Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach
Responsible is Able to Respond, able to answer for the way we choose to live / "Everything in this book may be wrong."
In a quiet field of the American Midwest, wandering pilot Richard Bach lands his biplane and discovers Donald Shimoda, a self-exiled messiah in the humble guise of a traveling barnstormer. Together, they journey among barns and small-town backwaters, where Shimoda’s miracles and cryptic lessons from the mystical Messiah’s Handbook challenge everything Richard believes about freedom, reality, and the deeper meaning of life.
By no means is this realistic—it’s full of absurd miracles, magic, and a self-proclaimed messiah—but it still delivers a central message: you can do what you want! It’s a short, humorous nudge that reminds us we have the agency to escape—or solve—our problems.
You can do what you want.
But that message isn’t confined to fiction. Arham and I keep repeating it the whole day last on Sunday, Feb 23.
My mentor shocked me by saying how I wasn’t working very hard (despite knowing the hours involved with these post-grad jobs). It was the loss of agency. He told me how he started his first business by scouting on the weekends and asking someone to buy their store. He figured out the financing (he was broke) and the rest along the way.
Why? Because you can do what you want.
Though not exactly my idol, Trump used to refuse to pay government fines on his property in his early days, apparently deciding they’d just keep returning otherwise.
Again, it boils down to the same principle: you can do what you want. We do have agency!
Because you can do what you want.
Selections:
There is no problem so big that it cannot be run away from.
You are quoting Snoopy the Dog, I believe?” “I’ll quote the truth wherever I find it, thank you.
Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.
The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, “I’ve got responsibilities.”
Don’t turn away from possible futures before you’re certain you don’t have anything to learn from them.
There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.
I didn’t quite know why, but reading that eased my confusions. I read it over until I knew it with my eyes closed.
The people of Troy were no more stunned by the miracle of the Travel Air’s flight than I would have been had some town bell rung at noon that hadn’t rung for sixty years… they didn’t know that it was impossible for what was happening to happen.
It was a problem, all right, and I needed its gift, but I still didn’t know what it meant.
And quitting, was suddenly glad, all at once happy that I was where I was and knew what I knew even though it wasn’t the answer to all existence or even a few illusions.
I had stopped thinking about the problems of the messiah; there was no way I could figure who he was or what he meant, and so I stopped trying and I guess that’s what made me happy.
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
feeling like a prehistoric ape that cannot understand a wheel is turning before its very eyes.
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.
Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.
You do everything for a reason, Don?” “Sometimes.
A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed, was what the handbook had to say. It feels an impulsion… this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.
You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.
It is easy to forget our times of knowing, to think they’ve been dreams or old miracles, one time. Nothing good is a miracle, nothing lovely is a dream.” “The world is a dream, you say, and it’s lovely, sometimes. Sunset. Clouds. Sky.” “No. The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the difference?
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.
The original sin is to limit the Is. Don’t.
Do you think that maybe if you say impossible over and over again a thousand times that suddenly hard things will come easy for you?
Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them
You’re sure of that. You live in the same world, do you, as… a stockbroker, shall we say? Your life has just been all tumbled and changed, I presume, by the new SEC policy - mandatory review of portfolios with shareholder investment loss more than fifty percent? You live in the same world as a tournament chess player, do you? With the New York Open going on this week, Petrosian and Fischer and Browne in Manhattan for a halfmillion-dollar purse, what are you doing in a hayfield in Maitland, Ohio? You with your 1929 Fleet biplane landed on a farm field, with your major life priorities farmers’ permission, people who want ten-minute airplane rides, Kinner aircraft engine maintenance and mortal fear of hailstorms… how many people do you think live in your world? 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?
If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.
Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully.
Richard, in being so fierce toward my vampire, you were doing what you wanted to do, even though you thought it was going to hurt somebody else. He even told you he’d be hurt if…” “He was going to suck my blood!” “Which is what we do to anyone when we say we’ll be hurt if they don’t live our way.
I had always believed that we are free to do as we please only if we don’t hurt another, and this didn’t fit. There was something missing. “The thing that puzzles you,” he said, “is an accepted saying that happens to be impossible. The phrase is hurt somebody else. We choose, ourselves, to be hurt or not to be hurt, no matter what. Us who decides. Nobody else. My vampire told you he’d be hurt if you didn’t let him? That’s his decision to be hurt, that’s his choice. What you do about it is your decision, your choice: give him blood; ignore him; tie him up; drive a stake of holly through his heart. If he doesn’t want the holly stake, he’s free to resist, in whatever way he wants. It goes on and on, choices, choices.” “When you look at it that way…” “Listen,” he said, “it’s important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do.
Every person, all the events oft your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
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.” I ate a potato chip and frowned at him. “You left out one thing. How do I do it?” “You don’t do anything. Cosmic law, remember? Like attracts like. 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.” “But that takes a lot of faith, and meanwhile you get pretty lonely.” He looked at me strangely over his hamburger. “Humbug on faith. Takes zero faith. What it takes is imagination.
Just your imagination? Of course it’s your imagination! This world is your imagination, have you forgotten? Where your thinking is, there is your experience; As a man thinks, so is he; That which I feared is come upon me; Think and grow rich: Creative visualization for fun and profit; How to find friends by being who you are. Your imagining doesn’t change the Is one whit, doesn’t affect reality at all. But we are talking about Warner Brothers worlds, MGM lifetimes, and every second of those are illusions and imaginations. All dreams with the symbols we waking dreamers conjure for ourselves.
If you dreamed about airplanes, what would that mean to you?” “Well, freedom. Airplane dreams are escape and flight and setting myself free.” “How clear do you want it? The dream awake is the same: your will to be free of all things that tie you back - routine, authority, boredom, gravity. What you haven’t realized is that you’re already free, and you always have been. If you had half the sesame seeds of this… you’re already supreme lord of your magician’s life. Only imagination! What are you saying?
If you want to be with what you’re magnetizing, you have to put yourself in the picture, too.
Responsible is Able to Respond, able to answer for the way we choose to live.
Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.
In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.
Don’t be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.
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.
Everything in this book may be wrong.
There was a Master come unto the earth, born in the holy land of Indiana,