Learning the Importance of Attitude
FLYING IS EASY
Flying an airplane is one of my most favorite things to do. The last time around I had a very short, but intense lifetime flying airplanes. We played a game. It was an intense game, a deadly game, but while we played it was an incredible amount of fun. I had a very good run, but I had not contracted to live beyond the duration of the game. All things pass in time.
In this life I have about one hundred hours in Piper Cherokees and I have flown a few Cessnas, but for the most part flying airplanes hasn’t come together for me. There could be several factors here. Intense experiences make intense impressions in the subliminal structure of one’s consciousness. There is a part of me that has trouble with the thought of flying an airplane that does not mount at least two machineguns. Interesting how something can be so vitally important in one lifetime and socially unacceptable in the next. To this very day I dearly love the airplanes I got to fly.
Riding a motorcycle has for now taken the place of flying an airplane. In many ways they are similar. Unfortunately, I prefer to ride at speeds that, if one is not on a racetrack, are socially unacceptable. Living in the wind at eighty or ninety miles per hour, flying at whatever speed the road will allow and the bike can do is an incredible rush. Of course, if one does that very much without a great deal of discretion, one will soon be talking to an official type who has no velocity in his soul whatsoever. Velocity is the essence of life. Remember that, VELOCITY IS THE ESSENCE OF LIFE.
VELOCITY IS THE VERY ESSENCE OF LIFE
On a motorcycle there are several conditions one lives in. These conditions are directly related to how fast you are going. Let’s consider a road with no traffic. There is only you, the bike and the road. Below ten miles per hour you have to pay close attention to keeping the bike balanced. As speed increases the bike becomes more stable and riding is easier and more fun. When riding a motorcycle, I do nothing else but ride the bike. I enjoy the velocity, stay focused and ride. At some speed on a bike you feel as though you are flying. It isn’t the same speed every day, but it makes the velocity envelope real.
An airplane without velocity can be several things. It can be a work of art. It can be a pile of junk, but it is only an airplane when it has achieved and maintains the velocity of flying speed.
MEDITATION WITHOUT VELOCITY DOESN’T GO ANYPLACE
If you are not looking to go someplace or accomplish something, sitting quietly has many benefits. But flying in meditation can pay incredible rewards and give you a grip on life beyond the limitations of the planet, the star, the galaxy, and even beyond the limitations of this universe. Flying in meditation is much more fun than airplanes or motorcycles, and if you learn how to navigate, it can go to a real place. A real place that is far more real than this place.
Thirty years ago I took flying lessons, and while I learned a lot about flying and about airplanes, what I really learned the most about was meditation. In many ways meditating is much like driving a car, riding a motorcycle, or flying an airplane. In the first place, if you sit in the seat and do nothing, nothing is going to happen. If you relax enough, you may get inner vision. This can occur on several astral levels. But the point is, doing nothing produces nothing. Driving a car, riding a motorcycle, or flying an airplane is a discipline. Each of these has a logical sequential progression one must follow, or nothing good is going to happen.
Meditation is the same way, except there are a number of things one can do that seem to produce results. Basically the things to do all take about the same amount of time, but the results can be incredibly different.
If you are driving a car, operating a motorcycle, or at the controls of an airplane, you are the most important person in relation to that vehicle. Your physical body is also a vehicle. If you are not the most important person in your life, you do not have command of own vehicle. With the keys in your pocket, get into the back seat of your car and close the door. Now pray to all the powers you know of, and the car in particular, to take you where you want to go. This is little different than many types of meditation.
For a long time I thought Sound Current was the engine in the car. Eventually I learned Sound Current is only the gasoline running into the tank. If you are practicing devotion to another being, you are directing the value you generate in meditation directly into their gas tank. A vehicle with an empty gas tank isn’t going anyplace, unless a hill is in the offering.
In the late 1960’s I was working for the Agriculture Department of Humboldt County in northern California. My physical life seemed to be going fairly well, but meditation had settled down to the same old thing every day. I was doing two hours a day at this time, and about the last fifteen minutes I would get vision, but the pictures didn’t make much sense. I was getting very frustrated with the whole thing. Every once in a while, sometimes in meditation, sometimes in my workaday life, I would hear a voice say to me, “You are a bird.” With nothing else to do in meditation, I tried to figure out what kind of a bird I was. Certainly coming out of meditation I often felt more like a chicken than a hawk.
Listen carefully to what life has to tell you. Listen carefully to what life runs by you. Life can answer your most pressing questions, but you must learn how to listen.
My partner and I were sitting in the coffee shop at the Arcata airport taking a break one morning. We seldom took breaks and never on a very nice day. As I recall, we had met a couple of other fellows from the Department and in talking to them, Charlie, my partner, asked one of the fellows if he liked coffee. The mark admitted he liked it a lot. Charlie bet him five bucks that there was a restaurant nearby in which he could not drink more than one cup of coffee. The mark shook hands on it and we proceeded to the Arcata airport coffee shop. I doubt if there is any formula that will produce a worse cup of coffee than they made at that airport café in those days. The mark took one sip of the coffee, hauled out his wallet and gave my partner the five bucks.
While all this was going on, there were a few other men in the coffee shop. Two of them were obviously pilots. They were not drinking coffee, and I could overhear much of their conversation about flying. Then one said to the other, “Well, let’s go get the bird and fly to Redding.”
Bird!! Oh, that kind of a bird. Many pilots refer to their airplane as a bird. Here I was trying to figure out how to flap my wings and what I really needed to figure out was how to run the engine. You are a bird, but if you flap your wings very much at all you may break the spar. Comparing meditation to flying an airplane has taught me many valuable lessons, but by far the most valuable lesson has been …
ATTITUDE
The airplane I learned to fly in sat on its landing gear slightly nose down. This resulted in the wing having a negative attitude in relation to the wind passing over it. It didn’t matter how fast it went down the runway, the airplane would not fly off until the pilot raised the nose enough for the wings to get a bite of the prevailing wind. Some airplanes sit on their landing gear in a slightly nose up position and their wings are in a positive position. These aircraft will fly off the active runway just by putting power to the engine and keeping it straight. Just as much as flying an airplane involves attitude, getting off in meditation involves attitude.
If you really want to get off in meditation, forget about Masters, gurus, Great gurus and all that stuff. Get a Calvin and Hobbs cartoon book or read Tumbleweeds or Hagar the Horrible until you get a good laugh out of them. Then holding that glee, plug in and ride on that attitude. There is a lot more “up” in humor than there ever was in devotion. Learn how to push on the Sound Current and that will put more power to your engine. Establish the fun factor first and your airplane should fly off by itself.
Remember, if you are not having fun,
You’re doing it wrong.
