Sunday, January 29, 2006

Religious Education

This morning I joined Friends for some free ranging discussion. We used a stuffed camel for a talking stick and took turns reading from a philosophical treatise by a zen master which quotes the Quaran a lot. I'll email Ron and Peg for the title, and append it here when I get it: Creation and the Timeless Order of Things: Essays in Islamic Mystical Philosophy by Toshihiko Izutsu.

We didn't all jump on a bandwagon. A lot of us (me included) swung invisible swords, cutting through whatever was holding us back on some personal inward journey. This means that outwardly, this wasn't a picture of everyone nodding and agreeing about everything.

We took issue, were at odds. The camel helped, plus the fact that we're quite practiced as Friends. I said the "face" metaphor reminded me a lot of Teletubbies (a baby facing an imaginary creation).

One of our number does electrical engineering with Intel, is a group leader with respect some some important nanoscale chip architectures. She reminds me of an astronaut in some ways.