Illusions

Today, I finished reading a fantastic book called Illusions by Richard Bach.

For any of you who haven't read it, I would highly recommend it.

There are a lot of little excerpts from a companion book called The Messiah's Handbook which is featured heavily in Illusions.  All of the little... I guess you'd call them "lessons" really spoke to me in one way or another, and a lot of them interconnected, in my opinion.  So I just want to talk about them a little bit and try to make sense of the meaning I took from the story.   Regardless of how the book ended, and my general feelings on the subject matter before the plot...twists (I'm not going to say what happens) this book made me really think about myself, my life, and what I want to do with the time I have here.

Your only 
obligation in any lifetime
is to be true to yourself. 
Being true to anyone else or 
anything else is not only
impossible, but the 
mark of a fake
messiah.

In Illusions, the "messiah," Don Shimoda, frequently asserts that people need to be their own messiah.  Or rather, he implies it when he tells Richard (the other protagonist) that everyone has the power to do what Shimoda himself can do, they just have to learn to use it.  So I guess that the "mark of a fake messiah" doesn't necessarily have to mean performing miracles, because though people have the potential to perform their own personal miracles, they often don't, instead looking for someone to easily save or cure them.  The simpler things that one can do to be one's own messiah involve being true to oneself, making oneself happy, and so on.

I had a difficult time with the idea of making oneself happy for a while.  Shimoda has actually quit being the one and only messiah at the beginning of the book, having been told "I command that you be happy in the world as long as you live."  For some reason, it seemed a selfish notion to me, as if "being true to yourself" meant "living only for yourself without a care for others."  Then I realized that the point is not that one should be selfish in one's happiness, rather one should never sacrifice what will make one happy, no matter what other people may want or expect.  If people have the ability to save themselves, there's no need for anyone to be anyone else's savior.

For a long time now, I've felt like I've been an observer in my own life, and a tentative observer at that.  The kind of person who comes to class every day, does the reading, and pays attention, but never raises her hand to speak, even though she's sure she knows the answer.  I have a lot of desires and impulses that I squelch within myself because I'm afraid of how people will react if I just learn to let go.

I am tired of clinging.  Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going.  I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.

When I read this at the very beginning of the book, I was struck by how much the creature reminded me of myself, as corny as that sounds.  I easily dismissed the idea, however, because I, like the other creatures, was convinced that boredom was worth safety.  My paradigm shift really didn't come until I read the first aforementioned passage.

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.  I'd been wondering about this idea for quite some time before I actually read it.  I wondered who I was really servicing in holding back pieces of myself and my desires from my friends, family, and acquaintances.  I thought that if this life is the only time that I have to do what I want to do, and when I die I will inevitably be forgotten by the world as those I know also die, then the only thing that should matter to me is doing what I want to do with my life, regardless of my fear of the consequences.

Just in the last few days (right before I read Illusions, and then after I read that particular passage) I have had what some might call a case of the f*ckits, but really, I'm just letting myself be free and follow my impulses.  And it's fantastic.   It's not like I've done anything crazy.  In the last two weeks or so I have not, in fact, skydived or given up college to become a traveling troubador.  I have, however, told people what I think and feel for the most part, when before I would have just kept my mouth shut.  And for me that is a big step.

Anyway, I'm sure I will want to write more about this incredible book later... it's really one of "those" books, the kind that stick with you forever and make you look at things with this sort of poetic sadness that weighs heavy on your brain and makes you want to write sappy poetry about the beauty of life until you snap out of it and walk around in a general literature daze.  This is just the beginning of me trying to dissect my feelings on the material.  Hopefully it was coherent and I didn't get redundant or anything.  Who knows.  I have run on something like 7 hours of sleep in the last three days combined.

Look at me, making excuses.

Argue for your limitations,
and sure enough,
they're 
yours.

Goodnight, internetworld.