Darren Aronofsky’s debut ‘Pi’ from 1998 became a cult classic with many people trying to crack the code and read the meaning of it. It’s much more clear from the spiritual perspective.
Max Cohen is a man who is trying to understand. He is searching and asking questions, not taking for granted anything that he is told. Even when his mom warns him against looking into the sun, he doesn’t listen to her and needs to experience for himself the blindness that will almost make him lose his sight. Since then he can see more but is also punished by severe headaches. He lives in Chinatown where the West meets the East. When he goes to the park to look at the trees, he is passing people practicing tai-chi, the ancient Chinese art of increasing the life energy by movement, breathing and meditation.
Max meets two people that will help him to get closer to the mystery of life that he is trying to resolve. The first one is Lenny Meyer, a Kabbalist who tells him about the correlation of every Hebrew letter to a number and the belief that the Torah is a code sent from God. Max gets interested and they obviously find a common language. Lenny also talks about the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden and Max recognizes the numbers he mentions as Fibonacci sequence and golden ratio symbolized by a spiral. That leads to a breakthrough making Max realize that the pattern of nature is a spiral.
The second person he meets is Marcy Dawson from a Wall Street company that is interested in his research regarding the stock market. She offers Max a new super chip that he reluctantly accepts. He is not interested in money or power but in the truth. Thanks to Marcy and Lenny, Max is able to find a 216 digit number in the Torah that Kabbalist believe to be the true name of God. But he doesn’t want to share it with either of them. He believes that he was chosen. He tells the rabbi that the number on its own is nothing and the meaning is in between the numbers.
His former math professor Sol told him to stop thinking, and start feeling and using his intuition. But Max didn’t listen again and got obsessed with the idea of understanding life. Sol is an older version of him, and when he was younger he was also obsessed with finding the pattern of nature which led him to a stroke. Max understands that Sol died because he found the number too. So Max decides to forget about it because he understands that pursuing his obsession means death.
The Chosen One needs to sacrifice his life. But Max chooses love which is symbolized by him waking up in the arms of Deva, his female neighbor. The number made him understand that we are all One.
