When I was little, my teacher brought me a present, the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull and it was one of the best books I ever read. It talks about freedom and the way back to your true self, which is by my understanding limited by the illusion of this material world we live in. I still remember my feeling while I was reading that book back then being little with a free mind from notions and the complex thoughts I earned while growing up and being part of the society of “mature people”. Nowadays being “mature” I still remember this book and keep it in my heart. It inspires me a lot and I created a series of jewellery dedicated to the story of Jonathan Seagull.
“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.” “We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.”
“You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that 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.”
“Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.”
“For most gulls it was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.” “Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand!”
“We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.”
“You don’t love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That’s what I mean by love.”
“What are we trying to practice everyday? If our friendship depends on things like space and time, we’ve destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don’t you think that we might see each other once or twice?”
“To begin with, you’ve got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself.”
“Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip,” Jonathan would say, other times, “is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too.”
“You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way.”
“To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.”
“Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect.”
Jonathan Livingston Seagull was always learning and practicing his flight, flying so hard to achieve perfection. But because he was different from the rest of the other seagulls he was sent away to live as an outcast. He later attained perfection.
Through the words of that book you can fly away to the amazing journey inside yourselves to the real world and see the true picture of the existence without the limits of our thoughts!
Natalia Basdeki
