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

 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.
     “Others inspire us with their own adventures, we inspire them.
    “We are never separated, never left by Love.
   “One I got from you, Don: No mortal life is true. They’re imaginations, seems-to-be, Illusions. We write and direct and star in the life in our own stories. Fiction.” 
       The last drew me once again — I saw a misty picture, my body unconscious on its hospital bed on Earth, the world of dear mortals there on my right, the world of after-living and its hayfield on my left. The only reality was Love, no images, no dream, just Itself.
       I didn’t think it was a dream when it happened. I had been flying. Something happened, before the blackness and the room in the air, and now, the meeting with Shimoda. How could it happen, how could I be in a hospital when Puff had been safe, an inch from the land?
       I had a bright clear memory of what happened. Memories, my whole life, weren’t they true? My airplane was already on the ground. There were no wires on the ground. Nothing could happen. Yet how could I wake in this place, or in a hospital, if nothing happened? It couldn’t happen, I had such a clear image. Floating just above the grass.
       “Remember what you told me?” Shimoda said. “Illusions are seems-to-be. They aren’t real. You think your memories are real, but nothing in this world is real! ”
       “How can I tell if it’s real?” I remembered when we flew. It wasn’t forty years ago, it was now. Sunlight warming us, the airplanes, the mowed hayfield. “Are you saying this world, us planning to fly some passengers here, wherever we land, isn’t real?”
       “Not a bit.”
       The hospital was my last dream. Now I had no tubes in me, I was well and happy to be with my friend, his Travel Air, my Fleet. The hospital, was it real?
       “The hospital…” he said. “It’s a dream, too. Us planning to fly passengers, that’s a dream. If it grows, shifts, if it’s subject to time and space, even here, it’s a dream. You disagree, don’t you? You think that’s true, the truth of airplanes, do you?”
       “Don, a minute ago I thought I was in a hospital. Then I blinked and here I am awake again with you and the airplanes!”
       He smiled. “So many dreams.”
       The smile changed me. Something was wrong.
       “My airplane. It’s here. But I don’t own the Fleet, any more. I sold it. Years ago.”
       He looked a question at me. “Ready to fly?”
       “No.”
       He nodded. “Good. Why not?”
       “This is a dream, too.”
       “Of course it is. None of it’s true, just dreams of lessons, till you let go of the school.”
       “The Dream School?”
       The quick smile, he nodded.
       The airplanes wavered, some sudden wind blurring their outline. Soon as we see something as an image, it begins to change, I thought. When I was with him before, the image of ground and water, of wrenches and vampires, all changed. Beliefs? Beliefs.
       “Your memory,” he said. “You had a clear image, landing?”
       “Clear as anything! The sound! I heard