After he led the John Main Seminar, “The New Creation in Christ”, I took a plane with Bede Griffiths. He was then in his eighties and recovering from a near fatal stroke. He was grateful for the spiritual benefits of it. He had been sitting in his small hut at Shantivanam when, he said, it was if somebody had punched him hard in the head and his vision went blurred – like the old televisions when they went wobbly. He felt the injunction to “surrender to the Mother” and thus began his transcendence of his English Edwardian conditioning. He and others saw how emotionally, empathetically free he became. At the time, however, he was convinced of his impending death and crawled to his bed to meditate and die. He survived, but everyone assumed he would be an invali