zoofence.com

The following is Nancy's description of this "Nancy Blog": The intention of this blog is to write a journal about my own spiritual search. Because it is a journal of sorts, and thus entries will usually be consecutive, I will date each subject entry with its entry date to make it easier to...

Here is one of my favorite passages from the Tao Te Ching (this translation is by Witter Bynner): Existence having born them And fitness bred them, While matter varied their forms And breath empowered them, All created things render, to the existence and fitness they depend on, An obedience Not comm...

As is apparent to frequent visitors, I have been absent. Here's why. After three and a half decades living at the end of a rural, wooded road, Nancy and I have decided we have reached an age where we need to live in a place where we can walk to stores, the public library, and the like, and where dia...

I have just completed reading Report on The Shroud of Turin by John Heller. It is a fascinating, engrossing account of an extraordinary examination of the shroud by a team of scientists. The book was written in 1984, which was before the shroud was carbon dated to the Middle Ages (although on that p...

We don't know or feel oneness because there is no us to feel it. Still there is a sense of oneness. Very nice! In an earlier thread , I mention the passage in the Gita (Chapter 11) in which Krishna gives Arjuna "a divine eye" with which Arjuna saw what he had always been seeing, the unive...

because the act of observing the atom changes it My question to science is, to what does the pronoun "it" refer? Is it the atom that is changed, or is it the observer? Or, is it the relationship, which includes the observer, the atom, the space and time in which they exist, and everything...

Remember Mumon's famous koan: Does a dog have buddha nature or not? To reword/elaborate: Can a dog - which "I" perceive as "separate" or "shadow" (in Plato's sense of the word) or "untrue" - represent the infinite, all inclusive - which also includes "me...

Here are excerpts from a recent interesting email conversation I have had with a friend of TZF ("aaron9412" on Open Forum) -- In "falling from grace" by eating from the tree of knowledge, did we create our own egotistical selves? So, according to the bible's metaphor, we ate know...

I like Lewis, too. Sometime ago I asked for copyright permission to post an excerpt from one his writings on TZF's Ampers&nd. I can't remember now what the passage was. Unfortunately, I was denied permission. Real life has not yet begun. Yes, I wonder about that, too. Increasingly, for me it is ...

I agree absolutely. I have long been fascinated by the machinations of disciples, devotees, followers, apologists, opportunists, and the like in the spiritual arena, and that's probably why I enjoy these kinds of books. As the supermarket comic book puts it, "enquiring minds want to know"....

As I have written here before, from time to time I enjoy reading from books like The incredible Shrinking Son of Man by Robert M Price, for their perspective on the early years of Christianity: who was Jesus, was there Jesus, how Christianity came about, where it came from, who chose the canon and w...

Consider this. Driving in the city today, Anna and I commented upon the fact that virtually all of the drivers on the road seemed to be obeying the law (more or less), respecting each other’s space, responding appropriately to each others’ turn signals and stop lights, and so on. In other words, beh...

Physical silence is neither a necessity for the silence of the mind nor will it work invariably, but usually it helps. Well said. The reality each of us lives in (“my life”) is a metaphor, and so is what each of us calls “me”. The scriptures of all the traditions are metaphors. Everything we percei...

Very nice. At the risk of getting caught inside a revolving door, I am sending your post to the two correspondents with whom this email conversation began. No personal data. As you know, I thoroughly agree that science and religion are talking about the same thing, and when approached with an open m...