Several articles about the mental differences between lucky and unlucky people have come out recently, all apparently triggered by the book the author of this current article is trying to sell. However, the ideas involved are worth thinking about for esoteric practicioners and explorers, so I picked this article as an example of the bunch, and suggest you give it a quick read.

The executive summary is that lucky people have mental traits that leaves them open to NOTICING possible openings that they can take advantage of for their benefit. I’ve snippeted out the mental traits as presented in the article below.

You may be able to quickly see why I mention these ideas – they involve yje way the brain and mind work, AND CAN BE TRAINED. They point at the phenomenon of selective perception, which is an incredibly important subject for the esoteric explorer to study and keep in mind.

But there’s another less obvious (on the face of it) reason to mention luck. If you hope to have success in your pursuit of meaning and “enlightenment”, you have to be damn lucky. Most people are, frankly, not so lucky. They are so focused on trying to see what they have been told to look for, that they forget to look at what is actually there, they miss the crucial clues, they fail to think for themselves and free themselves from the fictional storylines passed along in books and in popular mythology and “enlightenment culture”.

They are unlucky.

Don’t be unlucky. Stay relaxed, and look with relaxed eyes at the world and at yourself.

From the article:

“And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3304496/Be-lucky-its-an-easy-skill-to-learn.html

These are the traits of lucky and unlucky people:

• Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell – a reason to consider a decision carefully.

• Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

• Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

As some may know, the archaeological site once called Catal Huyuk, now usually called Catalhoyuk (usually said to mean “forked mound” or a double mound) is an interest of mine, kind of a hobby. The most well known manifestation of that hobby is my old article “Catal Huyuk: The Temple City of Prehistoric Anatolia“.

That old article starts with an image that is often described as the oldest map in the world, the “catalhoyuk map” – altho I describe it differently, I call it one of the oldest known examples of a “landscape painting”. Here’s a bad example of the image:

All along there has been a lot of disagreement about this image. Mellart’s book ‘cleaned up’ a lot of the badly damaged murals and wall paintings uncovered during his rushed old-style excavations, and frankly, it’s very hard to tell exactly what the wall paintings actually show. The common interpretation, that the shape on the wall represents the volcano now called Hasan Dag in an eruption (thus making the painting a landscape, and implying that the squarish cells painted in black underneath are an image of the town), has been questioned before.

And now from a cartographer an article that makes a good simple presentation of the arguments for the idea that the catalhoyuk wall painting isn’t a map NOR a landscape.

Why the World’s Oldest Map Isn’t a Map

It’s short, has some good illustrations, worth your time if you have an interest in ancient cultures.

Relevant to brain studies, behavior studies (smell and molecular communication play a larger role than most people realize in behaviors and experience), and the popular topic and theme of ‘vibration’ in the esoteric culture materials… How a new science and industry of scent chemicals is evolving from chemists and biologists applying a theory of smell based on molecular vibration.

Scent is an interesting topic, and a fruitful field for further study for we students of the mind. We use scent cues like perfumes and incenses as a basic part of our ancient and modern technologies of consciousness as tools to shapes moods and experiences and expectations. I predict that a lot of significant discoveries about the role of scent and smell in the brain and consciousness will be made this century, maybe even some really revolutionary discoveries – such as, for example, scent being one of the triggers for ‘feelings of energy in the body’, a subjective phenomenon familar to most people who’ve tried meditation or other training.

This Sciam article discusses a recent experiment with memory, that illustrates some of the complex detail that our memory can store. The experiment demonstrated that with a visual image to trigger memory recall, ordinary humans were able to quickly match and compare a really large number of details.

I thought a boingboing’s poster’s take on this was clever – managing long term memory may be a “search problem”.

Since I’m interested in memory, and the memory and association training systems from the underground esoteric culture like qabalah, art of memory, and mantrayama, I found this new study interesting, especially the visual cueing.

In the past several decades, cognitive psychologists have determined that there are two primary memory systems in the human mind: a short-term, or “working,” memory that temporarily holds information about just a few things that we are currently thinking about; and a long-lasting memory that can hold massive amounts of information gained through a lifetime of thoughts and experiences. These two memory systems are also thought to differ in the level of detail they provide: working memory provides sharp detail about the few things we are presently thinking about, whereas long-term memory provides a much fuzzier picture about lots of different things we have seen or experienced. That is, although we can hold lots of things in long-term memory, the details of the memory aren’t always crystal-clear

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-forget-things

A recently published study by Timothy F. Brady, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues suggests that these long-term memories may not be nearly as fuzzy as once thought, however. In their work, the researchers asked subjects to try to remember 3,000 pictures of common objects—including items such as backpacks, remote controls and toasters—that were presented one at a time for just a few seconds each. At the end of this viewing phase, the researchers tested subjects’ memory for each object by showing them two objects and asking which one they had seen before. Not surprisingly, subjects were exceptionally good (more than 90 percent correct) even though there were thousands of objects to remember. This high success rate attests to the massive storage ability of long-term memory. What was most surprising, however, was the amazing level of detail that the subjects had for all of these memories. The subjects were just as good at telling the difference between two pictures of the same object even when the objects differed in an extremely subtle manner, such as a pair of toasters with slightly different slices of bread.

If It’s Not Fuzzy, Why Do We Still Forget Things?
This new work provides compelling evidence that the enormous amount of information we hold in long-term memory is not so uncertain after all. It seems that we actually hold representations of things we’ve seen in a fairly detailed and precise form.

Of course, this finding raises the obvious question: if our memories aren’t all that fuzzy, then why do we often forget the details of things we want to remember? One explanation is that, although the brain contains detailed representations of lots of different events and objects, we can’t always find that information when we want it. As this study reveals, if we’re shown an object, we can often be very accurate and precise at being able to say whether we’ve seen it before. If we’re in a toy store and trying to remember what it was that our son wanted for his birthday, however, we need to be able to voluntarily search our memory for the right answer—without being prompted by a visual reminder. It seems that it is this voluntary searching mechanism that’s prone to interference and forgetfulness.

And it is this voluntary searching mechanism that is trained and developed with associative tools like qabalah.

A post in metafilter about AO Spare was interesting – in case you missed it – things rip by fast on metafilter – I archived it here. Basically a bunch of links to Spare art…

http://www.metafilter.com/76360/AOS

The Flag of Earth is a public domain design that can be used freely by everyone. It shows the blue “sphere” of the earth against the larger yellow arc of the sun, orbited by a white moon, against the black field of space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:CadleFlagEarth.svg

http://www.flagofearth.com/history.html

I always think a good review can be as useful to read and absorb as a book, in this modern age of information compression, sorting, and filtering. If you are interested in the history and character of Giordanao Bruno, this page is worth visiting.

I find the emphasis on Bruno’s involvement with the renaissance re-creation of the Art of Memory particularly interesting – I’ve written a bit about how important I think the art of memory is within the traditions of western consciousness exploration.

Giordano Bruno has been called a martyr to science and an occultist, but a new book argues that the brilliant philosopher’s unconventional behavior did him in.

the hooded and manacled effigy of Bruno, with its haunted stare, immediately catches the eye, and the gruesome story attached to it — Bruno was burned at the stake in that very spot, for the crime of heresy — cements him in memory. Practically every tourist who comes to Rome tromps through the Campo and hears that story, even if they’ve never heard of Bruno before. The students who commissioned the statue in the 1880s, as an emblem for freedom of thought and the division of church from state, really got their money’s worth.

But who was Giordano Bruno, and why was he executed in the Campo de’ Fiori in 1600? A common misperception mixes him up with Galileo, who ran into trouble with the church 16 years later for embracing the Copernican model of the solar system instead of endorsing the Aristotelian belief that the sun revolves around the Earth. (In fact, the two men shared an Inquisitor, the implacable Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, canonized by the Catholic Church in 1930.) Bruno, too, thought that the Earth circled the sun, and subscribed to many other than heterodox ideas as well: that the universe is infinite and that everything in it is made up of tiny particles (i.e., atoms), and that it is immeasurably old. But as Ingrid Rowland demonstrates in her new biography of the renegade thinker, “Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic,” Bruno was no martyr for science. What got him killed was a murky mixture of spiritual transgression and personal foibles, combined with a large dose of bad luck.

The Mineral of the Day

Because I think these have a real beauty to them.

Much of human history, and the power of himans, comes from our relationship to minerals. Using stones as colors, hammers, grinders, scrapers, and eventually sophisticated flint blade technology, the paleo and neolithic cultures. Clay and ceramcs, the chalcolithic cultures. Then metals, gold, silver, copper, bronze, iron, and steel. Then the fossil carbon cultures, coal, and now oil – our root culture. And now the new silicon and rare elements technology of the digital culture.

Humans are what we are, because we have mined the earth and transformed minerals into new forms and into energy.

And, they’re beautiful, too

When I first started this website I included a link to the website of Jan Cox, not because I knew the fellow, but because he seemed like a more interesting than average teacher, influenced by the Gurdjieff materials, but with a style of his own. And he had one of the few websites of a actively working teacher type, in a form and with a message in the same vein as my own ideas and writing.

I was touched when I heard that he had died fairly young, at the age of 67, from an unspecified form of cancer. He died long ago, 2005, I just heard about it recently. Oh well.

I’ve heard some people thought he was a petty, arrogant ass. That’s certainly possible. I wouldn’t know. I thought some of his writing was interesting enough, especially when compared to other “mostly unknown” thinkers and writers and teachers. Perhaps I judge too gently. But, mostly, I figure people should be judged gently.

Here’s an obituary notice:

http://www.jancox.com/obit.htm

And his website, not the prettiest. It was always kind of chaotic:

http://www.jancox.com/

And some youtube videos:

More Jan Cox videos at youtube

A Tribe thread about Jan Cox, with some opinions and stories.

We’re all gonna die, soon enough. ;-}

I thought this was an interesting little article. I have a great deal of hope and anticipation about what this kind of brain imaging can tell us about brain and mind.

Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works

“If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works.

Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain’s emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.”

Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don’t know why it works.

UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, which scan the brain to reveal which parts are active and inactive at any given moment.

They asked the subjects to look at pictures of male or female faces making emotional expressions….”.

…

“In a second experiment, 27 of the same subjects completed questionnaires to determine how “mindful” they are.

Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”

When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference—the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions. ”