Dicing with Life!

I should be so lucky...

We all have a perception about the nature of luck – what luck we have, the luck other people seem to have, the way the gods of good fortune smile in this place and not that one.
If somebody shoots at a target and they just miss we think, and often say,
“Oh – Unlucky! How unlucky was that?!” and so on.
Luck is that seemingly intangible resource that we’re always trying to tap into, because if we could only just have it – then we have an understanding that that would be a sure-fire guarantee to us getting what we really want in life, or at least in this particular part of it.

Our colloquial parlance is full of references to luck – Good Luck AND Bad Luck. Familiar remarks like,
“Best wishes and good luck with your interview; exams; new date; the big match; operation; speech etc.” We’ve all said and had them said to us time and time again.
Of course if you know you’re someone who is not exactly blessed with good luck then these best wishes can easily be pessimistically responded to, with something like,
“Yea thanks – although knowing my luck something awful will be almost bound to happen!” Especially if you can’t find your lucky charm, your mojo!
And then, when we get to meet these self same people later, we’ll probably end up saying, “Well never mind – better luck next time.”
Then there’s that massive imponderable that either makes (or breaks) our lives – the weather. “We were so unlucky with the weather there last year,” or “The wedding went really well and luckily for us the rain kept off until after the photographs.”

Luck is always implied as being something outside of us, and those of us that do seem to have it – whether that’s good or bad luck – somehow seem to have found a way to let it into our lives, or maybe we were even born with it! And even then, once it’s in, there is an idea that we have to do things a certain way in order to keep it in if it’s good or let it out if it’s bad. Lucky numbers, unlucky numbers, black cats, ladders, horseshoes pointing upwards or downwards, omens, portents, superstitions – they are literally everywhere.

Cheating the Unknown

We live in a scientific and gadget filled world, and yet think how many people read and follow their horoscopes. And with horoscopes, funnily enough, the more we look for something, the more we notice it being there – or if it’s not exactly the same at least something very much like it. Our facility to generalise, delete and distort is very good in this regard. And because luck always starts outside of us we try to steal a march on letting it in by getting to know about it before it’s actually arrived!

I’m getting changed before a match – I have a lucky peg or a lucky corner in the changing room. If I can’t occupy these places for some reason or other then things are already going wrong on this particular day. Now I’m going to start attributing every discomfort, every feeling, everything negative that happens – to not being in my ‘lucky place’. I might be even more obsessive than this; put my kit on in a certain sequence, tie my footwear up a certain way – the possibilities are only as endless as the limits of my imagination! These are massive pre-frames, well before the competition has started!

We are always trying to steal a march on luck, endeavouring to harness its resourceful ‘power’.

The Game

So – where’s this all leading? Well, as luck would have it, years ago I chanced upon this game called ‘Dicing with Life’. I suppose it was called that since there was a parallel opposite with Dicing with Death, and it was a game about navigating your life’s way through the world. You won’t imagine what I felt when I found it, quite by accident, when I was rummaging in my uncle’s attic - for a pack of tarot cards, would you believe!
It must have been inspired by the success of The Game of Life because there were a number of similar features, but what made it rather surreal was the inclusion of certain episodes in the game that can only be described as almost Faustian in nature.

The mechanics of the game involved a player’s “Life” token, which was propelled forward on the ‘temporal board’ by the throwing of a set of dice. At every throw some of the dice accessed certain cards, which permitted the player to add attributes to certain sections of his token, and to add to his wealth of knowledge, experience, money, and to add to his health and happiness. There were also certain configurations of resulting throws of the dice that caused fortunate or less fortunate happenstances to impact upon the player’s Life token and ‘silos’ of health, wealth etc.
And then there were these Faustian moments, where the player’s morality could be strengthened or traded!

It’s easy to see that such a complex game would not be too successful in the marketplace – however, it contained all the elements of chance, luck, cause and effect, and controlling our own destiny that we are ever likely to encounter in real life. All, curiously enough, controlled by random throws of dice and pick-ups of randomly shuffled game cards.

Anyone really getting into such an addictive game might then find themselves stepping out of real life and playing the fantasy game for real. And there are many times that we might, if we only realised it, find ourselves Dicing with our own real Life, by stepping out of it and trusting to luck or an excessive random throw of our personal set of dice. Yet, all the while, failing to see the nature of how things really work in paradise.

Alignment

We think we know what is really going on around us, but in truth we are only aware of a fraction of that. We can broaden our perspectives and our perceptions to make that fraction slightly bigger – but it will still always be a fraction.
If we go up in an aircraft or balloon, or even to a mountain top, and then look down upon what is happening beneath us we will see an ever changing sea of events involving people, other beings and objects and environmental forces.
Let us remember that within the mind of every person in that vista there a perception of what is going on around them – and for each and every one of them, that perception is based on a fraction of the actual data. Remember, also, that sat firmly in the middle of the formation of all these perceptions are the filters (that delete, distort and generalise) of each individual!

Now, in terms of this overview I’d invite you to take a look at Luck. Where is it? Do you have an awareness of it? Are there noticeable patterns and alignments that can be construed as Luck?  

Next, come out of that overview and down into the mind of one of those individuals – and again examine Luck. Not his or her luck at this stage, just Luck per se. Now, are there noticeable patterns and alignments that can be construed as Luck which may (or may not) impact upon him or her?

It’s an interesting exercise which I find keeps my feet firmly in the objective camp where Luck and alignment are concerned. When I consider cosmic order and cosmic chaos, I find that this alignment plays a significant part in all things – including people’s lives.
Luck, appears to me, to be a particular alignment of events, objects, natural forces and living things as noticed and interpreted by an individual’s mind.

Transit of Venus

There’s recently been a Transit of Venus – where there has been an alignment of Earth, Venus and the Sun. This has enabled observations on Earth (and in nearby space) to be made of Venus passing across the face of the Sun. In terms of our solar system, this is the last time such an event can be observed in the 21^st century.

There is a significance here to aid our understanding of the relationship between alignment and luck – and once we can perceive our own Luck merely in terms of an alignment of events, then we need never again be prisoners of our own mental construct.

“Okay,” you may say. “This is all well and good, Pete – but how can I get to be more lucky, to be luckier? I want more good luck. Show me how.” 

However - does it work like this? You’re talking about Luck in the same way you talk about Confidence! Yet, aren’t you really after something for nothing, to arbitrarily tip the scales in your favour? Won’t that be playing with the balance of alignments – the yin and yang? Won’t that tip someone else’s scales the other way? Maybe the law of attraction should really be about attuning to and understanding the nature of alignments. It’s just a thought of course, all of it!

Conclusion

And as 100 years is only a small fragment of time in terms of alignment of just three celestial bodies – so also are a whole range of alignments happening for us in small fragments of time, repeating many times over.  Every single day there are thousands of those alignments which we are totally unaware of – and that’s how lucky we are. And if we want to be more lucky, it merely starts with noticing more alignments.

So, to return to common parlance, and really state the obvious –
"We don’t know how lucky we are!”