DM: During all these disruptions you were spending a great deal of time on the reading circuit. How did you regard that experience?

WE: I regard it always as a witness. On the college campuses the emphasis is on communication, what you know. I can communicate, but the witness is greater. It's something like this: what you can communicate maintains the point of contact, but it isn't the essence of your total effect, which is witness. By witness I mean a personal confrontation, a personal encounter, a psychic crisis deliberately precipitated to produce a change in attitude, a new center of gravity, a displacement of consciousness from cognition to faith. I don't mean faith in the Catholic sense. I never proselytize. I mean faith in the sense of commitment to life and to living. To live my faith, rather than by the mental thing that our education inculcates. To enter via the ideational world, yes, but to move through it. To be able to field the questions as they come to you and at the same time to throw back into the questioner a different principle of life. We are familiar with this from the example of the Zen masters, but my point of orientation is not Zen.