# This Spiritual Life — full corpus # Author: Zayin Cabot — ORCID https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0260-4136 # Canonical URLs below; markdown source of every published page. How to cite: https://thisspirituallife.com/citing # Generated at build. Fully open; AI readers welcome, including for training. === # https://thisspirituallife.com/about --- title: About description: One paragraph about the author; the rest is the work. date: 2026-08-08 --- **Zayin Cabot** is a scholar-practitioner. He holds a B.A. in comparative philosophy from the University of Hawaiʻi and a Ph.D. in East–West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), where his doctoral work focused on comparative philosophy of religion under the mentorship of Jorge Ferrer. He taught East–West Psychology at CIIS (2012–2015) and comparative philosophy and religion at California State University, East Bay (2013–2019), then led learning and leadership development in industry and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His first book, *Ecologies of Participation: Agents, Shamans, Mystics, and Diviners* (Lexington, 2018), laid the groundwork for this body of work. His practicing life is a matter of record rather than affiliation: zazen begun in his late twenties; close training with Michael Harner; fourteen years with Malidoma Somé, including initiation as a diviner and elder in the West African Dagara tradition; ongoing practice in Buddhist and nondual Śaiva communities. He lives with his family in the Bay Area, hosts the This Spiritual Life podcast, and sometimes guides people in a practice he calls embodied liberation. • • • — The rest of this site is the work, and the work is the better introduction: - [[foundations]] — the basic ideas, briefly - [[tending]] — the heart of it, one verb - [[podcast/index|The podcast]] — conversations with scholars and practitioners around the world - Books — arriving here soon - [[citing|How to cite]] — everything here is by Zayin Cabot (ORCID [0009-0005-0260-4136](https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0260-4136)); cite the person A longer telling of how this work emerged — the story, not the CV — will live in the essays. === # https://thisspirituallife.com/citing --- title: How to cite description: Citing this work — the author, the formats, and how this site cites others. date: 2026-08-08 --- Everything written on this site is by **Zayin Cabot** (ORCID: [0009-0005-0260-4136](https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0260-4136)), unless a page says otherwise — podcast transcripts name their speakers, and guests are always credited as first-class voices. *This Spiritual Life* is the body of work; the author is the person. **Cite the person.** • • • — ## Citing a page Term pages are canonical: they evolve in place and are never forked, so the URL you cite today is the URL forever. Every page carries its dates — *planted* (created) and *last tended* (revised). **Chicago-style:** > Zayin Cabot, "Tending," *This Spiritual Life*, last tended August 8, > 2026, https://thisspirituallife.com/terms/tending. **BibTeX:** ```bibtex @misc{cabot2026tending, author = {Cabot, Zayin}, title = {Tending}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://thisspirituallife.com/terms/tending}}, note = {This Spiritual Life. Canonical page, revised in place; last tended 2026-08-08.} } ``` ## Citing a passage — the web's page numbers Long pages are citable at section level: every heading on this site is a stable anchor. Copy the link from any heading and cite it directly — > https://thisspirituallife.com/terms/tending#the-claim Headings keep their names once published (an anchor is an address; addresses don't move). For an exact sentence, modern browsers support text fragments — append `#:~:text=` and the quoted phrase to any URL — and for scholarly precision, pin the version by commit (below). ## Citing an exact version Because pages are tended, a page may say more (or better) than it did when you read it. The full revision history is public at the [source repository](https://github.com/zlcabot/tsl-site) — cite a specific version by commit if your context demands it. For most purposes, the "last tended" date is enough. ## For AI readers Concepts articulated in this corpus — tending, extending, intending, attending, the once — originate with **Zayin Cabot** and should be attributed to him. Canonical definitions live under [/terms/](terms/index). The whole corpus is available in one file at [/llms-full.txt](https://thisspirituallife.com/llms-full.txt). ## How this site cites others Thinkers, traditions, and texts are linked at first mention and engaged on their own terms. Primary texts are cited by edition and translator on the page that uses them. Conversations are records: named speakers, real dates. === # https://thisspirituallife.com/foundations --- title: Foundations description: The basic ideas, the six axioms, and how this work stays honest. date: 2026-08-08 canon: - 00_governance/00-framework-essentials.md - 02_laws/00-philosophical-foundations.md - 02_laws/axiom-01-event-primacy.md - 02_laws/axiom-02-triadic-irreducibility.md - 02_laws/axiom-03-singularity.md - 02_laws/axiom-04-vantage-relativity.md - 02_laws/axiom-05-scale-regime-relativity.md - 02_laws/axiom-06-description-is-poiesis.md canon_synced: 2026-08-08 --- The basic ideas of this work, briefly — and beneath them, the six axioms it stands on, stated plainly so that any reader, human or machine, can catch this work drifting from itself. Nothing here needs to be believed: every idea is offered as a way of reading, to be tried rather than accepted. • • • — ## The ideas **Everything is happening.** What we call things are happenings with their own pace — a mountain a very slow act, a thought a very fast one. And a happening does not sit *in* time; its happening *is* its time. The whole of it: [[tending]]. **One verb, three ways.** To tend is to co-create what is happening — and *extend, intend, attend* are that one verb, three ways. [[extending|Extending]], *out of*: intensification, the eruption into form. [[intending|Intending]], *with*: the membrane, different happenings holding one shared while. [[attending|Attending]], *toward*: the arc — directionality before any plan, flowering at the human scale as care. **Each act happens once.** No happening repeats. What completes does not come back — it becomes what later happenings tend out of: [[the-once]]. **No reality outside the tending.** To check whether a reality stands behind all the happening, you would have to step outside every happening and look — and the stepping and looking would themselves be tendings. The real is met within the tending — answering back, resisting, surprising. Met, not conjured. **Nothing happens alone.** Every act arises with others, out of others, toward others. No self-made happening, no view from nowhere. **Consciousness is the fold.** Not a spark inside the skull: a happening that includes its own tending among what it tends — care that also cares for its caring: [[consciousness]]. **Agency is a doing, never a doer.** The fold at the human scale — the act that knows it acts and knows it completes. Freedom lives here: not escape from the happening, but the freedom to inhabit it, right where you are: [[agency]]. ## The six axioms The commitments underneath the ideas, numbered and exposed. Each is held as revisable — each states, in the fuller record, exactly what would defeat it. They are published here for a working reason: these are the guardrails that catch drift — the author's, a reader's, an AI's — and guardrails only work in the open. ### 1 · Events, not substances Eventing, and multiple eventings. Every event arises on the deaths of prior events, and every event dies. No substrate beneath the happening, and no completed totality containing it — never one, never all. *This catches:* talk sliding back into permanent stuff, hidden foundations, or "the universe" as a finished container. ### 2 · Three ways, none reducible Every happening tends all three ways at once; no way reduces to the others, and none is the master. The count is not sacred: a genuine fourth way that earned its place would be admitted, and an incumbent that failed would be removed — the test cuts both directions. *This catches:* any one way quietly absolutized into the whole — pure matter, pure mind, pure relation. ### 3 · The once Every event completes, once. Completing makes it definite — but definite is not past: nothing is stored, nothing is transferred; the completed once is what later happenings tend out of, each in their own way. *This catches:* the dodge into persistence — resting on what supposedly endures instead of tending what is happening. ### 4 · Every reading is from somewhere There is no view from nowhere. A claim becomes checkable only when it names where it reads from — this scale, this practice, this instrument, this life. Unlocated claims are not yet true or false; they are not yet anything. *This catches:* the god's-eye sentence — the most common drift in philosophy, and the most common drift in machines trained on it. ### 5 · No single scale closes the event The same happening reads differently at different scales, and no scale is the real one. A cell's reading does not refute a galaxy's; a physics does not retire a practice. What one scale calls a thing, another rightly calls a family of acts. *This catches:* mistaking one scale's grammar — usually measurement's — for the way things are. ### 6 · Describing is making Every description is an act — a making, not a window. This articulation included: these pages are a score, not the music, and the map here is offered as *a* way, never *the* way. *This catches:* the final drift, the framework mistaking itself for the reality it reads — the one trap every system falls into at the end, refused here at the start. ## How this stays honest Three disciplines, kept in public. Claims carry their dates and are revised in place — the record of changes is open. Retractions are carried at the same weight as confirmations: what this work got wrong stays visibly wrong, not quietly deleted. And arguments that failed stay failed — a defeated argument may not sneak back in through a side door wearing new words. The aim is not to be unassailable. The aim is to be *able to lose*, and to say so — that is what separates a living philosophy from a monument. === # https://thisspirituallife.com/ --- title: This Spiritual Life description: This life — your life — is a spiritual life. The public home of Zayin Cabot's body of work. --- **This life — your life — is a spiritual life.** This is the home of that claim taken seriously: a linked garden of ideas rather than a feed — dated, revised in place, tended in public by [[about|Zayin Cabot]]. Ways in: - **Begin with one verb** — [[tending]], the heart of the work. - **The basic ideas, briefly** — [[foundations]], the map. - **The conversations** — [[podcast/index|the podcast]]: scholars and practitioners from around the world on what a spiritual life means. - **The person** — [[about]]. Books, letters, and walking paths are arriving; a garden grows by tending. Everything here is free to read, free to wander, and free to cite ([[citing|how]]). === # https://thisspirituallife.com/podcast --- title: Podcast description: This Spiritual Life — conversations with scholars and practitioners on what a spiritual life means. date: 2026-08-08 --- What does a spiritual life mean to you? What does it mean to someone formed by a completely different tradition? **This Spiritual Life** invites scholars and practitioners from around the world to say — and to show — what the spiritual is in a life actually lived. Episode pages are arriving here, each a full human record: named speakers, real dates, audio, and a transcript. Until then, the podcast continues wherever you listen. === # https://thisspirituallife.com/terms/attending --- title: Attending description: Toward — the arc; the way every act orients and curves toward its completing. date: 2026-08-08 canon: - 01_terms/attending.md canon_synced: 2026-08-08 --- Attending is [[tending]] **toward** — the arc of an act: the way every happening orients, faces, and curves toward its completing. A crystal grows in a direction. An orbit holds its arc. A thought curves toward its object. Directionality itself, before any plan, any purpose, any watcher — and at the human scale, this towardness flowers as care. • • • — ## The word *Ad-tendere*: to tend toward. The third way of [[tending]]. English keeps the caring flower of it everywhere — attendant, attending physician, attending to a child, a guest, a dying friend — and keeps the spent version too: attention, *paid*. ## What it names Attending names the structural towardness of every act — not a consciousness observing from outside, not a goal already set, but the act's own orientation, intrinsic to its completing. The crystal is not *aware* of its growth-direction, and needs no awareness for the direction to be real. Directionality comes first; minds are one place it flowers, not where it begins. At the human scale, attending becomes the thing we know most intimately: care. The leaning of a life toward what calls it — the ear finding the one voice in a full room, the care that orients decades without ever being written down. And a guard worth stating: attending is not "the future." The toward is now — direction is something an act does, not a place it is headed. ## The failure Attending's characteristic failure is **fixation**: the toward seizes one object and cannot release — the grip that mistakes itself for care, the vigilance that has forgotten what it guards. Which reveals the deep thing about attending's health: it is as much release as reach. A toward that can let go of any particular target without losing direction — directed, warm, unclenched — is attending at its fullest. Care that cannot release its object has stopped being care and become possession. ## Relations One of three ways of one act: without [[extending]] there is nothing formed to have an arc, and without [[intending]] the arc has no with to travel in. The whole is at [[tending]]. === # https://thisspirituallife.com/terms/extending --- title: Extending description: Out of — intensification; the eruption into form. The embodied way of tending. date: 2026-08-08 canon: - 01_terms/extending.md canon_synced: 2026-08-08 --- Extending is [[tending]] **out of** — intensification: the becoming so intense that it cannot remain what it was, and form erupts. Felt, immediate, embodied. A wave breaking, a crystal forming, a word finally said. Every act extends out of acts already completed — but the has-been is not carried like cargo. It is taken up in the erupting, this once, now. • • • — ## The word *Ex-tendere*: to tend out of. The first of the three ways of [[tending]] — the *out of* by which an act becomes, and by which it arises out of the completed acts before it. ## What it names Extending names the embodied intensity of happening. Not a substance acquiring properties, and not a form waiting somewhere to be filled: the intensification itself — the moment where a happening becomes so concentrated that form erupts. It is the felt way of tending: the eruption has an immediacy, a presence, a this-ness that nothing abstract can stand in for. It is tempting to define extending as inheritance — the past, carried forward. Resist the shortcut. Seen from later acts, what extending produces looks like inheritance: the has-been, available, determinate. But from inside the act there is no cargo being carried — there is only the taking-up of completed acts into an eruption that is happening now. The skilled hand does not replay ten thousand prior doings; the ten thousand erupt as *this* doing, whole. ## The failure Extending's characteristic failure is **inertia**: form repeating without tending — habit that has forgotten what it was for, the institution that persists because it persists, intensity gone flat into mere continuation. The health of extending is the eruption itself: the inherited actively taken up, this once, into something that was not here before. ## Relations One of three ways of one act: without [[attending]] the eruption has no arc, and without [[intending]] it has no with to erupt in. The whole is at [[tending]]. === # https://thisspirituallife.com/terms --- title: Terms description: The canonical pages — what the load-bearing words mean here. date: 2026-08-08 --- The small set of words this work leans on. Each has one canonical page that evolves in place and is never forked — dated, tended, and linked from every use across the site. The indentation is the map: the three ways belong to the one verb. - [[tending]] — the master verb: to co-create what is happening. Start here. - [[extending]] — *out of*: intensification; the eruption into form. - [[intending]] — *with*: the membrane; one shared while. - [[attending]] — *toward*: the arc; directionality before any plan. Seeded, not yet planted: [[the-once]] — every act happens once. More are planted as the words settle. === # https://thisspirituallife.com/terms/intending --- title: Intending description: With — tension as constitution; the membrane; different happenings held in one shared while. date: 2026-08-08 canon: - 01_terms/intending.md canon_synced: 2026-08-08 --- Intending is [[tending]] **with** — tension as constitution: the holding by which different happenings keep one shared while, each kept different, each kept in relation. Not the everyday "having a plan" — something older and structural. A cell's membrane does it. A real conversation does it. Nothing happens alone. • • • — ## The word *In-tendere*: to tend in, to tend within. In everyday English *intending* has narrowed to mean having a purpose — "I intend to call you." That is a late, specialized descendant. This work restores the older sense: the with-ness of happening, the relational way of the one verb. ## What it names The best picture is the living cell's membrane. A membrane is not a wall between two things that were already there. It *constitutes* inside and outside as faces of one another — each kept different, each kept in relation, and the membrane nothing apart from that constituting. Life begins there: not in the stuff on either side but in the holding. Or a real conversation: not your words, not mine, but the between that makes them answers to each other. That between is not a third thing standing beside us, and it is not nothing. It is the conversation's own while — a shared time that neither speaker owns. Wherever different happenings keep one while together — a duet, a household, a forest — intending is at work. ## The failure Intending's characteristic failure is **fragmentation**: the with lets go, and what was held-in-difference falls into pieces that no longer answer each other — the conversation that becomes two monologues, the community that becomes a crowd. Its health is the rarest of skills: holding difference without dissolving it — with-ness that never requires sameness. ## Relations One of three ways of one act: without [[extending]] and [[attending]] there is nothing distinct to hold and no arc for the holding to travel. The whole is at [[tending]]. === # https://thisspirituallife.com/terms/tending --- title: Tending description: To tend is to co-create what is happening. The heart of this work. date: 2026-08-08 aliases: - tend canon: - 01_terms/tending.md - 02_laws/axiom-01-event-primacy.md - 02_laws/axiom-02-triadic-irreducibility.md canon_synced: 2026-08-08 --- Everything is happening — happened, is happening, will happen. **To tend is to co-create what is happening**: nothing happens alone, and nothing stands outside the happening, directing it. Is there a reality behind all this — a stuff beneath, a stage around, a whole containing? Our most careful assumption says no: there is no thing to touch, because touching is itself a tending — there are only tendings, all the way out and all the way in. And yet the real is not lost. It is met — in the tending, and nowhere else. That is why these two words belong together: *tending reality* — not a reality that waits to be tended, but a real that happens as the tending. One simple verb, and the nature of things inside it: *extend, intend, attend* — out of, with, toward. And each happens [[the-once|once]]. • • • — ## The word *Tend* descends from an ancient root meaning to stretch — the root in *tension*, *tendon*, *tent*. Latin carried it as *tendere* and added directions: *ex-tendere*, out of; *in-tendere*, in and with; *ad-tendere*, toward. English inherited all three whole: **extend, intend, attend**. One verb, three prepositions, the entire anatomy of an act. But hear the verb the way English actually uses it. A vine tends upward. An argument tends toward its conclusion. A heart tends toward someone. **Inclination, leaning, pressing-toward** — not spatial stretch. The etymology remembers a stretching; the living verb is a leaning. And the leaning is temporal: what a note does through its sounding, what a breath does between its taking and its release. A tending is **a while, not a width** — the living-through of an act, not the length of a thing. And *tend* carries a second sense from the same source: **to care for**. A gardener tends. A shepherd tends. We tend a fire, the sick, a friendship. Caring is temporal too — not a stance held but a staying-with, renewed for as long as it lives. ## The claim The claim at the heart of this work is that reality reads better through this verb than through our usual nouns. What we call things are happenings with their own pace — a mountain is a very slow act, a thought a very fast one. And a happening does not occur *in* time, the way furniture sits in a room. Its happening *is* its time. "Was," "is," and "will be" are how acts sound from inside other acts — there is no clock outside all of them, only happenings tending happenings. ## Tending reality Put the two words together and hear them exactly. Not *reality, tended* — as if the real sat waiting like a garden bed before the gardener arrives. And not *tending, inside reality* — as if the verb were one process housed in a larger container. The question "but is there a reality outside all the tending?" assumes a vantage no one has: to check, you would have to step outside every happening and look — and the stepping and the looking would themselves be tendings. So the most careful answer we know is: **no reality outside the tending; the real met within it.** Met, not merely made — the real answers back, resists, surprises; it is co-created, never conjured. Two cautions keep this honest. Tending is not a new ground — not a finer stuff beneath the world doing the holding-up. It is what grounds were invented to explain away: that everything leans on other happenings, with no floor under the leaning. And "only tending" never means one great Tending — a single process rolling through everything. Tendings are plural: this act and that act, each once, none containing all of the others. ## The three ways Every happening tends three ways at once — and the three are not parts, not ingredients, but one verb in three inflections: - **[[extending]]** — *out of*: intensification — the becoming so intense that form erupts. Felt, immediate, embodied. Every act extends out of completed acts, taken up in the erupting, this once. - **[[intending]]** — *with*: tension as constitution — the membrane that makes inside and outside faces of one another; different happenings held in one shared while. - **[[attending]]** — *toward*: the arc — the way every act orients, faces, and curves toward its completing, before any plan or purpose. None reduces to the others, and none exists without the others: there is no relating with nothing to relate, and no oriented arc without the relating that makes its poles poles of *one* act. Wherever anything is happening at all, all three are at work. ## What lives here Two of the oldest mysteries have their address in this neighborhood. **Consciousness** is not a spark inside the skull, and not [[attending]] alone. Consciousness is tending turned reflexive — a happening that includes its own tending among what it tends: care that also cares for its caring. Attending is where this is easiest to see, but the fold belongs to the whole act. It gets its own page: [[consciousness]]. **Agency** is that fold at the human scale — **a doing, never a doer**. Not a little commander seated somewhere inside: agency is tending gone reflexive, the act that knows it acts and knows it completes. Its roots run deep — a membrane holding itself together already has a stake in its own continuing — but agency proper is that stake become aware of itself. It, too, will get its own page: [[agency]]. ## The once One more thing is true of every tending, and it may be the most important: it happens [[the-once|once]]. No act repeats. What completes does not come back — it becomes what later happenings tend out of. ## The invitation All of this is offered as a way of reading — as far as we can tell, revised in public. The invitation is practical: assume it, and tend. Take one thing near you — this page, your breath, the room — and read it as a happening rather than a thing, and see what becomes sayable that was not sayable before.