Law of Attraction and Synchronicity
Early in 2011, while living in WA, I played a game called Satori. It's based on a concept called "Radical Forgiveness" which is basically the practice of believing that everything that happens is perfect, or in more practical terms that every issue we face in our lives is there to teach us a lesson. Essentially, if we don't learn from the issues in our lives, or we avoid them, they'll keep resurfacing in similar situations until we get the point. I didn't really know that was what Satori was all about the first time I played it though. I had just heard that it was a really groovy "self-improvement game."
I won't get into all the mechanics of how Satori works right now, but it is a board game that you play with at least two other people. Through the course of the game, you're confronted with themes from your own life, and you're given challenging tasks that involve looking into your past and "reframing" former events, or putting them into a new perspective from the present moment. It's very new agey and honestly a little cheesy sometimes, but there is no doubt about it: Satori is a spiritually cleansing experience and an extremely profound way to spend an evening.
My first go around with Satori put me into confrontation with a part of my past that I had never even realized needed work. Back when I was 17, I established a friendship and collaborative partnership with a fellow from New York, whom I'll refer to here as Bruno. Bruno and I were very close, and it was our shared dream to start a video game magazine called Game Elite. He was a web design wiz, so him and a few of our mutual online friends created a state-of-the-art website for Game Elite. It looked awesome, but we always had issues finding quality writers and getting the word out. Anyway, Game Elite had been my dream since I was 12 or younger, and I had all my hopes wrapped up in it. Working with Bruno was awesome, and I felt like we were really going to eventually turn it into a newsstand publication.
In my early 20's, I got frustrated with the situation and finally packed it up. The dream resurfaced in my heart a few times in the following years, and I'd sometimes talk with Bruno about bringing it back. There were a couple of attempts that never got too far, and eventually Bruno laid it on me straight: he said that he was tired of feeling used by me. He felt like the only reason I kept him in my life was to use him for his technical skills.
The truth was, I considered him to be my best friend. Another unfortunate truth was, even though I did genuinely feel that way, he had every right to feel used. Game Elite was so important to me that it is indeed often what drove our friendship. I did use him. I did take him for granted. I didn't realize it at all back then. I didn't realize this fully until I played Satori. But when we had our falling out, I just felt hurt and betrayed by my best friend.
Last time Bruno and I spoke was in 2006 or '07. Not entirely sure. After that, he disappeared from the internet, and I didn't have a clue what became of him. I figured he needed a break from all of his old online acquaintances so he took on a new alias or something along those lines. Honestly, I didn't think about him a whole lot between then and 2011. He'd cross my mind occasionally and I'd try to find him on Facebook or whatever, and then I'd move on.
The week after my first Satori experience, two crazy coincidences went down. First of all, I received an email from a guy named Chris. Chris, Bruno and I used to play online Doom together. I hadn't spoken to or even thought about Chris at all since probably around 2006. He was Bruno's pal much more than mine. In his email, he asked if I knew how to get ahold of Bruno. He told me that he hadn't spoken with him since 2008 and he was worried. I responded that I hadn't been able to find him over the years either, and we agreed that we'd let each other know if we found anything out. The second coincidence was when I was going through an old flash drive just a day or so after Chris emailed me, and I stumbled onto Bruno's old address and phone number. I am not exactly in the habit of keeping people's contact info on flash drives, and finding it at that exact moment was a fascinating development. I called the phone number and recognized Bruno's mother's voice on the answering machine. I left a message and didn't hear back.
With this information so far, I theorize that my Satori experience somehow utilized "the law of attraction." It is hard to explain how this can be so. Maybe it cleared out room in my heart for new things to happen with an old event. Maybe I "dealt with" something I needed to confront in order for the page to turn and for this particular story to progress. There are so many ways to look at it, and all of them theoretical, but I find it difficult to believe that the above events (Satori bringing up issues with Bruno, Chris' email, finding Bruno's contact info) are unrelated or random. Furthermore, there have been other events in my life (many which I've journaled about publicly) that share a similar systematic nature. At any rate, it is as if a pattern was formed between Bruno, me and Chris, and that future developments in this story will involve a semi-predictable sequence. More on this semi-predictable sequence shortly.
In November of last year, while searching the internet one night, I finally found out what became of Bruno. In 2008, he was arrested for a plethora of charges pertaining to internet-related crimes. He was to face up to 15 years in prison. My heart broke for him and his mother, and I wrote to Chris with some links to the related news stories. I also told Chris that I would try to find a way to contact Bruno so that we could write to him and show our love and support. Between then and today, Chris and I have had no contact.
Earlier this month, I wrote to Bruno's mother and explained to her what I had discovered and that I wanted to get in touch with Bruno. She very gratefully called me a week later, and told me that she did receive my message last year but then she talked with Bruno about it and he was understandably too embarrassed to want her to explain to me what happened. But since I'd found out on my own, he was now receptive to my being in touch. His mom then said she'd be happy to deliver any of my mail to him if I send it to her address.
I have Bruno's letter ready to ship out today. And what do you suppose was in my inbox this morning? An email from Chris asking me what's up! I know that in this case, it is believable that the timing could truly be merely coincidental. It's been a couple months, and now he's following up around the same time that I got the information he needed. By itself, it isn't too mind-blowing. But let's go back to the semi-predictable pattern thing. If a pattern was formed between Bruno, Chris and I then this timing was inevitable; not random at all. It's like a cycle that grows and subsides (expands and contracts, gets bigger and them smaller) over time, which is such a frustrating way to put it because I feel like it doesn't quite make sense to anyone but me.
Like when I was really ill over the past couple days, I kept getting hit with waves of nausea, times when I really just wanted to make myself throw up to get it over with. The waves would hit me and then subside and then return later, but less intense and for less duration. This happened until eventually the "pattern" of nausea was absent. At any rate, it was predictable. I knew another wave was coming, and after a while I had made the connection that the next wave would be less severe than the last. I feel that this also somehow applies to the very events of our lives.
Meaning, this pattern with Bruno reached its crescendo as an effect of a cause (my reframing of the past through Satori). That would be like the most powerful parts of my nausea over the past couple days. Then, each time the pattern repeats, it is slightly less "intense," as if it is slowing down and becoming less vibrationally prominent/more integrated with reality. In other words, less weird? More normalized? Something like that...
I won't get into all the mechanics of how Satori works right now, but it is a board game that you play with at least two other people. Through the course of the game, you're confronted with themes from your own life, and you're given challenging tasks that involve looking into your past and "reframing" former events, or putting them into a new perspective from the present moment. It's very new agey and honestly a little cheesy sometimes, but there is no doubt about it: Satori is a spiritually cleansing experience and an extremely profound way to spend an evening.
My first go around with Satori put me into confrontation with a part of my past that I had never even realized needed work. Back when I was 17, I established a friendship and collaborative partnership with a fellow from New York, whom I'll refer to here as Bruno. Bruno and I were very close, and it was our shared dream to start a video game magazine called Game Elite. He was a web design wiz, so him and a few of our mutual online friends created a state-of-the-art website for Game Elite. It looked awesome, but we always had issues finding quality writers and getting the word out. Anyway, Game Elite had been my dream since I was 12 or younger, and I had all my hopes wrapped up in it. Working with Bruno was awesome, and I felt like we were really going to eventually turn it into a newsstand publication.
In my early 20's, I got frustrated with the situation and finally packed it up. The dream resurfaced in my heart a few times in the following years, and I'd sometimes talk with Bruno about bringing it back. There were a couple of attempts that never got too far, and eventually Bruno laid it on me straight: he said that he was tired of feeling used by me. He felt like the only reason I kept him in my life was to use him for his technical skills.
The truth was, I considered him to be my best friend. Another unfortunate truth was, even though I did genuinely feel that way, he had every right to feel used. Game Elite was so important to me that it is indeed often what drove our friendship. I did use him. I did take him for granted. I didn't realize it at all back then. I didn't realize this fully until I played Satori. But when we had our falling out, I just felt hurt and betrayed by my best friend.
Last time Bruno and I spoke was in 2006 or '07. Not entirely sure. After that, he disappeared from the internet, and I didn't have a clue what became of him. I figured he needed a break from all of his old online acquaintances so he took on a new alias or something along those lines. Honestly, I didn't think about him a whole lot between then and 2011. He'd cross my mind occasionally and I'd try to find him on Facebook or whatever, and then I'd move on.
The week after my first Satori experience, two crazy coincidences went down. First of all, I received an email from a guy named Chris. Chris, Bruno and I used to play online Doom together. I hadn't spoken to or even thought about Chris at all since probably around 2006. He was Bruno's pal much more than mine. In his email, he asked if I knew how to get ahold of Bruno. He told me that he hadn't spoken with him since 2008 and he was worried. I responded that I hadn't been able to find him over the years either, and we agreed that we'd let each other know if we found anything out. The second coincidence was when I was going through an old flash drive just a day or so after Chris emailed me, and I stumbled onto Bruno's old address and phone number. I am not exactly in the habit of keeping people's contact info on flash drives, and finding it at that exact moment was a fascinating development. I called the phone number and recognized Bruno's mother's voice on the answering machine. I left a message and didn't hear back.
With this information so far, I theorize that my Satori experience somehow utilized "the law of attraction." It is hard to explain how this can be so. Maybe it cleared out room in my heart for new things to happen with an old event. Maybe I "dealt with" something I needed to confront in order for the page to turn and for this particular story to progress. There are so many ways to look at it, and all of them theoretical, but I find it difficult to believe that the above events (Satori bringing up issues with Bruno, Chris' email, finding Bruno's contact info) are unrelated or random. Furthermore, there have been other events in my life (many which I've journaled about publicly) that share a similar systematic nature. At any rate, it is as if a pattern was formed between Bruno, me and Chris, and that future developments in this story will involve a semi-predictable sequence. More on this semi-predictable sequence shortly.
In November of last year, while searching the internet one night, I finally found out what became of Bruno. In 2008, he was arrested for a plethora of charges pertaining to internet-related crimes. He was to face up to 15 years in prison. My heart broke for him and his mother, and I wrote to Chris with some links to the related news stories. I also told Chris that I would try to find a way to contact Bruno so that we could write to him and show our love and support. Between then and today, Chris and I have had no contact.
Earlier this month, I wrote to Bruno's mother and explained to her what I had discovered and that I wanted to get in touch with Bruno. She very gratefully called me a week later, and told me that she did receive my message last year but then she talked with Bruno about it and he was understandably too embarrassed to want her to explain to me what happened. But since I'd found out on my own, he was now receptive to my being in touch. His mom then said she'd be happy to deliver any of my mail to him if I send it to her address.
I have Bruno's letter ready to ship out today. And what do you suppose was in my inbox this morning? An email from Chris asking me what's up! I know that in this case, it is believable that the timing could truly be merely coincidental. It's been a couple months, and now he's following up around the same time that I got the information he needed. By itself, it isn't too mind-blowing. But let's go back to the semi-predictable pattern thing. If a pattern was formed between Bruno, Chris and I then this timing was inevitable; not random at all. It's like a cycle that grows and subsides (expands and contracts, gets bigger and them smaller) over time, which is such a frustrating way to put it because I feel like it doesn't quite make sense to anyone but me.
Like when I was really ill over the past couple days, I kept getting hit with waves of nausea, times when I really just wanted to make myself throw up to get it over with. The waves would hit me and then subside and then return later, but less intense and for less duration. This happened until eventually the "pattern" of nausea was absent. At any rate, it was predictable. I knew another wave was coming, and after a while I had made the connection that the next wave would be less severe than the last. I feel that this also somehow applies to the very events of our lives.
Meaning, this pattern with Bruno reached its crescendo as an effect of a cause (my reframing of the past through Satori). That would be like the most powerful parts of my nausea over the past couple days. Then, each time the pattern repeats, it is slightly less "intense," as if it is slowing down and becoming less vibrationally prominent/more integrated with reality. In other words, less weird? More normalized? Something like that...