Becoming Trans-Personal

- Marilyn Schlitz, PhD

WHEN RICHARD GUNTHER stepped out on the deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, he felt the scene was smiling at him and was overcome with a tangible sense of feeling whole. “It was as though I had walked through a sci-fi energy screen into a new world,” he told me later. Gunther always saw himself as a no-nonsense businessman. Yet what he experienced on that deck was a spiritual awakening. He felt connected to all of nature—free from any separation. In a moment, he had a transpersonal glimpse into an expanded realm of existence. In time, he discovered that he is a profoundly spiritual person who simply needed “the shock of this opening to accept that truth.”