The Way of the Meister

Fun along the Way The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everyone rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves. (Alan Watts) I was returning to my office from lunch break and had to wait at a red light. I thought I would have a little fun looking at license plates for any spiritual messages when suddenly a car showed up with a license plate carrying the letters MARION. “Odd”, I thought to myself, “Marion works in London and to my recollection we are not scheduled to work on anything together.” I crossed the street and was just about to enter the building when I felt a vibration. It was a calendar update on my phone. You can imagine my surprise when I saw that Marion was planning a trip over to Boston and had sent me an invite to meet! Serendipities like this are really little energy boosts. They are nods from the Way to remind us that we are always connected. I started my spiritual quest because my scientific mind wanted answers when I first encountered synchronicity. The principle of Oneness just didn’t want to go into my scientific head until I saw all the evidence for myself. Later, I felt it was my mission to write about these metaphysical oddities given that I professionally specialized in pattern recognition. In the financial community, there is a popular assertion not to read meaning in apparent randomness, as emphasized in Nassim Taleb’s bestseller ‘Fooled by Randomness’. I have a twenty year career behind me in pattern recognition, separating the real financial and economic linkages from the many spurious relations, so if there is someone who has a good shot at not getting fooled by randomness, it should be me. That was how my first book, ‘The Magnificent Experiment’, was born; the desire to make sense of the little nods the universe seemed to be sending my way. It turns out, everything is connected, people, and all of life’s events. It is a fact that I have verified for myself, but of course, it is then natural to ask, what do we do with this insight? Not surprisingly, as we discover these new-found metaphysical powers, we want to use them. Well-timed market calls, auspicious lottery ticket purchases, and whatever else it is that our fickle mind comes up with. Maybe some can bend the workings of the universe at their will, but I mostly stopped trying to do so. The reason why I started the book out with this cute story is that there was absolutely nothing material that came of it. This story is about having a little fun with synchronicity and knowing that what truly matters in life is to spend our time with the people we care for. Alan Watts summed it up perfectly, the meaning of life might just be to be alive. Let’s have fun along the Way!