The Science of Yoga

and inspired a generation of seekers. “Control over death,” he declared in his writings, echoing the Hatha Yoga Pradipika , “comes when one can consciously direct the motion of the heart.” In his Super Advanced Course , Yogananda gave the ostensible secret: “Yogis know how to stop heart and lung action voluntarily but keep physically alive by retaining some Cosmic Energy in their bodies.”
    Into this supernatural blur came something entirely new in the world of yoga exposés—a defector, a true insider who knew the field’s secrets and personalities and perhaps its vulnerabilities.
    Basu Kumar Bagchi (1895–1977) had grown up in Bengal, like Paul, and had enjoyed a close friendship with Yogananda. The two men went to college together, took monastic vows together, ran a school together, came to America together, preached together, and published religious tracts together. Bagchi became the second-in-command of a rising spiritual enterprise that Yogananda founded in Los Angeles. The Self-Realization Fellowship came to own many costly properties, including more than a dozen lush acres of California coastline.
    The two eventually fell into bitter conflict, allegedly over Yogananda’s breaking his vow of celibacy with female devotees. Bagchi gave up his monastic vows and earned a doctorate in psychology. After a stint at Harvard, he took a post at the University of Michigan and became a pioneer in deciphering brain waves for the diagnosis and treatment of disease, including epilepsy. Bagchiwrote little or nothing about yoga during this period. It was his past, not his future.
    Then Yogananda died. It happened in 1952 while the famous swami was giving a talk at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. He suffered a heart attack and collapsed, his death reported on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. His demise at the age of fifty-nine seemed to kick the Self-Realization Fellowship into high gear. Yogananda became a departed saint. Hagiography flourished. The group released portraits of the departed yogi that fairly glowed with saintly radiance.
    Bagchi now dug in. Over the course of a decade, he investigated one of the most palpable of the miracles—stopping the heart.
    Bagchi recruited colleagues, won financial backing from the Rockefeller Foundation, bought the best equipment, traveled to India, visited Gune’s ashram, and studied some of the world’s most gifted yogis. To his delight, he eventually tracked down Krishnamacharya—the guru to the gurus who founded the main schools of modern yoga. The celebrated man had become a living testament to yogic wonders. To win converts, Krishnamacharya had taken to demonstrating what his devotees hailed as siddhis—suspending his pulse, stopping cars with his hands, lifting heavy objects with his bare teeth.
    When first approached to perform the siddhis, the yogi protested. He was sixty-seven and too old. Finally, he relented. Bagchi hooked up the electrodes as the venerated yogi closed his eyes and concentrated. Blip, blip, blip. The recording pens flew back and forth, catching the subtle cardiac rhythms no matter how hard Krishnamacharya tried. Yes, the heartbeat was diminished. But even a quick glace at the tracing paper showed that the beat was still there, even if reduced and too faint for a stethoscope to pick up. The heart was still thumping away inside, blip, blip, blip.
    In 1961, Bagchi and his colleagues published their findings in Circulation , the prestigious journal of the American Heart Association.
    “It was often reported that some yogis could stop the heart,” he later recalled. “Everybody including physicians thought that it was so. We discovered the truth.”
    Another insider joined in. He was no defector but rather a central authority in the world of yoga and one of its most respected elders.
    Gune at that point was approaching his eightieth birthday, white hair spilling down his neckin curls. The cardiac studies caught his attention. After all, some of his colleagues had participated. Bagchi had stayed at the ashram much longer than anywhere else in India—more than five weeks. What the foreign scientists had come to examine and—as it turned out, to rebut—was not some trifle but a central tenet of yoga and its legacy of superhuman achievement. It put the ashram in an awkward position.
    A lesser man might have denied the heart findings or disparaged them as flawed. Not Gune. Not the nationalist rebel who vowed to make no statement