But one day, when I was 15 years old, I found myself in complete, near-suicidal despair, sitting alone on a beach in England. I was lonesome, far away from home for the first time, suffering from unrequited love and a kind of late-adolescent metaphysical desperation, flailing about, with no inherited religious framework to guide me, to find answers to unanswerable questions about death, injustice, and human suffering.

Then something happened. When I told my friend Andrew Greeley about it years later, he recognized it as what he called a grace experience, and I realized, retrospectively, that that was precisely what it was. What it felt like was suddenly being warmed and then suffused first by the sun and then by the flickering images of the branches of the trees and the shapes of the clouds drifting by above me and the salt taste of the sea breezes and the sound of the surf. It was a sudden realization that they were all beautiful, all good, and all simultaneously a part of me and a part of some all-encompassing source of love, a power that pervaded the universe with compassion.

This image did not erase but somehow made bearable my knowledge of the sadness and ugliness of so much of the human world. It seemed to me then incomprehensible not only that I should ever be suicidal again but indeed that I should ever again experience bottomless unhappiness. It changed my life.

It was just a little while later that I started to read, in English translation, the Upanishads, the ancient Indian philosophical texts that speak of the identity of the individual soul, the atman, with the world-soul, sometimes called Atman with a capital A, sometimes brahman. The world-soul penetrates the individual soul like salt dissolved in water, the texts said. I recognized then what I had experienced on that beach, which people sometimes call pantheism or panentheism (god in everything).

I resolved to learn Sanskrit and to study the religious texts of India, and so I did. And that, too, changed my life.