Richard Bach: There's no such thing as objective experience

Richard Bach is a pilot and author of several bestselling books including the 1970s magnum opus Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Most of his books have been semi-autobiographical, using actual or fictionalised events from his life to illustrate his philosophy. He started flying planes since the age of 17 and his love for flying is evident in all his books.

Manoj Khatri [MK] You have a great number of fans in India, me included. We all want to know more about Richard Bach, the soul beyond the writer/pilot.

Richard Bach: It's a pleasure to know I'm not alone, practicing these odd ideas.

MK: You speak of alternate realities. What would you have become if not a pilot and a writer?

Richard Bach: I don't speak so much of alternate realities as of alternate worlds of appearances, alternate worlds of seems-to-be. I don't share the belief that we create our own reality. To me, there is only one reality: the Is—that incandescent Love that exists beyond all our presumptions of space and time. All the rest is games of separation and believing.
That said, in each of these alternate worlds we've made different choices: different parents, perhaps, different societies, different planets [or no planets at all], different systems of expressing life. Some differences are extremely subtle…the same lifetime as we know, but with one shifted choice. And all these lifetimes are going on simultaneously, right now.
A world in which I was not a pilot and a writer? I went to sea; I'm an engine mechanic; I'm a warrior killed in his first battle; I'm a fish imagining a world of air; I'm a deep-space creature with a body of stardust, stretching light-years between galaxies. Like everyone else, I've taken indefinite number of forms, knowing all the while that every form is illusion—that the only eternal is our no-form oneness with that radiant Love.

MK: Your books have always highlighted that we are more than our bodies—not limited by laws of physics. When did this realisation come about? Has flying, leaving the ground, defying gravity, somewhere helped you think beyond limits?

Richard Bach: Flying sure helps. I’m a slow learner, so it's easier for me to learn the perspective of thought when I take literal perspective from altitude, flying a little airplane. When the villages below look like toys, it's not so difficult to realise that they are toys; that they and all our inventions are the tools we use to express ourselves, to learn that in truth, our being far transcends the beliefs of the worlds we create. I've had many lessons, flying airplanes.

MK: 'Rileschardlie' was an enormous idea. Would you say that Rileschardlie is alive in an alternate reality? Or even if Richard and Leslie now live separately, Rileschardlie continues to exist?

Richard Bach: Every possibility, I think, is already being played in some alternate experience. Many Richards and Leslies from The Bridge Across Forever are following their own highest rights, learning together, learning on their own. To any of them, I'm an alternate self in a world reachable only in thought and spirit, as they are to me. I wish for them what I've known, the lovely consequences of their very best choices, the challenges of their not-so-best choices and ever-unfolding opportunities to improve.