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.
