The True Path: Western Science And The Quest For Yoga

The True Path: Western Science and the Quest for Yoga is not a book about yoga of limb-bending variety. Rather, it is about yoga as drawn from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning "union." Duke University professor and neurologist Dr. Roy J. Mathew focuses on unions of the everyday, waking mind and transcendental consciousness--experiences that produce spiritual ecstasy, religious bliss, and general well-being. They can arise from sitting meditation, psychedelic drug use, or even spontaneously from the depths of despair. But what causes them? Are they neurologically based? And can Western science hope to explain them?

Mathew tries--with moderate success. He has spent years studying blood flow in the working brain and helps run a drug-abuse treatment center. And as a native of India, he possesses firsthand knowledge of Eastern religious models that describe these transcendent states. He begins with Einsteinian relativity and its implications for what we call "reality." It is hardly new territory, having been explored in depth by New Age authors Fritjof Capra and Deepak Chopra. While newcomers to Eastern religion will appreciate Mathew's succinct accounts of Gautama Buddha's enlightenment and the Middle Way, casual students will find the material familiar, and serious students, redundant. Mathew also devotes considerable space to the neurological effects of LSD, peyote, marijuana, and even cocaine. He concludes, as did psychedelic pioneers Alan Watts and Ram Dass, that drugs are stepping stones to transcendental experiences and not a means of sustaining them.

Mathew steps out onto a professional limb in the last 50 pages, suggesting that transcendent states may be related to a release of norepinephrine, a pleasure-inducing chemical, into the right hemisphere of the brain. He does note, however, that this early hypothesis is still untested. Similarly intriguing are his observations of brain behavior in states of sleep, deep concentration, and enjoyment. Ultimately, though, Mathew comes up against the same difficulty other researchers of consciousness have encountered, namely reproducing ecstatic states in laboratory settings. --Demian McLean