Sunday 1 February 2015

Explaining luck in an animistic world

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We recognise in our lives periods of good and ill luck - and secular mainstream society can only regard these as being either an illusion due to misreading randomness or else a psychological projection of our own state of mind. Religious people may add an explanation relating to the will of god/s and demons - and/ or an element of getting what we 'deserve'.

Indeed, in the end most explanations of luck reduce to either randomness or desert - and if randomness there is no meaning to the whole thing except to undermine our confidence in our own judgement: to persuade people that they live inside a bubble of delusion (yet, somehow and self-refutingly, manage escape these delusions for long enough to realise correctly that they live inside a bubble of delusions...).

If luck is what we deserve, then who are the agents - in particular ill-luck: who is punishing us when we have periods of bad luck?

First of all, bad luck may not be truly bad, considered in the full perspective of our pre-mortal and post-mortal lives. In other words, that which makes us suffer and be miserable (to some extent) on earth may in some unknown way be good for us (and/or for other people) in the wider frame.

However that does not seem to account for everything - in particular we sometimes feel we are 'at odds with' things in general - we feel as if we are in an antagonistic position with respect to our environment, and in a way that certainly feel bad - and certainly does not feel like any kind of positive or creative struggle.

If we try to explain this with reference to God's will then this leads to a punitive and unloving God; if to demonic will then to a God who allows the devil negatively to wreck our lives - which again seems unloving.

Another possible source of apparent malevolence of our surroundings, oft neglected, could be from the 'animistic' world view that all things are living and 'conscious' (to some extent, often very small). SO - the world is not divided into a few living conscious things (mostly humans) and innumerable dead and inert things - but rather the world is made up entirely of living conscious things, but with life/consciousness on a very large continuum so that some things have much, much more of this property than others.

By this account, there is a primordial consciousness in the stuff of the universe which does not derive from God (and therefore cannot be attributed to God or blamed on God) but was already-there before reality was shaped from chaos (which was the act of creation).

When we feel at odds with reality; it may therefore be that we have put ourselves into an antagonistic relationship with the millions and billions of micro-consciousnesses which constitute our environment.

In other words - we are always in communication with everything in our environment, but most of these things with which we communicate are much lower, simpler and weaker consciousnesses so much of their communication is reactive - we set the tone, and they respond.

So when our attitude to our environment is aggressive, exploitative, or even simply passive - then the environment will respond defensively against us as individuals - and the same thing will happen to humans as a group, nation, species or at any meaningful level of communicating-aggregation.

By this account, luck is real, and objective in the sense that there really are more positive and more negative relationships with our environment- the environment really can be more helpful to us or more aggressive against us - and we 'make our own luck' but not psychologically but in terms of the quality of communication with the mega-multiple intelligences which surround us.

The test and proof of this is that if, or when, we can get into a set of positive harmony with our environment then our luck will turn - and even 'misfortune' takes on a very different quality: it stirs us and mobilises our inner resources; rather than inducing despair and anger.

The living world responds positively to our attitudes of love, respect, concern toward it; and negatively to the opposite - and that is 'luck' (or one form of it).

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