Gopi
Krishna
Gopi Krishna was born in 1903 to parents of Kashmiri Brahmin extraction. His
birthplace was a small village about twenty miles from the city of Srinagar, the
summer capital of the Jammu and Kashmir State in northern India. He spent the
first eleven years of his life growing up in this beautiful Himalayan valley. In
1914, his family moved to the city of Lahore in the Punjab which, at that time,
was a part of British India. Gopi Krishna passed the next nine years completing
his public school education. Illness forced him to leave the torrid planes of
the Punjab and he returned to the cooler climate of the Kashmir Valley. During
the succeeding years, he secured a post in the Department of Public Works of the
State, married and raised a family. In 1946 he founded a social organization
and, with the help of a few dedicated friends, tried to bring about reforms in
some of the outmoded customs of his people. Their goals included the abolition
of the dowry system, which subjected the families of brides to severe and even
ruinous financial obligations, and the strictures against the remarriage of
widows. After a few years, Gopi Krishna was granted premature retirement from
his position in the government and devoted himself almost exclusively to service
work in the community.
In 1967 he published his first major book in India, Kundalini--The
Evolutionary Energy in Man (currently available under the title Living
With Kundalini). Shortly thereafter it was published in Great Britain and
the United States and has since appeared in eleven major languages. The book
presented to the Western world for the first time a clear and concise
autobiographical account of the phenomenon of the forceful awakening of
Kundalini, which he had experienced in 1937, and the long process by which he
eventually attained the perennially transformed or sahaja state of
consciousness. This book, and the sixteen other published works by Gopi Krishna
have generated a steadily growing interest in the subjects of consciousness and
the evolution of the brain. He also traveled extensively in Europe and North
America, during the last seventeen years of his life, energetically presenting
his theories to scientists, scholars, researchers and others. Gopi Krishna's
experiences led him to hypothesize that there is a biological mechanism in the
human body, known from ancient times in India as Kundalini, which is responsible
for creativity, genius, psychic abilities, religious and mystical experiences,
as well as some types of aberrant mental states. He asserted that ignorance of
the workings of this evolutionary mechanism was the main reason for the present
dangerous state of world Gopi Krishna passed away in July, 1984 of a severe lung
infection and is survived by his wife, three children and grandchildren. The
work that he began is currently being carried forward through the efforts of a
number of affiliated foundations, organizations and individuals around the
world.
Source: http://www.ecomall.com/gopikrishna/
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