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ones spiritual unfolding within the stream of real time and space, finding emptiness in the world of form and inaction in the world of action.

We worked at karessa so ardently that there was barely enough time left to do our assignments in biology and chemistry. In a darkened room, Mary and I lay legs locked, lying on our sides, moving slowly and rhythmically, humming Om and waiting for our ascension. We worked at making the journey through Sri Aurobindo’s soul planes of higher mind, illumined mind, infinitive mind, over mind and finally, the supermind of infinitely empty no mind. This somewhat unusual way to study for a three credit course in Asian Studies at Stanford grew naturally out of the central message of Spiegelberg’s seminar that whereas “...deriving a universal theology is not possible, having the universal experience is required for an understanding of any of the world’s theologies.” The controversial Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark who teaches that Christian forms continue to evolve, John Shelby Spong, D.D. says, “...every biblical word represents an attempt on the part of our ancestors in faith to make sense out of a God experience in their time and place. The experience ...is eternal and real. The explanations will never be eternal and real. They will last only as long as the (cultural) mind-set that created them.”

Mary got an A+ grade, topping Spiegelberg’s class with a final examination essay, which, in literary detail, described her episodes of samadhi, yoga’s state of unity with the creator. Her 25 page blue book contained accounts of walking fugues, spontaneously strong genital sensations, changes in tastes and smells, sudden feelings of rising spinal-abdominal kundalini, middle of the night dreams of oceanic orgasmic fusion with God. She failed to mention that she was describing her usual pre-menstrual state.

During these college years, I learned about two Isaac Newtons The first I met at elementary physics lectures; the unit was about how things worked called mechanics. Logically and computationally consistent but taken on faith, I learned about an invisible field force between masses called gravity that decayed in strength like the inverse of the square of their distances apart and operated in my intuitive world like an electromagnetic spirit. Less occult were the expressions of gravitational fields as contact forces, computed for the tension in the string of a

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