The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (34 page)

Sannella said his survey indicated that kundalini represented no jump off the cliff but rather “a rebirth process as natural as physical birth. It seems pathological only because the symptoms are not understood in relation to the outcome: an enlightened human being.”

Scholar that he was, Sannella did mention Jung, who by that time had become a counterculture hero because of his embrace of the mystic East. But Sannella downplayed the warnings. He devoted one sentence to Jung’s conclusion that kundalini could lead to madness.

Sannella’s case studies tended to follow the same script—initial difficulties followed by slow recoveries so that the awakenings ended on a happy note, with the individual feeling a deep sense of personal renewal. But the evidence suggests that he engaged in a considerable degree of interpretative spin. For instance, his portrayal of the Reverend John Scudder, an Illinois psychic healer, reads nothing like the minister’s own account.

Scudder told of his body filling with heat, light, and energy. His blood seemed to boil. His organs felt like they were on fire. Waves of energy pounded his head. His heart beat so violently that alarmed friends could hear it thumping loudly in his chest, and their church later that day announced that he had suffered a heart attack. Sleep eluded him. Weeks of agony left him fearing for his life and his sanity, even as he judged himself able to read minds and see with clairvoyant vision. Then, quite suddenly, the horror ended and he felt thoroughly clean in a way he had never felt before.

Afterward, Scudder told anyone who would listen that the experience was to be avoided at all costs. “I was led to believe that the opening of the kundalini was a great and glorious occult experience,” he recalled. “What I went through was absolute hell. If there is a hell, it could not be any worse than what I endured.”

By the 1980s, aggressive gurus and practices had bestowed upon the San Francisco region many hundreds of kundalites, as students of the inner fire are known. Sannella
alone came across nearly one thousand cases and helped found a counseling service known as the Kundalini Crisis Clinic. The Spiritual Emergency Network—later renamed the Spiritual Emergence Network for a more positive spin—did no counseling but ran a hotline. Between 1986 and 1987, it answered more than five hundred calls. An analysis showed the typical caller to be a woman, age forty, who had questions about kundalini.

Today, scores of websites around the globe offer advice, most hailing the fiery experience as a sure path to spiritual uplift. But some tell of terrors, of strange illnesses and life upheavals, of desperate visits to doctors who find it hard to imagine what is going on, much less what kinds of treatments to recommend. A few tell of heart attacks and even death.

Bob Boyd of Greensboro, North Carolina, founded a website known as
Kundalini Survival and Support.
There he told of his own arousal as a young man and the nightmare of being unable to extinguish the mystic fire. The blinding rushes, he wrote, “literally crippled me mentally in terms of what academic achievements and future accomplishments I may have had.” People around the world, Boyd said, “rue the day they walked into the kundalini ring of fire.”

Such warnings get little play while popular portrayals tend to gain wide audiences. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the runaway bestseller
Eat, Pray, Love
, paints an alluring picture of her own experience at an Indian ashram. “I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely,” she gushes in her book. “I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, and I stepped through time.” Back on earth, she discovered that kundalini left her “randier than a sailor on a three-day shore leave.”

A few entrepreneurs have seized on the raw eroticism as a way to turn a profit, moving from the austerities of yoga to the garishness of commercialism. Their products focus not on full-blown kundalini but on an assortment of lesser arousals that seem to have little to do with mysticism or healing. It’s mostly about hedonism. Not surprisingly, California—home of distinction in the pursuit of drugs, sex, and other diversions—started the trend and became a hotspot.

A pioneer was More University. Founded in 1977, it flourished in the dry hills east of San Francisco, offering doctoral degrees in such subjects as sensuality. It had no library and no campus other than people’s homes, yet a doctoral degree
cost about fifty thousand dollars. What hundreds of students did learn was how to lengthen their orgasms. Graduates of the university reported one experiment in which a woman kept going for eleven hours. California, facing growing federal pressure to shut down diploma mills, eventually withdrew More’s certification.

But the knowledge spread. A principal medium was how-to books, several by More alumni.

Patricia Taylor graduated from Barnard College in Manhattan and received a master’s degree in business administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She worked on Wall Street before transferring to San Francisco, where she studied Tantra. In 1988, her life changed when a More alum brought her into a state of ecstasy that lasted about twenty minutes. “I was breathing fire out of my hands and feet,” she told me. “Then I went into the light.”

After studying at More, she refocused her life on teaching how to achieve long orgasms, calling them “a portal to the divine.” In 2002, she authored
Expanded Orgasm.
Her website,
www.expandedlovemaking.com
, offers books, advice, and courses, including intensives for partners.

Taylor told me she has been happily married for two decades. Her longest orgasm? Two or three hours, she replied. She added that it was hard to say exactly because it was easy to lose track of time.

Science is turning a new generation of imaging machines on these uncommon states in an effort to learn more about their characteristics and better understand the human sexual experience.

A pioneer is Barry Komisaruk, one of the first scientists to look into the neurophysiology of orgasm. The Rutgers professor worked with two female colleagues to publish the think-off study in 1992, and over the years has sought to map the neural aspects of sexuality, writing more than one hundred papers. His long interest resulted in an understated book,
The Science of Orgasm
, published in 2006 by Johns Hopkins University Press. By then, Komisaruk was not only doing research and teaching but was named associate dean of the graduate school.

Relatively late in his career, Komisaruk began using a new means of investigation that went far beyond the EEG in revealing how orgasms light up the brain. The technique, known as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or functional MRI, showed changes in cerebral blood flow and thus neural
activity. By the 1990s, functional MRI had come to dominate the world of brain mapping because of its easy operation, wide availability, and clear data. Its pictures showed the overall brain in grayish tones and areas of heightened activity lit up in oranges and yellows.

From his laboratory in New Jersey, Komisaruk began using the machine in the late 1990s to better understand the workings of neurophysiology and orgasm. By 2003, still fascinated by the think-off women of more than a decade earlier, he began a new round of experimentation meant to explore what functional MRI might reveal about their spontaneous orgasms as well as fundamental aspects of human sexuality.

Much good science gets done by eliminating the jumble of confusing variables that surround most aspects of nature. That is what Dostálek and the Russians did in examining the physiological repercussions of a single yoga pose. Komisaruk was attracted to the think-off women for the same reason. Spontaneous orgasms seemed to represent the human climactic experience shorn of the confusing variables of sensory input and muscular contraction. For brain imaging, that meant the sensory and motor cortex would stay grayish, as would most other regions of the brain normally involved in the human interaction with the external world. In theory, the functional MRI would show the purely limbic parts of the experience. Of course, women having orgasms without touching themselves might eventually shudder with pleasure, as the 1992 study had shown. But the commotion might start relatively late in the arousal. In theory, the new line of experimentation promised to produce what Komisaruk called a “cleaner picture” of orgasm and an opportunity to better understand its nature.

In 2003, upon examining the first images, Komisaruk was pleased to see confirmation of the study’s conclusions from a decade earlier. The pleasure centers of the women’s brains lit up more or less identically whether they reached their orgasmic highs by means of physical stimulation or simply thinking off. Different paths led to the same outcome.

The challenge was getting enough volunteers. A good study would require a fair number of subjects—all of them possessing a rare talent largely unknown to the world at large. The recruiting job required a light touch, good connections, and a bit of astute salesmanship. After all, what woman was eager to lie down on a hard table under the glare of fluorescent lights and
have her head zapped by a giant donut-shaped magnet while attempting to let go?

It was a difficult proposition at best—difficult, that is, until Nan Wise came along. Nan Wise is an attractive sex therapist and yoga teacher whom Komisaruk got to know when she went back to school at Rutgers after raising two children. Studying yoga and learning how to pay close attention to the energy currents in her body had turned her into a skilled practitioner of thinking off, and she agreed to a functional MRI scan when Komisaruk asked her. “It’s the least sexy thing in the world,” she told me. “But I do it for science.”

By early 2010, Komisaruk and Wise had succeeded in doing preliminary scans on half a dozen volunteers. Head movement turned out to be a significant issue. The orgasms that Wise herself experienced while in the machine had resulted in virtually no head motion and thus very clear images. But other think-off women often thrashed about. In one case, Wise recalled, “it looked like the scanner was going to jump around the room.” As a solution, the scientists devised a head restraint that was bolted onto the machine. It worked. Now the heads of the think-off women held steady even if their bodies became agitated.

Wise decided to pursue the inquiry as part of her doctoral research. What she and Komisaruk envisioned was documenting the steps by which various neural circuits and networks lit up in orgasm. In essence, they wanted to make a brain-scan movie, hoping it would throw light on fundamental riddles. For instance, the research might help scientists learn how to distinguish the parts of the brain that mediate pain and pleasure. The brain in a state of orgasm, Wise told me, looks much the same as when it experiences pain. “We don’t understand very much about what constitutes the difference.”

For her dissertation, Wise needed at least a dozen think-off volunteers. But now, with the rise of Neotantra and alternative sexuality, recruitment in the New York City area proved to be easy. Wise knew her way around the sex-and-spirituality crowd and knew the right people to contact for volunteers. “I know somebody who knows somebody,” she mused. “That’s how it works.” One group she drew on was One Taste. Its founder had taken up the methods of More University and set up businesses in San Francisco and lower Manhattan that promoted open sexual relationships as well as orgasmic meditation. Wise’s think-off volunteers ranged from New Age
mystics to radical feminists who preached the virtues of learning how to achieve sexual satisfaction without men.

The more Wise learned, the more she marveled at the diversity of euphoric states. “There are orgasms and there are orgasms,” she said. “For me, thinking off feels like a diffuse orgasm. Now that I’ve been interviewing people who have this capability, some of them have unbelievably intense orgasms. I think some people can cue their nervous system in that direction pretty easily.”

I asked about length.

“We’ve seen all sorts of different styles,” she replied. “There seem to be some people who can create an orgasmic state and keep it going. I’ve never timed it. But there are people who can go on and on.”

While science over the decades has made some progress in illuminating the relationship between sex and yoga, it has cast less light on an esoteric issue that is even more fundamental and important. For ages, the topic was seen as having to do almost exclusively with divine inspiration. Today, it is perceived as the heart of what it means to be human.

P
aul Pond wanted to know how the universe began. His doctorate in particle physics from Northeastern University in Boston opened the door to a world of thinkers who sought to identify how the building blocks of nature coalesced in the first instants after the Big Bang, how things like mesons took shape and disappeared in bursts of other elementary particles. He published in
Physical Review
—the field’s top journal—and did research in such places as Toronto and London, Paris and Vienna.

Then he began to undergo kundalini arousal. In 1974, he decided to give up physics research.

Pond and his friends lived in Canada, mostly in and around Toronto. But they became enamored of a Kashmiri mystic by the name of Gopi Krishna who lived half a world away. Late in the summer of 1977, Pond, along with more than two hundred and thirty other Canadians, boarded a jumbo jet and flew to India to visit the aging kundalite. A few helped him spread his message. In turn, the pandit visited Toronto in 1979 and again in 1983, a year before his death. Krishna shunned guru status. But the Canadians revered him as a visionary and felt an obligation to keep his agenda alive, most especially his passion for studying how kundalini could foster intuition and genius, insight and creativity.

Krishna taught that the mystic fire “must” turn a common person into “a virtuoso of a high order, with extraordinary power of expression, both in verse and prose, or extraordinary artistic talents.” His teachings—laid out in
The Biological Basis of Religion and Genius
—made the human potential movement seem like a tea party.