Gopi Krishna (1903-1984) was one of the most formative figures in the kundalini landscape of the West. He authored eighteen books, including The Secret of Yoga and The Biological Basis of Religion and Genius. Here, Gene Kieffer, founder of the Kundalini Research Foundation, provides a foreword to an interview with Gopi Krishna, discussing Krishna’s unique understanding of academia and science through his kundalini consciousness. Having worked with Gopi Krishna for fourteen years, Kieffer provides insight into Krishna’s background, his kundalini experience, and how his new wisdom relates to the scientific endeavors of the modern era. This essay serves as an introduction to a never-before-published interview with Gopi Krishna (which follows), in which he expands on his own experience of transcendental consciousness, his candid opinion of modern psychology and science, and his belief about the predetermined destination of the human brain and consciousness.
Kundalini is the most mysterious force in the universe, bar none. Compared with the behavior of infinitely small particles such as quarks and neutrinos, or with astronomical objects such as black holes and quasars, all of which mystify scientists to no end, kundalini tops them all by many light years.
Gopi Krishna, who attributed his kundalini awakening at the age of thirty-four to a practice of single-minded concentration, a disciplined moral code, favorable heredity, and most especially grace, said nearly fifty years later, “The Mystery surrounding Kundalini is so deep that the human intellect can never hope to fathom it. It is, in other words, the profound Mystery behind the universe.”[1]
Stephen Hawking, the world’s most respected theoretical physicist for more than thirty years, once thought that if science pushed just a little further and a little harder, it would be possible to “know the mind of God.” But a couple of other theoreticians convinced him he had been wrong—not about everything, but about one of his most fundamental theories: what happens when “information” crosses the “event horizon” of a black hole. He said it would disappear forever, but now he admits he was wrong.
When the Large Hadron Collider goes into operation at CERN in Switzerland, sometime in 2009, launching what is being called the “God particle” hunt, scientists hope to solve one or two longstanding puzzles about the nature of the universe and how it came into being. No doubt they will discover some extraordinary new facts, but I believe they will come away more baffled than ever. Does this mean that we may never discover all of the great mysteries?
Never say never. For as long as our sun continues to shine forth as it does now, the human race will continue to steadily climb up the ladder of evolution. We may colonize other planets similar to earth, and the path of evolution will still be beckoning us to keep on climbing. There is no end. For us humans, evolution has hardly begun.
After he had awakened kundalini, Gopi Krishna hovered between life and death for nearly a dozen years, with no help available to show him what to do to lessen his agony. His story, a classic tale of survival, has been published in many languages all over the world. Although he lived in India, where just about every yogi has some knowledge of the phenomenon, no one came forward to help him in any way.
In 1975, a three-day seminar on yoga, science, and man was held in New Delhi, sponsored by the government and several leading institutions of science, education, and yoga. On the final day, participants and observers were invited to ask questions of the principal speakers and panelists. A gentleman in the audience held up his hand and asked, “Would one of you please describe what it is like to be illuminated?” All eyes turned to Gopi Krishna for the answer. Nobody, including the yogis on stage, doubted that he was illuminated. Anyone who has read one of his more than twenty books on kundalini will agree that there is no other modern writer on kundalini with his command of knowledge on the subject of mystical ecstasy.
A person such as Gopi Krishna doesn’t come on the world’s stage by an accident of nature. His physical and mental torment for more than a decade after his awakening wasn’t without purpose. He had to learn everything possible about the phenomenon so that he could pass it on to future generations.
His first book, Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man, was published in 1967, and it still stands as the primary source for all other writers on the subject. It may well be that nothing new will be added to the world’s store of knowledge on kundalini for another two or three centuries, until the next specimen of illuminated consciousness appears on the stage.
We’ve all heard about autistic savants. Up until a few years ago, they were called idiot savants. There may be between fifty and a hundred of these extraordinary people in the world today. Many have appeared on television shows such as 60 Minutes. And despite a growing number of institutes solely concerned with understanding the cause behind the phenomenon, very little is really known about it.
Take the case of Daniel Tammet in England. He can reel off the number for pi to 22,500 decimal places. When challenged by scientists to learn Icelandic, one of the most difficult languages in the world, he did just that in one week! Born January 31, 1979, he is known as a high-functioning autistic savant gifted with a facility for mathematical and language learning. In his memoir, Born on a Blue Day, he describes how having epilepsy, synesthesia, and Asperger’s syndrome all deeply affected his childhood. Scientists will one day confirm that autistic savants have an active kundalini but that the cosmic prana is confined to a very small section of the brain. When they do, they will have proved that the epilepsy and Asperger’s syndrome in Daniel Tammet’s childhood were also caused by kundalini.
A “regular” genius, like Mozart, Michelangelo, or Shakespeare, is also born with kundalini active, but in his or her case the cosmic prana floods a much larger section of the brain. Some are great musicians, pianists, composers, artists, or mathematicians. Others, Isaac Newton, for example, are great scientists. Many geniuses are eccentric. But whether eccentric or perfectly normal, all geniuses were born as such.
Keeping this in mind, you can now begin to appreciate the phenomenon of illumination, a condition in which an even more concentrated form of cosmic prana permeates the entire brain—the Thousand-Petalled Lotus—whether the man or woman experiencing it was born with kundalini fully active or it became active at some later stage of life. As mentioned earlier, in Gopi Krishna’s case, it happened when he was thirty-four.
The reason he did not become a great composer, linguist, or mathematician, or all three, as happens with some polymaths, is due to his impoverished circumstances. He was born in a mud hut in rural Kashmir, and there was never enough money to provide the necessities of life for his parents, two sisters, and himself. His mother never learned to read or write, and his own education continued only through the twelfth grade, after which he had to find full-time work as a clerk in a local government office to help care for the family.
Now try to picture several different kinds of savants all rolled up into one, and then combine some of those qualities with uncommon wisdom, genius, and prophetic vision: that is what kundalini can bestow on an ordinary person when all conditions are favorable and the Goddess is smiling. No amount of meditation, pranayama, or recitation of mantras can force open the door to cosmic consciousness. It has to be opened from the other side.
There is a kundalini yoga center not far from my home that regularly sends out announcements of its scheduled activities. This month’s bulletin says that “Shakti or Kundalini awakening is available by appointment.” Generally, shaktipat is harmless.
Before I met Gopi Krishna, I wasn’t averse to paying for this sort of thing. I had purchased special mantras from high-level yogis, and I once traveled quite a distance to learn self-hypnosis, so I could slip through the door to superconsciousness for the equivalent of five hundred dollars in today’s currency. It was the kind of superconsciousness known as “soul travel” or daydreaming. At the time, I must have thought it was worth the money, but not anymore. I have since learned something about Indian metaphysics.
The highest attainment for any human being is the experience of samadhi, or mystical vision. In that state, the subtle worlds of mind and prana become perceptible. Gopi Krishna describes prana as life energy, or as “the bewildering source behind the amazing organizations and instincts of living creatures.” There is a different spectrum of prana for each form of life “with modifications for each individual of that form. Each distinct human personality reflects a distinct type of Pranic Spectrum. No two spectrums are alike in every respect, as there are no two personalities similar in every way.”[2]
During the course of mystical ecstasy or samadhi, a new, more potent stream of prana enters the brain, creating a revolution in consciousness. “No words can express the grandeur and sublimity of the experience nor the happiness and serenity felt during Samadhi,” Gopi Krishna says. “In rare cases, the experience can become a perennial feature of human life,” meaning that one remains in that state during sleep and wakefulness, and even in dreams.[3] When awake in the sense that we normally understand the word, one is fully alert, just like any normal person.
In India, perennial ecstasy has been called the Sahaja or Jiwan-Mukta state. Gopi Krishna tells us that when he retired for the night to sleep, it was like waking up for the normal person. And when he awakened in the morning, it was just the opposite: as if he were dreaming. It’s difficult if not impossible for us to imagine such a condition, except that we are told that in the sahaja state, one is completely different from an ordinary person but at the same time, all of the senses and the mind are superalert.
Gopi Krishna could enter another world, another dimension of consciousness, at will. Perhaps I’ve already said too much, because I must confess that I know nothing of mystical consciousness from my own experience. His prolific literary output itself is ample evidence of what superconsciousness can achieve in a very short period of time. Whenever he turned his attention to work, he was capable of writing on a variety of subjects: on moral values, the demands of leadership in the atomic age, and so forth.
The word pandit means learned man. There are countless pandits in India, but as far as I know, none is illuminated. Gopi Krishna didn’t become a pandit because he earned an advanced degree at a university, as is generally the case. Rather, he became illuminated, and then it was only natural that the pandits of Kashmir would refer to him as Pandit.
Krishna says the whole ocean of prana that sustains the human race today is in a state of flux. “It is this motion in the fundamental element of life which is behind the evolution of the brain and the transformation of consciousness.”[4]
The human world is advancing in knowledge because prana is moving in that direction, he has written. “And this movement or flux, in turn, causes subtle evolutionary changes in the brain which we are not able to measure but will do so when the mystery shrouding prana is solved. This will also solve the riddle of talent, genius, and extrasensory perception, because a well-marked change in prana is responsible for these conditions, too.”[5]
He says further that the evolutionary change occurring in the race now is irresistible. “All of us are sailing in the same mysterious ship without knowing for which port it is bound.” So, now, at last, we should know the purpose of life, which is to achieve cosmic consciousness. It may take another Century or two before scientists are in on the secret. They will come to know it sooner or later, however, but only after it is common knowledge. “Many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.” (Matthew 19:30).
We cannot imagine the mental state of a musical or mathematical genius, just as a child cannot imagine the mind of an adult. It is almost like a cat suddenly waking up from a nap with a newly planted human brain in its skull. Gopi Krishna had to deal with that kind of radical shift in his consciousness when kundalini unexpectedly shot up from the base of his spine and into his brain on Christmas Day in 1937. No wonder a decade passed before he was able to begin writing books—first his mind/brain had to become stabilized. His books, each in its own way, are of such a profound nature that one should be prepared to change his or her thinking when reading them. If the academic world were enticed into reading them, scholars, too, would find themselves as unprepared for his revelations as the cat with a human brain.
So why would anyone want to become knowledgeable about kundalini? The answer is that this kind of knowledge is more empowering than any other. It is not mere information. Words from the pen of an illuminated person are more potent than LSD. They cause major beneficial changes at the subatomic levels of the brain.
If being in the state of samadhi only meant having a blissful holiday traipsing through the galaxies, that would be one thing. But a superconscious person is able to gather up and bring back to the so-called real-world priceless gems of knowledge that could be applied to everyday life. Most of these gems have yet to be appreciated; they await the dawn of a New Age in which the significance of illumination is made the core curriculum of a doctoral program at MIT or Harvard.
Think of Nikola Tesla and countless other great inventors, writers, or engineers who received valuable hints and clues in their periods of reverie that could be incorporated into their creative projects. Once kundalini is widely understood as the biological mechanism or channel through which a person may obtain boons of every kind from the cosmic ocean of consciousness, scientists will eagerly begin to investigate the phenomenon in a serious way.
I will close this brief introduction to Gopi Krishna and his discoveries with the words of an illuminated poet who lived in the Kashmir Valley more than a thousand years ago. He wrote a hymn of praise addressed to “Super-Energy” or the Goddess Kundalini. The identity of the poet is unknown. Gopi Krishna translated the original Sanskrit text, called Panchastavi (a hymn in five parts), which consists of about two hundred stanzas, one of which is reproduced here. If you read it through slowly and then ponder its importance for the evolution of future generations, you will be doing your progeny a great favor: