We were interrupted by Swamiji’s lady secretary with a pack of visiting cards and messages from VIPs. ‘You go and look around the clinic,’ he said dismissing me. ‘If you have any more questions, you can come back.’
Dr R.N. Sinha who has been chief medical supervisor of the ashram for the last six years took charge of me. On the lawn a group of beginners was being put through the initial cleansing (kunjal). They were given tumblerfuls of tepid water and then put through gyrations to loosen their bowels. One after another they hurried into a line of lavatories behind the lawn.
‘They will expel everything in their stomachs till the water coming out of the rectum is as clear as the water that went in the mouth,’ explained Dr Sinha. ‘There are other techniques of stomach-cleansing; one is to eat a full meal or drink a bellyful of water, stick a finger at the back of the tongue and vomit it all out. This cleansing must be done at least once in seven days.’
‘How does it differ from an enema or a colonic irrigation?’ I asked.
‘Enemas only cleanse the lower bowels; yogic cleansing evacuates everything there is in the body. It has to be followed by cleansing the nasal passage by sucking water up the nostrils and bringing it out of the mouth. We also teach them to pass a string through the nostrils into the gorge. Likewise we train patients to swallow a twenty-foot-long (6.15 metres) muslin bandage and pull it out. It brings out all remains of food, phlegm, sinuses, mucus—everything. Most patients begin to feel better after this kind of purging. Would you like to see it done?’
‘No, thank you.’
The Vishvayatan Yoga Ashram specializes in treating four ailments: asthma, diabetes, gastro-intestinal disorders and arthritis. Dr Sinha maintains that of these ailments they have obtained the best results in treating stomach disorders. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of Indians suffer from some stomach trouble or other; the remaining one per cent do not know that they suffer from it,’ he remarked with a wry smile. ‘Most Indians have dysentery or constipation, hyper-acidity or flatulence which often affects their hearts. All this disappears with internal washing.’
Amongst the people who come for treatment at the ashram a fair proportion are men suffering from impotence. ‘Our treatment cures a lot of them,’ maintained Dr Sinha. Yoga tones up the system. And if you throw in the notion of virility, the chances of success are very good. All said and done, impotence is in the mind and not in the sexual organs.
At the time I visited the ashram hospital there were only eight male and two female patients. Three men were there for the cure of asthma. Two said yoga had done them some good; the third had not benefited at all. One patient suffering from chronic constipation said yoga had helped him move his bowels. A young girl suffering from TB of the hip-joint had not responded to the treatment.
The ashram laboratory where blood, sputum, urine and faeces of patients are examined is a shoddy collection of microscopes, test-tubes, heaters and other equipment all cluttered up in a shed. It was apparent that few of the instruments had been used or records kept. Nevertheless, Dr Jain, the pathologist, maintained that the results were ‘definitely encouraging’.
I returned to Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari’s office. His table was strewn with bouquets of flowers and he was still busy on the phone wishing somebody or the other a very happy and prosperous New Year. He put his hand on the mouthpiece and said, ‘There is a lot of misunderstanding about yoga in foreign countries, too many charlatans who go about in America-Shamerica lecturing on yoga without knowing anything about it. You must put them right.’ Then he resumed talking into the instrument.
What is Yoga
There is indeed a lot of misunderstanding about yoga. The main culprits are Indians who make tall claims for it and the gullible foreigners, chiefly the gullible Americans.
Yoga means much the same as the English word yoke—a system designed to yoke the human with the divine. There are many paths prescribed to achieve this goal of union with god. The Bhagavad Gita recommends three; the path of knowledge, the path of devotion and the path of good deeds. All the three paths assume that the human mind cannot comprehend the Divine if the body in which it is encased is imperfect. Hence the system of yoga exercises to make the body a fit receptacle of Divine Wisdom; mens sana can only exist in compore sano.
The system of yoga exercises was evolved 4,000 years ago. Among the relics found in the ruins of cities of the Indus Valley are figurines showing ascetics in yogic postures. The Aryans who invaded India (circa 2000 BC) adapted and systematized yoga. The most important treatise on the yoga of the body are the aphorisms of Patanjali who lived some time during 1200 BC.
Yoga of the body can be divided into three broad groups of exercises. The first consists of a variety of asanas. The second consists of regulating the rhythm of breathing (pranayama) accompanied by silent repetition of the mystic syllable Om or some other sacred mantra. This enables the practitioner to go on to the third stage, viz., to control his senses, to enable him to meditate and attain samadhi—the state of superconscious stillness during which he has communion with the Divine.
An extreme form of the culture of the body known as Hatha yoga is said to give supernatural control over bodily organs and develop occult powers. The goal of the Hatha yogi is to activate latent forces in his body. This is based on the notion that the base of the spine is a she-serpent (kundalini) curled three-and-a-half times in a state of hibernation. She can be roused from her slumber by assiduous yogic practice. When this happens she climbs upwards along the spine and passes through six chakras located at definite points (attended by progressively increasing powers) until she reaches the seventh and last chakra located in the apex of the skull where she is united with Shiva. In ancient tantric texts these circles are depicted as lotuses of different colours with specified numbers of petals.
The sexual implications of this serpentine theory are all too apparent. The seat of the dormant she-snake is between the genitals and the anus. The practitioner is enjoined to become like the gods, an urddhvaretas, one in whom the semen flows upwards. The semen (or bindu) is regarded as the life-substance and must never be dissipated. It follows that only the celibate can rouse the serpent within him. Hatha yoga is said to give the practitioner power to indulge in coitus without losing his bindu—he can even recover it after he has discharged it.
Many remarkable feats performed by Hatha yogis have been recorded. In 1837 Yogi Hari Das was buried alive at Lahore in the presence of the Sikh Maharaja Ranjit Singh and a visiting delegation of British officers. Relays of sentries mounted guard on his grave. After forty days he was dug out and revived by a massage. Yogis walking over beds of live coals, lying on beds of nails for long hours, drinking acids, chewing up electric bulbs have been witnessed by thousands of people. However not all Hatha yogis succeed in their endeavours. In 1961 a yogi of Trivandrum claiming to have acquired the power to fly, climbed up a palm tree to await the right kind of cloud which would bear him aloft. The cloud never arrived. The most celebrated debacle in the history of Hatha yoga took place on 13 June 1966 in Bombay. Yogi Lakshman Sundara Srikant Rao appeared before a vast crowd to demonstrate his ability to walk over water. He went down like a stone.
I asked Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari about serpent power. ‘Is there anyone today who has been able to rouse the kundalini within him?’ The Swamiji’s reply, though somewhat obscure, implied that such a person does indeed exist. ‘Rousing the kundalini is the ultimate goal of a yogi,’ he said. ‘The experience cannot be described. Only he knows who knows.’ Then he proceeded to list signs by which one who had roused the she-serpent within him could be recognized. ‘He is slim, his face is radiant, his eyes sparkle, his ears catch all the ten kinds of sounds there are, his body is free from sickness, his digestion is perfect, his urine and faeces do not emit unpleasant odours, he has no nervous tension, his semen instead of running downwards, as in most mortals, runs upwards.’ To help me further in identifying the person who had roused his kundalini, Swamiji casually mentioned th
at many years ago his personal servant had remarked that, although his master used the same spot every day in the field to urinate and defecate, a strange fragrance came from the spot, instead of a bad odour.
I asked him about Yogi Bhajan who teaches kundaliniyoga and has a sizeable following in the United States.
‘That fellow is no yogi-shogi’, scoffed Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari. ‘I warned him that he was doing wrong. I told him that the only thing that would save him from hell would be the accumulated goodness of his American disciples. It is people like this Bhajan Yogi and that Udupa chap with his rats who are giving people wrong ideas about yoga.’
One of the benefits claimed by yoga is an equable temper and a sweet tongue which does not lend itself to speaking ill of anyone.
~
Katil Narasimha Udupa (fifty-five) is an FRCS of Canada, a Fellow of the College of Surgeons from Michigan and has worked in the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. For the last seventeen years he has been professor of surgery and director of the Institute of Medicine of the Benaras Hindu University. Testing the effects of yoga on rats was his idea. He has a grant of Rs 60,000 to try out his experiments.
Dr Udupa handed me a sheaf of reports on which he had based an article he sent to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on the results of his experiments. The article roused a lot of interest in America.
Dr Udupa’s ‘guinea-pigs’ are students from the university. Modern equipment including a polygraph which records the heart, respiration, blood pressure and ‘a whole-body counter’ which records intake of isotopes is already in commission.
A yoga clinic has been given a wing of its own in the new university hospital. Here patients who have not responded to conventional medicines are sent. Dr Udupa mentioned some diseases in the treatment of which yoga has proved its worth; thyroid toxiasis, high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, arthritis and nervous dyspepsia. It is too early to gauge the results as the experiment is very new and only four patients had registered themselves for treatment. Nevertheless Dr Udupa maintains that in the treatment of arthritis quite remarkable results have been achieved in a short period by the ‘unlocking of joints’. When I told him that I had seen similar results at nature cure clinics where all that had been done was to cleanse the patients’ bowels by colonic irrigation and keeping them on a fast for a few days, he replied, ‘There are many ways of getting to the top of the Everest, yoga is also a kind of naturopathy.’
I asked him about his experiments on rats. He was somewhat embarrassed because of the publicity that it had received. ‘I made the mistake of talking to an American journalist. He went and put it in all the papers.’ I persisted in my enquiries. The doctor had acquired sixteen albino mice, stuck their heads in test-tubes with open bottoms so that their snouts were in the open. He had kept them in the shirshasana position for an hour and then examined their heart-beats, blood pressure and response to stimuli. ‘The effects were exactly the same as in humans. The rats were rejuvenated.’
‘Why then were the experiments abandoned?’
‘There was a spate of letters of protest from the SPCA including one from Dr Rukmini Arundale of the Thepsophical Society. Despite the fact that there was no cruelty of any kind—on the contrary the rats seemed to benefit from the experience—I was asked to discontinue the experiments.’
The borderline between yoga ot the body emphasizing asanas and yoga of the mind is very thin. Physical yoga includes pranayama with repetitions of sacred formulae. Yoga of the mind, though it obviates the need of asanas, also requires the practitioner to regulate his breathing while he meditates. The most successful teacher of the yoga of meditation is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Although his transcendental meditation has few adherents in India and is often criticized as the ‘capsule method’ or ‘instant meditation’, its success elsewhere is remarkable. The Maharishi who claims to teach the ‘science of creative intelligence’ has an estimated 2,000 centres managed by the Maharishi International University with Dr Keith Wallace, professor of philosophy, as president. At one time Mahesh Yogi’s disciples included Mia Farrow and the Beatles. In England, Maharishi’s institutes charge about Rs 480 for four ninety-minute lessons. This gave the London weekly, the Observer, an opportunity to caption an article on the subject as ‘Cash Vibration’.
The one country to have categorically rejected yoga is the Soviet Union. Marxists have understandably no time for meditation or mysticism, but their rejection of yoga as a physical cult is difficult to comprehend. An article in the Moscow journal Health denounced the head stand as dangerous to health. This brought forth a riposte from an Indian rhymester in the Times of India.
The pundits of yoga are wrathful
That their credo has been questioned abroad;
There is wild indignation at the insinuation
That shrishasana is a fraud.
‘Are the centuries of practice forgotten?’
They ask with a measure of scorn.
Are Nehru and Menuhin not really being genuine
When they stand on their heads every morn?
Devotees everywhere have joined the issue—
They brandish a rod in their pickle
They won’t take it prone, this effrontery shown
By the land of the hammer and sickle.
Viewed calmly, the Soviets may well
Have a point, when all’s said and done
To perch on one’s neck, in Omsk or Uzbek
May not be their notion of fun.
We may claim that by standing inverted
Our grey matter is cleansed and made new
But Reds in the know, will be able to show
Brainwashing is the best thing for you.
Most educated Indians accept yoga as the best form of nature cure and better than any other system of exercises. It is difficult to make any estimate of those who practice it, but it is a safe guess that it runs into millions. But there are a few who are very sceptical. I.S. Johar, a well-known film-star comedian whose first wife teaches yoga at the health club of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, denounces it as a dangerous hoax. ‘What did our ancients know about blood pressure or the toxins that holding the breath can produce? I can give you innumerable instances of people who lost their sense of balance by standing too long on their heads, of people who have done irreparable injury to their spinal cords by doing some of the asanas and strings that surgeons have taken out of the lungs and bellies of yoga enthusiasts. The Soviets are quite right in putting an end to this hocus-pocus,’ he said.
There is little doubt that yoga asanas do for the human body and mind what no other system of exercises either aims to do or achieves. Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari is a splendid example of what it can do for the body. Dr Sinha listed yoga’s superiority over other exercises. ‘Other exercises consume energy; yoga is designed to preserve it. There is no sweating, no running out of breath, no hardening of the muscles. And yoga asanas are designed to improve the functioning of every organ in the body including the eyes, ears, heart, lungs, liver and the kidneys.’ The shavasana (corpse pose), claims Dr K.K. Datey, one of India’s leading cardiologists, is most beneficial for people with high blood pressure and cardiac disorders. Controlled breathing and meditation soothes the nerves, reduces hypertension and thus releases many people from dependence on tranquillizers and drugs. Auto-suggestion plays an important role in the success of yoga. Emile Coue’s formula, ‘every day in every way I am getting better and better’, is assiduously inculcated. Catechisms are taught to schoolchildren. ‘How does yoga help you?’ asks Shobha Shirodkar, principal of the Arya Samaj School in Santa Cruz (Bombay). Her class chant the reply in chorus, ‘Yoga gives concentration and helps us to go further in life.’
‘What does yoga do for our body?’
‘It cleanses the body, it slows down our heartbeat and we can live longer.’ Another yoga ashram has a banner above its entrance gate proclaiming: ‘An Asana a Day Keeps the Doctor Away.’
The
findings at Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari’s ashram and the Benaras Hindu University were not very convincing. Since 1957 a team of doctors of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) has, in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) conducted experiments on 500 yogis on a more scientific basis. Dr B.K. Anand, a neuro-physiologist who is the leader of the team, says that they were trying to find answers to three questions. First: can yogis influence their internal activities by meditation? Second: can they live without nutrition in an atmosphere with very little oxygen? And third: what changes take place in their brains when they are so engaged? The institute has constructed a black, soundproof room, a box which can be sealed against air, attached to an electroencephalograph to record the activity of the brain. The doctors found that some yogis achieved incredible degrees of automatic control requiring minimal amount of energy. Whereas a normal human being can lower his metabolic rate by 10–12 per cent, the yogis could lower it by as much as fifty per cent. Heartbeats were slowed down to ‘near heart-block’—thirty to thirty-five per minute compared with the usual seventy-two.
The most interesting of the findings of the AIIMS were the changes in brain activity during meditation. The relaxed brain has waves called alpha activity which can be influenced by external stimuli such as the flashing of a light or a thud. In the case of the yogis in trance this alpha activity did not respond to external stimuli. The team came to the conclusion that ‘meditation has most definitely done something’.
Not a Nice Man to Know Page 16
