by Richard Bach
Copyright © 2013
by Richard Bach
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in any form whatsoever, without permission in writing from the author, except for brief passages in connection with a review.
Cover design © 2013 Anne Dunn Louque
Cover images © www.istock.com © www.vectorstock.com
Book production by:
Diamond Inspiration
www.diamondinspiration.com
ISBN 978-0-9913711-0-5
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
Introduction
Illusions. A book that I knew would never have a sequel. Add a word to it? Write a different story? Not possible.
I believed this until thirty-five years after it was published, until August 31, 2012.
That day, for the first time of my life, flying, fifty-eight years of an injury-free flying record, I had a little problem. It killed me for a few days and it demolished my airplane.
I was blissfully dreaming, while they helicoptered me to a hospital. They figured I was going to die, did all sorts of things to my pretty well lifeless body.
I woke up a week later in this astonishing scene: I was in a hospital! It is so easy to die, when we’re over the edge of dying, knowing “death” is a lovely beautiful part of life. Painless, distressless, perfect health.
When I came out of my coma, I was told that it would take a year to get better, to learn how to speak, stand, walk, run, read, drive a car, fly my airplane. The airplane was wreckage.
I didn’t know why I lived, something I promised on the other side of dying? There was no question that Puff, my seaplane, had to fly again.
My life today, it took my little crash, a near-death event, Sabryna’s certainty that I would be recovered from every suggestion of injury, my meetings with Illusions Messiah Donald Shimoda, with my other teachers, with Puff rebuilt; for this story to be told.
There’s no blessing that can’t be a disaster, and no disaster that can’t be a blessing.
Violent disasters, do they always become blessings? I hope so. I hope I can have my quiet little adventures, and write them, without needing to die.
—Richard Bach
December, 2013
34. The Master, having finished the tests he had chosen, left them for a lifetime beyond Earth. He found, in time, he could surpass a Messiah’s life by becoming not a teacher for thousands, but a guardian angel for one, instead.
35. What he could not do for the crowds of Earth, the Master did for his friend who trusted and listened to his angel.
36. His friend loved imagining an immortal friend who suggested ideas at crossroads in the worlds of space and time.
37. When his mortal sought understanding, the Master offered ideas, spoken through coincidence, in the language of events and in the adventures of life.
38. The Master whispered stories, tests that his mortal friend thought were built of his own imagination, tales sunk in the illusions of human belief, he wrote as he saw within.
39. From the stories, beliefs changed, for his mortal. No longer a pawn the powers of others, he began to chart his own destiny, became a mirror of his highest self.
40. No longer a distant savior far away in space and time, the Master became with practice a teacher, offered sudden lessons, ideas ever more perfect for his mortal’s understanding of life itself.
41. Every test, most of them, the Master designed to be a more advanced challenge for his dear mortal, eac...uthor Richard Bach was listed in critical condition Saturday at Harborview Medical Center, with a broken back and a traumatic brain injury after a landing accident in his experimental seaplane. Bach's plane struck high-tension wires, crashed inverted, leaving the pilot unconscious in the cockpit, near fires from broken wires. The author remains in a coma to date.
Chapter 1
God doesn’t protect anyone. Everyone’s already indestructible.
The landing was perfect, a word I rarely use for my flying. A few seconds before the wheels touched the land, they brushed the tops of the grass, the soft gold whispering. I don’t hear the lovely sound of wheels airborne above the grass that often. It was perfect.
Just as the wheels touched the farmer’s field, though, I couldn’t see. Not unconscious not-seeing, but as though someone had slammed a black plastic visor in front of my eyes.
There was no sound. The grass, the wheels, the hush of the wind…everything was still.
I’m not flying, I told myself. That’s odd. I thought I was flying. This is a dream!
I didn’t wake, didn’t stir from sleep. I waited, patient, for the visor to lift, and go on with Part Two of my dream.
It took a long time, it seemed to me, before the darkness left.
Way in the background, the gentlest sound, song of hummingbirds, whirring low, whirring high, lifting the dreamer up and away into the music.
While the whirring faded away, the dream continued.
Visor gone, I found myself in a room way in the sky, colored like a summer afternoon. There was a window there, and I looked down through fifteen hundred feet to the ground. A gentle scene: trees, bright emerald, fountains of leaves under the sun, a deep-sea river blue and calm, a bridge over it, a little town below.
A ring of children, I saw in a field near town, some running around the circle, playing a game I couldn’t remember.
The place around me was the gondola of a dirigible from a hundred years ago, though I couldn’t see the balloon itself. No pilots, no controls, no one to talk with. Not a gondola. A floating something?
On the left side of the wall was a large door, an airline latch to lock it, and a printed sign:
Do not open this door.
I hardly needed the advice, since the place was a long fall from the ground. It was not moving. Not a dirigible. What kept the room in the air?
A question all at once, in my mind.
“Do you want to stay, or go back again?”
Funny, that I should be dreaming such a question. I want to keep living, I thought. The idea of living beyond death is certainly interesting, but there’s a reason I need to go back.
What reason? I knew somehow that my dearest friend was praying for my life. Was she my wife? Why was she praying?
I’m fine, I’m not hurt, I’m dreaming! Dying is a journey for a later year, not one for now. I’d like to stay here, but I need to go back, for her sake.
The second time: “Your choice. Would you prefer to stay, or return to your belief of living?”
This time I thought, carefully. I’ve been fascinated with dying for a long time. Here’s my chance to explore what this place can tell me. And this place was not the world I knew. It was an after-life, I knew. Maybe I should stay here a bit. No. I love her. I need to see her again.
“Would you care to stay?”
I didn’t want to leave my life suddenly, without telling her good-bye. It was tempting to stay, but this is not dying, it’s a dream. I’ll wake up, please, yes. I’m sure.
That instant the room, or the gondola, disappeared, and for a half-second I saw below me a thousand file folders, each a different possibility of a lifetime, all of them vanished as I plunged into one.
I opened my eyes, woke in a hospital room. Another dream. Next I’ll wake up.
I’ve never had a hospital dream, didn’t much like hospitals. No way to find what I was doing here, but it was time to leave. I was in a bed in the hospital, surrounded by plastic vines from somewhere into my
body. It felt like not a nice place to be. A monitor showing something. My wrists were tied to the railing of the bed.
What is this place? Hello, I’m awake! Vanish this dream, please!
No change. It seemed, forgive me, real.
There by the bed was the woman I knew, she was my wife? No. I loved her, I knew. She reached for me, terribly tired, but warm, loving, happy. What was her name?
“Richard! You’re back!”
Nothing hurt. Why was I tied into this rig?
“Hi Sweet,” I said. My voice…my words felt like a foreign language, broken syllables.
“Oh, thank you so much, dear one. Hi! You came back!” There were tears in her eyes. “You came back…” She untied my wrists.
I had no idea why I was here, why she was crying. Was my dream somehow connected with this strange place? So much I needed to find what’s going on, here.
But I had to sleep, an escape from this terrible hospital. I was gone again, a smile for her, in a minute. No dreams, no understanding, feeling fine, exhausted, drifting away from waking into my coma again.
Chapter 2
Before believing, we choose what we want to believe. Then we test it for true.
When I woke once more, the hospital again!
She was still there. “Are you OK?”
She’s my wife, I thought. Can’t remember her name. Not my wife. I loved her.
“I’m fine. Where are we? Except all these wires, tubes. What’s going on? What are they for? Is it time to leave?”
My voice sounded like a broken cloud, barely English.
She had not slept.
“You were hurt,” she said. “You were nearly landing when the wires...”
Not true, I thought. I never saw any wires. A crash? I never saw any crash. In fifty-some years flying, I never came close to electric wires. I remembered the sound of the tires in the grass.
“Wires were right on the ground?”
“They said you hit the wires, up in the air.”
“Not true. They were wrong. I was a few inches from the ground.”
“OK, they got it wrong. You’re alive, now, dear one.” She brushed tears from her eyes.
“I was dreaming, is all. Fifteen minutes I was gone, half an hour max.”
She shook her head. “It’s been seven days. I waited for you here. They said you might not make it, or you might…die from the..”
“Sweet! I’m fine!”
“You have some of their heaviest drugs in you now. You had a respirator, for days, every kind of monitor, brain scans. Your heart rate was…way too high. They thought it could stop.”
“Not possible! I’m in perfect health!”
She smiled, through the tears. As though she had said the words a thousand times: “You’re a perfect expression of perfect Love, here and now. You will have a perfect healing. There will be no permanent injury.”
It was the first time I heard what she had said to the doctors, to the nurses, to me, for a week. She’d tell me again for a year. She would tell me again and again. It would be true.
She said that I’d recover perfectly. The medical staff thought that was highly unlikely.
I knew It was true. If I had been hurt, I would recover perfectly. I hadn’t been hurt!
I had a question. “Do you have a car?”
She shook her head, no. “Yes.”
“Can we leave, now?”
“You’re not quite ready to go, yet.”
Long silence. Next question. “Can I call a cab?”
“Wait just a bit.”
Questions settled on me like butterflies. What had happened? I have a charmed life. Why am I in a hospital?
I had friends who crashed airplanes, not me. Was there a crash? Why? I had no reason to hurt Puff, my little seaplane, she had no reason to hurt me. This was not my life. I made a perfect landing, no damage. What is going on?
I wondered who she was. Very close, yet not my wife!
I puzzled that, no answer. I disappeared into the coma once again. But she knew I’d come back. She knew I’d recover. Completely.
As I drifted away, she said You are a perfect expression of perfect Love, here and now. There will be no permanent injury.
Chapter 3
If we want to end this lifetime higher than we began, we can expect an uphill road.
The next day, my friend Geoff, a pilot and a mechanic, stopped by the hospital.
“Hi, Richard. You’re OK, I guess.”
“I’m fine, except for all these tubes in me.” My voice was better, now, still broken. “I’ve got to get them out, today.”
“Hope so.”
“What’s this about a crash? You picked Puff up? Took her home?”
“I did.”
“She have any scratch, from the landing?”
He thought about that, laughed. “A scratch or two.”
“What could have scratched her?” I remembered my image of landing. So smooth.
He looked at me. “Looks to me as if you hit the wires, way over the ground. The right wheel caught the wires. Things got worse after that.”
“Not true. I never saw any wires, never saw any crash. I remember, before it went black. I was just skimming the grass, about to land…”
“Some other landing, maybe. Not this one, Richard. Puff was out of control from forty feet up.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Don’t I wish. I took pictures, afterward. When the wheel caught the wires, Puff pitched upside down, dragged a couple of power poles over, there were fires from the sparks, little fires in the dry grass. She hit the ground with her right wing, then the tail, inverted. Puff took most of the force of the crash, a couple seconds. Not much of the impact left for you.”
“I think I remember...”
“I’m surprised you remember anything. It was an incredible crash.”
“Nothing hurt, Geoff. I was dreaming, not flying. I couldn’t see for a while, and then I was…somewhere else.”
“I hope so. Was no fun being where you were, after the crash. A man pulled you out of the cockpit. Then a helicopter came, took you to the hospital. You were here thirty minutes after the crash.”
“Did…” her name suddenly, “…Sabryna hear about it?”
“Yep. We flew right away, to Seattle. You were somewhere else, you stayed gone for quite a while. Some folks thought you were going to die.”
“I decided not to.”
“Good decision. Saw any little angels, did you?”
“Not a one, that I can remember.”
“They probably figured you were OK.”
“I would have liked it if they said something. ‘Have a nice day…””
“They must have said something. You were gone for a week.”
“I’ll remember later.”
Before he left, I said good-bye. Gone again.
Chapter 4
In every disaster, in every blessing, ask, "Why me?"
There's a reason, of course, there’s an answer.
The problem with the little rooms in hospitals is that they don’t much expect that you’ll be traveling. I had a narrow bed there, one with no room to move except for lying on my back awake, or lying on my back, sleeping.
I closed my eyes in the daytime, the gray of the room shifting seamless into the gray of sleep. Once in a while the dark behind my eyes was spangled with action and colors.
A dream? It was misty. A place away from the hospital? Either way, dream or far away, far away was OK with me.
The mist lifted. The field was dry hay, just been cut in the midst of a golden summer.
There was Donald Shimoda’s Travel Air biplane, pure white and gold, quiet in the morning, and my little Fleet biplane. When I walked around the engine, there he was, sitting in the hay, leaning against the airplane’s tire, waiting for me.
It wasn’t as if there had been forty years gone…not one day had changed. Something had happened to time.
The same young k
arate-master as he had ever been in my mind, black hair, dark eyes, flash of his split-second smile, old memories, happening now.
“Hi, Don. What are you doing here? I thought… you’d be far away.”
“You thought there’s a ‘far away?’” he said. “Your belief of time and space, it separates us, does it?”
“Doesn’t yours? Hasn’t it been years, since…”
He laughed. “Am I separated? I hope we’re not separated. Sharing your beliefs is my job.” Then, “You have no idea how many angels there are, that care for you.”
I smiled. “A hundred.”
He shrugged. I had guessed way high. “You’d have that many if you were in trouble, to keep you from not caring for this life, if you didn’t know there are tests you need to face.”
“Someone in trouble, some kid in jail?”
“Dozens of angels for the kids, just trying to get through, telling them they’re loved, right now.”
“Not me.”
“You understand. Once in a while.”
“They don’t talk to me.”
“They do.”
“Not that I recall.”
He laughed, as though someone he knew was all at once standing behind me. “Don’t turn around.”
I didn’t.
“Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” A soft, gentle voice.
The same voice I heard alone while I walked in the night decades ago, I didn’t know what it meant, then.
“It was you?”
I heard the voice again: “Start your pullout early.”
I closed my eyes and turned behind me, laughing. “You were in my airplane, Ingolstadt, Germany, 1962. No place for you in the aircraft, but your voice behind me. I broke off the pass and barely missed the trees.”
I could tell now. It was a woman’s voice. “Move to the right,” she said.
“Summer, 1968,” I said. “Can I open my eyes?”