Paper short abstract:

Ever since kuṇḍalinī's introduction to the modern world, esoteric circles have elaborated innovative practices and theories. Scientistic approaches linked kuṇḍalinī to biofeedback machines. This paper aims to investigate how esoteric protagonists applied technological means to support their claims.

Paper long abstract:

Ever since the 1880s the notion of kuṇḍalinī shakti had increasingly caught the attention of Indian and non-Indian religious protagonists. While the Theosophical Society had initiated the discourse on the “Serpent Power,” the Indian Pandit Gopi Krishna introduced kuṇḍalinī as a matter of personal experience. Gopi Krishna experienced in 1937 what he perceived as the rising of his kuṇḍalinī energy. Krishna’s systematic and reflective examination of this decisive event culminated in the publication of his autobiographical book “Kundalini. The Evolutionary Energy in Man” (1967), where he defines kuṇḍalinī as a biological mechanism. Against the backdrop of scientism, kuṇḍalinī was thenceforth interpreted as an empirically verifiable element that may be of interest for the scientific community.

An intriguing approach to this scientistic interpretation of kuṇḍalinī was carried forward by supporters of so-called biofeedback and related machines. A popular scientistic approach in the 1970s, religious protagonists interpreted biofeedback as a spiritual practice that might have a beneficial effect on one’s spiritual path. One such account was proposed by the American author W. Thomas Wolfe. In his book “And the Sun is up: Kundalini Rising in the West” (1978), Wolfe presents biofeedback machines as the primary key to the potential awakening of kuṇḍalinī among ‘Western’ practitioners. Another protagonist who correlated kuṇḍalinī with a machine, was Itzhak Bentov, who aimed to trigger kuṇḍalinī with a so-called ballistocardiograph to empirically prove its existence.

As this paper claims, the notion of biofeedback was commonly related to kuṇḍalinī in the 1970s and resulted in several research projects. The major aim of this paper therefore revolves around the question how kuṇḍalinī was increasingly linked to technology with biofeedback machines representing but one example.