My Autocosmology: A Life Between Rigour & Wonder

“The world is deep: deeper than day can comprehend.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

When I arrived at SJI International in 2010, after returning from a seven-year stay with my extended family in Kobe, Japan, I felt like a complete outsider. Because I had been educated in a Japanese-medium school, I had missed significant years of English-medium instruction and, with it, the foundational grounding in subjects like maths and science. My entrance exam was therefore deemed not up to the standard required to enter the 10th grade GCSE track. At sixteen, it is easy to confuse difficulty with deficiency. I felt unintelligent, incapable, and out of place, a continuation of a pattern that had followed me since I first entered Japanese elementary school as the only foreigner who did not speak the language. Little did I know that this so-called deficiency would become my secret compass.

From Outsider to Finding Home

Thankfully, there was a programme called FIB, which provided students with the foundations necessary to enter the IB track in Grades 11 and 12. It was a true gift to build those foundations alongside a small group of ambitious and intelligent students from Indonesia to the United States. For the first time in a long time, I was no longer an alien. I was home.

Yet the idea of home still carried within it struggle and hardship. My left brain simply did not activate in the way it seemed to for others. Instead, I longed for the arts, and so I filled my days at SJI International with music clubs and HL Theatre. Between the shame of not even being an average student in subjects like Maths Studies and SL Biology, and the splendid thrill of finding my voice on stage as Maria in West Side Story, produced by Ms. Wendy Ng, I discovered a spark of curiosity in Theory of Knowledge (TOK). If you grow up feeling like an alien, it becomes almost instinctive to question and observe everything deeply. The weekly TOK class with Mr. Tony Scheelbeek did just that; it nourished the questioning part of me, the one that had always felt compelled to probe reality down to its granular essence. What had once been a survival mechanism—this constant questioning—gradually became liberation. It broke me free from the chains of conditioning and marked the beginning of a deeper journey into self-discovery.

Turning Rigour into Wonder

My hunger to understand both the world and myself led me to major in Criminal Justice/Criminology, Psychology, and Philosophy, and to minor in Music, Social Entrepreneurship, and International Affairs at Northeastern University in Boston in the mid-2010s. In retrospect, the academic pressure I experienced at SJI International served me well, because college in the U.S. felt expansive; not because I was earning straight As, but because my appetite to learn had been strengthened. The well-rounded education I received during those three years at SJI International, including experiences like Challenge Week, prepared me for a world-class standard of exploration. The rigour that once felt like pain eventually became the very force that opened the gates of wonder.

When I first enrolled at Northeastern University, I declared Criminal Justice/Criminology as my sole major because I was set on entering the field of counter-terrorism. I imagined working for an organisation like INTERPOL and spending my career inside the minds of criminals. Yet, immersion in the darker recesses of human consciousness has consequences. The more I studied violence, the more I began to feel the moral weight of those realities. What initially felt like a psychological unravelling slowly revealed itself as an intellectual initiation. It was during this period that philosophy entered my life with force. The questions—not the answers—I was seeking found their home in this profound discipline, which quite literally means “the love of wisdom.” Inevitably, I was led back to the first spark of TOK, to the search for first principles. From Plato to Confucius, I encountered thinkers who wrestled with reality itself. Gradually, the lonely misery of my existential crises metamorphosed into the grand mystery of ancient knowledge. Founder of the Soto school of Zen, Dōgen Zenji, famously wrote,

“To study the self is to forget the self.”

That insight gradually became true in my own life. The more acutely I tried to understand, through psychology and philosophy, who I was, the more I found myself stepping outside the narrow confines of personal identity. Questions about life expanded into questions about the universe itself, leading me to study physicists like Carlo Rovelli and Brian Greene, and to become deeply fascinated with spacetime. What began as an interest in the criminal mind slowly transformed into a desire to understand the nature of the cosmos.

Convincing my parents–who thought I was on the path to becoming a criminal lawyer–that I was moving toward cosmology was not easy. Yet there was a pull I could not ignore; a tug at the human heart that felt both personal and timeless. So thank you, Mum and Dad, for supporting a path that may have seemed uncertain.

The Universe as an Unfolding Story

In the autumn of 2019, I entered the Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness (PCC) programme at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco—a small but intellectually daring institution born in the ferment of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s. Inspired by Eastern thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo and shaped by Western voices like Alan Watts, CIIS cultivated a space where science and spirituality were not adversaries but in deep dialogue. In Professor Brian Swimme’s classroom, I encountered the universe not merely as matter in motion, but as an unfolding story. With a background in quantum gravity yet speaking with poetic wonder, Swimme would remind us that “the earth was once molten rock and now sings operas.” He lifted me from the microcosm of personal striving into the macrocosm of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution. And yet the mystery was only beginning to fire up its engine, for what came next I could never have predicted.

The PCC MA and PhD programme was founded by Professor Richard Tarnas in 1994, the year I was born. Tarnas, an astute scholar and graduate of Harvard University, veered from the conventional academic path and followed his curiosity into the depths of human consciousness. That journey led him to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, a vibrant centre of the Human Potential Movement that emerged in the 1960s. There, he entered into collaboration with one of Esalen’s scholars-in-residence, Stanislav Grof, psychiatrist and founder of transpersonal psychology, and together their research into the nature of human consciousness uncovered an unlikely discovery, or rather, a re-discovery. In Tarnas’ words: “Much remains a mystery, and certainly much will always remain a mystery, but I have become convinced, after the most painstaking investigation and critical assessment of which I am capable, that there does in fact exist a highly significant—indeed a pervasive—correspondence between planetary movements and human affairs, and that the modern assumption to the contrary has been erroneous.”

Yes, that’s right. Though once a pronounced sceptic himself, Tarnas concluded that astrology offers profound insight into the unconscious dimensions of human experience. As a deep scholar of Carl Jung, his inquiry extended beyond the personal unconscious into the collective unconscious, where he found that planetary alignments correlated significantly with major historical epochs—from the Scientific Revolution to the birth of the internet. The extensive historical research culminated in his first book, The Passion of the Western Mind, a critically acclaimed philosophical overview of Western thought. That work, however, was only a prelude to his magnum opus, Cosmos & Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, which took another decade to complete and in which he revealed an underlying correlation of historical cycles with planetary alignments, presenting substantial evidence for the archetypal patterns of history.

If you are anything like me when I first discovered that the hidden heart of the PCC programme was astrology, then you may be rolling your eyes or laughing dismissively right now. I nearly left the programme when I realised this so-called “woo woo” was being taught, especially since I had joined this institution inspired by physics. Yet the mystery had its grip on me. In early 2020, while reading a chapter in Cosmos & Psyche about a specific planetary alignment between Saturn and Pluto that, throughout history, had coincided with major collective crises—plagues, world wars, economic collapse—Covid-19 began unfolding across the globe under that very Saturn–Pluto alignment. The words on the page were no longer confined to the past; they seemed to be playing out in real time. From that moment on, my scepticism slowly unshackled itself. 

My life was changing, not only because of this transformation in worldview, but because I had also found the love of my life. While at CIIS, I became close friends with Abeer Desai, the only other Singaporean in the programme. He had joined PCC several years before me and, like me, had initially been sceptical of astrology before encountering archetypal cosmology, the name of this emerging field that Tarnas established. Abeer came to recognise that Tarnas’ work would one day be regarded as significant as the Copernican Revolution, and so he founded Numinous Realm in 2016, a venture dedicated to researching planetary alignments and developing systems and tools to help individuals engage this worldview seriously. In 2021, I joined the company as Co-Founder and Chief Cosmologist, realising that my winding road had led me to the very inquiry I had been circling all along.

Bringing the Stars to the Streets

In 2024, we were married in Gujarat, India, on the land of our ancestors. Today, we live and work in New York City, seeking to bring the enchanting stars down to the concrete streets. Through our AI platform, Psyborg, we help creative seekers uncover the archetypal patterns shaping both their inner lives and the world around them. As Chief Cosmologist, I study historical and cultural cycles in correlation with planetary alignments, tracing recurring archetypal patterns across collective events and individual experience. My work involves rigorous research into these correlations and translating them into practical frameworks through which individuals can live and create with greater awareness of their historical moment.

I’m honoured to share my story, or rather my autocosmology—a term coined by Swimme to emphasise that all our biographies are embedded within a larger unfolding of the universe—with a school that truly nurtured my path. SJI International gave me both rigour and wonder. At the time, rigour felt like pain, and wonder felt like escape. Only later did I understand that they belonged together. Rigour strengthened my mind; wonder expanded it. Without rigour, wonder becomes fantasy. Without wonder, rigour becomes suffocation.

While at SJI International, I often carried the shame of low grades and the quiet desire to feel “normal.” Yet that very struggle led me toward the deepest inquiry of my life. I was terrible at maths and science during IB, and in an ironic turn, both returned to me through the study of planetary cycles and historical cycles.

The very place where I felt least capable became the birthplace of my vocation.

Difficulty is often a direction

In top-tier schools like SJI International, it is easy to believe that your worth is measured entirely by performance. But difficulty is not a verdict; it is often direction. The stress you feel may not be proof that you are failing. It may be the pressure shaping something rare within you. 

So if you are feeling overwhelmed, behind, or quietly inadequate, do not rush to conclude that you are deficient. You may be standing at the threshold of your own autocosmology. Keep doing the work. Let rigour discipline you. Let wonder enlarge you. And do not forget to look up at the sky, because as Swimme would say,

“You are the universe reflecting on itself.”

13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution has shaped you, including your doubts. Trust that even your struggle belongs to a larger unfolding. Take the leap of faith, and allow difficulty to guide you toward the treasure waiting to be discovered.