28 Apr Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one (RICHARD BACH)
“Where is everybody, Sullivan?” he asked silently, quite at home now with the easy telepathy that these gulls used instead of screes and gracks. “Why aren’t there more of us here? Why, where I came from there were …” “… thousands and thousands of gulls. I know.” Sullivan shook his head. “The only answer I can see, Jonathan, is that you are pretty well a one-in-a-million bird. Most of us came along ever so slowly. We went from one world into another that was almost exactly like it, forgetting right away where we had come from, not caring where we were headed, living for the moment. Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth. The same rule holds for us now, of course: we choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.”
…
“Chiang …” he said, a little nervously.
The old seagull looked at him kindly. “Yes, my son?”
Instead of being enfeebled by age, the Elder had been empowered by it; he could outfly any gull in the Flock, and he had learned skills that the others were only gradually coming to know. “
Chiang, this world isn’t heaven at all, is it?”
The Elder smiled in the moonlight. “You are learning again, Jonathan Seagull,” he said.
“Well, what happens from here? Where are we going? Is there no such place as heaven?”
“No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect.”
He was silent for a moment. “You are a very fast flier, aren’t you?”
“I … I enjoy speed,” Jonathan said, taken aback but proud that the Elder had noticed.
“You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”
Without warning, Chiang vanished and appeared at the water’s edge fifty feet away, all in the flicker of an instant. Then he vanished again and stood, in the same millisecond, at Jonathan’s shoulder.
“It’s kind of fun,” he said. Jonathan was dazzled. He forgot to ask about heaven.
“How do you do that? What does it feel like? How far can you go?”
“You can go to any place and to any time that you wish to go,” the Elder said.
“I’ve gone everywhere and everywhen I can think of.” He looked across the sea.
“It’s strange. The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly. Remember, Jonathan, heaven isn’t a place or a time, because place and time are so very meaningless. Heaven is …” “Can you teach me to fly like that?” Jonathan Seagull trembled to conquer another unknown.
“Of course, if you wish to learn.” “I wish. When can we start?”
“We could start now, if you’d like.”
“I want to learn to fly like that,” Jonathan said, and a strange light glowed in his eyes.
“Tell me what to do.”
Chiang spoke slowly and watched the younger gull ever so carefully.
“To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is,” he said, “you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived …”
The trick, according to Chiang, was for Jonathan to stop seeing himself as trapped inside a limited body that had a forty-two-inch wingspan and performance that could be plotted on a chart. The trick was to know that his true nature lived, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull a story
RICHARD BACH
Image:https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jonathan_Livingston_Seagull#/media/File:Sonne_Meer_und_M%C3%B6we.jpg
