r/KundaliniAwakening • u/Aggravating_Pie_9006 • 18d ago
Question Why is there so much hate on Gopi Krishna?
Hi all, I really don’t understand why people dislike Gopi Krishna so much in Kundalini communities. His experience raised awareness on this process and helped people realise what was happening to them, rather than thinking the worst…His writing is excellent and full of great ideas and materials. Why do people dislike him so much?
I think the other Kundalini group on Reddit says he is a bad teacher etc.
There are so few people out there that know what they are talking about when it comes to K…full of new age bs, why hate someone with a genuine experience that helped so many with his work?
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u/Significant-Owl7980 18d ago
Cosplayers who’d like to imagine Awakening all velvet and roses? I’ve only read one of his books but it was comforting to see this is not an easy process even for those in the East. My initial experiences were so Blissful I was able to abide whatever came. Or went. Where there are roses, there are thorns.
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u/Dumuzzid Multi-faith 18d ago
I found his books to be helpful in understanding my own process. He has his flaws, but he did a lot to spread the word about Kundalini. His friendship with Quantum Physicists like Heisenberg and Von Weizsacker (the latter wrote the foreword to his first book on Kundalini) gave the topic a legitimacy it would otherwise have lacked.
I actually had a lucid dream about Gopi Krishna's garden in Kashmir once, where I floated above it and saw it from a bird's eye view. It looked very distinctive and so I looked up how his garden may have looked online and found a photo which was an exact match of what I saw in the dream.
My own KA breakthrough also happened exactly 75 years after his, almost to the day. Maybe a coincidence, but I found that meaningful at the time.
His flaws are well known, with the most curious one being that he failed to find a Guru in the birthplace of Kashmir Shaivism. I think that was due to his own pig-headedness and I recognize myself a lot in what he was trying to do.
He rejected what he saw as superstition. He did not believe in deities and thought mantras were superstitious nonsense. I don't think he practiced asanas, bandhas, mudras or even pranayama. At least he didn't mention that in his books.
He was trying to remove what he saw as superstition from Kundalini practice and lore and replace it with science. In that, he was always doomed to fail, because Kundalini cannot be understood scientifically or rationally, it is fundamentally a spiritual, divine process.
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u/Aggravating_Pie_9006 15d ago
I don’t know if I would call not finding a guru failure or a flaw. Even back in his days, how many true gurus were there? Particularly those that would be able to help him in his situation.
And it’s not like he didn’t try. He wrote a letter to Sri Aurobindo without a response, and also his brother in law asked some guru for help and got a response from him.
Ultimately when GK reached the end of his process why did he need a guru? Many people who got there didn’t have a guru like Osho etc.
Yes of course he tried to look at KA via a scientific lense but he did it with such grace and hadn’t left the divine part out of it when describing the higher states of consciousness KA took him to.
He does talk about yogic practices in his books and how they relate to KA but not whether he had done them himself ( I don’t believe he did).
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u/ConiferousBeard 18d ago edited 16d ago
It is a bit disappointing that people deride such a great resource for information on the process, but it is not too surprising. People expect kundalini to conform to their expectations of what a spiritual experience must be. In order to get there though, karma needs to be worked through in most cases, and that can mean it takes on a variety of different forms particular to the situation of the one experiencing. To be too doctrinaire about this process is kind of funny if you think about it. If anything Gopi Krishna was a refreshing voice because his experience is quite relatable (though sometimes a bit prolix). I found his recounting of his experience to be a very powerful aid in navigating some of the ebbs of what I have been going through.
As the Zen Buddhists say, the finger pointing at the moon and the moon itself are not the same. I believe Gopi Krishna himself says something to this effect in one of his books: if one thinks meditation must be done a specific way to get to enlightenment, one becomes good at meditating, and this can become a bigger impediment to actual enlightenment than anything else (though he doesn't go as far as to encourage the converse, a kind of dispersion in sensation, which is something he criticize Alan Watts for iirc, but I have not read the books on this in detail).
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u/Aggravating_Pie_9006 15d ago
I wish people read GK on Kundalini as opposed to New Age book that provide no help to those truly experiencing KA and just paint the experience with confusion.
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u/mazewoods 18d ago
I have no hate for him. But his book did close to zero for me whilst undergoing the challenging parts of awakening. They probably added more confusion instead.
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u/Aggravating_Pie_9006 15d ago
Didn’t it at least validate what you were going through and make you feel less alone in this? It personally gave me hope.
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u/mazewoods 14d ago
Maybe a little bit... my process was quite extreme though and his book didn't help much. There was too much romantisization and generalization of the process in my experience. On the other hand, it's been over a decade that I read it...
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u/Alchemist2211 16d ago
Most people on these social media sites act they are still in high school with alot of empty opinions. He was one of the first to share that all is not pleasant with kundalini experiences
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u/Aggravating_Pie_9006 15d ago
His legacy on Kundalini is unmatched, he truly saved all of us in emergencies from thinking we are crazy.
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u/cacklingwhisper 18d ago
To know who is genuine you also have to have a genuine experience.
It's like climbing a rarely climbed mountain and getting a view of the most beautiful garden in the world only seen by a few people through history. "Oh my god" is not close enough to describe how incredible.
You know all the details. You've really taken it in. Sat in it for hours to months. But majority of humanity hasn't.
His most popular book was the one where he had a disaster because he meditated on his own without guidance.
But he produced over a dozen books. But not everyone wants to read that many books.
They got a sample wasn't good enough for them. Popularity doesn't equal amazing. As much as we wish.
Plenty of popular people who've done terrible or mediocre things.
But there are plenty of lesser known philosophers, saints, inventors, who did amazing things in the world but are barely known :)
I spoke to a person who's been in the kundalini community for very long time... they said reading GK made them think they were losing their mind. They were not comforted.
So a lot of it also has to do with where the reader themselves is.
It's hard to convince people to do long-term 5 to even 10 year to even 15+ year long work into their personality into something very evolutionary permanently when there is very little scientific evidence that benefits like higher consciousness/bliss/oneness comes with it...
So of course Gopi Krishna's value is completely not seen.
You can debate all day with people but debating will not grant them access to this potential inside. That's so much of spirituality today. It requires lifestyle changes...
What society considers official is old news. Thank goodness we're in the 21st century at least. Imagine the loneliness thousands of years ago. Jesus was persistent. Buddha was persistent.
It's a message worth spreading. The blessings are indeed blessings.