letters to a modern-day Job

I got re-routed twice in my attempt to reach Singapore and that’s how I ended up at the Larkspur Hotel. I was tired by the extra 24 hours of more travel, and frustrated at the wasted time and money. I should be in Singapore by now, I thought. Instead, I could only think of how badly I slept.

While waiting at the hotel, I whipped out my laptop as I felt I should record down some of the thoughts. I have not been writing for the last few months due to the emergent balancing of priorities of life, health and work. As I took out my laptop, I also took out the book I was reading – “Principles” by Ray Dalio.

After 30 mins of trying to put down fragmented thoughts down, “Serendipity” strikes. A guy started a conversation with me, because he had a serendipitous moment that someone made him read “Principles” before under odd circumstances and hence thought he should talk to me.

An educated technologist in his 50s, he said he was searching and trying to align himself with “serendipity”. We talked from Principles, Financial markets, Oppenheimer, the idea of true knowledge, the limitations of human intelligence, the nature of a photon, wave-particle duality of light, quantum mechanics, retro-causation, how Penrose postulates the “shadow” of a multiverse, how actions can have effects BEFORE and after the time it happens on the quantum scale and the Bible. His gut tells him all of this informed his intuition of that there is something bigger than all of us. He agreed that the fact we are all here is a miracle by definition. You can’t have something come from nothing. As a technologist, he knew that a quantum field is not nothing, it’s something. So the spontaneous existence of time and space breaks all physical laws we know.

I spoke that the ability to know that there is something much bigger than you and me out there constrains the worst part of human nature, and also elevates the spirit of discovery. For it is when we think there is nothing spiritual that connects all of us that eventually make us treat each other like animals or objects. He believes in that great something, and there is a way that guides. Somehow, quantum physics is the tip of the iceberg that informs his hunch. I say that others call that serendipity as “the hand of God in our lives”. I also mention that a past-present-future God was on full display in the Book of Joshua. A book written more than 2000 years ago, when Joshua asked God to help him in battle, God replies to him, “Haven’t I already given you victory?” (Present-Future). God talks to Joshua as though he is presently in the future.

He smiled.

Because of this engaging conversation, I managed to have considerable headway in framing the book I was writing! For in my book, I was trying to arrange quantum phenomena with the grace experiences and cause and effects of walking the Christian life.

So the big delays, the frustrations, and ending up in an expensive but uncomfortable hotel resulted in a few moments of inspiration that unlocked the flow of thoughts that I was struggling for weeks.

God sometimes has to create a space, born out of discomfort, to provide the right environment to get you what you really need, not what you think you need.

Serendipity indeed.

…

Here’s a video snippet of “Principles” by Ray Dalio.

Principles for Success: “The Call to Adventure” | Episode 1

A quick look at Retrocausality – on the quantum level, a present action can affect the past.