A leader of a social organization devoted to helping the disadvantaged in his community, Gopi Krishna was an Indian yogi, mystic, writer, teacher, and social reformer who was committed to the evolution of human consciousness and to the establishment and continuance of world peace.
Born in a small village near Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir on 30th May 1903, Krishna spent his early years there, and later moved to Lahore, current day Pakistan. At the age of twenty, he returned to Kashmir. During the succeeding years he secured a post in the state government, married and raised a family. He was one of the first to popularise the concept of Kundalini among Western readers.
Kundalini is a form of divine feminine energy believed to be located at the base of the spine. It is an important concept in 'Shaiva Tantra', where it is believed to be a force or power associated with the divine feminine or the formless aspect of the Goddess.
Books by Gopi Krishna
Gopi Krishna produced poetry and books in prose and verse form.
His autobiography Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man, which presented his personal account of the phenomenon of his awakening of Kundalini, (later renamed Living with Kundalini), was published in Great Britain and the United States and has since appeared in eleven major languages.
Before his death in 1984 at the age of eighty-one, Gopi Krishna would write seventeen books on Higher Consciousness – three of them entirely in verse. He credited this output not to his own efforts but to inspiration from a higher source.
Some of his books are:
The Real Nature of Mystical Experience
The Awakening of Kundalini
The secret of yoga
Kundalini: Path to Higher Consciousness
The Real Nature of Mystical Experience
Mystical experience
According to his autobiography, Krishna’s spiritual experiences began early in life. When he was eight, he was spontaneously overtaken with the question, “What am I?”. He then fainted and fell to the ground. Days later, Krishna had an extraordinarily vivid dream in which he was surrounded by ethereal beings and found himself transformed in an atmosphere of luminous serenity.
In his autobiography he has mentioned that at the age of thirty-four, while meditating one morning, he experienced the sudden and forceful awakening of Kundalini. As he sat meditating - exactly as he had for the three hours before dawn each day for seventeen years - he became aware of a powerful, pleasurable sensation at the base of his spine. He continued to meditate, and as he did, the sensation began to spread and extend upwards. It continued to expand until he heard, quite without warning, a roar like that of a waterfall and felt a stream of liquid light enter his brain.
Social Activism
One of the little known facts about Gopi Krishna's life is that he was a crusader for women's rights. Putting this in historical and cultural context shows how very extraordinary his dedication to this cause was. In 1930 it had been less than ten years since women had won the vote and the vast majority of the women in the world were still considered chattel. In India conditions for women were even worse and a man campaigning publicly for women's rights would have been unheard of.
