Authors: Richard Bach
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Modern fiction, #General & Literary Fiction
truth you
speak has no past
and no future.
It is,
and that's all it
needs to be.
I lay on my back under the Fleet, wiping oil from the lower fuselage.
Somehow the engine was throwing less oil now than it had thrown before. Shimoda flew one passenger, then came over and sat on the grass as I worked.
"Richard, how can you hope to impress the world when everybody else works for their living and you run around all irresponsible from day to day in your crazy biplane, selling passenger rides?" He was testing me again. "There's a question you are gonna get more than once."
"Well, Donald, Part One: I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy."
"OK. Part Two:"
"Part Two: Everybody else is free to do whatever they feel tike doing, for a living. Part Three: Responsible is Able to Respond, able to answer for the way we choose to live. There's only one person we have to answer to, of course, and that is . . . ?"
". . . ourselves," Don said, replying for the imaginary crowd of seekers sitting around.
"We don't even have to answer to ourselves, if e don't feel like it . . . there's nothing wrong with being irresponsible. But most of us find it more interesting to know why we act as we do, why we make our choices just so--whether we choose to watch a bird or step on an ant or work for money at something we'd rather not be doing." I winced a little. "Is that too long an answer?"
He nodded. "Way too long."
"OK. . . . How do you hope to impress the world. . ." I rolled out from under the plane and rested for a while in the shade of the wings. "How about I allow the world to live as it chooses, and I allow me to live as I choose."
He threw a happy proud smile at me. "Spoken like a true messiah! Simple, direct, quotable, and it doesn't answer the question unless somebody takes the time to think carefully about it."
"Try me some more." It was delicious, to watch my own mind work, when we did this.
"'Master,'" he said, "'I want to be loved, I'm kind, I do unto others as I would have them do unto me, but still I don't have any friends and I'm all alone.' How are you going to answer that one?"
"Beats me," I said. "I don't have the foggiest idea what to tell you."
"WHAT?"
"Just a little humor, Don, liven up the evening. A little harmless change of pacer, there."
"You'd best be plenty careful how you liven up the evenings. Problems are not jokes and games to the people who come to you, unless they are highly advanced themselves, and that sort know they're their own messiah. You are being given the answers, so speak them out. Try that 'Beats me' stuff and you'll see how fast a mob can burn a man at the stake."
I drew myself up proudly. "Seeker, thou comest to me for an answer, and unto thee I do answer: The Golden Rule doesn't work. How would you like to meet a masochist who did unto others as he would have them do unto him? Or a worshiper of the Crocodile God, who craves the honor of being thrown alive into the pit: Even the Samaritan, who started the whole thing . . . what made him think that the man he found lying at the roadside wanted to have oil poured in his wounds? What if the man was using those quiet moments to heal himself spiritually, enjoying the challenge of it?" I sounded convincing, to me.
"Even if the Rule was changed to Do unto others as they want to be done to, we can't know how anybody but ourselves wants to be done to. What the Rule means, and how we apply it honestly, is this: Do unto others as you truly feel like doing unto others. Meet a masochist with this rule and you do not have to flog him with his whip, simply because that is what he would want you to do unto him. Nor are you required to throw the worshiper to the crocodiles. ''l looked at him. "Too wordy?"
"As always. Richard, you are going to lose ninety percent of your audience unless you learn to keep it short!"
"Well, what's wrong with losing ninety percent of my audience?" I shot back at him. "What's wrong with losing ALL my audience? I know what I know and I talk what I talk! And if that's wrong then that's just too bad. The airplane rides are three dollars, cash!"
"You know what?" Shimoda stood up, brushing the hay off his blue jeans.
"What?" I said petulantly.
"You just graduated. How does it feel to be a Master?"
"Frustrating as hell."
He looked at me with an infinitesimal smile. "You get used to it," he said.
Here is
a test to find
whether your mission on earth
is finished:
If you're alive,
it isn't.
16
Hardware stores are always long places, shelves going back into forever.
In Hayward Hardware I had gone hunting back in the dim, needing three eighths-inch nuts and bolts and lock washers for the tail skid of the Fleet. Shimoda browsed patiently as I looked, since of course he didn't need anything from a hardware store. The whole economy would collapse, I thought, if everybody was like him, making whatever they wanted out of thought-forms and thin air, repairing things without parts or labor.
At last I found the half-dozen bolts I needed and journeyed with them back toward the counter, where the owner had some soft music playing. Green sleeves; it was a melody that has haunted me happily since I was a boy, played now on a lute over some hidden sound system. . . strange to find in a town of four hundred souls.
Turned out it was strange for
Hayward
, too, for it wasn't a sound system at all. The owner sat tilted back on his woo en stool at the counter, and listened to the messiah play the notes on a cheap six string guitar from the sale shelf. It was a lovely sound, and I stood quiet there paying my seventy-three cents and being haunted again by the tune. Perhaps it was the tinny quality of the cheap instrument, but it still sounded far misty other-century
England
.
"Donald, that's beautiful! I didn't know you could play the guitar!"
going to say, 'You never felt that way about guitars, did you ? "'
"You never felt that way about guitars, did you?"
"And this sinking feeling I have right now, Don, tells me that is how you learned to fly. You just got into the Travel Air one day and you flew it. Never been up in an airplane before."
"My, you are intuitive."
"You didn't take the flying test for your license? no, wait. You don't even have a license, do you? A regular flying license."
He looked at me strangely, the whisper of a smile as though I had dared him to come up with a license and he knew that he could do it.
"You mean the piece of paper, Richard? That kind of license?"
"Yes, the piece of paper."
He didn't reach into his pocket or bring out his wallet. He just opened his right hand and there was a flying license, as though he had been carrying it around, waiting for me to ask. It wasn't faded or bent, and I thought that ten seconds ago it hadn't existed at all.
But I took it and looked. It was an official pilot's certificate, Department of Transportation seal on it, Donald William Shimoda, with an
"You don't have your seaplane ratings, or helicopter?"
"I'll have those if I need to have them," he said so mysteriously that I burst out laughing before he did. The man sweeping the walk of the International Harvester place looked at us and smiled, too.
"What about me?" I said. "I want my airline transport rating:'
"You're gonna have to forge your own licenses," he said.
17
On the Jeff Sykes radio talk show, I saw a Donald Shimoda I had never seen before. The show began at
and went till
, from a room no bigger than a watchmaker's, lined about with dials and knobs and racks of tape-cartridge commercial spots.
Sykes opened by asking if there wasn't something illegal about flying around the country in an ancient airplane, taking people for rides.
The answer is no, there is nothing illegal about it, the planes are inspected as carefully as any jet transport. They are safer and stronger than most sheet-metal modern airplanes, and all that's needed is a license and a farmer's permission. But Shimoda didn't say that. "No one can stop us from doing what we want to do, Jeff," he said.
Now that is quite true, but it had none of the tact that is called for when you are talking with a radio audience that is wondering what is going on, these airplanes flying around. A minute after he said that, the call-director telephone began lighting up on Sykes' desk.
"We have a caller on line one," Sykes said. "Go ahead, ma'am."
"Am I on the air?"
"Yes, ma'am, you are on the air and our guest is Mr. Donald Shimoda, the airplane flier. Go ahead, you are on the air."
"Well, I'd like to tell that fellow that not everybody gets to do what they want to do and that some people have to work for their living and hold down a little more responsibility than flying around with some carnival!"
"The people who work for a living are doing what they most want to do," Shimoda said. "Just as much as the people who play for a living. . ."
"Scripture says by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread, and in sorrow shalt thou eat of it."
"We're free to do that, too, if we want."
"'Do your thing!' I get so tired of people like you saying do your thing, do your thing! You let everybody run wild, and they'll destroy the world. They are destroying the world right now. Look at what is happening to the green living things and the rivers and the oceans!"
She gave him fifty different openings to reply, and he ignored them all. "It's OK if the world is destroyed," he said. "There are a thousand million other worlds for us to create and choose from. As long as people want planets, there will be planets to live on."
That was hardly calculated to soothe the caller, and I looked at Shimoda, astonished. He was speaking from his viewpoint of perspectives over lots of lifetimes, learnings only a master can expect to recall. The caller was naturally assuming that the discussion had to do with the reality of this one world, birth is the beginning and death is the end. He knew that . why did he ignore it?