Hypnotizing Maria

have known if the left main landing gear tire had one-sixteenth inch less rubber on the tread than it happens to have this moment.
    Each incident pressed alongside the one just-past just-to-come, he thought, every one a co-incident.
    Seen from above, our life’s this vast field of co-incidents, flowers blossoming from the decisions we’ve made based on suggestions we’ve accepted based on our belief that the appearances that surround us are true, or aren’t.
    The left main tire may blow out next landing; it may be good for another fifty landings, gentle ones ... I don’t need a new tire at all.
    Which is what Jamie Forbes decided, that morning, kneeling by the landing gear. This tire’s fine. I’ll land softly. So long, different lifetimes just declined.
    What's she done to me?
    Never knew one airplane from another before I learned to fly. Now I do. Never noticed handwriting before I studied graphology. Now I notice. Never saw rolling cloudbursts of suggestions before Dee Hallock mentioned it’s where this world comes from. I see 'em now!
    Even what they call the Law of Attraction, he thought: “Whatever we hold in our thought comes true in our experience,” that’s a suggestion. Every time I try it and it works, there’s a suggestion. Every time I try it and it doesn’t work, there’s another. When I ignore it, nothing happens . . . my life doesn’t change, second by second, until the instant I do something because somehow I think it’s a good idea.
    Preflight finished, the pilot stowed his bag in the airplane, opened the aircraft canopy, and slid down into the cockpit.
    Like everyone else on the planet, he thought, the world I see around me is my own trance vision, materialized out of whatever gazillion suggestions I’ve accepted along the way. Soon as I say go, it moves ahead, molasses or lightning.
    So my whole world is propositions accepted, and those become beliefs become assumptions become my very own personal private executive truth.
    My positive truths: “I can ...” open the way for further suggestions, ways to go. My negatives: “I can’t ...” close the way, lodge themselves as my limit.
    I’m a citizen of a psychosomatic planet, he thought.
    So what?
    Then the pilot pressed the starter switch to START, spun the engine awake, and accepted his own suggestion: let’s hold off reorganizing the universe and go flying for a while.



CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    S outheast at low level over deserted land he flew, rivers and forests and wilderness, patches of old farm fields flashing below, turned to meadows.
    This is what it looks like, flying in dreams, except in dreams you’re not thinking where do I land when the engine quits.
    So I’m a hypnotized citizen of a psychosomatic planet, he thought. So’s everybody else. So what difference does it make?
    That moment, for the first time, the pilot heard a new voice in his mind. Not the monkey-chatter voice that had been with him always, not his co-pilot I’ll-fly-the-air-plane-for-you self, not his let’s-figure-this-out-together rational self; it felt like a whole brand-different mind, within, a higher self than the others.
    So what? Here’s what , it said. You're the one who's hypnotized yourself into the life you live every day.
    Here’s what: You can de-hypnotize yourself.
    Take all the time in the world, please , and think about what that might mean.
    He touched the control stick, the sky-blue airplane lifted her nose to clear a lonely telephone wire, dropped back down over the hayfields. It feels faster today, flying 160 knots just forty feet above the ground, than it had felt going Mach 2, years ago, eight miles up. He accepted that; it was true.
    Ever since Dee Hallock, why am I seeing suggestions everywhere?
    And how would I do that; de-hypnotize myself? Slam my whole lifetime into reverse? If I’ve accepted, say, two or three twenty-billion suggestions that my world is just what it seems to be, what am I supposed to do now to change it?
    Dying would do it. Seems to snap most people out of one trance right quick and into another. But if you . . .
    . . . WIRES! screamed the copilot mind, LOOK OUT! WIRES!!
    No need to scream; the pilot saw them ahead. There was all the time in the world to clear the power lines ... the airplane lofted easily over, settled back down above the empty fields.
    Much better, thank you, said the co-pilot. Careful you think about dying. Not just power lines, there’s microwave towers around here,