Diana Alstad eventually joined us. I hoped her feminine grace would cause the jagged sharpness of our ideological battle to soften a little. I was growing a little tired of all this energy without motion. We were still sparring over individuality and uniqueness versus oneness and connectedness, and had not progressed at all. Diana solicitously took out a handkerchief and gently wiped some moisture from her husband's face. She began to say something to me that I did not catch, but Joel interrupted her, waving her off and saying, "He's more sophisticated than that." Holding up the last edition of What Is Enlightenment? and pointing to the words "impersonal enlightenment" on its cover, she criticized all teachings that emphasize the impersonal. Turning the conversation to the topic of love, I suggested that there is nothing uniquely personal or special about romantic love. This elicited a strong and immediate emotional response.

"But everyone wants to feel special!" cried Diana.

"No one loves Diana the way that I do," Joel asserted.

"Yes, perhaps," I responded, "but then everyone feels that way about their romantic involvement."

Joel Kramer changed the subject. He asked me if I thought that God or the Absolute was identical with the universe, and if so, wasn't Adolf Hitler God?

"No, Adolf Hitler isn't God," I said.

"Well then, is God separate from the universe?" Joel wanted to know.

"No," I said, "God isn't separate from the universe, but He or She or It is not identical to the universe."

"But that's dualistic. That's monotheism,"exclaimed Alstad. (Kramer and Alstad believe that monotheism is patently authoritarian, whereas the authoritarianism of Eastern "oneness ideologies" is more subtle and hidden, although equally pernicious.)

I replied that saying that God is identical even with the entire universe still limits God, and God is unlimited.

A moment of stunned silence. Then I pointed out that we were enmeshed in the old debate of transcendence versus immanence of the Absolute, a philosophical issue of great profundity that theologians have been wrestling with for centuries. "I don't have the answer either," I said. "The closest I can come up with at the moment is that God is both transcendent and immanent."

"Well, you can't have it both ways," Joel protested.

I have to admit that even at this late stage in the proceedings this response surprised me a bit. One of the more interesting aspects of Kramer's and Alstad's thought is their insistence that we need to go beyond either/or "bipolar" thinking and become proficient at dialectics if we are to have any hope of solving the problems of our weary and burdened globe. The hallmark of dialectics is that out of the clash of opposites, a higher inclusive synthesis is supposed to emerge. But despite hours of lively tête-à-tête no glimmer of a synthesis of our opposing views was in sight. I decided to give it one last try.

"Couldn't your understanding of oneness or selflessness be artificially limited?" I stammered. I was getting worn out. "Isn't the very point of genuine oneness experience and understanding the resolution of the conceptual opposites of one and many, self and nonself, into a higher unity? And isn't this where dialectics is supposed to ultimately lead?" It didn't work. He said that there is no higher oneness; the one is always opposed to the many. And we were back in the same loop.

But I hadn't quite run out of steam yet. I finally asked, "If selflessness is a harmful basis for morality, as you argue, what would you base morality upon?"

They both answered, "Survival." They said that given the ecological crisis and the threat of nuclear extermination, this was the problem most urgently facing humanity today. I could not disagree with this. But I asked how a morality of survival could be free from the danger of authoritarianism. "In fact," I went on, "I don't think you could find a morality more susceptible to authoritarian abuse than one based ultimately on survival. Wasn't the survival of China, for example, the rationale for Chairman Mao's authoritarian oppression? Couldn't survival as the ultimate yardstick justify the most extreme forms of suppression of the individual?" Diana Alstad hesitantly offered that respect for the individual would be seen as necessary to survival of the race. Then Kramer changed the subject again.

Feeling that we were now beyond the point of polite philosophical debate, Kramer told me, in so many words, that although intelligent, relatively sophisticated, and sincere, I was very confused. "I don't hold back saying where I think things are at," he told me, in case I was unsure of this. After four and a half hours of battle with his and Alstad's prodigious intellects, this was one of the few things I was not unsure of at this point. But there was one other.

Joel Kramer had told me that in his days of teaching at Esalen and elsewhere, he had been tempted to become a guru himself. Several times during the course of our conversation he had asserted that he could have pulled it off if he had wanted to. "I know what people expect, and I could play that role," he told me. But when he was teaching he saw the temptation, and the effect that adulation from others had on him, and he didn't like it. He knew that the temptation to abuse the position was too strong and he renounced taking the role. I respected him for that. I had even had a similar experience, although not as dramatic as his, years ago when teaching a class on spirituality, and had made a similar choice.

"Well, I haven't told you explicitly what I think is behind your philosophy," I said. They invited me to go on.

"I think that many people have been deeply burned, both by what they have seen in others who have abused the guru role and by what they have seen in themselves," I said. "Being genuinely selfless is the greatest challenge. Most of us come up against the same temptations in ourselves, and make the same mistakes, over and over again. It is very easy to despair of ever going beyond the temptations of power and selfishness." I was speaking from personal experience here, not from theory. Despite years of effort at personal transformation, I was still very much struggling. "I think that the difficulties that you faced in yourself have made you deeply cynical about the possibility of anyone manifesting real selflessness," I concluded.

There was a moment of silence. I could not tell if they were impressed with my point, or only affected by the emotion behind it. It seemed that for an instant there was the possibility of meeting in mutual respect, but the moment passed. There wasn't much more to say.

Soon, another visitor dropped by and I took my cue to thank them both and leave. On my way out Alstad gave me a book of teachings by Kramer from years ago, some articles by him on yoga and a copy of a manuscript of a new book they are working on about the inherent authoritarianism of Buddhism. Diana and I spoke for a few moments about my current spiritual involvement, and she graciously said to Joel that she thought there was more to it than the usual "oneness ideology." But Joel, looking annoyed, just waved this off, said good-bye and returned to his guest.

I drove back down the mesa, through a grove of eucalyptus, and headed south on Highway 1. Bolinas Lagoon rippled orange beneath the setting sun, silhouetting statuesque egrets, herons and other waterfowl, nature forming a picture of peaceful perfection.

Exhausted, I breathed a sigh of relief.