Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach (Book review 3/2015)

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

The book starts from the old tradition of the seagulls; Seagulls as you know, never falter, never stall. To stall in the air is for them disgrace and it is dishonor.

He snapped into that same terrible uncontrolled disaster, and at ninety miles per hour it hit him like dynamite. Jonathan Seagull exploded in midair and smashed down into brick-hard sea.  The place for a seagull at night is on shore, and from this moment forth, he vowed, he would be a normal gull. It would make everyone happier. There in the night, a hundred feet in the air, Jonathan Livingston Seagull-blinked. His pain, his resolutions, vanished

.

Short wings. A falcon’s short wings!

That’s the answer! What a fool I’ve been! All I need is a tiny little wing, all I need is to fold most of my wings and to fly on just the tips alone! Short wings!

So the best way to overcome our limitation is the insight to the innovation of redefining our means to achieve the end.

His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.

This happens to all the new ideas that come in our society, people don’t open their eyes and see as it’s easy to stay that way and refute all the enhancements one can achieve.

What he had once hoped for the flock, he now gained for himself alone; he learned to fly, and was not sorry for the price that he had paid. Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with these gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.

The same young Jonathan Seagull was there that had always lived behind his golden eyes, but the outer form had changed.

So to say our thoughts have the power to change even our outer form and to make us young again physically but the transition starts from the inner self.

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.

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.

Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect, and perfection doesn’t have limits.

To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived

The trick was to know that his true nature lived, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.

You have less fear of learning than any gull I’ve seen in ten thousand years.

We can start working with time if you wish, till you can fly the past and the future. And then you will be ready to begin the most difficult, the most powerful, and the most fun of all. You will be ready to begin to fly up and know the meaning of kindness and of love.

If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we’ve destroyed our own brotherhood!

Also the turning point is when Jonathan returns to his roots to change the people there in spite of knowing the hostility he is going to face as his inner conscience tells him that his life would have been to some other place if he would have got assistance of the right Guru at the right time. This event is totally inspired by the love to uplift his fellow beings and the leader who does this is respected always, history is the best example to this. 

The price of being misunderstood; they call you devil or they call you god.

This kind of flying has always been here to be learned by anybody who wanted to discover it, that’s got nothing to do with time.

The trick is that we are trying to overcome our limitations in order, patiently.

Why is it that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?

You don’t love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That’s what I mean by love. It’s fun, when you get the knack of it. 

You need to keep finding yourself, a little more each day, that real unlimited self. He’s your instructor. You need to understand him and to practice him.

Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.