In
the era of Vietnam and Civil Rights, a glorious spiritual awakening happened.
Richard Bach, a fighter pilot, captured the movement in writing with his story
of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, an international bestseller.
“For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered but flight.” And fly he did, power diving at speeds of over 200 miles an hour. But the elders in his flock banished him for doing things unbecoming of a seagull. In time, he was brought up into a higher realm by two pristine glowing seagulls, and he found other gulls there perfecting their flying.
There he met his master, Chiang. “Forget about faith,” Chiang instructed. “You didn’t need faith to fly, you needed to understand flying.” Perfect speed “isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light,” because “any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”
Chiang taught Jonathan how to transport himself instantly from one place to another, vanishing completely and reappearing in another place, in the exact same millisecond. Jonathan in turn taught another seagull, Fletcher, what Chiang had taught him, and together they tutored other seagulls, even returning to his old flock to give instructions. Yet he still encountered resistance from the elders. When Jonathan’s time came, he became completely transparent and “vanished into empty air.”
While author Richard Bach was out observing the flight of seagulls, he may not have noticed that he too was being watched as he flew his jet fighter plane; by a young ambitious seagull named Johann Earlington. Like the elder Jonathan, Johann, too, became fastest of all seagulls and, desiring perfection, he managed to crack the cosmic egg, flying up to the loftiest of all heavens. This is his story, forty years after.