The Mystic Ranger

An amaz­ing story with every­thing one could expect to be in it — and much more! The Alchemist was a book I had mainly heard from oth­ers was bor­ing. But I never found it even close to that. It was grip­ping, if not in its sto­ry­line (ok, if you read books only for a story, you may not like this book…) it was cap­ti­vat­ing in its insight­ful philoso­phies. For one of the first times, I actu­ally found the reviews about the book true, it was one of the first books I had read in my life which actu­ally changed the way I think about liv­ing through life. It talked about zil­lions of things in extremely sim­ple ways, so sim­ple that you feel very hard-hit by their ele­men­tary truth­ful­ness. It even con­cludes in the end, in one of the ways that the one of the biggest prob­lems of human­ity was their belief that noth­ing could be as sim­ple and clear as it is. The real alchemist also tells the pro­tag­o­nist, San­ti­ago, that Alchemy wasn’t as great or tough as it had been made to look. The Alchemist had been suc­cess­ful in his sci­ence because he had rec­og­nized how it was his des­tiny to be able to heal peo­ple and also and that it was bound for him to be able to do that. He clearly says that the entire sci­ence of alchemy “had been writ­ten on an emer­ald tablet. But peo­ple had writ­ten thou­sands of books of thou­sands of pages after thou­sands of attempts because they did not man­age to believe in the sim­ple­ness of life.
The book also talks detailedly about how one should fol­low his des­tiny as that was the only pur­pose of one’s life and exis­tence. One’s des­tiny was writ­ten by the same hand, that of God, and so was the des­tiny of every­thing else. Also, every­thing was bound to each other by a uni­fy­ing object called the Soul of the World. This reminded me of an Avatar episode in which the Avatar real­izes that “every­thing is inter­con­nected”, said in a much more encom­pass­ing state­ment in this book as “All things are one.” It also says how the soul of the World pro­vided a medium for all sorts of life and also non-living objects to com­mu­ni­cate with each other with­out the use of any ortho­dox or com­monly known lan­guage. Fol­low­ing one’s des­tiny is the key theme of the book as writ­ten on the cover of the book, which says – “A mag­i­cal Fable about fol­low­ing your dream”. It says a lot of things as to how the most impor­tant thing in the world for any one per­son was to fol­low his dream as that was a sign of his des­tiny. How the entire uni­verse con­spires to make you suc­cess­ful in what­ever you desire to achieve (This line dis­closed the source of the highly pop­u­lar line of OSO which hap­pened to be a straight rip-off or trans­la­tion of the orig­i­nal Eng­lish sen­tence), and how the Soul of the World tries its best to guide you through to your des­tiny by leav­ing a trail of omens and it all depended if one chose to fol­low them and get sub­dued by the oppres­sive noise made by every­one around who talked about what other would become. It said that very often peo­ple get more involved in think­ing about the des­tinies and char­ac­ters of other peo­ple and in the process for­get think­ing about their own des­tinies. Fol­low­ing your heart was an essen­tial step in reach­ing your des­tiny as it was bound to the Soul of the World and knew what one wanted to achieve. It also told us through­out our lives what we ought to be but if we, like aver­age peo­ple ignored it for long, its voice got lost in the din of the sur­round­ing world. Also, when one set out to fol­low one’s heart he was greeted by some­thing the book called beginner’s luck in which the per­son was extremely lucky in his ini­tial attempts. [This beginner’s luck was an omen of the Soul of the World to us that we were on the right path and ought to fol­low it.] It also said that after one’s beginner’s luck dried up, most peo­ple gave up on their dreams and ended up fail­ing in achiev­ing their des­tiny how­ever close they had reached to it. That is how the achiev­ing of one’s des­tiny always started with beginner’s luck but ended with the warrior’s vic­tory. I felt very touched by the entire story and for the first time, due to the rela­tion with the universe’s omens, I did not feel that the twists and turns were mis­placed and also felt that they might have been very real for all I know.