Gopi Krishna

Gopi Krishna (1903–1984) was a Kashmiri civil servant and yogi whose memoir Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man (1967) became the most widely read modern first-person account of a kundalini awakening.

In 1937, during meditation, he experienced a sudden, overwhelming release of energy up his spine that initiated years of physical and psychological upheaval — intense heat, sensory distortion, near-breakdown — before stabilizing into a transformed, luminous state of expanded consciousness and spontaneous creativity.

Rather than presenting this in purely traditional terms, he spent the rest of his life arguing that kundalini is a real biological-evolutionary mechanism: a latent energy whose activation drives the evolution of the brain and consciousness toward genius, mystical experience, and the next stage of human development, and he founded research institutes to encourage its scientific study.

For the mind-power lineage, Gopi Krishna is significant as the figure who took the subtle-body energy concept that Woodroffe had textualized and made it experiential, embodied, and quasi-scientific for a modern audience.

His vivid testimony that a dormant inner energy can be awakened and can radically transform mind, perception, and capacity directly reinforces the energy-and-consciousness core of mind-power and New Age thought, while his evolutionary framing — kundalini as the engine of higher human potential — parallels Aurobindo and feeds the “untapped inner power / next stage of consciousness” motif central to the manifestation and human-potential movements.

His candor about the dangers of premature awakening also seeded modern awareness of “kundalini syndrome,” giving the energy paradigm a cautionary, clinically attentive dimension often absent from breezier New Age treatments.