Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Being a pilot by profession he mostly takes recourse in technical and scientific aspects of ‘flight’ to put his philosophy of life. He begins with physical description of his ‘flights’ and soon the reader starts having the glimpses of the deeper insights. That is though his novels seem to be talking about flights; they are in fact drenched with spiritual philosophy and ‘flight’ is just used as a metaphor to put forth his point. One is wonderstruck to see how amazingly the spiritual world enters his works which apparently seem to be describing aircrafts, their technical faults and his physical airplane flights. The beauty lies in the manner in which he has dealt with the subject of spirituality. He has brought about the diametrically opposed

The parable that he has dedicated to the present work is, “To the real Jonathan Seagull, who lives within us all.” As we all know that the seagulls generally glide over the sandy shores and soar over crests of waves and that they are happy flying low. Here, in this book, he introduces us to Jonathan, one of the many gulls from Breakfast Flock, a particular gull colony. Every day the flock tends to fight over food as they fly over the sea, fishing boats and dive for scraps of food. But Jonathan seem to be different from the rest. For him, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. He doesn’t understand the practicality of such monotonous daily routine. He had a passion, a passion to fly high, to soar high. So instead of fighting and screeching and living like the rest, he spends his time perfecting his flying skills. Even though his flock members detest him for being different, he doesn’t deter from his ambition. Finally one day he gets his breakthrough and becomes the first gull to reach the terminal velocity at 214 m.ph. and later flies the first acrobatics . In his excitement he runs to tell his flock that, “…there’s a reason to live! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!” (Jonathan Livingston Seagull, 5, hereafter

Here instead of making direct statement to express his philosophy, Bach uses ‘flight’ of a bird as a metaphor. Through this metaphor he lays stress on the fact that our aim in life should be to be true to the real Jonathan who lives within all of us and in doing so we should follow our own instincts. It does not matter if we choose a road less travelled. What matters is that we believe in ourselves, no matter what others think of us. And also we are never given a wish without having given the ability to fulfill it. Of course! We have to work hard for it!
In Illusions –The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, the unforgettable follow up to his phenomenal best seller Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard once again takes to air to discover ageless truth that makes our souls fly, showing that people don’t need airplanes to soar and that even the darkest clouds have meaning once we lift ourselves above them and that messiahs can be found in the unlikeliest places – the hay fields or on traffic lights and most of all deep within