Back in 1975, a smart girlfriend who had her hands full saving my sanity gave me a paperback and said, “Here, read this.” The book was Jacob Needleman’s The New Religions, and therein I found a passage that has come to mind frequently over the past fourteen years. As I’ve struggled and slept along a faintly marked trail between the devil and the deep blue sea — what I like to call my “spiritual path” this paragraph has served me well as a sort of recurring signpost. In discussing the central crisis of Western religion, Needleman wrote: