Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Temple >

Do You Feel Lucky?

15:14 / 06.06.02

while reading a book on magick, there was a reference to advanced sorcerors appearing 'lucky' to the outside world. which reminded me of a question i've often wanted to ask: do (some) people act as attractors for good or bad luck? good luck - those who seem to get from a to b without the hassles the rest of us face, who walk into jobs.... who always fall on their feet. i've known others who seem to act as magnets for bad luck, too, who go from one appalling situation to another through no apparent fault of their own.

and if this is the case, why should it be so?

15:57 / 06.06.02

It's certainly the case - I've known lucky people, and people to whom only bad things seem to happen.

I don't know why, but it seems to have something to do with what they *expect* to happen.

02:52 / 07.06.02

If you take a group of people, they will fairly quickly fall into roles, and, I think, something of a partial ordering on status. When you feel you change status on the tree, your chemical makeup changes. An example. Before a meeting takes place, all the people in the meeting have comparable levels of (something). After the meeting is over, the chairman has significantly higher levels than everyone else.

If this applies generally to life, then people who have been lucky will be more confident, more astute, and so on... If one or two bad things occur, then they will be able to fend off these problems more easily than if their chemical makeup were as of a lower status.

These things are complicated, but I think that's the main reason some people are luckier. Someone said luck is a form of genius.

07:23 / 07.06.02

well i was rather wondering if some are born either lucky or unlucky.

i suppose these things are rather shaped by events and by early upbringing - i.e. a young child who is bought up to be confident might deal with situations well from an early age. another who is bought up to be ze is pretty worthless may deal badly with the same situation, thus possibly setting a negative behaviour pattern of some kind. maybe this is the case with the people i've known who seem to have a homing beacon for bad, bad things to happen to them.

however, there *is* one woman i know who is very strong, incredibly intelligent etc and who is constantly battling against the most terrible mishaps. an exception to the rule, perhaps?

Less searchable M0rd4nt

07:43 / 07.06.02

Funnily enough, there was a study done a couple of years back which seemed to bear out the idea that there's a link between how lucky you feel and how lucky you actually are. I'm usually dubious about that kind of result, but the study looked pretty well constructed, and I've never seen its findings contradicted.

13:18 / 08.06.02

I'm a jammy bastard.

There's been a few times when highly unlikely things have happened to me, and I've come out of it smelling of roses or at least not hurt.

I tend to win raffles, meet people who I was just thinking about and good things tend to happen in threes for me.

But, I'm an eternal optimist. Am I really lucky or is it attitude? And isn't that one of the tricks in Magic?

17:45 / 09.06.02

one possibility that comes to mind is that much of the good/bad luck you percieve others to have is an unconscious value judgement on your part. If I feel that person X is lucky to have found a certain job, does that tell me more about a) the person b) what I think of the job they've got and c) what I think about their suitability?

ALso, it occurs that one man might be very lucky to win the lottery. Another might be very lucky not to. Unless you try it both ways, how do you know?

Nick is talking about a different sort of thing- a high incidence of serendipity and coincidence in one's life. That definitely feels like a magickal attitude thing.

17:46 / 09.06.02

Doh. Of course, I meant Mr Ed, not Nick. Brain fart. Scuseme.

19:12 / 09.06.02

"one possibility that comes to mind is that much of the good/bad luck you percieve others to have is an unconscious value judgement on your part."

flame - agreed. and also perhaps an indication of how one feels about oneself? i feel more 'lucky', or more accurately, able to be lucky, since i stopped feeling so damn resentful of everyone else, and more in control of my own destiny.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

02:29 / 13.06.02

I am actually going to try to make myself a bit more lucky with a bit of ol Chaos. Part of it will be actually changing how I think about myself and another part of it will be kind of "ritualized".

Anyone have ideas other than ye olde sigilizing?

06:22 / 24.06.02

It's also possible that luck is simply a matter of focus. If you consider yourself "Lucky", then when good things happen to you you attribute it to your luckiness, but when bad things happen, you ignore them or find something else to blame. Contrariwise, if you're "Unlucky", then that's why bad things happen to you, and any good things that happen do so for other reasons.

Not unlike cursing someone by telling them "Booga booga! I've cursed you!", then waiting for something bad to happen to them and saying "See, I told you so."

--Riff

13:14 / 24.06.02

Yeah, I agree its attitude and focus. And you can also consider someone is very lucky while he himself does not.

In short, I consider luckiness is for the non-magickian what magickal power is to the magickian. If you have a magickal intention (an intention you just can't go and hit a button, a phone call, and make it happen) you of course will consider yourself more magickally powerful (or luckier if you are next-door-John) the more your intention is fulfilled in the consensual world.

Magick is then somewhat adjusting your luckiness in line with your desires, and the word "metaprogramming" comes in handy for this. For spontaneously lucky and happy people that are not magickians, and see all their desires fulfilled, yes, I agree it is related to their own metaprogramming, of which they may be aware of not (just listen to any happy-John-who how he changed his life and luck for the better, and you'll get an excelent on-the-street dissertation on accruing magickal power without it ever being mentioned). The magickian is just consciously devoting himself (and his brain/soul/whatever) to this metaprogramming, and sort of assuming that he and the universe have no limits on desire fulfillment, so any worthy magickal system has implied that any experience can be experienced.

Back to the beginning,

"while reading a book on magick, there was a reference to advanced sorcerors appearing 'lucky' to the outside world."

I have met two, and read about many, quite powerful sorcerers, that to the urban western-man appear as total loosers in term of commodities and economical choices, but you really do not want them to give you the "eye". And of course, you would never dare asking them if they consider themselves to be "lucky".