Om Mani Padme Hum

What is and What it should be. Sharing thoughts of a few people.

Monday, April 25, 2005

A few thoughts on Luck

Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks they deserve? A psychologist says he has discovered the answer.

Ten! years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people are always in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experience ill fortune.

I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research and, over the years, I have interviewed them, monitored their lives and had them take part in experiments.

The results reveal that although these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of their good and bad fortune.

Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not.

I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside.

I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying: "Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.As a result, they miss 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 miss o! 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 eventually revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four 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.
Towards the end of the work, I wondered whether these principles could be used to create good luck. I asked a group of volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person.
Dramatic results These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck.
One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80% of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier.

The lucky people had become even luckier and the unlucky had become lucky. Finally, I had found the elusive "luck factor" . Here are Professor Wiseman's four top tips for becoming lucky: · Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right · Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal routine · Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well · Visualise yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call.

Luck is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Contributed by Sleeping Buddha

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Freedom

Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. It is man's pretense that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity.



Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever-limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution.


When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.


Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence.



contributed by Kavita T

Monday, April 04, 2005

startling book

a friend of mine had given me a book "celestine prophecy" , first look, i said , looks interesting.
then i started reading and i am hooked.

very interesting thought process and concept. and hell it seems to make perfect sense.

i have now started getting actively after the other books in the series.

have managed to trace out the titles of the next few books.

- "the tenth insight"
-"in search of the eleventh insight"

man i am waiting to get my hands on them.

check out the celestine prophecy link below

http://www.celestinevision.com/

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