been said before: kundalini can be scientifically verified in the laboratory to prove the essential truth of religious tradition. We can get objective evidence that will show what has been the major claim of religious and spiritual teachers throughout history—namely, that man was born to attain a higher state, a state of union with the divine. Until such proof is available, Gopi Krishna says, don’t believe what I say—just do the research.
How did Gopi Krishna come to have such a radical message? What are the sources of knowledge for this man who flunked out of college, lived a simple life as husband and father, and worked most of his career as a minor civil servant in the Indian government? The answer is: personal experience and scholarly research.
In 1937, after seventeen years of steadfast meditation (he got up faithfully at 4:00a.m. to meditate, even after his wedding night!), on Christmas morning, Gopi Krishna awakened the kundalini force. In his autobiography, he writes, “There was a sound like a nerve thread snapping and instantaneously a silvery streak passed through the spinal cord, exactly like the sinuous movement of a white serpent in rapid flight, pouring an effulgent, cascading shower of brilliant vital energy into my brain, filling my head with a blissful luster....”
What began during meditation was the development of a higher state of consciousness in Gopi Krishna. But the process was far from complete. What followed were years of hell, periods of severe ordeal when the changes being made in his nervous system caused enormous pain, prolonged sickness, near-death, bewilderment, and self-doubts about his sanity.
Slowly, carefully, he began to conduct experiments in the laboratory of his own body, observing the sometimes terrifying effects as he encountered the mysterious bioenergy. He notes in his autobiography, “I was destined to witness my own transformation ... attended all along by great physical and mental suffering. But what I witnessed ... is so contrary to many accepted notions of science ... that when what I have experienced is proved empirically there must occur a far-reaching, revolutionary change in every sphere of human activity and conduct.” The transformation included the spontaneous appearance of psychic, intellectual, and literary powers.
Local gurus and holy men were unable to give Gopi Krishna any relief or understanding, so he undertook a reading program through the literature of religion, psychology, and occultism. He found that kundalini was recognized at least five thousand years ago but was always a closely guarded secret recorded in veiled language and allusion that made little sense to someone who had no personal experience of it. Like acupuncture, which was also known that long ago, this knowledge had been lost to modern man. But, Gopi Krishna says, it can be recovered and grounded in scientific concepts and terminology through laboratory research and scholarly studies of the thousands of still-untranslated old texts dealing with kundalini. Thus, what has been recorded until now in occult terms will be demystified and explained in simple language.
How might the reality of kundalini be shown? First, a person in whom it is fully developed will clearly be a genius. New knowledge will come from him or her, knowledge such as Gopi Krishna himself offers that elegantly unites the entire psychic/occult/spiritual scene with evolutionary theory and the transpersonal psychology arising from Freud, Maslow, and Jung.
Next, as the kundalini process transforms a person, the nervous system and brain undergo changes that will be observable (although the necessary instruments for observing them may still be only on the drawing boards).
Third, the “food” the body uses to nourish the nervous system during transformation comes from the sex organs—the “essence” of seminal fluid in men and what Gopi Krishna calls “the erotic fluids” in women. Thus, the reproductive organs increase their activity dramatically, producing much more copiously than usual. This, incidentally, explains why ancient statuary and paintings show men, even a Pharaoh and an Egyptian god, in meditation with an erect phallus. This is not meant by the artist to be erotic at all, Gopi Krishna says, but rather is a frank and literal depiction of a biological fact about kundalini.
This fluid sexual essence, existing at the molecular or submolecular level, streams from the reproductive organs into the spinal canal and then upward into the brain. This can be verified by a spinal tap at the time the phenomenon is occurring.
The bloodstream also carries nerve food during this organic transformation. Hence, the composition of the blood changes due to the awakening of kundalini and ought to be examined in any research program. Heart activity (pulse rate) and other internal organs undergo radical changes. Likewise, perception, digestion, and elimination change dramatically—still more clues to look for in the full spectrum of physical-mental-behavioral transmutations that necessarily must occur as nature prepares the organism through a total cellular reorganization for a higher state of being. These are matters that can be objectively determined by neurophysiologists and medical researchers.
In addition, the person will have high moral character and other traits typically associated with spiritual masters, such as psychic and literary talents. (Gopi Krishna says he was amazed to find himself at age fifty spontaneously writing poetry in nine languages, four of which were unknown to him. He had never taken any interest in poetry nor attempted any literary performance, he claims, yet long narrative poems in rhymed metrical verse would impress themselves on his awareness so quickly that he could scarcely write them down.)
What about celibacy? In growing to higher consciousness, is it necessary, as some claim, to abstain from sex and to “mortify the flesh”?
From Gopi Krishna’s point of view, the answer is a firm no—with one condition. Since he himself was married and had three children, he strongly disagrees with those who regard sexual contact as detrimental to spiritual evolution. Moreover, he points out that during the Vedic Age thousands of years ago, when many of the great yogic scriptures were first written, several hundred inspired sages were recognized as enlightened men, and in almost every case they were married and had children.
Gopi Krishna feels that an enlightened person can enjoy an active sex life up to an age of 100—and even beyond! But he emphasizes the need—arising from the biological laws of spiritual evolution—of basing sexual activity on love and respect, while avoiding immoderate or promiscuous behavior.
Generally speaking, he says, celibacy is contrary to nature, since enlightenment is an evolutionary process, with heredity playing an important role by stamping the genes of the enlightened so that their biological gains through spiritual disciplines can be passed to their progeny. Suppression of sexuality out of contempt or hatred of our “lower nature” is an act of ignorance leading only to atrophy of the sexual system. The biological fact that only the primates, especially humans, are perennially ready for sex is a clue to linkage between our animal origins and our higher destiny. But there is a critical period during the kundalini process—lasting possibly as long as a year or two—when celibacy is important. During that time, the fluid essence is needed for remolding the nervous system and brain. Otherwise, the kundalini awakening may be “aborted” through misuse. That is the only condition Gopi Krishna recognizes as demanding celibacy.
The “sage of Srinagar” has broken new ground and—is it proper to say?—sown seed. He has written about his discovery of the mighty law linking biology, physics, and psychology in a dozen books and numerous articles. The scope and depth of Gopi Krishna’s thought is awe-inspiring. In unraveling the kundalini experience, he has apparently discovered the key to understanding practically every mystery and paranormal phenomenon that now puzzles science. The matters he raises relate to everyone on planet earth. They challenge the entire scientific community, a community that so far has been unable either to explain humanity or tame it. As Albert Einstein observed, nuclear energy and the atomic bomb changed everything except our thinking. And the renowned neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield admitted in The Mystery of the Mind that all his experience in trying to understand mental experience—the mind—on the basis of brain studies came to almost nothing. “The mind is peculiar,” he wrote. “It has energy. The form of that energy is different from [the electrochemical energy in the nerve pathways]” Gopi Krishna feels we can identify the mysterious mind energy that eluded Penfield. He also feels that it can do what Einstein hoped—change human thinking. That is because kundalini, as Gopi Krishna presents it, is the first testable field theory of psychophysical linkages among body, mind, and cosmos, covering the entire spectrum of psychological, psychical, and spiritual phenomena. With it comes the possibility of objectively studying higher consciousness, thus answering questions presently beyond science and ending philosophical speculation about the condition.
This is a daring stance—daring, yet rationally and plausibly presented. It is a sober and serious call for science to become involved in demonstrating the high spiritual destiny of the human race. Nothing since the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” so vigorously calls attention to the controversial cause of evolution. But whereas the Scopes trial flamed antagonism between science and religion, Gopi Krishna is making a breathtaking attempt to heal the split. And it is humorously ironic that Western science and technology—often called the product of a godless, materialist approach to life—might be the means by which this is demonstrated to the world. Let Gopi Krishna, therefore, have the last word: