Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student (Illusions 2)

“Tell me,” he said, “I’m curious. Why do you believe that you crashed your airplane.”

“I didn’t crash anything! They said I hit the wires, Don! I didn’t see them!”

“That explains it. You’re a master when things go well, you’re a victim when they go out of control.” He was laughing at me.

“I didn’t see…” Anyone else would have said he was crazy, not me.

“Why, I wonder,” he said, “did you convince everyone you crashed?”

I was determined not to be a victim, even if I were. “For the…for the first time, Don, I had…had to fight for my life. I never had to do that.”

“You will now. You know you’re going to win.”

I smiled at his certainty. “Right here, I’d say so. In this dream, I’ve already won. On the other side, something’s happened. I’m not sure.”

Is this a world of sides? I thought. This side I’m perfect. The mortal side, I can die?

“There are no sides,” he said. “You’re right. One’s a dream, so’s the other. There are beliefs. Here, you believe you’re fine, there you’ll believe you’ll fight for your life. What if you can’t?”

“Of course I can. I’m…I’m already perfect here and now.”

“Well said.”

“Nothing can hurt us, ever, can it?”

He smiled. “People die all the time.”

“But they’re not hurt. They come here, somewhere like this, they’re perfect again.”

“Of course,” he said. “If they want to. Dying, the end of life, that’s a belief.“ He frowned. “Hospitals, you don’t care for. Physicians are strangers to you. Yet all of a sudden they’re in your life. So what do you do with them, about them? Live, day by day, clawing your way back from your illusions of harm, to the belief of the person you thought you were. Another wrong belief. Yet it’s your belief.”

“You’re a thought form, aren’t you, Don? You’re not a real image. This is a dream, the hayfield, the airplanes, the bright sunlight?”

He blinked at me, changing the talk. “Not a real image,” he said. “No such thing as a real image. The only real is Love. I’m a thought-form, like you.” A little smile from him. “We’re living our own stories, you and me, aren’t we? We give ourselves a story we think is difficult, we’ll finish it now or later. Doesn’t matter what others think of us, does it? It matters what we think of ourselves.”

I was caught by his words. “No such thing as a real image? No reality as thought forms, either?”

“It’s all beliefs, here, too. I can change it, you can change it, whenever you want. This field, the airplanes, you can make it shift any way you wish. Earth is harder for you. Earth, you’re convinced, takes time.”

He lifted a hay-stem, letting it float in the air. I knew I could do that, too, in this place.

“What’s true for you, Richard? What are the highest beliefs you know?”

In that place, coming as it did from almost-dying, it was easy to find what I wanted to believe. Not perfect, but a step ahead, for me.

“Whenever we think we’re hurt, we’re healed in mind, first.

“Holding ideas in our mind, that brings events to us, tests, rewards.

“What seems to be a terrible event, is for our learning.

“Others inspire us with their own adventures, we inspire them.

“We are never separated, never left by Love.

“One I got from you, Don: No mortal life is true. They’re imaginations, seems-to-be, Illusions. We write and direct and star in the life in our own stories. Fiction.”

The last drew me once again — I saw a misty picture, my body unconscious on its hospital bed on Earth, the world of dear mortals there on my right, the world of after-living and its hayfield on my left. The only reality was Love, no images, no dream, just Itself.