The Kashmir Discourses

By Gopi Krishna

In August 1977 Gopi Krishna gave a series of 8 discourses to a group of spiritual seekers from Canada at his Central Institute for Kundalini Research near Srinagar, Kashmir, India. In this transcript of these talks, he discusses in detail the characteristics of an enlightened person, and various methods to achieve the state of Cosmic Consciousness. He also spoke on other related topics, such as karma, reincarnation, and meditation. Much of this invaluable material is being presented for the first time, and does not appear in any of his other books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Institute for Consciousness Research
• Release date: Jan 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780993831683

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 plains of the Punjab and he returned to the cooler climate of the Kashmir Valley. During the succeeding years, he secured a post in the Public Works Department of the state, married and raised a family.In 1946 he founded a social organization and with the help of a few 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. 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 awakening of Kundalini, which he had experienced in 1937. This work, and the sixteen other published books 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, 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 which is responsible for creativity, genius, psychic abilities, religious and mystical experiences, as well as some aberrant mental states. He asserted that ignorance of the working of this evolutionary mechanism was the main reason for the present dangerous state of world affairs. He called for a full scientific investigation of his hypothesis and believed that such an objective analysis would uncover the secrets of human evolution. It is this knowledge, he believed, that would give mankind the means to progress in peace and harmony.Gopi Krishna passed away in July 1984 of a severe lung infection and is survived by his three children and seven 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.

Book preview

Gopi Krishna:

The Kashmir Discourses

Published by:

The Institute for Consciousness Research

and

The Kundalini Research Foundation, Ltd.

Smashwords Edition

Gopi Krishna: The Kashmir Discourses

Copyright © 1977 Gopi Krishna

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Published by:

The Institute for Consciousness Research

165 Valley Crescent,

RR #4, Markdale ON,

Canada   N0C 1H0

The Kundalini Research Foundation, Ltd.

86 Wallacks Drive

Stamford CT

06902   U.S.A.

International Standards Book Number: 978-0-9938316-8-3

Cover Art: Mount Kailash in the Himalayas east of Kashmir, most sacred to both Hinduism and Buddhism.

Table of Contents

Discourse 1 – Signs and Characteristics of Enlightenment

Discourse 2 – The Meaning of Illumination

Discourse 3 – How to Win Cosmic Consciousness Part I

Discourse 4 – How to Win Cosmic Consciousness Part II

Discourse 5 – Karma

Discourse 6 – Meditation

Discourse 7 – Questions and Answers for Spiritual Seekers

About the Author

Other Books by Gopi Krishna

Discourse 1

Signs and Characteristics of Enlightenment

Once again, I extend my heartiest welcome to you, to this hoary place which is known as Gopi Tirth. The ancient name of the spring close by is Gupta Tirth. Gupta means hidden and Tirth means a place of pilgrimage—a spring. But the word Gupta has been corrupted to Gopi. So, by a strange coincidence, this place bears my name.

I do not think there is any coincidence in this world. Everything is ordered and planned. I purchased this piece of land perhaps more than forty years ago. I never imagined, I never dreamed at that time that a day would come when it would be used for the purpose of these discourses, and that a party of loving, dedicated and beautiful friends would come from a distance like Canada to sit here and to join in discourses about spiritual knowledge.

It is a matter of immense pleasure to me to see all of you and to be one with you here in this hermitage in the Himalayas and once again to repeat what happened thousands of years ago when seekers after knowledge came to the Himalayas to pick up the wisdom which still persists in the ancient scriptural books of my country.

Years ago, I could not imagine that such a monumental event will occur and that a large party of friends, motivated by one purpose, would assemble here to talk, to listen and to discourse about things of which the world stands in the direst need at present.

Today, perhaps inspired by your presence, I shall speak about something which is of great importance in the modern world and which is also of great importance to distinguish right knowledge from false. I shall discourse today on those signs and characteristics that should distinguish the enlightened person.

As you know, the world is flooded with men and women who claim to have the knowledge of the occult and the sublime, who have hundreds, and even hundreds of thousands of followers whom they try to enlighten. And you also know that especially in the West, there are huge movements of new thought, and a New Age, and of spiritual disciplines for the reason that the world seems to have been saturated with the materialistic tendencies of our time.

Now the first sign of an illuminated soul is divine inspiration. This has always characterized the illuminati of India. Vedas, in Sanskrit, are known as shruti. Shruti means ‘that which is heard’, ‘that which is inspired’, ‘that which is revealed’, because the teaching it contains is thought to be beyond the intellect. Similarly, we know that the Bible, too, is considered to be a revelation. Similarly, the Koran, and in the case of the Buddhist scriptures, it is well known that Buddha was considered to be enlightened and inspired. He was commonly known as ‘the eloquent’ because his appeal to the hearts of people was terrific, and no one who came to discuss with him could stand against his arguments.

So the first sign of illumination is divine inspiration. There are people, both in the East and West, who write in a state of trance, who are prone to automatic writing, either by letting their hands hold a pencil or a pen and allowing it to work, or just by writing without thought. There is a difference between that writing, which is known as automatic writing, and divine inspiration. And that difference is this—that in the case of divine inspiration, one does not think, one makes no effort to write or to calculate, and it appears as a surrounding intelligence, as if some other source of knowledge is handing over all that he writes, or speaks to him, in a manner which is indescribable.

So you will find that in the case of great mystics, and prophets, and the founders of all great religions, the conviction in their mind was that whatever they were expressing as revelation was coming to them from a superhuman soul which they called either God, or Allah, or Brahman, or Shiva, or Krishna, or any name of this type. So the difference between automatic writing and revelation lies in this—that in the latter case, the man, the recipient, the sage, the seer, is aware not only that he is writing, but also that some other intelligence is promoting, is inducting whatever he is writing. That is also one of the reasons why all the prophets and mystics were so confident that what they said was perfectly true, and that it was a wisdom that could help mankind on its path to divine consciousness.

The modern science has cut at the roots of revelation by introducing the factor of subconscious. Whenever somebody writes in a state of trance, or in a state of inspiration, the verdict is that it is coming from his subconscious, or that as Freud put it, it is the libido sublimated into genius. But if we were to ask the most learned psychologist, or the most learned scholar of our time, what is the subconscious? What is its nature? Where is it when we are talking, when we are awake? Is it in our interior or is it out of us? If it is out of us, then mind has a separate existence. If it is in our interior, where is the organ from which it has come out?

The unfortunate thing is that most of the science of our day is a mere collection of words aimed to describe something which is not known. This is particularly true of the mind. Nothing is known about the mind. And I, too, would be just wading and wandering into these huge books of scholars if my experience did not tell me that I, or you, or you there, are just small streams, small rays, small drops of an ocean of Life, of a Sun of Life, of a Universal Life which is round you here and now. The sub-conscious is there. The over-conscious is there. The super-conscious is there. The eternal knowledge of all that happens, that has happened, or that will happen is here now in every particle around us.

So we have, unfortunately, because of the prejudice towards religion and spirituality exhibited by the learned, during the 19th century especially, come to the wrong conclusion—that the subconscious is something below the surface in the human mind which remains hidden and out of touch as if mind, too, has a special level, like a mountain—something lower down and something up there—while mind is beyond space and time.

What I mean to say is that without being able to explain what is subconscious, or what is super-conscious, we have rejected revelation as a fallacy, as a false doctrine, and given every attitude to the intellect to tell us about things where it is impossible for it to reach. In the case of revelation, as I can say from my own experience, it is an awe-inspiring process. It is something for which you have no explanation in science. It is not the subconscious which comes to activity in our sleep. It is an ocean of intelligence which you can sense, but which you cannot see; which you can feel, but which you cannot touch—illusive—all around us. It is, and it is not. It is this knowledge from the infinite source of wisdom which can never be known in its entirety to anybody but which has come, in small droplets, into the human brain, which is the basis of all religions.

We had a famous mystic in Kashmir, a woman mystic. Her name is a household word in our country. And all communities and all religions and creeds in this valley honor her. At one place she says, describing this knowledge, since she was divinely inspired, she says, I will just give you the Kashmiri and then I will translate it .  . . . You will see the beauty and the profundity of the words. They are inspired. . . . That is, Whatever I learned in the books, I acted on it, and that which no one could read, I got the knowledge of That. That means of higher consciousness  .  . . . And this lion in the forest, I caught hold of it and made it into a jackal. The lion is the mind, which is so turbulent, which is so full of passion and lust and desire. She says, I tamed this lion and turned it into a jackal. . . . What I preach to others, I acted on that myself. Whatever I said to others, whatever teaching I gave, I first acted on it myself. . . . Then I came to know of the unknowable and that was my success in Yoga.

So you can see that this idea, that there is a supernal source of knowledge which can guide mankind in a better way than reason can, is one of the basic principles of religion, and access to this knowledge is one of the first signs of an illuminated consciousness. Now the question might be asked, and reasonably, But what is the need of this knowledge in an age where so much knowledge has already been gathered, and there are libraries full of books on every subject under the Sun? Let me make this clear to you.

We do not know the nature of consciousness. We do not know where mankind is going. We do not know what will happen to the Earth in the next twenty or fifty or a hundred years. All we know is of the past or of the present. But what the 21st century will be like or what events will occur after ten years, no one of us can foretell. At the present moment, knowledge is divided into hundreds and even thousands of branches. There are specialists in every branch of knowledge—physics, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, psychiatry. There are small specializations which it takes a man all his life to gain a mastery upon.

So it is impossible to have a man who is a master of all the knowledge at the present moment. If a man is an expert psychiatrist, an astronomer will lend no credence to what he says so far as his branch of knowledge is concerned. If one is a deeply learned psychologist, a doctor or a surgeon will have nothing to do with him. So we have so many different branches of specialized knowledge that it is not possible for any one single individual to gain mastery of all of them or, I would say, even a few of them.

We have specialists in politics. We have specialists in science. We have specialists in philosophy. We have specialists in literature. Everywhere we have specialists. At the present moment, as far as I know, 30,000 books in English are published all over the world in a day. Now please tell me where is the brain that can study all these books and then say, Now I know every bit of knowledge that mankind has accumulated so far. There is no one like that. No giant. No Hercules. No colossus of the type which can at this moment say that I am a master of the knowledge of the world.

So what is the situation now? There are groups—some believe in Darwin, others oppose them. Some believe in Freud, others oppose them. Some believe in Jung, others oppose them. Some believe in Maslow, others oppose them. So there is, in the whole world of knowledge, a tug of war going on for which there seems to be no end. The world is, on the other hand, divided into warring groups, into warring political bodies, into superpowers and powers who view each other, though secretly, with hate, who are suspicious of each other, and who are, at this moment, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Now can you imagine a single political leader, or a single psychologist, or a single scientist, or a single astronomer to come forward to the world and to tell them, Now here is the saving knowledge. This will free you of all worry and there will be no war, no destruction. You don’t see anyone, with the knowledge gained of science, with the knowledge gained of astronomy, with the knowledge gained of geography.

Every day, mankind will be more and more specialized in different branches without any possibility of a coordination that would give to one mind the capacity to be equally at home in all the branches. Here is now where the Divine inspiration comes, like a streak of lightning cleaving the darkness of the night. One single flash of thought can pierce the whole gloom and present to you the solution of the world. This is what has always happened in the history of all religions. Since, now, our knowledge is expanding, our inspiration, too, has to expand to be able to adjust itself to the growing intellect and the growing knowledge of the human race.

Divine inspiration is necessary to guide mankind in the nuclear age. The normal intellect has failed and failed miserably. We have already in the nuclear stocks of the world sufficient stuff to destroy mankind a hundred times over. It only waits for a chance to come to the surface and to cause a catastrophe. Nature is not so blind as not to be aware of the fact that the human race has created for itself an arsenal, a means to self-annihilation. Nature and Heaven are well aware of the fact that because of lust, and passion, and narrow prejudice, of racial antagonism, people have so forgotten their sanity, so far forgotten their duty to mankind, that they are prepared even to fight a nuclear war which may well destroy the whole of mankind. Nature is not dead or blind to where the human intellect has degenerated in our times. This will happen again and again because with the knowledge gained of the forces of Nature, man will be able to act both ways—for creative activities, to raise mankind upward, and also for destructive activities to annihilate the race.

In such a situation, when we find that the intellect, ruled by passion, ruled by lust, ruled by even patriotism, narrow patriotism, is prepared to do the worst, in such a situation, where is the hope of release? Where is the hope to find an avenue by which mankind may be saved and may continue to survive for ages to come? The hope lies in divine inspiration because, as I said, like lightning, weighing all the pros and cons, weighing all the advances of science, weighing everything known to man, a new wisdom can come that can show the path, that can show the future, that can show the paramount need of mankind and guide it accordingly.

What I am saying, and including my own self, it is like the first experiment on the airplanes made in the beginning of this [20th] century, it was a crude plane, perhaps partly wooden, which could hop for some distance. Just jumping. And once they gave a demonstration, the press came but refused to write anything about it because they thought that it was all a trick, or perhaps they were being deluded. They did not write a single word.

In the same way, what I am saying now is the first attempt of the Wright brothers to launch a very primitive kind of an airplane, with further investigation, and better, and much better people, much superior people than myself will come to the Earth to guide mankind in this crisis. And it is only they—the divinely inspired—who rise above all the scholars of the time; above all the scientists of the time; above all the political heads of the time, to give the right lead to the masses.

Hence, the first indication of an enlightened is a divine inspiration which can make a judgment, after considering all the knowledge that exists. Sometimes, telling you my own impressions, in a frank way, when I am in a mood of writing, I weep. The same thing used to happen to Mohammed after writing the Koran and knowing his own ignorance, he would burst into tears.

I sometimes have the feeling as if, for instance, when I get a whole chapter in a moment, just a flash, and I am not able even to catch it, my limited mind, which works in time, is not able to catch the instantaneous flashes of revelation, at such times I feel, and I feel it very deeply, so that tears come to my eyes, as if every atom of this intelligence, round me could, if it liked, in a flash, present the whole Encyclopedia Britannica to the mind. This is my impression.

We are dealing with an intelligence which knows the present, the past, and the future; every atom of which knows all that is happening in the universe; what every atom is doing, what every sun is doing. I am talking of that intelligence. And this is the first perception of higher consciousness. You are lost in an ocean. I am trying to carry you with me to this vision. We are lost in an ocean in which there is overwhelming knowledge, knowledge of all time, of all that has happened, of all that will happen and, at the same time, the knowledge that I, poor, humble, frail, riddled with fear of death, sometimes in depression, that I am a part, a ray of this light. Only I am constrained by the capacity of my brain not to be able to comprehend the whole.

So what I mean to say is this; that the first sign of an illuminati is divine inspiration. The second sign, these are objective signs, I mean which we can observe. You cannot observe his inner being, but you can observe his outer being. The second sign is that a man of this stature has a different outlook towards the world. His behavior, his character, his writing, his way of expression all corroborate this fact. He is not attached to the world. And there is a valid reason for it. Already, in his interior, something wondrous has occurred. Already, in his interior, he has constantly before him a universe with which the Earth and all its allurements bear no comparison. So he is not attracted by power or by wealth.

Perhaps I should explain this by saying that when the ancient Aryans, who have perhaps made the greatest contribution to higher consciousness, in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita and other similar books, made the social order and divided the population into four classes—the Brahmins, the Kshetriyas, the Veshyas and the Shudras—the highest class, the Brahmins, are our modern intellectuals. Brahmin means the intellectual—who were doing the work of reading and writing. And do you know what restriction they placed on them? After an experience of perhaps thousands of years, that they should have no property of their own. So they were debarred from exercising their lust to wealth. And at the same time they could not be the rulers, because another class—the warriors—were the kings. So the intellectual had neither the power nor the wealth which is at the base of all the evil that you see

Reviews for The Kashmir Discourses

[Chandan Satapathy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A book that Describes Yoga with all its effects and also associated side effects.