Love Is....

[Mikal]

Now thats a truth for many people...myself I like to make the dream, thats lovely..an affair of the heart for sure but the real beauty is when the dream becomes reality and stands in front of you to see and touch....why have half the equation Prof??


Mikal

[Profpat]

[quote=Mikal;87409]Now thats a truth for many people...myself I like to make the dream, thats lovely..an affair of the heart for sure but the real beauty is when the dream becomes reality and stands in front of you to see and touch....why have half the equation Prof??

Actually i'm blessed to have both, a wonderful beautiful wife, who came to me because I was able to dream.

Question: Are we real or just part of God's dream?


You got to have a dream,
If you don't have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?

[Mikal]

Yes Prof...I have seen your lovely wife and indeed you have the dream that became reality....you must have done something right ehh...possibly proximity had something to do with it, would you think...afterall is not love in proximity that moment of two eyes catching a glimpse of one anther, is it not a gesture that makes you feel wonderful, a tilt of the head...a spreading smile...gestures that move out from the heart....

Dreams can be like sandcastles in the air...proximity begins to build foundations under them....

God may have dreamt me Prof....but I somehow think his overarching goal was for me to realize that I am real, a unique expression of life living....


Mikal

[Profpat]

Hi Mikal;

Dreams don't come right away. I knew Linda for 9 years before she married me, though I proposed in the 1st week I knew her.

I'm the chair of the accounting dept. at my alma mater, but that also was a number of years in the making. No instant gratification for me. First a dream, and then the faith that it can happen, and then the effort to make it happen. Then I feel like I deserve it because of the time and effort, but I really know it's God fulfilling my dream at the right time and place.

Now I have this dream about coming up with the TOE.......

[Mikal]

Prof....even across the miles we can pick up impressions of people. I do get the impression that you are a very self-determined man...smiles...

What I am talking about here with dream and reality....let us say I am a carpenter and in my mind I dream a table...if it stays a dream it stays as a dream table....if I draw up a plan, form and shape its parts, then buy the wood, gather the tools and put all effort in the plan, the forming and shaping..it begins to materialize as a table in progress...its when I get proximity to its assemblage that it actually becomes a table....

So dreaming starts it but effort, progress and proximity make it real...that takes time especially with a table but with love...its desire is to keep progressing until it can realize itself...no realization...no dream come true...

Good luck with your TOE!!!!!


Mikal

[Unreal Zelta]

So dreaming starts it but effort, progress and proximity make it real...that takes time especially with a table but with love...its desire is to keep progressing until it can realize itself...no realization...no dream come true...

Well put, although the last part is somewhat redundant.

regards

Zelta

[austintorn@aol.com]

“A Beautiful Mind” Movie

When we dream, as in a night dream, and fall for it without knowing it to be a dream, then that is almost what it may be like to be schizophrenic, except that it is probably worse since the really real reality would be overlapped onto the night-like dreams that schizophrenics have when they are quite wide awake.

As “film makers” we can have lucid night dreams, that is, to realize that we are dreaming while we are dreaming, and direct the action, accomplished, at first, perhaps by telling ourselves before we sleep the hopefully later echoing thought “that it is only a dream”, and, later on, perhaps months later, merely by noticing in our dreams that something isn’t quite right and then take over the dream and produce a film instantly as writer, producer, director, and all the actors. Too bad we can’t record it.

One time I opened a book in my lucid dream and amusingly saw that the same page read differently each time I looked back at it after I had looked away, or that there were digits here and there among the letters, or that some of the text was reversed, but the words pretty much made good sense and, again, too bad that I could not have printed it. I could have had many original novels. The fact that dreams exist is some kind of clue to something big, although I’m not sure what, but one of the small things is that the model from which reality is constructed during night dreams is EXACTLY THE SAME MODEL as the one that constructs our vision of reality when we are awake, the other difference being that the input to the model is real when we are awake and that some kind of noise or brain static is the input to the model when we are night-dreaming. Another small thing is that we only ever see the insides of our heads, whether awake or dreaming, that everything as it looks is created in the mind and that the real source of it is unknown or consists of some waves and fields that our senses and brain convert to what we know as reality.

Could the big thing be that everything is sort of connected in a higher, 4th, dimension, and still as real as can be, but projected in our 3 dimensions (the extra dimension being something like that all possibilities exist at once), like a hologram with more oomph, by our mind. After all, consciousness seems rather spatially uncontained and works so well in its instant global manner, seeming to collapse all possible scenarios into one result, much like what happens in the quantum world that is the root of all our reality, in which objective reality does not exist at all, just the probability of all possibilities.

So, anyway, if I ever become schizo, I may be able to realize it sometimes and be able to treat some people as not existing, the ultimate in detachment from any annoying cartoon-type characters. But, I am not schizo. . . and neither am I. . . and neither am I.

[austintorn@aol.com]

The folk singing tuesday night after the meeting went until 12:30 AM, the longest one ever, as the stars were showing up from all over. There was Tina, with her large portable keyboard, the old hippie, Moose, and his singer-girlfriend, Redwood, the Storyteller, Lee Brown, the owner, some poets giving away their books, and all the rest of the regulars, and many visitors rounding out the circuit of the clubs. And they do it all for free—for the joy of music! My Chai Tea foamed in the large bowl-cup, the aromatic ingredients of honey, ginger, and other spices drawing me to its sipping. A heated buttered muffin went with it well. I sat on the sofa; there was only now.

Yesterday is gone, dead and buried—History;
Tomorrow, the future is unknown—a Mystery;
Today is a gift—
That’s why it’s called the Present.


My topic was accepted for the non-step meeting:

Happiness is An Inside Job

“The Soul exists for it’s own joy. At least, mine does. Happiness is the ongoing object and goal of my life, every minute, every day. I feel triumph, delight, overwhelming gladness, and every other synonym for joy.

If I am not happy, then I am not living, and if I am not busy living, then I am busy dying. I could never remain in a prison cell of life, for the door is always wide open and never ever shut.

I sat in front of Barnes & Noble on this day of fine weather, reading a book of Rumi’s mystical poetry, watching the sun set, listening to some of the 1000 songs that are on on my ipod music player, that came from MP3s and CDs, smiling and being smiled back at by people going in and out of the bookstore, although some looked at the ground to avoid contact. I did not dare to look into the setting sun, so, I pretended that is was rising. I had some inspirations from Rumi and wrote:

The rhythm and music of Life’s spirit
Want to play through me;
The least I can do is let it—
And live it,
By drinking the wine that moves me.

The world crashes, out there,
But, in here,
There is a soft garden,
All that matters.
Now it grows up through me.

There is a longing,
A string connecting body and soul,
As like the tugging
Of a real string, attached,
Between a mouse
Consigned to the ground
And a frog underwater
Or a bird in the air,
Such that the soul and the body
Know that they are both ever present,

And likewise the soul string tugs at us,
When we go against the flow
And says “Ugh” or some such.
That is the mind within the mind.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Well, do wonders never cease—our New Hamburg Cafe, my “office”, has closed, but, its Garden of Peace and Serenity, surrounded on three sides by 30-foot rocks, the “Himalayas”, is still open, and, anyway, it’s time to move my “office” outdoors, not that I would ever do any W-O-R-K there, for that is a four-letter word to a retired person.

The Cafe was an American-Korean restaurant recently, run by Sin-Ha and Su-Nee, but, before that, it was run by (and is still owned by) the Buddhists, mostly by the Buddha Girls from the monastery on Shafe Road, home to one of only two Lamas in the entire United States, and the only one on the east coast. The Cafe was called “Himalayas on the Hudson” and the Lama often came to eat there, with his entourage of higher-ups and bodyguards. Because I was there often, as well, I got to know the Lama, his bodyguards soon retreating, and I taught him how to do high fives and low fives and such and so we we began to talk about the connectedness that underlies all things, the reaching of which state through the removal of all thoughts during meditation is the very heart of Buddhism. In addition, I always gave him the weather for the rest of the day and for the next day, always saying that it would become sunny if it was raining, and that it would be still sunny if it was already sunny. And if it was really raining forever, we both knew that it was sunny on the inside.

I remember, thinking upon first meeting him that “here he is”, the great one, and so I have a chance to ask a deep question of him without having to go over to Tibet or India and climb up a mountain, so, I pointed to an article in the newspaper that said “We may never know who won the Presidential election, Bush or Gore” and I asked him for his wisdom on the matter. Well, he thought for only a second or two and said “Who cares!”, and such it sunk into me later that this was a great wisdom, indeed.

The Cafe workers, the Buddha girls, didn’t wear the flowing gold and reddish robes that the visiting Buddhists wore, but wore regular clothes and had long hair, and many of the hectic type customers, unknowing of this, wondered at the peace and joy that the workers radiated like some sort of serenity field, and I suppose the workers were chosen for their outgoingness as well. I talked with them about “String” theory, the fairly recent theory that the differing vibrations of really small “strings” gives rise to all of the elementary particles and forces, and, so, we related this to all that is absolute and fundamental beneath this projection of reality in which we live out our life-dream.

Buddhism is not a religion, but a way of life, and they can still have friends, outside jobs, sex, and what-for, although some of them spend a lot of time on the inner world which, like meditation, can only be described as “not what you think”. So, miracles of miracles, today, after saying good-bye to the Koreans at the Cafe and taking home 50 eggs and many bags of chocolate chip cookies, I went back to the Cafe garden to sit under an umbrella table in the rain, and there was the old Lama himself, just sitting there alone, having just shown the building to someone who might lease it. I hadn’t seen him in 6 months, for he had been off to other continents. He gave me a medium high five and I told him that the sun would be out tomorrow, and that it was always sunny on the inside.

Then I told the Lama about the one who had recently sprung into another level of being, literally by “dying into life” and saying to him: She blossoms, so colorfully, like a spring flower, because the energy was in the bulb all along, deep within her, life’s music wanting to sing through her, and, so, now it has begun.

There, on some remoter shore of human soul
To which I helped restore life and spirit,
I learned that love was the only flame that lit
This life—for she had taught me how to give it.

(and that, furthermore)

What once I was has dimmed, physically,
But, I am a star, still bright in the night,
Though, when the sun rises, I disappear into her.
For, no one looks for the stars when the sun is out.

No, I did not just disappear—
I am just completely soaked in her qualities.

The drop has become the ocean—
Now I drink from her spring of eternal youth.
And to think that she once hid inside her coat.

Do I feel some memory of elsewhere?
Do I dare to look into the setting sun?
No, I’ll pretend that it’s coming up.
It shines through me, illuminating me.

I am re-energized.
I am glowing bright.
I am becoming a supernova.

There is a longing,
Between Body and Soul,
That reassures us
When we go with the flow,
And tugs at us when we don’t. . .

That is the mind within the mind.

I drink the very wine that moves me.
I freely let life’s spirit play through me.
I live its rhythm and music.

Life, though anguishing sometimes,
Must be lived fully,
For that is all we have.

The world crashes, out there,
But the flowers grow, in here.
For, I am the garden.

And the Lama said to me:
“Rumi lives.”
“Yes”, I answered, “Rumi lives again in the heart of his friend. I just read a book on him.”
“He never left—it is him, and you, too.”
“His spirit wanders ‘long the Milky Way,
With an houri, life’s moments drank away
In some sweet wood far from the noise of day—
Where with her he yet lives, sings, laughs, and plays.”
“What do we seek?”
“We long for the source—the human soul turns inward to find its way home.”
“Why do we wander around in the middle of the night?”
“Well, if I knew the answer to that, I would have been home hours ago.”
“Where would that be?”
“I don’t know. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.”
“How do we see this “home”?”
“Close both eyes, to see with the other eye.”
“How do we hear of it?”
“Listen—the blossoms drop their blessings all around.”
“What quenches our thirst?”
“Break the wineglass, and fall toward the glassblower’s breath.”
“Why?”
“We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours it. Plus more—we are even that which makes the drink taste so refreshing.”
“Where is the Light?”
“There is a light seed grain inside you. You fill it with yourself, or it dies.”
“Where do we go, do we climb mountains—the Himalayas?”
“A mountain is but a tiny piece of a piece of straw blown off into emptiness.”
“And what of her, your beloved?”
“There is a window open between us, mixing the night airs of our beings.”
“How’s that?”
“Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I meet her there.”
“And then do we see the light of day?”
“This day that I seek is outside of living and dying.”
“Do we not tire, always walking and looking?”
“At first, I did, yes, but then came a moment of feeling the wings I’d grown, lifting.
“We fly?”
“The rhythm lifts me—the living music plays through me.”
“From. . .?”
“It was fully fashioned even before it came into being, like an idea.”
“What do we feast on?”
“I am tasting the taste of eternity this minute.”
“Are we not afraid.”
“I have long since wet my robe in the shallow water. Now, I dive deeper, under, and naked under, and deeper under the surf. The drop becomes the Ocean, as the Ocean, too, becomes the drop.”

(Some months passed, and, later, upon return, after a long time, and seeing the Lama once again.)
“Where have you been?” asked the Lama of me.
“Well, everywhere, and nowhere. I did not cease from exploration, and after all my exploring I have returned to the place that I started from, and now I know the place for the first time.”

[austintorn@aol.com]

The world is, as always, looking like one big wish, which, I guess, is what it really is. I went to a lecture entitled “Quark Stars” and learned that they are so dense as to make neutron stars look like helium balloons and that the first such quark star has just been discovered and is only 7 miles wide, and consists of “up”, “down”, and “strange” quarks.

Well, I postulated an anti-quark star in my “Star Trek” novel, so, I guess that I was really way, way off back then! Vita-D, Vita-K, and Vita-C were at the “lecture”, as well, and so we all sat together. Vita-D is a good friend and has become as well the Hester Prynne to my Rev. Arthur Dimmsdale ever since we revealed our favorite characters as being in ‘The Scarlet Letter’. Vita-K is my Irish kin. Vita-C is the rising sun that radiates through me, lighting me up.

They were all going to sneak into the singles dance a little later on, but needed food now. So, Vita-D and Vita-K went in and I sat outside for a few minutes reading some mystical poetry and waited for Vita-C to come over from Barnes & Noble.

I heard her already talking to me still hundreds of feet away. She wore a pink sweater, black pants, boot-shoes, and who knows what color underwear. For the record, I had blue underwear on. She lit me up, and a smoke, as well, and I told her about some journal papers I had given to Vita-D, held her, then held her hand, and said “See you soon—and, remember, the way to sneak in (for it was late and they shouldn’t really charge) is to come in not wearing a coat, go down the stairs and take a quick left to the restroom, as anyone would from the restaurant upstairs, and especially avoid going near the desk, then come out of the restroom and go in through the back hallway, as if you had already been in there.

The music of the night carried everyone past midnight, even the nearly dead and especially the newly unwed, as well as all the sneakers’ in, but, now, it is 4 AM and I am home and Vita-D and I are reading our Rumi books in bed together. Did I mention that she is back at her own house reading a book identical to mine? No, well I must really watch my grammar. Good night—I am pleasantly tired.