The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (37 page)

The connections between sex and creativity become most evident with the kundalites. Their declarations of inspired artistry, coupled with new candor about the role of sexuality, seem to offer, at least in theory, an intriguing augmentation to Freud’s ideas about the role of sexual energy. If Freud was right about creativity, and if the yogis are right about the inner fire surging into a sexual blaze, then perhaps kundalini does in fact provide a basis for artistic expression.

One way to investigate the issue is to see if any creative parallels to the kundalini experience have arisen and found their way into the deliberations of science. As it turns out, serious investigators have studied whole classes of individuals whose personalities have undergone sudden transformations.

An astonishing case involves Tony Cicoria, a former college football player who became an orthopedic surgeon. One fall afternoon in 1994, Cicoria was at a family gathering in upstate New York when he stepped outside a lake pavilion to call his mother. He was forty-two and in excellent health. The day was pleasant. But Cicoria, while approaching a pay phone, noticed dark clouds on the horizon. As he talked, it began to rain. He heard distant thunder. Cicoria had hung up and was about to head back to the pavilion when lightning flashed out of the phone and struck him in the face.

He fell to the ground. Sure he was dead, he saw people running toward his body, saw his children and felt they would be okay, saw the high and low points of his life. Waves of bliss and bluish-white light washed over him as he felt his consciousness starting to race upward. “This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had,” he began to think. And at that instant—
bam!
He was back in his body.

Cicoria survived. Indeed, he soon found himself fit enough to resume work as a surgeon and once again move ahead with his life. But he was a changed man—a deeply changed man.

Within weeks, a longing for classical music replaced his love of rock. He acquired a piano and taught himself how to play. Soon, his head filled with music from nowhere. Within three months of the lightning strike, Cicoria had little spare
time for anything but playing and composing. Eventually, his marriage fell apart. But Cicoria pressed ahead. In 2007, he started giving recitals. In 2008, the Catskill Conservatory sponsored his debut at the Goodrich Theater in Oneonta, New York, where he lives. The sold-out audience was all smiles and applause. Also that year, Cicoria issued a CD of classical piano solos titled
Notes from an Accidental Pianist and Composer.
Prominent among the arrangements was “The Lightning Sonata.”

Oliver Sacks, the distinguished author and neurologist at Columbia University, details the case of Cicoria in his fascinating book
Musicophilia.
He also discusses other examples of people who have experienced a sudden passion for art and music. Sacks cites a body of developing evidence that traces such transformations to traumatic rewirings of the brain, in particular its limbic system and its temporal lobes, home of the hippocampus and long-term memory as well as auditory processing.

The surges appear similar to what happens to kundalites. If Cicoria experienced a blinding flash from outside his body, the kundalites seem to experience a similar shock from within. Indeed, some yogic authorities liken the mystic current to a bolt of lightning.

So does kundalini stir creativity? No scientific studies have addressed the issue. But the anecdotal evidence is rich.

Gopi Krishna (1903–1984), the Kashmiri who inspired Pond and his friends, reported that the stabilization of his own inner fire coincided with the commencement of an unending flow of poetry. The pandit composed verse in not only his native Kashmiri but Urdu, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, French, Italian, English, and German. It was an urge he was unable to extinguish.

Krishna—who went to college for two years in Lahore but failed the examination that 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 as
president 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 quite
unmystical—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 were kundalites. But all had developed an interest in the subject and, most especially, its creative repercussions.

For this annual meeting, the organizers put the focus on the personal stories, as suggested by the conference title: “Kundalini: Changing Lives from Within.” The speakers told of how the mystic fire had touched them and displayed the results in the form of songs and poems, meditations and paintings.

The informal agenda seemed just as important. A table displayed kundalini books that were for sale, including nearly a dozen by Krishna. Perhaps most important, the
relaxed atmosphere gave time for networking and comparing notes. It was a quiet place where people could talk about their experiences, their coping strategies, their dreams.

Teri Degler, a writer who had profiled several of the assembled kundalites in her books, and who had undergone her own ecstasy of arousal, joked about how the word “kundalini” could be loosely rendered as their own peculiar brand of craziness: “Kind of Loonies.”

A businessman told me how much he enjoyed the get-togethers and how he found it impossible to speak of his kundalini experience at work.

“What would I say? ‘Hey, wait a second, guys. I’ve got a wind blowing up my back.
’
”

Paul Pond, a lean man of sixty-three, opened the program and ran it like a veteran. He joked a lot and had a deadpan style that kept the audience in high spirits. But his introductory tour of the kundalini horizon was dead serious. He touched on all the major issues—the sexual nature of the experience, the joys, the dangers, and the subtle repercussions. Standing at a white podium under the billowing tent, speaking into a microphone, Pond said kundalini awakenings seemed to be on the rise and that the wave could prove important in stabilizing the wobbly planet. “We need direction,” he said, “and that’s going to come from within.”

Pond said historical researchers had shown that kundalini arousal tended to foster the creative fires and complimented the speakers for agreeing to speak frankly about their own experiences and struggles.

His wife, Dale, described her own. She had been profiled by Degler in a book,
Fiery Muse.
It said Dale had been a shy woman who lacked a serious intellect when, two decades ago, she underwent a kundalini arousal that transformed her into a serious reader, a productive artist, and confident public speaker.

At the podium, she reiterated those claims. “I did spontaneous art, spontaneous poetry,” Dale told the audience of her early days. “All the different parts of me were opening up.” The inner fire, she said, fostered a deep sense of inner cohesion and inspiration that—like the musical compositions of Tony Cicoria and the poetry of Gopi Krishna—seemed to come from nowhere. “I’d be crying, watching myself do art, and say, ‘Where did
that
come from?
’
”

Under the tent, speaker after speaker struck related themes. Neil Sinclair—the chairman of CyberTran International, a start-up in Rich- mond, California, that is
seeking to create a highly ecological passenger railroad—stepped to the podium in sandals, white socks, and a flowered shirt. He told of how kundalini had struck in 1973 while he was a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley. The setting was a Halloween party. Sinclair had dabbled in yoga and meditation for many years. During the party, he retreated to an empty bed as his mind began to reel. He felt a release at the base of his spine followed by an upward sense of expansion.

“It didn’t stop,” he told the audience. “A rush came up and I lost any sense of my body and I found myself immersed in an expanding sphere of ecstasy.” He called it “an orgasmic sensation” that seemed to engulf the universe.

Sinclair cautioned the uninitiated to avoid thinking of kundalini as unmitigated bliss. “Gopi Krishna almost died twice,” he noted. “He was on the verge of insanity. Society is not there cheering you on. It’s very challenging.”

He peppered his talk with readings from the poetry he began to write shortly after his awakening. He said the words tended to tumble into his head.

A book of Sinclair’s poetry had just been published, titled
The Spirit Flies Free: The Kundalini Poems.
During a break, I bought a copy. It contained more than a hundred poems whose 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 goes to 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.