• Snippets for Reflection
• Links to Jonathan Resources

Select a part of the book or scroll down the page to review selected quotes (snippets) from the text of Johathan Livingston Seagull. Reflect individually on these quotes or respond to the prompts that are provided with many of them. Use this as a way to review the text, or simply to think about the lessons that both Jonathan and you might expereince  

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

 

1. Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight-how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly. [14]

 

• Reflect on this observation. What do you think it is trying to say to us as humans?

 

2. When he came to, it was well after dark, and he floated in the moonlight on the surface of the ocean. His wings were ragged bars of lead, but the weight of failure was even heavier on his back. He wished, feebly, that the weight could be just enough to drag him gently down to the bottom, and end it all.

 

As he sank low in the water, a strange hollow voice sounded within him. There's no way around it. I am a seagull. I am limited by my nature. If I were meant to learn so much about flying, I'd have charts for brains. If I were meant to fly at at speed, I'd have a falcon's short wings, and live on mice instead of fish. My father was right. I must forget this foolishness. I must fly home to the Flock and be content as I am, as a poor limited seagull. [21]

 

He felt better for his decision to be just another one of the flock. There would be no ties now to the force that had driven him to learn, there would be no more challenge and no more failure. And it was pretty, just to stop thinking, and fly through the dark, toward the lights above the beach. [24]

 

3. His vows of a moment before were forgotten, swept away in that great swift wind. Yet he felt guiltless, breaking the promises he had made himself. Such promises are only for the gulls that accept the ordinary. One who has touched excellence in his learning has no need of that kind of promise. [25]

 

4. ...When they hear of it, he thought, of the breakthrough, they'll be wild with joy. How much more there is now to living! Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there's a reason to life! 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! [27]

 

• Students can make a prediction about what will happen next
• Students can reflect and try to identify any other symbolic, metaphoric elements they recognize up to this point

 

5. ..."Irresponsibility? My brothers!" he cried. "Who is more responsible than a gull who finds and follows a meaning, a higher purpose for life? For a thousand years we have scrabbled after fish heads, but now we have a reason to live - to learn, to discover, to be free! Give me one chance, let me show you what I've found..." [35]

 

Jonathan Seagull spent the rest of his days alone, but be flew way out beyond the Far Cliffs. His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see. [35]

 

What he had once hoped for the Flock, he now gained for himself alone; he learned to fly, and was not sorry for the price that he had paid, Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with these gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed. [36]

 

6. "...I can lift this old body no higher."

 

"But you can, Jonathan. For you have learned. One school is finished, and the time has come for another to begin."

 

As it had shined across him all his life, so understanding lighted that moment for Jonathan Seagull. They were right. He could fly higher, and it was time to go home. {46-47]

 

• Students reconcile their earlier prediction about the flock's reaction to Jon
• Students reflect on what they think is happening at the end of Part 1

1. ...he was ever so faintly disappointed. There was a limit to how much the new body could do, and though it was much faster than his old level-flight record, it was still a limit that would take great effort to crack. In heaven, he thought, there should be no limits. [51]

 

2. In the days that followed, Jonathan saw that there was as much to learn about flight in this place as there had been in the life behind him. But with a difference. Here were gulls who thought as he thought. For each of them, the most important thing in living was to reach out and touch perfection in that which they most loved to do, and that was to fly. They were magnificent birds, all of them, and they spent hour after hour every day practicing flight, testing advanced aeronautics. [53]

 

3. Jonathan...you are pretty much a one-in-a-million bird. Most of us came along ever so slowly. We went from one world into another that was almost exactly like it, forgetting right away where we had come from, not caring where we were headed, living for the moment. Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, of fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth. The same rule holds for us now, of course: we choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome." [53-54]

 

• Comment on what you feel is the lesson that can be applied to our real lives here

 

4. "No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect." He was silent for a moment...

 

"You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, the moment you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there." [55]

 

...The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly. Remember, Jonathan, heaven isn't a place or a time, because place and time are so meaningless..." {58]

 

5. "To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is," he said, "you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived..." [58]

 

The trick according to Chiang, was for Jonathan to stop seeing himself as trapped inside a limited body that had a forty-two-inch wingspan and performance that could be plotted on a chart. The trick was to know that his true nature lived, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time. [58-59]

 

• What is this saying about the true nature of reality - can you guess? Do you know?
• Give a talk about the nature of interbeing and the Eastern ideas of impermanence and emptiness

 

 

6. "Forget about faith!" Chiang said it time and again. "You don't need faith to fly, you needed to understand flying..." [59]

 

7. Then one day Jonathan, standing on the shore, closing his eyes, concentrating, all in a flash knew what Chiang had been telling him. "Why it is true! I am a perfect, unlimited gull!" He felt a great shock of joy. [59]

 

8. ..."I'm the newcomer here! I'm just beginning! It is I who must learn from you!"

 

"I wonder about that, Jon," said Sullivan, standing near. "You have less fear of learning than any gull I've seen in ten thousand years." [60]

 

9. "We can start working with time if you wish," Chiang said, "till you can fly the past and the future. And then you will be ready to begin the most difficult, the most powerful, the most fun of all. You will be ready to begin to fly up and know the meaning of kindness and love." [60]

 

...exhorting them never to stop their learning and their practicing and their striving to understand more of the perfect invisible principle of all life...Jonathan" he said, and these were the last words that he spoke, "keep working on love." [61]

 

...For in spite of his lonely past, Jonathan Seagull was born to be an instructor, and his own way of demonstrating love was to give something of the truth that he had seen to a gull who asked only a chance to see the truth for himself. [61]

 

10. ...Those gulls where you came from are standing on the ground, sqawking and fighting among themselves. They're a thousand miles from heaven-and you say you want to show them heaven from where the stand! Jon, they can't see their own wingtips! Stay here. Help the new gulls here, the ones who are high enough to see what you have to tell them." [62]

 

11. "Sully, I must go back," he said at last

 

..."I think I'll miss you, Jonathan," was all he said.

 

"Sully, for shame!" Jonathan said in reproach, "and don't be foolish! What are we trying to practice every day? If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we've destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don't you think that we might see each other once or twice?" [63]

 

• What advice can be applied to our real lives from this passage?

 

12. "Don't be harsh on them, Fletcher Seagull. In casting you out, the other gulls have only hurt themselves, and one day they will know this, and one day they will see what you see. Forgive them, and help them to understand." [64]

 

• What lessons that Jonathan learned from Chiang, could be applied to the purpose and responsibility of a gifted program
• When the student is ready, the teacher will appear

 

1. "You're wasting your time with me, Jonathan!" I'm too dumb! I'm too stupid! I try and try, but I'll never get it!"

 

Jonathan Seagull looked down at him and nodded. "You'll never get it for sure as long as you make that pullup so hard. Fletcher, you lost forty miles an hour in the entry! You have to be smooth! Firm but smooth, remember?"

 

He dropped down to the level of the younger gull. "Let's try it together now, in formation. And pay attention to that pullup. It's a smooth, easy entry." [75-76]

 

• Reflect on the qualities that Jonathan has as a teacher. What are his good qualities. Use this passage and what you have learned about his attitude toward sharing before this point.

 

2. "Each of us is in truth an idea of the Great Gull, an unlimited idea of freedom," Jonathan would say in the evenings on the beach, "and precision flying is a step toward expressing our real nature. Everything that limits us we have to put aside. That's why all this high-speed practice, and low-speed, and aerobatics..." [76]

 

• Connect this to our discussion about our own connection to something greater than ourselves, our interbeing with all things, the image of the wave and the ocean
• Reflect on the purpose of refining our gifts and challenging ourselves in each endeavor. Einstein said that education is what remains after you have forgotten everything you have "learned." Think about the our discussion about the phrase that it is not the destination, but the journey, that counts.

 

3. "Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Jonathan would say, other times, "is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too..." [76-77]

 

• Reflect on this concept. What do you think it means? Remember thought as one of the six elements of reality (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, and thought?) How powerful is thought on our reality?

 

4. "Come along then," said Jonathan. "Climb with me away from the ground, and we'll begin."

 

"You don't understand. My wing. I can't move my wing/"

 

"Maynard Gull, you have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way. It is the Law of the Great Gull, the Law that Is."

 

"Are you saying I can fly?"

 

"I say you are free"

 

"As simply and as quickly as that, Kirk Maynard Gull spread his wings, effortlessly, and lifted into the dark night air.[82-83]

 

• Discuss the metaphor of the broken wing. What is it saying about the nature of some people and their ability to learn, their ability to grow?"

 

5. He spoke of very simple things--that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form. [83]

 

• Reflect on the stories that we have created about our selves. Are there any stories that we use/believe that hold us back from becoming who we are/ How many of them do we have? What are many of them like?
• What is your "flying," the thing that sets you free, the thing that makes you experience the joy of who you are as a person? Have you discovered that yet? How could you go about finding it?

 

6. "How do you expect us to fly as you fly?" came another voice. "You are special and gifted and divine, above other birds."

 

"Look at Fletcher! Lowell! Charles-Roland! Judy Lee! Are they also special and gifted and divine? No more than you are, no more than I am. The only difference, the very only one, is that they have begun to understand what they really are and have begun to practice it." [83]

 

• What does this tell you about what might be another way to look at the nature of "gifted" people? About the gifts in everyone?

 

7. "They are saying in the Flock that if you are not the Son of the Great Gull Himself," Fletcher told Jonathan one morning after Advanced Speed Practice, "then you are a thousand years ahead of your time."

 

Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god. "What do you think, Fletch? Are we ahead of our time?" [84]

 

"He lives! He that was dead lives!"

 

"Touched him with a wingtip! Brought him to life! The Son of the Great Gull!"

 

"No! he denies it! He's a devil! DEVIL! Come to break the Flock!" [90]

 

• We discussed the concept of Allusion - a literary reference in a story that gives a hint to a reader to think of another, famous, story like it. Can you see an allusion the author might be making here to something he might expect to be part of your cultural or personal background? What might that allusion be? What are it's implications? How might you interpret it?

 

8. It was for him as though the rock were a giant hard door into another world. A burst of fear and shock and black as he hit, and then he was adrift in a strange strange sky, forgetting, remembering, forgetting; afraid and sad and sorry, terribly sorry...

 

"Oh, Fletch, come on. Think. If you are talking to me now, then obviously you didn't die, did you? What you did manage to do was to change your level of consciousness rather abruptly. It's your choice now. You can stay here and learn on this level--which is quite a bit higher than the one you left, by the way--or you can go back and keep working with the Flock. The Elders were hoping for some kind of disaster, but they're startled that you obliged them so well." [86]

 

• A Breakthrough. Remember the metaphor, the literary motif / theme of death and resurrection--how many lives we have to live before we begin to touch freedom. Reflect on the idea that learning, real learning, real becoming, is a series of deaths and resurrections, leaving the old behind, gratefully remembered, but living in the new and experiencing that joy and sharing in it with others. Think about a breakthrough that change how you saw yourself, or the world, and how an older part of you "died" and a new part of you began living.

 

9. "Why is it," Jonathan puzzled, "that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he [or she] is free, and that he [or she] can prove it for himself [herself] if they'd just spend a little time practicing? Why should it be so hard? [90]

 

• So, answer it for Jonathan.

 

10. "...Jonathan, remember what you said a long time ago, about loving the Flock enough to return to it and help it learn?"

 

"Sure."

 

"I don't understand how you manage to love a mob of birds that has just tried to kill you."

 

"Oh, Fletch, you can't love that! You don't love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That's what I mean by love. It's fun, when you get the knack of it. [91]

 

• Reflect on what this passage is trying to say to us? How DO you see the real gull inside? What is the practice?

 

11. And thought he tried to look properly sever for his students, Fletcher Seagull suddenly saw them all as they really were, just for a moment, and he more than liked, he loved what it was he saw. No limits, Jonathan? he thought, and he smiled. His race to learn had begun. [93]

 

• What is it Fletcher was able to see? What is it that he more than liked, but loved? What is it that you now see as you look around you in the world? What is it now that you think as you look around your life? Your life; what's it about?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Text Version of the Book

 

• Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Try this one)
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Or try this one)

 

About the Author

 

• Richard Bach's Home Page

 

Interviews with Richard Bach

 

• Running From Safety
• Intuition and Imagination

Return to Mr. Byrne's Homepage

| last update: 9/1/05| send us email | © joebyrne.net