Interesting Article About Luck

Rationalists don't believe in luck, at least as the common person thinks of it. Guess I'm gonna go with the irrationalists. Lucky streaks, unlucky streaks ... is there some principle at work in the Cosmos?

My personal philosophy is this: embedded in the warp and woof of the Cosmos are strands of potentiality. I believe we can follow threads to fortunate or unfortunate ends. Also, I make room for the Cosmic Trickster:
 a force that can play havoc with the best laid plans of mice and men, as they say.

Be that as it may, I was happy to read Kate Rockwood's article How To Get Lucky, which was featured in the February 2016 issue of Reader's Digest. The Digest is always on my bedside table.

For those of you who aren't subscribers, you are in luck (ha, ha). Rockwood's article is online and may be read by clicking this link.

In four simple points Rockwood sums up the lucky lifestyle nicely, I believe:

1.) Expect Good Things

This "tilts the scales of serendipity in their favor," she says. If you're thinking "hey, that sounds like the Secret", please don't get turned off yet. I do believe that to a very large extent we are our thoughts. The power of the self-fulfilling prophecy is very real.

2.) Court Chance

Her explication of that point left me a little flat, but I do agree: "The goal is to stay open to possibilities. Or as the old saw goes, "nothing venture, nothing gained."

3.) Look For Silver Linings.

Good advice to be found in these paragraphs. I've never known a lucky "Negative Nellie" or "Pitiful Pearl." The most successful people I have known are those who just keep making lemonade when they are presented with lemons. It seems in my own life that the more I remain positive the more I am rewarded with positive outcomes. It works for me and I recommend this approach to others.

4.) Trust Your Gut

Perhaps this point interested me most. Starting perhaps three years ago I made a determined effort to try to trust my gut more and follow my intuitions better. This has paid great benefits to me (but please bear in my mind when I write this that material wealth is not part of the "good life" in my personal spiritual philosophy.)

How seriously do I take the concept of luck? I can't think about it apart from a conviction that there are principles that can be followed to tap into the good or ignored to the bad.

I understand those who don't want to get all metaphysical about it. That's okay. Rockwood's article isn't so-called woo. But I do like to think about the metaphysical. I tend to want to explore areas outside the box.  

Don't Throw Out That Baby!

Don't know if the origin of the old phrase "Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater" can successfully be nailed down, but do know it is a popular warning about being overly dismissive.

Too much rigidity in thinking and not enough openness to possibilities, methinks.

Shall will be hasty to wave off that which we can't possibly be sure about? Most reasonable would answer "no," I'm persuaded.

I've had to backtrack on a lot of things I had come to be very rigid about. Oh, the doubts always lurked beneath the surface, but with a firm a worldview in place it was simple enough to hammer things into their proper places. (I thought.)

My present blog is about what might be called anomalous experiences - my own and those of others. Well, that's the thing. When you look at the reports - bazillions of them - you find that strange experiences, eerie events, spooky happenings truly aren't anomalous at all. They happen to practically all of us. And has happened all throughout history.

Here's the rub: The popularity and extremely widespread devotion to the materialist, mechanistic view of the universe makes the aforementioned common experiences anomalous.

My solution was to explore idealism.as a worldview. For me it works, It makes sense. The unusual is not so unusual after all. At least I don't find it so.

Sure, I think we have to be careful not to become gullible fools. But we can approach a better understanding of some of the strange world experiences by freeing our minds a bit. It's a vast universe. We can't pretend to have all the answers.

Why Study The Paranormal?

After confessing a fascination with "the soft edges of science" biologist Lyall Watson wrote in the introduction to his book Beyond Supernature:

I am not wedded to the proposition that the supernatural must exist. If one defines supernatural experience as - the experience of something unusual, something which exceeds the limits of what is deemed possible - then there is clearly a vast field of experience, of repeated experience, from all over the world, just waiting to be explored. The fact that such reports are, by their very nature, largely anecdotal, has led to their being discarded as unacceptable to science. Which is a pity and a waste, because I suspect that answers to some of the riddles of the paranormal might well lie in the pattern and contents of such reports.

Words such as supernatural and paranormal trouble me somewhat because they often become mingled with an unfortunate superstition to the point of ridiculousness. Perhaps nature and normal are so incompletely and poorly understood that we are drawing false lines.

For my part I collect personal anecdotes of unusual experiences - what some call "glitches in the matrix" - and study them. As suggested by Watson, I look for patterns. Premonitions, near-death experiences, visions, etc., all interest me because they are so common. Drawing too hasty a line between what is natural and what is supernatural doesn't help here.

I have come to accept that mind is primary in the universe. In my thinking it is impossible to start with matter and make sense of the universe and life without acknowledging the primary role of mind and intelligence. Nothing makes sense without sense in the first place. Or else all is a very long string of meaningless coincidences beyond human comprehension.

Closing thought: The unusual really is usual if we are paying attention.