The Science of Yoga

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 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