Very few individuals lead a life entirely connected with mysticism. Some become known as mystics or gurus for material gain, and their abilities are eventually shown to be hoaxes or delusions. Others have occasional periods of mystic attunement, but the result is often lost in a life otherwise spent in an ordinary way. Still others degenerate into insanity or a fluctuating, unreliable state causing doubt to be thrown on all their opinions and writings.

One individual in the 20th century devoted three hours every morning from the age of 17 to 34 to meditation. Raised in a religiously minded family, he turned to meditation to satisfy an urge to discover a reality more permanent than the ephemeral physical world. His meditation culminated in an extraordinary experience of transcendentalism with parallels in classical cases of mysticism.

He experienced remarkable inner visions, as documented in his autobiography, The Awakening of Kundalini (See extract on facing page). But for physiological reasons which he devoted much of his life to unravelling, whatever changes his brain or nervous system underwent had a disturbing effect. After enthusiastically attempting to repeat the experience, his personality became unhinged, and he experienced a prolonged period of physical and mental decay.

So his story would have ended, if not for the devotion of his wife, and his persistence and will to live. He searched for an answer to his predicament, but could not find a single authority or document to assist him. The ancient Sanskrit texts on Kundalini were veiled in mystery and very frustrating in the light of modern medical knowledge; even more so to an individual searching for unambiguous insights which might help save his life.

His condition continued to deteriorate and he was forced to leave his clerical post in the Indian government. A long period in which he often avoided all religious discussion and felt repelled by all notions of spirituality showed a gradual improvement until he was able to sustain concentration for short periods again.

He found his health returned slowly, but he noticed something else. Around everything he perceived a strange silvery luminescence. If this was all that one could expect from long and painful efforts, he at first suspected he may have only wasted his time and energy.

During one such spell of intense concentration I suddenly felt a strange sensation below the base of the spine, at the place touching the seat...the sensation was so extraordinary and so pleasing that my attention was forcibly drawn towards it.

..I had read glowing accounts, written by learned men, of great benefits resulting from concentration, and of the miraculous powers acquired by yogis through such exercises...with a great effort I kept my attention centered round the lotus. Suddenly, with a roar like that of a waterfall, I felt a stream of liquid light entering my brain through the spinal cord.

Entirely unprepared for such a development, I was completely taken by surprise; but regaining self-control instantaneously, I remained sitting in the same posture, keeping my mind on the point of concentration. The illumination grew brighter and brighter, the roaring louder, I experienced a rocking sensation and then felt myself slipping out of my body, entirely enveloped in a halo of light. It is impossible to describe the experience accurately. I felt the point of consciousness that was myself growing wider, surrounded by waves of light.

It grew wider and wider, spreading outwards while the body, normally the immediate object of its perception, appeared to have receded into the distance until I became entirely unconscious of it. I was now all consciousness, without any outline, without any idea of a corporeal appendage, without any feeling or sensation coming from the senses, immersed in a sea of light, simultaneously conscious and aware of every point, spread out, as it were, in all directions without any barrier or material obstruction.

I was no longer myself, or to be more accurate, no longer as I knew myself to be, a small point of awareness confined in a body, but instead was a vast circle of consciousness in which the body was but a point, bathed in light and in a state of exaltation and happiness impossible to describe.

Regaining his health over many years he was not keen to encourage more mystical leaps into the infinite, and contented himself with what he saw as a strange aberration of very little significance. During spells of suffering he cursed himself for tampering with the unknown and bringing such devastation onto himself and his family.

But gradually, he found himself drawn to matters of mysticism again, and with patiently small attempts at meditation found to his surprise the ability to poduce poetry, a form of writing he had no taste for, in German, a language he had almost no knowledge of:

O, people of the world unite, to pave the way for peace sublime.
Divided, you yourselves invite disastrous war, unrest and crime.

In time he found himself drawn to writing poetry in English, a language he was not altogether comfortable with, and saw that it had a global message, beyond anything he could have thought of himself. Sometimes the lines and verses came to him so quickly that he found it impossible to write fast enough to put them all to paper.

Nevertheless, this writing became a firm feature of his consciousness, which by this time had become much more stable, and in which he found he was able to look within, while fully conscious, becoming aware of a dimension of high intelligence he would never have imagined before his mystical experiences, but which surrounded humanity on every side.

He refused to write down many experiences, feeling they would not be believed. Those he did commit to paper often caused him much ridicule, especially among the scientists of his day who not only criticised him, but his poetry, which they felt was not particularly good, and a poor reward for the long years of suffering he claimed to have had undergone.

His books now number among the most authoritative on the subject of evolution, consciousness, and mystical experience. No student of yoga or transcendental experience will have failed to be aware of his existence. Even in the blinkered fields of science, he became an object of great curiosity, due probably as much to his humility and great humour as to his tireless writings and lecturing on the subject of spirituality and its relevance to the modern world.

My thoughts were in a daze. I could hardly belive that I had a vision of divinity. There had been an expansion of my own self, my own consciousness, and the transformation had been brought about by the vital current that had sarted from below the spine and found access to my brain through the backbone. I recalled that I had read long ago in books on yoga of a certain vital mechanism called Kundalini, connected with the lower end of the spine, which becomes active by means of certain exercises, and when once roused carries the limited human consciousness to transcendental heights, endowing the individual with incredible psychic and mental powers.

..this night I felt strangely restless and disturbed. I could not reconcile the exaltation of the morning with the depression that sat heavily on me while I tossed from side to side on the bed. I had an unaccountable feeling of fear and uncertaintly. At last in the midst of misgivings I fell asleep. I slept fitfully, dreaming strange dreams, and woke up after short intervals in sharp contrast to my usual deep, uninterrupted sleep.

(after a second experience the next morning during meditation:) It seemed as if a scorching blast of hot air had passed through my body. The feeling of exhaustion and weariness was more pronounced than it had been yesterday.

A heavy cloud of depression and gloom seemed to hang round me..I did not feel I was the same man I had been but a few days before, and a condition of horror, on account of the inexplicable change, began to settle on me, from which, try as I might, I could not make myself free by any effort of my will.

Little did I realize that from that day onwards I was never to be my normal old self again, that I had unwittingly and without preparation or even adequate knowledge of it roused to activity the most wonderful and stern power in man, that I had stepped unknowingly upon the key to the most guarded secret of the ancients, and that henceforth for a long time I had to live suspended by a thread, swinging between life on one hand and death on the other, between sanity and insanity, between light and darkness, between heaven and earth.

He wrote that an intelligence far beyond that which humanity is familiar with existed from one end of the Cosmos to the other, and that the astounding complexity of the natural world was an effortless creation of this same intelligence, working through an innate, subtle layer of the world, a living intelligence which formed the matrix from which matter and even intelligence itself could arise.

He realised the phenomenon of cosmic consciousness was a natural progression for humanity, and that the brain was designed for the experience. In fact, the brain had already evolved to the point where many hundreds of thousands of people could safely experience it, given good heredity and balanced lifestyles, but were unlikely to do so in a modern climate demanding all available energy be spent on material gain.

He believed the mysterious intelligent energy permeating the human body is always active in attempting to maintain and uplift the consciousness of an individual and the race: religion was the natural mass instinct to adhere to a mode of life conducive to that evolution, and so humanity abandoned religious guidelines at its own peril.

The result was a race that instead of basking in awareness of its own immortality, and gradually accessing an inner world of infinite intelligence and creativity, was falling rapidly into a degenerate and decayed state, in which all available mental energy was lavished on the body, and the soul was ignored and the sciences of the soul, built up patiently over the millenia were discredited and ignored.

Welcome to the result: the 21st century. Humanity may well eventually regain its lost spiritual discipline, returning to a simpler way of life. While keeping the advantages of modern science, the hectic and viciously competitive ways of life will give way to a more thoughful and altruisitic existence in the centuries to come.

Gopi Krishna, the Kashmiri mystic referred to above, passed away in July, 1984 and this website is respectfully dedicated to the man, his writings, and the organisations and trends of thought his lone voice and years of effort set in motion.

But, strange to say, the Message with it brings
To me the vision of related things;
Of global wars and cataclysms to shake
Mankind out of her torpor soon to make
Her conscious of her glorious destiny,
Lost in the war of wits 'twixt you and me,
In gross obsession for the flesh and brawn,
In grandeur, glamour and the pleasures drawn
At the expense of soul, based on the blind
Fallacious doctrines which deny to mind
Lasting experience, more pervasive than
The whole of cosmos we still fail to span.

Gopi Krishna's experience in more depth
What is cosmic consciousness?
Civilisation and cosmic consciousness
The experient to bridge science and religion

And in less than two decades from this date
The world-conditions would assume a state
Of terror such that mortals on their knees
Would pray to Heaven the nightmare soon may cease.
This would be followed by a lightning war
With frightful devastation near and far;
A global conflagration that will make
A clean sweep of obstructions, roughly shake
Mankind out of her stupor and install
The rule of plenty, peace and joy for all
After a spell of suffering so acute
That frozen with its horror one is mute.

Gopi Krishna, New Delhi, 1974