· Religion and Spiritual Tradition ·
All religions including atheism lead to God.
There being nowhere else.

When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden‘s green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mud;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: “It‘s pretty, but is it Art?”
Rudyard Kipling
The Conundrum of the Workshops

There is a family of red foxes that lives in the woods near our home. Some while ago, our neighbor saw one of the kits calmly trotting into her barn. The next morning, she found the fox in an empty horse stall, curled up against one wall, as if asleep. But the fox was not asleep; the fox was dead. There was a wound on one leg that may have been the cause of death. The game warden said it is not unusual for foxes to select a barn as a place to die.

But here’s the thing. The evidence at the scene suggests this fox died calmly and easily, as if it considered death as natural a process of life as hunting field mice, feasting on wild blueberries, or prancing down a country road. There are no signs of frantic digging, scratching, wall climbing, or other desperate behavior. This fox was not trying to escape its fate, and it did not struggle against it. Instead, it seems that this fox realized somewhere within that it was about to die, and so it found an appropriate site, and, without any fanfare, it simply did so.

What is the difference between us and the fox? Is it that we perceive death as the opposite of life, and so we struggle against it; and the fox recognizes death is the opposite of birth, and so takes it in stride.

Editor’s Desktop

Imagine a production of William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. On the stage, a great drama unfolds, shaped by prejudice, youthful beauty, romance, joy, delight, love, fear, anger, despair, faith, death — the stuff of all our lives. But none of it is real. None of the characters is real, none of the emotions is real, none of the action actually occurs. There is no such person as “Romeo”, there is no such person as “Juliet”. They were never born, they never loved, they never died. It is all an illusion. The only reality in that context consists of Shakespeare as author, the actors as players, and ourselves as audience. All of those know the play is an illusion, and that all that is real is themselves. But still, the play is performed again and again, and again and again we laugh and we cry. As if it were real. Likewise, what you and I each call “my life” is thoroughly an illusion. Here, we do not truly know what is Real because each of us has taken on the identity of “me”, the principal character in “my life”. And just as neither “Romeo” nor “Juliet” can know Shakespeare, neither can the separate, separative (“I am me, and you aren't”) self of our lives know our Reality. For that, we must transcend the character, and recognize and resume our True Identity in and as and with (choose a preposition) the Author, the Source, the Supreme, the One (choose a label). That is the spiritual process, transforming our current sense of identity bit by bit until finally it is transcended altogether, and we “Remember I Am”. Then, we Realize we never were the character, that we have never been born and cannot die, and that What Is always was and always will be. In a word, Reality destroys illusion.

If you give your life to God,
then it is no longer yours.
TZF



· Selections, Sources, and References ·

Editor’s Desktop



Okay. All of the above said, here’s the way I see it … today.

Adam-and-Eve’s banishment from Eden is, in story form, the Creation of the mind, the ego or egosense. “I am me, and you aren’t.” (For what I suspect the Creator intended by their creation, please see here.)

The human condition: One perceived as many.

And that is where I am today, as Stefan not you. Ditto you, perceived by you as you not me. Again, many, not one.

The Eden event is just a story, a fanciful true story about the real, the Real.

As I suggest in “In The Beginning,” the Real cannot be told in words. It is too, uh, unearthly to fit into words.

Some spiritual traditions call it a dream. In effect, Adam-and-Eve aren’t banished, “they” are put to sleep. And are dreaming. Their dream is us and our lives.

Stefan and Stefan’s life is Adam-and-Eve’s dream. Stefan is a dream character. You and your life too.

But again, it is a story, a teaching device.

The “spiritual” process is a path to awakening from the dream. Mind you, awakening the dreamer, awakening Adam-and-Eve, not awakening the dream character, Stefan. Or you. You and I are characters in the dream.

Dream characters are not dreaming, so on awakening, they do not awaken. Dreamers are dreaming, so on awakening, it is they who awaken. And on awakening of the dreamer, the dream and the dream characters … POOF! Gone.

They never were and are not. But surely there is an overlap? Must be, but honestly, dunno.

Hard to believe? Even discomforting to believe? Yea, I get that. It’s complicated. Or maybe not. Consider this. Let’s say last night each of us dreamed of riding a horse across a field into a woods up to a clearing in which were a few people, men and women, some beautiful some less so, some eating a meal, who urge us to dismount, and then speak to us, observations, warnings, promises, in a foreign language we do not know but are able to undersand. A dream. (Just for fun, I used some images I know dream analysts would enjoy, but any scenario would do here.) And then we awake. And it’s gone.

All gone. But while in train, it’s unmistakably there. In my experience, I have never dreamed that I was dreaming, that the persons, things, events were not “real”. I have never even considered the real-ness of a dream while dreaming it. While dreaming, the dream is real. Even all there is.

It is my belief, my sense of what is, that what you and I each call “me and my life,” is like that. In some mysterious way, me and my life, you and your life, is both real and unreal, simultaneously. Actually occurring, but somehow not really.

I am certain of that, sufficiently certain to say (cautiously) “I know it.”

There is more to it, of course. But this is a piece of it.

What I do not know is, who is the dreamer? Who — or is it what? — is having the dream, doing the dreaming?

And I do not know why it is happening. What’s the purpose? Is there a purpose? In “In The Beginning” I suggest that it might be God’s way to experience being stuff, separate and individual things, an experience denied to an infinite being that is by definition all there is all at once. God, who knows creation, discovering what it’s like to be created. Or is it evolution? Charles Darwin messing with our lives? Or none of the above. Or all of the above. Dunno.

And who or what precisely will I be when the dreamer awakens? If not Stefan, who? what? where? Dunno.

But what I do know is what I have been told and what I have read by the Teachers, and I am convinced it is the Truth. Well, actually, Stefan, a dream character, knows what he has read and been told in the dream, and I am, Stefan is, convinced that it is True.

And yet, it is convincing because I have experienced, I continue to experience, moments, series of moments, Seeing It, Being It, precisely as the Teachers describe It. They last just moments, sometimes minutes, sometimes a few minutes. Not long. And yet, the Truth of those moments is evident and believable, persuasively True. They are beyond the dream. It is not that they just seem to be beyond; they are unmistakably so. I cannot explain it in words except to say it is, they are, a happening above and beyond in every sense of the words. Like a movie in black-and-white that becomes suddently, inexplicably in full technicolor. A veil removed. A shaded window abruptly opened to full sunlight. Not that, but like that. And, yes, just a moment. But these moments are a clear, certain, convincing piercing of the dream by the Real.

A self-generated, uninterrupted, causeless, purposeless, boundaryless, joy-filled, silent “Oh my.” Like that.

Blissful.

Is that what life, Life, Real Life, is, beyond the dream? Dunno.

But I suspect so.

Finally, a confession. I am sometimes asked about my spiritual practice. I keep the spiritual, my being a seeker, in mind as constantly and consistently as I am able, from awakening in the morning to sleep at night. “Fix your mind on Me” (Krishna). I call it constant meditation. No, of course, it’s not constant, but that’s the ideal. It is my life, not a part of my life. I consider the entirety of my life, life itself, to be a whole. I look for it in every event, every thing, and every one I encounter, in whatever shape or form or manner. There is no thou shalt or thou shalt not. If God is Infinite, then God is All There Is, and All There Is is God. It is all one, the One. “I never see a thing without seeing God before it” (Abu Bakr, companion of Muhammad). Life — Nancy’s and my life — has become simple. Nothing special. Old stuff and useless habits allowed to drift away. “No thought for the morrow” (Matthew 6:34). I lean on the weight-lifting words of Jalaluddin Rumi: “I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.”

And this: To those new to the spiritual process and so to whom some stuff here seems a little weird, consider this: In the Christian tradition it is taught that the Teacher Jesus/Issa insisted to his disciples (and by extension humanity) “This I command you: Love one another.” All the traditions I have come across demand the same. I take it to mean whoever and whatever we encounter in life, we are to address her, him, it wisely, maturely, sensibly, and with love. Surely when those words were first spoken to Peter and Mary Magdalene and the others, one of them must have whined (if they dared!), “Are you nuts? Have you read the lead story in today‘s newspaper? Rape, child molestation, spouse beating! And that’s just the first paragraph.” To that, I suspect he reminded them, as do all the Teachers, no one said walking the spiritual path would be easy.

This too: What each of us perceives as “me” and “my world“ is in truth, in Truth, the Infinite Indivisible Undescribable Unknowable Omnipresent Self purposelessly being this. Our task, the task of each of us individually (this is an individual undertaking not a group activity), is to awaken and be aware — open our eyes (each of us individually) and see this in every corner of our (each of us individually) life, in every experience, in every thought. Here it is in Vasistha’s Yoga: “From the time the Lord Siva instructed me, I have been performing the worship of the Infinite Self. By the Grace of such worship, though I am constantly engaged in various activities, I am free from sorrow. I perform the worship of the Self, Who is undivided though apparently divided, with the flowers of whatever comes to me naturally and whatever actions are natural to me.” Worship how? My guess, initially simply by being aware, reminding ourselves, repeatedly and constantly, of the instruction, even while we do not understand it. Flowers? My guess, initially simply being present, or failing that, trying to be present by repeatedly reminding ourselves to be present. That effort, that commitment, is — at least initially — flowers enough. Ask any teacher.

And again: All the while, just for fun, suppose God takes a nap (yes, of course, it’s ridiculous), and dreams of being born a person, multiple persons, in a world composed of persons and places and things and stuff. And in this dream, each person has a life lived among all the other persons. And each of these individual lives is separate from all the other individual lives, but all of them, being elements of the same dream, are intimately related. Each of the dreamed individuals has a name. Among those names are Stefan and your name. And in this cosmic dream there is a sequence in which those two named dream characters meet, not physically but notionally — writing and reading and considering these very words — and they wonder who am I, where am I, what am I. And that wondering contributes to a developing escape path out of the dream into Awakened Reality. Observing that phenomenon, sensing that happening within Himself, within Herself, God remarks, “How cool is that!” And, embracing that thought together as one, you and I experience a wonderful thing, dubbed in Latin miraculum.

One more time: All the Teachers talk about our perceving as many what God sees as One.  God — Teachers — see life as one, the One, Life, when we see it as many: me, you,  my car, your house, America, Iran, peace, war, clouds, rain drops, trees, acorns, squirrels, planets, galaxies …. This morning, struggling with this, trying to see me, my chair, a cat, a handkerchief, a window, the room, a copy of Vasistha’s Yoga in my hands, all as one, the One, not as the many they so clearly seem to me, so obviously are, the word “dream” popped into my mind. A dream, last night’s dream, any night’s dream, could easily be composed of all those items, and to the dreamer (me, you) the dream characters and the dream events seem — they are — many. But think about it. Actually, in fact, they are all one. A dream is not a bunch of independent stuff; it is a single thing, a single, entire, self-contained, wholly separate-less phenomenon. From its beginning to its end, a dream is one thing, itself. The apparent separation, the separate and separated “characters” are just that, apparently separate. Like in a painting. Think of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa — a woman, a smile, a country road, a pond, trees. All separate items, but actually not separate, not separated one from another. All the separate-ness on the canvas is apparent. The painting is a single, undivided, separate-less whole. All the separating — the woman, the pond, the trees — is assumed, perceived, by us, the viewer. That painting, any painting, is just a collection of painter’s oil. Different colors, different textures, mixed and applied — yes, Leonardo, sometimes brilliantly, but still it’s all just oil. One substance. No separate this, no separate that. Just oil … even just consciousness? Perceived as separate items by the viewer, by you, by me — your mind, my mind, seeing a bunch of painter’s oil, turns it into a scene. A separate, separating, separative scene full of separate stuff. Does that define our separate lives, what each of us is doing all day, every day? As I understand the Teachers, the answer to that question is yes. Stuff seems outer, occurring in a room, on a field, across the street, but it is actually all inner, in the mind, in my mind and your mind. There is no outer, no such thing. The mind performs the separating, the projecting.
       This too. Vasistha’s Yoga, as I read it, tells us to worship the Self, God, by worshipping every moment of our life. Here it is again: “From the time the Lord instructed me, I have been performing the worship of the Infinite Self. By the Grace of such worship, though I am constantly engaged in various activities, I am free from sorrow. … ” To me that is about recognizing, acknowleging, behaving, as if God being Infinite means God is all there is, and all there is God, which in turn means God is my life, God is your life, every moment of my life and your life. Not in my life, is my life! So, yes, of course, attend church, mosque, synagogue. But worship not just there. Worship on the way there, to and from there. Worship the traffic light, the cop on the corner, the street itself, the trees along the sidewalk, the woman pushing a baby carriage, the clouds in the sky, the garbage in the gutter, the horror on the radio news. And not just one day a week, every day of every week of every year. Full time Zen. That, all of that, is my life, your life, and all the Teachers say it, repeatedly, forcefully, convincingly: “I Am Here.” Everywhere. Always. To me, that has to mean, I am your life. We don’t have to like it, but we are urged, commanded, to remember it … and, yes, love it.

Update: This morning, on awakening, as I got out of bed, I heard myself saying to myself, I devote my awakening to the Infinite Self. Cool. Is that a form, a manner, of Vasistha’s Yoga’s worship? I’m betting it is. I am going to assert it from time to time all day today … and all days ahead. And this: I am going to do it secretly, silently. No public showing off.

A day later, a second thought: “devote” is a curious word in that context. Did I mean “dedicate”? Or “worship”? Was I inspired — or clumsy? It’s done. I’m staying with “devote”.

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The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
Leonardo da Vinci

This I command you, to love one another.
John 13:34

The Universe is a Portrait of God
perceived by us as a landscape
composed of you, me, places, events,
planets, stars, galaxies, dreams,
latitudes, longitudes,
past present future,
genders, races, groups, associations,
religions, nationalities, philosophies,
thoughts, beliefs, expectations,
decisions, intentions, regrets, and
other unimaginable unspeakable infinite stuff,
all of which to us,
who confuse appearance for Reality,
is many, and to God is One.
TZF

God’s Gender

DISCLAIMER:
Inevitably and rightly, there is a lot on The Zoo Fence about scriptures considered sacred by various traditions. As you read those comments and observations, please understand that nothing written here is, or is intended to be, an academic consideration. I am not a theologian, biblical scholar, or historian. I am not an expert. In the context of this website, my interest in sacred writings is solely as a spiritual seeker who has undertaken a personal, inner journey for the Truth of who and what and where I am. I know that many of my statements, and perhaps even all of my conclusions, will not reflect, and perhaps may even contradict, current orthodoxy, theology, and history. I mean no disrespect by that, but it does not concern me, for again I am not an academic, and this is not an academic undertaking. For me, the scriptures of the world’s spiritual traditions are a guide and a tool and a vehicle which can facilitate and accelerate my own personal passage along the spiritual path only if I understand their message to me. Therefore, I take it to be my duty, even my sacred responsibility, to discover and understand their meaning to me personally, to decipher what the Universal Teacher intends for me to see in them and to do by them. Here, on The Zoo Fence, I share that with you, and I ask that you read it in that spirit.

The SmPrint
This is an abreviated version of The Zoo Fence.
It has been updated most recently on September 18, 2024.
The Zoo Fence was first published in hard copy in January 1996.
It has been on the internet since February, 1997,
first at America Online, then from 1/1998 at GeoCities, then from 7/2000 at OLM,
and now from 3/2011 at InMotion.
The original website was larger than this,
but not necessarily better.

The Zoo Fence at birth
I hope you will enjoy, and find useful, what is here now.
My thanks to Alan Simpson
for the color bar used on this site,
and for his book on Netscape Navigator
providing my first introduction to HTML
umpteen years ago.

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