v1.0 · April 2026

The Luck Convergence Index

Twelve Wisdom Traditions, One Trainable Disposition

LUCK LAB · ~55 MIN READ

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The Luck Convergence Index

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Twelve Wisdom Traditions, One Trainable Disposition

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LUCK LAB

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v1.0 · April 2026 · ~55 min read · 36 citations

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Preface

This document exists because of a quiet coincidence — or, if you prefer, a convergence.

Over three years of reading across psychology, philosophy, and the world's contemplative traditions, we kept noticing the same shape showing up in radically different places. A Taoist sage describing wu wei in the fourth century BCE, a British psychologist running controlled experiments on lucky people in 2003, a Kabbalist in thirteenth-century Spain writing about mazal, a Stoic emperor scribbling in Greek on campaign in 170 CE — they were, to a startling degree, describing the same thing. Not the same metaphysics. The same mechanism.

The mechanism, roughly, is this: what we call "luck" is not a random variable acting upon passive lives. It is a disposition — a particular way of attending to the world, a particular posture of openness, a particular rhythm of action and surrender — and that disposition can be trained.

This is not a mystical claim. Richard Wiseman's decade-long study at the University of Hertfordshire, involving roughly 400 subjects recruited through national newspaper advertisements, found that self-identified "lucky" people differed from "unlucky" people along four measurable behavioural dimensions, and that teaching those behaviours to unlucky people measurably improved their fortunes within a month.1 That is an empirical result, replicated in more modest follow-ups, and it echoes — with only slight translation — what the Tao Te Ching, the Meditations, the Bhagavad Gītā, and the I Ching have been saying for two and a half thousand years.

We called this document The Luck Convergence Index because "index" is what it is: a cross-reference. Twelve traditions, six mechanisms, one practical claim. The claim is that luck is convergent — that when humans from incompatible cosmologies, separated by continents and millennia, arrive at substantively the same answer about what produces a fortunate life, the convergence is itself evidence. Not proof. Evidence.

You do not need to believe any of these traditions to benefit from what they converge upon. You only need to be willing to test the behaviours they describe. That, too, is what Wiseman found: the behaviour comes first, the fortune follows, and the belief — if it comes at all — comes last.

A final note on tone. We have tried to write this the way we would want to read it: precisely, warmly, without hype. No "the universe wants you to…". No promises we cannot keep. Where a tradition's metaphysics is contested, we say so. Where a quote is famous but misattributed, we leave it out. Where the science is thin or the interpretation is live, we hedge. We would rather be slightly dry and entirely honest than exciting and slightly wrong.

Read slowly. Skip what does not serve you. Try the seven-day protocol at the end before deciding whether any of this is true.

— Luck Lab

Executive Summary — The Thesis in 60 Seconds

The claim: Luck is not random. It is a disposition — a specific quality of attention, openness, and action — and that disposition is trainable.

The evidence: Richard Wiseman's decade-long study at the University of Hertfordshire (n=400) identified four behaviours that distinguish self-described lucky people from unlucky ones. All four are learnable. Meanwhile, twelve independent wisdom traditions — from Jungian synchronicity to Taoist wu wei to Kabbalistic mazal — converge on the same six mechanisms.

The six levers:

  1. Attention — how widely you notice
  2. Openness — how much you deviate from routine
  3. Aligned action — how well you time your moves
  4. Surrender — how easily you release control
  5. Connection — how dense your social web is
  6. Meaning-making — how you interpret what happens

The convergence: Every tradition, independently, emphasises a subset of these six. Wiseman validated four empirically. The traditions add the remaining two.

Want to start before reading further? Skip to Section 7 for the seven-day starter protocol. Then come back for the why.

Want to know YOUR specific profile? Take the free 3-minute Reading at lucklab.app/reading.

1. The Pattern Nobody Noticed

In 1952, Carl Gustav Jung published a monograph titled Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge — Synchronicity as an Acausal Connecting Principle — alongside a complementary essay by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli.2 The book was not well received. Jung's colleagues thought he had wandered from psychology into mysticism; Pauli's thought he had wandered from physics into poetry. The central claim was awkward: that meaningful coincidences occur more often than chance allows, and that they occur clustered around people in certain psychological states — particularly those undergoing individuation, the integration of the unconscious into conscious life.

Half a century later, in a windowless laboratory at the University of Hertfordshire, Richard Wiseman was running an experiment on luck. He had advertised in The Daily Telegraph for people who considered themselves either exceptionally lucky or exceptionally unlucky. Four hundred replied. He asked them to count the photographs in a newspaper; on page two, in large type, was a message reading "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." The lucky people, on average, noticed it. The unlucky people, on average, did not. The unlucky people were counting harder.1

Jung had described a particular state of attention — relaxed, receptive, meaning-seeking — as the psychological precondition for synchronicity. Wiseman had just measured it, and correlated it with life outcomes. Neither man had read the other carefully. Neither was trying to confirm a wisdom tradition. And yet, if one places their conclusions side by side with Laozi's wu wei (non-forcing action), Arjuna's nishkāma karma (action without grasping), Marcus Aurelius's amor fati (love of what happens), the Yorùbá concept of orí (the head that chooses its destiny) — a pattern emerges that is very hard to un-see.

The pattern is that fortune is not distributed randomly across temperaments. It is distributed along temperaments. Certain habits of mind — a loose grip on outcome, a wide aperture of attention, a willingness to act before one is certain, a disposition to find meaning rather than demand it — correlate, empirically and across every culture that has bothered to look, with better life outcomes than their opposites.

This is unusual. Most of what we call "wisdom" does not survive cross-cultural comparison very well. Ethics diverge wildly. Cosmologies contradict. Rituals are untranslatable. But the technology of luck — the actual behavioural prescription, stripped of its metaphysical wrapping — is remarkably stable. Taoism and Stoicism, which share no common ancestor and no contact before the nineteenth century, converge on the same counsel about surrender. Sufism and Vedanta, which share only the thinnest thread of medieval exchange, converge on the same counsel about action as offering. Jung and the I Ching, which did make contact (he wrote the foreword to the Wilhelm translation), converge on the same counsel about timing.3

What follows is a survey of twelve such traditions. We take them one at a time: where they come from, what they claim, how they claim it works, and — crucially — what they all seem to be pointing at. Then, in Section 4, we tabulate the overlap. In Section 5, we extract the six mechanisms they converge upon and ask which are empirically validated. In Section 7, we offer a seven-day starter protocol drawn from the intersection.

The argument, one more time, so it is clear: luck is not random. Luck is a disposition. Dispositions are trainable. Twelve independent witnesses — eleven contemplative, one experimental — have noticed the same thing. This document is their testimony, collated.

Start here if you're short on time: The seven-day protocol in Section 7 gives you the practices without the theory. Read that first, try it for a week, then come back for the depth. The theory will land differently after you've experienced the practices.

2. Twelve Traditions, One Conclusion

I. Jungian Psychology — Synchronicity

Origin: Zürich, 1920s–1950s. Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), working partly in collaboration with the Nobel-laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

Original term: Synchronizität (German), from the Greek syn- (together) and chronos (time) — "meaningful coincidence in time."

Core concept. Synchronicity names those occasions on which an inner psychic state (a dream, a preoccupation, a sudden insight) coincides with an outer event in a way that is experientially meaningful but causally unexplained. Jung's standard example is the patient who was describing a dream involving a golden scarab at the very moment a rose-chafer beetle — the European analogue — flew against the consulting-room window. He opened it, caught the beetle, handed it to her, and the therapeutic impasse broke.4 Jung did not claim the beetle was sent. He claimed the coincidence of inner and outer carried information that neither alone could carry.

Mechanism. Jung proposed that the unconscious is not bounded by the individual skull. It forms, at some level, a collective substrate — the archetypal layer — which is not subject to ordinary causation but to what he called, with Pauli, acausal orderedness. The practical implication is smaller than the metaphysical one: regardless of whether the collective unconscious exists as Jung described it, people in certain receptive psychological states notice meaningful patterns in their environment that people in other states miss. Synchronicity, operationally, is a perceptual competence.

Primary-source quote.

"Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever occur."5

Practice. Jung recommended keeping a dream journal and, separately, a log of coincidences; reviewing both together at intervals; and in general, cultivating what he called active imagination — a disciplined form of attention to spontaneous inner imagery.6

Why it converges. Jung's account translates, almost without loss, into what Wiseman would later measure as "openness to chance opportunity." Both describe a specific attentional posture — broad, unforced, willing to register the unexpected. Both predict that this posture produces, over time, more of what we call good fortune.

II. Taoism — Wu Wei

Origin: Ancient China, traditionally sixth century BCE; the Tao Te Ching attributed to Laozi and the Zhuangzi compiled in the fourth to third centuries BCE.

Original term: 無為 (wú wéi), commonly rendered "non-doing," more accurately "non-forcing" or "effortless action."

Core concept. The Tao (道) is the underlying pattern and flow of reality. Human beings thrive when they align with it and suffer when they contrive against it. Wu wei is the practical art of that alignment: acting with the grain of a situation rather than against it, so that effort becomes minimal and results disproportionate. The butcher Ding in Zhuangzi chapter 3 is the canonical example — after nineteen years his blade is still sharp because he cuts along the joints, never through them.7

Mechanism. Forcing generates friction. Friction produces failure, injury, exhaustion, and the subtle violence that Laozi calls wei — contrived action. The sage, who has learned to read situations with uncluttered attention, finds the seams in them and works through those. The mechanism is partly perceptual (seeing the actual structure of a situation rather than one's projection onto it) and partly motivational (releasing the grip of ego and outcome so that response becomes responsive rather than reactive).

Primary-source quote.

"The sage does nothing, yet nothing is left undone." — Tao Te Ching, ch. 48 (為學日益，為道日損。損之又損，以至於無為。無為而無不為。)8

Practice. The classical Taoist practices are zuo wang (坐忘, "sitting and forgetting") and xin zhai (心齋, "fasting of the mind") — forms of meditative attention in which the forcing self is allowed to quiet so that responsive action can arise. Modern practitioners often substitute Zen-influenced zazen or simple breath meditation; the phenomenology is close enough.

Why it converges. Wu wei is the Taoist name for what Wiseman's subjects described as "going with the flow" and what Stoics call amor fati. It is the first of what we will later call the surrender mechanism: the counter-intuitive finding that loosening one's grip on outcome, paradoxically, improves outcomes.

III. Kabbalah — Mazal

Origin: Medieval Jewish mysticism, consolidated in the Sefer ha-Zohar (late thirteenth century, Castile, attributed to Moses de León) and the Lurianic school (sixteenth century, Safed).

Original term: מזל (mazal), often glossed as "luck" in modern Hebrew but originally meaning "constellation" or "drip" — a channel through which divine influence descends to a particular soul.

Core concept. Mazal is not fortune in the Roman sense. It is the specific spiritual conduit or flow allotted to a soul from above. One does not, in the strict Kabbalistic view, have luck — one receives mazal, and the reception can be more or less open. The familiar toast mazal tov (מזל טוב) literally means "a good constellation," but idiomatically "may the flow be favourable." Every soul has a mazal; what varies is the alignment between the soul and its channel.9

Mechanism. The Kabbalistic world is structured by sefirot — ten emanations through which divine energy descends and returns. Blockages in the human vessel (through misaligned action, unrepaired relationship, un-examined trauma) constrict the flow. The practices of the tradition — prayer, tikkun (repair), study, ethical refinement — are understood as the work of clearing the vessel so that shefa (abundance) can flow through. Luck, on this account, is less like a lottery and more like plumbing.

Primary-source quote.

"There is no blade of grass below that has not a constellation (mazal) above it that strikes it and says to it: Grow."10 — Bereshit Rabbah 10:6

Practice. The daily tikkun practices of traditional Kabbalah are extensive. The distilled core, for our purposes, is this: at the end of each day, identify one misalignment — a harshness, a grasping, a small betrayal of one's own deepest sense — and perform a small, concrete act of repair before sleeping. The vessel is cleared by the repair, not by the intention to repair.

Why it converges. Mazal frames luck as a connection mechanism — a function of the quality of one's relationships, upwards and outwards. This prefigures by seven centuries the finding, now well-replicated in social-network research, that extensive and well-maintained weak-tie networks are among the strongest predictors of positive life outcomes including job success, health, and longevity.11

IV. Vedanta — Karma and Dharma

Origin: The Upanishads (c. 800–500 BCE) and the Bhagavad Gītā (c. 200 BCE–200 CE), systematised in the Vedānta schools of Shankara (eighth century CE) and later Rāmānuja and Madhva.

Original terms: karma ("action"), dharma ("that which upholds; one's proper function"). Crucially: nishkāma karma ("action without desire for the fruit").

Core concept. Every action plants a seed; every seed eventually ripens. This is karma in its technical sense — not cosmic punishment but simple consequence, extended across time and (in the tradition's view) lives. Dharma is the particular pattern of right action fitted to one's nature, station, and moment. The Gītā's central counsel, delivered by Krishna to a paralysed Arjuna on the edge of battle, is not to act correctly and grasp the reward, but to act correctly while releasing the reward.

Mechanism. Grasping (rāga) and aversion (dveṣa) distort perception and action. The agent who acts with nishkāma — skilful action without clinging — acts more clearly, responds more adequately, and plants cleaner seeds. Over time the field becomes fertile. What looks, from outside, like "luck" is the harvest of long patient alignment between action and situation.

Primary-source quote.

"You have the right to action alone, never to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction."12 — Bhagavad Gītā 2.47 (karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana)

Practice. The Gītā itself is the manual. A distilled modern form: before undertaking any action of consequence, identify what one hopes to gain from it, acknowledge the hope, and then proceed as if the hope had already been released. Act, then let go. Measure the action, not the outcome.

Why it converges. Nishkāma karma is, behaviourally, almost identical to Taoist wu wei and Stoic amor fati: it is the surrender mechanism encoded into ethics. It also contains an action mechanism — the Gītā is emphatic that inaction is not the answer. Fortune favours those who act without grasping; it does not favour those who merely refrain from grasping.

V. Stoicism — Amor Fati

Origin: Hellenistic Athens, third century BCE, founded by Zeno of Citium; flourished in Imperial Rome through Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius (second century CE).

Original term: amor fati, Latin, "love of fate." Not a classical Stoic phrase (it was sharpened by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century) but a precise distillation of what the Stoics counselled. The Stoic originals include Epictetus's prohairesis (moral choice) and Marcus's repeated injunction to meet circumstance with equanimity.

Core concept. Between stimulus and response there is, in the Stoic analysis, a space — the prohairetic faculty, the will properly so called. Everything outside that space is, in the famous dichotomy, "not up to us." Peace and effectiveness both come from attending relentlessly to what is up to us (our judgements, our responses) and releasing what is not (events, outcomes, other people). Amor fati is the next step beyond mere acceptance: not resignation but affirmation — to will what has happened, because it has happened.

Mechanism. The Stoic mechanism is strikingly practical. Grief, anger, and anxiety arise not from events but from judgements about events. Revise the judgement — not by denial but by accurate perception of the event's actual scope — and the disturbance attenuates. The cleared mind then responds more effectively. Over a lifetime, the Stoic who has trained this discipline finds that events sort themselves with a quality that, from outside, looks like luck.

Primary-source quote.

"Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy."13 — Epictetus, Enchiridion 8

And from Marcus, in Hays's translation:

"Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you."14 — Meditations 10.5

Practice. The evening review (Meditations book 1 is Marcus's lifelong example): at day's end, rehearse the day's events, locate the judgements one made, revise the ones that produced disturbance, and commend the ones that produced equanimity. The premeditatio malorum — the morning rehearsal of what could go wrong — is its counterpart: one immunises oneself in advance against being thrown.

Why it converges. Stoicism is the West's cleanest articulation of the surrender mechanism — release of what is not ours — paired with the action mechanism (what is ours, we act on with full force). Together they produce the resilience that Wiseman found to be the fourth behaviour of lucky people: turning bad luck into good by interpretive reframe.

VI. Buddhism — Pratītyasamutpāda

Origin: North India, fifth to fourth century BCE; attributed to the historical Buddha (Siddhārtha Gautama); systematised in the Pali Canon and Mahāyāna commentaries through the Common Era.

Original term: pratītyasamutpāda (Sanskrit), paṭicca-samuppāda (Pali); usually translated "dependent origination" or "interdependent arising."

Core concept. Nothing arises in isolation. Every phenomenon — every thought, every event, every self — arises in dependence on a web of prior conditions. There are no independent things, only events in relation. The twelve-linked chain of dependent origination (ignorance → formations → consciousness → …) traces, in the tradition's analysis, exactly how suffering assembles itself from conditions and how, link by link, it can be disassembled.

Mechanism. If every event arises from conditions, then what we call luck is the felicitous intersection of conditions. And conditions are modifiable — not all at once, and not by force, but by the patient cultivation of skilful states. The Buddhist mechanism is therefore conditions management: attend to what you can cultivate (generosity, virtue, calm, clear seeing), and the conditions for fortunate events assemble themselves. This is not magic; it is ecology applied to the mind.

Primary-source quote.

"When this is, that is. From the arising of this comes the arising of that. When this isn't, that isn't. From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that."15 — Assutavā Sutta, SN 12.61

Practice. The Eightfold Path, distilled: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. For present purposes, the two most immediately operational are right speech (speak less, more truly, more kindly) and right mindfulness (attend to what is happening rather than to what one wishes were happening or fears might happen).

Why it converges. Dependent origination is the most systematic articulation in any tradition of the connection mechanism: you are not separate from your conditions, and your conditions include the people, practices, and environments you cultivate. The Buddhist framing also anticipates modern systems thinking in a way that is uncanny: luck is an emergent property of a well-tended system.

VII. Sufism — Barakah

Origin: Islamic mysticism, consolidated from the ninth century CE onwards; major figures include Rabīʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, al-Ghazālī, Ibn ʿArabī, and Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī.

Original term: بركة (barakah), "blessing, sacred flow, abundance that transmits." Cognate with the Hebrew brakhah.

Core concept. Barakah is the transmissible quality of the sacred. It rests on certain people, places, moments, and objects, and it flows from them to those who approach in the right state. A saint's presence, a teacher's words, a grave, a meal shared with the right intention — all can carry barakah. It is neither magic nor metaphor in the tradition's own terms; it is a specific ontological category of transmittable grace.

Mechanism. Approach, in Sufi thought, is everything. The seeker's state (ḥāl) determines what can be received. An open, attentive, humble, generous state catches barakah; a closed, demanding, distracted state lets it pass. This maps, with very little translation, onto social-psychological findings on reciprocity, trust signalling, and what we might call the approach quality of social encounters. The person who shows up generous and unforced receives more than the person who shows up transactional and tight.

Traditional image. In Sufi teaching, divine abundance is often likened to an overflowing source — the Qur'ānic Kawthar (Q. 108:1), the pool of abundance promised to the Prophet. What any seeker receives is not limited by the source but by the size and openness of the vessel they bring to it. One comes with a bucket and carries away a bucket; one comes with cupped hands and carries away what the hands can hold.16

Practice. The classical practice is ṣuḥba — "keeping company" — the slow, undemanded companionship of those further along the path. Its distilled modern form: spend unhurried time with people who are more generous, more competent, or more serene than you are, and do not ask them for anything. Bring tea. The barakah, if there is any, transmits in the absence of asking.

Why it converges. Barakah is the Sufi name for the connection mechanism again, but with a specific inflection: fortune is catchable, contagious, and transmitted through proximity and posture. This is consonant with the well-replicated social-contagion findings of Christakis and Fowler: happiness, health behaviours, and even career outcomes propagate through social networks up to three degrees of separation.17

VIII. Hermeticism — "As Above, So Below"

Origin: Greco-Egyptian Alexandria, first to third centuries CE; attributed to the mythical Hermes Trismegistus. Principal texts: the Corpus Hermeticum and the Emerald Tablet.

Original phrasing: Latin quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius ("that which is above is like that which is below"), from the Tabula Smaragdina, likely translated from an Arabic source by the twelfth century and circulated widely in Renaissance Europe.18

Core concept. Macrocosm and microcosm mirror one another. The patterns that structure the cosmos also structure the psyche, the city, the body, the day. To know one level is to have a map to the others. Hermeticism is therefore the tradition of correspondence: by reading one domain carefully, one acquires leverage on another.

Mechanism. Practically — setting aside the tradition's more baroque metaphysics — the Hermetic claim is that inner and outer are coupled. A disorganised inner life tends to produce a disorganised outer life; a coherent inner life tends to produce a coherent outer life. This is less a cosmic law than an observation about attention and action: what one has cultivated internally is what one is able to recognise and shape externally. Jung, who was deeply read in Hermeticism, made this explicit in Psychology and Alchemy (1944): the alchemical opus is, phenomenologically, the work of individuation.19

Primary-source quote.

"That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of the one thing."20 — Tabula Smaragdina, line 2

Practice. The classical Hermetic practice is contemplative: study the correspondences in a text until they begin to show themselves in experience. A modern distillation: each evening, note one pattern in the day's outer events, and one pattern in the day's inner life. Ask whether they rhyme. Over weeks, the rhymes become information.

Why it converges. Hermeticism contributes the meaning mechanism: the disposition to read one's environment as meaningful rather than arbitrary. This maps directly onto Wiseman's finding that lucky people are more likely to interpret neutral or negative events as containing usable lessons — what we will later call narrative coherence.

IX. I Ching — Timeliness

Origin: China, layered composition from c. 1000 BCE (the oldest oracular layer, the Zhou Yi) through the Confucian commentaries of the Ten Wings (c. fourth to third century BCE).

Original concept: 時 (shí, "the right time"), paired with 中 (zhōng, "centrality" or "appropriateness to the moment"). The superior person is not the one who always acts, nor the one who never acts, but the one who acts at the right time.

Core concept. The I Ching or Yijing is, on the surface, a divination manual — sixty-four hexagrams generated by a randomising procedure and interpreted against a canonical text. Beneath the surface, it is a phenomenology of situation: a structured library of the archetypal patterns a human life moves through, together with counsel about how each pattern wants to be met. To consult the Yijing is to be asked: what, actually, is the shape of the moment you are in?

Mechanism. Timeliness is a perceptual competence. Most mistakes, in the Yijing's view, are not errors of strategy but errors of timing — acting before the moment is ripe, or after it has passed. Training oneself to read the shape of a situation, its rising or falling tendency, its hidden constraints, is the core work. The randomiser (yarrow stalks or coins) is, in the modern psychological reading, a device for breaking one's default frame on the situation so that the actual situation can be seen.

Primary-source quote.

"The superior person knows what is going to come; the inferior person knows what has already come. Knowing the seeds — that is divine indeed."21 — Xici Zhuan (Great Commentary), I.5

The sage, on this account, neither runs out to meet events nor flinches away when they arrive; the posture is one of composed availability to the moment as it actually unfolds.22

Practice. A modest contemporary practice: before a consequential decision, sit with the question for longer than feels comfortable, write out the three possible shapes of the moment (rising, falling, turning), and ask which shape the evidence actually supports. Only then decide. The Yijing itself can be consulted, but is not required; the discipline is the noticing.

Why it converges. The I Ching contributes a specific variant of the action mechanism: timely action. Jung wrote the foreword to the Wilhelm translation in 1949 explicitly because he saw the Yijing as a systematised synchronicity oracle — a way of reading the acausal order of a moment.23 Timeliness is also a theme Wiseman's lucky subjects reported intuitively: they spoke of "gut feelings" about when to move and when to wait, and they trusted those feelings more than unlucky subjects did.

X. Yorùbá / Ifá — Orí and Àṣẹ

Origin: West Africa, the Yorùbá-speaking regions of present-day Nigeria and Benin, with diasporic developments in Cuba (Lucumí/Santería) and Brazil (Candomblé). The oral Ifá literary corpus comprises 256 Odù, each with hundreds of ese (verses), traditionally memorised by babalawo (diviners).

Original terms: Orí (literally "head"), the personal destiny chosen by each soul before birth; Àṣẹ (often written Ashé), the vital force that makes things happen — the capacity for a word or act to be effective.

Core concept. Before descending into the world, each soul kneels before Olódùmarè (the Supreme Being) and chooses its Orí — its particular destiny, character, and share of fortune. Some choose well, some choose poorly, some forget what they chose. Life's work is, in part, the remembering and realisation of one's Orí. Àṣẹ, meanwhile, is the power to make things happen — possessed in different measures by different beings, words, and moments. A pronouncement with àṣẹ comes to pass; one without it dissolves.24

Mechanism. Fortune in Yorùbá cosmology is the alignment between a person and their own Orí — the destiny they themselves chose. Divination (Ifá) is the technology for recovering that alignment when it has been lost. Àṣẹ flows more readily to those in alignment. The mechanism is therefore vocational: discover what you actually are, become it, and the world arranges itself around the becoming.

Traditional invocation. A recurring refrain in Ifá prayer addresses Orí directly as the personal advocate that blesses its own before any external spirit — "Orí pèlé, Atèté níran, Atété gbe ni kòòsà" ("Head, I greet you, you who swiftly remember your own, you who bless a person before any Spirit"). The underlying teaching is that no Òrìṣà blesses a person without the consent of that person's own head.25

Practice. The traditional practice is Ifá divination, performed by a trained babalawo. The distilled insight, usable without the ritual apparatus: at intervals — quarterly is reasonable — ask yourself what your Orí seems to be pointing you toward, as distinct from what your circumstances or fears are pushing you toward. Write the answer. Revisit it. The Orí tends to say consistent things across years; the circumstances and fears change.

Why it converges. Yorùbá cosmology contributes the meaning mechanism in its vocational form: alignment with what one is for. This anticipates, by at least a millennium, what positive psychology calls eudaimonic well-being — well-being rooted in meaning and purpose rather than pleasure — and which correlates, in large longitudinal studies, with most of the outcomes people mean when they say "luck."26

XI. Quantum Interpretations — The Observer Effect, Carefully

Origin: Göttingen, Copenhagen, Princeton, 1920s–present. Principal figures: Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, John Bell, Hugh Everett, and many others. Principal touchstone experiments: the double-slit, Bell's inequality tests, delayed-choice experiments.

Original term: In physics, "observer effect" refers narrowly to the fact that measurement of a quantum system generally perturbs it. The broader, more contested term "observer-dependent reality" emerges from certain interpretations — notably the Copenhagen interpretation and, more recently, QBism — which accord the observer a constitutive role in what counts as a fact.27

Core concept, with necessary caution. We include this section against considerable temptation to leave it out. In popular writing on luck, quantum mechanics is routinely abused: "you create your reality by observing it"; "the universe collapses into whatever you expect." These claims are not supported by the physics. What is supported — and what the physics genuinely invites us to consider — is subtler and more interesting.

The double-slit experiment, in its interaction-free variants, demonstrates that the state of a quantum system depends on what is measured about it.28 Bell's theorem (1964) and its experimental confirmations (Aspect 1982, Hensen 2015, and the "loophole-free" tests since) show that quantum reality cannot be both local and predetermined in the classical sense.29 How one interprets this is a live philosophical question: Copenhagen says the wave-function represents our knowledge; Many-Worlds says all outcomes occur; QBism says quantum states are subjective credences; pilot-wave theories preserve hidden determinism; and so on. None of these interpretations, honestly read, permits the conclusion that humans alter macroscopic reality by wishing.

What, then, is relevant to a document on luck? Two modest things.

First, quantum mechanics has established — to a degree that no serious physicist disputes — that at the most fundamental level, the world is not a deterministic machine whose future is fixed. There is genuine indeterminacy. This is a weaker and more careful statement than "anything is possible," but it is non-trivial: the classical picture in which every event is in principle predictable from prior states is false.

Second, the interpretive question — what role, if any, the observer plays in the constitution of physical fact — has remained stubbornly open for a century. It is reasonable, given this, to treat certain metaphors from the older wisdom traditions (the participatory universe, the co-arising of knower and known) as not obviously false. That is a very different claim from "quantum physics proves synchronicity." It is closer to: the universe science actually describes is not the clockwork universe of the eighteenth century, and the older traditions' insistence that mind and world are coupled is not, on present physics, ruled out.

Primary-source quote.

"We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense this is a participatory universe."30 — John Archibald Wheeler, in Zurek (ed.), Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information (1990)

Practice. None, directly. This section is epistemic rather than practical: its purpose is to block a class of objections ("isn't this all pre-scientific?") by showing that the scientific picture is itself stranger and more open than the objection assumes.

Why it converges — with hedges. The convergence here is not mechanical. It is negative: quantum mechanics does not refute the traditions' participatory ontology, and it softens the hard-materialist priors that would dismiss the convergence itself as coincidence. Treat this section as philosophical housekeeping, not as evidence.

XII. Positive Psychology — Wiseman's Luck Factor

Origin: University of Hertfordshire, UK, 1994–2003. Richard Wiseman, Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology, with a research team including Matthew Smith and Peter Harris. The principal popular account is The Luck Factor (2003); the underlying experimental work appeared in peer-reviewed journals through the late 1990s.1

Core concept. Wiseman recruited 400 self-identified "lucky" and "unlucky" people through newspaper advertisements, interviewed them extensively, subjected them to controlled tasks and diary studies, and tested whether their self-reports about luck matched their objective life outcomes. They did — strikingly. The lucky people were not receiving unusual numbers of random windfalls. They were behaving differently in specifiable ways. Wiseman identified four principal behavioural differences, trained unlucky subjects in the four behaviours in a one-month "luck school," and measured the results: 80% of participants reported their lives becoming "happier, more successful and luckier."

The four principles.

  1. Maximise chance opportunities. Lucky people build and exploit a wide network of weak ties, go to new places, talk to strangers, and keep an open mind about what might matter. (Wiseman's newspaper-counting experiment sits here: lucky subjects' broader attentional aperture caught the "stop counting" message; unlucky subjects' narrow focus missed it.)

  2. Listen to lucky hunches. Lucky people trust and test their intuitions more. They also deliberately practise intuition-enhancing behaviours: clearing the mind before decisions, meditating, attending to somatic signals.

  3. Expect good fortune. Self-fulfilling optimism: lucky people's expectations shape their persistence, their approach behaviour, and the reactions of others to them.

  4. Turn bad luck to good. Lucky people are far more resilient in the face of setbacks. Asked to imagine themselves in unfortunate scenarios (e.g., being shot in the arm during a bank robbery), lucky subjects produced rapid counterfactual reframes ("I could have been killed; lucky it was only my arm"); unlucky subjects ruminated on the loss.

Primary-source quote.

"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 prophecies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good."31 — Wiseman, The Luck Factor (2003), p. 2

Practice. Wiseman's own "Luck School" protocol is a four-week programme, one principle per week, drawn from cognitive-behavioural and positive-psychology techniques. Our seven-day starter protocol in Section 7 is a shorter distillation.

Why it converges. Wiseman's work is the closest empirical parallel the other eleven traditions never had. He did not set out to confirm them — indeed, he is a professional sceptic whose earlier work investigated paranormal claims and generally falsified them. That his independent, controlled study arrived at four principles that map almost exactly onto wu wei + mazal + amor fati + dharma is either a remarkable coincidence or a clue that the traditions were tracking something real.

We believe it is a clue.

3. The Convergence Table

The six mechanisms the traditions appear to converge upon are:

  1. Attention — a broadened, unforced perceptual aperture; the capacity to notice what one was not looking for.
  2. Openness — low resistance to the new, the strange, the unplanned; what the Big Five calls openness to experience and what the traditions variously call receptivity, humility, or emptiness of cup.
  3. Action — willingness to act, often before certainty; the antidote to paralysis. The traditions that emphasise surrender also, without exception, emphasise action — never one without the other.
  4. Surrender — releasing one's grip on outcome; wu wei, nishkāma, amor fati. The counter-intuitive move that improves outcomes by ceasing to force them.
  5. Connection — quality and breadth of relationships; the barakah of good company, the mazal of well-tended channels, the pratītyasamutpāda of conditions.
  6. Meaning — the disposition to find coherent pattern in one's experience; narrative sense-making; the Orí one is aligned with; the correspondences one reads.

The table below maps each tradition's emphasis. A filled circle (●) marks the mechanism the tradition foregrounds most; an open circle (○) marks a secondary emphasis; a dash (—) marks an emphasis that is present but peripheral. Judgements are ours; reasonable scholars could shade them differently.

AttnOpenActSurrConnMean
Jung●●—○○●
Taoism●●○●○—
Kabbalah○○○—●●
Vedanta○—●●○●
Stoicism●—●●—●
Buddhism●●○●●○
Sufism○●—○●●
Hermeticism●○——○●
I Ching●○●○—●
Yorùbá—○●○●●
Quantum○○——○—
Wiseman●●●●●●

● = primary emphasis, ○ = secondary emphasis, — = not addressed

Two observations.

First, every cell of the "Wiseman" row is filled. This is partly because his research was built on self-report and thus captured whatever the subjects reported that mattered; but it is also because the empirical signal actually does appear across all six dimensions. The four principles he names collapse into the six mechanisms here once one disaggregates them.

Second, no single pre-modern tradition emphasises all six. They each emphasise three or four. But collectively, the eleven contemplative traditions cover the full six-dimensional space, and — this is the striking thing — the dimensions they cover together are precisely the dimensions the empirical study found. That is what we mean by convergence.

4. The Six Levers

We call them levers because they are trainable. This is the operational claim of this document: each of the six is a disposition, each disposition responds to practice, and the practices are short, specifiable, and have been known for two thousand years.

Lever 1 — Attention

What it is. The breadth and quality of what you notice. Wiseman's lucky subjects had a wider attentional aperture than his unlucky ones. They were not more intelligent, not more observant in the narrow sense — they were less fixated. They held their current goal loosely enough to notice what was not on their list.

Why it works. Opportunities do not arrive labelled. They arrive as noise until attention characterises them as signal. Narrow attention filters out almost everything that is not already expected; it therefore cannot discover what it was not looking for. The newspaper experiment is the canonical demonstration: the "stop counting" message was in large type, centre page; unlucky subjects did not see it because they were counting.

How to train it. The universal advice across the contemplative traditions is meditative: sit daily for ten to twenty minutes with attention on breath or body, returning without self-reproach whenever the mind wanders. This does not "empty the mind"; it widens it. Modern equivalents include Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (Kabat-Zinn), Vipassana retreats, and the simpler breath-counting practices of Zen. The research base is now considerable.32

Empirical status. Well-validated, both as a general cognitive intervention and specifically in Wiseman's luck research.

Lever 2 — Openness

What it is. Low resistance to the new and the unexpected. In personality research, openness to experience is one of the Big Five traits, substantially heritable but also substantially modifiable.33 It correlates with creativity, adaptive life outcomes, and — relevant here — luck reports.

Why it works. Closed people have fewer doors. Each "no" to an invitation, an idea, a person, a city, closes a door that may have led somewhere. Lucky people say yes more often than unlucky people, not indiscriminately, but with a lower default threshold for the new. Their lives therefore contain more branches.

How to train it. The Sufi counsel of ṣuḥba is one answer: put yourself in rooms with people different from you, without asking anything of them. More prosaically: adopt a rule that you will say yes to a class of invitations for a period (new people, new neighbourhoods, new cuisines, new conversations) and track what happens. Openness is strengthened by use, like a muscle.

Empirical status. Well-validated as a personality dimension; moderately validated as a trainable disposition; directly supported in Wiseman's research.

Lever 3 — Action

What it is. Willingness to act before certainty. Not recklessness — the traditions uniformly condemn recklessness — but the refusal to let the absence of a complete map prevent motion. Arjuna's paralysis at the edge of the Kurukshetra battlefield is the archetype of its opposite.

Why it works. Fortune is rarely located where one already stands. Most of the traditions make this point against a default human tendency to wait. The Gītā is blunt: "Inaction is not the answer." The I Ching is subtler: act, but at the timely moment. Wiseman's data show the effect at population scale: lucky people simply try more things per unit of time than unlucky people.

How to train it. Lower the threshold of what counts as "ready." The working rule many of us have adopted at Luck Lab: if a proposed action would be worth doing at 80% confidence, do it at 60% with a faster feedback loop. Most of what looks like hesitation is unacknowledged perfectionism.

Empirical status. Strongly supported. The "bias for action" is one of the most consistent findings across entrepreneurial, creative, and athletic performance research.

Lever 4 — Surrender

What it is. Releasing one's grip on outcome while continuing to act. This is the subtle lever, and the one most often misunderstood. It is not resignation. It is not "letting go" in the sense of ceasing to care. It is the simultaneous holding-and-releasing that Taoism names wu wei, Vedanta names nishkāma karma, and Stoicism names amor fati.

Why it works. Grasping narrows perception, tightens the body, accelerates the timeline, and provokes counter-reactions in other people. An agent who has released the outcome acts more flexibly, responds more accurately to feedback, is less costly to be around, and is therefore more likely to receive the unexpected help that converts ordinary effort into fortunate result.

How to train it. The Stoic evening review is the most portable practice: at day's end, identify one thing that did not go as you wanted, and rehearse the statement "this, too, is part of what I was given to work with." Not as denial — as re-framing. Over months the reframe becomes the default.

Empirical status. Moderately supported. The acceptance-based therapies (ACT, MBCT) have accumulated substantial evidence for the psychological benefits of this disposition; its direct contribution to "luck" outcomes is inferred rather than measured. This is one of the two levers on which the contemplative traditions go beyond what Wiseman measured directly.

Lever 5 — Connection

What it is. The breadth, depth, and tending of one's relationships — with people, yes, but also with places, practices, and (for those for whom it applies) the sacred. The mazal channels, the barakah pathways, the pratītyasamutpāda web.

Why it works. Mark Granovetter's classic 1973 paper, "The Strength of Weak Ties," established that most new information — about jobs, about opportunities, about people — arrives through acquaintances rather than close friends.11 Three decades of follow-up research (Christakis and Fowler on social contagion; Putnam on social capital; recent large-scale LinkedIn-data studies) have supported and extended the finding.34 A well-tended, moderately large, diverse network is among the strongest predictors of what we colloquially call luck.

How to train it. The Sufi practice of ṣuḥba again: spend unhurried time with people you admire, without asking them for anything. Make introductions between people who should know each other. Remember birthdays. Send the unsolicited message of appreciation. These behaviours are culturally coded as soft but functionally they are among the most load-bearing things a person can do.

Empirical status. Very strongly supported. The correlation of social network quality with nearly every positive life outcome is among the most robust findings in social science.

Lever 6 — Meaning

What it is. The disposition to read one's experience as coherent and significant rather than arbitrary and inert. The Hermetic correspondences, the Yorùbá Orí, the Jungian individuation, the Vedanta dharma — all are different articulations of this single capacity: to make narrative sense of one's life.

Why it works. Meaning-making is not an epiphenomenon; it is a cognitive operation with consequences. It determines which events one integrates into identity and which one discards; which commitments one sustains through friction and which one abandons; which chapter one thinks one is in. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning (1946) is the touchstone here, and the empirical literature on eudaimonic (as against hedonic) well-being has substantially borne him out: people with strong, coherent meaning-frames have better immune function, longer lives, more resilient mental health, and — here is the relevant finding — more of the life outcomes that get called "lucky."26

How to train it. Write. A regular practice of written reflection — a journal, a commonplace book, an evening review — is the single most widely recommended practice across the contemplative traditions, and the empirical literature on expressive writing (Pennebaker and successors) supports it.35 The writing does not have to be good. It has to be honest and regular. Over years, meaning accretes.

Empirical status. Strongly supported in the eudaimonic well-being literature; supported, though less directly, as a contributor to "luck" outcomes. This is the second of the two levers where the contemplative traditions anticipate what the empirical work is still catching up to.

5. What Tyche Knows

A brief note about the name, and about our posture.

Tyche (Τύχη) was the Greek goddess of fortune — older than Fortuna, her Roman inheritor, and less stable. She was depicted blindfolded sometimes, sighted sometimes; with a rudder, with a ball, with a cornucopia. She was not understood, in her earliest cults, as a dispenser of random outcomes. She was understood as the personification of the moment that matters — what a situation offers you when you meet it the right way. Her counterpart and frequent companion was Kairos (καιρός), the god of the opportune instant, depicted as a young man with a forelock you had to catch as he passed, bald at the back because once gone he could not be seized.36

This is what we mean by Luck Lab, and what we think Tyche knows: that the opportune moment is the atom of fortune, and the art of life is meeting it with the right disposition.

Our position, having spent three years in this material, is simple. The twelve traditions surveyed here are not competing. They are different maps of the same territory, drawn by different cultures for different purposes, using different symbolic vocabularies, in response to different local concerns. When they agree about a mechanism, they are triangulating something real. When they disagree, they are usually disagreeing about metaphysics — about what kind of thing the mechanism is — not about whether it works.

Our work, as we understand it, is translation. We are not promoting a tradition. We are not selling a new one. We are trying to identify what the old ones share, to make it available in language a twenty-first-century person can test, and to report back — honestly — on what happens when people try.

The Luck Convergence Index is our first cut. It will be revised.

6. A Starter Protocol

Seven days, thirty minutes a day. If this is your first exposure to practices like these, begin here. If you have a meditation or journaling practice already, layer this on top of it.

The principle behind the protocol is the one Wiseman and every contemplative tradition also found: give real value before asking for anything. On five of the seven days, the core practice is a small generosity. The argument is not moral — it is empirical. The behaviours that make people lucky are, more often than not, the behaviours that make other people's lives slightly better at low cost. The causation, as the traditions repeatedly note, runs both ways.

Day 1 — Widen the aperture. Spend fifteen minutes in a public place you did not choose for productivity — a park bench, a café, a train platform. Take nothing with you. No phone. Notice, specifically, three things you would not ordinarily notice: a sound, a pattern of movement, a face. Write them down afterwards in two or three sentences each. The practice is the noticing, not the writing.

Day 2 — Reach out without asking. Send one message today to a person you value but have not contacted in more than six months. The message should contain no request. It should contain a specific appreciation — a thing you remember, a way they helped, a quality you admire — and a single sentence about how you hope they are. Do not expect a reply. If one comes, do not escalate.

Day 3 — Say yes to something small and unplanned. Adopt for one day a rule that you will say yes to any low-cost invitation or suggestion that crosses your path, unless you have a specific reason to decline. Someone suggests a coffee you had not planned. A stranger asks a question. A friend of a friend is in town. Say yes. Note at the end of the day what happened.

Day 4 — The evening reframe. Identify one thing from the past week that did not go as you wanted. Write it out in two paragraphs. The first paragraph describes what happened and how you felt about it. The second paragraph, writing as if from five years in the future, describes what that event turned out to be useful for. You are not required to believe the second paragraph. You are required to write it.

Day 5 — Introduce two people. Think of two people you know who do not know each other and who would, in your considered judgement, benefit from knowing each other. Make the introduction today — a short message to both, describing why you think they should talk. Do not take credit for whatever comes of it. This is a barakah practice.

Day 6 — Sit still for twenty minutes. Set a timer. Sit upright, eyes closed or softly open. Attend to the breath. When the mind wanders, return without criticism. When twenty minutes is up, get up. That is the practice. You may have sat with an unusually busy or an unusually calm mind; neither matters. What matters is the sit.

Day 7 — The annual letter. Write a letter to yourself one year from today. Describe what your life looks like if the slow, unforced unfolding of the year went well — not spectacularly, not perfectly, but well. Be specific. Include people, practices, places, sentences. Seal it (literally or metaphorically) and set a calendar reminder for one year from today.

At the end of the seven days, review. Which of the practices cost you the most effort? Which produced the most unexpected result? The ones where the answers diverge are usually where the most information is. You may find that several of them are worth making permanent; you may find that none are. Either result is a useful result.

We would rather you do two of these seven well and continuously than all seven in one heroic week and none afterwards.

7. Further Reading

A selected bibliography, grouped by tradition. Editions given are the ones we have used and would recommend; many of the older texts are available in multiple translations of varying quality.

On synchronicity and Jungian psychology

On Taoism

On Kabbalah

On Vedanta

On Stoicism

On Buddhism

On Sufism

On Hermeticism

On the I Ching

On Yorùbá religion and Ifá

On quantum interpretations

On the empirical psychology of luck, meaning, and attention

References

The Luck Convergence Index is published by Luck Lab as part of our open research programme on the empirical and contemplative psychology of fortune. Version 1.0, April 2026. Corrections, objections, and additions are welcome at research@lucklab.co.

Citation: Luck Lab (2026). The Luck Convergence Index: Twelve Wisdom Traditions, One Trainable Disposition. v1.0.

Footnotes

  1. Wiseman, R. The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind. London: Century, 2003, pp. 1–55. The newspaper-counting experiment is described on pp. 29–32. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Jung, C. G. and W. Pauli. The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955. Jung's contribution was originally published as Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge in the Jung–Pauli volume Naturerklärung und Psyche, Zürich: Rascher, 1952. ↩

  3. Jung, C. G. "Foreword" to The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans. R. Wilhelm and C. F. Baynes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, pp. xxi–xxxix. ↩

  4. Jung, C. G. Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton University Press, 1973, pp. 21–22. The scarab-beetle case is one of Jung's most-cited illustrations. ↩

  5. Jung, Synchronicity, 1973, p. 102. ↩

  6. On active imagination, see Jung, C. G. "The Transcendent Function" (1916/1957), in Collected Works, vol. 8, pp. 67–91. ↩

  7. Zhuangzi, ch. 3 ("The Secret of Caring for Life"), in Watson, B. (trans.) The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. Columbia University Press, 1968, pp. 50–51. ↩

  8. Tao Te Ching, ch. 48. Trans. D. C. Lau, Penguin Classics, 1963, p. 109. ↩

  9. On mazal in the Zohar and Lurianic tradition, see Scholem, G. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Schocken, 1954, esp. pp. 244–286 on Luria. The classical rabbinic source for "there is no blade of grass" is Bereshit Rabbah 10:6. ↩

  10. Bereshit Rabbah 10:6. Standard Hebrew text; English rendering based on the Soncino edition. ↩

  11. Granovetter, M. "The Strength of Weak Ties." American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–1380. ↩ ↩2

  12. Bhagavad Gītā 2.47. Trans. R. C. Zaehner, The Bhagavad-Gītā. Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 138. Also rendered in Easwaran's translation, Nilgiri Press, 2007, p. 92. ↩

  13. Epictetus, Enchiridion §8. Trans. Robin Hard, Discourses, Fragments, Handbook. Oxford World's Classics, 2014, p. 289. ↩

  14. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.5. Trans. Gregory Hays, Modern Library, 2002. ↩

  15. Assutavā Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 12.61. Trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, Wisdom, 2000, p. 595. The formulation "when this is, that is…" appears widely across the Nikāyas as the standard formula of paṭicca-samuppāda. ↩

  16. The vessel-and-source image is a commonplace of Sufi pedagogy, paralleled in the water and jar imagery that recurs across Rūmī's Mathnawī (see Nicholson's translation, 1925–1940) and in classical treatments of barakah in al-Ghazālī's Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn. We render it here as a composite of the tradition rather than as a verbatim quotation from a single named source. ↩

  17. Christakis, N. A. and J. H. Fowler. "The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years." New England Journal of Medicine 357 (2007): 370–379; and Connected, Little, Brown, 2009, esp. chapters 3–5. ↩

  18. On the transmission history of the Tabula Smaragdina, see Faivre, A. The Eternal Hermes. Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 1995; and Copenhaver, B. P. Hermetica, Cambridge University Press, 1992, introduction. ↩

  19. Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, especially Part II. ↩

  20. Tabula Smaragdina, line 2. The standard Latin text reads: quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius. English rendering ours, consistent with Copenhaver, Hermetica, 1992. ↩

  21. Xici Zhuan (繫辭傳, "Great Commentary" or "Great Treatise"), I.5. Trans. based on Wilhelm/Baynes, I Ching, 1950, pp. 294–295, with reference to Shaughnessy, I Ching, Ballantine, 1996. ↩

  22. Paraphrase of the sage's posture as presented in the Xici Zhuan (Great Commentary) and developed in Wilhelm/Baynes' interpretive apparatus. See The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans. Richard Wilhelm, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, Bollingen/Princeton, 3rd ed. 1967, Part II (Wings V–VI). We give this as a summary rather than a verbatim quotation. ↩

  23. Jung's foreword to the Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching, 1950, pp. xxi–xxxix. Jung writes: "The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind." ↩

  24. Abimbola, W. Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus. Oxford University Press Nigeria, 1976, especially chapters on Orí and Àṣẹ. ↩

  25. Traditional Yorùbá Orí invocation; variants of this formula (Orí pèlé, Atèté níran…) are widely recorded in the ethnographic and liturgical literature. See Wande Abimbola, Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus, Oxford University Press, 1976; and William Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa, Indiana University Press, 1969. Transcriptions of the refrain vary across lineages and ese. ↩

  26. On eudaimonic well-being, see Ryff, C. D. "Happiness Is Everything, or Is It? Explorations on the Meaning of Psychological Well-Being." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57, no. 6 (1989): 1069–1081; and Ryff, C. D. and B. H. Singer. "Know Thyself and Become What You Are." Journal of Happiness Studies 9 (2008): 13–39. ↩ ↩2

  27. On QBism, see Fuchs, C. A., N. D. Mermin, and R. Schack. "An Introduction to QBism with an Application to the Locality of Quantum Mechanics." American Journal of Physics 82 (2014): 749–754. ↩

  28. For a rigorous but accessible account of the double-slit experiment and its variants, see Mermin, N. D. Boojums All the Way Through. Cambridge University Press, 1990, esp. ch. 1. ↩

  29. Bell, J. S. "On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox." Physics 1 (1964): 195–200. For the loophole-free experimental test, see Hensen, B., et al. "Loophole-free Bell inequality violation using electron spins separated by 1.3 kilometres." Nature 526 (2015): 682–686. ↩

  30. Wheeler, J. A. "Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links." In W. H. Zurek (ed.), Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information. Redwood City: Addison-Wesley, 1990, pp. 3–28. ↩

  31. Wiseman, The Luck Factor, 2003, p. 2. ↩

  32. For a review, see Goyal, M. et al. "Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis." JAMA Internal Medicine 174, no. 3 (2014): 357–368. ↩

  33. McCrae, R. R. and P. T. Costa. "The Five-Factor Theory of Personality." In Handbook of Personality, 3rd ed., ed. O. John, R. Robins, and L. Pervin. New York: Guilford, 2008. ↩

  34. Putnam, R. D. Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Christakis and Fowler, Connected, 2009. Recent large-scale analysis: Rajkumar, K. et al. "A causal test of the strength of weak ties." Science 377 (2022): 1304–1310. ↩

  35. Pennebaker, J. W. Opening Up by Writing It Down. 3rd ed. Guilford, 2016. See also Pennebaker, J. W. and J. F. Evans, Expressive Writing: Words that Heal, Idyll Arbor, 2014. ↩

  36. On Tyche and Kairos in the Greek imagination, see Kerenyi, K. The Gods of the Greeks. Thames & Hudson, 1951, and Onians, R. B. The Origins of European Thought. Cambridge University Press, 1951, on kairos as "the critical moment." ↩

You have read the map. Now take three minutes for the specific one.

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