The Science of Yoga

celebrities as Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, and Marilyn Monroe. She became known as the first yoga teacher to the stars.
    Devi gathered her insightsinto a 1953 book, Forever Young, Forever Healthy. It became Hatha yoga’s first bestseller and the first to widely popularize the vision of ultimate health, quickly going through sixteen printings. It spoke especially to women, its tone intimate, its pages rich in fitness and beauty tips.
    As yoga soared in popularity, science dug into an aspect of the old agenda that had managed to endure—veneration of the miraculous. Big claims, despite a number of exposés, had grown more prominent.
    The star was Yogananda. The name of the charismatic swami meant “bliss through divine union.” His book, Autobiography of a Yogi , told of his personal experience with yogic supermen who could fly, change the weather, read minds, walk through walls, materialize jewels, and, of no small importance to meditators in the woods, make clouds of mosquitoes suddenly disappear. It was Aladdin come true. His book, translated into dozens of languages, awed 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,