The Question
Quotes from the book: The Last Turtle - Zero, Zen, and the Culmination of Faith
What if faith isn’t belief at all?
In The Last Turtle: Zero, Zen, and the Culmination of Faith, Jim Redel dismantles one of the most persistent assumptions in both spirituality and everyday life—that faith is about believing in something unseen. Instead, he offers a radically practical redefinition: faith is the activity of assigning authority in the face of uncertainty.
Drawing from Zen Buddhism, the teachings of Joshu Sasaki, and the Buddha’s discourse to the Kalamas, this book examines how we continually place trust in sources of authority—tradition, teachers, reason, and even our own direct experience—often without recognizing the underlying process.
Jim traces a clear and compelling progression:
From reliance on inherited beliefs and institutions
To dependence on teachers and personal reasoning
To the authority of direct experience
And ultimately to the instability of the self who claims certainty
At each stage, what seems like solid ground reveals itself to be provisional.
Rather than rejecting these forms of authority, The Last Turtle shows how they function—and where they fail. Even reason, often treated as the final arbiter of truth, is exposed as limited when held as absolute, creating rigidity and conflict instead of clarity.
At the heart of the book is the concept of Zero—not as a philosophy, but as a description of activity itself. From Zero, all experience arises and returns. Thoughts, identities, beliefs, and even spiritual insights follow this same pattern.
This framework reframes Zen practice entirely. Practice is no longer a means to reach a final answer, but the ongoing activity of self-awakening—an expression of faith that does not depend on certainty.
The culmination of this journey is not a final belief, nor a permanent state of understanding. It is the recognition that all authority—including faith itself—is part of an ongoing process. Nothing fixed. Nothing final. Only activity unfolding.
Written for curious beginners, dedicated practitioners, and long-time students alike, The Last Turtle offers a grounded, systematic approach to understanding Zen—not as mysticism or abstraction, but as something observable, testable, and lived.
If Zen truly works, this book asks a simple but demanding question:
What, exactly, is it doing—and can you see it for yourself?