Why The Zoo Fence? One night in 1974, in a fishing camp on the windward side of Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands, we had a dream about publishing a journal called The Zoo Fence. The name probably originated from the practice of the Honolulu Zoo to allow artists to display their artwork on the zoo fence along Monsarrat Avenue in Waikiki. But beyond that, who knows what the subconscious meant by the phrase! In any case, it made sense in the dream, and when, more than two decades later, The Laughing Cat decided to issue a newsletter which evolved into this website, the choice of a name seemed already to have been made.
One day in Eden, Adam sees Eve for the first
time.
“I am Adam,” he says to her.
“Yes, I know,” Eve replies, “so am
I.”
In The Beginning Chapter 4
The Lord is my Shepherd,
I shall not whine.©
Psalm 23 & TZF
This is not stuff we learn and then know.
This is stuff we ingest and become.
It is not necessary to meet your Guru on the physical.
The Guru is not external.
Neem Karoli Baba
In the beginning, we create, and then throughout our lives we sustain, our sense of self by perceiving ourselves as separate and apart from others. That is, we create the appearance of a separate self, which each of us calls “me” and “my life,” by establishing artificial personal boundaries beyond which everything else is perceived as “not me.” This process of personal identification, which we might call the human condition, is a product of the “I-Thought,” the ego, also known as the mind, by which we define ourselves for ourselves by the statements, ”I am me, not you. I am this and not that.” The first cousin of the I-Thought is the my-thought, which informs us “This is mine, not yours.”
As I understand it, the mind is not a thing. It is the ego, which is an accumulation of stuff — ideas, thoughts, memories, preferences, biases, dispositions, intentions — that manifest or embody or appear (word?) physically as Stefan and, in your case, as your name, and generate or awaken our sense that I am me, and will continue to manifest as me and as you in or as other bodies in other times and other circumstances (reincarnation?) — until Self Realization. It is Self Realization that, as I suggest here, erases or eliminates or transcends the mind (and the ego). And absent the mind, I (you) Recognize (Remember?) Who and What and Where I AM In Truth … and have always been, however unaware. Mind you, that I AM is not Stefan; it is the absence of Stefan. It is the I AM of Exodus.
Last Supper ·