Follow Your Dreams, Fulfil Your Destiny - and Experience God?

That's the message in the book "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho, which I just finished reading.

Or at least that's what I *think* is the message.

It was one of those symbolic, metaphorical reads about spirituality and true connection with God (and also the juxtapositioned concepts of luck and coincidence, free will and fate), that is hard to condense into a short abstract. Still, I will attempt to try and sift out the main message of the novel - if anything, for my own satisfaction so I know that I understood what I read!

The story is told through the eyes of a young shepherd who dreams of a treasure and, after meeting a King (or angel?) is convinced that he should fulfil his destiny and goes on a journey to find the treasure.

The journey is a constant struggle, yet he learns to follow good omens, tune his intuition and improve his luck by tuning into the signs around him. His internal learning process is paralleled by an Englishman who wants to learn the arts of alchemy, but cannot make sense of the codes, diagrams and mysterious instructions. The Englishman represents the countless men who have gone mad trying to master the arts of alchemy, turning lead into gold and producing the Elixir of Life, because they didn't recognize that in order to achieve these things, bigger lessons had to be learned first.

But the shepherd boy realizes that it is first important to learn the Universal Language of the World - each of God's creations are manifestations of His greatness and bear His imprint, and therefore communicate in a common language - and then connect with the Soul of the World to master these arts, and truly experience the love and majesty of God. This spiritual union is perhaps intended to be the destiny of each human being, but because most people ignore dreams, hopes and desires, because of their impracticality and remote chance of being true, their lives are deprived of this kind of spiritual fulfilment.

It's an interesting concept, and while the shepherd boy starts off in Spain as a Christian, all of this realization happens to him in the Arabian deserts, where he is guided by Muslim guides, tribesmen and even the Alchemist himself, and I can recognize traces of Islamic thought in the symbolism.. so it's intriguing to see how Coelho - for whom this book was a symbolic version of his own spiritual exploration - brings all of his religious and alchemist influences together to create an uplifting story that really makes you think.

Definitely recommended for those who don't find such topics frustrating or too vague to be enjoyable :)