A strange man from a distant land once told me, via a means resembling the subtlest hand theater, evoking strings of an orchestral idea as if by subtly adding veins beneath the flesh, plucking them under one by one, overlaying by degrees and passing over seas through thinning silver clouds, his hands spoke silently with minnowing gestures articulating phrases plainly understood for their universality, which shaped a story in the air about a cloaked and hooded man upon a camel or horse, it wasn't clear, striding for days across the rippled dunes of a half-blown desert, until every night, when they dreamed together in a heap by a depression in the red rock, their being the center of their own dream, each was revealed behind closed eyelids the same titanic body of water awaiting them after many days travel across the shared landscape of the real, and during one early morning while they passed over the blowing sands, the man remembered an old poem which a wizened Spaniard had taught him when he was nine years old.
Life is but a Dream, and there is only one, without a dreamer, for what we are is the dreaming, every one of us being dreamed, and dreaming also but with ourselves the center of our own dream. I dream the universe; all that I dream is I; I who both am and am not as I; and while dreaming the universe, with you perceiving it—you who are not as I but am as I—for we are the dreaming without a dreamer, and there is only one Dream that is life.
“This poem arose from ancient philosophies beyond the east and has been reputed to contain the literal truth as the masters of old came to understand it,” the donkey brayed as they approached the coastline—as if to make fun of the masters or not, the man wasn't quite sure—as they gazed clear eyed through the spray beyond the horizon over the sea shore.
In memory of the spirit of Wei Wu Wei
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