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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Richard Bach
Read between
January 17 - September 6, 2018
“People couldn’t fly for a long time, I don’t think, because they didn’t think it was possible, so of course they didn’t learn the first little principle of aerodynamics.
“And you think you’ll be led to a teacher who can help you.” “If the teacher doesn’t happen to be me, yes.” “Maybe that’s the way it happens,” he said.
“I’ll say. Your friend could sell ashes to the devil, I’ll wager, can’t he now?”
“Of course you can quit! Quit anything you want, if you change your mind about doing it. You can quit breathing, if you want to.”
A good messiah hates nothing and is free to walk any path he wants to walk. Well, that’s true for everybody, of course. We’re all the sons of God, or children of the Is, or ideas of the Mind, or however else you want to say it.”
logic: ‘OK, I’m the son of God, but so are we all; I’m the saviour, but so are you! The works that I do, you can do!’ Anybody in their right mind understands that.”
‘There is no problem so big that it cannot be run away from.’ ” I slid from the cowling down to the hay and began tightening the cylinder nuts on number three and four cylinders. Not all of them were loose, but some were. “You are quoting Snoopy the Dog, I believe?” “I’ll quote the truth wherever I find it, thank you.”
Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers.
Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.
You are led through your lifetime
by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. Don’t turn away from possible futures before you’re certain you don’t have anything to learn from them. You’re always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.
“Sorry what?” “Doesn’t work that way. If you learn what this world is, how it works, you automatically start getting miracles, what will be called miracles. But of course nothing is miraculous. Learn what the magician knows and it’s not magic anymore.” He looked away from the sky. “You’re like everybody else. You already know this stuff, you’re just not aware that you know it, yet.”
It’s not crowds that wear me, it’s the kind of crowd that doesn’t care at all about what I came to say. You can walk New York to London on the ocean, you can pull gold coins out of forever and still not make them care, you know?”
said. “If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.”
Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.
“Snap out of it. Wake up. It’s all illusions.” I was irked. “Donald, there’s just a few minutes more and then we can talk all you want. But let me watch the movie, OK?”
“but the world’s best movie is still an illusion, is it not? The pictures aren’t even moving; they only appear to move. Changing light that seems to move across a flat screen set up in the dark?”
“We are game-playing, fun-having creatures, we are the otters of the universe. We cannot die, we cannot hurt ourselves any more than illusions on the screen can be hurt. But we can believe we’re hurt, in whatever agonizing detail we want. We can believe we’re victims, killed and killing, shuddered around by good luck and bad luck.”
“You can hold a reel of film in your hands,” he said, “and it’s all finished and complete – beginning, middle, end are all there that same second, the same millionths of a second. The film exists beyond the time that it records, and if you know what the movie is, you know generally what’s going to happen before you walk into the theater: there’s going to be battles and excitement, winners and losers, romance, disaster; you know that’s all going to be there. But in order to get caught up and swept away in it, in order to enjoy it to its most, you have to put it in a projector and let it go
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Imagine the universe beautiful and just and perfect, the handbook said to me once. Then be sure of one thing: the Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have.
“Negative attachments, Richard. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That’s all there is to it.”
You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.
The world is your exercise-book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages.
“Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them,” he sang.
even told you he’d be hurt if …” “He was going to suck my blood!” “Which is what we do to anyone when we tell them we’ll be hurt if they don’t live our way.”
We choose, ourselves, to be hurt or not to be hurt, no matter what. Us who decides. Nobody else. My
“Listen,” he said, “It’s important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do.”
“Well, Richard, we’re magnets, aren’t we? Not magnets. We’re iron, wrapped in copper wire, and whenever we want to magnetize ourselves we can. Pour our inner voltage through the wire, we can attract whatever we want to attract. A magnet is not anxious about how it works. It is itself, and by its nature it draws some things and leaves others untouched.”
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 like 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 we don’t feel like it … there’s nothing wrong with being irresponsible. But most of us find it more interesting to know why we
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“How about I allow the world to live as it chooses, and I allow me to live as I choose.”
In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.
all. The Is doesn’t need me to tell anybody how it works.”
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
Dying is like diving into a deep lake on a hot day. There’s the shock of that sharp cold change, the pain of it for a second, and then accepting is a swim in reality. But after so many times, even the shock wears off.”
You don’t tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds, remember.”
