Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Practice makes perfect. But are we machines that we are striving for perfection? Shouldn't it be practice makes better. The more we practice, the better we get.

Good morning fellow toastmasters. Today I want to share the story of Jonathan Livingston, a seagull. Seagulls are not known for their flying. but Jonathan wanted to fly. 

He wanted to push the boundaries of what flying meant. So he practiced day and night. The first thought in this head when he woke up was to find way to fly better and fly faster. He spent his days just doing that. This obsession with flying made it difficult for him to fit in with his flock. Where his parents and siblings were content in finding food, Jonathan loved flying for its own sake. This attitude of his made him a suspect, his parents pressured him to conform to society.

This lack of support and after a lot of failures Jonathan decided to quit and live the life of an ordinary seagull. At this point he had a vision, an epiphany: if he few on his wing tips he could fly faster. Jonathan was able to attain a speed of over 200 miles per hour. Jonathan is overjoyed, he returns to his flock, excited and eager. He wants to share his knowledge with his flock, but to his dismay, the flock kicked him out. Now he was an outcast shunned by this community.

Jonathan thought, by learning to fly, seagulls could lift themselves out of ignorance, and find themselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. If we could learn to fly, we could be free! What he had hoped for his flock, he gained for himself, and he was not sorry for what he had lost. Boredom, fear and anger are the reasons that a person's life is short and with those gone he can live a long infinite life.

One day a pair of gulls came to take him to another realm where he could be with his own kind. So, this is heaven, he thought. Heaven was just another plane of existence. A place where he was understood. He could continue to grow and learn. But this place seemed empty. "Where is everybody?" Jonathan, the place where you are at only one-in-a-million make it here. Countless of lives have gone through before we even got the first idea that is there more to life then eating, or flighting or sleeping. Slowly we find the purpose of life, the life that leads to perfection. We choose our next world through what we have learned in this one. This pursuit and then attainment of perfection is what heaven is.

So, is there no place called heaven? Heaven is not a place nor is it time. Heaven is being perfect. Perfection doesn't have limits. A person who scorns perfection for the sake of life goes nowhere. Those who put aside life for the sake of perfection go everywhere. The trick is to stop seeing oneself trapped inside a limited body. The trick is to know that our mind is limitless, and it can go everywhere at once across space and time. Fear of learning is what holds us back from heaven.

Finally I would like to share a quote from the book "Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a story" by Richard Bach - “The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.”

Jonathan Livingston Seagull : Richard Bach : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

When bad things happen to good people

 Why do bad things happen to good people?

  There is an Iranian folk proverb “If you see a blind man, kick him; why should you be kinder than God?” 

"More sincere payers are said in hospitals then in temples."

As I read this line over and over again in the hall of the hospital waiting for my father to win the fight against Covid, one thing kept going through my mind “why do bad things happen to good people”?

It reminded me of this book that I had read many a moon ago by Rabbi Harold Kushner who asked the very same question after his teenage son died of a rare disease. He a man of God to have lost his child to an incurable and one in million diseases, devastated him. 

He asked himself the meaning of GOD. If god existed, if he was minimally fair, let alone loving and forgiving, how could he do this to me?

Kushner in his book presents God not as an omnipotent dispenser of favors or punishments but as a deity who has created a universe over which he has limited power.

My speech today is not a religious one nor is it philosophical, I just want to share some thoughts with you, that has helped me make sense of the world we live in.

Everything in life happens for a purpose

A few weeks back, me and couple of my friends were driving down to Pokhara and along the journey we started talking about Karma. We all carry our own Karma be it good or bad and there is a great big register where everything is being recorded.

Really? So, what about misfortunes that befall to those whom we consider good. So should their suffering be justified as some settlement of past Karma?

It was 1996, my uncle who had just turned 30 passed away. I was 15 at the time. As the rituals started, I was asked to perform the last rights. His 4-year-old daughter kept looking for her father after she didn’t see him for a few days. What do I tell her?

The elders in the family, the visiting relatives all talked about some big plan of god. A plan that we cannot and should not question.

Sometimes there is no reason.

A man snaps, picks up a gun, runs out on the street and starts shooting randomly. Mr. Hari who leaves his house at exactly 8:30 am suddenly happened to be running late but Mr. Shyam who never leaves his house before 9 am had a meeting today and left early at 8:30. My Shyam got shot and Mr Hari was saved. I can understand the man snapping but what I cannot understand is the logic of who dies and who gets to live.

Why do we have to insist on everything being reasonable? Why cannot the universe have a few rough edges? Shouldn’t these random acts angers and saddens God as much as it angers and saddens us.

There is no exception for nice people.

A friend of mine gets into an accident, his car is completely totaled but he walks away with barely a scratch. Later he tells me, “Thank god, he saved me. God must be looking out for me” I am thinking “really” you? God looking out for you? Is god that blind?

Soldiers in war do not talk about whether they deserve to die or not or the person across their gun is a good person or not. They only talk about the bullet with their name on it or their number coming up.

God can't do everything, but he can do some important things

If God didn't cause our problems and can't fix them, why pray? Two reasons: The prayers of others can make us aware that we are not facing our problems alone. Payer, when it is offered in the right way, redeems people from isolation. If assures them that they need not feel alone and abandoned. And God can give us the strength of character that we need to handle our misfortunes if we are willing to accept it. 

Like every one of us at one time or another have faced a scary situation, prayed for help, and found out that you were a lot stronger, and a lot better able to handle it, than you ever would have thought you were. In your desperation, you opened your heart in prayer and what happened you didn't get a miracle to abort a tragedy but you discovered people around and God beside you and strength within you to help you survive the tragedy. I offer that as an example for prayer being answered.