Not just airplanes. All tests.
Why are you so confident, when I'm not?
Since you just bought a suggestion that you're not, I'll tell you why. I'm confident because I don't wonder if what I see around me are my own beliefs. I know they are. I know I bring them to me for important reasons. With your permission, I'll fill the Confident square for a bit, till you're comfortable doing it on your own.
Thank you, but . . .
But what? Are you planning to put a negative in that blank?
The pilot was not known for being slow of mind. He dropped “. . . I'll never be able to do this all the time” like a hot turkey.
Thank you, but . . . I don't need your help.
He sensed amusement from his higher self.
Good. Let me know if ever you do. 'Bye.
It felt a little lonely, his new friend gone.
“It does not feel lonely!” he said aloud. Not gone at all, but just met. Finding selves in high places, that feels fine, and they answer when I call.
The confidence he pretended flared into confidence he felt, his second instant healing of the day. Something had changed within Jamie Forbes. All this talk of Hypnotism by Culture was no empty play of words. The more he examined the idea the more he saw for himself it was true.
Answers to every question shall come to me in some clear way, including quick and unexpected, and from within.
The airplane slanted up through the top of the haze layer at four-thousand five, whisking by popcorn clouds dreaming giant futures. For a second its shadow fell on a layer of white mist, airplane silhouette in sharp black light, centered in a halo of technicolor rainbow, full-circle round.
Oh, my, the pilot thought. Flying airplanes, you get eye-pictures like this, half-second snapshots you carry forever. What a life!
The word on the blackboard, he remembered; isn't that interesting, the word from his dream. He puzzled a bit, why Life solitary, all others erased?
Do we have to tell you?
Hello again.
You wanted to know what's real, remember?
Since everything else is suggestions and appearances, yes, I did. Oh. Life? Life's real?
Level at five-thousand five, his thought-form 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. Can't trust vision or hearing or touch to teach me Real, they're all part of my t
rance.
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 foreverspirals about a continuous nuclear explosion in a pinwheel 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.