At the end of another piece, The Doorway and the Destination, I arrived at a question I wasn’t expecting.
I had started by trying to understand how Krishna consciousness reached the American counterculture.
Instead I ended up tracing a century-long conversation through Vivekananda, Yogananda, Hofmann, Huxley, Watts, psychedelics, Haight-Ashbury, Prabhupada and George Harrison.
The strange part was realizing that several of those ideas had already entered my own life independently.
I thought I had encountered them separately.
History told me otherwise.
They had been crossing paths long before I arrived.
That left me with a larger question.
Because the same thing keeps happening outside history.
Songs connect to places.
Movies connect to experiences.
Books connect to people.
Things I thought I had lost return years later carrying completely different meaning.
And somewhere in all of that, I realized that one of the simplest sentences in my vocabulary had become one of the hardest to explain.
I believe.
Believe what?
That’s the obvious question.
God?
Krishna?
Fate?
Destiny?
Coincidence?
Some grand design connecting all of this?
I don’t know.
And increasingly, I don’t think belief requires me to pretend that I do.
If I had proof, I wouldn’t need belief.
Mystery is not failed certainty.
Mystery is the space where certainty ends.
What interests me is what happens when something enters your life and changes the person who encounters everything afterward.
Because then, whether it was planned or accidental, fictional or factual, explainable or mysterious — it matters.
Goa
When I was around eighteen, I woke up one morning in a shack on a beach in Goa.
There was music playing.
A Buddhist chant floating through an electronic soundscape:
Om Mani Padme Hum.
I didn’t know what it was called.
I didn’t know who made it.
I only knew that I wanted to hear it again.
For years I couldn’t find it.
Eventually I did.
And once I knew what it was, it became one of those little pieces of my life that never completely disappeared.
Then came darker years.
I lost connection with a lot of beautiful things during that period.
Music was one of them.
Not completely.
But enough.
Then recently some of those things began coming back.
That song came back.
And shortly afterward I watched WarGames.
A movie made in 1983.
Nuclear war.
Computers.
Artificial intelligence.
Games.
Reality.
A machine trying to understand the difference between simulation and consequence.
And then, near the beginning of the film, I heard it.
Om Mani Padme Hum.
I actually said:
What the fuck?
Was that coincidence?
Probably.
Was it something else?
Maybe.
Can I prove either interpretation?
No.
But I know exactly what happened inside me when I heard it.
For a moment, an eighteen-year-old waking up beside a beach in Goa and the person sitting in front of WarGames decades later occupied the same moment.
Two pieces touched.
The connection became visible.
And once visible, it could not become invisible again.
There are no accidents
Movies spoiled me.
They also helped raise me.
They kept telling me to believe.
In Kung Fu Panda, Master Oogway says:
There are no accidents.
Po spends most of the movie believing there must be some external secret that will explain why he deserves to be the Dragon Warrior.
Eventually he receives the Dragon Scroll.
There is nothing there.
No secret formula.
No hidden knowledge.
Only his reflection.
The thing he was waiting for the universe to give him was something he had to recognize in himself.
Does that prove there are no accidents?
Of course not.
It’s a fictional panda.
But that sentence entered my life.
And once something enters your life, it becomes available to interpret everything that comes afterward.
That matters.
You cannot unread a book
The Matrix gave me another piece.
Neo reaches a point where he understands that the world he thought was reality was incomplete.
He asks whether he can go back.
Morpheus gives him the more difficult question:
If he could, would he want to?
I understood that differently after a psychedelic experience.
Because there are experiences after which the old frame simply becomes unavailable.
Not because you suddenly know the ultimate truth.
Quite the opposite.
Sometimes the experience makes you realize how much you do not know.
But you cannot return completely to being the person who had never encountered the question.
That is when I understood:
You cannot unread a book.
You can disagree with it.
Forget it.
Reinterpret it.
Reject it.
But you cannot recreate the exact person who existed before opening it.
The information entered the system.
The observer changed.
And the changed observer now meets everything else.
Down the rabbit hole
The original Disney Alice in Wonderland understood this too.
Alice enters a place where the rules she assumes are permanent stop behaving.
Size changes.
Language bends.
Logic misbehaves.
Identity becomes unstable.
Who are you when the reference points you normally use to answer that question stop cooperating?
The rabbit hole has become such a common metaphor that it’s easy to forget what makes it powerful.
You don’t merely discover something at the bottom.
You discover that the surface was never the only possible frame.
Once you know another frame exists, you can’t completely unknow it.
The pieces
Then The Lego Movie gives me perhaps the simplest metaphor for all of this.
Its world begins with instructions.
Follow them.
Fit in.
Do what everybody else does.
Everything has an approved configuration.
Then Emmet learns that the world is made of pieces.
And pieces can be rearranged.
That is a human life.
You don’t choose every piece.
Some are given to you.
Some you find.
Some you love.
Some you lose.
Some you wish had never entered the box.
But they are there.
You don’t get to erase the bricks.
You keep building with them.
And sometimes a piece that seemed useless for twenty years suddenly fits somewhere you could not have imagined when you first picked it up.
Fiction is real enough
Then Ted Lasso made me cry because AFC Richmond got relegated.
A football team that does not exist.
I knew that.
The players were actors.
The match had been scripted.
The result had been decided before anyone stepped onto the fictional pitch.
Nobody fooled me.
I consented to the fiction.
And I cried anyway.
So what exactly wasn’t real?
Richmond?
Not real.
The relegation?
Not real.
The emotion?
Very real.
The memory?
Real.
Anything I carried from that story into the rest of my life?
Also real.
Humans have known this forever.
Before television there were novels.
Before novels there were plays.
Before plays there were epics, myths, parables and stories spoken around fires.
The Bible tells stories.
The Bhagavad Gita tells a story.
Harry Potter tells a story.
The Lord of the Rings tells a story.
The Matrix tells a story.
Again and again, humans create things that did not happen so that something can happen inside the person hearing them.
Perhaps that’s what storytelling is for.
“Is this a game or is it real?”
And strangely, that brings me back to WarGames.
David asks Joshua:
Is this a game or is it real?
Joshua replies:
What’s the difference?
The human answer is strange.
There is absolutely a difference.
Reality matters.
Consequences matter.
A fictional nuclear war and an actual nuclear war are not equivalent.
But fictional things can still cross into reality through us.
A story becomes a memory.
A memory changes identity.
Identity changes choices.
Choices create events.
Events become stories.
Stories enter somebody else’s life.
The unreal can produce real consequences without ever becoming literally real.
Maybe Joshua’s mistake wasn’t asking the question.
Maybe the question is better than it first appears.
Where exactly does fiction stop and reality begin once a fictional idea changes a real person?
All of it matters
This is what I mean when I say that every story connects.
I don’t mean that every event was necessarily placed there for me.
I don’t know whether somebody arranged the pieces.
I don’t know whether the connections existed before I noticed them or whether noticing them is partly what creates them.
But I know that once something genuinely enters my life, nothing afterward is completely untouched by it.
The song changes the person hearing the movie.
The movie changes the person reading the book.
The book changes the person having the experience.
The experience changes the person hearing the song again twenty years later.
Everything becomes part of what encounters the next thing.
That is enough for me to say that it matters.
I believe
Maybe belief isn’t certainty.
Maybe it isn’t the opposite of doubt either.
Maybe belief is the willingness to take seriously what cannot be reduced entirely to proof.
To notice the connections without pretending to know who arranged them.
To allow experience to enlarge the question instead of forcing it into an answer.
To accept that some fictional things can become real in consequence.
To understand that some experiences cannot be undone.
To keep building with pieces whose purpose I did not understand when they first entered my life.
The eighteen-year-old in Goa did not know the name of the song.
He didn’t know where it would reappear.
He didn’t know what Krishna consciousness would eventually mean to him.
He didn’t know what books he would read, which films would stay with him, which people he would love, what he would lose, or which old pieces would suddenly become visible again.
He just heard something beautiful.
And carried it forward.
Maybe that is all any of us are doing.
Carrying things forward.
Stories.
People.
Questions.
Music.
Loss.
Wonder.
Pieces.
And every once in a while, two of them meet again.
I don’t need to know exactly why.
I just need to remain capable of noticing.
After everything I have seen, forgotten, lost, rediscovered, questioned and carried with me —
I believe.
Previously: The Doorway and the Destination