Aspects of THIS Moment

IS (Now-Ever Present)

BRIGHT (Illuminated, All-Light, All-Power)

INEXHAUSTIBLE (Timeless and Eternal; cannot be depleted.)

COMPLETE (Unbroken, Unbreakable, Irreducible. Cannot be added to or subtracted from.)

ALL-FLOWING

BREATHING

ALL-GIVEN (Spontaneously arising.)

SURPRISING (Not memory, not imagination. Astonishing!)

ATOMICALLY DETAILED (Exactly so.)

OPEN (No object, no entity: no separated “I” and no “other.”)

UNCREATED/INDESTRUCTIBLE (Cannot be annihilated or even diminished.)

NO KNOWING (Only do not know.)

NO GAINING (Never can grab hold and keep.)

NO DILEMMA (No opponent. No alternative. No war.)

Yahweh, or the Highway!

“No matter where you touched this God, he bellowed. If you said a kind word to him he lifted his fist and shouted, ‘I want meat!’ If you offered a lamb or your firstborn son as a sacrifice, he screamed, ‘I don't want meat. Do not rend your clothes; rend your hearts. Turn your flesh into spirit, your spirit into prayer, and scatter it to the winds!’” (Nikos Kazantzakis The Last Temptation)

I detest the angry, jealous, abusive father-god of the Old Testament! I am unaware of a more terrifying and loathsome, murderous deity! I say this as one who holds a master's degree in the humanities with a concentration in comparative religion, who taught an introductory course in world religions at the university level for seven years. 

I Am a Mystery, and the Mystery Is Bright

I am a pan-entheist. As such, I am a student of human cultures, but even more a lover of the wilderness that supports and informs human culture. I am a pragmatic phenomenologist (i.e., a scientist). I am a trans-rational (but not irrational or anti-rational) mystic. I am not a believer; I do not mistake mythologies, imaginings, and pseudo-sciences for reality.

I am a Mystery (I am even The Mystery), and The Mystery is irreducibly whole and inexhaustibly bright. 

Even the Lion Lies Down for the Worm

Excerpt from the novel “Cinnamon and Gunpowder,” by Eli Brown.

(In this shipboard scene, crashing furniture has killed Kerfuffle, a pet rabbit owned by Mabbot, a female pirate captain. The narrator is a man who is nursing the wounded captain, his lover, back to health. Until now, the man has felt jealous of the pet rabbit, but is aghast when the captain tells him to cook it for them to eat.)

“You’re joking.”

“Do you imagine that I don’t know where meat comes from?" 

It was the most lucid I had seen her in days. I would have balked if not for the glare she gave me over her shoulder, which was a taste of the old Mabbot.

Knowing she needed proper nourishment, and as there was no other fresh meat, I dressed and went to the galley, holding Kerfuffle under my arm.

I thought I would take pleasure in skiing that watchful rabbit, but now that it was still, it engendered in me a tenderness for all fragile flesh. I sharpened a knife until it shone, then skinned and cleaned the rabbit, trying to make each cut a gesture of respect. Loath to waste any part of the animal, I set brains and hide aside for tanning.

As I progressed deeper into the body, I felt a mystery revealing itself to me and began to pray, not with words but with simple cooking, a prayer not for the soul of the rabbit exactly but for the generous blending of its life with Mabbot’s. She had fed and loved it, and now its flesh would become hers and mine, and in this way I understood that all beings lived to feed one another as even the lion lies down for the worm. In the striations of the rabbit’s muscle, I saw eons of breath and death.

This was God’s grace, without which all bodies would fall to ash. I had been cooking my entire life and had never understood the sanctity of my duties. For all of my kitchen philosophies were nothing compared to the truth that now opened me to the bone: that I was, myself, food.

…

The bowl of rabbit broth I carried to Mabbot’s cabin was a forgiveness and a plea for forgiveness, an acknowledgment that this blood is shared universally. With this meal I surrendered to the mystery of my days and vowed never to look askance at love of any kind, nor to defy it. For the world is a far more expansive and mystifying place than can be said.

Naming the Nameless

Every philosophy and religion has its “god-term”— the term that stands for ultimate reality. Plato’s term was “The Form (or Idea) of the Good.” Lao Tzu called it Tao (“The Great Way”). Pythagorus referred to “The Divine Number” and Plotinus named it “The One.” One of my favorite terms for ultimate reality comes from the German theologian Rudolf Otto: Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, that is, “The Terrible and Fascinating Mystery”.  Or we all could just agree to name it Sheila. 

Astrology Debunking 101

Carl Sagan complained that of the ~1,500 daily newspapers in the U.S., only 31 have weekly science sections. Yet EVERY daily newspaper offers a daily horoscope.

There are five schools of astrology: Egyptian, Chinese, Tibetan, Hindu and Western Astrology. What if there were 5 schools of biology, 5 schools of anatomy & physiology, 5 schools of physics? Which particular school of physical science would you trust? Which surgeon would you allow to operate on you---the doctor who believed in and practiced Hindu surgical procedures, or Egyptian?

Yes, there is a grain of truth in astrology: INTERDEPENDENCE. Related to chaos theory: a butterfly farts in Beijing and one hundred zillion multiplier effects cause a rainstorm in Tallahassee.

Interdependence, YES. But astrology?

How accurate were astrological charts before...

1781 and the discovery of Uranus?
1846 and the discovery of Neptune?
1930: and the discovery of Pluto?
2003: and the discovery of Charon (twice the size of Pluto)?
2005: and the discovery of Quaoar (½ size of Pluto)?

Here is my UNIVERSAL Astrological Reading. It applies to virtually all human beings. Read it carefully and see if the description fits you:

You are a mostly self-confident character, yet sometimes you feel drastically unsure of yourself. With the help of your circle of friends you feel, for the most part, self-sufficient and more or less complete emotionally, yet at certain moments you can get so lonely and haunted with an undefined longing that it surprises you—and kind of scares you.

You’ve got a few little unexplained quirks or habits that are mostly just amusing to you and those around you, although once in a while your little hang-ups or idiosyncrasies may start to bug others—or especially annoy yourself. That’s no big deal. But on the other hand, every now and then, a REALLY perverse thought or feeling runs through your mind that you are damned glad no one else can detect!

In general, you do accept and appreciate yourself. You deem yourself to be an imperfect but basically good person—if people took the time to know you, they’d like you. Yet in certain moments, it can feel as if you are own worst enemy!—or that in some weird way you are both “who you want to be” and the “opposite” of who you want to be! But in spite of such self-conflict and the occasional sense of struggling with yourself, you truly believe you have a remarkable potential for happiness, love, and success—maybe even greatness of some kind.

All-in-all, you consider yourself “above average” in intelligence, talent, and abilities. If you were to compare yourself to 100 Americans your age, chosen at random, you would rank yourself in the top 25 percent on most scales: looks, smarts, personality, sense of humor, likability, creativity, loyalty to friends, and so forth. In other words, you regard yourself (quite honestly, you believe), as actually superior to most of the people you know and meet. (If you are "above average" and in the top 25 percentile, then it follows that you are superior to most humans.)

Is this YOU?