The Science of Yoga

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. Sannellaalone 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 degreecost 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