For one thing, he could perceive prana in his own body, moving around, and he said it was super intelligent.

It knew everything about every cell in his body.

It would go into an organ that was not working properly, fix it, and then withdraw.

He said he would wake up in the middle of the night and there'd be a storm of activity going on inside of himself.

And he felt like a helpless victim.

Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.

My name is Rick Archer.

Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people.

This is our 16th season and we've done 730-something of them.

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My guest today is Michael Bradford.

Michael has been involved in research into Kundalini and consciousness for more than 45 years.

In 1977, he traveled to India where he spent six years serving as a volunteer for the Central Institute for Kundalini Research, which was founded and directed by the late pundit Gopi Krishna, a noted authority on Kundalini.

I had heard of Gopi Krishna way back when he was alive.

I think he died in '84 or so.

And all I knew was that he was this Indian guy who had a really intense Kundalini awakening.

It was very difficult for him.

But I just listened to his biography, and I was really impressed with him.

And stay tuned for why I was really impressed, but very interesting man.

So Michael, back to Michael, has been a board member of the Institute for Consciousness Research.

He's been involved in several organizations.

I'll just have him talk about them rather than me read that in the bio.

He was an IT consulting guy for many years and retired from that in 2014.

And his focus has been to make Gopi Krishna's theories more widely known and to encourage research into Kundalini and consciousness.

Okay, Michael, so how did you first find out about Gopi Krishna and how did you end up in India with him for six years?

Well, thanks very much for having me on the show, Rick.

Sure.

To go back to a little further than when I got involved there, I always had a longstanding interest in both science and the paranormal.

And my interest in science started when I was maybe about ten years old and I started reading science fiction.

And then that went on until my mid-teens.

And then in 1967, I think I was in grade 11, and a friend of mine gave me a copy of a book called The Third Eye by a man named Dilob Sang Rampa.

And the book had a very powerful effect on me.

He was supposedly a monk who was born in Lhasa, Tibet, near the beginning of the 20th century.

He went into a monastery, learned medical arts as well as things like astral traveling and reading auras.

And there was something about the book that really grabbed me.

In the book, at one point, he actually mentions Kundalini.

Like this is 1967, and I think he wrote the book in 1956.

So there wasn't much being said about Kundalini back then.

But it was interesting for me because 1967 was the first year that Gopi Krishna's autobiography, original one, Kundalini, the evolutionary energy and man was first published in India.

So it's like something was stirring in the ether at that point.

So after high school, I went on to university and I wanted to be a nuclear physicist to find out how does matter work at the deep levels.

Well, that didn't work out.

My market calculus was just barely above passing and I couldn't get into the honors physics program.

So I ended up in the IT business instead, which actually stood me in good stead because it gave me a decent income without having to put out too much effort.

The major turning point came in 1976 and I was living in Toronto at the time and I became a member of a meditation group in that city.

Now the founder of that organization had heard about Gopi Krishna and in the fall of that year he went to Zurich and spent about a week interviewing Gopi Krishna.

He was so impressed with what Gopi Krishna told him that when he came back to Canada, he announced that the organization would be sponsoring a trip to India the next year for its members.

So sure enough, in August 1977, there were more than 230 of us who flew to New Delhi and then on to Srinagar and Kashmir, where Gopi Krishna had his research institute.

And at that time, one of my hobbies was sound recording, and I had a very high quality, one these great big reel-to-reel machines.

So I was tasked with the job of recording all of Gopi Krishna's interviews and discourses and everything.

So I recorded them all and in fact those same recordings that I made in 1977 of Gopi Krishna, like I think 11 hours and 20 minutes worth, are available as an audiobook that we published some years ago, also as an e-book.

It's called Gopi Krishna, the Kashmir discourses.

And it was a wonderful introduction to Kundalini for me because he really got down to the nuts and bolts basics of what is enlightenment.

That was the topic of one of his discourses, are the characteristics of an enlightened person.

And he also spent several discourses on how to achieve cosmic consciousness.

And focusing very much on the lifestyle that is necessary, the mode of life, and what spiritual practices and things like that.

So it was a really wonderful introduction to Kundalini for me.

But what happened was during one of the private interviews, I believe it was, Gopi Krishna remarked that he was very limited in what he could do in his work because the only help he had was a secretary who took dictation and did his typing.

And although he had, I think, five books already published by major publishers in the West, in English and in German, he had a number of other books he wanted to publish.

So he said if any of the members of the meditation group would be interested in coming back to India to work for him as volunteers on his publications, then he would be very much appreciative.

So I thought this was a great idea.

It's like, hey, I can go to India, have a real wonderful experience and at first they said they wanted us to go for three months and I thought oh good I could just take off come back to my nice safe job and my nice apartment and then just before we're about to leave they said well we told Gopi Krishna you were coming for three months and he wrote back and said it'll take these people three months just to figure out which end is up and then they're going to leave so he said if they're going to come they got to come for a year and I went, "Oh, God, what have I got myself into?" [laughs] But I made the commitment, so I had to do it.

So off we went, with myself and three other Canadian volunteers, to New Delhi in December of 1977.

And for the first two years, I was pretty much totally involved in the book publishing part of it.

Back then in India, the typesetting of the books was all done by hand.

It wasn't automatic.

It was all, you know, these little letters in these bins that they were putting in to make the type.

And the people doing this type setting, their native language wasn't English.

So you can imagine there were a lot of mistakes in the type.

And to compound matters, none of the group of us were professional proofreaders.

So that meant that we had to read Gopi Krishna's books over and over and over and over again to make sure we got all the mistakes out.

And I think we did something like nine books in the first couple of years we were there.

So this gave me a very firm grounding in Kundalini and Gopi Krishna's message.

Towards the middle of 1979, I contracted a really severe intestinal dysentery.

And although I got over it, my digestion continued to be in bad shape.

So after two years in India, the end of 1979, I decided to come back to Canada to get my health back.

So I came back, worked in the IT business for a year, and towards the end of the year, I thought, "Well, I really want to go back to India." And there were two reasons for that.

One was that I really enjoyed doing the work.

It was really interesting and different.

We got to travel around a foreign country.

And I thought, "Well, this is much more to my liking than sitting in front of a computer, a CRT screen, for seven to eight hours a day writing programming code." The other reason was that by this time, I had absorbed enough of Gopi Krishna's writings and theories to realize that what he was saying in his theories would mean the difference.

I'm not understating this.

It would literally mean the difference between the human race surviving in the long term or destroying itself with its own technology.

For that reason, I thought, well, I really have to go back to India.

So, at the beginning of 1981, off I flew to New Delhi.

And for the next four years, I was there, continuing to do some of the publication work, but we actually ended up building a new center for our work in a city called, or near a city called, Dehradun.

It's in the foothills of the Himalayas, about five or six hours drive north east of New Delhi, in the same valley as Haridwar and Rishikesh.

And during that time, from maybe May 1981, August 1983, I lived with Gopi Krishna, first of all in two different rental houses, while we constructed our center and then in our center.

I lived with him, we worked together on a daily basis.

He worked for the Canadian group.

And I really got to know him as a person.

So, Gopi Krishna died in July 1984.

Although there were three of us Canadians left at that time, we really wanted to stay and continue the work.

We were all pretty much exhausted from the years in India, and my digestive difficulties had come back.

I was like a skeleton when I see pictures of myself now.

I look like a skeleton.

Couldn't keep weight on.

So at the end of December in 1984, back I flew to Canada.

Now in the meantime, the meditation group that had funded the living expenses of the volunteers had disbanded.

But there was quite a few members of that former organization who, like me, really appreciated the importance of Gopi Krishna's work, and they had taken up the funding, the living expenses of the volunteers.

They also started an organization to publish his books in Canada, and I joined that organization and that organization eventually became the Institute for Consciousness Research.

My position in the organization was Director of Publications in 1985, and it has been till this day.

So, in the late 90s and early 90s, we published a number of other of Gopi Krishna's books that had not been published.

Starting around 2010, I started converting all those books to e-books, converting all those books to e-books, plus adding a few more like the Kashmir Discourses.

And then about seven or eight years ago, I started converting them into audiobooks.

And of course, at every step of the way, when you convert from one medium to another, whether it's transcripted or OCR scanned or whatever, all had to be proofread again and again and again.

So that means that I have literally read every one of Gopi Krishna's books numerous times.

In addition to that, ICR is the custodian of Gopi Krishna's written archives, which includes his correspondence, printed books, numerous articles, interviews and speeches.

And so I've been working to convert those into electronic format to preserve them.

So I think given all that, I feel that I am personally well qualified to talk about Gopi Krishna and about his ideas.

Two other aspects to my Kundalini history.

In '91, I went with a number of other ICR members, including Terry Daigler, Paul and Dale Pond, and Alf Walker.

We went to California and met with a number of other individuals who were interested in starting an organization to promote research into Kundalini.

These included Bonnie Greenwell.

I know Bonnie.

I've interviewed her a couple of times.

Khe Sang.

Anindya Devar.

Anindya Devan.

Joe and Harrigan got involved a bit later, but there was also a man named George Tompkins who died some years ago.

He was very much involved in Gopi Krishna's work.

Rasanjoti Park, Megan Nolan, and probably a few others that I apologize if I can't remember your names.

Anyway, we founded the Kundalini Research Network, I think it was in 1992 or 1993.

From 1993 to 1995, I was co-executive coordinator of the network with Yvonne Cason.

And during those three years, I guess it was, we hosted, organized and hosted two major international conferences on Kundalini, one in Canada, one in the United States.

So the final aspect of my career in this way is that about 10 years ago, ICR was contacted by Michael and Linda Molina.

And they had formed an organization called the Emerging Sciences Foundation in California and had become in Gopi Krishna's theories and ideas and ICR's work and they started coming to our conferences.

So Michael and Linda invited me to join the board of directors of the ESF a couple of years later.

And it's a really exciting time right now for ESF because Michael, Linda, and another one of our board members, Mauro Zapatera, have written a research paper, which they're in the process of submitting to a mainstream psychological journal.

And this began with the creation of a survey of about 263 questions, I believe it was, was given to people having any kind of spiritual or paranormal experience, Kundalini experiences, mystical experiences, bliss, unity, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, anyone who had anything like that, we encouraged them to take the survey online.

And we ended up with 630 completed surveys from people in 43 different countries around the world.

So Mike and Linda and Mauro did a very in-depth statistical analysis of this data.

And one of the techniques they used was to match the data to a particular hypothesis.

And the hypothesis they used was Gopi Krishna's hypothesis that all of these different types of experiences were the manifestation of an underlying psychophysiological mechanism in the human body.

manifestations of the same mechanism.

And the statistical analysis tended to indicate that this was exactly the case, that there is a single mechanism at work in all these cases.

So the next thing that they did was to distill these 263 questions down to a set of 18, which they call the Higher Consciousness 18 or HC 18 scale.

These 18 questions, when answered by someone having any type of spiritual or mystical or Kundalini experience, will give an accurate indication of how intense that experience is and how it relates maybe to other similar experiences.

You know, what does Kundalini experience relate to, like a mystical experience and things like that.

So this, they call the Kundalini, the HC-18 scale, and what they're doing now is, as well as publishing this paper, they're looking for collaborators in either individuals or organizations who would like to take this scale and apply it to other modalities of research.

So say you're doing some kind of physical research on spiritual states, like say brain scans or testing cerebral spinal fluid or whatever, that this 18 scale can be used in conjunction with that.

Or if you're doing, say, trying to see the efficacy of various meditation techniques or spiritual practices, that this scale is extremely useful in terms of, you know, giving a numerical measure of what people are experiencing.

And I'll talk about this, hopefully a bit later in the show, when I'm talking about Gopi Krishna's theories and their validation, because it's absolutely essential.

Now, for anyone who's interested in either collaborating or would just like to read the paper, if you go to the ESF website, which is www.emergingsciences.org, on the homepage, there is a link, which I think there's two links, one near the top and one partway down, will take you to a preprint, to a download of a free preprint version of the paper.

So anyone who's interested is welcome to download the paper.

And if you're interested in collaborating with ESF, then you can contact Linda Molina through the contact form on the ESF website.

So that concludes my personal history with Kundalini and organizations.

So it would be a good time to ask any questions if you had any, Rick?

Oh yeah.

So first of all, if someone is listening to this while they're driving or something, I'll have a page on thatgap.com about this interview and it'll have links to anything Michael mentions.

So you don't have to memorize it, you don't have to stop the car to write it down.

You can just go there and find that link.

I was thinking as we were talking, as you were talking, that it might be good to cover some basics.

probably most of the people who've, if not everyone who's listening to this interview has heard the word Kundalini, but you can tell me there might be a variety of understandings of what that word means.

And perhaps since we want to make sure we're all talking the same language, you could define what you mean by that term.

Well, that is not really a simple or easy answer.

how much we have to cover today and give me an appropriate answer in the time available.

The simple answer is that it is a psychophysiological mechanism in the human body which when activated brings about a transformation in the human body that will, if it goes to completion in a successful way, will result in what we call enlightenment or cosmic consciousness.

Let me interject as you go along here.

Do only humans have kundalini energy or do cows have it, for instance, but it's just not activated in cows?

It can't be, but it can be.

I haven't seen any cows sitting there in yoga posture.

Ramana Maharshi said his cow got enlightened.

But anyway, is this unique to humans?

Well, it seems to be.

But then there's a reason for that.

I can explain about that in terms of evolution.

Yeah, so Kundalini is, in a general sense, this mechanism in the human body, and it is connected with evolution.

But to be honest, it has taken me something like 40, 45 years of study of the Indian spiritual tradition to really get a really good grasp of what it is according to that tradition, which is very different from the Western understanding.

And in most Western circles, there is no understanding.

I mean, most doctors have never heard of the term, and anatomists have never discovered any such thing as they do autopsies.

So it would be too much for me to explain right now the Indian perspective on it, which really, if you really want to understand Kundalini, you have to understand how the Indian spiritual tradition understands it, because it's literally an integral aspect of the process of creation.

It's not just a little process in the body.

It's actually an integral part of that whole creation process, which is… Creation of the universe.

Creation of the universe, but specifically with life.

Okay.

So, without kundalini or prana, there would be no life.

It's… in the Indian tradition, prana is life.

So that kind of relates to my cows question.

I mean, you know, cows are life and monkeys and cats.

And so I wonder if there's some kind of rudimentary form of all life forms.

Well, the way to explain it fairly simply is the last two aspects of this creation process are prana shakti and kundalini shakti.

Shakti means creative power.

Prana shakti is responsible for the maintenance of life and it is active in all organisms that are living whether it be a bacteria right up to a human all organisms if prana was not active they would be they wouldn't be living kundalini shakti is that aspect of the creative process which is responsible for the creation of life and we see this in the gestation process in the womb and i don't have enough time to get into it today, but one of the best kept secrets in science is that they is that people believe that science understands the gestation process.

I could literally take hours to talk about this.

But it's like it's a miracle what happens in the womb of the mother to produce this living, thinking, breathing human being of a trillion cells in the space and nine months.

It's unimaginably complex.

And to think that the genetic code can explain it all is really, it's just a wash.

Yeah, you've written a beautiful book, which we'll talk about later in the interview, the central theme of which is that not only is consciousness fundamental, but intelligence is a characteristic of consciousness and it orchestrates the whole universe from the microscopic to the macroscopic.

So, I love the book.

Shakti in one form creates the physical universe through what I discovered, I hope.

It's true that the process of quantum electrodynamics is how this Shakti creates the physical universe and then prana shakti and kundalini shakti are maintenance and creation of life.

But kundalini shakti is also responsible for evolution of life.

And if you like, I can get in and talk about that because it's really central to why Gopi Krishna's message is so important.

So if you like...

If you feel that that's the most appropriate thing to talk about next, yeah, go for it.

Yeah, I mean, I was going to talk about his experiences first, but I...

You can do that, and yours.

I mean, you know, we haven't really said who this Gopi Krishna guy is very much yet.

You know, we've been talking about things that, you know, more general points, but if you want we could do a bit more of a biographical sketch on him, and I'd also be interested to know, have you ever had a kundalini awakening, and you want to describe that.

Well, it's really bizarre because my whole life has been almost totally focused on kundalini since 1977.

I've never had an experience.

I've had a few minor psychic experiences.

The only thing I can think of is at one time I was at work, I was sitting in a cafeteria and I started thinking about the scale of the universe and I had a bit of an expansion experience.

But it ended and I went back and finished my dessert and that was it.

That's literally the sum total of my… Do you practice meditation or something?

Do you do some spiritual practice and have you been all these years?

Well, I have done meditation practice over the years, but I have a hard time staying with it.

But for me, what I have been doing my whole life is what I would call karma yoga.

That's the yoga of selfless service.

And by all these years I spent in India and all the work I've put into promoting Gopi Krishna's books and all that, to me, that's my yoga.

That's my spiritual practice.

But also too, I really won't, I don't want to get into it at this point because I don't want to distract from Gopi Krishna's message, but I've also spent 30 years in intensive study in the Vedic tradition of India.

And that also has been a major factor in my spiritual process.

But you know, maybe we can talk about that.

So you're kind of a jnana yogi and a karma yogi.

Yeah.

And you know that's something that you know is a major part of my story But like I said, I'd rather keep the focus on Gopi Krishna.

So Gopi Krishna, I was so impressed with him And I'll let you elaborate on this but here He was kind of an ordinary guy in many respects.

He's a family man he had high ethical standards and There are so many examples of it in his biography For one thing, he worked in a government office as a sort of a clerk or administrator, and pretty much everybody in the office was crooked.

They were all taking bribes, and then the contractors they were dealing with were crooked.

They were pocketing a lot of money and using substandard materials so they could pocket more, even though that jeopardized people's lives if they were building bridges or buildings or something.

And Gopi Krishna would just not bend.

He would not kowtow to any of that kind of behavior.

behavior.

He just maintained high ethical standards despite a lot of pressure not to.

I don't know how he did it, frankly.

And just as a personal anecdote, I was told by someone who was very close to him that one time in the government offices, somebody, a contractor came to him and was putting pressure on him.

And they worked out, I think, a couple of floors up, and there was like an open space in the middle of the building, like a rectangle of open space.

And then there was like a balcony that went all the way around And this contractor started threatening him and gopi krishna was very strong physically.

He he he was a wrestler Apparently he picked up the guy Held him out over the railing.

He says shall we end it for you?

That's funny Yeah And but he he somehow managed his supervisor supported him, but eventually it didn't last and he was transferred out of the Public Works Department into the Education Department, which was much more amenable to him.

And he also did all this cool stuff, like for instance, you know, widows in India would often end up on the street, you know.

Yeah.

Or jumping on the funeral pyre along with their dead husband and things like that.

And he campaigned against this sort of thing and set up organizations to help them them and to help all kinds of other people.

His house was always a haven for people who were in dire straits.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, he actually in 1946, he created a social service organization in Kashmir to help the disadvantaged, you know, people who were disadvantaged by economics or by life circumstances or in the case of women, very much by the customs of the time.

So for instance, a woman who was widowed could never remarry.

Now, say, like, they have this custom of child marriage as well, where they would arrange a marriage between two children.

They wouldn't live together as husband and wife until they were mature, but they were formally married as children.

If the little boy died, no marriage for the girl, her whole life.

He would take women like that.

And he built these centers, he would hire teachers to train them in doing arts like weaving so they could earn money for themselves.

He arranged marriages within his social organization with men who committed to taking, you know, to being responsible family men.

And this included women who got pregnant out of wedlock, not often because they were victims of rape.

And he would give these women a choice.

Like he would say, "Here's a number of men in our organization who are willing to marry you.

You pick the one that suits you." Yeah.

You know, he just had a tremendous soft spot in his heart for women.

I guess it was Shakti or whatever.

But he started women's shelters in Kashmir in the 1950s.

And it was literally the 1970s before anything like that even happened in the West.

And he actually was doing that service work from 1946 to the day he died.

He was involved in it.

He was like the head of the organization.

And this is something that is hugely important in terms of spiritual transformation, this willingness to devote yourself to the betterment of mankind.

Yeah, and it's not always emphasized, you know.

There's a lot of spiritual teachers who don't pay much lip service to that, and some in fact who feel like they are above human moral standards and can do whatever they want by virtue of their supposed level of attainment.

And Gopi Krishna was very adamant that, well, to quote Sarvep...

He would have liked a statement by Swami Sarvepiyananda, which is that you can have ethics without enlightenment, but you can't have enlightenment without ethics.

Excellent, I like that.

He just insisted that pristine ethical standards would be a characteristic of a genuinely enlightened person.

Absolutely.

That's one of the primary characteristics.

It's very interesting, and the biography of Gopi Krishna, I just want to talk about that for a minute.

There are two books about Gopi Krishna.

Krishna.

One was his autobiography which deals with his life from his birth to 1949.

His original autobiography was called Kundalini, the Evolutionary Energy in Man and it was originally published in 1970 by Shambhala.

And then in the mid-1990s, we engaged a British author named Leslie Shepherd to take that book and combine it with two manuscripts of autobiographical material that Gopi Krishna had written before he died.

And the result is "Living with Kundalini", which is still being published by Shambhala.

And this book is, you know, in my humble and obviously unbiased opinion, the best book you can find anywhere that gives a really complete account of Kundalini transformation, starting with a person who is in a state of normal consciousness, who goes through a powerful Kundalini awakening, And 12 years, 12 years of transformation of his sensory and mental faculties, until finally he transitioned into this perennial state of really it was a perennial state of enlightenment.

Now I want to make it very clear.

By a perennial you mean abiding, it didn't come and go.

Yeah, it was a, he, his consciousness was such after the, his transition, he could literally let his mind just immerse into this infinite ocean of consciousness.

The way he explained it to us once, he said it's almost like a drop of rain falling into an ocean.

And it realizes that it is the ocean, but somehow it retains its own integrity.

Yeah.

So it becomes the ocean, but it also retains its own integrity.

So, we'd be sitting there having dinner with him, and then he'd just be...

Going to Samadhi.

He'd just be gone.

And at first we were like, you know, oh my God, after a while we just chatter amongst ourselves until eventually he came back.

And this state that he was in was indescribable.

I'll tell you another personal anecdote.

One time he had given me the job of coming up with section titles for the chapters in one of his books, I believe it was Secrets of Kundalini in Pantastavy.

So I cooked up what I thought were some reasonably good titles, and then I trucked over to his house to tell him what I'd done.

I knocked on the door, and his daughter-in-law answered the door, and I said, "I'd like to see Panditji." So she said, "Okay, come in and sit down in the living room." So about 10 minutes later, he came down from upstairs.

His office was upstairs where he did his dictation work and all that.

So he came down and sat down and I said, "Panditji, I would like to show you these chapter or these section titles that I've come up with." So I started to tell him, you know, the first chapter I was going to do this and that.

After about 20 seconds, he put his hand up and he said, "Stop." He just looked at me and he said, "If you had any idea where I have had to bring my mind back from.

I talked to you about these inconsequential matters.

You wouldn't be bothering me with them.

It was like that for him.

He would just, and, but it required tremendous self-discipline because at one point in his Kundalini process in that 12 years, he had had the initial experience, which he almost died from, which is very famous.

It's been written about in so many books.

About six years after that, he had the impulse to start meditating again.

So we started… He had been meditating like three hours every morning for quite a while.

Yeah, from the time he was 17 to the time he was 34 when the initial awakening happened.

And then after that awakening, the crisis resolved, he stopped meditating completely.

But after six years, he felt that he had recovered enough that he could meditate again safely.

So he He started meditating and he eventually got to the point, probably after a week or two, where the meditation was so blissful, so intense, so enrapturing that he neglected his diet and his sleep and he ended up back in a similar condition to what he was in the initial crisis.

So he went through these two periods of crisis.

By the way, I really like to correct the misconception that many people have about him.

I've met many people who seem to think that he suffered in torment for years without let-up.

This is absolutely not the case.

The initial crisis lasted for about nine and a half weeks.

The second crisis lasted about half again longer, and he had other minor crises of shorter duration as well.

But other than that, he lived a relatively normal life, at least outwardly anyway.

You know, he had a third child right after, two years after the awakening.

He went to the office, did his job, and for the most part, he lived a relatively normal, healthy life.

And it wasn't like he was tormented for years, but he mentioned, he did say that this, when a person goes into this type of experience, they can literally, are so enraptured, they are so gripped by it that they don't come back to the body.

They just eventually depart the body.

They're gone.

You know, they leave it.

So it requires tremendous self-discipline.

And fortunately for him, when he was younger, he had that failure in the examination at — he calls it college, but for me it was like 12th grade, it was like high school, I would call it in North America.

So in the final year of his high school, he had been a good student up until that time.

He had been, you know, he's very bright and intelligent and managed to pass his grades with no trouble.

But in the final year, he took to reading novels and books on science and philosophy that had nothing to do with his schoolwork.

And he neglected his studies and to the eventual result that when it came time to write the final exams, which would determine whether he could go on to higher education, he failed miserably.

And he was absolutely devastated by this failure.

And not just on his own account, but the family had been mired in poverty for years, and his mother had put all of her faith into him, the only surviving male child, to lift the family out of poverty by getting a good education and she had sacrificed everything for him and he let her down and failed in his examinations.

So he made this absolutely ironclad vow that he would never, ever let his wayward tendencies in his mind have a negative impact on his life.

So he set off on a program of iron self-discipline, iron self-discipline, that whatever he had chance.

If his body shirked against doing something, he would force himself to do it.

And it was this iron self-discipline that literally saved his life later in his kundalini experiences.

So that was a really key event in his life when he failed the examinations.

The other thing that happened was afterwards, he vowed to live his life according to the dictates of the Bhagavad Gita.

You know, honesty, truthfulness, charity, reduction of self-importance, minimization of ego, charity, helping others.

So he resolved to live his life in this way.

So this event in his life where he failed the examinations, major, major impact on him.

But I wanted to make that point about that, you know, the, when he started meditating again, that it is so enrapturing and I could tell you about some of the descriptions he gave of his mental state.

Let me just...

Yeah.

Now, it should be noted, of course, that he said that we might be headed for a world, a society in which everyone, or most people, were in such a state, and it would be kind of a heavenly world.

So we don't want to give the impression that he was so unique that he was experiencing things which everyone is not theoretically capable of attaining themselves.

Absolutely, yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

So now keep in mind, we have a lot to cover, so we don't want to spend too much on these minutiae.

Okay.

But I would like to say a little bit about his internal experience, because it's really important for people to understand how different it was from normal consciousness.

He said to us one time, he says, "You have no idea how different it is for me." He said, "I have something kings never had, this bliss, this joy." One time he said to us, he said, "If the world at large could experience my consciousness for even just a few minutes, there would be a mad stampede of people practicing yoga and meditation." A mad stampede.

He said, "It is so different." there were a number of differences in his consciousness.

And this started five of them were six things five of them started right after the initial awakening experience For one thing he could perceive prana in his own body Moving around and he said it was it was super intelligent.

It knew everything about every cell in his body it would Go into an organ that was not working properly fix it and then withdraw He said he would wake up in the middle of the night and there'd be a storm of activity going on inside of himself and he felt like a helpless victim.

That was one thing.

The second thing was he said his conscious bubble had expanded tremendously.

Now, I think I have, just for myself, I perceive my conscious bubble as being in and around my head.

And I think that's the way it is for most people.

But he said after the initial awakening, this had expanded to a much greater size.

He called it his mental mirror because it reflected the external world.

and it tended to shrink and grow, but it basically stayed much, much bigger than the normal.

The third thing that was different was his internal visualization process.

And he said before the awakening, if he brought to memory an object of some kind, it would be against a sober background, it would be similar intensity of color to the original.

He said after this initial experience, he said his whole mind was alight, like the background of his mind was full of light.

And when he recalled to from memory and image, it would be carved in living fire.

Those were his exact words.

That was the third thing.

The fourth thing was his dreams.

And from the end of the initial awakening crisis, he said, when he went to sleep at night, his dreams were like an Elysium, like a fairyland, full of light, love, bliss, happiness, joy.

He said it's indescribable.

And he said the glow from that would last well into the next day.

You know, this being in this Elysium.

And it was like this till the day he died.

The fifth thing that happened to him was that after the initial awakening, everything he looked at seemed to be covered in a layer of chalk dust.

And he thought it was rather unusual, But he couldn't explain it, and he eventually concluded that it wasn't a problem with his eyes, it was something that was happening in his brain.

So this went on for about two years, and then in 1839, I think he was walking to work from the description he gave in his autobiography.

He was walking to work one day, and he looked up at the office buildings where he worked, And he stopped dead in his tracks in utter astonishment, because that layer of chalk dust had morphed into a ravishingly beautiful silvery luster.

It surrounded everything, it made it alluring, entrancing, beautiful, literally indescribable.

That was a feature of his consciousness until the day he died.

And do you have that image that I sent you the other day, Rick?

Yeah, and before I show that, I just want to say that I totally believe everything you're saying here, but I just want to say that from my understanding, this may be rare, but it's not unique.

Not unique.

And this thing of like the silvery stuff, it's often described as celestial perception, which is characteristic of a certain level of consciousness.

And the dreams being blissful and all this other stuff.

You know, many yogis and saints and such people have described such experience throughout the ages.

Absolutely, yes.

Yeah, and the point to emphasize is that, you know, Gopi Krishna was, you know, a remarkable man but a case in point of what everyone is potentially capable of.

We all have the innate ability to unfold such levels of experience.

So yes, let me share that image.

Okay, I'm sharing that image you wanted me to share.

Okay, so if you notice, the female deity at the feet of Vishnu, this is Vishnu on the coils of the serpent floating on the ocean of milk, and his spouse Lakshmi is at his feet, caressing his feet, and she is whitish in color, and Vishnu himself is blue in color.

this is a common feature all through the art in India, that the female deities like Lakshmi and Parvati, they are whitish in color, and the male deities are bluish in color.

Now why is this?

In the Indian spiritual tradition, the female, the feminine represents creative power or Shakti, which manifests the physical world.

And the male aspect represents the consciousness.

So you have consciousness and creative power, like the two aspects of reality.

So what Gopi Krishna said, when the transformed person looks out at the outer world, they see it bathed in this beautiful silvery luster.

And so that's why Lakshmi is silvery in color, and Vishnu is blue, as is Shiva and Krishna and other universal deities.

He said there's a dual significance to this.

On the one hand, blue represents the sky, which, as we know from the Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescopes, goes on, if not to mathematical infinity, at least to practical infinity.

So it's infinite.

And he said, when the transformed individual looks inside themselves at their own consciousness, it's like looking into the starry sky at night that goes on to infinity.

The other reason for the bluish color, he said, this is the color of the pranic currents the body, and this is actually corroborated by the Western mystic Wilhelm Reich, who talked about orgone energy surrounding life, and this is, you know, the equivalent of prana, and he said it had a bluish tinge to it.

So Gopi Krishna, he says, "When I look at a painting like that, every detail is significant, and I know what all of it means.

You know, what's the significance of the serpent?

What's the significance of the ocean of milk?

Why is this cord coming from the navel of Vishnu?

What is this figure sitting on this lotus with red color?

Why is he holding four books?

Why does he have four faces?

Every detail is significant to a person who's had this transformation.

And even one last thing, Rick, I guess you're probably familiar with the Ramayana, you know, the story of Ram.

Sure, I've read, yeah.

It is a direct allegory of the awakening of Kundalini, a direct allegory.

And this is not known in India, as far as I'm aware.

You have three characters.

You have Ram, the prince, you know, impeccable character.

You have his wife Sita, who is the epitome of feminine virtue.

And you have the evil demon Ravana, who has ten heads.

And in the Indian tradition, ten symbolizes the five organs of sense and the five organs of action, which is the physical body.

So Ravana kidnaps Sita and imprisons her in his island fortress of Lanka.

So Sita is Kundalini, imprisoned in the body.

And Rama, through his impeccable behavior and his courage and strength and all these other virtues, frees Sita from Ravana.

This isn't even known in India as far as I'm aware.

Yeah, that's interesting.

The story is a direct allegory of Kundalini.

And he just told us this one time out of the blue, you know, this is an allegory of Kundalini.

The birth of Krishna is an allegory, the same way.

Yeah, I think all these things are.

I mean, it's not like God is really this blue guy lying on a snake, you know, with a lotus coming out of his belly button.

It's all symbolic of things that has deep spiritual significance.

And he explains some of these in Kundalini, the Dawn of a New Science.

He explains the Vishnu image and all the details.

He explains the Natharaj, the dancing Shiva, and he explains the birth of Krishna, how all the symbology involved in these, if anybody is really interested.

Anyway, so the point I'm making is these changes that happened in his consciousness Are reflected in the whole tradition of india.

They're not just sort of aberrant psychological states which you know Like a psychologist may look at and go.

Well It's obviously semi deranged These are integral to the indian tradition And the state of consciousness that he had You know, he tried to tell us what it was like how beautiful it was just Sometimes he just couldn't find the words.

He was asked once at a conference to describe the state He said there are only two ways that the state can be described.

He said one is silence, the other is tears.

You cannot describe it.

So I just want to make that point that his transformation in his consciousness was so extreme to go from somebody with a normal state of consciousness to this.

What he said was this is what Kundalini does.

it will eventually become the state of consciousness of everybody in the human race.

Yeah.

And he also said that even though the word Kundalini isn't used in other cultures around the world, people have had these experiences in cultures that had no knowledge of Indian spirituality.

Every culture.

It's universal.

And I would imagine that among the 2 to 20 trillion galaxies in the universe, there are uncountable civilizations in which people are having similar experiences and using their own language, whatever it may be, to try to explain them.

That's a little bit beyond the scope of my understanding, but I would agree.

There's lots of galaxies out there and almost every star has planets around it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Life is amazing.

A question came in from someone.

Shall we take a question?

Okay, this is from Irma Francis, whom I have interviewed.

She's been on Backgap.

She's wondering, "Can a child have a Kundalini awakening or possibly be born with Kundalini awakening?" And before you answer that, I think it might have been Joan Harrigan or I don't know who was saying that kundalini can awaken in one lifetime and take another or perhaps several lifetimes to fully ascend and you kind of pick up where you left off.

If it awakens and you die before it completes, you pick it up where you left off.

Oh yeah, the way I understand it is that, you know, I mean we have cases like Ramakrishna who had mystical experiences from a very early age.

So yes, it is certainly possible.

the whole race will be born into this state.

It will not be something that happens during our lifetime.

We will be born into it in the same way that we all have an intellect.

We all possess an intellect.

Are you saying people will be born enlightened?

Yeah, totally.

The general theory is that if you are enlightened, you don't need to get born, but maybe that's wrong.

I wouldn't agree with that, but you know.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying that's an absolute, but at least in some circles, people sort of see enlightenment as getting off the wheel of reincarnation, and you know, you're up and out.

And I'm not entirely sure that is true.

Actually, I would leave it in God's hands, and it seems to me it would be useful for enlightened people to be born, even if they don't need to achieve liberation.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, Gopi Krishna said that when this faculty becomes fully active, he said, it will open up a whole area of investigation, like these other realms of creation that we have no perception of right now.

So it's not like there'll be nothing to do when this new faculty of perception is fully active.

There'll be more to do than there is today.

But it'll just be very different than what we engage in at this point.

So yeah, you know, Kundalini can become active in children, but there are physiological considerations here.

And I think what I would like to do is to talk about the actual physiological mechanism of Kundalini in the body.

Because this is something you will not find on any website, you will not find it in an organized fashion in Gopi Krishna's books, it's kind of spread around, bits and pieces all over the place.

The only book that it exists in is Consciousness, the New Paradigm.

And what I did was I collected together all of Gopi Krishna's statements about the process and I put it into a narrative that explains it.

So I was going to go through that narrative.

Sure.

Let's do it.

Okay.

There are two aspects of the Indian spiritual tradition, which Gopi Krishna said, must be incorporated into modern science before science will be able to understand Kundalini.

One of these is prana, the life energy, and the other is the, I guess you could say that consciousness is a higher order of reality than the physical creation.

Now prana, anyone who's done yoga seriously has heard of pranayama.

Has three long A's.

Pranayama.

It's not pranayama.

Pranayama.

This is the absorption of prana into the body through the breath.

Now what is it that's in the air that we breathe?

There are basically two elements.

There's nitrogen, which I think is about 83%, and oxygen, which is about 63%.

No, no.

Something like that.

It couldn't be 83 and 63.

I think it's 27 or some lower.

Yeah, something like that.

16%, some such thing.

The majority of it is nitrogen, but nitrogen in its atmospheric form is extremely inert.

It's not totally inert, but it's highly inert.

It does not combine easily with any other substance.

It was a major breakthrough in science when they managed to separate the nitrogen molecules, the pair.

Anyway, nitrogen appears to be absorbed into the body or taken into the body in the breath and just expelled, it's not taken in.

Oxygen is very different.

It is a terrific catalyst, you know, catalyzing other reactions.

And Gopi Krishna speculated that there may be some kind of subatomic particle associated with the oxygen atom, which attaches to it.

Now, oxygen is taken into the body through the lungs, and oxygen atoms are distributed to every living cell in the body, because cells, like the body as a whole, they have to have oxygen in order to survive.

He said all the cells of the body extract this pranic energy from the oxygen atoms, and the cells themselves become kind of like pranic batteries.

like a battery holds electric charge, but our cells of our body hold a pranic charge and it's continually being replenished by the oxygen.

The next stage of this process is that this pranic essence, and this is my term, I call it a pranic essence, is taken from the cells of the body by the nerves and is transported to two different locations in the body.

One of these locations is the brain.

And in his definition of prana, Gopi Krishan said, it is an extremely subtle, as yet undiscovered by science, an extremely subtle substance, which is responsible for the activity of thought and transference of impulse and sensation in living organisms.

In other words, without this pranic fuel in our brains, we couldn't think.

So of course science does not believe in this, but science has a lot to learn about the brain.

So part of this pranic energy goes directly to the brain, but it's only carried to the brain by a very limited number, a set of nerves.

And my personal belief is it might be the cranial nerves.

There's 12 pairs of cranial nerves coming from the eyes, nose, ears, mouth, going straight into the brain.

it's those that provide the brain with the prana that it needs for a person in the state of normal consciousness to function.

The majority of this pranic essence collected from the cells of the body by the nerves goes to the reproductive system and it is stored in the fluids, specifically in the fluids of the reproductive system.

Now I know that there are physiological differences between males and females and Gopi Krishna described it as a parallel process.

It accomplishes the same thing even though the physiology may be different.

So the secretions in the reproductive organs are like the major storehouse of this pranic essence in the body.

Now this pranic essence can be used in two different ways.

One is for sex and reproduction, and this pranic essence is really what is behind the pleasure we feel in sexual arousal and orgasm.

Without that essence, we wouldn't have that pleasure.

Gopi Krishna also stated that he believed that it was essential for insemination as well.

Maybe the squiggly sperms, I don't know.

But he made that point that it's necessary for insemination.

So that is the one purpose that this pranic essence can be used for.

And he said that when it's used for this purpose, it is converted from the essence in the reproductive system into a gross form, which is maybe necessary for it to produce that sensation of pleasure.

I'm not sure.

The other purpose that this pranic essence is needed for is spiritual transformation.

Now here's a major misconception, major misconception that so many people have about Kundalini.

When somebody says, "I'm going through an intense Kundalini process," right, you know, I think what most people, where their mind goes, is what's happening at the base of the spine, you know, is just shooting this energy up the spine through the chakras and all that.

When I hear somebody say that, where my mind goes is what's going on in their brain, because The awakening of Kundalini is more about the, I guess, the activation of what Gopi Krishna called an evolving center in the brain.

He actually described it physically as above the palate and below the crown of the head and slightly back towards the back of the head.

He said near the fourth ventricle, but I'm not sure what that is.

I'm not an analyst.

He described that it's a very small region.

In Sanskrit, this is called Brahma-Randra, the chamber of Brahma.

And it's referred to as the chamber of Brahma because Brahma is the creator deity, and it's creating this new faculty of perception.

So when you meditate, what organ of the body is it stimulating?

The brain.

So if you remember Gopi Krishna's awakening, I guess I should point, I just want, let me say something further first.

So what happens is when this center in the brain starts to become active, what it does is it sends signal down to the reproductive system and says, "Start sending that energy up to the brain." Because when the center becomes active, it's somewhat similar to like, if you take a 100 watt light bulb out of a lamp and you put in a 200 watt light bulb, it's going to give you double the amount of light.

However, it's going to draw double the amount of current from the electrical system.

So when this center in the brain starts to become active, it instantly must have far more pranic energy than the nerves can provide that a person in a state of normal consciousness has.

So, it tells the reproductive organs, start producing this stuff.

And this, these pranic essence in the reproductive organs is sublimated into, it gets very complicated, there's actually two things that get created, but let's just say there's one just for the sake of simplicity, that it sublimates it into this refined, what is called in Sanskrit ojas, O-J-A-S, which is sent up the spine to the brain.

And it is essential for the brain to have this pranic essence in order to function properly.

Because if it doesn't get that, then all sorts of neuroses and psychoses and problems can happen.

So it's the center in the brain that is triggering the center at the base of the spine, not the reverse, which most people think.

And if you remember Gopi Krishna's initial awakening experience, he sat there, you know, for three hours a day and he would picture this lotus shining above his head, glowing with light.

And he was meditating one day and all of a sudden he felt this intensely pleasurable sensation at the base of his spine.

So his attention went from the lotus to the base of his spine, the sensation disappeared.

So he managed to calm himself down and bring his attention back to the lotus.

Again the energy started to come up.

As soon as he took his attention off of the lotus, the energy went back down.

The third time he managed to bring the energy all the way up to the brain.

But this is a clear indication that it's the center in the brain which is really what is triggering the activity at the base of the spine.

And in terms of understanding a Kundalini process, it's really essential to to understand this mechanism because it explains all sorts of things about why people have difficulties.

And one of the key things to understand is that this pranic essence that is converted or sublimated and sent to the brain, it has to be very pure for it to work properly.

And unfortunately, our Western lifestyles seem to be designed to proxify our prana.

You've got all these different things like tobacco.

It's a poison for the prana in the body.

Your recreational drugs and alcohol, a diet that is low on nutrition, high on fats and sugars, terrible for the prana.

Insufficient sleep.

And then there are all the mental side of it too, constantly focusing on material gain, getting more, getting more, that, you know, this greed for power and wealth.

They all tend to toxify the prana.

And whenever, you know, I've been talking to countless people over the years, and what I tell them when they call me up and tell me that they're having difficulties with their kundalini process, I'll say, "You have to do everything you can to purify the prana in your body." And it's difficult.

I mean, even assuming that you can do all these things, you can have a totally pure diet, get adequate sleep, eliminate all habits like smoking and drug things, you've still got to deal with toxins in the air and plastics and things in the food and the water.

So it's almost impossible for someone to have a perfectly pure prana.

But the implications of this are really serious for someone having a powerful kundalini awakening.

I'm going to tell you a case history of someone I met in India, because it's really fascinating and it really gives you a clear idea of this process.

This guy was a professional man.

He was somewhat older than us, maybe 15 or 20 years older than us.

Professional man, he had a great deal of responsibility, a lot of stress in his work.

And all of a sudden, Kundalini started to become active in him, majorly.

And he ended up in a mental institution as a consequence.

You know, he had to take a leave of absence from his work.

Fortunately for him, there was two things that were fortunate.

One was the mental institution was in Kashmir, in Srinagar.

And secondly, he got hold of a copy of Gopi Krishna's autobiography, the original one.

And when he read the autobiography, he realized, this is what's happening to me.

And he went to Gopi Krishna, and I'm not quite clear on how long it took Gopi Krishna, but eventually he got this guy back to full health, restored him to his job, you know, the whole bit.

You know, we met the guy quite a few times.

However, it was one aspect of his experience that is really amazing.

He told us that when he was going through the worst of this Kundalini process, when he was the mental institution, that he would have a dozen full orgasms a night.

Now for a mere mortal male like myself, this is astounding.

Why did this happen?

But when he told us about his lifestyle prior to the awakening, it was perfectly obvious what had happened.

He was, as I described a few minutes ago, doing just about everything wrong.

He was a heavy smoker, heavy drinker, terrible diet, high stress, poor sleep, everything.

So what happened was...

It's amazing that Kundalini woke up in him under those circumstances.

Well, this is the thing.

You're talking about what happens in the brain.

And there are certain people who are ripe for the experience.

Despite what they're doing, yeah.

And he was obviously someone who was ripe for the experience.

Anyway, so what happened was when the center in the brain opened up it goes "I need energy" so it sends a message to the reproductive system "start producing" so his his reproductive system went into overdrive.

However, Kundalini Shakti in its wisdom knew that if it sublimated this essence and sent it to the brain he would have undoubtedly gone totally insane and maybe even have died.

So it saved his life by forcing this impure essence out of his body.

But the consequence was his brain didn't get the energy it needed, which is why he had all these psychological problems.

So it's really key to understanding this whole biology of Kundalini.

And it's a similar process in women.

Gopi Krishna told us one time about a woman who came to him and she was quite embarrassed about it.

But he said, you know, "Please describe your experience to me." And she said, "Well, you know, I had these things happening." And he said, "Oh, please describe in detail.

Don't be shy about it." And so she described how her reproductive system had, like this fellow's, gone into overdrive.

And at the end of it, she said to him, "Is this the way to God?" And he says, "Absolutely!" So, it really is important to understand this physiology if you are having difficulties with the Kundalini process, process, that you have to do everything you can to modify your lifestyle to purify the prana.

And one book that I would highly recommend is Joan Harrigan's book, Kundalini Vidya, you know, just a tremendous book in terms of describing this process whereby Kundalini is, you know, she calls it renovating the body.

And so, you know, when you understand what happens, you know, how the center and the brain affects, you know, the center and the basis.

And this explains why they got this whole variety of things.

You can have people who have, say, a profound mystical experience, but that's all that ever happens to them for the rest of their life.

They go back to a state of normal consciousness.

Well, what's happened is the center of the brain has opened up temporarily.

had the experience and it's closed up, but they didn't have maybe the heredity or whatever factors for that, or they didn't do enough spiritual practice for that to stay open.

In other cases, you can have people where the center at the base of the spine, for whatever reason, starts to become active and send energy up the spine, which causes all sorts of mental fireworks, but they don't really have any kind of permanent transformation going on.

And so, you know, it's really essential to understand.

Now, one area that this is…it really helps to give us a better idea of is drug experiences.

And I just wanted to talk about that for a minute.

So, in terms of saying, what is the relationship between drug experiences and mystical experiences, I guess you could say a simple answer and a complex answer.

The simple answer is that drug experiences are a distortion of normal consciousness.

You know, they are simply distorting our...

Normal consciousness gets distorted in lots of ways.

I mean, I know there's one kind of painkiller that I've taken.

So these are distortion of normal consciousness.

However, the more complex answer is more interesting.

There are certain people who, as I said a few minutes ago, may be ripe for the experience.

Their nervous system, their brain, they're ripe for the experience.

And if they, say, lived the right type of lifestyle and did, you know, moderate spiritual practices, they could probably awaken Kundalini and have, you know, a major Kundalini experience.

For a person like that, if they take a psychotropic drug, it is possible for it to trigger the center in the brain to some form of activity.

Normally it's not as sublime as a real mystical experience, but it can happen.

I know someone who has had a drug experience that turned into a mystical experience.

So this is possible.

However, you have to look at the whole thing overall from the biology of it.

kind of psychotropic drug that you take, what kind of an effect is it going to have on your prana?

And given that it's a foreign substance, it's not produced in the body, and it's a powerful substance, I would say that the chances are almost certain that it's going to have the effect of toxifying the prana.

And that can't be good.

Anything that toxifies the prana, you may get some sort of twinge of this center in the brain, But you'll probably pay for it in other ways.

Now the other aspect of the Kundalini experience, I'm sorry I forgot to mention it a few minutes ago, I should go back here, is obviously, as I said, when the center in the brain becomes active, it starts sending up this energy from the base of the spine.

Now this has the effect of draining the energy out of the reproductive organs.

And I know you had Scott Heigl on, you know, a while back, a couple of years back, and he talked about this.

Gopi Krishna talks about the same process where the reproductive organs go into overdrive.

Now the ideal thing that should happen, and this happened, it took 12 years in Gopi Krishna's case, is that Kundalini will remodel the brain and the nervous system and the internal organs of the body so that the body itself, without going through the reproductive organs, that the nerves can provide a sufficient amount of energy for the new state of consciousness.

And after this happens, the drain on the sexual organs will decrease.

And this is why so many spiritual disciplines recommend continence or a reduced level of sexual activity.

It's not that it's evil or unclean or anything.

It's because the brain needs this fuel to function.

Now, eventually, as I said, the body itself will adjust and more nerves will provide energy to the brain, and the person can go back to a more or less normal state of sexual activity.

And if you look at Gopi Krishna, his third child was born two years after the initial awakening.

So, you know, it didn't impair his ability to have a child, obviously.

Now understanding this whole process of drug experience, as I said, taking any kind of psychotropic drug is going to have the effect of toxifying the prana.

The other thing to consider is what the body is trying to do is to adjust the brain, the nervous system, and the internal organs to basically rewire them so that it can provide more prana to the brain.

Is taking a psychotropic substance going to help this process at all?

I don't think so.

I can't see any way that it would, in fact, it would probably have the opposite effect.

The body would go, "Well, you're going to use drugs to do this.

Why should I bother?" So you know, when all things are considered, taking psychotropic drugs is inimical to spiritual transformation for that reason.

So that's one way this understanding, this mechanism can really help.

I have a couple of questions based upon everything you've just been saying.

So the first is, there have been certain people who have had powerful kundalini awakenings and they became intellectually brilliant, much more so than they had been, eloquent, radiating spiritual energy.

They set themselves up as a spiritual teacher.

People were very impressed with them.

And yet they developed voracious appetites for sex, drugs, and other indulgences, and seemed to become megalomaniacs, proclaiming themselves the greatest avatar ever to walk the earth.

And my sense is that Kundalini awakening in such people, Kundalini Shakti awakened in a vehicle that was not prepared for such awakening.

And there ideally should have been greater purification or refinement of the nervous system or some kind of greater self-control once this awakening had happened.

And instead they were dumping all these drugs and engaging in all this hedonism.

And the whole situation just got really, really bizarre.

So what do you make of basket cases like that or train wrecks like that?

I guess, I think pretty much everything you said is bang on.

If you have to consider the toxification of the prana and the effect it can have on a process.

And one thing, I remember asking Gopi Krishna one time about people who did have things like that happen to them.

And what he said was, when Kundalini becomes active, it has the effect of magnifying the personality.

And this is what gives people like this charisma.

But he said it will magnify the negative traits of personality more.

And so this is why, if you think about what it was like in ancient India, the person didn't just go to the guru, and the guru gave him, you know, meditate for four hours a day on this.

The guru said, "Clean out the latrine," you know, "Make my supper, fetch the water." And the guru would study the disciple for years, find out their personality kinks.

there of a tendency towards megalomania, to self-importance.

A guru would hammer away at them.

And only after years of this hammering away at their ego would the guru give them these practices.

But now today, everybody wants it right away.

Like, you know, I want something I can do, give me something I can do for the next, say, two weeks, so I can be enlightened.

It doesn't work like that.

You know, you don't get that.

So it's really important for anyone who is undertaking this process to understand the need, the absolute essential need for developing self-control.

And if you look at Gopi Krishna, I mean, here's a guy, when he was doing his three hours meditation a day, what he would do first, he'd get up at three in the morning every day, and he did this even on the morning after his wedding night, if you recall from his autobiography, He got up at three in the morning, go to the temple near where he lived, it was a spring in the temple, we need to have a bath.

Now Kashmir has a temperature in the winter which is much like northern US and southern Canada.

It is cold!

And some of my compatriots when we were in India had to stay in Kashmir in the winter without any central heating, and it was not fun.

He would go to the temple, have a bath in the spring, come back blue, sit down and do his meditation.

He did this every day, no matter what.

And so he developed this iron will.

And so the other thing to consider is that when he was going through his Kundalini process, and he talks about this a great deal in the Kashmir Discourses, how one time, he gave example, he said one time his wife, I think she got fed up with the fact that, you know, he'd been caught in it for quite a few months, and she demanded that he do his husbandly duty one night.

And he said after he was finished, he said he felt like he was being plunged into a pit of hell, because all of a sudden the brain was deprived of this energy.

So I think people who are having these things happen, they have to understand the mechanism that's involved here, and their disciples have to understand this mechanism.

And there need to be things, what's the word, regulations or checks or whatever, checks and balances in place for someone who is in the position of being a spiritual teacher, for them to be identified when this kind of thing happens.

And in Gopi Krishna's case, he was meticulous about noting his own inner process.

And he would at the beginning, he would make it out.

What about these characters who claim to be enlightened or serving as gurus, who are sexually profligate, you know, usually behind the scenes while claiming to be a lifestyle, but not always.

Have they kind of reached a stage at which they're not cast into the pit of hell when they're not beyond the need for it or what?

What I would say is that they are using their position as a way to have sex.

Sure, but in terms of the whole neurophysiology and Kundalini phenomena, you know, how can they do that without feeling like shit and not wanting to do that anymore?

People are immoral in that way, but there's a range.

Like there's people who will use spiritual status to gain control of people like that, and there's others who are really pure in their mind, and yet they still have this thing happen to them where, you know, the center in the brain starts stimulating the reproductive system.

But in their case, they will really make an effort at self-control.

And if they understand that this can happen, and I think Gopi Krishna said one time, he said, if he hadn't developed that self-control, he would have died.

And I think he was referring to the time when he felt tremendous pressure on his reproductive system, which if he had given into it, it would have been disastrous for his brain.

So people, first of all, need to be taught what this mechanism is and how it works, and They have to be put through a regimen or a series of disciplines where they are able to, to some degree, manifest self-control when it's needed.

But it's a very tricky subject, and there's a lot of shades of gray in there.

But I think it's really critical to understand this physical mechanism, how it works in the body, and the effect of the impure prana.

I would say that a person who goes off the rails like that, quite likely it's because their prana is impure.

And the impure prana will cause all sorts of mental aberrations, neuroses, psychoses.

You know, it's a really difficult thing.

And one of the aspects of Gopi Krishna's theory is that there are a certain proportion of mentally ill people, in mental institutions who are there because of an aberrant Kundalini process.

A certain proportion.

Now there's other people who are in those institutions for other reasons, but there's a certain proportion that it's Kundalini that is a problem.

Yeah, which could get us into a whole discussion about how the medical profession needs to understand this so they don't start giving people Thorazine and locking them up if they start having Kundalini symptoms.

Let me just ask you one more thing before we go on to that, if we do, which is that you're talking about drugs.

These days, psychedelics are huge.

It's a huge industry.

All kinds of people are doing it.

There's some good, serious research at Johns Hopkins and NYU and places like that in which alcoholics or veterans suffering from PTSD or stage four cancer patients who are terrified of dying and so on are using psilocybin and other substances with great benefit.

We don't want to make a blanket statement that they're bad.

But on the other hand, I think that if a person thinks that their regular use of them is going to result in a state of enlightenment, they are mistaken.

So do you care to comment on that?

Oh, I would say we're into a gray area where they are not recreational drugs.

They are therapeutic in what they are trying to accomplish.

They're administered very carefully with a lot of supervision.

Yeah, it's a therapeutic situation, which is something that is, to me, a totally separate thing and would require a medical training that I don't have.

But it's more that people do the drunks just for the sake of enjoyment or because they think that they're having transcendental experiences that they do this.

So that's the sort of the group that to me is really needs education in that area, that you are not going to have a positive spiritual transformation process by doing recreational drugs in that form.

So the motivation is important, whether it's therapeutic or not.

Have you ever heard of someone doing psilocybin or ayahuasca or one of those things and having it elicit the kundalini awakening?

I haven't really been in contact with too many people doing that kind of thing, to be honest.

You know, unless they come to me in my capacity as corresponding secretary for ICR, like I handle all the inquiries coming into the website, you know, I will answer.

But I haven't actually had that many people who are in that situation, or if they were, they weren't about to tell me.

It's been more a problem that people have a lifestyle that's inimical to the prana.

And it's very frustrating having a correspondence with these people and they say, "Well, look, you have to stop smoking." "Well, I tried, but I can't." And then say, "What can I do?

What can I do?" "You have to stop smoking." "Well, I can't." "What can I do?

What can I do?" - Brother, go to Kashmir and take a bath in the wintertime.

That'll help.

It makes me crazy when, you know, they're not very common, but you know, this kind of thing happens.

Yeah.

So, I've interviewed people who like had a spontaneous Kundalini awakening and didn't know what the heck was happening to them and started researching on the internet and saw the word Kundalini and thought they had Kundalini disease or they didn't know what it was.

And then on the flip side, there are, I'm sure, like you just said, there are people in mental hospitals who had Kundalini awakenings which were not understood by the medical professionals.

So, you know, have you ever kind of interacted with medical professionals to educate them on this matter?

And, you know, if you had the opportunity to do so, or even to design a course or something, what would you like doctors and psychiatrists to know so they don't misdiagnose people?

Well, it's a very tricky area because the medical profession is very guarded and very strict in terms of what people can do and can't do.

As far as my involvement in founding the Kundalini Research Network back in the early 90s, one of the goals of the network, which they accomplished, was to get a spiritual process included in the diagnostic service manual for psychiatry, which they succeeded in doing.

The spiritual process was a valid psychiatric condition.

So we at least got that far, but unfortunately there's a huge amount of resistance in the medical community to this and I'm not qualified.

You know, I cannot make and even when I talk to people about Kundalini, I will never say, you know, I'm going to give you something that will cure your problem.

I just say, look, from what you've told me, It sounds to me that your prana is toxic to everything you can to improve your lifestyle, to make it more healthy in order to fix the problem or to help Kundalini.

And that way I can't be faulted.

I'm not saying I'm diagnosing you as a Kundalini and whatever.

And I know, you know, there are some doctors who, like Yvonne Quezon, who specialized in treating people with Kundalini issues.

And we just need more of them.

Yeah.

it often takes the person themselves having some kind of kundalini or mystical experience before they accept the reality of it and will take the risk of standing up to the medical profession and saying, "This is a valid area of inquiry and research." It will probably be one of these things that 50 years from now is pretty mainstream, you you know, but like everything, the initial resistance is typical of established paradigms, which leads us actually into a discussion of your book, if you want to talk about that, unless you want to say more things about what we've been discussing.

Okay.

I just wanted to make one more remark about the research, and that is that I think the The key to making Kundalini a valid area of research is when medical science develops the ability to detect and measure the individual prana.

And if we could see the prana and the effect, let's say, you know, alcohol or tobacco or therapeutic drugs or medicinal drugs or meditation or whatever, what effect do these things have on the individual prana?

It will be a quantitative proof that this is an actual mechanism in the body.

Now what the Emerging Sciences Foundation has done is they've given, from the psychological standpoint, this paper that they're writing, is saying that statistically, based upon statistical analysis of individual experiences, this seems to be the case, that there is this mechanism in the body.

But I think it will be only when prana is detected and can be actually measured, the health of the prana or the purity of the prana, then we're going to see some actual heads will turn in the medical profession.

Are there any attempts being made to develop some instrument like that?

I mean, Kirlian photography or whatever could do it.

I've heard of them.

I mean, years and years and years ago, there was the Kirlian photography.

I'm sure you remember that.

I just mentioned that, yeah.

Ostrander and Schroeder, where there are psychic discoveries behind the Iron Curtain and all that kind of thing.

But I don't know whether they were actually detecting prana or not.

It's extremely subtle.

Right.

And whether they were detecting like a field as opposed to prana, I don't know.

I really just am not technically versed enough in the subject to know whether anything like that has been actually developed or not.

But I'm hoping that someday, and you know, if someone has developed something like that, then please get in touch with Linda Molina at the Emerging Sciences Foundation.

Because you know, all we have at the moment is their paper, but we want actual hard scientific data in the form of measurements of cerebrospinal fluid or brain scans or prana or whatever.

I should interview Mauro Zapatero one of these days.

He used to speak at the Science and Nonduality Conference.

He is terrific.

Mauro is so...

You know, he gave a wonderful presentation on the ESF about six or seven years ago, and he talked about how the amniotic fluid in the womb of a mother is almost the same thing as the cerebrospinal fluid.

And these are the two fluids in the body that Kundalini Shakti, when it's building the fetus in the womb or when it's remodeling the nervous system, it's working with these fluids.

So yeah, if you could get Maharaj on, that would be… Yeah, he'd be interesting.

Yeah, he really would be.

Okay.

So would you like to talk about your consciousness book?

Yeah, there's one more thing that I just wanted to say.

For someone who really is interested in Gopi Krishna, that there is the autobiography, and I started to talk about that, but I didn't go on to talk about the biography.

And the major downside with the autobiography is that it only goes up to 1949, and Gopi Krishna died in 1984, so there's like 35 years where there's nothing.

So fortunately, ICR recently has published a full, complete biography of Gopi Krishna's life.

And it was done by my longtime compatriot and friend at ICR, Terry Daigler.

That's T-E-R-I and then T-E-G-L-E-R.

I'll put a link to it on your page.

That's the book that I read in preparation for this interview.

It's called Gopi Krishna, A Biography, Kundalini Consciousness and Our Evolution to Enlightenment.

And Terry spent, I don't know, more than 20 years interviewing everyone she could find who knew Gopi Krishna personally, his family, associates, friends.

She flew all over the world, to the States, to Europe, to India.

And in conjunction with that, she used his correspondence from his written archives, which is like all his correspondence from the 1960s to the day he died, to paint a really complete and accurate picture of his life.

But her approach is somewhat different in that Terry really he wanted to show that Gopi Krishna himself was an unparalleled example of the humanity of the future.

He showed all the qualities that he said you would find in an enlightened person, and Terry has done a wonderful job of that.

So I just wanted to… Yeah, no, the book really made that impression on me because there have been so many guru scandals and, you know, Gopi Krishna wouldn't even call himself a guru, but there have been so many… entire lifetime, he did not take a single disciple.

Right.

A group of us Canadians, we went there to work.

That's all we did.

Yeah.

We worked our butts off.

But I mean, he did set a great example.

And for me, I mean, I shouldn't say that I didn't get anything from the experience.

I mean, for me, the work I did in India and since is karma yoga.

And that's, you know.

Of course.

But it wasn't that he sat and taught me, this is what you should do.

He never did that with anyone.

Not a person.

So, he wasn't a guru.

Okay, good.

So define what a paradigm is.

Yeah, the new paradigm.

As I said at the beginning of the interview, I always had a keen interest in science and the paranormal.

And for years, you know, I've been going over Gopi Krishna's books and he's talking about how prana manipulates life processes.

And, you know, it was like, gosh, it sounds good, but I wish I could see some proof of it.

Well, back when my vision was better, every morning I used to sit down at my computer, turn it on, and the first thing I would do was I would go to the Astronomy Picture of the Day website.

And it would give these beautiful pictures of nebula or galaxy or comet or something, and you know, a little blurb about it, maybe the latest discovery made about something.

I've downloaded hundreds of those.

I use them as my desktop pictures.

But it was in, I think, August of 2015, I turned it on and they did something totally different.

It was a graphic animation of a strand of DNA being replicated.

And it showed this ladder at the bottom being split, and it came up the one side and these little enzymes and proteins were reassembling the ladder.

On the other side, it was throwing out these loops that had to be recombined backwards.

Then it would throw out another loop, recombine it backwards.

I looked at this and I went, "Oh my God, this is Shakti.

This is obviously not a random process.

It's Shakti, it's intelligent, it's purposeful, it's designed." And I was just blown away.

And that triggered in me a study of microbiology.

And so I, you know, I went out and I, you know, watched YouTube lectures from microbiology professors and whatnot, and I started learning about what goes on inside cells.

And, of course, there are so many amazing things that happen inside cells, but what really struck me was all these things that were happening inside cells that they had no explanation for.

You know, I could, in consciousness, the new paradigm, I just list all these different things in the process of mitosis.

There's no explanation for how this happens or how that happens, or how the other happens.

Like, as a simple example, when a normal cell divides, you've got these 23 pairs of chromosomes that divide into 46 pairs of chromosomes, and each one of the daughter cells gets a perfect copy of the original 23.

What is it that makes sure that every chromosome gets replicated only once, and that only a perfect copy goes to each one of the daughter cells?

What is it that's regulating and controlling that?

There was no answer.

I remember, I used to watch these microbiology lectures by, I won't identify the universities in the Northwest United States, but this microbiology professor was talking about some of these processes.

He says, "It's just like magic!" If magic is the only way that you can explain what's going on, then science does not understand microbiology very well.

And so, I had this urge to write this book, and so I started writing.

I had written a number of articles on Kundalini up to that time for ICR, so I thought, "Well, I'll combine them into a book," and so I started writing it.

And I had another, just to me, it just blew me away, this breakthrough I had.

I was thinking about quantum processes, and I've always had a fascination with quantum physics.

And I was thinking about this quantum process where when you make an observation of a subatomic particle, you can never know in advance exactly where it's going to be.

So say we do a thought experiment, say we evacuate all the air from a chamber, and then You have a gun that fires an electron or a proton into the chamber, and it's a perfect vacuum, so it can't run into anything.

And then after, say, a microsecond, you use a detector to see where that particle is.

It'll be in a specific spot.

Now say you repeat this experiment 10,000 times in an absolutely identical fashion.

The probability will approach zero that it will be in exactly the same position on any two of those replications, any two of them.

And I thought, you know, this is why Einstein said, "God does not play with dice," you know, and it's really a troubling thing for quantum physicists.

And then I thought about it, and I thought, in order to know where the particle is requires consciousness, and what are we using to detect these particles?

We're using our individual human consciousness.

And then I thought about how Gopi Krishna just described—here's an example of the way he described his consciousness when he perceived it.

He said, "It is so vast and so powerful," he said, "I am humble to dust." Those were his exact words, "I am humble to dust.

It is so vast." And I thought, would a consciousness that powerful be limited by the position, by quantum process, so that it would not be able to know where it is.

Maybe a consciousness that powerful could make the proton or whatever be exactly where it wanted to be.

And I thought, all of a sudden, it was like, "Oh my God, I've explained how consciousness, which is totally non-physical, can influence physical matter." And here's an example of how that could work.

In the case of the production of an enzyme or a protein, what happens is the information in the gene is copied into a strand of what's called mRNA, which we've all heard about lately thanks to COVID, messenger RNA.

That strand of messenger RNA is taken up by a molecular machine called a ribosome, which is an agglomeration of about 75 enzymes and proteins.

And what it does is it reads the genetic code, and each number in the genetic code corresponds to a particular amino acid.

I think there's 18 possible amino acids.

So it'll read a number, "Go get amino acid number 17." Then it reads the next number, "Amino acid number 3." It goes out and gets it, attaches it to the 17.

"Amino acid number 9." Attach it.

And it builds up this chain of amino acids that could be anywhere from 50 to several thousand in length.

Now what happens is when this chain comes out of the ribosome, it folds up into a particular shape and the shape of that folding determines its function.

It's kind of like an excavator machine, its shape determines its function, it can dig out the dirt.

So the shape is key.

Now here's the thing, at every juncture of these amino acids, it's possible that it could fold a number of different ways.

And for an amino acid of say a thousand, or a chain of a thousand amino acids, the number of ways it might possibly fold up is probably greater than the number of stars in the known universe.

And yet, it always folds up in exactly the right way, unless of course there's an error in the DNA.

And I thought, why does it always fold up?

And I thought, well, if this consciousness, this prana shakti or kundalini shakti, could make a proton be where it wanted at the join where these amino acids, oftentimes they share a proton.

They suddenly bond together, they share a proton.

And the proton will only be, according to probability theory, in a particular place.

So if you could make the proton be at a specific place, you could control how that protein folds.

Oh my god.

I'm totally out to lunch or crazy or I've just made an amazing discovery.

And then I started thinking about other quantum processes and Shakti, how it works.

And there's a quantum process called quantum electrodynamics.

And this is a very fascinating thing.

You think of space as being empty, but according to quantum electrodynamics, every cubic millimeter of the universe is seething with potential energy.

And out of emptiness, pairs of subatomic particles can suddenly pop into existence, as long as they have opposite charge, they pop into existence and then annihilate each other.

And as long as the time that this happens in is short enough, then the Heisenberg uncertainty principle says, you can do this, you can violate the law of creation of matter and energy, but it's only for a short length of time.

So I thought, well, is consciousness going to be limited by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?

Probably not.

So it could literally create matter out of nothingness, out of this base energy, this Shakti energy, this power.

So I had all these thoughts about how introducing the effect of a powerful consciousness into our understanding of quantum processes could, unless I'm totally out to lunch, help explain life processes.

So I put it out there in the book for what it's worth.

I'm hoping someday to be validated.

Whether that'll happen before I kick the bucket, I don't know, but we'll just have to see.

So one of the other things I did in the book...

Let me make a comment on that before I go on, which is that this might be over people's heads a lot of this stuff that you were just saying, but the exciting thing for me is that if you study this stuff, even as a layman such as myself, who doesn't understand the science anywhere near as clearly as someone who is a professional at it, you're left to the impression that in so many different ways, nature is anything but random or accidental or arbitrary.

It's as if, like in what you're describing with the DNA duplication, it's as if you had a Las Vegas slot machine with a thousand wheels and every time you pulled the handle, it came up all cherries or all whatever, you know, they all matched up.

And the odds against that are astronomically small, and yet it happens millions of times a minute in our bodies, in all bodies.

Or the thing you just said about these particles popping out of nothingness and then going right back in really fast.

Another way of looking at it is that it's not nothingness, it's fullness, purna.

And it's this field of all possibilities, as Deepak Chopra likes to say, this sort of infinite reservoir of energy and intelligence and creativity.

So things are not coming out of nothing, they're coming out of a vast potentiality.

And physics does tell us, actually, you were alluding to what's going on in a cubic millimeter of space.

They tell us that on the level of the vacuum, there is more energy in every little cubic centimeter than there is in practically the whole manifest universe.

It's just huge on that unmanifest level.

So the implications of all this is that creation is not a dumb mechanism, it's not arbitrary, it's not accidental.

There is incomprehensibly vast intelligence orchestrating every iota of it, and it's staring us right in the face.

I like to say God is like hiding in plain sight.

And so it's very exciting to contemplate this.

And I believe there are more and more scientists who see it this way and are very excited.

But then there are those who kind of monitor the predominant paradigm who would think that this is all New Age woo-woo.

Yes, hooey.

I was arguing with a guy like that, and he said, "Well, just grant us one miracle and we can explain the rest.

Tell us how the, you know, grant us the miracle that the laws of nature came into existence in the first place and then we can use those laws to explain how everything works.

I can give you a miracle, a baby.

Yeah, really.

A baby is a miracle.

So I mean, and you know, you alluded earlier to the marriage of science and spirituality.

I think this is how they will be conjoined.

This is how they will reconcile their differences and become one unified means of gaining knowledge, which is that science is revealing the wonders of divine intelligence.

And then the yogis, they have a sort of a scientific apparatus that they've learned how to use, which can probe realities in ways that scientific instrumentation is not capable of doing.

Yeah, absolutely.

Such as Gopi Krishna's kinds of experiences and perceptions.

You know, you're saying, "Can we measure prana, for instance?" Well, maybe a human being who is capable of subtle perception will have to be the instrument that can diagnose somebody to see what's going on with their prana.

I had a friend once who said microorganisms may be the key, that the effect of prana on microorganisms might be measurable as a way to determine.

So that's another possibility.

Yeah.

Anyway, I've always been excited about the notion that science and spirituality are actually allies in human quest for gaining knowledge, and neither will be as successful individually as they can be in conjunction or in collaboration with each other.

Absolutely.

It's true.

One thing I would like to get to, because our time's getting on, I would like to talk about And a few questions came in also, so we'll get to those.

Okay.

Just briefly talk about Gopi Krishna's theory of evolution and why it is so important.

And one thing, evolution according to science is totally random.

But if you look at evolution, you know, from the standpoint of the fossil record, it is obviously not random, because we have this steady progression from simple to more complex, more complex, more complex.

And the Darwinian theory has no explanation for it.

"Oh, it's random genetic mutations." Well, how can that produce this increase in complexity?

Yeah, despite the second law of thermodynamics, which is supposed to break everything down again.

Yeah.

So, science cannot explain it.

So, what Gopi Krishna said was, "Evolution is under the control of Kundalini Shakti." And when you understand that in the life cycle process, there are two places where evolutionary changes can happen.

One is in the meiosis process, where the sperm and egg are being produced, and the other is when the fetus is being built in the womb.

And it is Kundalini Shakti that is in charge, that really directs this process of construction in the womb.

So it is able to control this evolutionary thing.

Now the question is, why is it so important?

Now if you look back at the history of the last three or four thousand years, you'll see that mankind has been literally plagued by violence—wars, revolutions, conquests.

And if you look at that, there are really three major sources of these problems.

One is greed for power and wealth.

The other is ideological differences like communism versus capitalism, or democracy versus dictatorship.

and the third is inter-religious strife.

And Gopi Krishna said that the reason these things are happening is because there is a goal to evolution, that Kundalini Shakti actually has a predetermined goal that it is trying to bring the human race to.

And that goal is enlightenment.

It is trying to bring it to being a new faculty of perception in the brain, brain, which is what the ESF, you know, this survey is starting to show, that it brings this new faculty into operation in the brain.

But according to Gopi Krishna, he said, this process can only proceed according to strict biological laws.

And these laws have to do with our behavior.

And the human species is the very first species on the earth, at least that we know of, that has been given the choice to affect their own evolution.

All other species are driven by instinct and they're locked into it, they can't change.

We humans, we now have the ability to influence our own evolution and we can either hinder it or we can obstruct it or we can enhance it.

And what we're doing most of the time these days by our lifestyle is we're obstructing it.

And he said, "All of these things you see in society, you know, substance abuse, interpersonal violence, you know, mental illness, like obsessive compulsive disorder, there's so many of these things that are a direct consequence of this obstructed evolution." And he said, "We must know what the mode of lifestyle is that we need to adopt to correct evolution." And he also said, "If we don't do it, then nature will do it for us." Which he said, "And it will not be gentle." So what we're trying to do at ICR and ESF is we're trying to get this idea out there that we need to understand these evolutionary laws.

And Mike and Linda and Mauro's survey is the first step.

Detection of prana is another step.

Unless we understand these laws, I don't think the human race has much of a chance of survival.

not with all these nuclear weapons and biological...

I mean, say somebody, either deliberately or by accident, came up with a virus that had the virility of Ebola and the transmissibility of the common cold.

It could wipe out half the human race in a couple of months.

I mean, Spanish flu, millions and millions of people.

Or nuclear weapons.

And anyone who thinks that nuclear weapons won't be used...

Well, I went through the Cuban Missile Crisis when I was a kid, and I remember that.

And when you get people running countries in the world like we see right now, really it's only a matter of time before they're used.

So, really, the only hope the Cuban race has for long-term survivability is if we understand these evolutionary laws and adopt our behavior accordingly.

And it's not such a difficult thing as it sounds because we've already done this with microbes and bacteria.

You know, before we had the microscope, we were at the mercy of every microbe and bacteria that came along.

Now we know that there are certain standards of cleanliness, physical cleanliness, we need to maintain our health.

It's the same with our mental health.

Aldous Huxley said something like, "There aren't all these problems that plague humanity are not problems, they're symptoms.

symptoms of one underlying problem which essentially, I don't know how he phrased it, but essentially our lack, our failure to recognize our own essential nature, to sort of establish this kind of spiritual foundation of our individual and societal lives on the basis of which all these problems would just not arise in the first place or would be much more easily solved.

Well, again, to me the solution is understanding evolution because the human being of the future, like I was saying about how Terry Gagler's book shows this, Gopi Krishna was a wonderful example of the human being of the future.

He wrote a book against nuclear war.

He was against the whole economic system where consume, consume, consume.

science has a problem with accepting consciousness as a higher order of reality.

Even religions, you know, what he was saying about this mechanism, there's resistance there.

But he said all of these things have to be changed in order for humans to evolve in a healthy way.

He said every aspect of human society, our education systems, our economic systems, our political systems, all of these systems will have to be examined using the tools that, you know, hopefully we will design to measure this evolutionary process to see what works and what doesn't.

But he said, once this is done, he said, the future of humanity is beyond belief how glorious, how amazing it'll be.

War will be eliminated, poverty eliminated, all these things.

And it's all down to understanding these evolutionary laws.

Yeah.

And like you said, either we do it voluntarily, willingly, or nature does it for us and whoops us upside the head.

Yeah, the cosmic smack.

Yeah.

Okay, so here's a few questions.

This is from Kenny Hogan in Scotland.

This has been a very challenging topic for me.

Could you clarify if the Kundalini awakening is a physical or mental process or both?

And how is this awareness affected or not?

I think you kind of covered it, but you might want to just give it another shot.

Yeah, I mean, it is both physical and mental.

And subtle physical as well as gross physical.

There's subtle physiology stuff going on.

I mean, it's beyond the time I have left, but in order to really understand what's going on, you have to understand the pranic spectrum.

And I haven't really hardly said anything about the pranic spectrum.

I was going to do a presentation on September 10th to the Kundalini Collective in England about the pranic spectrum, but it is something I could take three or four podcasts to explain.

You have to understand how the brain is affected by the pranic spectrum, and in order to understand that, you have to understand the Indian tradition's understanding of creation, so it's not super easy, but there's a lot more going on.

If they read Gopi Krishna's books, they'll get into all this, right?

If they were to read Gopi Krishna's books, this kind of stuff is covered?

It would help.

Yeah.

Okay, here's one from Martin Klein in Germany.

What would you recommend to control sexual urges?

Maybe breathing exercises?

And if so, could you recommend specific ones?

Anything else?

I would say the only thing that I'm aware of, I'm not an expert in this kind of thing.

What I will say, though, is that I know for a fact that eating meat will dampen a Kundalini process.

I mean, we used to have these Kundalini Research Network conferences, you know, and people would get all zingy, and people would say, "Oh, I've got to eat meat," or "I can't handle it anymore." So eating meat, you know, will dampen a Kundalini process to some degree.

But it's a challenging topic, and unfortunately, I have to confess that I think it'll be up to research in the future which will answer it.

But I would say that Gopi Krishna devotes a major amount of time to this topic in the Kashmir Discourses.

Gopi Krishna, the Kashmir Discourses, you can get it as an audiobook from the recordings I made in 1977, or the transcript as an e-book.

But he goes into tremendous detail about the balance between our sexual drive and our spiritual drive and what is a healthy amount of sex for someone on a spiritual path.

So I would highly recommend that you listen to or read those discourses.

Okay, good.

And I would also suggest that if you feel inclined to do so, a regular meditation practice of kind can be conducive to sublimating the energy, so it doesn't just get stuck.

It helps to convert it and raise it.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I think really trying to adopt the spiritual lifestyle is one of the best things to do, and, you know, focusing the mind on a higher reality as much as possible, rather than, "Oh, I need this, I need this." But again, it's not an easy thing.

And you shouldn't strain too much because that can result in whiplash, you know.

And also, that to which, like you said, focusing the attention, that to which we give our attention grows stronger in our lives.

So obviously there's lots of materials out there that one could put one's attention on that would be inimical to the aspiration to, you know, sublimate your sexual urges.

One question here from Karsten Reitz in Denmark.

I was referring earlier and you were commenting on these people who appear to have had some sort of kundalini awakening and then be very charismatic and shakti and eloquence and all that stuff, but they're kind of off the rails in terms of their behavior.

This question he asks about your thoughts on deflected risings as Joan Harrigan has discussed them in my interview with her and in her book.

In other words, the Kundalini rises to a certain extent, but then gets off on a sidetrack, and one seems to be awakened both to one's own assessment and observer's assessment, and yet is not.

It's just risen to a certain extent and then gotten sidetracked.

Yeah, I mean, Joan is coming from what's called the oral tradition of Kundalini, which is a very ancient and rich tradition because knowledge of Kundalini was, to a large degree, kept secret in India.

Because, I mean, it's obviously can be dangerous if abused.

If somebody goes and does intensive practices, pranayama and meditation, they could get into terrible trouble.

So, a lot of the information about Kundalini was kept in the oral tradition.

In other words, you had to be part of that tradition to get that knowledge.

And Joan is a tremendous reservoir of that knowledge.

So I really can't comment on her understanding or the oral tradition's understanding as opposed to Gopi Krishna's.

My approach has been to focus on Gopi Krishna's, and I'll be openly calling a model.

I do that in my book, his model of Kundalini, because no model is perfect.

All models are—they're models.

They're an estimation or a general representation of what is really happening, which is much more complex.

So I would have to say that I would defer to Joan on that, because that's her area of expertise, and I really don't have that detailed knowledge of the oral tradition that she does in order to answer that question.

Okay, good.

And she has a big thick book that goes into tremendous detail about all this and she's working on a major revision of it.

Yeah, Kundalini Vidya, just a terrific book.

Right.

Terrific book.

I love Joni, she's terrific.

Yeah, she's great.

She came and visited us somewhere before last and we had a nice chat.

She used to come to our ICR conferences all the time.

Yeah, great.

Okay, well, obviously this is a huge field and we could talk for days and not cover it all.

giving people a taste and I'll put up links to your websites and several books and so on and so forth.

And if people really want to dive into this, it won't be hard to find all the resources that you would like to check out, all the Gopi Krishna books and Joan Harrigan's book and all kinds of other things.

You could spend the rest of your life studying this stuff.

Sure.

As you have.

Well, I've only got almost 50 years.

I mean, I've got a long way to go yet.

Good start.

Just getting my feet wet, you know.

Yeah, right.

So, thanks, Michael.

I really enjoyed preparing for this interview and doing it, and getting to know you and talking with you, and a lot of fun.

Yeah, it's been great.

And keep up the good work.

I mean, in preparation for this, Scott Heigl recommended I watch some of your other interviews, and Tom Campbell, he was just terrific.

I really love Tom's interview.

It's like he was coming to so many of the same conclusions that Gopi Krishna did, but directly from quantum physics.

You know, I was just blown away.

Yeah, he's an interesting guy.

He loves to talk.

There's some guy who does interviews like I do.

He said he interviewed Tom Campbell and they went on for like seven or eight hours.

I'd be surprised.

It was a huge long thing.

Yeah, anyway, keep up the good work.

I will.

Thank you.

So thanks to those who've been listening or watching.

I appreciate your time and attention.

We have quite a few interviews scheduled now.

Irene has got them all lined up through December, so if you want to look at our upcoming interviews page you'll see on bathcap.com, you'll see who we've got scheduled.

So stay tuned and also come to the website.

You can subscribe to the audio podcast.

You can get on the email list to be notified every time there's a new interview, all kinds of things like that.

So thanks, Michael.

Thank you Rick, my pleasure.

All right, stay in touch.

Thank you.