The surges appear similar to what happens to kundalites. If Cicoria experienced a blinding flash from outside his body, the kundalites seem to experience a similar shock from within. Indeed, some yogic authorities liken the mystic current to a bolt of lightning.
So does kundalini stir creativity? No scientific studies have addressed the issue. But the anecdotal evidence is rich.
Gopi Krishna (1903–1984), the Kashmiri who inspired Pond and his friends, reported that the stabilization of his own inner fire coincided with the commencement of an unending flow of poetry. The pandit composed verse in not only his native Kashmiri but Urdu, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, French, Italian, English, and German. It was an urge he was unable to extinguish.
Krishna—who went to college for two years in Lahore but failed the examination that would have let him continue his studies—claimed to have little or no knowledge of several of these languages. Instead, he said the poetry welled up from inside him, as if from a universal source. At times, his mind rebelled when his inner voice told him that a poem was about to emerge in a foreign tongue.
“I had never learned German,” he recalled protesting at one point, “nor seen a book written in the language, nor to the best of my knowledge ever heard it spoken.”
Carl von Weizsäcker (1912–2007), an eminent German physicist whose brother served as president of West Germany, wrote the introduction to Krishna’s book The Biological Basis of Religion and Genius. There he said that he found the German poetry to be rustic but inspired, much like a folk song. “It is, if one may say so, touching,” he wrote. He gave a few sample lines as well as a translation:
Ein schöner Vogel immer singt
In meinem Herz mit leisem Ton
A beautiful bird always sings
In my heart with a soft voice
“What makes this poetic phenomenon possible and what purpose does it serve?” von Weizsäcker asked. “I do not know. Honor the incomprehensible!” From someone else, such a proposition might have sounded irresponsible. But the German physicist had discovered such basic things as how big stars like the sun generate their energy.
Untold numbers of kundalites have undergone artistic makeovers similar to Krishna’s. Franklin Jones, a California guru who in the 1980s moved to Fiji, produced a diverse body of artwork ranging from cartoons to ink brush paintings to giant works to multiple-exposure photographs, including many studies of the female nude. His 2007 book, The Spectra Suites, showcased some of the results. By the time he died in November 2008, his oeuvre ran to more than one hundred thousand works.
Jana Dixon, a kundalite I visited in Boulder, argued that her own inner fire had inspired her artwork. Her Biology of Kundalini website has a page devoted to her paintings, and I saw canvases in various states of completion around her apartment. Her images were electric in color and design, some bordering on the psychedelic, some unabashedly erotic.
“When my K is up,” Dixon told me, “it’s peak creativity.”
It was in Canada that I found the most ambitious studies of kundalini and creativity—the core objective of the Institute for Consciousness Research. If cultivation of the mystic fire represents a dangerous undertaking, as Jung warned, the group’s investigations seemed to suggest that kundalini also has a primal upside.
The kundalites looked quite unmystical—some frumpy, some turning gray, some thin and elegant, all seemingly part of the upper middle class and glad to be chatting with one another in rural Ontario on a summer weekend. They wore sandals and shorts, baggy pants and flowery shirts, running shoes and cotton frocks. All had plastic name tags. The group seemed about evenly divided between men and women. They sat attentively in a big white tent filled with fifty or sixty plastic lawn chairs and listened to speakers recount some very personal experiences, the presenter occasionally pausing in tense silence, head down, holding back tears. They took long breaks for schmoozing and eating—lots of eating. The meals featured lush vegetarian dishes and salads dotted with blueberries. Big cookies appeared at coffee breaks.
“We’re everyday people,” Dale Pond, one of the organizers, told me during a break, her voice slightly edgy. “We do wine and cheese parties.” Indeed, every night, Paul and Dale Pond invited the kundalites over to their house a few miles down the road to party, Ontario style, with good beer and snacks.
It was the late summer of 2009 and the occasion was the twenty-fourth annual conference of the Institute for Consciousness Research. The group’s original name captured its early affability: Friends in New Directions, or FIND. The conference site was a farm about two hours north of Toronto. The spot was beautiful and private. Thick stands of conifers surrounded the old barn, the farmhouse, and the wide lawn that held the big tent. Just off the main highway, to mark the turnoff, a temporary sign had been set up that pointed down a long gravel road. “FIND-ICR,” it said, welcoming friends old and new. Although the group’s core members remained in Ontario, attendees came from such places as Baltimore and San Francisco, New York and Pennsylvania. Not all were kundalites. But all had developed an interest in the subject and, most especially, its creative repercussions.
For this annual meeting, the organizers put the focus on the personal stories, as suggested by the conference title: “Kundalini: Changing Lives from Within.” The speakers told of how the mystic fire had touched them and displayed the results in the form of songs and poems, meditations and paintings.
The informal agenda seemed just as important. A table displayed kundalini books that were for sale, including nearly a dozen by Krishna. Perhaps most important, the relaxed atmosphere gave time for networking and comparing notes. It was a quiet place where people could talk about their experiences, their coping strategies, their dreams.
Teri Degler, a writer who had profiled several of the assembled kundalites in her books, and who had undergone her own ecstasy of arousal, joked about how the word “kundalini” could be loosely rendered as their own peculiar brand of craziness: “Kind of Loonies.”
A businessman told me how much he enjoyed the get-togethers and how he found it impossible to speak of his kundalini experience at work.
“What would I say? ‘Hey, wait a second, guys. I’ve got a wind blowing up my back.’”
Paul Pond, a lean man of sixty-three, opened the program and ran it like a veteran. He joked a lot and had a deadpan style that kept the audience in high spirits. But his introductory tour of the kundalini horizon was dead serious. He touched on all the major issues—the sexual nature of the experience, the joys, the dangers, and the subtle repercussions. Standing at a white podium under the billowing tent, speaking into a microphone, Pond said kundalini awakenings seemed to be on the rise and that the wave could prove important in stabilizing the wobbly planet. “We need direction,” he said, “and that’s going to come from within.”
Pond said historical researchers had shown that kundalini arousal tended to foster the creative fires and complimented the speakers for agreeing to speak frankly about their own experiences and struggles.
His wife, Dale, described her own. She had been profiled by Degler in a book, Fiery Muse. It said Dale had been a shy woman who lacked a serious intellect when, two decades ago, she underwent a kundalini arousal that transformed her into a serious reader, a productive artist, and confident public speaker.
At the podium, she reiterated those claims. “I did spontaneous art, spontaneous poetry,” Dale told the audience of her early days. “All the different parts of me were opening up.” The inner fire, she said, fostered a deep sense of inner cohesion and inspiration that—like the musical compositions of Tony Cicoria and the poetry of Gopi Krishna—seemed to come from nowhere. “I’d be crying, watching myself do art, and say, ‘Where did that come from?’”
Under the tent, speaker after speaker struck related themes. Neil Sinclair—the chairman of CyberTran International, a start-up in Rich- mond, California, that is seeking to create a highly ecological passenger railroad—stepped to the podium in s
andals, white socks, and a flowered shirt. He told of how kundalini had struck in 1973 while he was a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley. The setting was a Halloween party. Sinclair had dabbled in yoga and meditation for many years. During the party, he retreated to an empty bed as his mind began to reel. He felt a release at the base of his spine followed by an upward sense of expansion.
“It didn’t stop,” he told the audience. “A rush came up and I lost any sense of my body and I found myself immersed in an expanding sphere of ecstasy.” He called it “an orgasmic sensation” that seemed to engulf the universe.
Sinclair cautioned the uninitiated to avoid thinking of kundalini as unmitigated bliss. “Gopi Krishna almost died twice,” he noted. “He was on the verge of insanity. Society is not there cheering you on. It’s very challenging.”
He peppered his talk with readings from the poetry he began to write shortly after his awakening. He said the words tended to tumble into his head.
A book of Sinclair’s poetry had just been published, titled The Spirit Flies Free: The Kundalini Poems. During a break, I bought a copy. It contained more than a hundred poems whose topics ranged from war and apple trees to the workings of the harpsichord. Several struck wilderness themes. Mystic reflections ran throughout the volume. But Sinclair kept the fundamentals simple, as with the opening lines of the collection:
Beneath the surface of this world,
Invisible to the naked eye,
Exists an energetic framework,
The basis of both you and I.
Over the years, a number of intriguing clues about the relationship between yoga and creativity have come to light. It seems like they now constitute a significant body of evidence. Still, the findings are relatively modest. Other topics more central to the discipline—health, fitness, safety—have received more attention.
One reason for the comparatively slow advance is sheer complexity. By definition, creativity goes to deep issues of psychology and ultimately what it means to be human—areas that science has always had a hard time investigating. Science tends to do the easiest things first. It is nothing if not practical. This fact of scientific life suggests the magnitude of the challenge that investigators face.
Even so, the importance of the subject and the potential richness of the returns make it attractive. Big risks can produce big rewards. It is the kind of topic that might flourish in the decades ahead.
The cottage industry might grow into schools. Maybe cures would emerge for creative paralysis. Creative blocks might go extinct. Perhaps many people would learn how, as Menuhin put it so eloquently, to draw out their “maximum resonance.” Maybe world leaders would take up yoga as an aid to their deliberations, formalizing the kind of reflective calm that Larry Payne introduced at Davos.
Maybe yoga would soar.
Epilogue
Run the clock forward a century or two. What is yoga like? It seems to me that, based on current trends, two very different outcomes are possible. Both revolve around science, otherwise known as the pursuit of systematized truth.
In one scenario, the fog has thickened as competing groups and corporations vie for market share among the bewildered. The chains offer their styles while spiritual groups offer theirs, with experts from the various camps clashing over differing claims. Immortality is said to be in the offing. The disputes resemble the old disagreements of religion. But factionalism has soared. Whereas yoga in the late twentieth century began to splinter into scores of brands—all claiming unique and often contradictory virtues—now there are hundreds. Yet, for all the activity, yoga makes only a small contribution to global health care because most of the claims go unproven in the court of medical science. The general public sees yoga mainly as a cult that corporations seek to exploit.
In the other scenario, yoga has gone mainstream and plays an important role in society. A comprehensive program of scientific study early in the twenty-first century produced a strong consensus on where yoga fails and where it succeeds. Colleges of yoga science now abound. Yoga doctors are accepted members of the establishment, their natural therapies often considered gentler and more reliable than pills. Yoga classes are taught by certified instructors whose training is as rigorous as that of physical therapists. Yoga retreats foster art and innovation, conflict resolution and serious negotiating. Meanwhile, the International Association of Yoga Centenarians is lobbying for an extensive program of research on new ways of improving the quality of life among the extremely old. Its president, Sting, recently embarked on a world tour to build political support for the initiative.
In short, I see the discipline as having arrived at a turning point. It has reached not only a critical mass of practitioners but a critical juncture in its development.
Yoga can grow up or remain an infant—a dangerous infant with a thing for handguns. Traditionalists may find it loathsome. But growing up in this case means that yoga has to come into closer alignment with science, accelerating the process begun by Gune, Iyengar, and the other pioneers. The timeless image is a mirage. Yoga has changed many times over the centuries and needs to change again.
The stakes are enormous—and not just for the millions of practitioners who expect a safe experience. The really gargantuan issue is helping the discipline realize its potential.
I caught a glimpse of the future that Friday night at Kripalu when Amy Weintraub said, “It really saved my life.” Her testimony still rings in my ears, giving me hope for better ways of fighting the blues.
In antiquity, the geniuses of India forged a radically new kind of relationship between humans and their bodies. We are now on the cusp of learning how to apply their discoveries in startling new ways, of bestowing on the world new gifts of healing and emotional renewal, health and vitality, personal energy and creative inspiration. Think of Loren Fishman holding up his healed arm. Think of Amy Weintraub doing Breath of Joy. Physicians talk about breakthroughs in personalized medicine and pharmacogenetics—of using information from a person’s genetic map to tailor medicine to his or her own particular needs. But yoga can already do that. It can turn our bodies into customized pharmaceutical plants that churn out tailored hormones and nerve impulses that heal, cure, raise moods, lower cholesterol, induce sleep, and do a million other things. Moreover, yoga can do it at an extremely low cost with little or no risk of side effects. It has the potential to usher in a genuine new age, not one of wishful thinking.
Western science tends to view the body as a fixed thing with unchanging components and functions. But yoga starts from a different premise. It sees a lump of clay. The body in this view is awaiting the application of skilled hands.
A conviction of some Hindus and spiritual yogis is that we live in the Kali Yuga—a dark time in which people are distant from God and civilization has fallen into decline. They venerate the past. With all due respect, I see the best times for yoga as lying ahead. We can turn the fledgling discipline into a better shaper of clay.
If yoga played for keeps, if it achieved a new kind of maturity, the discipline could become a force in addressing the global crisis in health care, which in the United States now consumes more than $2 trillion a year. It could become the basis for an inexpensive new world of health care and disease prevention, of healing and disciplined well-being. It might be a game changer. Michelle Obama is working hard to achieve those kinds of benefits for young people.
But to have a hope of exerting greater influence on the organization of global health care, yoga must come into closer alignment with science—with clinical trials and professional accreditation, with governmental authorities and their detailed evaluations, probably even with insurance companies and their dreaded red tape. Yoga could become a major force. Or it could stay on the sidelines, a marginal pursuit, lost in myths, looking to the past, prone to guru worship, fracturing into ever more lineages, increasingly isolated as the world moves on.
Realizing even a small fraction of yoga’s potential is going to require wor
k—hard work.
We need to make advances along two complementary lines of inquiry that, as this book demonstrates, have coexisted since the start of the scientific investigation of the practice: We must better understand what yoga can do and better understand what yoga can be. The latter issue goes to Robin’s “better yoga.”
Let’s call the postural discipline that yogis started practicing in medieval times Yoga 1.0. The modern variety that formed early in the twentieth century under the influence of science might be called Yoga 2.0. Now Yoga 2.5 or even 3.0 seems to be in the works, judging from the advent of many vigorous styles and the wide efforts of yoga professionals to make their discipline safer. In the future, Yoga 4.0 may yet emerge, quite different from anything we can now imagine.
A first step in yoga’s wider development centers on addressing the threat that practitioners face right now—the lack of reliable information about the discipline’s pros and cons. Increasingly, it seems like the din of competing styles, the rise of new commercial ventures, and the inchoate nature of Yoga 3.0 are adding to the confusion. I have tried my best to clarify the situation with this book (and its suggestions for further reading and detailed notes). But there’s still a long way to go—and a lot more that can be done—to help make trustworthy information more widely available.
One problem is the diffuse nature of the existing science. It seems fairly unique in having been done in so many places over such a long period of time. In my travels, I was impressed at how experts had assembled troves of books and papers. The Ponds in Canada, Sat Bir Khalsa in Boston, Mel Robin in Pennsylvania, Gune’s ashram south of Bombay, and PubMed in Bethesda have all assembled much good information on the science of yoga. But they all seem to have different pieces of the puzzle. And I suspect there are many more out there waiting to be uncovered, examined, and shaped into a comprehensive body of knowledge.
The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards Page 27