Illusions

The book Illusions is about an itinerant flier (ostensibly Richard Bach himself at an earlier stage in his life) who flies passengers around the skies above Midwest corn fields in an antique bi-plane. He is unexpectedly joined on this lonely journey by another individual doing the same thing in a 1928 Travel Air--Donald Shimoda. However, it pretty quickly becomes apparent that there is something abnormal about Shimoda. His plane sits in an Illinois corn field appearing factory new, no torn fabric, no oil stains, not even straw from the passengers inside the aircraft. Upon questioning from Richard, it turns out that their meeting was no accident, Donald Shimoda had planned it. Donald has arrived to be something of a mentor for Richard.
The story itself is only marginally entertaining. What Bach does is use the story about a mentor / mentee relationship as a framework for presenting his conception of life. One need go no further than the title to deduce what that concept is: Illusions. His premise is that life itself is an illusion, that we are in reality beings of spirit, not beings of material substance. If the concept of life as illusion sounds familiar, the most likely reason would be that it is the central tenant of Hinduism.
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