So many events, I’m finding now ideas that I should have learned in high school. When someone’s angry, for instance, I didn’t learn what one needs to say to them (except get away, to myself).
Now I’ve learned that the question for me, if not to the Angry One, is: What am I afraid of losing?
Anger is always fear. And fear is always about losing something that matters to us.
What Am I Afraid of Losing?
I am almost never angry, but when that happens and I ask what am I afraid of losing, there’s an answer right top of all that emotion. I’m going to lose my freedom; I’m going to lose my right to be by myself; I’m going to lose my independence; I’m going to lose the company of a friend.
When I answer what am I afraid of, my earth mind is quick and true: "I’m going to lose my . . ." and the answer is one or two words. I can explain those words or not, I can fight (which has never physically been necessary in my life) or flee, which I’ve done time and again, this lifetime.
Even while I was with the Air Force, the guns were never loaded to fire at human beings . . . just targets in the wilderness. While flying, I was never angry, nor can I remember any of the other pilots angry, either. We could be frightened, but never did it jump to angry.
That was a good thing to learn, no matter how late it came for me.
Nowadays, or Thenadays, something that threatened loved-one’s lives, or my own, would tick me off. Not so much now. Nothing threatens the one friend I care about, and as far as I can tell, nothing threatens my life, either.
After the Near-Death-Experience
There’s an odd thing that happens to most near-death-experiencers . . . they come back from dying and they’re no longer frightened of it. Maybe the definition of Death has changed for them. It has for me! It changed because there was nothing painful, waiting for me, I didn’t even realize I had died. The airplane crashed and I didn’t know it till a week or so later.
The illusion that I was making a wonderful soft landing on a farmer’s landing strip continued for a minute after the airplane was caught in the wires and slammed inverted onto the ground. I felt no crash, no sudden change in her flying.
I was a spirit pilot in a spirit airplane, both of us perfect. I had no shadow that anything was wrong until a week later, when I woke in a hospital bed, of all places.
Nowadays, something threatens to kill me, I’m not angry: "Oh, time to go home? Fine!" My bags are packed.
How is it that people hearing a medical verdict of death can keep from smiling? We’re all heading home, and sorrow is a mortal’s game, not a spirit’s. Try it. Shift into your spirit’s mind, right now, and ask if your spirit is sorrowful about dying.
What Can We Lose As Mortals?
What can we lose, here, as mortals? Our houses and airplanes, the things of our lives? Not necessary at home. Lose our lives? Funny . . . but impossible. Our friendships, our loves? Can’t lose love from dying. It may seem to end to a mortal survivor, but it’s there all at once, soon as they fly home.
A long time, being separated? Hardly. Take your memory of your life—does it seem a long time ago, when you were six or ten? It’s a few minutes gone in time.
Sure enough, our belief of days going forward in time is awfully slow, like a horizon we’re driving toward, in a car, while the past is lightning gone. The slow time is necessary for us to care for the details of the future.
Long waits to bear between friends? Not true at home . . . how often do dear departed friends tell us they can’t wait to see us again? As far as I know, never; while we mortals can miss them terribly, year after year.
The Belief in Death? It's Nothing!
A big change for me: since the crash, the belief of death is nothing!
If I were going to move through an arched doorway into a room of old friends, into a delight of beliefs, into a homecoming, would it seem like a strange event for me? Welcome, certainly; but strange? Not a moment! We’re there in a second, we don’t miss the ones who are connected to us, the ones who stay as mortals for a while . . . we’ll see them in dreams every night, which they mostly forget but we as spirit, never do.
The only times I’m afraid, now, is when I’ve forgotten home, and tune to the beliefs of mortals. And a mortal I guess I believe I shall be, for a while yet. Soon as I remember home, though, there’s no fear.
Mortality is a lonely place for a few of us. We live since most of us promised to hang on even when we found that home is infinitely to be preferred, but leaving here is not for a single second a sad event for us. Some things to do, and do them we shall, but going home? That’s a rainbow!
©2015 by Richard Bach.
Reprinted with permission of the author.
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Part-Time Angels: and 75 Others
by Richard Bach.
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About the Author
A former USAF pilot, gypsy barnstormer and airplane mechanic, Richard Bach is the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions, One, The Bridge Across Forever, and numerous other books. Most of his books have been semi-autobiographical, using actual or fictionalized events from his life to illustrate his philosophy. In 1970, Jonathan Livingston Seagull broke all hardcover sales records since Gone with the Wind. It sold more than 1,000,000 copies in 1972 alone. A second book, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, was published in 1977. Visit Richard's website at www.richardbach.com
