Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

by Richard Bach

  "Because they think they deserve it for horrifying somebody else, or they like the excitement of horrification or that boring is the way they think films have to be. Can you believe that lots of people for reasons that are very sound to them enjoy believing that they are helpless in their own films? No you can't."

  "No, I can't," I said.

  "Until you understand that, you will wonder why some people are unhappy. They are unhappy because they have chosen to be unhappy, and, Richard, that is all right!"

  "Hm."

  "We are game-playing, fun-having creatures, we are the otters of the universe. We cannot die, we cannot hurt ourselves any more than illusions on the screen can be hurt. But we can believe we're hurt, in whatever agonizing detail we want. We can believe we're victims, killed and killing, shuddered around by good luck and bad luck."

  "Many lifetimes?" I asked.

  "How many movies have you seen?"

  "Oh "

  "Films about living on this planet, about living on other planets; anything that's got space and time is all movie and all illusion," he said. "But for a while we can learn a huge amount and have a lot of fun with our illusions, can we not?"

  "How far do you take this movie thing, Don?"

  "How far do you want ? You saw the film tonight partly because I wanted to see it. Lots of people choose lifetimes because they enjoy doing things together. The actors in the film tonight have played together in other films before or after depends on which film you've seen first' or you can see them at the same time on different screens. We buy tickets to these films, paying admission by agreeing to believe in the reality of space and the reality of time. . . Neither one is true, but anyone who doesn't want to pay that price cannot appear on this planet, or in any space-time system at all."

  "Are there some people who don't have any lifetimes at all in space-time ?"

  "Are there some people who never go movies ?"

  "I see. They get their learning in different ways ?"

  "Right you are," he said, pleased with me. "Space-time is a fairly primitive school. But a lot of people stay with the illusion even if it is boring, and they don't want the lights turned on early."

  "Who writes these movies, Don ?"

  "Isn't it strange how much we know if only we ask ourselves instead of somebody else? Who writes these movies, Richard ?"

  "We do," I said.

  "Who acts ?"

  "Us "

  "Who's the cameraman, the projectionist, the theater manager, the ticket-taker, the distributor, and who watches them all happen? Who is free to walk out in the middle, any time, change the plot whenever, who is free to see the same film over and over again?"

  "Let me guess," I said. "Anybody who wants to?"

  "Is that enough freedom for you ?" he said.

  "And is that why movies are so popular? That we instinctively know they are a parallel of our own lifetimes?"

  "Maybe so... maybe not. Doesn't matter much, does it? What's the projector?"

  "Mind," I said. "No. Imagination. It's our imagination, no matter what you say."

  "What's the film?" he asked.

  "Got me."

  "Whatever we give our consent to put into our imagination?"

  "Maybe so, Don."

  "You can hold a reel of film in your hands," he said, "and it's all finished and complete - beginning, middle, end are all there that same second, the same millionths of a second. The film exists beyond the time that it records, and if you know what the movie is, you know generally what's going to happen before you walk into the theater: there's going to be battles and excitement, winners and losers, romance, disaster; you know that's all going to be there. But in order to get caught up and swept away in it, in order to enjoy it to its most, you have to put it in a projector and let it go through the lens minute by minute.. . any illusion requires space and time to be experienced. So you pay your nickel and you get your ticket and you settle down an forget what's going on outside the theater an the movie begins for you."

  "And nobody's really hurt? That's just tomato-sauce blood?"

  "No, it's blood all right," he said. "But it might as well be tomato sauce for the effect it has on our real life . . ."

  "And reality?"

  "Reality is divinely indifferent, Richard. A mother doesn't care what part her child plays in his games; one day bad-guy, next day good-guy. The Is doesn't even know about our illusions and games. It only knows Itself, and us in its likeness, perfect and finished."

  "I'm not sure I want to be perfect and finished. Talk about boredom."

  "Look at the sky," he said, and it was such a quick subject-change that I looked at the sky. There was some broken cirrus, way up high, the first bit of moonlight silvering the edges.

  "Pretty sky," I said.

  "It is a perfect sky?"

  "Well, it's always a perfect sky, Don."

  "Are you telling me that even though it's changing every second, the sky is always a perfect sky?"

  "Gee, I'm smart. Yes ?"

  "And the sea is always a perfect sea, and it's always changing, too," he said "If perfection is stagnation, then heaven is a swamp! And the Is ain't hardly no swamp-cookie."

  "Isn't hardly no swamp-cookie," I corrected, absently. "Perfect, and all the time changing. Yeah. I'll buy that."

  "You bought it a long time ago, if you insist on time. "

  I turned to him as we walked. "Doesn't it get boring for you, Don, staying on just this one dimension ?"

  "Oh. Am I staying on just this one dimension ?" he said. "Are you ?"

  "Why is it that everything I say is wrong?"

  "Is everything you say wrong ?" he said.

  "I think I'm in the wrong business."

  "You think maybe real estate?" he said.

  "Real estate or insurance. "

  "There's a future in real estate, if you want one. "

  "OK, I'm sorry " I said "I don't want a future. Or a past. I'd just as soon become a nice old Master of the World of Illusion. Looks like maybe in another week ?"

  "Well, Richard, I hope not that long!" I looked at him carefully, but he wasn't smiling.

  9

  The Days blurred one into another. We flew as always, but I had stopped counting summer by the names of towns or the money we earned from passengers. I began counting the summer by the things I learned, the talks we had when flying was done, and by the miracles that happened now and then along the way to the time I knew at last that they aren't miracles at all.

  Imagine

  the universe beautiful

  and just and

  perfect,

  the handbook said to me once.

  Then be sure of one thing:

  the

  Is has imagined it

  quite a bit better

  than you

  have.

  10

  The Afternoon was quiet . . . an occasional passenger now and then. Time between I practiced vaporizing clouds.

  I have been a flight instructor, and I know that students always make easy things hard; I do know better, yet there was I a student again, frowning fiercely at my cumulus targets. I needed more teaching, for once, than practice. Shimoda was stretched out under the Fleet's wing, pretending to be asleep. I kicked him softly on the arm, and he opened his eyes.

  "I can't do it," I said.

  "Yes you can," he said, and closed his eyes again.

  "Don, I've tried! Just when I think something's happening, the cloud strikes back and goes poufing up bigger than ever. "

  He sighed and sat up. "Pick me a cloud. An easy one, please."

  I chose the biggest meanest cloud in the sky, three thousand feet tall, bursting up white smoke from hell. "The one over the silo, yonder," I said. "The one that's going black now."

  He looked at me in silence. "Why is it you hate me?"

  "It's because I like you, Don, that I ask these things." I smiled. "You need challenge. If you'd rather, I could pick something smaller . . ."
>
  He sighed again and turned back to the sky. " I'll try. Now, which one?"

  I looked, and the cloud, the monster with its million tons of rain, was gone; just an ungainly blue-sky hole where it had been.

  "Yike," I said quietly.

  "A job worth doing . . ." he quoted. "No, much as I would like to accept the praise which you heap upon me, I must in all honesty tell you this: it's easy."

  He pointed to a little puff of a cloud overhead. "There. Your turn. Ready? Go."

  I looked at the wisp of a thing, and it looked back at me. I thought it gone, thought an empty place where it was, poured visions of heat-rays up at it, asked it to reappear somewhere else, and slowly, slowly, in one minute, in five, in seven, the cloud at last was gone. Other clouds got bigger, mine went away.

  "You're not very fast, are you:" he said.

  "That was my first time! I'm just beginning! Up against the impossible . . . well, the improbable, and all you can think to say is I'm not very fast. That was brilliant and you know it!"

  "Amazing. You were so attached to it, and still it disappeared for you."

  "Attached! I was whocking that cloud with everything I had! Fireballs, laser beams, vacuum cleaner a block high. . ."

  "Negative attachments, Richard. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That's all there it to it. "

  A cloud does not know

  why it moves in just such a

  direction and at such

  a speed,

  was what the handbook had to say.

  It feels an impulsion. . . this is

  the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns

  behind all clouds,

  and you will know, too, when

  you lift yourself high enough

  to see beyond

  horizons.

  11

  You are

  never given a wish

  without also being given the

  power to make it true.

  You may

  have to work for it,

  however

  We had landed in a huge grazing place next to a three acre horse-pond, away from towns, somewhere along the line between Illinois and Indiana. No passengers; it was our day off, I thought.

  "Listen, he said. "Don't listen. Just stay there quiet and watch. What you are going to see is not a miracle. read your atomic-physics book. ..a child can walk on water."

  He told me this, and as though he didn't notice the water was even there, he turned and walked out some yards from shore, on the surface of the horse-pond. What it looked like, was that the pond was a hot-summer mirage over a lake of stone. He stood firm on the surface, not a wave or ripple splashed over his flying boots.

  "Here," he said. "Come do it."

  I saw it with my eyes. It was possible, obviously, because there he stood, so I walked out to join him. It felt like walking on clear blue linoleum, and I laughed.

  "Donald, what are you doing to me?"

  "I am merely showing you what everybody learns, sooner or later," he said, "and you're handy now."

  "But I'm . . ."

  "Look. The water can be solid," he stamped his foot and the sound was leather on rock, "or not." He stamped again and water splashed over us both. "Got the feel of that? Try it."

  How quickly we get used to miracles! In less than a minute I began to think that walking on water is possible, is natural, is . . . well, so what?

  "But if the water is solid now, how can we drink it?"

  "Same way we walk on it, Richard. It isn't solid, and it isn't liquid. You and I decide what it's going to be for us. If you want water to be liquid, think it liquid, act as if it's liquid, drink it. If you want it to be air, act as if it's air, breathe it. Try."

  Maybe it's something about the presence of an advanced soul, I thought. Maybe these things are allowed to happen in a certain radius, fifty feet in a circle around them . . .

  I knelt on the surface and dipped my hand into the pond. Liquid. Then I lay down and put my face into the blue of it and breathed, trusting. It breathed like warm liquid oxygen, no choking or gasping. I sat up and looked a question at him, expecting him to know what was in my mind.

  "Speak," he said.

  "Why do I have to speak?"

  "For what you have to say, it's more precise to talk in words. Speak."

  "If we can walk on water, and breathe it and drink it, why can't we do the same to land?"

  "Yes. Good. You will notice . . . "

  He walked to the shore easily as walking a painted lake. But when his feet touched the ground, the sand and grass at the edge, he began to sink, until with a few slow steps he was up to his shoulders in earth and grass. It was as though the pond had suddenly become an island, and the land about had turned to sea. He swam for a moment in the pasture, splashing it about him in dark loam drops, then floated on top of it, then rose and walked on it. It was suddenly miraculous to see a man walking on the ground!

  I stood on the pond and applauded his performance. He bowed, and applauded mine.

  I walked to the edge of the pond, thought the earth to liquid and touched it with my toe. Ripples spread into the grass in rings. How deep is the ground ? I nearly asked aloud. The ground will be as deep as I think it will be. Two feet deep, I thought, it will be two feet deep, and I'll wade.

  I stepped confidently into the shore and sank over my head, an instant drop off. It was black underground, scary, and I fought to the surface, holding my breath, flailing out for some solid water, for the edge of the pond to hold on to.

  He sat on the grass and laughed.

  "You are a remarkable student, do you know that?"

  "I ain't no student at all! Get me out of here!"

  "Get yourself out."

  I stopped struggling. I see it. solid and I can climb right out. I see it solid...and I climbed out, caked and crusted in black dirt.

  "Man you really get dirty doing this!"

  His own blue shirt and jeans were without spot or mote of dust.

  "Aaaa!" I shook the dirt out of my hair, flapped it out of my ears. Finally I put my wallet on the grass, walked into the liquid water and cleaned myself the traditional wet way.

  "I know there's a better way to get clean than this. "

  "There's a faster way, yes."

  "Don't tell me, of course. Just sit there and laugh and let me figure it all out for myself."

  "OK "

  I finally had to walk squishing back to the Fleet and change clothes, hanging the wet stuff on the flying wires to dry.

  "Richard, don't forget what you did today. It is easy to forget our times of knowing, to think they've been dreams or old miracles, one time. Nothing good is a miracle, nothing lovely is a dream. "

  "The world is a dream, you say, and it's lovely, sometimes. Sunset. Clouds. Sky."

  "No. The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the difference ?"

  I nodded, almost understanding. Later I sneaked a look in the handbook.

  The world

  is your exercise-book, the pages

  on which you do your sums.

  It is not reality,

  although you can express reality

  there if you wish.

  You are also

  free to write nonsense,

  or lies, or to tear

  the pages.

  12

  The original sin is to

  limit the Is.

  Don't.

  It was an easy warm afternoon between rain-showers, sidewalks wet on our way out of town.

  "You can walk through walls, can't you, Don ?"

  "No "

  "When you say no to something I know is yes, that means you don't like the way I said the question."

  "We certainly are observant, aren't we ?" he said.

  "Is the problem with walk or with walls ?"

  "Yes, and worse. Your
question presumes that I exist in one limited place-time and move to another place-time. Today I'm not in the mood to accept your presumptions about me. "

  I frowned. He knew what I was asking. Why didn't he just answer me straight and let me get on to finding out how he does these things ?

  "That's my little way of helping you be precise in your thinking," he said mildly.

  "OK. You can make it appear that you can walk through walls, if you want. Is that a better question?"

  "Yes. Better. But if you want to be precise..."

  "Don't tell me. I know how to say what I mean. Here is my question. How is it possible that you can move the illusion of a limited sense of identity, expressed in this belief of a space-time continuum as your 'body,' through the illusion of material restriction that is called a 'wall'?"

  "Well done!" he said. "When you ask the question properly it answers itself, doesn't it:"

  "No, the question hasn't answered itself. How do you walk through walls?"

  "RICHARD! You had it nearly right and then blew it all to pieces! I cannot walk through walls . . . when you say that, you're assuming things I don't assume at all, and if I do assume them, the answer is, 'l can't. "'

  "But it's so hard to put everything so precisely, Don. Don't you know what I mean?"

  "So just because something is hard, you don't try to do it; Walking was hard at first, but you practiced at it and now you make it look easy."

  I sighed. "Yeah. OK. Forget the question. "

  "I'll forget it. My question is, can you?" He looked at me as though he hadn't a care in the world.

  "So you're saying that body is illusion and wall is illusion but identity is real and that can't be hemmed by illusions. "

  "I'm not saying that. You're saying that."

  "But it's true."

  "Naturally," he said.

  "How do you do it ?"

  "Richard, you don't do anything. You see it done already, and it is."

  "Gee, that sounds easy."

  "It's like walking. You wonder how it ever came hard for you to learn."

  "Don walking through walls, it isn't hard for me now; it is impossible."