Personal meditation anecdote involving university professors and spiritual practices

Leonard, Integral Transformative Practice. | watched him go through a dramatic personal transformation after participating in Professor of Asian Studies, Frederick Spiegelberg’s seminar (with meditation lab) about Sri Arubindo’s interpretation of the Hindu Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita. Shortly after the semester, he climbed into an abandoned tower on campus to continue his meditation. He remained there for several months, refusing to come down even after the Stanford Student Health Service sent a medical school psychiatrist to investigate. | was more than curious about how it was that this hard drinking, and like his brother Dennis, all night poker playing, Phi Gamma Delta party boy, had suddenly become a transcendent ascetic. My girl friend Mary and | signed up for Spiegelberg’s seminar in Indian Religions. We were made breathless by his accounts of administering a Rorschach Test to the Indian Saint, Swami Sivananda. He recounted discussions about God with the artists Paul Klee and Max Ernst and the philosophers Rudolph Otto, Paul Tillich, Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber. As homework, Mary and | practiced breathing awareness mediation twice a day. During the year, Spiegelberg sponsored a visit by the aging but still very lively Aldous Huxley to our seminar. He also brought us Alan Watts and several lecturers from the Jung Institute of San Francisco. Shortly after hearing Huxley talk about the spiritual power of a particular exercise of will and loving thoughts, Mary and | began the daily practice of karessa, some Call it coitus reservatus. | was eighteen and she was nineteen. We found that withholding an orgasm in order to achieve nirvanic extinction of all desires and passions was difficult. We spent hours in karessa meditation, trying to experience the detachment described in the Bhagadvad Gita. This biblical explication of karma yoga told how it was that the warrior, Ardjuna, instructed by God Krishna in the form of his charioteer, was able to detach sufficiently to do his assigned job of killing without emotional involvement. Ken Wilbur, a modern, self proclaimed pandit, an academically oriented articulator and intellectual justifier of the dharma, the spiritual work of Hindu and Buddhist practice, contrasts the nirvana (literally “end”) composed of emptiness in time and space, dharma Kaya in which “...no objects are n arising...” with the lesson of the Bhagavad-Gita. Its message involved realizing 10 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013510