It was a sunny day last summer when I went to meet Joel Kramer. I drove my car up an unmarked winding road to the top of the seaside mesa where he and Diana Alstad live. Diana Alstad met me at the door and invited me inside. Soon Kramer joined us and asked me if I would like to sit with him on their deck outside. As we sat there high above the Pacific Ocean's endlessly rolling and crashing waves dotted with foam, sea gulls and an occasional surfer, it seemed somehow fitting to me that my meeting with two of the sources of the widely proclaimed anti-guru new paradigm was taking place in the town of Bolinas, California. Bolinas is a coastal town off Highway 1, at the West's furthermost limits. A bastion of anarcho-libertarianism, its residents have driven the authorities to despair by repeatedly tearing down every sign announcing its existence that the California Department of Transportation has ever posted.

Enjoying the dramatic beauty of our surroundings, I thanked Kramer for meeting with me, and I told him that I had found his book fascinating. Then I brought up the subject of its reputed influence on Andrew Harvey. Yes, he said, the book had influenced Harvey. But he was critical of Harvey for not going far enough. Although Harvey criticizes the guru system, he still believes in the virtues of self-sacrifice and impersonal love, Kramer said.

Then, obviously not a man to waste time getting to the point, he let me know in a passionate tone that he had me and the magazine I write for pegged as perpetrators of what he calls the "renunciate morality" based on selflessness and self-sacrifice, which he claims is wreaking havoc upon this planet. He told me that he would never grant an interview to a magazine that promulgates such views, because he would not want to appear to endorse them. Taken aback, I was not sure how to proceed, but I did not have to think about it for long.

In a still forceful yet more philosophical tone, Kramer immediately went on to say that what is necessary is understanding—never renunciation. He asked me to explain how renunciation could ever lead to any good. I told him that I have personally struggled with a tendency towards anger, towards lashing out at people when I am crossed. I agreed with him that understanding is essential, and I told him that I am interested in anger's causes and effects. But being doubtless about its destructiveness, when I feel anger arising I think I should renounce acting out of it. By doing this, breaking the chain of action and reaction that anger creates, I have a better chance of coming to an understanding that will uproot it, I explained. But Joel Kramer was clearly unconvinced.

I brought up what I considered to be the heart of the matter. I told him that I found it hard to believe that he and Diana Alstad were serious in their assertion that selflessness or self-sacrifice does not have a higher moral status than self-centeredness. But I proposed to Joel Kramer that if we defined our terms it might turn out that we were not so far apart as it appeared. Perhaps they were using the term self-centeredness in a way that is different than usual.

"I can see aspects of what you might call selfishness or self-centeredness that arguably should not be negated,
such as creativity, individual discrimination, personal responsibility and so on," I suggested, attempting to find some meeting ground. "Perhaps this is what you mean by self-centeredness, and why you say it is necessary and should not be renounced?" But he dashed my hopes for a rapprochement, informing me in no uncertain terms that our viewpoints were diametrically opposed. This despite the fact that in his book, and in our ensuing conversation, he cited over and over again similar positive aspects of "self-centeredness" to those I had just proposed to him.

Then Kramer retook the offensive. He attacked the emphasis Eastern thought places on oneness, on our ultimate identity. For example, he pointed out to me that everyone has to face their death alone. I don't know if it was because we were perched so precariously high above the Pacific Ocean's crashing waves, but I was deeply struck by his point, and found myself sinking like a stone into the depths of a still contemplation of the aloneness of each of us in the face of the ultimate.

"That is a very profound paradox," I heard myself say, staring at him dumbly while vaguely recalling that paradox was one of those things Joel Kramer found especially pernicious, a sure sign of authoritarian thought. Joel Kramer looked at me, waiting. I repeated, "That is a mystery, and a profound paradox."

Then the answer came to me, like a silver fish leaping unexpectedly out of the blue ocean. "We are alone in the face of death, that is true," I said, "but that aloneness itself is a universal experience, pointing to our oneness as well as our individuality."

He remained silent. For a moment I could not tell if it was because he was struck by what I had said or flabbergasted at my obtuseness. Then, as if I had said nothing at all he stated, "No one else can feel my pain."

Our conversation continued in a similar vein. I wasn't surprised by the fact that our views were different. But what disturbed me was that we were never able to meet, even when it seemed at times that we agreed. Every time I posited a higher "one," he acknowledged it, but then countered with a "many." Every connecting universal I proposed was greeted with a nod, followed by the assertion of a unique and separating individual.

Kramer told me that he does not discount the idea of oneness, or the religious experience of it. "I've had oneness experiences," he said. But he and Alstad argue that from the oneness experience, religions abstract philosophies of oneness, drawing conclusions about human nature and the nature of existence from the experience of oneness, and this is where the trouble begins. Kramer and Alstad call these philosophies "oneness ideologies." In such ideologies, oneness and selflessness are given precedence over separateness and individuality, and thereby authoritarianism is born. Why is this? Because oneness is only one side of the picture, they say, and giving it higher priority than separateness makes human beings feel bad about themselves, and consequently susceptible to authoritarian manipulation.

We went over these points in various ways, again and again. Much was said, often with great passion, but very little actually happened. We seemed to be continually stuck at the same barrier, despite exploring it from every different angle. I would try to leap it, but would be pulled back. Sometimes I would barrel on, almost feeling lush green spaces beneath my feet, only to find I had been corralled back into the same narrow pen. At some point I noticed that several hours had passed.