Yoga kundalini

Kundalini
the evolutionary energy in man
by Gopi Krishna
with an introduction

by Frederic Spiegelberg
and a psychological commentary

by James Hillman
London 1970

Stuart & Watkins
FIRST PUBLISHED BY RAMADHAR & HOPMAN, NEW DELHI 1967 REVISED EDITION FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN I970 BY VINCENT STUART AND JOHN M WATKINS LTD 45 LOWER BELGRAVE STREET LONDON SWI © 1967 BY GOPIKRISHNA © 1967, I97O COMMENTARY BY JAMES HILLMAN MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ROBERT CUNNINGHAM AND SONS LTD LONGBANK WORKS ALVA CLACKMANNANSHIRE SCOTLAND SBN 7224 0115 9

1

Introduction
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES mainly concerned with the description of outer life events are today perhaps only written by statesmen, that is in a field where the external historical conditions are more important forthe reader than the man and his character itself. Only since Goethe's 'Dichtung und Wahrheit' can we talk about real autobiographies, since only the author himself can report adequately, if at all, about the inner process of his maturing and about the ways of his feeling. Therefore, autobiographies have commanded the literary field in the West during the past century, when men have been apt andable to introvert in a systematic way and thus to explore the vast field of their inner life. Such efforts have recently found their highest pitch in the psychologist C. G. Jung's fascinating account of the ups-and-downs of his inner development even to the very depths of his unconscious. In India we find beginnings of such autobiographical statements as early as the Upanishads and again in our owntime, partly influenced by Western trends. Autobiographies by Yogis have been extremely rare, partly because the Yogi is well aware of the importance of keeping and living with a secret and partly because he properly shares the secret only with God and not with the people in his surroundings who are less aware of the subtle workings of inner tendencies. Only in a few instances have great men ofwisdom in India revealed themselves to us in selfdescriptions, like Yogananda, Ramdas and Sivananda. In most cases it has been Westerners who, because of their search for stimulation from a foreign way of self-introspection, have discovered and published the achievements of the Indian masters of Yoga, so did Paul Brunton reveal Ramana Maharishi to the West and also to India, and so Romain Rollandbecame fascinated with Ramakrishna, Friedrich Heiler with Sadhu Sundar Singh, Annie Besant with Krishnamurti, Jean Herbert with Ramdas. Now James Hillman and F. J. Hopman have discovered Gopi Krishna, whose sensational autobiography they help to publish and to interpret in the psychological way. It remains for me, as an historian of world religions, to introduce this book by putting it into theframework of Indian religious history. For Gopi Krishna is of unusual interest, first as an example of a most thorough-going mixture of East and West, and secondly as a self-taught prophet of an original kind. Gopi Krishna's approach appears as a great surprise because in his book, except for the last chapter, there is no mention of spirituality, religion and metaphysics. Gopi Krishna's endeavoursappear as a historical laboratory in which he, the author, develops genuinely in himself what others have developed before him. But he re-mains independent of his fore-runners, who frequently have wound up in sterile intellectual formulae. By contrast, this self-taught, Guru-less author remains genuine in all his discoveries. Being exposed to Gopi Krishna's experiences is like meeting a spacetraveller who seemingly for no purpose has landed on a strange and unknown star without the standard equipment of the professional astronaut, and who simply reports about the bewildering landscape around him, colourfully, truthfully, without really knowing exactly what he has found. We have here, in this wholly unintellectual personality, a classical example of a simple man, uneducated in Yoga, who yet...