Frederic Spiegelberg was a Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 professor of religion. A friend of Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich

Paul Johannes Tillich was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the 20th century...

, Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...

, and Carl Jung

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...

, he participated in Jung's Eranos

Eranos

Eranos is an intellectual discussion group dedicated to the study of psychology, religion, philosophy and spirituality which has met annually in Switzerland since 1933....

 symposia

Academic conference

An academic conference or symposium is a conference for researchers to present and discuss their work. Together with academic or scientific journals, conferences provide an important channel for exchange of information between researchers.-Overview:Conferences are usually composed of various...

 and lectured in Jung's institute in Zurich

Zürich

Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...

. Paul Tillich helped Spiegelberg escape Germany in 1937 after Spiegelberg was fired from the university. Spiegelberg moved to Stanford University and became professor of Asian religions with a classical comparative focus.

In 1951, Spiegelberg invited Haridas Chaudhuri

Haridas Chaudhuri

Haridas Chaudhuri , Bengali integral philosopher, was a correspondent with Sri Aurobindo and the founder of the California Institute of Integral Studies . He was born in Kolkata. He studied at the Scottish Church College and later at the University of Calcutta from where he earned his doctorate in...

, a disciple of Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo , born Aurobindo Ghosh or Ghose , was an Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru, and poet. He joined the Indian movement for freedom from British rule and for a duration became one of its most important leaders, before developing his own vision of human progress...

, to join the staff of the newly formed American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. This eventually became the California Institute of Integral Studies. Spiegelberg was also involved in founding the Esalen Institute

Esalen Institute

Esalen Institute is a residential community and retreat in Big Sur, California, which focuses upon humanistic alternative education. Esalen is a nonprofit organization devoted to activites such as meditation, massage, Gestalt, yoga, psychology, ecology, and spirituality...

 with Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy (author)

Michael Murphy is the co-founder of the Esalen Institute, a key figure in the Human Potential Movement and author of both fiction and non-fiction books on topics related to extraordinary human potential.- Biography :...

. Also, at this time a very imaginative figure named Alan Watts

Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York...

 was invited to the new school.

In 1960, Spiegelberg and Chaudhuri published a commemorative volume on Sri Aurobindo.

In his April 2007 essay "From Altered States To Altered Categories (And Back Again): Academic Method And The Human Potential Movement

Human Potential Movement

The Human Potential Movement arose out of the social and intellectual milieu of the 1960s and formed around the concept of cultivating extraordinary potential that its advocates believed to lie largely untapped in all people...

", religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal wrote the following:

Spiegelberg’s phrase "the religion of no religion" had deep existential roots. It was based on a mystical encounter with the natural world he experienced as a young theology student. He was walking in a wheat field on a bright day when, quite suddenly, his ego vanished and what he calls the Self appeared. Through this altered perspective, he began to see that God was shining through everything in the world, that everything was divine, that there was nothing but holiness. As he reveled in this revelation, he came around a corner and found himself confronting a gray church. He was horrified. How, he asked himself, could such a building claim to hold something more sacred, more divine, than what he had just experienced in the poppies, birds, and sky of the now divinized cosmos? It all seemed preposterous, utterly preposterous, to him. From the theological scandal of this initial altered state, Spiegelberg developed and theorized what was essentially (or non-essentially) an apophatic mystical theology

Mystical theology

Mystical theology is a branch of theology which treats of acts and experiences or states of the soul which cannot be produced by human effort.-Catholic tradition:...

 that approaches religious language, symbol, and myth as non-literal projective expressions of some deeper metaphysical truth that, paradoxically, is simultaneously immanent and transcendent

Transcendence (religion)

In religion transcendence refers to the aspect of God's nature which is wholly independent of the physical universe. This is contrasted with immanence where God is fully present in the physical world and thus accessible to creatures in various ways...

—a kind of dialectical or mystical humanism, if you will. It was just such a comparative mystical theology grounded in the natural world, and just such a critical but deep engagement with the religious traditions of the world, that inspired Murphy and his colleagues in their new venture.