Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student (Kindle Single) Read Free

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.”