70
I believe that all the world’s religions share, at their core, a desire to find a transporting
metaphor. When you want to attain communion with God, what you’re really trying to do is
move away from the worldly into the eternal (from the village to the forest, you might say,
keeping with the theme of the antevasin) and you need some kind of magnificent idea to con-
vey you there. It has be a big one, this metaphor—really big and magic and powerful, be-
cause it needs to carry you across a mighty distance. It has to be the biggest boat imaginable.
Religious rituals often develop out of mystical experimentation. Some brave scout goes
looking for a new path to the divine, has a transcendent experience and returns home a
prophet. He or she brings back to the community tales of heaven and maps of how to get
there. Then others repeat the words, the works, the prayers, or the acts of this prophet, in or-
der to cross over, too. Sometimes this is successful—sometimes the same familiar combina-
tion of syllables and devotional practices repeated generation after generation might carry
many people to the other side. Sometimes it doesn’t work, though. Inevitably even the most
original new ideas will eventually harden into dogma or stop working for everybody.
The Indians around here tell a cautionary fable about a great saint who was always sur-
rounded in his Ashram by loyal devotees. For hours a day, the saint and his followers would
meditate on God. The only problem was that the saint had a young cat, an annoying creature,
who used to walk through the temple meowing and purring and bothering everyone during
meditation. So the saint, in all his practical wisdom, commanded that the cat be tied to a pole
outside for a few hours a day, only during meditation, so as to not disturb anyone. This be-
came a habit—tying the cat to the pole and then meditating on God—but as years passed,
the habit hardened into religious ritual. Nobody could meditate unless the cat was tied to the
pole first. Then one day the cat died. The saint’s followers were panic-stricken. It was a major
religious crisis—how could they meditate now, without a cat to tie to a pole? How would they
reach God? In their minds, the cat had become the means.
Be very careful, warns this tale, not to get too obsessed with the repetition of religious ritu-
al just for its own sake. Especially in this divided world, where the Taliban and the Christian
Coalition continue to fight out their international trademark war over who owns the rights to