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.

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 thought this recent article was a pretty good exposition of Kunstler’s “Long Emergency” scenario.

Alternet article by James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency – We Must Imagine a Future Without Cars

“Hope is something we really have to supply for ourselves. We are our own generators of hope, and we do it by demonstrating to ourselves that we are capable of facing the circumstances of our time, of working competently to meet these challenges, and of learning the difference between wishing and doing. In fact, what we need is not so much hope, but confidence in our inherent abilities and the will to act.”