The Science of Yoga

psychoanalytic insights of a kind that Jung would have cherished.
    The public evidence suggests that yoga’s rather profound ability to slow the human metabolism can function like a match to ignite a sexual blaze. Often, the resulting state is feverish and the yogi animated (if not meditating or immobilized in the Punjab yogi’s kind of catalepsy). As noted in chapter 6, I call this reversal the yoga paradox. It has received no explicit attention to my knowledge from either yoga professionals or the world of biomedicine. Corby’s team at Stanford saw glimmers of the transformation. The main symptom is a radical change of homeostasis—the body’s metabolic equilibrium—from cool to hot. One of my hopes for this book is that it will prompt the scientific community to carefully study this and other aspects of yogic hypersexuality.
    The science of yoga has only just begun. In my judgment, the topic has such depth and resonance that the voyage of discovery will go on for centuries, perhaps millennia. What started with Paul and studies of respiratory physiology will spread to investigations ever more central to life and living, to questions of insight and ecstasy, of being and consciousness. Ultimately, the social understanding that follows in the wake of scientific discovery will address issues of human evolution and what we decide to become as a species.
    Even so, as I mentioned in the prologue, it’s important to remember that science has no monopoly on the truth.
    As a science journalist, I have devoted my career to writing about science and trying to illuminate its findings and methods. Science is incredibly tough in practice despite its often gentle and glamorous image. By nature, it seeks to limit the role of faith, to make as few assumptions as possible, and to subject the information it gathers as well as its own tentative findings to withering doubt. A synonym for “science” is “organized skepticism.” The process can be intellectually brutal. The constructive side is that science, done right, also works to suspend judgment, to collect and test andverify before coming to firm conclusions. In theory, it can see without prejudice. That makes it a rare thing in the world of human institutions.
    But science—even at its best, even with its remarkable powers of discrimination and discovery—is nonetheless extraordinarily crude. It ignores much about reality to zero in on those aspects of nature that it can quantify and comprehend. What gets set aside can be considerable—the wonders of the Sistine Chapel, among other achievements. Science, for all its triumphs over the last four centuries, sometimes fails to see the obvious. It is blind to the individuality of a snowflake and the convulsions of the stock market, not to mention ethics. No equation is going to outdo Shakespeare.
    My book The Orcenter1e devoted its last chapter to sketching out the limitations of scientific knowledge. The arguments are philosophic in nature but come down to the great difficulty that science faces in trying to provide a comprehensive worldview.
    What I know with certainty is that science cannot address, much less answer, many of the most interesting questions in life. It’s one finger of a hand, as a wise man once said. I treasure the scientific method for its insights and discoveries, as well as for the wealth of comforts and social advances it has given us. But I question the value of scientism—the belief that science has authority over all other interpretations of life, including the philosophic and spiritual, moral and humanistic.
    So while the science of yoga may be demonstrably true—while its findings may be revelatory and may show popular declarations to be false or misleading—the field by nature fails utterly at producing a complete story. Many of yoga’s truths surely go beyond the truths of science.
    Yoga may see further, and its advanced practitioners, for all I know, may frolic in fields of consciousness and spirituality of which science knows nothing. Or maybe it’s all delusional nonsense. I have no idea.
    But even if the otherworldly view has merit, this book and the long studies of the scientific community show the bottom line. The transcendental bliss starts with the firing of neurons and neurotransmitters, with surges of hormones and brain waves.
    It’s the science of yoga.

Further Reading
    Here are some recommended books on the science and historyof yoga, as well as a few selections from