Heidegger in turn also helped form the German theologian and scholar of comparative religion Frederic Spiegelberg (1897–1994), who fled for his and his family’s lives from National Socialist Germany, where Heidegger remained quite comfortable and protected as a card-carrying Nazi and an anti-Semitic academic and writer.3 Spiegelberg eventually landed at Stanford University in Northern California, where he would mentor the two founders of a future think tank and retreat center called the Esalen Institute—in particular, Michael Murphy (who is my own closest mentor to this day).
