Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman Read Free Book Online Page B

last year... hope she does a good job.”  
    I noticed that I was not receiving words, but feeling-concepts---sometimes quiet or muffled, sometimes loud and clear. That was how I could “understand” Russian, German, or whatever.  
    I noticed something else. When the Soviet gymnast was doing her routine, her mind was quiet. When she finished and returned to her chair, her mind started up again. It was the same for the East German gymnast on the rings and the American on the horizontal bar. Furthermore, the best performers had the quietest minds during their moment of truth.  
    One East German fellow was distracted by a noise while he swung through handstand after handstand on the parallel bars. I sensed his mind drawn to the noise; he thought, “What…?” as he muffed his final somersault to bandstand.  
    A telepathic voyeur, I peeked into the minds of the audience. “I'm hungry .... Got to catch an eleven o'clock plane or the Dusseldorf plans are shot.... I'm hungry!” But as soon as a performer was in mid-flight, the minds of the audience calmed too.  
    For the first time, I realized why I loved gymnastics so. It gave me a blessed respite from my noisy mind. When I was swinging and somersaulting, nothing else mattered. When my body was active, my mind rested in the moments of silence.  
    The mental noise from the audience was getting annoying, like a stereo playing too loud. I lowered my glasses and let them hang. But I had neglected to fasten the strap around my neck, and I almost fell off the rafter trying to grab them as they plummeted straight for the floor exercise mat and a woman performer directly below!  
     
    “Soc!” I whispered in alarm. He sat placidly. I looked down to see the damage, but the binoculars had disappeared.  
    Socrates grinned. “Things work under a slightly different set of laws when you travel with me.”  
    He disappeared and I was tumbling through space, not downward but upward. I had a vague sense of walking backwards from the edge of a cliff, down a canyon, then into a mist, like a character in a crazy movie in reverse.  
    Socrates was wiping my face with a wet cloth. Still strapped to the chair, I slumped.  
    “Well,” he said. “Isn't travel broadening?”  
    “You can say that again. Uh, how about unstrapping me?” “Not just yet,” he replied, reaching again for my head.  
    I mouthed, “No, wait!” just before the lights went out and a howling wind arose, carrying me off into space and time.  
     
    I became the wind, yet with eyes and ears. And I saw and heard far and wide. I blew past the east coast of India near the Bay of Bengal, past a scrubwoman busy with her tasks. In Hong Kong, I whirled around a seller of fine fabric bargaining loudly with a shopper. I raced through the streets of So Paulo, drying the sweat of German tourists playing volleyball in the hot tropical sun.  
    I left no country untouched. I thundered through China and Mongolia and across the vast, rich land of the Soviet Union. I gusted through valleys and alpine meadows of Austria, sliced cold through the fjords of Norway. I tossed up litter on the Rue Pigalle in Paris. One moment I was a twister, tipping across Texas; the next, I was a gentle breeze, caressing the hair of a young girl contemplating suicide in Canton, Ohio.  
    I experienced every emotion, heard every cry of anguish and every peal of laughter. Every human circumstance was opened to me. I felt it all, and I understood.  
    The world was peopled with minds, whirling faster than any wind, in search of distraction and escape from the predicament of change, the dilemma of life and death--seeking purpose, security, enjoyment; trying to make sense of the mystery. Everyone everywhere lived a confused, bitter search. Reality never matched their dreams; happiness was just around the comer--a corner they never turned.  
    And the source of it all was the human mind.  
     
    Socrates was removing the clothstrips which had bound