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Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull and, a few years later, Illusions were formative books for me. They are perfect for newcomers to life on the path and yet have much to say to those with decades of experience. Anyone who has not read them has a treat in store. In Illusions there are many references to the Messiah’s Handbook, but it existed only in that book and in that place from which inspiration flows. I was surprised and delighted to find that Richard has come out with the Messiah’s Handbook. I was even more excited at the opportunity to have the following conversation with him.

—Guy Spiro

Guy Spiro: Richard, I’ve wanted to talk with you since I first read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, way back in ’71 or ’72. In those days, there was so little along these lines that I wondered where your inspiration came from.

Richard Bach: Seagull came from deep within me and was one of the first things I ever wrote. Like any new writer, I was surrounded by walls of self-consciousness. “Let’s be careful that the grammar is correct. What if I say something and they call me a fool? Oh God, that would be horrible, so I must be very careful and dip my quill in purple ink, and write one word at a time.”

Then a strange thing happened. I discovered that I couldn’t hold a job. I could stay at a job about nine months, then go mad with boredom and quit. I’d learned in a class in high school that I could write stories that people would pay me money for, so I stepped on that raft, which sank pretty quickly. I wrote a lot of stories and didn’t sell very many.

Then one night I was out walking and worrying how I was going to survive. “What am I going to do in this world?” I heard a voice, what seemed to be a voice, and it said, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” It said it just that way, kind of off-handed, and I was very frightened. I knew I was alone. I turned around into the night where I heard the voice come from and there was nobody there. I figured the voice may have been looking for someone else, and then I heard it again on my next walk. I said, “What? What does this mean?” and there was nothing. There was just the silence of the wind and leaves. I went home and locked the door of my office and said, “If you’re trying to say something that means something to me, honestly, I don’t understand. Please tell me.” And I saw nothing but the blank wall in front of my desk.

Just at about the point when I was going to give up, the wall disappeared and in its place there was a wide screen IMAX motion picture. There was a little seagull flying alone, way above the sea, very much like one of the first photographs in the book and I said, “That obviously has to be Jonathan Livingston Seagull and this is probably not just for my entertainment. You say you’re a writer Richard, well write!” So I grabbed a green ballpoint pen and wrote on the back of some stationery someone had given us. I wrote as fast as I could, not caring whether I was a fool or not, not caring about grammar or structure. The self-consciousness was not there. I just raced to keep up with the story that I saw and the dialogue that I heard. I did not invent Jonathan Livingston Seagull. By some stroke of absolute luck, I had the good sense to not question and just write. I wrote until my hand hurt and I was pressing on and it got to the point where he was being thrown out of the flock about two thirds of the way through part one, and some discarnate tripped over the power cord to the projector and the screen vanished. There was my wall.

I was not ready for that at all. I said, “Thanks very much whoever, whatever you are, you got me started. I know this is going to be absolutely great. I really appreciate the help.” I thought I was off and running. I put my pen to the paper again and nothing happened. What would Jonathan do if he was being thrown out of the flock for this crazy flying? I had no idea. So I put this thing away in a folder marked Manuscripts—Unfinished and said, “That was the strangest thing in my life. I’ve never dreamed anything like that.”

It bothered me. It was on my mind for several months and then, in time, I forgot about it. I was back to writing stories for aviation magazines. I managed to survive as an aviator and writer. Eight years later and about 1500 miles away, at five o’clock in the morning, wham, covers flying, out of bed, that’s what happened to the seagull! All of a sudden, there was the end of the story. I flew out of bed and went to the electric typewriter, instead of the green ballpoint pen, and I wrote as fast as I could. I knew when you’re writing as fast as you can, you’re probably writing pretty well. Of course, that’s how the story had to end. Then there was a part two, just wham, wham, wham. I just absolutely loved this little guy. By then, I had published three books with Harper and Row and I thought, they’re going to love this. I sent it off and got the fastest rejection I ever got in my life.

GS: It was not like anything they’d seen before.

RB: “Richard, not a talking seagull, how about a nice book on aeronautics for children?” It was another test, how much did I believe in my story? I said, “I believe in it a lot. I’m going to send it out again. I’ll show them.” I sent it to everyone I knew in publishing and they all sent it back. Last ditch, I got an agent. I sent it to Don Gold at William Morris Agency. He said, “What a nice little story, I’ll send it out.” And everyone he knew sent it back. Finally the day came when I trudged out the little gravel road to the mailbox and I had two pieces of mail. One was the manuscript and the letter from Don Gold, “Richard, I like your little story, but nobody else in Manhattan does. Maybe it’s time to move on. What else do you have?” The other piece of mail was from Eleanor Frieda, an editor at McMillan, that said, “Dear Richard Bach, I read a couple of your books and find them not completely objectionable, would you happen to have a manuscript not committed to another publisher? I’d like to see it.” It was one of those major starburst turning points in one’s lifetime. I knew standing there by the roadside that this was some kind of direction as if it said, “OK, we see you’ve tried hard enough, let’s give you a little hand here.” I’d never had an editor say, “I want to see something that you’ve written.”

The manuscript went out speed-of-light to New York, and Eleanor Frieda loved it. She wrote me that she wanted to publish it and I told her that it had already been rejected at McMillan. She stormed into an editorial meeting and asked, “Who rejected this?” They said, “Rejected what? Oh, is that the talking seagull?” She got all over them and said, “We are going to publish this. You may not get it, but a whole lot of people are going to. Sit there and be quiet.” She made such a thing in the meeting that they said “OK, Eleanor, publish your little seagull book, but do it cheap.” She called me back and asked if I’d take a low advance. I said I’d take no advance. So we agreed on $5,000 and she said, By the way how are you going to illustrate it?” I said, “Illustrate? Does it need illustration?

This was really my introduction to the amazing guidance that so many of us feel and grow more and more reliant upon. I went to New York to talk with her about it and stayed at the studio of Russell Munson. We had done some barnstorming stories together and he was an excellent photographer. I told him that I’d sold the seagull story and needed some illustrations, but didn’t know where to get them. He said, “What about photographs?” I said, “We can’t afford one day of your day rate and we need to illustrate a whole book.” He went over to his refrigerator and took out this big box of contact sheets, 36 shots per sheet of seagulls. Russell! What?! He said, “Well, two or three years ago, I was doing some photography with Wingate Paine and he said I’ll pay your expenses for two weeks, go out and shoot whatever you want, and I felt like shooting seagulls. I’ve never done anything with the photographs, they’ve just sat here.” I looked through them and they worked. I didn’t know that seagull’s feathers ruffled when they stall out or even that they had the courage to stall. Here was this little bird and you could see the feathers ruffling. I grabbed the photographs and went over to McMillan and said, “There are the illustrations.”

That was my first sense that there is a song that I’m on this planet to sing. I hear the notes when I listen to my deepest self. Gradually, over time, I got to trust that more and more and I realized that the self-conscious writer had been absolutely wrong. It’s our foolishness that is the gift that we give to the world. That crazy stuff. It seems so strange in a world that, on the surface, is so ferocious and so uncaring of who we are. It has so many problems and it’s so delightedly concerned with death and destruction. But that’s all tissue paper. Behind it is our chance to express who we really are. To live to our very highest sense of right, no matter what seems to be around us. From that it was not much of a jump to recognize that this is a world that seems to be. We don’t create our own reality. Reality is divinely indifferent to all our little games and beliefs. But we do have the power to create our own appearances, and those we create in abundance. They seem so real. And yet, watch, change our thought, withdraw our consent from any environment we’re in and sooner or later that environment will change.

GS: There’s this story about you a few months after Seagull was published. I’ve wondered if it’s true.

RB: It’s essentially true. McMillan was very cautious. Their first printing was only 5,000 copies, but a strange thing happened. It spread by word of mouth. For a while, I put a classified ad for autographed books in an aviation newspaper. By that time I was becoming fairly well known in aviation from other books. “And here’s a book you may be interested in, send me $5 and an envelope and I’ll send it back.” Then I noticed that the same person that I sent the book out to would write me again and say, send me two more. In time, I stopped doing that, but there’s a phenomenon there of a few people liking those ideas and finding those ideas were a reflection of what their own intuition had been whispering to them.

GS: The paradigm of the brotherhood, the elders and all of that. Had you been reading Theosophical Society books?

RB: Not at that time. Later on I did. I read The Initiate. It was the first book that I read that referred to that brotherhood. It was set in the ’20s, and it’s the story of this person who could do remarkable things but was dismayed when people would say, “Show us, float in the air.” But to this day I have my doubts about any hierarchy that’s binding. That startled me in Seagull. It talked about a fairly direct connection that we as individuals have. As we follow what we most love in all the world, we learn the nature of reality. That which calls us comes through. That magnetism itself has the answers we’ve been seeking.

The elders in Seagull are very conventional. They, to me, were antagonists to this free spirit that was Jonathan. I, like many people, had the sense that I somehow just didn’t fit into the world around me. So Jonathan’s message, as I saw it, was disregard elders. Disregard anyone who suggests to you something that you know intuitively not to be so.

GS: Seven years after Seagull you came out with Illusions. When my older daughter Annie was eighteen, she wanted to get a tattoo and I was somewhat dubious. But if an eighteen year old wants to get a tattoo, she’s going to get one. She came home with a blue feather on the outside of her left ankle.

[laughter] [There is a blue feather on the cover of Illusions. —Ed.]

RB: If you’ve gotta have a tattoo ...

GS: I just had nothing negative to say about it. So I’m not the only member of my family who is a fan of yours. I really love the very short story in the first chapter of Illusions, about the little creatures in the river. It seems to me that if one were to read that story, and get it, the rest of the book is hardly necessary. [see sidebar]

RB: You are absolutely right, and I don’t think anyone’s ever made that comment to me. The story is a prediction for everyone who decides, “I don’t know where this current is going to take me, but I trust it and it’s better than the anguish of living other people’s dictums of how I ought to live.” You just guarantee that, yes, you’re going to be bashed around for awhile. It’s going to be difficult times. You’ll say, why is this idea, this current that I so believed in, why has it forsaken me? Why is it giving me these hard times? It just seems that that’s part of the test. Do you give your consent to the appearances around you, or do you give your consent to the underlying force that says appearances are for your learning and you will learn to transcend appearances. Be patient, live to your highest sense of right, and watch what happens. Sure enough, after awhile, you’re not bashed around quite so much, and odd coincidences ... anyone who’s walked this path knows there’s no such thing as a coincidence. We bring these events to us by where we put our thoughts. The universe somehow always seems to have a little smile. Like when I stood out there at the road and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Here’s the rejection of my little story that meant so much to me, and furthermore the pronouncement that it would never sell. But in the same mail somebody said essentially, “I’m looking for the manuscript that you’ve got in your other hand.”

GS: There is no coincidence, only synchronicity.

RB: We launch ourselves on the current of that synchronicity and there is nothing that can stop us except ourselves. We can quit and say we despise the current, and choose to cling again and spend our days in the sand at the bottom of the river. If we want to do that, we’re free to.

GS: Over the years I’ve come to think of myself as an essentialist. I’m interested in the essence. For my money, Illusions is as close to the essence as anything else out there. It’s the perfect “newbie” book, being so simple and yet really touching the essence of what all of the different paths lead to.

RB: Thank you. I have to find out if a story is for me to write. I try to run away from it and it follows me down dark alleys. I jump into a trash can and I hear a knocking on the lid. I look out and here’s this story saying, “I will stay, no matter where you go, no matter what you do, until your write me down.” Then it’s time to write. I had this long conversation with Donald Shimoda [the reluctant Messiah in Illusions]. Again the story was vivid. I was talking back and forth with him and I remember specifically when I asked, ‘How do you get to be a messiah?” I was typing away, and I had a little smile and thought this is going to be interesting. And there was no answer. I got up and went to the kitchen and got a pretzel or something and as I got around the side of the desk, wham, there was the answer. “They give you a book to read!” Crazy, come on, and wham I was out there writing at high speed again. He was taking me off balance in a way I love to be taken off balance in any book that I read. I have an idea of how the story is going to go. When you shift, I have this little intake of breath, oh, that’s where you’re going, and then it shifts again. I was trying to pin Donald Shimoda down and he didn’t want to be pinned down. “Is it as simple as you’re saying, Donald? Believe you’re a master and you are one? As you link your spirit to your highest, all of a sudden you will have understandings that you didn’t know you had before? All of a sudden you will have abilities that you didn’t know you had before? Is that all there is to it?” “Yep, that’s all there is.” He remains a very close and very dear friend of mine, and of course, to a lot of other people, too. Because of him, I stopped defining a human being as someone who has a body. He doesn’t have a body. Humanity is the essence of who we are. It’s something that we earn. It’s not something we’re just handed when we enter in this lifetime.

GS: I’m not the first to say it, but we’re not physical beings with a spiritual potential. We’re spiritual beings having a physical experience.

RB: Absolutely right, and we can modify that physical as an absolute perfect expression of our thoughts. Our physical body is a perfect expression of our thoughts about “physical body” with all of its joys and flaws. If we want to change it, we can.

GS: The physical plane is far more malleable than it appears.

RB: In fact, according to my intuition, it doesn’t exist at all. Look at the comparison between the world of appearances and the world of the hypnotist. It’s almost an exact parallel. We’ve seen the demonstration of hypnotism where there’s someone on stage that has had a suggestion that she is surrounded by a brick wall. The harder she pushes the more she finds it impossible to break through. The audience smiles and we see this poor person struggling to push through a wall that’s not there. She believes it’s there and is limited for as long as that belief lasts. With a snap of the fingers the belief vanishes and so does the wall. The same thing is true for us. I believe we’ve been hypnotized since we were tiny infants. Daddy walks through a door, he never walked through a wall. Oh, a wall is supposed to limit me.

GS: The Buddhists will tell you that the physical plane is Maya. And they’re right. Yet, when you stub your toe, it hurts.

RB: If you believe that it hurts. If you’re in a different state, such as hypnotized, you will not feel the needle going through your palm. I’ve been there. I did not feel it. That was another thing that reminded me I’m the one who controls pain or pleasure. No matter what, I am in control of that. I am the one who gave my consent to all of the beliefs, and there are a ton of default beliefs, simply because I haven’t examined them carefully. I know for instance that we don’t need to breathe to express life. There are all kinds of dimensions in which life is being expressed without oxygen being cycled. Yet, here I am on the phone, breathing, and making sounds in the air in order to communicate with you. I know that’s not necessary, but that’s where my belief system happens to be in this moment. I’m working my way through it like we all are.

GS: Your understanding seems to have grown a lot in between the publication of Seagull and Illusions. Were you influenced by any reading or teachings? Or did Illusions come out through you the same way Jonathan did?

RB: Not the same way, because I was no longer a beginner, and I knew that my craziness was what I had to author. What sounds crazy, very often, I’ve found, has wonderful truth behind it. So I needed the touch of this character, I needed somebody who knew that path. I don’t know how long my subconscious or inner being was working on this. I’ve reached the point now that everything that I write is up to this inner being. When it’s ready it taps me on the shoulder and lets me know. All of a sudden, there was Jonathan. All of a sudden, there was one sentence that absolutely caught my heart, “What would it be like to be the best friend of the savior of the world?” What would that be like? All of a sudden, all my own experience, my own vocabulary, my own flying, everything I knew was focused down onto that, the way I would perceive what it would be like.

Well, let me see, what do I know? I’d fly passengers for $3 a ride and I’m going to have him appear in my world. He’ll know my world and he’ll know other worlds, too. What will he say? Well, he’s not going to be dressed in robes and funny hats. He’s going to be a person, very straight, and he’s going to be very eager to communicate.

What do you know about Messiahs, Richard? You know that everybody comes flocking to them and expects them to do our thinking for us and healing for us. Boy, that’s got to be wearing. So have him quit his job. He’s turned in his keys. The more I thought about that, of course I’m writing all this time, the more I’m swept up in this dear character who I so love still today. I just listened to what he’d say.

Where did that come from? Well, it didn’t come from a philosophy. It didn’t come from a religion. It came from a world that we all glimpse. We either turn our head and watch or we turn away and stay lost in the world of appearances that says you’re just a pawn in the big scheme of things. Just sit there, be quiet, don’t eat much and maybe we’ll let you stay until some power with a sword cuts you down. I don’t like that world. I don’t believe in that world. I believe we are absolutely indestructible beings of light and there are two things we can’t do. We can’t create reality and we can’t destroy it. We can’t die. It’s not in our capacity to die, but we can believe we can in any number of ways, horribly gory or delightfully peaceful, however we want to. We can believe that, but as soon as you read the literature of near death and supposed discarnates, we wake to a new understanding of what life is.

GS: It’s a transition.

RB: Exactly right, so why call it death when it isn’t death? The dictionary says death is a complete cessation of consciousness. No! No way. I don’t buy that. But I’ll buy a transition, and furthermore, why not buy a transition on the highest of terms? Why do we have to wait until we’re dragged out of this lifetime by sickness or accidents or war or something like that? Why not decide, I’ve been here for a while, I’ve accomplished what I’ve wanted to accomplish? My mission is complete. I’ve said what I want to say. And now, in perfect health, I choose to make this transition, I choose to leave this body. I wish you well, have great adventures, and I’ll see you again some other time. As you know, there are adepts who are advanced souls who do exactly that.

GS: I was always intrigued in Illusions, with the Messiah’s Handbook. I really wanted to get a peek at that book, but I have to say I never thought you’d actually come out with it.

RB: I didn’t think so either. But in time, the more I wrote, the more I thought. You know what it’s like, very often you’ll get very startling, lovely ideas succinctly said. I don’t know where they come from. I am open to ideas. I love maxims and all those little things. So, if our inner self knows that we really like maxims, OK. Let’s hand out some maxims that will please and delight and, furthermore, that will be practical and that we can use in daily life. These little notes and scraps, over a period of time, built up, and what was I going to do with them? They have found their way into every book I’ve written. They are all part of that inner handbook that I have, and that we all have, that offers these things to us when we ask. If we ask, we get them. If we don’t ask, we don’t get them.

GS: My favorite line from Messiah’s Handbook is: “The original sin is to limit the Is. Don’t.” I love that!

RB: That’s very rare. Nobody has mentioned that one before. That, to me, was extremely powerful.

GS: It’s very close to essence.

RB: I realized soon after Messiah’s Handbook was published how important the subtitle is, “Reminders for Advanced Souls.” An advanced soul, I think, is someone that realizes we have an agenda beyond the appearances of this world. This book is not subtitled a Skeptics Guide, or a Cynics Manual. If you don’t believe that the answers you need are already within you, this is not the book for you. In the writing of Illusions, when this amazing idea that Shimoda had that he just took for granted, “of course, they give you this little book to read.” When that came up, it just floored me. I almost never feel that I’m the author of a book. I wrote it, but author as inventor feels very strange to me. I see the story, I’m part of the story, and as I’m part of it, my fingers are moving on the keyboard. So these things kind of came out of nowhere. Did I write that? That is really interesting.

GS: I used to use the term channeling before channeling became channeling.

RB: I am a conduit for information that comes from a different level of me. Whether that level is connected with everybody else’s level, that’s a really interesting thing to consider, but I know for sure that it’s not the conscious me that’s out there saying, how am I going to pay the rent? It’s some part that does not care about the rent. It says you‘ve got a much more important rental to work with and that’s the rental of your belief of this time, of the belief of this planet. How are you going to express light and love around you now? That’s all that level cares about. If we don’t recognize that level is there, and we don’t care about it, that’s OK, we’ll just get silence. But if once and awhile we ask, what are we here for, what is my highest sense of right, that level will come back with an answer.

GS: Well, there was this one really famous guy who said something like, ask and it shall be answered, seek and you shall find.

RB: It seems like a misty, lofty thought, but it is practically very true. Writers know that. You know that. Where do ideas come from? The more you write, the more you listen to that part within that says, “Here’s a really interesting thing to write about.” The more that part says, “Oh, he’s serious. OK, I’ll get him some more.” I’ve collected these things over time since Illusions, and as I would write other books, they would be there. So I went through all the books and said how many times has this happened to me? It turned into Messiah’s Handbook. There are over 200 things in there and they all came from that level. As far as I know, the book does not respond to questions about appearances. Is my 401k going to outperform the Dow Jones average by more than 10% this year? What should I do about my wardrobe? I haven’t tried it on those things, but I suspect you probably won’t get really good answers. I think it reminds us of what we need to know on the highest levels, the issues that pertain to our spiritual well being. What do I need to remember as I begin this day, this adventure? There is a default mode. Let your mind go completely blank, open the book and that level of you will choose something for you to remember or think about.

[Instructions for using the Messiah’s Handbook, from the introduction: Hold question in mind, close eyes, open handbook at random, pick left page or right. Eyes open, read answer. —Ed.]

GS: How would you describe the essence?

RB: The essence for me is that we’re not helpless in this world. We can remember what we’ve known all along. This world leaps up and down in front of us like monkeys in a cage. It says look at me, look over here, look at this disaster, look at this funny thing, but don’t listen to that stillness within you because we want your attention out here. To me, it is so important to remember that whenever we get a little bored with the monkey, we can stop the whole show and turn within. Here is this warm, gentle, forever light that says I am love and so are you. Our greatest joy is to shine that love across the world in which we find ourselves. That is the essence. We are always in a safe harbor even though our eyes are telling us there’s this vast storm. It may appear that you’re going to be destroyed, you’re going to die and the world’s going to blow up. But the light within says what world? There’s only one world and that world is Me, You, I, Us, Love, this magnificent principle of the Is. That’s all there ever was. All that ever will be.

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