Hypnotizing Maria

forever?”
    He banked the airplane around a cloud top, rolling mist hissing by the wingtip.
    Something’s real. God, whatever God is. Love?
    Don’t need to know what’s forever this minute; I’ll find that out someday.
    What matters now? If I don’t have to de-hypnotize myself off the planet, Sam Black style, I can re-hypnotize me, instead. I can choose which trance I want to live. Long term, I can suggest myself into any heaven or hell I want to believe, right here on Earth.
    Fuel state, one hour forty remaining. Clouds scattered to broken, Marianna airport’s made. He trimmed the nose down, airspeed sliding up to 210.
    What’s that going to be, he wondered, what do I want to live? It’s going to be a safe landing at the end of this flight, one more hop to home, and then ...
    And then what?
    Long silence, in his mind.
    Anything I want, whatever I imajon would be fun to
    live.
    What’s best, happiest?
    I pretty well have it now. Great marriage, good students to teach, airplanes to fly, surviving pretty well. There’s heaven enough.
    So after all this change, all of a sudden I think I know how the world works, what’s the change in me?
    He raised his helmet visor, looked in the mirror on the canopy bow and saw himself there, not much different from this morning.
    Knowing is the change. Somebody spends his life on the ground, one day he goes to flight school, comes out a licensed pilot. What’s different? He can’t tell, looking in a mirror, but now he has the ability to perform what he used to call miracles.
    So do I, thought Jamie Forbes. So do I.



CHAPTER NINETEEN
    H e bought a sandwich at the Marianna airport, and a pint of milk. After the airplane was fueled, truck driven away, he sat on the ground under the wing and unwrapped the sandwich.
    I know how it works. I can change whatever seems to be whenever I want to change it. What shall I change, what suggestions shall I give myself, shall I accept, take them for truth in my trance and watch the world shift around me?
    He opened the Jacksonville sectional chart, colored pattern-green low elevations and empty-blue Gulf of Mexico. He took the pen from his sleeve pocket, poised it over the blue.
    If I were hypnotizing me, he thought, what suggestions would I want to see come true around me? He wrote, neat printed letters, on the map:
    Everything that happens around me shall work out for the good of all concerned.
    People shall be as kind to me as I am to them.
    Coincidence shall lead me to others who bring lessons for me to learn, and for whom I have lessons to give, as well.
    I shall not lack for whatever I need to become the person I choose to be.
    I shall remember that I created this world, that I can change and improve it by my own suggestion whenever I wish.
    Time and again shall I see confirmation that my world is changing just as I’ve planned it to change, and I’ll find changes better than I’ve imagined.
    Answers to every question shall come to me in some clear way including quick and unexpected, and from within.
    He lifted the pen, read what he had written. Sure enough, he thought, not a bad start. If I were my hypnotist, I’d like me to make those suggestions.
    Then he did a strange thing. He closed his eyes and imagined an advanced spirit there with him that moment, under the wing of the airplane.
    “Is there anything,” he whispered, “you’d care to add?”
    As though the pen had come to life in his hand and was writing by itself, in larger, bolder strokes than his own:
    I am a perfect expression of perfect Life, here and now.
    Every day I am learning more of my true nature and of the power I've been given over the world of appearances.
    I am deeply grateful, on my journey, for the parenting and guidance of my highest self.
    Then it was still. While the pen moved, he felt as though he were standing in a science museum close by some giant van de Graaf generator, electrics coursing through his body, his hair tingling. When the words stopped, the energy faded.
    Whoa, he thought, what was that? He laughed at himself. That’s the answer to, Is there anything you’d care to add?
    Unaware, for it was deep in his subconscious, the response: Answers exist before you ask your question. If slow is necessary, please make that clear in your request.
    He unfolded from under the wing, the world feeling not quite the same as it had a minute ago. He did not catch the significance of the strange word parenting, he did not remember to thank