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On Tuesday, as had been pre-arranged by phone the previous week when I had been attending the symposium, Jennifer and I got together. The time apart had been only about a week, but I felt as if years had passed since I last had been in her presence.

As mesmerizing as the eyes of Mary Streeter were and her great beauty notwithstanding, I did not feel as entranced or as intoxicated whenever I was with her as I did when I was with Jennifer. Whatever existed between Jennifer and myself - emotionally, psychologically, spiritually and/or physically - went very deep and was more than just a matter of pheromones.

I was enchanted by Jennifer and would have been willing to do anything to please her. Yet, all she seemed to want from me was my presence.

What she might be getting from our relationship on any given level was hard for me to understand. In fact, as far as I was concerned, through the generosity of her being and spirit, and for reasons that only could have been fathomed by Divinity, a love for me had arisen within her that was not caused by anything which I did or was.

I might not understand the hows and the whys of the matter. Nevertheless, her love for me was undeniably palpable in the way she looked at me, spoke with me and interacted with me.

She was doing me an honor every time she permitted me to be near her. When I was with her, I felt like I was engaged in a sacred process through which a form of sustenance for my continued existence was being transmitted to me.

I had never experienced this condition in my life, and prior to now, I never could have imagined it as anything but a possibility of fiction. Having now tasted something of its reality, I could not conceive how anyone could forget or ignore the intense character of the thoughts, feelings, and states that were given expression through such a condition.

When I had arrived at Jennifer's, Beth, who had moved in with Jennifer for a little while, was just coming out the door. Beth said she was on her way to a friend's house and might not be back until sometime after work the next day.

Jennifer and I decided to go out for a leisurely dinner and, maybe, take another walk along the Charles. The weather was balmy and conducive to the aimless wanderings of those who were in love.

Throughout the evening, time seemed to be suspended. Each moment seemed as if a delicious eternity were merely waiting, patiently, to be replaced by the next such 'moment'.

Einstein was wrong. Time is not what a clock measures.

These measurements are merely some of the degrees of freedom which time assigns to clocks in order for clocks to act in accordance with their inherent nature. The measurements say more about the manner in which clocks - whether natural, mechanical, atomic or psychological - engage time, than such measurements reveal anything about the essence of time.

I was thankful to God for the opportunity to be with Jennifer and, as a result engage time in a way that allowed me to have experiences whose duration could never be measured by conventional and scientific clocks. The movement of shadows across the face of a sun dial, or the flow of grains of sand, or the rotation of wheels, or the vibration of atoms, all have their characteristic properties, but love dances to various rhythms that fall beyond the horizons of these modalities of measurement, even while these clocks tick their tocks and attempt to correlate physical time with the experiences of non-physical temporality.

After completing dinner and going for a walk, we decided to take a drive. Not too long into this segment of our evening together, the brakes failed while going down a long hill, and I lost control of the car.

I must have hit my head at some point because I lost consciousness. I awoke into a very different world.

When my eyes finally opened, I was in a bed. A woman was seated next to the bed looking at me with concern.

She asked: "David, how are you feeling? You've had us worried. You were unconscious for nearly two days."

I looked at her for a moment and two questions popped into mind. Who was she, and who was I?

Apparently, as the woman later explained to me, I was suffering from psychogenic amnesia. I could remember pretty much everything about the world in general and virtually nothing about my world in particular.

The woman said her name was Jennifer Ormsby and that we were very close to one another. For some reason, a chill had swept through me when she told me this because I knew, after a brief period of introspection, that I didn't feel anything for her, and, for whatever reason, this frightened me.

She was trying to be solicitous, supportive and encouraging toward me. However, her attentions were making me feel uncomfortable.

I didn't have any sense of how to respond to her. The two poles of the dynamic - her and me - were blanks, and what to do about that was difficult to figure out since I really didn't have any points of reference that would help guide me except some general principles of etiquette and politeness which, somehow, managed to bubble to the surface at appropriate times.

Over the next several days, Jennifer fed me both food and information. The latter was far more difficult to digest than the former.

She said that when the accident took place, she too had lost consciousness for a brief period of time. When she came to, a tall, athletic, middle-aged, bearded, black man was leaning over her trying to unfasten her seat belt.

The man had introduced himself as Rip. He helped Jennifer to deal with the aftermath of the accident.

Somewhere in his life, Rip seemed to have picked up a considerable amount of paramedical training. Following a preliminary examination, Rip indicated he believed I was suffering from a concussion of some sort and that everything else appeared to be alright.

For reasons that, currently, I didn't understand, the two of them had decided that perhaps the safest place to take me was not to a hospital but to Jennifer's spiritual teacher who lived on a farm-like setting about an hour's drive from Boston. Both Rip and Jennifer seemed to believe the accident was not all that accidental.

Since the front end of my car was pretty mangled from its rather forced and rude introduction to a tree which had been trying to mind its own business, Rip and Jennifer had to remove me, unconsciousness and all, from my car and put me in Rip's car. Once the transfer had been made, Jennifer gave directions about how to get to the residence of her spiritual teacher, and we all proceeded on our way, some of us more aware of what was going on than others.

After Rip had completed his mission of mercy, he disappeared into the night. Jennifer said he departed as mysteriously as he had arrived since she was witness to neither his coming nor going - they just seemed to happen.

While at the house of her spiritual teacher, and while I still was unconsciousness, a medical doctor, who was a friend of the teacher, had been asked to take a look at me. The doctor confirmed Rip's initial diagnosis.

In addition to the sequence of events on the night of the 'accident', Jennifer filled me in on the events of the last month and a half. The names of: Beth, Brian and Warren Idaho; Timothy Jameson; Ken and Pamela Pratt; Rip; Paul Bradley and Ed Williams, or Mary Streeter, meant no more to me than did Jennifer's name or that of David Phelps.

I knew nothing of my parents or my family. I had no recollection of having lived in Canada.

I was a psychology teacher who, among other things, taught about personality, development and identity. Yet, at the moment, I lacked direct insight into all three areas.

Jennifer suggested I might benefit by talking with her spiritual guide. Since I already seemed to have lost everything else, I didn't feel there was anything else to lose by pursuing her counsel.

Jennifer took me to her teacher and introduced us. After that, Jennifer left the room.

Her guide's name was Jamee. She was a woman in her sixties whose hair showed only a few traces of gray and whose face seemed to be adorned with light, like mist hovers about a mountain top.

She was very loving and compassionate. I was drawn to her, and, almost immediately, I felt more comfortable in the presence of her unfamiliarity than I did in the presence of my own current estrangement from myself.

Jamee ushered me to a sofa chair across from her. There was a pot of tea hiding beneath a cozy on the table between us, and beside the pot were two cups, as if waiting for my arrival.

When I settled into the indicated seat, she asked: "Would you like some tea, David?"

Out of politeness, I replied: "Yes ... sure, but I have no idea how I like it."

She looked at me in an apprising manner and smiled. She said nothing but went about preparing a cup of tea for me.

When she had finished, she lifted the cup and saucer and placed it on the table in front of me. She said: "Why don't you try that, David, I think you'll like it?"

I did, and she was right. The taste was quite agreeable.

Leaning back into the softness of the sofa chair, I placed the cup and saucer on my lap. Being at a complete loss as to what to say, I remained silent and alternated between studying the floral design on the teacup and checking out the room in which I was sitting.

Finally, Jamee broke the silence. "I don't know if you understand how lucky you are David."

Perplexed by her words, I responded with: "I'm not sure I know what you mean. Are you referring to my having survived the accident?"

"Not entirely," she indicated, "although, obviously, there is much to give thanks for in that respect as well. No," she went on, "what I mean is you are in a very advantageous condition.

"Through circumstances, you have lost, at least for the time being, what most of us need to lose in order to be opened up to certain aspects of reality. In losing your personal identity, you now have an opportunity to consider events free from the personal biases, prejudices and habits that normally control how most of us think, feel and interact with the occurrences of our lives.

"Most of us, David, assume we know whom we are. We confuse personal history with essential identity.

"We believe our familial and social experiences tell us what we need to understand about ourselves. However, the nature of true identity has nothing to do with roles, career, social status, ethnicity, race, gender, family background, religion or class.

"Unfortunately, most of us have a tendency to become entangled in the network of relationships that constitutes the purely peripheral and superficial dimensions of our lives. Since our initiation into this network occupies a fundamental part of our first fifteen or twenty years of our lives, there are few of us who are able to survive this socialization process with any clear sense that there may be more to whom we are than what our families, communities, education and jobs are trying to convince us is the case.

"If one asks most people if they know who they are, they will say yes, and they will be wrong. If one asks you if you know who you are, you will say no, and you will be right.

"You know you don't know who you are, and you are seeking to change that. Most people don't know that they don't know who they are, and, therefore, they have no desire or motivation to change the way things are.

"Consequently, you are in a much better position than most people. Because you don't know who you are, and you are painfully aware of this, you are starting from a basic truth, while most other people are operating out of a basic falsehood since they are assuming they know who they are, when they do not.

"Very few people either have, or take, the opportunity to look at things from a completely fresh perspective. Having been stripped of your personal biases, you have been given such an opportunity, and I hope, God willing, you embrace this chance in the spirit with which it has been given to you.

"Don't seek to become who you were, David. Seek to realize who you are."

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