Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

by Richard Bach

He could have been a karate master on his way to some quietly violent demonstration.

“I wanted to say, for the love of God, if you want freedom and joy so much, can’t you see it’s not anywhere outside of you? Say you have it, and you have it! Act as if it’s yours, and it is!

If that’s all illusion, Mister Shimoda, then what is it that is real? And if this life is illusion, why do we live it at all?

there are no adventures when you know that you can’t be troubled by any thing on this earth.

“If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.”

“Look at the sky,” he said, and it was such a quick subject-change that I looked at the sky. There was some broken cirrus, way up high, the first bit of moonlight silvering the edges.

“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.”

“So just because something is hard, you don’t try to do it? Walking was hard at first, but you practiced at it and now you make it look easy.”

“Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them,”

You say four billion people live in your world? Are you standing way down there on the ground and telling me that four billion people do not live in four billion separate worlds, are you going to put that across on me?”

“Listen,” he said, “it’s important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do.”

Just be who you are, calm and clear and bright. Automatically, as we shine who we are, asking ourselves every minute is this what I really want to do, doing it only when we answer yes, automatically that turns away those who have nothing to learn from who we are and attracts those who do, and from whom we have to learn, as well.”

“Humbug on faith. Takes zero faith. What it takes is imagination.”

“How about I allow the world to live as it chooses, and I allow me to live as I choose.”

Then you think somebody could have walked up to Jesus the Christ and handed him a guitar and he would have said, ‘I can’t play that thing’? Would he have said that?”

“Just give up all your inhibitions and all your beliefs that you can’t play. Touch the thing as though it was a part of your life, which it is, in some alternate lifetime. Know that it’s all right for you to play it well, and let your nonconscious self take over your fingers and play.”

“Only a few people are interested in what you have to say, but that’s all right. You don’t tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds, remember.”