The Science of Yoga

as cover stories. His 2004 book sums up his perspective in a blunt chapter title: “Kundalini—A Code Word for Sex.” He calls the mystic experience “a flowering of orgasm, an expansion of orgasm into endless full bloom in the whole body.”
    The main investigators ofkundalini in the world of science turn out to have been not sexologists or biologists but psychologists and psychiatrists. The group is fairly small and typically works on the fringes of the therapeutic world. Moreover, it has achieved nothing like accord on whether the hotwiring of the human body is good or bad, healthy or pathological. Instead, the experts typically clash.
    Remarkably, one of the first investigators—if not the first—was no less a figure than Carl Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychiatrist. He came upon a case of kundalini arousal early in his career and developed a deep interest. Around 1918, a woman of twenty-five came to his attention whose symptoms included a wave of physical turmoil that rose from her perineum, to her uterus, to her bladder, and eventually to the crown of her head.
    He was baffled—and she delighted. “It’s going splendidly!” the woman said of their analytic sessions. “It doesn’t matter that you don’t understand my dreams. I always have the craziest symptoms, but something is happening all the time.” To Jung’s astonishment, he realized belatedly that the woman found the physical and psychological chaos to be enjoyable.
    Jung lectured repeatedly on kundalini over the years and in 1932 gave four talks in Zurich on its psychology. He endorsed its academic study but warned people away from its practice. One of his sternest admonitions came in 1938, two decades after taking in his kundalini patient.
    Jung called the experience a “deliberately induced psychotic state, which in certain unstable individuals might easily lead to a real psychosis.” The term is one of the darkest of psychiatry. It bespeaks serious breaks with reality marked by delusions, hallucinations, and other crippling failures of consciousness.
    Kundalini, Jung concluded, “strikes at the very roots of human existence and can let loose a flood of sufferings of which no sane person ever dreamed.”
    The analytic tone changed dramatically in the 1970s as waves of Indian gurus swept the United States and many yogis and spiritual seekers began to undergo kundalini arousal. Lee Sannella (1916–2010) gave one of the earliest and most upbeat assessments. A graduate of the Yale medical school, the San Francisco psychiatrist led early seminars at the Esalen Institute, the icon of the human potential movement that explored drugs and sex, religion and philosophy.
    For Sannella, the questionwas whether the mystic fire led to genius or madness, or some ambiguous mix of the two. His 1976 book Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence? told of thirteen people who had undergone arousal. They included an actress, a psychologist, a librarian, a professor, a writer, two artists, two housewives, a healer, a secretary, a psychiatrist, and a scientist. His portraits were anonymous.
    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