some things in life are beyond measure,
unfathomable, and yet simple they are;
yearning of tender hearts, for instance,
always throbbing with a new hope,
furbishing the other-worldly dreams;
always with unconditional love,
negating the mundane notions of life.
(from sleepwalker/ sila’s journal)

usually one awakens from a dream into the reality of the physical world, more often jolted by the deeply disturbing content of a dream. so, too, being physically disturbed one wakes up from a pleasant dream despite one wanting it to continue. sometimes one vividly remembers the whole dream after waking up; then, one also physically wakes up and sleepwalks while still in the dream world. and, for many a rags-to-riches person it is said to have the dream come true. for people of the urban society earning a living by being employed, it is quite common to daydream while doing unengaging things. their daydreams are made of the wishful thinking, but this dreamer only physically awoke, without being disengaged from the dream. he had even tried to dissolve some engaging content dreams by getting up and pacing a little, and yet he had not gotten out of such dreams. for him dreaming is usually an audio-visual process, similar to making his way through a new obstacle on an ever changing animal trail in the jungle he lives in.

while sleepwalking one steps into the two worlds simultaneously by stepping onto the hard physical ground to go to a place that only the sleepwalker sees. this one is a dream which this person was drawn into in a wakeful state. now, the waking up means seeing for real where one is, as one is. so this waking up in the dream did mean that one was clearly interacting with things and beings in the dream with clarity of the wide open — eyes of the wakeful state of being. thus one was dream-conversing with a 16 year old young man, who was having problems of profound consequence simply because in the eyes of his father he was a minor, who being a legal minor did not have any say in the problem that would affect both the father and the son. the nature of the problem simply required of the youth to not just accept to wear the law defined identity of a minor, and live up to it ‘like father, like son” concept of the familial relationship, happily planning things as envisioned by his father.

now the problem started when the young man’s grandfather on the maternal side left him with an inheritance of substantial wealth, with a stipulation that the youth must use it for developing and promoting an eco-centric way of life devoid of the hierarchical statuses that form the notions of high and low in all walks of life in an experientially experimental undertaking. except for some much talked about improvised form of changes aimed at the living on equal footing forming much read few books, even the writers of such books actually were materially living rather well, made possible by the royalties earned from those books. his grandmother had lived rather a life more or less very close to what sociologists would describe as a minimalist way of life. and both the father and son had been familiar with such books; the father as the pastime, feel-good thoughts, and the son with the assigned reading by some junior professors, who were considered to be progressive for having a taste for such thoughts.

the young man himself, along with some of his peers saw those writers and professors as hypocrites for having the best of both the concepts, the capitalist, with its all talk and do nothing concept of education, and equally admired as progressive by the campus community. among these young men there were a couple of students who were admitted to such a progressive school by scholarships that were set up by the feel good rich people. and one such student had stirred up the thinking process of the financially well off few students who had befriended him. as a result, this young man had begun to simplify his living, which was viewed by his father as a try to look different. this was before he was bestowed the big inheritance of which he would be the ultimate authority in future when he becomes 21. the young man had been told by one of his classmates of an almost nonexistent non profit organization that has been practicing in whatever little ways with its limited material resources and lack of co-workers, as all its few coworkers were completely volunteers. and nobody was paid.

it had drawn the attention of a couple of rich parents, head of institutions and a participant in the primary for the presidential race, because of their sons’ and daughters’ interest in it. and with their coaxing their fathers had offered it funds and the use of an island in the south. but this organization would not accept any such help from persons who became rich by exploiting the people, unless the rich donors also renounced their riches and lived eco-centrically on equal footing with all.

this young man's father, too, had heard of it, and apparently the father was afraid that his son’s increasing interactions with this small group would make the young man become the only funding source of this group, despite the fact that nothing whatsoever was discussed of the funding between the young man and the person in charge of that non profit. the mere acquaintance was viewed by his father as a threat. and though his son was not opposed to receiving any guidance from the elders, he was not at all for setting up a non profit with the salaried staff paid according to the status quo with the head honcho receiving the amount in six figures; and to continue such maximum operating expenses investing the financial assets of the non profit in for-profit business corporations, including the banks. this is why his father has been seeking legal advice to make his minor son hand over the legal authority to the father. and of course, there is a special group of lawyers whose expertise is in interpreting the legal definitions that favours their clients of the non profits in any legal disputes, with their high fees paid in the percentage of the amount sought in judgement being paid by the non profits all the same.

in the last conversation with the young man, he said that he saw a tv movie in which a close kin had hired an assassin to kill the rich relative to obtain the rich inheritance. of course he would not anticipate anything like that happening to him, but nevertheless he does consider being dragged into a legal battle to enable his father to set up a non profit with the father obtaining the legal authority over the minor son and his affairs before the son becomes 21.

existence is a personally experienced sense of being in relation with the elements — things, beings and motions; some interactive, and some one way, such as giving or taking of material things in a dream that disperse along with the dream in a wakeful state of being. in a slipping in and out of dream into the objective reality normally becomes a memory of having experienced something in dreams.

this sleep-communication is so much interwoven with this person’s real life interactions with persons that even the real life friends he had lived with in his student days called him a dreamer and head twirling mystique. one had even told him that he was like a character in a dream. but that person did not desire to ponder on the question: “in whose dream?” one of his professors had vocally muse-ingly told him, that if he were to just lie down in one of india’s many empty ruins of temples, in a day or two he would arouse curiosity of some passerby, and bring him food. In a few more days the local community would gather around him seeking spiritual guidance. “you are that kind of person,” he was told. that professor, as the head of the art school had given him the school’s art materials, him being penniless. and his classmates and some other teachers had fed him and offered him a place to sleep.

during one of a study tour the schoolmates took him along to an island, whose owner had hosted the school’s stay there. and while having a little chat with the host, the host told him that for this young man’s school for the ecocentric living project he would donate the whole island, except for the portion where he had his cultured pearl factory. but this young man could not accept the island at the cost of the pearl oysters' lives. another conversation with a buddhist monk had brought him to the san fancisco zen centre, where, while having sensible interactions with the visitors, the rich young persons in charge had asked him to leave the centre for his talks were dissentious. along with his departure from there a few of the students of zen left with him, and the not for profit non-profit organization came to be.

it is not the issue for him whether he is living in a dream or reality, as neither in such dreams nor in the world when not dreaming there is any difference in his thoughts and actions. but he is quite certain that his is not the wishful thinking forming the daydreams. he does not daydream to escape from the hard realities of living. so in dreams he observes problems rather than avoiding them. after all, problems are the justification for having an organ called the brain. all his dreams contain a geometrically mathematical evolutionary process that not just one single element of the whole can guide the path. so it is out of any thinker person’s wildest imagination can predict the next step. see if you can predict the formation of a pattern of just a couple of bits in a kaleidoscope by trying to reform the pattern by giving a carefully controlled nudge. it is a dance of all the elements constituting an ever changing formation called cosmos. instead of trying to stand aloof to predict its next collective step, one can just join in the cosmic dance. so this dreamer just steps in and out of the ever changing motions of life, eyes closed or wide open, his or others’ around him.

he awoke in the middle of working on a life-like image of the buddha. he did the face exactly as he had seen the live buddha that had inspired so many painters and sculptors up until about a thousand years ago. as he proceeded to work on the torso and limbs of the buddha he had seen being wrapped in the ochre robe, that the siamese monks had enwrapped him with while being ordained to “check it out” as the buddha had suggested to him in one of his first dream-like conversations with the buddha. the guiding monks taught him to put on the about 9’x9’ square, thin cotton cloth, beginning with starting with one end to wrap around the hip and then, very meticulously rounding the corner at the other end in a cylindrical form to hold under the arm at the armpit. this created those statuesquely attractive folds of the robe in the front.

this unsewn, buttonless robe is held only with the cylindrical corner end under the left arm, leaving the right arm free to hold the begging bowl. wearing this thin cotton robe, very next morning he went begging along with five other older monks, imitating the act of receiving the steaming hot rice and vegetable stew in the new, lacquered begging bowl held in his free right hand. as the young siamese woman was ladelling the vegetable stew in the begging bowl, a horse fly landed on his newly shaved head, and gave me a rather painfully piercing sting. It was not noticed by the young woman whose attention was centred on reverently serving this young monk from india. and his both hands being occupied with holding the robe and the begging bowl. the horse fly stayed sucking the blood until she had finished serving him. It drew out blood, and five drops ran down over his chin.

a few months later he went to japan as the captain's guest in a siamese cargo ship, seeing him shivering so violently, that the elderly owner of a large temple gave him his own thick woolen overcoat, in which later on he slept for years in freezing cold winters while living in the small wooden cabin he had built in the pee dee valley of the ozarks of arkansas.

the host head monk, who also owned a temple and a crematorium, took him to the asia culture centre of japan from the sea port, and he slept in a warm bed that did not rock like the ship’s cabin bed he had slept in previous thirteen nights. when meeting yukiko next morning, she handed him a yellow flower, and took him to a tearoom in tokyo. as he was about to sit, yukiko suggested that he take off the woolen overcoat, for people would stare at him sitting clumsily in the overcoat in a warm, fancy tearoom. and he had told her that their stares would not penetrate the skin as did the japanese winter cold air. when he was thoroughly warmed up she helped him to take off the overcoat, and in the process, the folded cylindrical end of the robe came off, making yukiko exclaim: “i can see your ribs!”

while starting to work on the torso image, too, he did not quite know how to put on the robe on the torso. and he began to wonder about the form and function of the robe. It disturbed the visual aspect of the dream, but left intact the wondering aspect of the relationship between the form and the content: what is the buddha image if not the container of the perceptions of the life process?

he woke up thinking of this robe, the wrapper and the wrapped, the person, the buddha, and then the buddha’s image as the wrapper containing the wisdom known as buddhism. when the content is perceived as the marketable commodity, placed in the shop window along with several other commodities, what catches the eyes of the window shopper is the packaging, the wrapper, the book jacket. It is the outward appearance, of the thing or the person, whether or not it is functionality related to the window shopper. as for the nonmaterial aspects affecting the living, concerning how better to live, the actual living, some persons initially would have attracted people nearby, and then from their talking about such persons’ ways of life to other people.

the word: question is the noun form of the verb: to quest:- intensely searching for something.