Greatness of Soul, Heart, and Mind

It has been happening slowly for a hundred years,

even though people are not taught to become Great Beings.

Mistakes, especially the ones that make us feel foolish,

open out minds for rapid self education.

It used to be harder to learn,

now we have Audiobooks and video lectures.

It is a very big difference between finding Thoreau's Walden,

and having a Writer or a Professor take you on a tour of modern philosophy.

I think the ability to pause a lecture or an audio book is amazing,

I paused as often to stop and think as I used to pause to cry.

My Dear Friends,

I speak of Great Beings,

because I was moved, by Great Beings.

And all my Heart and Love tells me,

that the most important lesson I can share with You,

Is that for all the goodness You do;

You must become, a Great Being too.

I used to drive around listening to Audiobooks,

I went down to Florida during Michigan Winter.

I set my Audio Books aside, and turned on the radio for a bit,

I only heard two words, it was the third Monday of January.

"Content of Character"

I turned the radio down, goodness, once my eyes dried,

I knew that the Soul had no limit, and that it was meant to hold Wisdom.

That's how Philosophers were growing in Greatness,

Knowledge begot Wisdom, and Wisdom begot Greatness.

Martin Luther King Jr. is his name and it will never be forgotten,

his words are a permanent invitation to Greatness.

I enjoyed practicing driving on North Territorial Road between Canton and Ann Arbor,

and on a late Autumn evening with trees dressed in beautiful colors a lecture was playing in the background.

All of a sudden my mind snapped to attention,

my mind became as sharp as a razor blade, and I could not believe the gravity and beauty of what I was hearing.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,

to front only the essential facts of life,

and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,

and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

I did not wish to live what was not life,

living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation,

unless it was quite necessary.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,

to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life,

to cut a broad swath and shave close,

to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms..."

I hit the pause button on my Audio Player,

I had tears in my eyes but didn't cry.

Ever since that one fun time when we watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off in my first year of Highschool,

as part of learning English and good film making, I remembered:

Ferris Bueller saying "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.",

I was as cautions as a cat not to let a day go by withut doing something important.

And now I heard a world celebrated Philosopher say the same,

in a book from 1850, a book written by a man that shared some of his strength with Mahatma Gandhi.

A man I lovingly call Henry,

I think of him as my friend in time.

Henry David Thoreau is a friend to us all,

he used to think about us, about making life better for us, the future generations.

I was at Ambrosia in Ann Arbor,

Though I wasn't a regular, I spent a lot of time there when it was empty and I could be alone later at night.

I started keeping a folder of ideas and poems,

I've noticed really beautiful people going to the sports bar next door.

I tried to ignore the song that was playing as it was frightening me,

the lyrics rang "Where'd you get your body from, I got it from my moma."

A couple of regulars gathered by and inquired about my paperwork,

and I thought it was prime time, to tell them word for word.

I begun by reading Kosmos by Walt Whitman,

I remember finishing with such a flourish that one of my listeners staggered back.

Kosmos (Written in 1860 by Walt Whitman)

Who includes diversity and is Nature,

Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth and the equilibrium also,

Who has not look’d forth from the windows the eyes for nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing,

Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic lover,

Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the æsthetic or intellectual,

Who having consider’d the body finds all its organs and parts good,

Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body understands by subtle analogies all other theories,

The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States;

Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in other globes with their suns and moons,

Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,

The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.

I actually I had to stop the person from leaving,

"One more" - I asked, nay commanded, demanded, just to share Ayn's Vision of John Galt, and I begun:

"Your destroyers hold you by means of your endurance, your generosity, your innocence, your love

the endurance that carries their burdens

the generosity that responds to their cries of despair

the innocence that is unable to conceive of their evil and gives them the benefit of every doubt, refusing to condemn them without understanding and incapable of understanding such motives as theirs

the love, your love of life, which makes you believe that they are men and that they love it, too." (from John Galt's Speech from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand)

I remember I wasn't able to finish my listeners fidgeted and had to go,

I didn't belong in Ann Arbor, I didn't really belong at Ambrosia, the truth was I didn't belong anywhere anymore.

I remember someone asking me where I was from, what country;

and as I rolled up my poems getting ready to leave,

"I am a Citizen of the World." - I said without thinking anything of it.

I remember sitting up one time feeling really alone,

I think I was headed up to Ludington this time.

And time came to listen to Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning,

bullies came after me when I was a chubby child.

One year sometime when I was 13 maybe,

the little me made the older me make a promise.

I was to return to that damn classrom in my imagination,

and sit right next to my younger self, and keep him company so that he is not scared anymore.

I kept that promise,

but from time to time I also visit Dr. Frankl, I sit by his bed to keep him company too.

There is a very powerful description of Great Beings in his book,

it is something that we should each remember.

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others,

giving away their last piece of bread.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing:

the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

The book I have read the most times is "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson,

it is a book that begins with an honest journey to find out more about the world.

It is very helpful to realize that we don't know all the things we should know,

and not be ashamed of that, just simply look for some Audio Books on the subject.

I write this in 2020 in the middle of the Pandemic,

and there is a lot of misled people, people who got taken in by false information.

In my memory Carl Sagan in his "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark"

mentions something similar on the subject of Aliens and UFOs.

He says that there is more beauty and interesting things in the actual Science,

than fantasizing stories of visiting aliens and flying saucers.

When I was a teenager I was a huge fan of shows like the X-Files,

and I remember walking into a mighty New York Public Library to crack the case, once and fall all,

Nut instead falling in love with Mokele-mbembe, I recognized the creature from my first Science book "Wszechświat życie człowiek" published in 1955,

it was a Brontosaurus, and I instantly fell in love with the idea there there might be a few left in Rhodesia.

For the world to carry on becoming more and more United,

we have to become Great Lovers of Knowledge and take to Books and Audio Books.

The treasures withing are unlike anything we have heard of in school,

the books that we end up loving and carrying with us for the rest of our lives, make us better.

And there is never an end to learning for real,

every few weeks a new book comes out that you didn't even know you were waiting for.

It becomes a source of Wisdom, or just sheer joy as the case is with Randall Munroe's

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions.

My Dear Friends, I wish you the discovery of new poems, new quotes,

new books and video lectures, authors you will love for live and then some.

And don't worry, the world is coming together, the borders are fading, and there is noting that can stop that,

Humanity is in the process of Unifying to become One Loving Family.

We can hasten this process by learning, acquiring more knowledge,

preventing history's mistakes from repeating themselves.

The path to the future is found In Knowledge and Wisdom,

and aiming for Greatness of Soul, Heart, and Mind.