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.

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

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. ;-}

Does it say anything new about Ken Wilber? No, I don’t think so, it merely expresses a common arc in the various paths of the student. The attraction to a guru figure, and the inevitable subsequent disillusionment and seperation as the emotional glamour of the original attraction is unfulfilled, as it almost inevitably must be, because the original attraction to a teacher figure and parental figure is part of the nature of the “young mind”, and individuation and seperation is part of the self’s (inherent?) growth patterns.

I thought you might enjoy this fellows story.

“What interests me, personally… is what were the psychological reasons that I was so strongly drawn to Wilber’s work and is my present skepticism of Wilber due strictly to shortcomings in his work or also to a deeper skepticism of comprehensive worldviews in general, discomforting as it may be to wonder?”

“…the primary lesson should be methodological: that it will no longer do for a didactic celebrity to dictate Integral as dogma. It is because everyone is flawed, Wilber and his critics, that the appropriate method for philosophy is dialogue. Dialogue is what separates philosophy from dogma. This is what keeps our beliefs open for debate and reconsideration.”

“WINNING THE INTEGRAL GAME?”

“In 1939, when UG was 21 years of age, he went and met Sri Ramana Maharshi and asked him, ‘This thing called moksha, can you give it to me?’ Ramana reply, ‘I can give it, but can you take it?’ struck him like a ‘thunderbolt’ and set him up on a relentless search for truth that ended at the age of 49 with a totally unforeseen result.”

A totally unforseen result. That’s useful to remember.

More discussion of good old UG here. UG Krishnamurti, one of my favorite “enlightened dudes”, has died. “Thinker and philosopher U.G. Krishnamurti, 89, died at Vallecrosia, Italy, on Thursday” (March 28, 2007)

With thanks to http://guruphiliac.blogspot.com/

Nothing revolutionary, but I ended up enjoying it. If you occasionally find guruphiliac valuable, you’ll probably like this podcast.

I did think his description of enlightenment could have been stronger. One interviewer comments, “I’m a little skeptical about wether there is really anything to teach, but then, you believe in enlightenment…”. Jody says, “But you can’t teach it, tho. (refering to enlightenment) … It is completely outside the realm of intellectual discourse, or emotional experience. It’s not a thought, feeling, or sensation of any kind. But it is a special kind of knowledge, a special kind of understanding, that can exist in the context of a persons life.”.

Which is all true enough, and a good choice of a description for an internet radio show, but it certainly makes one think about how hard it is to try to simply describe and discuss even the idea of enlightenment. Much less the aspects of the enlightenment thing that are outside of the realm of language.

My favorite quote, referring to one of the currently semi-famous gurus that were being discussed: “… (a) factory spewing clouds of occluding nonsense about self realization … because … people come to think “When I get enlightened, I’m going to become this Shakti-spewing God or Goddess able to give people spiritual experiences by hugging them or looking at them or touching their forehead.” … none of that has anything to do with self realization.” (according to vedanta, Jody adds.)

Jody Radzik of Guruphiliac Interviewed by RU Sirius – the mp3 is on this page.

guruphiliac

Scientific American review of “I AM A STRANGE LOOP”, the new book on consciousness by Douglas R. Hofstadter

“Think of your eyes as that video camera, but with a significant upgrade: a mechanism, the brain, that not only registers images but abstracts them, arranging and constantly rearranging the data into mental structures–symbols, Hofstadter calls them–that stand as proxies for the exterior world. Along with your models of things and places are symbols for each of your friends, family members and colleagues, some so rich that the people almost live in your head.

Among this library of simulations there is naturally one of yourself, and that is where the strangeness begins.
“You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated ‘you’ makes more decisions, and so forth, round and round,” Hofstadter writes. What blossoms from the Gödelian vortex–this symbol system with the power to represent itself–is the “anatomically invisible, terribly murky thing called I.” A self, or, to use the name he favors, a soul.

It need know nothing of neurons. Sealed off from the biological substrate, the actors in the internal drama are not things like “serotonin” or “synapse” or even “cerebrum,” “hippocampus” or “cerebellum” but abstractions with names like “love,” “jealousy,” “hope” and “regret.”

And that is what leads to the grand illusion. “In the soft, ethereal, neurology-free world of these players,” the author writes, “the typical human brain perceives its very own ‘I’ as a pusher and a mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad infinitesimal entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among them.”

I’ve said on other pages here at telesterion and other places, that I got “enlightened” a while back. Whatever it is that happened, that I call “my enlightenment”, seems very similar to whatever it was that happened to UG Krishamurti. His attitide towards it and mine are very alike.

So I was touched to hear, from one of the most useful blogs for self-dvelopment guruphiliac on RIP UG, that he had died.

Death is the friend of the enlightened. Most people don’t get that, and thats understandable, I suppose. I figure UG Krishamurti probably did, tho I never met him, and don’t know for sure.

I enjoy how he dies without ceremony. “According to his wishes, no rituals or funeral rites were performed.”.

Here’s the wiki on UG:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U._G._Krishnamurti.

“He also claimed that the reason people came to him and to gurus is to find solutions to ease their everyday real problems or for solutions to a fabricated problem, namely, the search for spirituality and enlightenment. He continued to say this drive is caused by the cultural environment, which demands conformity of individuals and places within them the desire to be special. Consequently, it is this need that is exploited by gurus, spiritual teachers and sellers of “shoddy goods”, who pretend to offer the way to reach that goal but never deliver and cannot, since the goal is itself unreachable.”.

UG is not to be confused with the other much more famous Krishnamurti, the Theosophical Societies Jiddu Krishnamurti. Jiddu also had his better moments, in that he was able to reject the artificial cult built around him in his childhood and even returning much of the money and property given by Theosophical followers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiddu_Krishnamurti

“(J) Krishnamurti had denounced all organized belief, the notion of “gurus”, and the whole teacher-follower relationship, vowing instead to work in setting man absolutely, totally free. From that time, he began to disassociate himself from the Society and its teachings/practices, despite being on cordial terms with some members and ex-members throughout his life.”

(I’m sure my readers are familiar with the idea, popular in modern cosmology, that we exist in such a universe because such a universe is required for us to exist. That is, that there may have existed or exist now [possibly] countless numbers of universes that don’t/didn’t have the required “laws of nature” [laws of physics] that allow us to be alive and conscious, but since we can only exist in a universe which allows us to exist, inevitably we find ourselves in a universe that seems miraculously constructed to allow our existence.)

A new article recently written by an odd source, Robert Lanza, a businessman in cell research, is bringing this question into the public debate. (And it’s got some ideas that seem to me to be important for consciousness research and self-development as well…)

Robert Lanza suggests a new model of physics, one that recognizes that our physics is “our physics”, that we have to recognize that our biology shapes our understanding of the physics of this universe.

I love this sentence from Lanza – “Space and time are not objects or things — they are forms of animal sense perception.”.

American Scholar article by Robert Lanza – “A New Theory of the Universe – Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting life into the equation”

“…life has taught us that time and space are external and eternal realities. They bound all experiences and are more fundamental than life itself. They are above and beyond human experience.

As animals, we are organized, wired, to think this way. We use dates and places to define our experiences to ourselves and to others. History describes the past by placing people and events in time and space. Scientific theories of the big bang, geology, and evolution are steeped in the logic of time and space. They are essential to our every movement and moment. To place ourselves as the creators of time and space, not as the subjects of it, goes against our common sense, life experience, and education. It takes a radical shift of perspective for any of us to entertain the idea that space and time are animal sense perceptions, because the implications are so startling.

Yet we all know that space and time are not things—objects that you can see, feel, taste, touch, or smell. They are intangible, like gravity. In fact they are modes of interpretation and understanding, part of the animal logic that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.

We live on the edge of time, where tomorrow hasn’t happened yet. Everything before this moment is part of the history of the universe, gone forever. Or so we believe.

Think for a minute about time flowing forward into the future and how extraordinary it is that we are here, alive on the edge of all time. Imagine all the days and hours that have passed since the beginning of time. Now stack them like chairs on top of each other, and seat yourself on the very top. Science has no real explanation for why we’re here, for why we exist now. According to the current physiocentric worldview, it’s just an accident, a one-in-a-gazillion chance that I am here and that you are there. The statistical probability of being on top of time or infinity is so small as to be meaningless. Yet this is generally how the human mind conceives time.”

Wired’s Interview with Robert Lanza

“Lanza: Of course they should be funded. I don’t think that everything should be changed. What I am saying is that there is a missing piece to the puzzle of how the universe works. The answer is biology. It is as simple as that. The biological picture of space and time must be integrated into our understanding of physics.

WN: Why do you think that there is such a deep misunderstanding of what time and space really are?

Lanza: Our minds are structured to think that way. Even Einstein avoided the question of what space and time are. He simply defined them as what we measure with clocks and measuring-rods. However, the emphasis should be on the “we,” not the measuring.

WN: Do you expect that some people will read your article and think you mean that they can sit on a mountaintop and meditate to change the world around them with mind powers?

Lanza: We can’t decide that we want to jump off the roof and not get hurt. However much we want, we can’t violate the rules of spatiotemporal logic.

WN: In your article, you make the assertion that time and space do not exist. What do you mean by that?

Lanza: There is something very unusual about them. We can’t put them in a marmalade jar and take them back to the lab for analysis. Space and time are forms of animal sense perception. Space and time are not objects or things — they are forms of animal sense perception.”

It’s a shame that personal EEG machines are still so rare and expensive. They could be really useful to people who are studying their own minds, doing self-development practices, meditating, and so forth. If anybody knows of any sources for good EEGs below a thousand bucks, I’d be very happy to hear about it.

I looked around for links for buying a personal EEG like that last version of Mind Mirror, the Mind Mirror III, with no luck. This company, http://www.brainmaster.com/ looked the most promising – it looks like the Discovery channel’s Mythbusters used their machine for some tests.

Here’s some links and info on the Ken Wilber brainwaves video:

An Integral Naked page about the video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFFMtq5g8N4

“Ken emphasizes that the patterns shown on this machine may or may not be typical, but they do emphasize that profound consciousness states can be evoked at will, and these show immediate correlation in brain-wave patterns.”

It’s a little dissapointing that the Integral Naked post ends with this line – “More seriously, as Ken often says, “If you want to know God, you’ve got to get your brain out of the way first. It’s just one big stupid filter….”".

That’s one of those things that sounds good, but, one can’t help but point out, that as far as we can know nothing without a brain can even formulate the concept of god, let alone “know God”. Certainly nothing without a brain can “know God” in the way that a human, with a brain, can.

Whatever “knowing God” is believed to mean.