The Science of Yoga

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 Agemystics 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 meansto be human.

VII
MUSE
    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.
    A farm in southern Ontario became the headquarters from which Pond, his wife, and their friends spread the word. In 1986, they held the first of what would become decades of annual conferences under a big tent. They called theirgroup the Institute for Consciousness Research. The small Canadian charity with the esoteric agenda became a magnet for hundreds of people. It sold kundalini books, built an extensive library, put out a newsletter, and sought to show that the mystic fire could result in artists and writers, saints and innovators. Over the years, it examined such figures as Brahms, Emerson, Gandhi, Victor Hugo, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Rudolf Steiner, Saint Hildegard, and Saint John of the Cross. The published results were typically rich in endnotes.
    Pond underwent his own transformation. He became more open to people. So did his writing. As a scientist, he had specialized in papers that were extremely dry. Now he found pleasure in poetry—something he had previously avoided