The Kashmiri Extraordinaire Gopi Krishna Shivapuri (Hardcover)

Gopi Krishen (Krishan) Shivpuri was a Kashmiri Pandit Yogi, who has remained nearly unknown within his own community, less known in India but universally renowned in the West during his lifetime, (1903-1984), The pages that fill this monograph demonstrate that Gopi Krishna was the greatest Kashmiri Pandit, Kashmir has produced in more than one thousand years since the time of Acharya Abhinavagupta in the tenth century. Many in the West have opined that Gopi Krishna was a genius. In the least, he was extraordinary. His work and ideas on Kundalini, the fountain-head of Yoga and higher state of consciousness revolutionized the idea and awareness of Yoga in the western world during the twentieth century. Among the big spiritual Masters that India produced during the twentieth century, Gopi Krishna alone stood to the scientific scrutiny of his claims. As an exceptional Yogi, Gopi Krishna exhorted the scientific world at the highest levels to check and test the claims of his spiritual and meditative claims under the strictest scientific testing. In his lifelong crusade to promote his ideas on Kundalini to the Western world as a scientific evolutionary potential in human beings than merely a spiritual experience as based in religious culture, While there is plethora of international literature and recorded references about the life and ideas of Gopi Krishna on the awakening of Kundalini and his efforts to promote it in the West on scientific lines, there is little awareness of these aspects about him in India in general and almost a near vacuum among the Kashmiri Pandits, to whom he belonged, in particular. Hence, the monograph is a humble attempt to place before the readers; Kashmiris in particular, all the existing major references and accounts based on Gopi Krishna’s own writings and those written by western scholars about him and thereby introduce the Kashmiri Pandit community to one of its great sons in their entire history of more than five thousand years and the greatest the community has produced in the twentieth century, From this consideration, it may be hoped that this monograph ignites some interest in other Kashmiri Pandit scholars and writers to explore more about this genius.