From the Unseen

INTRODUCTION

The phenomenon of Revelation has been arguably the most powerful force influencing human behavior since civilization began. For thousands of years, from the time that the first organized faiths came into being, their adherents have been guided by the statements made by the founders of those faiths about the nature of Divinity, our relationship to it, and the edicts they laid down for how we should conduct our lives in order to reach that Divinity. The influence that these guidelines have had on human behavior has been so strong that no other external factor can compare to it.

Even today, in a society dominated from end to end by science and technology, a substantial portion of the race professes to a particular faith, and tries to live by the guidelines laid down by its founder. In addition, the course of many world events—from politics in the United States to the conflicts in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent—is powerfully influenced by the actions of individuals motivated by their interpretation of the precepts of their faith.

In the past, many wars were fought, and countless lives were lost as a consequence of the strife that was rooted in the rivalry between one faith and another. Until recently, these conflicts were limited in the destruction and loss of life they could cause by the low technological level of the weapons that were available to the combatants. But today, where it is almost a certainty that the terrible power of a nuclear arsenal will eventually come under the control of an individual or individuals driven by the fervor of blind religious fanaticism, a nuclear conflict is only a matter of time.

If this were to happen in, say, the Middle East, the long-term disruption of oil supplies would be a distinct possibility. Given that our civilization is almost totally dependent on oil for everything from transportation to food production, the effect on the global economic and financial systems of such an interruption could be catastrophic.

But despite this threat to the stability and even survival of our civilization, there has been very little serious effort expended on trying to understand the reason why the phenomenon of Revelation has retained such a powerful grip on the human mind. Since its inception, science has explained countless phenomena that were formerly attributed to Divine will as actually being the consequence of natural laws. Therefore, it is difficult to explain why the influence of faith has not been substantially diminished, let alone eliminated altogether, by the discoveries of science.

Our understanding of human nature, both physical and mental, has made tremendous strides in the last few centuries. Advancements in fields such as microbiology, genetic engineering, brain research and medical imaging technology have revolutionized our knowledge of the brain and body. But none of these avenues of inquiry has led us any closer to understanding why the phenomenon of Revelation continues to be so influential in human behavior.

One recent and striking example of the grip that religious teachings can have on the human mind is that of the recruitment of Westerners, both female and male, by I.S.I.S. to the conflict in Syria and Iraq. Despite growing up in a society that provided not just basic amenities but all the marvels and comforts of modern technology, a significant number of mostly young people rejected this way of life in favor of one of hardship and strife in a hostile, foreign land. It might be argued that many of these individuals were duped by the skilful recruitment tactics of the fundamentalist organization, but this does not explain the tendency of these people to so willingly reject the material comforts of modern civilization in favor of a religious cause.

The main reason why this phenomenon has never been seriously investigated is because of the antipathy that orthodox science has had towards the subject. One reason for this is its refusal to acknowledge the possibility of a spiritual dimension to human life. Another is its belief that consciousness is just a result of neuronal activity in the brain, and can have no existence apart from it. This attitude is undoubtedly a direct consequence of science’s centuries-old struggle to escape the rigid beliefs of some faiths.

This battleground has been concentrated recently in the field of evolution. The proponents of some fundamentalist faiths—the Creationists—take the position that evolution is only a theory, that human beings were created recently by a Divine power, and are separate and distinct from all ‘lower’ forms of life. The proponents of science, on the other hand, take the view that evolution is solely a consequence of purely random physical processes, and that natural selection has been the driving force behind the evolution of species from lower to more complex forms.

Both sides in this debate seem to be blind to the shortcomings of their own theories. The Creationists deny the obvious existence of the fossil record. The evolutionists, on the other hand, attribute the creativity in life processes, which makes anything achieved by humanity pale into utter insignificance, to blind, random chance.

But neither side has been willing to consider the possibility that the answer to the riddle of evolution contains elements of both approaches. As science has proposed, life has evolved over aeonian spans of time from simple to more complex forms. But as faith has insisted, this progression has occurred as a consequence of a guiding and controlling Intelligence vastly superior to our own.

The other fatal flaw in the theories of both faith and science is that they make the assumption that the primary faculty of mind that we currently possess, i.e. the intellect, is the highest that can ever be attained, and that no other modes of apprehending reality beyond it are possible. In other words, they believe that with the advent of the human species, evolution is finished. If asked, they would probably deny that this is so, but their short-sighted and outmoded belief systems, and refusal to even consider the possibility of continued evolution, tell a very different tale.

If the possibility of continued evolution of our mental faculties were admitted, then science would not be so quick to deny the existence of aspects to Creation that we cannot perceive with our physical senses. If continued evolution were admitted by faith, then the possibility that our understanding of Divinity is incomplete would also have to be accepted, resulting in more receptivity to the discoveries of science and to the teachings of other faiths.

In 1967, an unknown Kashmiri Brahmin named Gopi Krishna published the first edition of his autobiography–Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man. For the first time, he presented the idea that evolution was under the guidance and control of an Intelligence vastly superior to our own, and that a new faculty of perception—cosmic consciousness—was evolving in the human brain. This new faculty is essentially the same one possessed by all the enlightened throughout history—including the founders of all the major faiths. He proposed that this new faculty would provide humanity with a new channel of perception for the apprehension of levels of Creation invisible to us at present, and would eventually become a feature of the race as a whole.

Perhaps the most important consequence of his theory is that the evolution from lower to more complex forms of life is purposeful, and as such, this new faculty of perception evolving in the human brain is the predetermined goal of this process. But for the first time humanity, with its powerful intellect, now has the ability to influence the course of its own evolution. The guidelines laid down by the founders of faith came from this controlling Intelligence, and were meant to ensure that mankind facilitated the process of healthy evolution. When human behavior instead deviates from these guidelines, the course of this evolution becomes obstructed.

Throughout history, revolutions and uprisings happened to remove blockages in the course of evolution by replacing political, social, and economic systems that were inimical to evolution with those that were more suitable. According to Gopi Krishna, these changes came about as a reaction in the deep psychic levels of the human mind to these unhealthy conditions. In a letter to the noted biologist Sir Julian Huxley he expressed these ideas poetically:

This is why revolutions, riots and wars

Are used by Nature to remove the bars

Which wrong political or social chains

Impose on still evolving human brains.

Do not deceive yourself that it is chance

That starts the upheaval and the bloody dance,

But 'tis the racial mind which, when it deems

The time ripe, comes forth in rebellious teams

To wreck decadent orders that outlive

Their usefulness and people must renew.

If the average modern lifestyle is compared with the guidelines laid down by faith for a simple, virtuous life, there can be little doubt that humanity has deviated in a major way from the path of healthy evolution. Wasteful and unnecessary consumption, destruction of the environment, inability to control population growth, emphasis on material wealth as the main goal in life, inequitable distribution of resources, authoritarian political systems, hatred of different cultures and faiths, the opioid crisis, abuse of recreational drugs, glorification of gun violence, and addiction to modern technological devices are clearly counter to these guidelines.

The deep-rooted dissatisfaction with the current political and social orders, not just by the disadvantaged and the religious fundamentalists, but also by many in the general population, is therefore a reaction against the conditions that are currently obstructing evolution. Until these obstructions are removed, revolutions, religious conflict, terrorism, and the intractable social ills mentioned above will continue to plague our civilization.

One difficulty with studying the phenomenon of Revelation is that there have been so few clear examples of it in recent times. Although Gopi Krishna never claimed to be enlightened, the unique and profound nature of the poetic compositions in this book has all the qualities of true Revelation. In his autobiography, he described the process by which poetic verse came to him:

. . . The lines occurred one after the other, as if dropped into the three-dimensional field of my consciousness by another source of condensed knowledge within me. They started from the glowing recesses of my being, developing suddenly into fully formed couplets like falling snowflakes which, from tiny specks high up, became clear-cut, regularly shaped crystals when nearing the eye, and vanished so suddenly as to leave me hardly any time to retain them in my memory. They came fully formed, complete with language, rhyme, and meter, finished products originating as it seemed from the surrounding intelligence to pass before my internal eye for expression.

After receiving these first verses in Kashmiri, the author's native tongue, other material came to him in English, Punjabi and Persian—languages with which he was familiar to a more or less degree. But within a month, he was astonished when he began to receive verses in German, a language he had never learned nor seen written, nor, to the best of his knowledge, ever heard spoken in his presence. This was followed shortly thereafter by poetry in French and Italian, again languages with which he was not familiar. The publishers have taken the liberty of correcting a few minor spelling errors in the original text.

In addition to poems in these three European languages, those in Hindi and Kashmiri, written in the Devanagri script, have been included, in graphic format, with translations where available. The second half of the original edition, not reprinted here, contains 32 pages of material in the Arabic script, written in Kashmiri, Punjabi, Urdu, and Persian.

Several aspects of this experience are unique. The first is, of course, the poetry came to him in languages he could not write or speak. Another is that it all happened while he was in a fully alert and conscious frame of mind. This contrasts with the semiconscious or unconscious states in which psychic phenomena, such as automatic writing occur. Rather, he was in complete control of his reasoning and discriminative faculties and was required to use them to the fullest to retain and record the material as it came to him.

But perhaps the most important feature of the process is the overwhelming perception of the source from which the knowledge emanated. As he related in his autobiography:

. . . I am made to feel as if the observer in me, or speaking more precisely, my lustrous conscious self, is floating, with but an extremely dim idea of the corporeal frame in a vividly bright conscious plane, every fragment of which represents a boundless world of knowledge, embracing the present, past and future, commanding all the sciences, philosophies, and arts ever known or that will be known in the ages to come, all concentrated and contained in a point existing here and everywhere, now and always, a formless, measureless ocean of wisdom from which, drop by drop, knowledge has filtered and will continue to filter into the human brain.

In ancient India, one major criterion which a person had to meet in order to be considered as enlightened was to possess vak siddhi, or the paranormal gift of revealed speech. This generally took the form of poetry, written in one of a number of styles, each of which had to conform to a specific form and meter. Two classic examples of this type of writing are the great Hindu epics—the Mahabharata (which includes the Bhagavad Gita,), and the Ramayana. The latter is comprised of about 24,000 shlokas or verses, and is larger than the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer combined. In the shloka style, each verse consists of 4 lines of 8 syllables each, conforming to a particular meter.