The Science of Yoga

would have let him continue his studies—claimed to have little or no knowledge of several of these languages. Instead, he said the poetry welled up from inside him, as if from a universal source. At times, his mind rebelled when his inner voice told him that a poem was about to emerge in a foreign tongue.
    “I had never learned German,” he recalled protesting at one point, “nor seen a book written in the language, nor to the best of my knowledge ever heard it spoken.”
    Carl von Weizsäcker (1912–2007), an eminent German physicist whose brother served aspresident of West Germany, wrote the introduction to Krishna’s book The Biological Basis of Religion and Genius. There he said that he found the German poetry to be rustic but inspired, much like a folk song. “It is, if one may say so, touching,” he wrote. He gave a few sample lines as well as a translation:
     
    Ein schöner Vogel immer singt
In meinem Herz mit leisem Ton
     
    A beautiful bird always sings
In my heart with a soft voice
     
    “What makes this poetic phenomenon possible and what purpose does it serve?” von Weizsäcker asked. “I do not know. Honor the incomprehensible!” From someone else, such a proposition might have sounded irresponsible. But the German physicist had discovered such basic things as how big stars like the sun generate their energy.
    Untold numbers of kundalites have undergone artistic makeovers similar to Krishna’s. Franklin Jones, a California guru who in the 1980s moved to Fiji, produced a diverse body of artwork ranging from cartoons to ink brush paintings to giant works to multiple-exposure photographs, including many studies of the female nude. His 2007 book, The Spectra Suites , showcased some of the results. By the time he died in November 2008, his oeuvre ran to more than one hundred thousand works.
    Jana Dixon, a kundalite I visited in Boulder, argued that her own inner fire had inspired her artwork. Her Biology of Kundalini website has a page devoted to her paintings, and I saw canvases in various states of completion around her apartment. Her images were electric in color and design, some bordering on the psychedelic, some unabashedly erotic.
    “When my K is up,” Dixon told me, “it’s peak creativity.”
    It was in Canada that I found the most ambitious studies of kundalini and creativity—the core objective of the Institute for Consciousness Research. If cultivation of the mystic fire represents a dangerous undertaking, as Jung warned, the group’s investigations seemed to suggest that kundalini also has a primal upside.
    The kundalites looked quiteunmystical—some frumpy, some turning gray, some thin and elegant, all seemingly part of the upper middle class and glad to be chatting with one another in rural Ontario on a summer weekend. They wore sandals and shorts, baggy pants and flowery shirts, running shoes and cotton frocks. All had plastic name tags. The group seemed about evenly divided between men and women. They sat attentively in a big white tent filled with fifty or sixty plastic lawn chairs and listened to speakers recount some very personal experiences, the presenter occasionally pausing in tense silence, head down, holding back tears. They took long breaks for schmoozing and eating—lots of eating. The meals featured lush vegetarian dishes and salads dotted with blueberries. Big cookies appeared at coffee breaks.
    “We’re everyday people,” Dale Pond, one of the organizers, told me during a break, her voice slightly edgy. “We do wine and cheese parties.” Indeed, every night, Paul and Dale Pond invited the kundalites over to their house a few miles down the road to party, Ontario style, with good beer and snacks.
    It was the late summer of 2009 and the occasion was the twenty-fourth annual conference of the Institute for Consciousness Research. The group’s original name captured its early affability: Friends in New Directions, or FIND. The conference site was a farm about two hours north of Toronto. The spot was beautiful and private. Thick stands of conifers surrounded the old barn, the farmhouse, and the wide lawn that held the big tent. Just off the main highway, to mark the turnoff, a temporary sign had been set up that pointed down a long gravel road. “FIND-ICR,” it said, welcoming friends old and new. Although the group’s core members remained in Ontario, attendees came from such places as Baltimore and San Francisco, New York and Pennsylvania. Not all