The Evolutionary Impulse

In spite of Gopi Krishna's focus on the evolutionary aspects of kundalini, many people ignore the fact kundalini is, first and foremost, an evolutionary mechanism.

What does that mean exactly? Kundalini provides the energy needed to nourish nonstop neuroplastic activity in the brain, which, in turn, fosters cell growth and mutation upgrades.

"Billions of years ago, according to the theory of evolution, chemicals randomly organized themselves into a self-replicating molecule. This spark of life was the seed of every living thing we see today (as well as those we no longer see, like dinosaurs). That simplest life form, through the processes of mutation and natural selection, has been shaped into every living species on the planet."

~ "How Evolution Works" - Marshall Brain, How Stuff Works

We evolved from one-celled organisms into the current form we label homo sapiens. It took a long time, but the process was, and continues to be, ongoing and incessant. Thanks to its role in evolution, kundalini never takes a break.

"The initial response of most people who are unfamiliar with the idea of continued evolution of the human brain is to just dismiss it. This is not because it is illogical, or even improbable, but simply because it is foreign to their way of thinking."
~ Bradford, Michael. Consciousness: The New Paradigm (p. 50). Institute for Consciousness Research. Kindle Edition.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to the acceptance of evolution is some people's belief that we have reached an end form, the last and ultimate configuration for our beings. Not so, we are a work in progress:

• It is possible for the DNA of an organism to occasionally change, or mutate. A mutation changes the DNA of an organism in a way that affects its offspring, either immediately or several generations down the line.
• The change brought about by a mutation is either beneficial, harmful or neutral. If the change is harmful, then it is unlikely that the offspring will survive to reproduce, so the mutation dies out and goes nowhere. If the change is beneficial, then it is likely that the offspring will do better than other offspring and so will reproduce more. Through reproduction, the beneficial mutation spreads. The process of culling bad mutations and spreading good mutations is called natural selection.
• As mutations occur and spread over long periods of time, they cause new species to form. Over the course of many millions of years, the processes of mutation and natural selection have created every species of life that we see in the world today, from the simplest bacteria to humans and everything in between.

~ "How Evolution Works" - Marshall Brain, How Stuff Works

Energy is needed to drive this process forward. Over the eons, as mutations occurred, there had to be an energetic outlay to transform each previous iteration of our species into new, improved species.

Where did this energy come from? It came from the same source it still comes from — part of our sexual energy is used for procreation and part for evolutionary purposes. There is, as Gopi Krishna stated, an Evolutionary Impulse that guides and determines how this energy is to be used.

Creating the energy for the regeneration process begins at the cell level:

"An enzyme is a protein that speeds up a particular chemical reaction. For example, one of the 1,000 enzymes in an E. coli's DNA might know how to break a maltose molecule (a simple sugar) into its two glucose molecules. That is all that that particular enzyme can do, but that action is important when an E. coli is eating maltose. Once the maltose is broken into glucose, other enzymes act on the glucose molecules to turn them into energy for the cell to use."

~ "How Evolution Works" - Marshall Brain, How Stuff Works 

It's a complex and intelligent biological process. There's another aspect of this process that's even more problematic for most people — consciousness. How and where does it fit into evolution? If there's an impulse there must be a consciousness that drives it.

Science is trying — without success for the moment — to find an explanation for consciousness. That's because scientists are looking from the outside-in, trying to locate consciousness on the periodic table as if it was a molecule.

"The argument unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality – such as space, mass, or electrical charge – just do exist. They can’t be explained as being the result of anything else. Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that consciousness could be like that, too – and that if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter."
~ "Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?" - Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian

So what's with the inside-out approach?

"The first reality we come across is consciousness. The world comes later. We know first ourselves and then the world. So the wiser course is first to understand the knower. What modern thinkers have done is to ignore or bypass the knower, forgetting that it is the knower that is doing it."
~ The Awakening of Kundalini—Gopi Krishna

The "unified field of consciousness from the perspective of neuroscience" compares it to information stored in the cloud as opposed to information stored locally:

"Pim van Lommels take on the unified field of consciousness centres around the concepts of non-locality and interconnectedness:
“'The mind seems to contain everything at once in a timeless and placeless interconnectedness. The information is not encoded in a medium but is stored non-locally as wave functions in nonlocal space, which also means that all information is always and everywhere immediately available.' (van Lommel, p. 224, 244) The implications of this hypothesis challenge dramatically the perception of individual consciousness as something limited and folded upon itself.
“'In this new approach, complete and endless consciousness with retrievable memories has its origins in a nonlocal space in the form of indestructible and not directly observable wave functions. These wave functions, which store all aspects of consciousness in the form of information, are always present in and around the body.
"'The brain and the body merely function as a relay station receiving part of the overall consciousness and part of our memories in our waking consciousness in the form of measurable and constantly changing electromagnetic fields.
In this view, brain function can be seen as a transceiver; the brain does not produce but rather facilitates consciousness.'” (van Lommel, p. 265)

~ "Unified field of consciousness. ONE = MANY" - Van Lommel, Pim. Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience. HarperOne, London, 2010. as quoted in "Transcendental Meditation."

So, if these notions are to be taken seriously — as is more and more the case — then it is clear that both evolution and biology are expressions of a consciousness that is more extensive than present scientific theory supposes. It is consciousness that provides the energy for continued evolution as well as the impulse to continue to evolve.

Gopi Krishna hit the nail on the head when he coined the term, evolutionary impulse:

"The aim of the evolutionary impulse that is active in the race is to mold the human brain and nervous system to a state of perception where the invisible world of intelligent cosmic forces can be cognizable to every human being."

~ Higher Consciousness and Kundalini - Gopi Krishna