Your thoughts on Bad Luck.

Hey, i was sat and it came to me today, bad luck, i get a hell of alot of it in life, believe me i do, and i'm not over exaggerating either. For example yesterday i said i'd meet someone to talk on msn at 12 midnight, MSN was working fine all day, not a problem, but when i tried to sign on at 12 it wouldn't let me, it kept taking ages and then jamming, maybe a co-incidence but i think its bad luck, i've had lots of crap happen to me over the past few years, i'm not after sympathy but i'm making a point that i think that bad luck is more than just simply co-incidence, i've had so much things that have happened that is bad luck i'm wondering if its a trait in the family.

What are your thoughts on Bad Luck? I'm not talking about such taboos in which you walk over a grave and you have bad luck for three years, i'm talking about general bad luck. Thanks

It *IS* just a coincidence, and any curse you think you have, you put on yourself by linguistically programming yourself to actually believe there's something wrong. Also, there is no such thing as karma. You can be an asshole, and if something bad happens to you, it's NOT because you were an asshole, but because bad things happen to everyone.

Also, maybe, just maybe, MSN is a piece of garbage :D.

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Originally Posted by Replicon

It *IS* just a coincidence, and any curse you think you have, you put on yourself by linguistically programming yourself to actually believe there's something wrong. Also, there is no such thing as karma. You can be an asshole, and if something bad happens to you, it's NOT because you were an asshole, but because bad things happen to everyone.

Also, maybe, just maybe, MSN is a piece of garbage :D.

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I pretty much agree except for the karma thing. Now, when people hear the term "karma" they tend to think of it as some mysterious force that governs the balance of "luck". Personally, I don't like the word karma because of the implication I mentioned.

But, the "force" that goes by the name "karma" is what I like to call "mechanics of attitude". A friend of mine (in fact, the guy who first introduced me to LDing back in 1990-91) coined that term some years back and I believe it to be the very thing that others refer to as karma, only without the mystic attributes attached to it.

Mechanics of attitude - and by association karma - is nothing more than "if you treat others like crap then eventually they will return the "favor"". The opposite is also true. That's a gross over-simplification of the concept but it should give the idea of where I'm coming from.

Then there is what people generally think of as being "karma", which is when absolutely unrelated things happen and they are believed to be "payback" for events or actions that took place at some other time. This is not true except for in the sense of mechanics of attitude.

I'm not sure if I made sense or only caused more confusion. My point, however, is that there is something to it but it's quite different than it is commonly believed to be. In other words: What goes around comes around but only because you brought it on yourself or because you put yourself in situations that foster such outcomes.

Luck? Eh, luck is what you perceive it to be. Nothing more. Luck is a term used to explain things that happen anyway or that have no other convenient, obvious explanation. When things go well, we credit "good luck". When things don't go so well, we blame "bad luck".

"Luck" is mere probability, the attachment of unseen cause and/or a way to absolve oneself of personal responsibility.

coincidences are so damn overrated! something happens, and it happens again later, and maybe the same day of the same time and the same place and tons of people go "it's just a coincidence".:rolleyes: I'm sorry but the world is not some huge "coincidence" that everything that happens, maybe it is exact timing like i gave an example of, or something similar and lots of people call them "coincidence". What if it happened 5 years ina row? what then? a coincidence???? same time, same place, same hour, same minute, same second, same day, etc.

There are some things that are just beyond our current understanding, i'm not talking about god but maybe there is some type of invisible line some people keep crossing without knowing it? or a few times in their life cross.

I know some things ARE coincidence's but not everything that happens, that is just a load of crap! you gotta really be nieve if you think everything is a coincidence's, i mean the flat out obvious non coincidence's that keep happening over and over and over again, not the once in a blue things because that could be some type of brain related thing that programs things that have happened and you without knowing do it again, things like that have happened are really are coincidence's.

You know, now that you mention it, you're right. In fact, I've been noticing that over all these years, on the same day each year, roughly at similar times, there's all these kids in costumes asking for candy... whoaaa...

Seriously though, you can rant all you want about coincidences and the lack thereof, but how about some examples? And remember, there is a difference between "coincidences" and "the fact that people control their own fates, and some will consciously or unconsciously repeat the same behavious/mistakes over and over again."

I certainly hope your things occuring over and over are not related to photos that bleed and people who see the virgin mary in their cupcakes.

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Originally Posted by Oneironaught

Mechanics of attitude - and by association karma - is nothing more than "if you treat others like crap then eventually they will return the "favor"". The opposite is also true. That's a gross over-simplification of the concept but it should give the idea of where I'm coming from.

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You're absolutely right, and it's not a gross over-simplification at all. But you're talking about random bad luck happening. Unless you pissed off your neighbour and he decided to cut your network cable, you can't blame MSN crapping out on anything like that ;).

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Originally Posted by Replicon

You know, now that you mention it, you're right. In fact, I've been noticing that over all these years, on the same day each year, roughly at similar times, there's all these kids in costumes asking for candy... whoaaa...

Seriously though, you can rant all you want about coincidences and the lack thereof, but how about some examples? And remember, there is a difference between "coincidences" and "the fact that people control their own fates, and some will consciously or unconsciously repeat the same behavious/mistakes over and over again."

I certainly hope your things occuring over and over are not related to photos that bleed and people who see the virgin mary in their cupcakes.

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I'm not talking about you, i'm talking about people in general.

Still, I'm interested. What kinds of invisible lines do you speak of?

Kinda hard to describe but maybe something like when you go on a certain path in your decision making you can come up to this like universal kinda line. Not paranormal, but some type of invisible to the naked eye universal line type of thing. Like i said it's hard to describe, but maybe you cross paths with it in your decision making path, or also maybe some subconcsious kind of thing.
Is there even a word that possibly comes close to something like this? besides universal line. I say universal line because if there is life on other planets, they could possibly have these types of things.

I guess you would have an "alive" universe to an extent or something to have this happen. We all make paths, there are an infinate number of paths, i call them paths but you can call them whatever you wish, it's just because if you changed the past everything else changes, big or small. That's why i call it a path. Change what you did yesterday, and today it would be something completly new. just like on earth on timing, and sometimes when you make, or do not make a certain point. Example - I am riding on a bus, if i am looking out my window to all the hot ladys walking by and i miss 1 by an inch. If i go back, and maybe somehow speed the bus up i'll have changed the path i am on right now, and saw soemthing i should not have unless something was altered. I used to be really good with timing, with other things other then watching the ladies go by.


I'm not saying there is a "god", that governs this line, i don't like to talk about this stuff with some creator as the maker, but maybe there is more to the universe then what we know, we are just been starting on this for like 50 years and there is mucho we don't know, but there is alot we already know. Anyway, universal line is the line i'm talking about, or whatever name it may already have that we gave it.

I dunno, maybe i'm just stretching things i say and think. Does any of this sound reasonable, or sane to anyone? or am i just messed up? :P

Right, for a start i was not talking about karma, sorry if i implied it, well i've always had this thought that if i think more positively things will get better, i have yet to try this due to the annoying situation with bullies that i will escape from in a few weeks time. Thats the point that i believe things will go uphill for me, maybe its just psychological and its all in my mind. Most likely so.

LucidFlanders i can see what your saying and i respect that, there is lots of stuff we don't currently know however when you speak about paths an going back in time will change a path i can see your point however i disagree, have you ever heard of the grandfather paradox? You probably have but here it is anyways. Time travel is impossible as exemplified by the famous grandfather paradox. Imagine you build a time machine. It is possible for you to travel back in time, meet your grandfather before he produces any children (i.e. your father/mother) and kill him. Thus, you would not have been born and the time machine would not have been built, a paradox. Sorry to go off topic a bit but as far as changing a path through time travel i do not think its possible, thats only my opinion though, you could be right about all this. Thanks for the replies everyone

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Originally Posted by lucid_seeker

Right, for a start i was not talking about karma, sorry if i implied it,

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I don't think you implied it at all. The conversation swayed that way because the topic of "luck" make a good segue into similar kinds of phenomena.

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well i've always had this thought that if i think more positively things will get better, i have yet to try this due to the annoying situation with bullies that i will escape from in a few weeks time. Thats the point that i believe things will go uphill for me, maybe its just psychological and its all in my mind. Most likely so.

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And therein lies the other face of the mechanics of attitude. Your attitude and the way you relate to things effects the way you perceive them.

It's very true, your attitude will actually change your "luck". That's because on some level, you project your mood, and people pick up on it. And there's also the linguistical self-programming thing I mentioned earlier. Like if you tell yourself "I can't talk to beautiful girls", you're only convincing yourself (with your wording) that that will never change, and until you get it into your head that it will, it really won't.

Bad luck doesn't exist in the way that there are certain people that really (actively) attract bad things. That is just silly.

Sure, there might be people that have a lot of bad things happen to then. But almost half the people have more bad things happen to then than the average person...

So: Bad Luck is nonsense really.

Also: Importantly, some people just complain more, or just naturally feel more effected by bad things. That means, that if they would have as much bad things happen to them, as to people that naturally are more 'happy' or less easily effected, they would feel like they have more bad luck then other people..

Yeahhh

peace

. . .

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Originally Posted by LucidFlanders

Kinda hard to describe but maybe something like when you go on a certain path in your decision making you can come up to this like universal kinda line. Not paranormal, but some type of invisible to the naked eye universal line type of thing. Like i said it's hard to describe, but maybe you cross paths with it in your decision making path, or also maybe some subconcsious kind of thing.

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...:eh:

Why is this stuff (not the quoted passage in particular, that just struck me as unreasonably muddled and nonsensical) in the philosophy section?

I've always wondered why so many seemingly intelligent people cringe at the mention of 'philosophy'. I'm getting the feeling that it's because they associate it with vague, confused, pseudo-intellectual what-iffing instead of the purely logical hypothesizing that it should be.

I'm not saying my definition of philosophy is the 'right' one, but it would be really great if some people could think over their ideas more closely before letting them loose. Vague is not good.

As for 'bad luck', it seems pretty obvious that there is no such thing. Recalling notable outcomes to events and forgetting normal ones is a widely acknowledged phenomenon, and it often applies to things like 'luck'. How many times have you successfully talked to people on MSN at a given time? Most likely, much more than once. You represent this one event disproportionately in your memory because it struck you as unexpected, and then you proceed to attribute it to some sort of malevolent force simply because you've made it seem like such a big deal.

It surely is not a coincidence. Luck is very real. Fortunately, you're not as bad off as you think. You are a lucid dreamer and so you are much more equipped to deal with your luck than many others.

You see, your outlook on life and your beliefs effect your world in ways that few people grasp and nobody understands fully. The most obvious aspect of your thoughts effecting your world is the simplest one; what you expect, you find. If you happen to notice the number 45 as being significant, it will show up more and more throughout your daily life. Your bad luck manifests itself in much the same way. You believe yourself to have bad luck, therefore you focus on all of the negative circumstances that you find yourself in and then say to yourself, "see I was right." This is a common human trait.

Another way in which your beliefs effect your life in relation to luck is the attitude and persona that you display to the world. You may not realize it, but your belief in your bad luck changes the way you act. You will be more likely to get discouraged, subconsciously or otherwise attributing any failures to an insurmountable invisible force. You will display a persona of downtrodden-ness overtly or subtly and this will effect how others react to you.

There is even some evidence that you may be able to physically effect the world around you simply with your beliefs and not related to the image you project to the world, although this is the bit that you may not accept and is not really important when you take the much more grounded evidence in to account.

You see, you make your bad luck simply by believing it is there.

fortune favors the brave,

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Originally Posted by thegnome54

...:eh:

Why is this stuff (not the quoted passage in particular, that just struck me as unreasonably muddled and nonsensical) in the philosophy section?

I've always wondered why so many seemingly intelligent people cringe at the mention of 'philosophy'. I'm getting the feeling that it's because they associate it with vague, confused, pseudo-intellectual what-iffing instead of the purely logical hypothesizing that it should be.

I'm not saying my definition of philosophy is the 'right' one, but it would be really great if some people could think over their ideas more closely before letting them loose. Vague is not good.

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Good for you, i could care less what you think of my 6 month old opinion. Don't like it, don't read it.

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Originally Posted by Xaqaria

It surely is not a coincidence. Luck is very real. Fortunately, you're not as bad off as you think. You are a lucid dreamer and so you are much more equipped to deal with your luck than many others.

You see, your outlook on life and your beliefs effect your world in ways that few people grasp and nobody understands fully. The most obvious aspect of your thoughts effecting your world is the simplest one; what you expect, you find. If you happen to notice the number 45 as being significant, it will show up more and more throughout your daily life. Your bad luck manifests itself in much the same way. You believe yourself to have bad luck, therefore you focus on all of the negative circumstances that you find yourself in and then say to yourself, "see I was right." This is a common human trait.

Another way in which your beliefs effect your life in relation to luck is the attitude and persona that you display to the world. You may not realize it, but your belief in your bad luck changes the way you act. You will be more likely to get discouraged, subconsciously or otherwise attributing any failures to an insurmountable invisible force. You will display a persona of downtrodden-ness overtly or subtly and this will effect how others react to you.

There is even some evidence that you may be able to physically effect the world around you simply with your beliefs and not related to the image you project to the world, although this is the bit that you may not accept and is not really important when you take the much more grounded evidence in to account.

You see, you make your bad luck simply by believing it is there.

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What if say in 1 month....your best friend died, your parents died in a car accident, you lost your legs, all your friends hate you for no reason, you are getting evicted, you lose your job, your kids are being taken away, your TV gets broken when you turn it on, you get into massive dept. All this in 1 month. That's bad luck. I just made this up but i'm sure this has happened to some people in a month. Bad luck is there if you see it or not. bad luck is not something paranormal, or not paranormal. It's just there, when you least expect it. BAM! Happens to every single person, some more then others. Bad series of events that happen from time to time in your life, just like good series of events.

It seems to me that fate is a vector. Nothing is predetermined, fate isn't a straight line.
But that vector aims in a certain direction, that direction being luck.

Manipulating the vector of fate in one's own favour is a matter of "beyond dreaming" but I'd say that luck, due to its nature, seems balanced. The balance is hard to see but it always seems to level out eventually. Not without one's own effort though, of course, since luck is a supplementary trait that goes along with actions, not an independent process.

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Originally Posted by LucidFlanders

What if say in 1 month....your best friend died, your parents died in a car accident, you lost your legs, all your friends hate you for no reason, you are getting evicted, you lose your job, your kids are being taken away, your TV gets broken when you turn it on, you get into massive dept. All this in 1 month. That's bad luck. I just made this up but i'm sure this has happened to some people in a month. Bad luck is there if you see it or not. bad luck is not something paranormal, or not paranormal. It's just there, when you least expect it. BAM! Happens to every single person, some more then others. Bad series of events that happen from time to time in your life, just like good series of events.

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A series of unfortunate events is equally possible as a series of the fortunate events; less common than the normal events, but does not necessarily prove something such as "luck" which has no solid definition.

As far as I know luck is just a way to look a something.

Is it the luck of the die? Or the velocity/angle/density/magnetism of your wrist and projection, and style/structure and nature of the die themselves, and the air resistance and gravity, wind speed and surface tensions, and where the die bounce and collide together in many possible ways, and the exercised thought which affects the universal materials and events?

I'd like to add that coincidences are overlooked by some, and really do have deeper meaning to be recognized.

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Originally Posted by LucidFlanders

What if say in 1 month....your best friend died, your parents died in a car accident, you lost your legs, all your friends hate you for no reason, you are getting evicted, you lose your job, your kids are being taken away, your TV gets broken when you turn it on, you get into massive dept. All this in 1 month. That's bad luck. I just made this up but i'm sure this has happened to some people in a month. Bad luck is there if you see it or not. bad luck is not something paranormal, or not paranormal. It's just there, when you least expect it. BAM! Happens to every single person, some more then others. Bad series of events that happen from time to time in your life, just like good series of events.

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Your straw man evidence does nothing to convince me of whatever you are arguing for.

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Originally Posted by LucidFlanders

What if say in 1 month....your best friend died, your parents died in a car accident, you lost your legs, all your friends hate you for no reason, you are getting evicted, you lose your job, your kids are being taken away, your TV gets broken when you turn it on, you get into massive dept. All this in 1 month. That's bad luck. I just made this up but i'm sure this has happened to some people in a month. Bad luck is there if you see it or not. bad luck is not something paranormal, or not paranormal. It's just there, when you least expect it. BAM! Happens to every single person, some more then others. Bad series of events that happen from time to time in your life, just like good series of events.

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Don't you see that you are contradicting yourself? You're trying to say that hypothetical situation would be "bad luck," as in an active malevolent force, but then you say "I'm sure this has happened to some people in a month." That's an appeal to probability, which is contradictory to this wierd idea about bad luck as a force of nature.

No a little word about "streaks." Statistical distribution always appears in streaks of results, particularly when results can be exressed binarily. (That is to say, in dualities, such as good/bad, or win/lose, or plus/minus, or, as I will illustrate, head/tails.) Say you take a quarter and start flipping it, then recording the results of each flip. There will be some instances of getting heads five, or maybe even ten or fifteen flips in a row. Is that because your quarter is more likely to land on heads next time you flip it?

Of course not!! The odds are always fifty/fifty. But stats always show streaks of consistancy, because the alternative is a perfectly repeating pattern of heads, tails, heads, tails, heads, tail, ad nauseum. And why should chaos fall into patterns like that.

So you see, streaks of what you call good or bad luck are statistically inevitable, and are not meaningful in any metaphysical way.

The only contra is when i say bad series of events, and good series of events. I gave examples of the bad things, where is the contra?:?

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Your straw man evidence does nothing to convince me of whatever you are arguing for.

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I'm just answering the bolded part as best i can. Bad things happen, bad series of events. I'm not trying to convince you, or anyone else to say bad luck is amung people, i just stated it.

Read it again.



More slowly, this time.

There is no such thing as bad luck. If someone seems to get a lot of it, it's just an illusion. Also, remember that fortune favors the brave. Think about that... maybe you're not living your life the way you should be.

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Originally Posted by LucidFlanders

The only contra is when i say bad series of events, and good series of events. I gave examples of the bad things, where is the contra?:?

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Great game, great game...