Hypnotizing Maria

propeller lever eased back toward Decrease, dropping the belief of revolutions from 2,700 per minute back to 2,400 on the not-there tachometer. Cant trust vision or hearing or touch to teach me Real, they’re all part of my trance.
    Yet I know, that I live. That’s real. I am.
    Have ever been, came the whisper. Shall ever be.
    For all the fakery in now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t spacetime, he thought, for all its suggestions and misdirections, its assumptions and beliefs, for all its theories and laws and pretending we’re somebody we’re not, namely erect-walkers on the cooling surface of spherical melted stone, one of a dozen planets drawing forever-spirals about a continuous nuclear explosion in a pin-wheel galaxy in a fireworks universe; behind our mask, it’s Life that’s the never-born never-dying infinite eternal principle, and the real me is one not with dying fires but with It!
    Us on our little belief of a home; ancient aliens in their belief of star-flung civilizations; spirit-creatures from beliefs of afterlives and dreams of dimensions beyond; inside we’re all playing at symbols, we’re each of us the spark and flash of undying Real.
    He blinked at himself. What’s this I’m thinking? How do I know this stuff?
    It’s because you fly airplanes, Jamie . . .
    Oh, come on! That can't...
    . . . and because like everybody , it’s already within; you’ve known it all along. You're just deciding to remember ; along about now.
    Is it fun for you?
    Creating worlds? It’s fun, all right, doing it well. As you ... as we all find out when we realize it’s worlds were creating, every suggestion, image, statement, affirmation ...
    I’m going to find out?
    There’s no going back, unless you’re desperate for boredom.
    The pilot balanced on the edge of what he’d been waiting a lifetime to learn.
    Let me get this straight, he thought, tell me if I’m pointed in the right direction. Were floating around somewhere, we imagine a story that would be fun to live ...
    We’re not “floating around somewhere. ” Where’d you get that?
    ... we imagine our story, and so imagine ourselves into players who can act that story.
    We don’t need to be in any story, said his other self. But . . . OK for now . Go on.
    We create ourselves out of imagination, suggestions and ideas; we attract ourselves into an environment where lots of folks are in the kind of trance we want to be in.
    I shall remember that I created this world, that I can change and improve it by my own suggestion whenever I wish.
    We can steer our story any direction any time, but our belief in spacetime is our sea, it’s our stage, and soon as we forget we can change it, we live an uncreative trance instead of a creative one.
    “Creative trance.” That's very nice.
    We don't have bodies, we continuously imagine them. We become that which we constantly suggest to ourselves, sick or healthy, happy or hopeless, thoughtless or brilliant.
    He stopped, waited for feedback. Silence. Hello?
    I'm listening. Go on.
    That’s about it. That’s where I am right about now.
    That isn't where you are. You're way beyond that. But that's where you believe you are, and that's fine. Am I reading you right, dear mortal? You've just discovered your blue-feather wings; you've always had 'em inside, living your fantasy of flight. You're standing on a cliff a mile high, you're leaning forward, trusting, wings out, you're this minute losing your balance on the ground, hoping you’ll find it in the air ?
    Yes! Finding my balance in the air!
    Nice.
    That was the last word Jamie Forbes heard from his higher self for a while. He spent that time listening to what he had just said, himself.



CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
    B y the time the first raindrop of the first storm of the afternoon touched the ground, the T-34 was landed, fueled, rolled safely into its hangar. The pilot drove home in the rain, let flying go, savoring time ahead with Catherine, at last. So much to tell her, so much he wanted to hear what she’d say.
    He took the next day to remember what had happened on this trip, relived the flying, relived the listening and the ideas, put it down as much as he could, word for word. It came to seventy pages in the computer.
    His students waited, patient as condors.
    “What would you do,” he asked, next training flight in the little Cessna with Paolo Castelli, “if the rudder jammed?”
    “I’d steer with the ailerons.”
    “Show me.”
    Then, “What would you do