The Science of Yoga

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 goesto 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.

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 and engaged in only when forced to do so in school. The muse compelled him to write.
     
    Restless ego like a child
eating