zoofence.com

The end of October, TZF’s weekly thought feature was a quotation from Lao Tsu that asked “How can the Divine Oneness be seen?” and answered, “If you are willing to be lived by it, you will see it everywhere”. I love that line, “If you are willing to be lived by it”! Not to live it, but to be lived b...

I am constantly astounded how desperately determined we are, the lengths we will go to, to fashion a theology that fits and justifies our belief of existence as other than One. In Islam, one of the names of Allah is Al-Qayyum, the Ever Self-Existing One. The book The Most Beautiful Names , says of ...

Ah yes, pantheism. As you might imagine, TZF gets an accusatory letter about that every so often. The Random House dictionary definition of pantheism reads more or less: Pantheism is the doctrine that God is the transcendent reality of which the material universe (including us) is only a manifestati...

Thank you all for such nice words! I truly am grateful that ITB has spoken to you so clearly, and that you have said so. While I am delighted to accept your applause (there remains a lot of life left in this graying ego), please remember that it is your own awareness that enables you to see and get ...

I agree, it is a good essay, and nicely put. Art, I am not sure I understand your reference to Christian Scientists "attempting to live in tomorrow while it is yet today". To be sure, many religions, particularly messianic and apocalyptic religions, seem sometimes to be focused more on the...

Neo wrote, "Think of it as a zen koan". That's exactly right, a koan . And isn’t that sometimes the nature of riddles, anyway? They don’t quite make sense because they are not supposed to make sense, exactly. They are supposed to stump or stretch the brain, even transcend it. That’s what m...

I have posted at TZF’s Ampers&nd a very nice essay called to our attention by Open Forum’s own ihavesayso. The writer, a professor at the University of California, is a libertarian, which, briefly stated, is a doctrine or belief system based upon free will and individual freedom – personal, poli...

Interesting points. And thanks for the recommendations. They sound good. I will look for them. I confess that I like movies. Nancy and I watch movies often. Always at home by VCR or DVD, not in theaters. And I – we – like a wide variety of movies. Here are a few we have watched several times, and pr...

If God is infinite, who are you? Good question, the very question that was once posed to me, and which I eventually called The Sacred Riddle . As for your post, it makes a lot of sense to me, and is well put. Your use of the expression “tribal god” is quite right. As Anna has written somewhere on O...

windabove, Nice to see your name again! We regard the realness of objects/others as being outside our self, instead of as symbols of and within our self. Too true. But here's the question: If our Divinely Inspired Function (raison d'etre) is to experience a sensate life, then we "regard the rea...

Consider this. Last evening, Nancy and I watched the movie Field of Dreams in which Kevin Costner, an Iowa farmer, is moved by “a voice” to build a baseball field in his corn field. Among the events that occur when he does so, is Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of the Chicago Black Sox players banned from...

Anna wrote I suddenly realized, in bald clarity, that ALL desire, no matter how glamorous, how justifiable, how acceptable, how encouraged, how NOT encouraged, is simply, and only, a re-directed survival instinct. This is so obvious to me that I cannot understand why I did not see it before. If one ...

Okay, I asked: How do I know that I (never mind I who?) did not just this instant create “Stefan”, which phenomenon includes “Stefan’s memory”, so that as Stefan sits here at the keyboard, for all the world it seems to “me” that “I” have been “alive” for decades, when in Fact “Stefan” has been “here...

A quick afterthought – Nancy and I were talking a few minutes ago about the general subject addressed here, and she reminded me that the ego’s perspective (that is, the perspective of “me”) is a mirror image of what actually IS. So, whenever the answer to the question "Who’s asking?" which...

This is great stuff. These are the kinds of issues that the spiritual path is paved with. If I am understanding correctly, part of, or one aspect of, what we are asking here is the question, Is what I call “my life” all there is to “the world”? Or, to turn jenjulian’s statement into a question, “Is ...