Eat, Pray, Love

which true wisdom is acquired.” Unknowingly echoing the poems of the Persian Sufi mystic
Hafiz, who demanded why, with a God so wildly loving, are we not all screaming drunks,
Teresa cried out in her autobiography that, if these divine experiences were mere madness,
then “I beseech you, Father, let us all be mad!”
Then, in the next sentences of her book, it’s like she catches her breath. Reading Saint
Teresa today, you can almost feel her coming out of that delirious experience, then looking
around at the political climate of medieval Spain (where she lived under one of the most re-
pressive religious tyrannies of history) and soberly, dutifully, apologizing for her excitement.
She writes, “Forgive me if I have been very bold,” and reiterates that all her idiot babbling
should be ignored because, of course, she is just a woman and a worm and despicable ver-
min, etc., etc. You can almost see her smoothing back her nun’s skirts and tucking away
those last loose strands of hair—her divine secret a blazing, hidden bonfire.
In Indian Yogic tradition, this divine secret is called kundalini shakti and is depicted as a
snake who lies coiled at the base of the spine until it is released by a master’s touch or by a
miracle, and which then ascends up through seven chakras, or wheels (which you might also
call the seven mansions of the soul), and finally through the head, exploding into union with
God. These chakras do not exist in the gross body, say the Yogis, so don’t look for them
there; they exist only in the subtle body, in the body that the Buddhist teachers are referring to
when they encourage their students to pull forth a new self from the physical body the way
you pull a sword from its sheath. My friend Bob, who is both a student of Yoga and a neuros-
cientist, told me that he was always agitated by this idea of the chakras, that he wanted to ac-
tually see them in a dissected human body in order to believe they existed. But after a particu-
larly transcendent meditative experience, he came away with a new understanding of it. He
said, “Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a hu-
man being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One
is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But
they are both equally true.”
I like it when science and devotion find places of intersection. I found an article in The
New York Times recently about a team of neurologists who had wired up a volunteer Tibetan
monk for experimental brain-scanning. They wanted to see what happens to a transcendent
mind, scientifically speaking, during moments of enlightenment. In the mind of a normal think-
ing person, an electrical storm of thoughts and impulses whirls constantly, registering on a
brain scan as yellow and red flashes. The more angry or impassioned the subject becomes,
the hotter and deeper those red flashes burn. But mystics across time and cultures have all
described a stilling of the brain during meditation, and say that the ultimate union with God is
a blue light which they can feel radiating from the center of their skulls. In Yogic tradition, this