Bartley recounts a revelation that Erhard said he had experienced in March 1971 while driving into San Francisco, California to work at Grolier Society. Erhard described to Bartley what the revelation experience felt like: "What happened had no form. It was timeless, unbounded, ineffable, beyond language." He told Bartley that he realized: "I had to 'clean up' my life. I had to acknowledge and correct the lies in my life. I saw that the lies that I told about others — my wanting my family, or Ellen (his second wife), or anyone else, to be different from the way that they are -- came from lies that I told about myself -- my wanting to be different from the way that I was."