Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student (Kindle Single) (2 page)

   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 karate-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?”

   “Please don’t.”

   “There was another airplane landing toward me. We missed, when I turned.”

   “The hand of God.”

   “In the desert, 1958. I was going to hit the ground. There was…”

   “…an updraft. Lifted your airplane…”

   “Lifted? Sheared rivets, nine something G’s, blacked me out till I was in the air, safe again.”

   “You heard, when I spoke.”

   “I never understood. The desert was cold, early morning, I was going down at 350 knots in a gunnery range, I pulled up way late, knew I was going to hit the ground, and then this blackout, this explosion lifted the F-86 like a toy. I knew it couldn’t be an updraft. Never knew what happened. Never heard anyone explain.”

   “I explained.”

   “I told you then! Yes, I understand the hand of God! But how did it…”

   I could tell she was shaking her head. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

   I opened my eyes, saw an image of a lovely mist vaporizing. “When you got in trouble, we gave you a second or two to do something when you could,” she said. “Once, when you couldn’t, we changed space-time. The one time, call it an updraft.”

   “But I was thirty degrees descending,” I said to where she had been. “Fifteen thousand pounds coming down at three hundred some knots, there’s no updraft…”

   There was a laugh. “The hand of God,” she said.

   “Where were you when Puff and I crashed?”

   “You needed to learn about healing. There’s more to learn. Puff’s fine. The spirit of her is fine.”

   “And me?”

   “You’re a perfect expression of perfect Love, perfect Life, here and now.”

   “Do you have to be invisible?”

   There was no answer.

   I turned back to Shimoda.

   “She said don’t open your eyes,” he told me.

   “What is so important about closing my eyes!”

   “What’s so important about opening them? They tell you what’s true? Even when she doesn’t live in your world of space and time?”

   “Well…”

   “You’ll see her again. Remember you wrote about a crew of angels, aboard the ship of your life?”

   “Yes. A navigator, a defender, a carpenter and a sailmaker who keep the ship sailing, topmen at the crosstrees, trimming the sails, furling them in storms…”

   “She’s there, too. You’re the commander, she’s the captain’s mate. You’ll see her again.”

   Captain’s mate, I thought. How I miss her now!

   In the silence of the field I had time to think. “You didn’t like the Messiah-job. You told me so. Too many people, too many expecting magic, no one caring why. And the drama: someone had to kill you.”

   “Ah, so true.”

   “So what’s your job now?”

   “Instead of crowds, I have one person. Instead of magics, maybe there’s understanding. Instead of drama, there’s…well, some. Your airplane crash was dramatic, wouldn’t you say?”

   More silence. There was the crash again. Why does he say that?

   “Some of us tried Messiahing,” he said. “Nobody’s made it a success. Crowds, magic, suicide, murders. Most of us have stopped the work. All of us, I think. We never knew there would be so much resistance to a few simple ideas.“

   “Resistance to what? What ideas?”

   “Remember what she said:
You are a perfect expression of perfect Love?”

   I nodded.

   “That’s one.”

   Sabryna, too. “Yes. I felt healed, over here, like she said. No pain, no injury, thinking’s clear. But back there, in the hospital …something happened. The airplane crash?”

   There were no customers for our flights, early in the morning.

   “Why you, Richard?” he said. “You believe a crash ‘happened’ because you have no control over events?”

   Not a word about his life, what had happened for him, who he was now.

   “Tell me,” he said, “I’m curious. Why do you believe that you crashed your airplane.”

   “I didn’t crash anything! They said I hit the wires, Don! I didn’t see them!”

   “That explains it. You’re a master when things go well, you’re a victim when they go out of control.” He was laughing at me.

   “I didn’t see…” Anyone else would have said he was crazy, not me.

   “Why, I wonder,” he said, “did you convince everyone you crashed?”

   I was determined not to be a victim, even if I were. “For the…for the first time, Don, I had…had to fight for my life. I never had to do that.”

   “You will now. You know you’re going to win.”

   I smiled at his certainty. “Right here, I’d say so. In this dream, I’ve already won. On the other side, something’s happened. I’m not sure.”

   Is this a world of sides? I thought. This side I’m perfect. The mortal side, I can die?

   “There are no sides,” he said. “You’re right. One’s a dream, so’s the other. There are beliefs. Here, you believe you’re fine, there you’ll believe you’ll fight for your life. What if you can’t?”

   “Of course I can. I’m…I’m already perfect here and now.”

   “Well said.”

   “Nothing can hurt us, ever, can it?”

   He smiled. “People die all the time.”

   “But they’re not hurt. They come here, somewhere like this, they’re perfect again.”

   “Of course,” he said. “If they want to. Dying, the end of life, that’s a belief.“ He frowned. “Hospitals, you don’t care for. Physicians are strangers to you. Yet all of a sudden they’re in your life. So what do you do with them, about them? Live, day by day, clawing your way back from your illusions of harm, to the belief of the person you thought you were. Another wrong belief. Yet it’s your belief.”

   “You’re a thought form, aren’t you, Don? You’re not a real image. This is a dream, the hayfield, the airplanes, the bright sunlight?”

   He blinked at me, changing the talk. “Not a real image,” he said. “No such thing as a real image. The only real is Love. I’m a thought-form, like you.” A little smile from him. “We’re living our own stories, you and me, aren’t we?  We give ourselves a story we think is difficult, we’ll finish it now or later. Doesn’t matter what others think of us, does it? It matters what we think of ourselves.”

   I was caught by his words. “No such thing as a real image? No reality as thought forms, either?”

   “It’s all beliefs, here, too. I can change it, you can change it, whenever you want. This field, the airplanes, you can make it shift any way you wish. Earth is harder for you.  Earth, you’re convinced, takes time.” 

   He lifted a hay-stem, letting it float in the air. I knew I could do that, too, in this place.

   “What’s true for you, Richard? What are the highest beliefs you know?”

   In that place, coming as it did from almost-dying, it was easy to find what I wanted to believe. Not perfect, but a step ahead, for me.

     “Whenever we think we’re hurt, we’re healed in mind, first.

     “Holding ideas in our mind, that brings events to us, tests, rewards.

     “What seems to be a terrible event, is for our learning.